Shakespeare: A Life (50 page)

1605 from Ralph Hubaud of Ipsley, Shakespeare bought a half-share in
the Corporation's tithes for £440. This was his largest outlay of
cash, the equivalent of roughly £300,000 or a little more at the end of
the twentieth century. His purchase involved the tithes of corn,
grain, blade, and hay from Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton, and
tithes of wool, lamb, and other 'smalle and privie tythes' from the
whole parish, except that a few tithes of Luddington and Bishopton
and certain rights of Lord Carew and Sir Edward Greville were
reserved. The tithes -- originally a payment to the rector of a parish
of a tenth of its produce -- had mainly devolved to the Corporation
and had been leased out.

How much
did his moiety yield? It did entail some continuing costs. For his
half-lease he had to pay £5 yearly to John Barker, a subtenant, and an
annual fee of £17 to the Corporation (as the owner). Shakespeare was
never the town's chief tithe-holder, and around 1611 the aggregate
value of all of Stratford's tithe estates was given as £293 6s. 8d.
The annual value of his own moiety was then £60, or about a fifth of
the whole.
²⁰
With fees deducted, he was left with a surplus of about.£40, and so
in ten or eleven years he might make good his outlay. His lease had
thirty-one years to run when he bought it, so Shakespeare clearly
expected his heirs to benefit (as they were indeed to do, before
selling most of the half-share back to the Corporation in March 1625).
He left the farming of his tithe fields to Anthony Nash, whose father
had farmed them for the Hubauds.

With his normal prudence, he put other assets to use. At the Worcester
County Record Office, papers which tell us much about the layout of
the Birthplace (or the Birthplace and Woolshop together) came to light
in the 1990s.
²¹
One of them is a detailed inventory of ten rooms of the Henley Street
premises and of a kitchen, cellar, and brewhouse which was made on the
death in 1627 of Lewis Hiccox, who had taken a long lease on the
property about two decades earlier. At Wood Street, Hiccox's wife, on a
modest scale, had brewed malt. Lewis himself acquired a licence to
sell ale, but a few years earlier he seems to have tried his hand at
the plough, inasmuch as ' Thomas Hiccoxe and Lewes Hiccoxe' are cited
-- in 1602 in the Combes' deed -- as holding tenures 'nowe or late' in
the Old Stratford acres.
²²

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Soon after John Shakespeare died, the Hiccoxes began to thrive in the
Birthplace's eastern wing. Here Lewis and his wife Alice, 'Old Goody
Hiccox' who fought with a neighbour, set up an inn, at first called
the Maidenhead and later the Swan and Maidenhead. The poet derived a
modest, regular rental, and he let his sister Joan Hart stay on in the
western wing, where she seems to have been living with her husband in
the old glover's days.

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These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself -- for, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.
In following him I follow but myself
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action cloth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.

( Iago,
Othello
)

What, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph?

( Lucio,
Measure for Measure
)

Hamlet'
s
success doubtless encouraged Shakespeare, and might have led his
troupe to believe their solvency and prestige were assured. Yet their
situation offered little ground for optimism in 1602. They had no
representative at court, and if the ageing, irritable Queen died they
could be closed down once and for all. Their patron was incapacitated (
Baron Howard of Walden carried out duties at the Lord Chamberlain's
office) and actors were obliged to plan for a dark, worrisome future. A
costly Spanish war dragged on, and extremes of wealth and poverty
glared in London -- where inflation was as relentless as it had been in
the 1590s.
Troilus and Cressida
itself suited a public mood of ennui and anxiety, and its somewhat coarse, cynical

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language of commodity might have indicated a modern time.
¹
The troupe's fate depended on much that was far beyond their control,
such as the unpredictability of state politics, the unresolved
succession, and the whims of England's next monarch: it was clear at any
rate that the nobility would not countenance another female on the
throne.

Queen Elizabeth's fondness
for drama lasted from the Christmas holiday season on through January
-- altogether she saw eight plays put on by five troupes. Had she ever
favoured Shakespeare? She gave little sign that she cared for the man
or his work, and distanced herself from Hunsdon and Howard's
theatrical plan of 1594, though Lord Hunsdon's daughter, Catherine
Carey, could have told her what she needed to know of the public
theatres. In February 1603 the unexpected death of Catherine Carey (then
Countess of Nottingham) coincided with the physical decline of the
Queen. Catherine's widower, the 68-year-old Lord Admiral, soon married
an heiress of 19, who was said to have sung on the wedding-night. This
prompted debate as to whether the heiress had meant to send her
husband to sleep, or had simply tried to keep him awake. The Queen had
not credited the Lord Admiral's brains of late, but the death of his
Catherine affected her. 'No, Robin, I am not well!' she told Sir Robert
Carey in March. She sat up on the floor, until persuaded to her
chamber, where her archbishop (says Carey) 'told her plainly what she
was, and what she was to come to; and though she had long been a great
Queen here upon earth, yet shortly she was to yield an accompt of her
stewardship to the King of Kings'. Lord Cecil, her chief minister, had
arranged for James VI of Scotland to succeed her, and to this she
consented before she died. Upon news of Elizabeth's death on 24 March
1603, Carey rode straight up to Edinburgh, where he arrived with a
bloodied head after a fall from his horse to tell James of Scotland that
he was King of England.
²

The new King -- whose mother was Mary Queen of Scots -- was a sound
Protestant with at first a sympathy for Catholics and a partiality for
Essex's followers. When still in the north, he released Shakespeare's
patron the Earl of Southampton from prison on 5 April and saw him on
the 24th. Meanwhile the nation mourned their late

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Queen, although Henry Chettle who had been quick to see that Greene's
remarks on an 'upstart Crow' and 'Shake-scene' were printed, took
care to note this year that Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare had
forgotten to write elegies upon Elizabeth's death. In Chettle's
Englands Mourning Garment
, Shakespeare is a 'silver tongued
Melicert',
who has not loosed 'one sable tear'

To mourn her death that graced his desert,
And to his lays opened her Royal ear.
Shepherd, remember our
Elizabeth,
And sing her rape, done by that
Tarquin,
Death.
³

A torrent of verses greeted the new King, who styled himself
rex pacificus
or royal peacemaker. An outbreak of plague kept most Londoners from
seeing him in 1603, but the euphoria over his advent appears to be
mentioned in Sonnet 107. 'The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured',
writes Shakespeare with an allusion to Queen Elizabeth's loss, if the
word
endured
can mean 'undergone' or 'suffered',

And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme. . .

With echoes of Horace and Ovid, and an allusion in the couplet to
'tyrants', the writer maintains a cool detachment from events.
Shakespeare's detachment is worth bearing in mind as we follow him in
the new reign.

To most theatre
people, the King was as unknown as his rainswept Scotland. Two years
younger than Shakespeare, James was an affable, robust figure addicted
to hunting, but politically astute, fond of talk about theology, and
capable of writing unpedantic books on kingship, demonology, and
tobacco. He had two sons, a daughter, and a young wife (known as Queen
' Anna' not 'Anne' at his court) who danced and acted in masques. He
was in a difficult position as the King of Scotland and of England.
Beneath the keen flattery he met with in the south were fears that the
Scots would grab at lands, offices, places

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in overcrowded universities, and other privileges under English noses.
Partly to counter anti-Scottish feeling, he kept the Scots out of
office but gave them money, and feeling that he had inherited no
loyalties he created allegiances with an 'inflation' of honours (he
bestowed 906 knighthoods in four months). James required a court of
splendour with art, masques, and stage-plays to hold the devotion of
his entourage, beguile domestic enemies, and impress foreign envoys.
Ten days after arriving in London he unexpectedly ordered through his
secretary that the Keeper of the Privy Seal,
pro tem
-- Lord Cecil --

issue 'letters patent' to elevate Shakespeare's actors. Drawn up two
days later, and dated 19 May 1603, the royal patent (here quoted in
modern spelling) has a touch of Polonius's style in authorizing and
licensing: 'these our servants Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare,
Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell,
William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley', and the rest of their
acting associates

freely
to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies,
histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, stage plays and such like
as they have already studied or hereafter shall use or study, as well
for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and
pleasure when we shall think good to see them during our pleasure. . .
⁴

Under Queen Elizabeth, actors had noble patronage. In James's reign
they had royal patronage, and the patent (renewed in 1619 and again
with slight changes after James's death) testifies to the prominence of
the troupe henceforth known as the King's Servants, or the King's
men or players.

When the epidemic
lets up, declares the patent, Shakespeare's troupe may act in their
'usual house called the Globe', or in any city, university town, or
borough in the realm. Justices, mayors, and other officers are to
'permit and suffer' them to perform in shows without hindrance, and
must allow 'such former courtesies as hath been given to men of their
place and quality'. The patent adds that any 'further favour you shall
show to these our servants for our sake we shall take kindly at your
hands'.
⁵

Contrary to what Shakespeare's biographers imply, James delayed

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before incorporating
other
troupes under royal names, and
his
actors were to be slightly favoured. The King's men would have a
'free gift' of £30 for 'mayntenaunce and releife' in the plague
⁶
(which kept theatres shut from 19 May 1603 until the following 9
April). Only late in 1603 did Worcester's men become the 'Queen's
Players' under the patronage of Queen Anna, who also sponsored the
Chapel Children as 'Children of the Queen's Revels' by a patent of 4
February 1604. In turn the Lord Admiral's men became 'Prince Henry's
Servants' early in 1604. (though their patent was issued two years
later).

A royal patent authorized a
troupe to play in town halls -- whether or not a council forbade
acting. Stratford's council might still bar actors from the Gild hall,
but it would have had to appeal to the Privy Council to justify that
ban.

For a spendthrift King, the
actors, all in all, were a bargain. Despite inflation James paid them
just £10 for a performance, exactly what his predecessor had paid. The
troupe's gross receipts from his royal court in 1603 through to
February 1604. were about £150, a small amount in plague-time if each
of a major troupe's actors had been receiving about £1 a week. Whereas
Elizabeth had enjoyed plays, King James was not very fond of them,
nor did he, nor any of his immediate court so far as is known, find
Shakespeare unusual. 'The first holydayes', observed Sir Dudley
Carleton at Hampton Court early in 1604, 'we had every night a
publicke play in the great hal
l
e, at w
hi
ch the
King
was ever present, and liked or disliked as he saw cause: but it seems he takes no extraordinary pleasure in them. The
Queene
and Prince were more the Players frends, for on other nights they had them privatly.'
⁷
James was to countermand the decisions of play -- licensers, not
always to the benefit of a play, while at times tolerating stage
satire aimed at himself. If a play struck at an issue about which he
felt strongly (such as his plan for a union between Scotland and
England), he could be ruthlessly quick to respond.

Shakespeare's troupe played at court far more often than before. They
seem to have changed, in a few playbooks, offensive references to the
Scots. In new works such as
Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, or Cymbeline
,
the poet, in effect, touched his cap to his sovereign. The gesture is clear, firm, distinct, and limited as if

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