Shakespeare

Another play, of curious construction and tone, seems to date from this period. All’s Well That Ends Well is generally considered to be a comedy, but it is one dressed in sombre hues. The plot of the infatuated orphan, Helena, pursuing the fatuous and disdainful Count Bertram is not the most edifying; it might almost be a sourly dramatic version of the relationship between the lover and the beloved proposed in the sonnets, with the “lascivious” Bertram as an image of the “Lasciuious grace” of the poems’ recipient. When Helena writes a letter, it takes the form of a sonnet. But the play does have a redeeming character in the portrayal of the elderly Countess of Rossillion, described by George Bernard Shaw as “the most beautiful old woman’s part ever written.” A certain unevenness of tone in the writing prompted Coleridge to speculate that the play “was written at two different, and rather distinct periods of the poet’s life,” 7and it used to be believed that it was a rewriting of the early play Loue labours wonne attributed to Shakespeare. Yet it is best to accept the play as a complete and coherent achievement.

Shakespeare adopted the plot from an anthology of stories, William Painter’s Palace of Pleasure , but the original or parent source is Boccaccio’s Decameron . This was a book from which Chaucer also purloined some of his plots. Shakespeare intensified the action while at the same time introducing riddling complications that display his sheer love of invention. He provides plots and sub-plots that work in parallel, and in part parody one another. He creates patterns of imagery that are like the shadows of paper-lace upon a wall. He has also invented the character of Parolles, the military braggart, a creature of prolific and meaningless words who can now be firmly identified as a Shakespearian “type.” Shakespeare loved those who dwelled in a wilderness of words.

It is a difficult play in the sense that in characteristic fashion Shakespeare conflates several disparate elements, with the folk tale vying with realistic comedy and the elements of fable coexisting with the elements of farce. The verse itself is often very difficult, with meaning wrestling against syntax and cadence. Helena laments “the poorer borne,” for example (182-5),

Whose baser starres do shut vs vp in wishes,

Might with effects of them follow our friends,

And shew what we alone must thinke, which neuer

Returnes vs thankes.

It is a demanding poetry once more recalling that of Shakespeare’s contemporary John Donne. It is even possible that there was in this period a fashion for difficult poetry, which Shakespeare mastered just as he mastered every other form. It is a difficult play but it is also a dry play, an abortive exercise in comic form. We do not need to suppose any great crisis in Shakespeare’s creative or personal life, as some biographers have suggested, in order to explain this loss of power. A dark thought took wing into a dark valley which, once thoroughly investigated, proved barren and boring. That is all.

On 24 July, 1605 , Shakespeare invested £440 in tithes or, as the official document states, “one half of all tythes of corne and grayne aryseing within the townes villages and fieldes of Old Stratford, Byshopton and Welcombe” as well as “half of all tythes of wooll and lambe, and of all small and privy tythes.” 1A tithe had originally been a tenth part of the produce from the land, paid by farmer or tenant to the Church; this archaic form of tribute had then been passed to the Stratford Corporation at the time of the Reformation. Shakespeare was leasing his tithes from the corporation for a period of thirty-one years. At this late date it sounds a complicated matter, but at the time it was a conventional and familiar way of securing a reasonable income. The sum laid out by Shakespeare was in fact a very large one, and he could not raise the whole amount at one time; a year later he still owed some £20 to the vendor, Ralph Hubaud. He expected an annual return on his investment of something like £60, which was in itself a reasonable income. There were, however, one or two additional costs. He collected the tithes but was obliged to pay an annual fee of £17 to the Corporation of Stratford for the privilege. Nevertheless he still gathered a large amount.

The fact that his tithe lease ran for thirty-one years is evidence that he was intent upon securing his family’s future after his death. It was a question of social, as well as financial, status. As the owner of tithes he was classified as a “lay rector,” and had earned the right to be buried within the rails of the chancel of Stratford Church; it was a right that was taken up at his behest or on his behalf. Meanwhile his purchase of New Place had given him the right to a reserved pew in the church. He seems always to have been concerned about his precise social standing in his old town. It was in this period, too, that he rented out the eastern part of the family house in Henley Street to brewers by the name of Hiccox.

The transaction concerning the tithes was witnessed by two friends who would at a later date be named in his will, Anthony Nash of Welcombe and the lawyer Francis Collins. It is a mark of the invisibility of Shakespeare’s Stratford life that little is known of these gentlemen, who played an intimate and familiar part in the dramatist’s commercial affairs. They were part of a world very different from that of the players and playgoers, but he was equally at home in their company.

His prosperity did not go unremarked and in a fictional “biography” published this year of a notorious highwayman, Gamaliel Ratsey, there are references to actors who “are grown so wealthy that they have expected to be knighted, or at least to be cojunct in authority and to sit with men of great worship.” There is also a clear allusion to Shakespeare in the remark that “thou shalt learne to be frugall … to make thy hand a stranger to thy pocket… and when thou feelest thy purse well-lined, buy thee some Place or lordship in the country, that growing weary of playing thy mony may there bring thee to dignitie and reputation.” 2The anonymous writer goes on to say that “I haue heard indeede, of some that haue gone to London very meanly, and haue come in time to be exceeding wealthy.” This fits Shakespeare’s case exactly. The little volume seems to have been written by someone who knew of Shakespeare’s affairs, and it is interesting that he should emphasise the dramatist’s obvious thrift as well as his success.

The wealthy player is described as “weary of playing,” too, which confirms the evidence that Shakespeare had retired from the stage by 1603 or 1604. The purchase of tithes, as we have seen, ensured that he had an annual and independent income larger than that of a player. It is doubly unlikely, then, that he was on tour with the King’s Men in autumn and winter of this year. They were travelling again out of necessity, since a new onset of the plague meant that the theatres were closed from the middle of October to the middle of December. Among the plays they took with them were Othello and Measure for Measure as well as Ben Jonson’s Volpone . They seem to have travelled as far west as Barnstaple, taking in Oxford and Saffron Walden enroute, and may indeed have stayed in the provinces until the Globe was reopened on 15 December. Just eleven days later, they performed before the king.

They were playing in uncertain times, and to a king who was reported to be in a state of alarm and anxiety. In early November the conspiracy popularly known as the “Gunpowder Plot” was revealed to the world, with its ambitious and unprecedented attempt to blow up king and Parliament. It led to renewed suspicion and persecution of Roman Catholics, of course, nowhere more fiercely than in Stratford and Warwickshire. The leading conspirator, Robert Catesby, was a Warwickshire man. The conspirators met in that county, and one of them had even rented Clopton House just outside Stratford to be close to his colleagues. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of 5 November the bailiff of Stratford seized a cloak-bag “full of copes, vestments, crosses, crucifixes, chalices and other massing relics.” It was supposed “to be delivered to one George Badger there.” 3George Badger was the woollen-draper who lived next door to the Shakespeares in Henley Street. Shakespeare knew him very well indeed, and would have quickly been informed by his family of the calamity that had fallen upon him.