1600-1603 - “If
music be the food of love, play on Give me excess of it…”
Things must have going pretty well for Shakespeare in 1600, even if it was a pretty slim year for his writing. The Globe seemed to be becoming very lucrative and revivals of many of Shakespeare’s plays in the 1600 season seemed to keep the crowds coming from June through until September (even despite heavy snowfalls outside London even as late as April). He even had a 1600 production of his ‘Julius Caesar’ mentioned in the diary of the Swiss ‘tourist’ Thomas Platter when Platter wrote that he saw "… in the straw-thatched house the tragedy of the first emperor, Julius Caesar, quite excellently acted by about fifteen persons.”
Shakespeare was even able to sell a
few copies of his plays with the publication of ‘The Merchant of Venice’ and ‘A
Midsummer’s Night’s Dream’. He and the Chamberlain’s Men were able to clamp
down a bit on stealing and copying of popular plays like ‘As You Like It’ which
they registered with the Stationer’s Company to prevent unauthorized copying of
this play.
As the calm of 1600 came to a close,
the turbulence of 1601 came to the fore. The year started in January/February
with a rebellion started by the Earl of Essex. After having being deprived of
public office at the end of 1600, in January, Essex started to gather an army
of his followers and began to fortify his house on the Strand. On February 4th,
some of Essex’ followers including Charles and Joscelyn Percy, approached
members of the Chamberlain’s
men to commission a special performance of Shakespeare’s ‘Richard II’ (a play
which involves the usurping of a king) at the Globe Theatre and offered the
handsome sum of forty shillings for the performance (at least ten shillings
above the going rate). The players consented and to a small audience on the
early afternoon of February 8th, they performed ‘Richard II’. In the
late afternoon, Essex moved with a band of others nobles and gentlemen into the
confines of the City of London to force an audience with Queen Elizabeth I.
Essex was driven back and retreated to Essex House and surrendered after the
Queen’s Guard stormed Essex House. Essex and his followers were tried and executed
before the start of March 1601. One interpretation of the poem is that it is
about the death of the relationship between Essex and Queen Elizabeth I.
‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’ is Shakespeare’s only truly metaphysical poem, an allegorical poem which explores the death of truth and beauty of symbolized by the Turtledove and the Phoenix. The poem was first published in a collection of poems supplementing the title poem by Robert Chester published in 1601 called “Love’s Martyr’.
In September 1601, William
Shakespeare’s father John Shakespeare died and was buried in the Holy Trinity
Churchyard in Stratford. William Shakespeare was executor of the will and he
within a month signed a new lease for 91 years on the Henley Street house to
Lewis Hiccox. Perhaps William and Ann Shakespeare needed the money. Since
William Shakespeare was probably making about £250
a year some people assume that The Bard and his wife had started to speculate
on property shares and tithes.
“If music be the food of love,
play on;
Give me excess of it…”
‘Twelfth Night or What You Will’
was probably performed in December 1601 or in January or February of 1602 for
beginning of the Christmastide celebrations or for twelfth night celebrations
or at the Candlemas celebration at the end of Christmastide celebrations.
Originally celebrations for Christmas went for twelve days hence the Twelfth
Night was the end of Christmastide and then it was extended for forty days so
that Candlemas (the celebration of Jesus’ presentation by his mother at the
temple) traditionally ended the Christmastide celebrations.
So, ‘Twelfth Night’ may have been
performed on the first day of Christmas on December 1601 or on Twelfth Night on
January 6th, 1602 or at Candlemas on February 2nd, 1602.
Any of these dates meant that it was probably performed in doors so the
playwright and screenplay writer Tom Stoppard in ‘Shakespeare in Love’ making
the play one that was requested by Queen Elizabeth I is not beyond the realms
of belief (even though this is highly improbable since it would place the play
much earlier and the quite precise Royal records would probably confirm this if
it was so). So we can probably best imagine that on the evening of January 6th (the Twelfth Night) or February 2nd (Candlemas) 1602, the candles were lit
in the Middle Temple of the Inns of Court (one of the four law schools in
London at the time), musicians appeared on stage and played a lyrical
melancholic tune on a violin, a viola
da gamba, a lute and theorbo (bass lute) and then the actor Richard Burbage
entered the stage dressed as Lord Orsino and the music stopped and Burbage
uttered the now famous first lines of the play that let us know that this play
is going to be about love, rejection and desire:
“If music be the food of love,
play on; (music continues)
Give me excess of it, that,
surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying
fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the
sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of
violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough;
no more…
After the ‘triumph’ of a complex
play like ‘Hamlet’ it is possible that Shakespeare sat down in 1602 and decided
to tackle a project he had been thinking of for a long time. He knew that
Elizabethan audiences could accept plays that were complex in ideas characters
and themes and now he wanted to challenge the boundaries of their understanding
of dramatic style and form.
The Globe Theatre was proving a
financial and popular success and ‘Twelfth Night’ had been a triumph when it
was revived there in May, June and July of 1602 along with ‘Hamlet’ and other
plays. As the weather turned colder and The Globe closed its doors,
Shakespeare’s mind turned to what new project he could premiere at an indoor
venue in Winter at one of the inns or colleges inhabited and run by the lawyers
in London. He was also probably thinking of making this new play easily
transferable to The Globe and its more eclectic audience in May in the Summer
of 1603. It is then that he probably burnt the late night candle with
re-reading Homer’s ‘Iliad’ and Chaucer's fourteenth-century epic poem, Troilus and Criseyde. Chaucer and the work of the Ancient
Greeks were undergoing a revival in publishing at that time, yet strangely, not
too many dramatic versions had made it to the stage and those that did were
largely unsuccessful. It must have struck Shakespeare that these stories were
absurdly tragic and romantic to the point of strangeness and Shakespeare knew
that his audience would know the end of the story involving Cressida's
treachery and Hector's death well. With a passion for the story in hand and a
good idea of what an audience might expect and how to still challenge them,
Shakespeare would have sat at his table sometime on a dark night in October
1602 and started writing the Prologue to one of his most strange and problematic
of his plays - ‘Troilus and Cressida’.
The New Year of 1603 would not have
been a happy and ceremonious occasion for Shakespeare and others who lived in
London. After a relatively subdued party for her 69th birthday on September 7th in
1602, Queen Elizabeth started to be seen even less in public and everyone
played the waiting game. She knew people wanted her to name a successor but she
also knew that she had successfully played the political game of not naming an
heir for a while now and this had worked for stability in her case. She knew
that her cousin Arabella was popular but Arabella had annoyed Elizabeth on a
number of occasions due to flippant statements and besides, Elizabeth knew that
the Privy Council favoured a male heir. So although not publicly announced, her
preferences swayed towards James VI of Scotland who was already a monarch and a
fortuitously for Elizabeth and England, a Protestant. The weather deteriorated
further in January 1603 and Queen Elizabeth’s health and will to live took a
further blow when the last of her close friends and confidante’s Catherine
Howard (Countess of Nottingham) died in February. Elizabeth fell into
"settled and unremovable melancholy" and was moved to Richmond Palace
early in March 1603 and so the waiting game began.
The events surrounding the ‘melancholy’ of Queen Elizabeth I, the questions of succession and the cold and wet weather meant that William Shakespeare probably was stuck in London for most of January, February and early March of 1603. He spent much of his time reading and buying manuscripts which he found in the market place but uncertainty about Queen Elizabeth and whether the theatre would open in May, meant that this was a lean time for Shakespeare. Sometime in early March of 1603, he may have re-read through Cinthio’s ‘Hecatommithi’.
‘Hecatommithi' is a set of tales framed within the story of Roman fugitives escaping by sea who sit down every couple of nights at different ports and tell stories. These stories within the main story each have a theme (normally one for each night of the storytelling) and there is a sense that by telling the stories that the fugitives achieve some redemption. The story of Epitia which involves a corrupt magistrate who, when the wife of man who is to be executed gives up her body to the him, sleeps with the woman and then kills her husband anyway, must have been seen to have some dramatic legs for Shakespeare. He probably saw the potential in this story even though in its original form it lacks a sense of character and purpose.
As the waiting game continued as
Elizabeth I’s health deteriorated further, Shakespeare probably turned to older
plays by English playwrights. It was probably out of frustration that he burnt
the candle late one night reading Whetstone’s ‘Promos and Cassandra’ for
another time. Shakespeare had probably seen Whetstone’s play when he was young
or maybe even acted in it as a young actor some 13 years earlier. The comic
sub-plot of the play and the character of Mistress Overdone who runs a brothel
would have been seen to have dramatic potential for Shakespeare. What probably
troubled him about the main plot of the play was that Cassandra marries Promos,
the murderer of her brother. Shakespeare saw that he needed a very clever and
subtle handling of the main tragic plot but he probably was also fascinated
with putting a tragic plot with high and bawdy comedy (a idea that had worked
with the character of Falstaff). With Falstaff it had worked because the story
of Henry V was so well known and the comedy helped to move along the narrative
of history plays but Shakespeare probably mused over whether it could work with
a tragedy or even dominate the tragic events. But his musings and initial
writings came to a halt when on March 24th 1603, the bells rang out over
London.
Through much of March 1603, Queen Elizabeth I had refused to see doctors and even members of her Privy Council. She even refused to take to her bed and would stand for hours looking out the window of Richmond Palace. It is said that her servants even made a day bed for her on the floor of one of the rooms. Then on March 23rd she was finally taken to her bed and early in the morning of March 24th depending on your sources she either spoke to Lord Robert Cecil in whispered tones on her death bed and "...mildly like a lamb" and "easily like a ripe apple from the tree..." and said “I will that a king succeed me and who but my kinsman the king of Scots.” Or if you follow the other common scenario, Elizabeth, being unable to verbally reply to the question should James VI of Scotland succeed her, she simply nodded and gestured a circle crown on a head. Even as her body was still warm, a rider was dispatched to Scotland and to London (since relay riders would have been set in place days if not weeks before). Later on the day of her death, Cecil and the Privy Council announced James VI of Scotland as her successor. A torch and candle lit barge was arranged and Elizabeth's coffin was carried downriver at night to Whitehall. On 28 April, her coffin was taken to Westminster Abbey and she was interred with her half-sister, Mary with the inscription "Regno consortes & urna, hic obdormimus Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis" ("Consorts in realm and tomb, here we sleep, Elizabeth and Mary, sisters, in hope of resurrection") written on the tomb.
By early May, Shakespeare was being
pressured to have a play ready for late May to open the Globe Theatre’s 1603
season. He had 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 £250 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. With parades in the streets
on May 7th when James
arrived in London in preparation for his July coronation, Shakespeare knew he
needed something new for a new age for his play and the main topic of
conversation on the street seemed to be questions of what sort of ruler James
VI of Scotland (soon to be crowned James I of England) would be. Time was
running out when Shakespeare 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 he called ‘Measure for
Measure’.
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