Roaring Boys (26 page)

It was also that same year that Shakespeare made his last major property purchase, a smart house in Blackfriars, which seems somewhat strange as he was now spending more and more time in Stratford to the point where John Fletcher had virtually taken over from him as resident dramatist of the King’s Men. The Blackfriars property, a large dwelling, was conveyed to him on 10 March of that year at a cost of £140, of which he put £80 down as a deposit, the balance of £60 to be paid off as a mortgage. The Conveyance Deed according to the relevant documents tell us that the ‘dwelling house, shops, cellars, sollars, plot of ground and singular other the premises above, by the presents mentioned, to be bargained and sold and every part and parcel thereof with the appurtenances, unto the said William Shakespeare and William Johnson, John Jackson and John Hemmings’.
⁸

The three men were his sureties for his mortgage. Hemings, as we know, was his friend and fellow sharer in the King’s Men, Jackson was a city merchant and Johnson the landlord of the actors’ favourite tavern, the Mermaid. They were never called on to honour their guarantees for Shakespeare paid off his mortgage in full and on time. He then created a trusteeship for his London property which, on his death, was to be sold off on behalf of his family with the profits going to them. A very different picture, this, from the position in which the hardworking and prolific Thomas Dekker found himself and who, at the same time, was arrested for debt and spent the next three years in and out of debtors’ prisons.

Yet another sign of the passing of an era was the death, two years later, of Robert Armin, the last of the great clowns for whom Shakespeare had specifically written. At this point Ben Jonson, who must have had some realisation of what was happening and who alone among his contemporaries saw his work as something for posterity, collected together his best poetry and existing play texts and in 1616 had them published in a Folio edition. King James, recognising his status as poet and dramatist, awarded him a pension for life. The year 1616 also saw the death of Francis Beaumont. Whatever his relationship with Fletcher might have been, three years earlier he had married Ursula, heiress to Henry Sly of Sundridge in Kent. There were two daughters of the marriage, the younger, Frances, born posthumously. Beaumont died on 6 March 1616, the cause unknown, but he achieved burial in Westminster Abbey.

His death, however, was totally overshadowed by that of another, for on 23 April, Shakespeare died at his home in Stratford. His father had died in 1601, his mother in 1608, both having reached a decent age, but their children, with the exception of their daughter Joan, were not long-lived. Gilbert had died in 1612 at the age of forty-five and Richard the following year at the age of thirty-nine. Death was also taking its toll elsewhere. Shakespeare had named his twins Hamnet and Judith after his friends the Sadlers, and in 1614 Judith Sadler died as did another old friend, John Combe, who is buried next to Shakespeare in Holy Trinity Church.

It is ironic that Shakespeare, who had so successfully avoided scandal while living in a hotbed of it in London, was to find himself embroiled in a local one only weeks before his death. On 10 February 1616 Judith Shakespeare, now aged thirty-one and considered an elderly spinster, finally married Thomas Quiney. The couple were married at Holy Trinity Church but were then immediately summoned to appear before the consistory court in Worcester for marrying without a proper licence. Quiney refused to attend and was promptly excommunicated; no mention is made as to whether or not Judith suffered the same fate. The problem arose because a special licence was needed for Lent weddings and although the banns had been properly called for three weeks, no such licence had been applied for. But worse was to come.

There is a possible reason for such sudden haste to the wedding. While supposedly courting Judith in what can only be described as a leisurely fashion, Thomas had been involved in an affair with a young woman called Margaret Wheeler who was now having his child. The proper and expected thing for him to do was to marry her, not Judith. But he chose not to, possibly because he was aware of the advantages of marrying into a well-off family, and marriage to Judith would release him from this obligation. Poor Margaret, after suffering a difficult pregnancy, died in childbirth along with her baby a month after the marriage. They were buried on 15 March.

This time Quiney was summonsed before an ecclesiastical court especially set up to deal with cases of ‘whoredom and uncleanness’ (popularly known as ‘bawdy courts’), and he appeared before it on 26 March confessing to having had
carnalem copulacionem
, carnal copulation, with ‘the said Wheeler’ and was sentenced to the usual punishment for such an offence: to perform open penance, dressed in a white sheet, before the church congregation for three Sundays in a row. Unusually, and possibly due to his father-in-law’s influence, this was commuted to paying a fine to the parish and acknowledging his crime, fully dressed, before the minister of Bishopton Chapel. Not surprisingly a marriage off to such a poor start was doomed from the outset.

In January, Shakespeare had called in his friend, the lawyer Francis Collins, and drafted his will, which was substantially altered in March, possibly as a result of Judith’s marriage, signing that he was at that time ‘in perfect health and memory’. A host of causes, all surmise, have been suggested as the cause of his death: that he died, variously, of alcoholism, Bright’s disease, exposure after sleeping a night under a crab-apple tree (!), typhus, cholera, paralysis, epilepsy, apoplexy, arterio-sclerosis, excessive smoking, angina pectoris, pulmonary congestion and syphilis. The best-known one, which has something of the ring of truth, is that put forward by a later vicar of Stratford, the Revd John Ward, in 1662 and might well have still been extant locally. ‘Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seemed drank too hard for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.’
⁹

It is quite possible to believe that the three met up in Warwickshire that spring; indeed the Bell Inn at Welford just outside Stratford claims to be the meeting place. Drayton, now an established poet, lived in Nuneaton, an easy day’s ride away, while Jonson took any opportunity to call on friends out of town. To this day local tradition has Shakespeare either walking back home along the path beside the Avon, which still exists, or riding back on horseback along the Evesham road. Either way he is said to have become thoroughly soaked. If this was the case and if, as was probable, he had retired to Stratford exhausted and drained from his vast output of work, then he might indeed have died of ‘pulmonary congestion’, in other words, pneumonia.

The Burial register reads: ‘1616 April 25. Will Shakespeare, gent.’ His position in the town entitled him to be buried inside the church within the chancel rail and it is for his standing in the local community, not his reputation as a playwright and poet, that he lies where he does. He is said to have been buried seventeen feet down but this is hardly possible so close to the River Avon. He is also credited with writing his own epitaph:

Good frend for Jesus sake forbeare,
To dig the duste encloased here;
ET
Blest Be Y Man YU spares thes stones
And curst be he Y moves my bones.

An entire industry has grown up around his epitaph alone and constant requests have been made to open up the grave in the hope that by so doing his authorship might in some way be ‘proved’. But those who still prefer to believe that Shakespeare did not write Shakespeare have never been able to explain how he was able to fool the actors among whom he worked for the best part of a quarter of a century, during which time he also lived among and mixed with all the other playwrights of the day from Marlowe through Jonson to Middleton and Fletcher. Or why, in his will, he left to ‘my fellows’ John Hemings, Henry Condell and Richard Burbage ‘a peece [that is money] to buy them rings’. Not to mention Ben Jonson’s poetic tribute to him as ‘Soul of our age!, the applause! the wonder of our stage!’, telling how he outshone Lily, ‘sporting Kyd and Marlowe’s mighty line’. That he will stay alive so long as his works live:

Shine forth, thou Star of Poets, and with rage
Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage.

Prospero had finally left his magic island, abjured his ‘rough magic’, broken his staff, drowned his books and set the creatures of his imagination free. He had nothing more to say.

The Poet’s eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown; the Poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing,
A local habitation, and a name.
Such tricks hath strong imagination.

Shakespeare,
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
, V, i

I
n the March of 1618 another major theatrical light went out with the death of Richard Burbage. He had risen with Edward Alleyn in the late 1580s, matched him for ten years, then, as Alleyn gradually withdrew from the stage at the end of the century, had gone on to become the greatest actor of his day, unrivalled over a span of twenty years. He had not only done his writers proud, he was both respected and much loved within his profession and in an age of gossip and the hothouse atmosphere of that profession it is impossible to find anyone who had a bad word to say of him.

Those who saw him act vied with each other afterwards to describe the effect he had on audiences. There are several versions of the
Funeral Elegy on the death of the famous Actor Richard Burbage: who died Saturday in Lent, the 13 March 1618
:

The Play now ended, think his grave to be
The retiring house of his sad Tragedie,
Where to give his fame this, be not afraid
Here lies the best Tragedian ever played.
No more young Hamlet though but scant of breath
Shall cry revenge for his dear father’s death:
Poor Romeo never more shall tears beget
For Juliet’s love and cruel Capulet:
Harry shall not be seen as King or Prince,
They died with thee, dear Dick
Not to revive again. Jeronimo
Shall cease to mourn his son, Horatio,
Edward shall lack a representative,
And Crookback, as befits, shall cease to live.
Tyrant Macbeth with unwash’d bloody hand,
We vainly now may hope to understand.
Brutus and Marcus henceforth must be dumb
For ne’er their like upon our stage shall come
To charm the faculty of eyes and ears,
Unless we could command the dead to rise . . .
Heartbroke Philaster and Amintas too
Are left forever with the red-haired Jew,
Which sought the bankrupt merchant’s pound of flesh
By woman lawyer caught in his own mesh.

The list of characters referred to in the Elegie, of which this is only a part, shows that, as well as his roles in Shakespeare’s plays in his own day, Burbage was equally famed for his performances in those of Kyd, Marlowe, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, and other contemporary dramatists.

Richard Corbet wrote of how, by his brilliance, he could ‘change with ease from Ancient Lear to youthful Pericles’:

What a wide world, the Globe thy fittest place!
Thy stature small, but every thought and mood
Might thoroughly from thy face be understood.

After listing various roles Burbage had made his own he concludes:

Thereafter must our poets leave to write,
Since thou art gone, dear Dick, a tragic night
Will wrap our black-hung stage. He made a Poet.
And those who yet remain full surely know it.
For having Burbage to give forth each line
It filled the brain with fury more divine.
¹

But renowned as he might have been as Jonson’s ‘subtle Alchemist’ and Volpone or Kyd’s Hieronimo in
Spanish Tragedy
, it is his creation of Shakespeare’s roles that still overshadows them all. He is first remembered as a young actor playing one of the Antipholus twins in
Comedy of Errors
, followed by Petruchio, Romeo, and Benedict. Thomas Nashe wrote of him that when he played the chivalrous Talbot in the
Henry VI
plays, it had seemed to him during the time he was in the theatre that England’s great military hero actually ‘lived again’. ‘Crookback’ Richard III also came early but it was a role Burbage would play for the rest of his life so convincingly that ‘a simple innkeeper mistook a player for a King’, not least when he cried real tears on Bosworth Field. There were so many more, Richard II with his splendid poetry, Prince Hal growing into Henry V, Shylock ‘in a red wig’, ‘the grieved Moor’ Othello, and ‘ancient Lear’. Tradition has it that in common with a number of serious actors today he also played Malvolio. Prospero is not listed in the many contemporary tributes but it is hard to imagine that he did not also play that last great role.

No actor since has ever had written for him such a range of parts. Writer and player found each other at exactly the right point in time. ‘He made a Poet’, wrote Corbet. Shakespeare was indeed magnificently served by his great friend and colleague, but ‘made a Poet’? If this is true, then it might also be said that the Poet made the Actor.

It was during that same summer that Ben Jonson was to pay his famous, or notorious, visit to Sir William Drummond at his Scottish home, Hawthornden Castle.
²
Jonson walked the whole way from London, presumably from choice since he was well able to afford the hire of a horse. Dekker describes Jonson’s appearance at this time as ‘having a face like a bruised, rotten russet-apple, or a badly pock-marked warming pan’. As he stomped steadily north he had plenty of time to consider both his past life and his present situation. He no longer fought duels nor would he again risk prison for the sake of a good joke; his wilder years now lay behind him. He had suffered loss, first his baby daughter then, in 1601, his eldest son had died of the plague as the result of which, he was to tell Drummond, he suffered a strange experience. At the time of the boy’s death he was staying in the country with Sir Robert Cotton, when he suddenly awoke in the middle of the night to see a vision of the boy ‘with a mark of a bloody cross on his forehead as if he had been cut with a sword’. Thoroughly shaken, the next morning Jonson told his host of his nightmare. Cotton’s response was to reassure him that it was ‘but an apprehension of his fantasy’ and to take no notice of it, but shortly afterwards Jonson received a message from his wife, Anne, telling him that the boy was indeed dead. All that was left was for Jonson to write his epitaph: