1604-1605 - "O, Beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on..."

1604-1605 - "O, Beware, my lord, of jealousy; It is the green-ey'd monster, which doth mock the meat it feeds on..."

When Shakespeare returned to London from Stratford after Easter, he probably looked at London with new eyes. The plague of 1603 seemed to be abating by April, and the theatres looked like they would reopen in May or June of 1604. With more leisure time to write because of the Plague but no compelling reason to write, the pace of Shakespeare’s life would have changed through the end of 1603 and the beginning of 1604. Shakespeare probably started lodging at the Mountjoy's residence on the corner of Silver and Muggle Streets in East London around this time. It is possible that he paid the £25 a year rent in advance. This was a step up from other accommodation he had rented prior but Shakespeare probably was making around £200 a year by this point with his tenanted farmland, his investments in moiety, his shares in the Lord Chamberlain's Men and the Globe and the money paid to him for writing plays.

London city was busy in the spring and the ports were busy with boats and traders from Europe, Africa and the East. Shakespeare was a great observer of people and places and it was probably while observing people and ships at the port that he turned a tale by Cinthio called Hecatommithi, which dealt with jealousy and the unfaithfulness of husbands and wives and he adapted it to an English context.

Although the play may have been performed in July 1604, the first mention of the play is in the Revels Office 1604 records which states that on "Hallamas Day, being the first of Nouembar... the King's Maiesties plaiers" performed "A Play in the Banketinghouse at Whit Hall Called The Moor of Venis."  

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure was probably performed also in July 1604 at The Globe Theatre although the Revels Office records it being performed at King James I court on December 26^th 1604 (St Stephen’s Day). After some success with ‘Othello’, time Shakespeare's Measure for Measure was probably performed in July 1604 at the Globe Theatre although the Revel's Office records a performance at King James I's court on December 26, 1604 (St Stephen's Day).  Shakespeare experimented with this play stylistically and probably started to pull together the tragic and comic elements of Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi’ and Whetstone’s ‘Promos and Cassandra’ into the tragic-comedy or comi-tragedy which eventually became ‘Measure for Measure’. The starts with a ruler (The Duke) appointing his trusted subordinate Lord Angelo while he goes away on a long trip. The play looks at the nature of power and hypocrisy and looks at the pitfalls of imposing an overly strict moral code. Although the play is a difficult one, it was probably a success since it was performed before King James I. 

In October of 1604, Shakespeare was involved in a real life domestic incident of high drama and intrigue. Shakespeare's landlady asked for his help with a personal family matter. Her husband's apprentice Stephen Belott had promised to marry the Mountjoy's only daughter Mary, but Belott had started to get cold feet because Christopher Mountjoy would not pay the dowry. Marie Mountjoy asked Shakespeare to talk to Belott. Shakespeare successfuly intervened and gave the young lovers the assurance that "...they should have a sum of money for a portion from the father..." Shakespeare then united them in a handfast (like that done between Rosalind and Orlando in As You Like It). Eventually the lovers married and eventually in 1612, Belott belatedly took his father-in-law to court to claim a fair dowry.

Early in 1605, Shakespeare probably worked quickly to produce ‘Timon of Athens’. He hadn't produced many plays over the last year and now that he was settled back in London with his properties in the country making a fair sum for him, he probably started in earnest. Once again, he looked around him to see what aspects of contemporary life struck him. His company were desperate to get the opportunity to perform more before the new king but the queues outside St James's Palace seemed to stretch for hours with sycophants of all sorts from nobles to painters and poets. This probably gave him the idea behind 'Timon of Athens'. 

Shakespeare probably went back to his lodgings on the corner of Silver and Muggle Streets in East London and took out his Plutarch and probably happened upon Timon of Athens. The real Timon was a philosopher and misanthrope who lived around 445-400BC in Athens during the time of the Peloponnesian War. Shakespeare then probably took out a copy of ‘The Misanthrope’ which was written around 165AD by Lucian but which he had an 1580 translation of. The idea of a misanthrope (a person who dislikes humans) would have caught his fancy. The allusions in 'Lysistrata' to Timon hating men but being liked by women probably interested him too. He then looked through the verse of Brooke's 'The Tragical History of Romeus and Juliet' (1562) again as well as looking at the prose of William Painter's 'Palace of Pleasure' (1567) to give a sense of some characters and stories. It is alleged that Shakespeare worked closely with someone else on 'Timon of Athens' since some of the language is more like that of Thomas Middleton. Maybe the Jacobean era meant that Shakespeare and other playwrights started to develop their plays in a more collaborative manner. Nevertheless, 'Timon of Athens' is an interesting play that takes us on the journey of a wealthy fool who loses everything and shuns human society and curses humanity only to find honesty in the friendship of a single man.

The play starts with a Poet, a Painter, a Jeweler, and a Merchant entering  Timon's house in Athens. The Jeweler is trying to sell a jewel to Timon while the Painter and Poet talk about works they created for Timon. Then Timon enters and being told his friend Ventidius is now in prison, Timon says he will his friends debt to free him. An old Athenian enters and when Timon hears his servant Lucilius is after the old Athenian’s daughter, Timon gets an agreement of a marriage between Lucilius and the girl. Lucilius feels he is forever in Timon’s debt. Timon then takes the gem from the jeweler, the poem from the poet and the painting from the painter.

We have no idea what audiences at The Globe in 1605 thought of Timon of Athens at the time. Perhaps the play’s investigation of Asceticism would have sat well with the new world of James I’s court. Its unexplained plot points, combination of verse and prose makes it a strange play for modern audiences. Some people see the play as both satire and tragedy. The great writer Herman Melville saw the play as one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays and stated in an article about Shakespeare that he is not "…a mere man of Richard-the-Third humps, and Macbeth daggers," but rather "it is those deep far-away things in him; those occasional flashings-forth of the intuitive Truth in him; those short, quick probings at the very axis of reality:–these are the things that make Shakespeare, Shakespeare. Through the mouths of the dark characters of Hamlet, Timon, Lear, and Iago, he craftily says, or sometimes insinuates the things, which we feel to be so terrifically true, that it were all but madness for any good man, in his own proper character, to utter, or even hint of them."