A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  The story of Lewis Gilbert, who returned maimed from the Irish wars, is summarized in James O. Halliwell, A Descriptive Calendar of the Ancient Manuscripts and Records in the Possession of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon. Additional records detailing his fate can be found in the Stratford Archives: BRU 15/12 and BRU 15/5.

  SPRING

  6. The Globe Rises

  For Southwark and the liberties in Shakespeare’s day, in addition to Stow’s Survey of London, see: H. E. Malden, ed., The Victoria History of the Counties of England: Surrey, vol. 4 (London, 1912); Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage (Chicago, 1988); Jeremy Boulton, Neighbourhood and Society: A London Suburb in the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, 1987); and David J. Johnson, Southwark and the City (London, 1969). For Shakespeare’s move to the Bankside, see Chambers, Facts and Problems, and Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare. There’s a possibility that Shakespeare may have lived farther west on Bankside at some point after 1596, perhaps near Paris Garden, or if a lost document viewed by Malone is right, near the Bear Garden; if so, it would have meant a considerable commute to the Theatre.

  On the location and archaeology of the Globe, see: W. W. Braines, The Site of the Globe Playhouse, Southwark (2 ed., London, 1924); Sir Howard Roberts and Walter H. Godfrey, eds., Survey of London: Bankside, vol. 22 (London, 1950). Simon Blatherwick and Andrew Gurr, “Shakespeare’s Factory: Archaeological Evaluations on the Site of the Globe Theatre at 1/15 Anchor Terrace, Southwark Bridge Road, Southwark,” Antiquity 66 (1992), 315–33; along with Blatherwick’s three subsequent articles, “The Archaeological Evaluation of the Globe Playhouse,” in J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge, 1997), 67–80; “Archaeology Update: Four Playhouses and the Bear Garden,” Shakespeare Studies 30 (2002), 74–83; and “The Archaeology of Entertainment: London’s Tudor and Stuart Playhouses,” in London Under Ground: The Archaeology of a City, ed. I. Haynes, H. Sheldon, and L. Hannigan (Oxford, 2000), 252–71. On the Bankside communities near the theaters, see William Ingram, “‘Neere the Playe House’: The Swan Theater and Community Blight,” in Renaissance Drama n.s. 4 (1971), 53–68, as well as his “The Globe Playhouse and Its Neighbors in 1600,” Essays in Theatre 2 (1984), 63–72.

  On the Globe’s design, the study of which has first been driven by plans to build a replica on the Bankside and then by the recent rediscovery of the foundations of the Rose and the Globe, see: John Cranford Adams, The Globe Playhouse: Its Design and Equipment (Cambridge, Mass., 1942); John Orrell, The Human Stage: English Theatre Design, 1567–1640 (Cambridge, 1988); Andrew Gurr, Ronnie Mulryne, and Margaret Shewring, ed., The Design of the Globe (International Globe Centre, 1993); J. R. Mulryne and Margaret Shewring, eds., Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt (Cambridge, 1997); Franklin J. Hildy, “‘If You Build It They Will Come’: The Reconstruction of Shakespeare’s Globe Gets Underway on the Bankside in London,” Shakespeare Bulletin 10 (1992), 5–9; and Gabriel Egan, “Reconstructions of the Globe: A Retrospective,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 1–16. John Gleason’s “New Questions about the Globe,” Times Literary Supplement (26 September 2003), 15, draws on new scientific data to revise earlier claims about the dimensions of the Globe. For a speculative account of when the Globe opened, see Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre, 1599 (Manchester, 1999).

  On how the Globe was constructed, see Balthazar Gerbier, Counsel and Advise to All Builders (London, 1663), a richly informative account of early modern building practices; Irwin Smith, “Theatre into Globe”; John Orrell, “Building the Fortune,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 127–44; and Mary Edmond, “Peter Street, 1553–1609: Builder of Playhouses,” Shakespeare Survey 45 (1992), 101–14. For John Wolfe’s plans to build a theater, see John Cordy Jeaffreson, ed., Middlesex County Records, vol. 1 (London, 1878).

  7. Book Burning

  In addition to Dutton’s essay on Hayward in Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England (and Dutton and Clare’s work on censorship in general), see, for the Bishops’ Ban in particular, Richard A. McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” in Yearbook of English Studies 11 (1981), 188–93, and Linda Boose, “The 1599 Bishops’ Ban, Elizabethan Pornography, and the Sexualization of the Jacobean State,” in Richard Burt and John Michael Archer, eds., Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (Ithaca, 1994), 185–200. For censorship this year, also see James R. Siemon, “‘Word Itself Against the Word’: Close Readings After Voloshinov,” in Shakespeare Reread: The Texts in New Contexts, ed. Russ McDonald (Ithaca, 1993), 226–58; and Ernest Kuhl, “The Stationers’ Company and Censorship 1599–1601,” The Library 4th series, vol. 9 (1928–29), 388–94.

  Any study of Hayward’s History begins with the outstanding edition of John Manning, ed., The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Raigne of King Henrie IIII, Camden Fourth Series, vol. 42 (London, 1991). Hayward has attracted a good deal of criticism, including Cyndia Susan Clegg, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, 1997), and her subsequent “Archival Poetics and the Politics of Literature: Essex and Hayward Revisited,” Studies in the Literary Imagination 32 (1999), 115–32; G. B. Harrison, “Books and Readers,” The Library, 4th series, xiv (1933), 1–33; and Blair Worden, “Which Play Was Performed at the Globe Theatre on 7 February 1601?,” London Review of Books, July 10, 2003, 22–24. In addition, see: David Wootton, “Francis Bacon: Your Flexible Friend,” in The World of the Favourite, ed. J. H. Elliott and L. W. B. Brockliss (New Haven, 1999), esp. 193–96; Margaret Dowling, “Sir John Hayward’s Troubles over His Life of Henry IV,” The Library, 4th series, 11 (1930), 212–24; Rebecca Lemon, “The Faulty Verdict in ‘The Crown v. John Hayward,’ ” Studies in English Literature 41 (2001), 109–32; Howard Erskine-Hill, Poetry and the Realm of Politics: Shakespeare to Dryden (Oxford, 1996); and Arthur Kinney, “Essex and Shakespeare Versus Hayward,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (1993), 464–66. For what ordinary Elizabethans (at least those who got in trouble) said about Elizabeth, see J.S. Cockburn’s edited volumes of Calendar of Assize Records (London, 1975–80) for Essex, Kent, Sussex, Surrey, and Hertfordshire indictments.

  For Heyward’s politics and the related issue of his use of Tacitus, see F. J. Levy, “Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History in England,” Huntington Library Quarterly 50 (1987), 1–37; E. B. Benjamin, “Sir John Hayward and Tacitus,” Review of English Studies n.s. 8 (1957), 275–76; L. Goldberg, “Sir John Hayward, ‘Politic’ Historian,” Review of English Studies n.s. 6 (1955), 233–44; David Womersley, “Sir Henry Savile’s Translation of Tacitus and the Political Interpretation of Elizabethan Texts,” Review of English Studies n.s. 57 (1991), 313–42; J. H. M. Salmon, “Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” in Linda L. Peck, ed., The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (Cambridge, 1991), 169–88; and Malcolm Smuts, “Court Centered Politics and the Uses of Roman Historians, c. 1590–1630,” in Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England, ed. Kevin Sharp and Peter Lake (New York, 1994), 21–43. On Tacitus in England, see the two early translations: Henry Savile, trans., The End of Nero and the Beginning of Galba: Four Books of the Histories of Tacitus (Oxford, 1591); and Richard Greneway, trans., The Annals of Cornelius Tacitus (London, 1598), where the footnote that Essex read on decimation can be found. On Essex’s attraction to Tacitus, see Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarization of Elizabethan Politics. For Shakespeare’s interest in Tacitus, see D. J. Womersley, “3 Henry VI: Shakespeare, Tacitus, and Parricide,” Notes & Queries 32 (1985), 468–73; and George R. Price, “Henry V and Germanicus,” Shakespeare Quarterly 12 (1961), 57–60. For Cornwallis, see William Cornwallis, Essayes (1600); and Don Cameron Allen, ed., Essayes, by Sir William Cornwallis, the Younger (Baltimore, 1946). And for Jonson on Tacitus, see vol. 1 of C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson, eds., Ben Jonson, eds., 11 vols. (Oxford, 1926–52).

  Francis Bacon’s insights and actions in 1599 can be found in
vol. 2 of James Spedding, The Letters and the Life of Francis Bacon (London, 1862). For Bacon’s character sketch of Julius Caesar, see “Imago Civilis Julii Caesaris,” along with an English translation, in vol. 6 of James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath eds., The Works of Francis Bacon (London, 1890). See as well: Lisa Jardine and Alan Stewart, Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon (New York, 1999); Fritz Levy, “Francis Bacon and the Style of Politics,” in Arthur Kinney and Dan S. Collins, eds., Renaissance Historicism: Selections from English Literary Renaissance (Amherst, 1987), 150–53; and Abbott, Bacon and Essex.

  For Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch, see, in addition to Thomas North’s translation, The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (London, 1579; 1595); Martha Hale Shackford, Plutarch in Renaissance England (n.p., 1929); Christopher Pelling, “Plutarch on Caesar’s Fall,” in Plutarch and His Intellectual World, ed. Judith Mossman (London, 1997), 215-32; and Judith Mossman, “Henry V and Plutarch’s Alexander,” Shakespeare Quarterly 45 (1994), 57–73. For Elizabeth’s translation of Plutarch, see Caroline Pemberton, ed., Queen Elizabeth’s Englishings (London, 1899). For Shakespeare’s connection with Richard Field, see A. E. M. Kirkwood, “Richard Field, Printer, 1589–1624,” The Library, 12 (1931), 1–35, as well as Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare.

  8. Is This a Holiday?

  On the Guild Chapel and the Stratford of Shakespeare’s childhood, see Sidney Lee, Stratford-Upon-Avon from the Earliest Times to the Death of Shakespeare (London, rev. ed., 1907); Robert B. Wheler, History and Antiquities of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1806); Levi Fox, The Borough Town of Stratford-upon-Avon (Stratford-upon-Avon, 1953); J. Harvey Bloom, Shakespeare’s Church, Otherwise the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity of Stratford-upon-Avon (London, 1902); L. F. Salzman, ed., The Victoria History of the County of Warwick, vol. 3 (London, 1945), and Christopher Dyer, “Medieval Stratford: A Successful Small Town,” in Bearman, ed., The History of an English Borough. For a record of the ordering of the replacement of the stained glass with clear glass, see Richard Savage et al., eds., Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford. The paintings of the Guild Chapel are discussed in Thomas Fisher, Series of Antient [sic] Allegorical, Historical, and Legendary Paintings, in Fresco: Discovered, in the Summer of 1804, on the Walls of the Chapel of the Trinity… at Stratford-Upon-Avon (London, 1836), and more recently in Clifford Davidson’s helpful, The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon-Avon (New York, 1988). A broader discussion of the destruction of images in post-Reformation England can be found in John Phillips, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, 1973); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts. Vol I. Laws Against Images (Oxford, 1988); and Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England During the Middle Ages (Toronto, 1993). For the importance of Saint George, see G. J. Marcus, Saint George of England (London, 1929).

  On holiday and its changing meaning in post-Reformation England, in addition to the important work of David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells; and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, see: Barnaby Googe, The Popish Kingdome (London, 1570), ed. Robert Charles Hope (London, 1880); and J. B., A Treatise with a Kalendar, and the Proofes Thereof (London, 1598). For the ways in which Shakespeare engages holiday in his plays, see the seminal work of C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Princeton, 1959), and François Laroque, Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage, trans. Janet Lloyd (Cambridge, 1991). For holiday and dress codes, see N. B. Harte, “State Control of Dress and Social Change,” in Trade Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England. Essays Presented to F. J. Fisher, ed., D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (London, 1976), 132–65; and Wilfred Hooper, “The Tudor Sumptuary Laws,” English Historical Review 30 (1915), 433–49. For an illuminating recent study, see Alison A. Chapman, “Whose Saint Crispin’s Day Is It?: Shoemaking, Holiday Making, and the Politics of Memory in Early Modern England,” Renaissance Quarterly 54 (2001), 1467–94. On the broader issues of Shakespeare and memorialization in 1599, see Anthony B. Dawson, “The Arithmetic of Memory: Shakespeare’s Theatre and the National Past,” Shakespeare Survey 52 (1999), 54–67. And for the ways in which Elizabethan drama engaged post-Reformation issues, see Louis Montrose, The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre (Chicago, 1996); and Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago, 2002).

  On the Elizabethan triumph, I have drawn on Gordon Kipling, “Triumphal Drama: Form in English Civic Pageantry,” Renaissance Drama n.s. 8 (1977), 37–56; Anthony Miller, Roman Triumphs and Early Modern English Culture (London, 2001); and for the triumph of Henry V, see James Hamilton Wylie, The Reign of Henry the Fifth; The Great Chronicle of London, eds. A. H. Thomas and I. D. Thornley (London, 1938), and The Anglia Historia of Polydore Virgil, 1485–1537, ed. Denys Hay, Camden Society, 3rd Series (London, 1950).

  On the controversy swirling around Accession Day, in addition to Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, see: Roy Strong, “The Popular Celebration of the Accession Day of Queen Elizabeth I,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 21 (1958), 86–103, as well as his The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977); along with Frances Yates, Astrea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London, 1975). For contemporary sources, see Thomas Holland, A Sermon Preached at Paules in London the 17. of November Ann. Dom 1599 (Oxford, 1601); as well as Edmund Bunny, Certain Prayers and Other Godly Exercises for the Seventeenth of November (London, 1585); Thomas Bentley, The Monument of Matrones (London, 1582); John Prime, A Sermon Briefly Comparing the Estate of King Solomon and His Subjectes Together with the Condition of Queen Elizabeth and Her People (Oxford, 1585); and Thomas Bilson, The True Difference Between Christian Subjection and Unchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585). For Sanders’s critique, see Nicholas Sanders, A Treatise of the Images of Christ and His Saints (Louvain, 1567); Nicholas Sander, The Rise and Growth of the Anglican Schism (Cologne, 1585), trans. and ed., David Lewis (London, 1877), and T. Veech, Dr. Nicholas Sanders and the English Reformation (Louvain, 1935). For Robert Wright’s story, see Historical Manuscript Collection Report 8: 2, 27, and Strype, Annals of the Reformation. And on Elizabeth as goddess, in addition to Sir John Davies, Hymnes, of Astraea, in Acrostic Verse (London, 1599), see Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (Basingstroke, 1995). For the timing of the Oxfordshire rising of 1596, see John Walter, “‘Rising of the People?’ The Oxfordshire Rising of 1596,” Past and Present 107 (1985), 90–143.

  On representations of Elizabeth, see Roy Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth (Oxford, 1963), The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (London, 1977), and Artists of the Tudor Court: The Portrait Miniature Rediscovered 1520–1620 (London, 1983); along with “The Character of Queen Elizabeth” by Edmund Bohun in vol. 2 of Nichols, Progresses of Elizabeth. Janet Arnold’s richly illustrated Queen Elizabeth’s Wardrobe Unlock’d (Leeds, 1988) contains a wealth of information. And on iconography and iconoclasm, see Michael O’Connell, in “The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm, Anti-Theatricalism, and the Image of the Elizabethan Theater,” English Literary History 52 (1985), 279–310; and John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton, 1989). On Paul’s Cross sermons, see Millar MacClure, The Paul’s Cross Sermons 1534–1642 (Toronto, 1958); Arnold Hunt, “Tuning the Pulpits: the Religious Context of the Essex Revolt,” in The English Sermon Revised: Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough (Manchester, 2000), 86–114; and McCullough’s Sermons at Court.

  The definitive account of Squires’s attempt on Elizabeth’s life can be found in Arthur Freeman, Elizabeth’s Misfits (New York, 1978). For Ralegh’s letter about assassination, see Agnes Latham and Joyce Youings, eds., The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh (Exeter, 1999). For the debate over assass
ination, see Robert Miola, “Julius Caesar and the Tyrannicide Debate,” Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985), 271–89; see, too, Rebecca W. Bushnell, Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance (Ithaca, 1990). On the matter of succession, in addition to Thomas Wilson’s “The State of England,” see Peter Wentworth, A Pithie Exhortation to Her Majestie for Establishing Her Successor to the Crowne (Edinburgh, 1598), and Sir John Harington, A Tract on the Succession to the Crown (1602), ed. Clements R. Markham (London, 1880).

  For depictions of Julius Caesar in Elizabethan England, see the various travel narratives of Platter, Hentzner, and others. See, too, Ernest Law, The History of Hampton Court Palace 3 vols. (2nd ed., London, 1890); “Inventory of the Pictures in Hampton Court Viewed and Appraised the 3rd, 4th, and 5th of October 1649,” in Oliver Millar, ed., The Inventories and Valuation of the King’s Goods 1649–51 in The Walpole Society 43 (1972); and George Wingfield Digby, Victoria and Albert Museum: The Tapestry Collection, Medieval and Renaissance (London, 1980). More generally, see Lucy Gent, ed., Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (New Haven, 1995). And for Shakespeare and Rome more generally, see John W. Velz, “The Ancient World in Shakespeare: Authenticity or Anachronism? A Retrospect,” Shakespeare Survey 31 (1978), 1–12; Terence Spencer, “Shakespeare and the Elizabethan Romans,” Shakespeare Survey 10 (1957), 27–38; and G. K. Hunter, “A Roman Thought: Renaissance Attitudes to History Exemplified in Shakespeare and Jonson,” in Brian S. Lee, ed., An English Miscellany: Papers Presented to W. S. Mackie (Capetown, 1977), 93–118.