1607- 1610 “’Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.”

1607- 1610  “’Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss.”

By 1607, the honeymoon was well and truly over for James I's reign. England faced growing financial pressures and creeping inflation. Around 1607, Shakespeare started an association, which turned into a loose friendship which turned into a collaboration with George Wilkins. Wilkins was an inn-keeper (his inn was the notorious Cow-Cross Inn in London), pamphleteer and eventually a dramatist but we know most of what we know about Wilkins from his regular appearances in court. Wilkins certainly involved in a range of criminal activities. Shakespeare was probably asked by Wilkins to collaborate on producing ‘Pericles’ and he would have probably read John Gower’s Confessio Amantis and Lawrence Twine’s version of the same story contained in Twine’s The Pattern of Painful Adventures. Perhaps Wilkin’s had shown Shakespeare a draft of his The Painful Adventures of Pericles or maybe he started this after starting work with Shakespeare on ‘Pericles’. 

In April of 1607, riots against the enclosure of common land took over much of the Midlands of England. Starting in Haselbech and Pytchley it eventually spread to Shakespeare’s home county of Warwickshire. At the height of the riots, Captain Pouchh (John Reynolds) said to his protesters that he had the authority of the King of England and of God to destroy the enclosures and he said that he would protect them with the contents of his pouch. In Shakespeare’s own county of Warwickshire, almost 5,000 protesters destroyed enclosures. The law came in with an iron hand. Curfews were imposed and eventually the protesters were subdued.

Shakespeare seemed to like order and rule and seemed genuinely frightened of mob rule and the loss of order. He had fought hard to get a coat of arms for his family name. He had bought up considerable property around Stratford upon Avon. For all his adventurous, innovativeness and creativeness as a writer, Shakespeare was in many ways a conservative in his private life. The riots pf 1607 would have scared Shakespeare and his writing of ‘Coriolanus’ can be seen as an exploration of Shakespeare exploring notions of power, mob rule, public discontent and opposition to government and peasant revolt.

We know Shakespeare was familiar with and perhaps even had a copy of the 1579 Thomas North English translation of Plutarch’s ‘The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans’. There are significant references to and even parts of speeches in the text from Camden’s ‘Remains of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine’ so we know that Shakespeare also used this for perhaps his most complex verse drama ‘Coriolanus’.  This play shows that while straight-talinking politicians and people may have some appeal, an official who clings too tightly to the truth or to their own vision opens themselves up to inflexibility and change. 

Shakespeare would have most certainly traveled back to Stratford upon Avon in June of 1607 for the marriage of his daughter Susanna (who was 24 at the time) to Dr John Hall (who was 32). He had been involved in dowry negotiations for much of early 1607 and probably the most substantial part of this dowry was 104 acres in Old Stratford. This would leave no dowry for Shakespeare's younger daughter Judith. Susanna and John Hall had one daughter called Elizabeth who was born in 1608 and she became the last surviving direct relative of William Shakespeare when she died in 1670.

In December of 1607, William Shakespeare helped to bury his brother Edmund Shakespeare in Southwark in London. Edmund had followed William to London and he had become a small time actor. Edmund died in poverty and William Shakespeare probably paid for the burial with a "forenoone knell of the great bell".

In February of 1608, Shakespeare was probably not in Stratford for the baptism of his granddaughter Elizabeth. By June the plague had hit London again and by August 1608, the theatres were closed again and Shakespeare had to think how to maintain himself and his family. Shakespeare and his fellow players had been 'elevated in 1603 to the status of the King's men and although this meant that they played private performances at Hampton Court, the big money maker The Globe stood idol during this period. As the epidemic spread, provincial tours were not the solution that they had been before. This plague would continue on and off until December 1610. Shakespeare probably didn't travel much in 1608. He probably did not return to Stratford for the burial of his mother Mary Shakespeare in September. The purchase by the King's Men of Blackfriars Theatre in late 1608, even if bought at a bargain basement price, would have been an extra expense William Shakespeare did not need. But Shakespeare was probably not idol during this period.

Early in 1609, Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets were published in a quarto edition by publisher Thomas Thorpe. We do not know whether this edition was an authorized or unauthorized edition but the inclusion of the narrative poem ‘A Lover’s Complaint’ (which is dubiously attributed to Shakespeare) at the end in an appendix to ‘The Sonnets’ probably suggests that it was unauthorised. Although Thorpe’s edition says on the cover “SHAKE-SPEARE’S SONNETS: Never before imprinted” some had been printed before such as Sonnet 138 and Sonnet 144 which had appeared in the poetry collection entitled ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’.

The sonnets are assumed to have been written from 1592 until about 1607, although some place the writing of the earliest sonnet to as early as 1588 and some believe that the last sonnet was written in 1599. Shakespeare’s sonnets are based on the Italian Renaissance sonnet form invented by the poet Petrarch often known as the Petrarchan sonnet form. This form can normally be separated into two segments – the octave (normally with the rhyming pattern of ABBAABBA or even ABBACDDC) and the sestet (normally CDCDCD or even CDECDE). In Elizabethean England, the sonnet form was rejuvenated by lyric poets like Sir Philip Sydney. Shakespeare became the master of the new Elizabethean form sometimes even known to us now as the Shakespearean sonnet. Shakespeare’s sonnets are of the 14 line sonnet form comprising three four line (un-separated) stanzas and ending with a final rhyming couplet. The dominant poetic rhythm of his sonnets particularly in the final rhyming couplet is an iambic pentameter (a line comprising five feet or beats or stressed beats which alternate unstressed then stressed beats which some describe as the rhythm of a heartbeat). At least one of his sonnets breaks with this pattern and has an iambic tetrameter. The rhyming scheme of Shakespeare’s sonnets is normally ABAB CDCD EFEF GG. The three quatrains often build the sequence to the volta (also known as the twist or turn) at the end of the third quatrain and then the final rhyming couplet gives us the crux, the twist or a revelation to end the sonnet.

If you don't have the patience or time to sit read and contemplate due to distractions then I would suggest the Top Ten of Shakespeare's sonnets to read would be:

10. Sonnet 104 - "To me, fair friend, you never can be old" 

9. Sonnet 30 - "When to the sessions of sweet silent thought"

8. Sonnet 33 - "Full many a glorious morning have I seen"

7. Sonnet 73 - "That time of year thou mayst in me behold"

6. Sonnet 129 - "The expense of spirit in a waste of shame"

5. Sonnet 130 - "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun" 

4. Sonnet 1 - "From fairest creatures we desire increase"

3. Sonnet 29 - "When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes"

2. Sonnet 116 - "Let me not to the marriage of true minds"

1. Sonnet 18 - "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day"

The central questions which surround Shakespeare's sonnets for many people are:

·      Are Shakespeare’s sonnets autobiographical?

·      Are they poetical exercises which deal with imagined people, circumstances and experiences?

·      Who is the Fair Youth in the sonnets?

·      Who is the Dark Lady in the sonnets?

·      Who is the Rival Poet in the sonnets?

Poets over the years have certainly thought that Shakespeare’s sonnets are autobiographical. Wordsworth said that the sonnets “…express Shakespeare’s own feelings in his own person…” and even in one of Wordsworth's own sonnets, he poetically claims that he like Shakespeare was revealing himself because “…with this same key Shakespeare unlocked his heart…” People over the years have wanted so much to know more about Shakespeare that the sonnets have, for many, become an unofficial autobiography which seems to reveal Shakespeare's inner and outer life through an intimate love life that the sonnets could reveal to go something like this:

Shakespeare, under the commission of some rich figurehead urges a young man, “…the only begetter of these ensuring sonnets”, to marry and have children to pass on his good looks to another generation. Many believe the young man to be the Henry Wriothesley (Earl of Southhampton) or William Herbert (Earl of Pembroke). Then the autobiographical approach would see Shakespeare falling in love with the young man himself. This leads him onto revealing a host of emotions and contemplations on love, loneliness, mortality, immortality through writing, the transience of life and the fear of death. Then the sonnets reveal jealousy of another poet who the young man seems to prefer, at least as a poet. The rival poet could be seen to be Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman, John Davies or even Francis Davison. Then Shakespeare seems to become sexually involved with the Dark Lady and he gets involved in a love triangle which involves him, the Young Man and the Dark Lady where he is forced to contemplate the difference between the spiritual love he feels for the “fair youth” and the sexual love he feels for the “dark lady”. The Dark Lady is suitably mysterious but speculation has identified her as everyone from the London prostitute of African descent known as Lucy Negro or Black Luce to Mary Fitton to Emilia Lanier to Queen Elizabeth II herself. Back to the love triangle. Shakespeare then, in this narrative, blames The Dark Lady’ for the love triangle and shifting of affections and forgives the Young Man.

I tend to see ‘The Sonnets’ as ultimately an amazing sequence of narrative fiction, an exercise in poetic gymnastics which also seeks to play with (and even at points mock) the sonnet form itself. I believe that the intimacy of the tone of the sonnets plays with the reader to make them think that the poems give them an insight into the inner would of the poet (or the speaker). Obviously, Shakespeare uses much as his own voice and his own experiences to infuse authenticity into ‘The Sonnets’ but I believe the ultimate beauty of ‘The Sonnets’ lies in their ability to paint a clear and focused landscape of the inner world of an emotional life, while letting the reader transport these emotions and feelings wherever they like from connections to their own life, to judgments about the universal nature of these feelings to even a imaginary biography of a great playwright and poet who died almost 400 years ago about whom very little is known.

By autumn of 1610, the numbers of deaths due to the Plague seemed to be falling. The King Men seemed to have performed a couple of times at Hampton Court and around this time Shakespeare finally wrote another play. Cymbeline, also known as ‘Cymbeline, King of Britain’ and ‘The Tragedy of Cymbeline’, has had a strange life as a play. It was probably written at the end of 1610 and had its first performance probably in one of the London law colleges in the Christmas of 1610. Curiously, it was listed in the First Folio as a tragedy but today is listed as a Comedy and it certainly has many aspects of comedies like ‘The Winter’s Tale’ and even ‘Much ado About Nothing’.

Shakespeare seems to have been based Cymberline on the ancient Welsh King Cunobelinus (20BC-40AD approximately) although some characters and subplots seem to be hark back to Boccaccio’s ‘Decameron’. It is interesting to note that at the age of 47, Shakespeare is interested in themes like fidelity and infidelity, redemption and the relationship between appearance and reality. Perhaps after years of fooling around in London, Shakespeare himself was examining these themes in his own life. Perhaps it is also pertinent that around this period in his life, many of his plays deal with father/daughter relationships. At the end of 1610, his daughter Susanna was 27 and had married a local doctor in Stratford upon Avon, and his younger daughter Judith (whose twin brother Hamnet had died in 1596 at the age of 11) was 25 and still unmarried and living at home in Stratford upon Avon. Judith eventually had a strange and unhappy marriage to a vintner named Thomas Quiney and some argue that plays like ‘Cymbeline’ express the general anxiety that Will Shakespeare had with some of Judith’s suitors like the rascal Quiney who she eventually married.

Cymberline starts in Britain at Cymberline's castle where two gentlemen recount to the audience recent goings on in the court of King Cymbeline.

“You do not meet a man but frowns: our bloods

No more obey the heavens than our courtiers

Still seem as does the king…

As 1610 came to a close, so did another chapter in William Shakespeare's life. Some believe that he retired to Stratford as early as 1610. Whatever the truth, the period after 1610 marks the final period of Shakespeare's life as a playwright and includes some of his final greatest plays.