Shakespeare

Nevertheless he was godfather in this year to another William, baptised in the font of Stratford Church. William Greene was the child of Thomas and Laetitia Greene, who were in fact residing at New Place during this period. Thomas Greene was a local lawyer who had been educated at the Middle Temple, an institution with which Shakespeare was very well acquainted, and he had moved to Stratford in 1601. At some point he moved with his wife into New Place as a tenant, sharing the household with Anne Shakespeare and her daughters. It may have been a way for Shakespeare of easing the burden of costs. The fact that they named their son William is, in any case, an indication of harmony with the master of the house.

The continuance of the plague meant that, in the summer and autumn of 1608, the King’s Men were obliged to tour the provinces with their new plays. They were at Coventry at the end of October, and also at Marlborough, but the rest of their progress is unknown. They were back in London, however, for the court performances of that year. They performed twelve plays at Whitehall, but the titles are not recorded.

It is more than likely that Shakespeare’s most recent plays, Pericles and Coriolanus , were among them. But there is one other candidate for inclusion in this period. Timon of Athens is a play of strange clamour and majesty. It is the story of a man whose lavish generosity is not reciprocated and who, as a result, falls into a state of savage misanthropy. It has been suggested that it comes close to a fable or morality play, with Timon as a type rather than a character. But that is to misinterpret Shakespeare’s subtlety. There is no conflict here between good and evil, only between variously mixed natures.

The play cannot be securely dated. It is one of those free-floating dramas, without much contemporary reference and no record of contemporary performance, which could be placed anywhere in the early seventeenth century. It may be unfinished or have been abandoned. There are passages of dialogue that need revision, and certain elements of the plot are left suspended. His texts were always in a fluid and incomplete state but, to paraphrase Animal Farm , some are more incomplete than others. It is also possible that it represents a “first draft” by the dramatist, and that he was content to leave it at that point. There is also a theory that the play survives at various stages of composition, with some scenes “roughed out” and others almost finished. If that is the case, then it is a Shakespearian document of the utmost interest; it shows, as it were, the painterly “washes” of Shakespeare’s imagination. On this occasion he created a structure and sketched out the balance of plot and sub-plot, adding incident and detail, but he paid relatively little attention to the role of the minor characters. None of these observations necessarily implies that the play was not performed. Even in its incomplete state it is a fluent and powerful piece of theatre. There is no record of any contemporary productions, but that in itself is not conclusive.

The immediate source of the play was once more North’s translation of Plutarch, and indirectly we may see Shakespeare’s process of association. The story of Timon is related in Plutarch’s life of Antony, which Shakespeare studied for Antony and Cleopatra . In Plutarch’s work Alcibiades is the figure complementary to Coriolanus, the subject of Shakespeare’s previous drama. Alcibiades plays a large part in Timon of Athens . So there is a set of connections leading Shakespeare forward. He moved from one classical figure to another, all part of the immediate arena of his imaginative concerns. He was also influenced by an academic comedy, entitled Timon , which might have been performed at the Inns of Court. This drama may have played some part in the composition of King Lear as well, and so acted as a powerful spur to Shakespeare’s imagination.

It is also surmised that Timon of Athens was in part the result of a collaboration with the young dramatist Thomas Middleton, who by his mid-twenties was already well known for his verse and for his satirical city comedies. Shakespeare’s collaboration with Middleton resembled that with a co-author, perhaps George Wilkins, over Pericles . Shakespeare was happy to contribute scenes, or whole acts, while leaving intact the somewhat jejune work of his collaborators. It is as if he did not care very much about the finished article, as long as it was performable. In this respect he was acting as a professional man of the theatre rather than as an “artist” in the modern sense. It may well be that each dramatist wrote his selection of scenes independently, and that they were brought together only in the process of rehearsal. For this reason his colleagues did not originally intend to place Timon of Athens in the Folio edition of his collected plays. It was only included when a sudden gap (the result of problems over the publication of Troilus and Cressida ) had to be filled. The King’s Men did not consider the play to be really “by” Shakespeare. As a result of its placing in the Folio, however, it has remained forever in the canon. The legacy and reputation of even the most eminent writers can sometimes be secured by accident.

The plague raged through London for the entire year of 1609. Dekker lamented the condition of the period when “Pleasure itself finds now no pleasure but in sighing and bewayling the Miseries of the Time.” He recorded that “play-houses stand (like Tavernes that have cast out their Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their Bushes) taken down; or rather like houses lately infected, from whence the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.” And he added that “Playing vacations are diseases now as common and as hurtful to them as the Foul Evil to a Northern Man or the Pox to a Frenchman.” 1The King’s Men were once more on a provincial tour to escape the miasma of the capital. They visited, among other places, Ipswich, New Romney and Hythe. For much of this journey they sailed around the coast.

Shakespeare, probably relieved of his acting duties, was certainly now considering a permanent removal to Stratford. His tenant or house-guest, Thomas Greene, was urgently enquiring whether a new house would be ready for him by the spring of 1610. This suggests that a date for Shakespeare’s return had been agreed. But in this year, too, Shakespeare had business finished and unfinished in Stratford. In June 1609, for example, he settled his dispute over debt with John Addenbrooke. In the records of the Stratford court Shakespeare himself is described as “generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc Regis Anglie.” 2He was, in translation, a gentleman recently at the court of James, now King of England. His status as the king’s servant was very well known in Stratford. He was something of a resident dignitary. In this year, too, he and Thomas Greene sent a suit of complaint to the Lord Chancellor over some matters concerning the Stratford tithes which Shakespeare had been granted. Later in the year his brother, Gilbert, had to appear in court for some unspecified offence; to judge from those cited with him, he had some violent companions in the neighbourhood.

Shakespeare had not finished accumulating land in the vicinity. In the following year he bought for £100 a further 20 acres from the Combe family, adding to his previous purchase of 127 acres eight years before. In this period his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Hathaway, paid £200 for the farm and farmhouse at Shottery where Anne Hathaway had been brought up. It was their real family home. It is likely that Shakespeare helped his relative to find that large sum. One astute scholar of Shakespeare’s imagery has noted that in Cymbeline , the play he was composing in this period, there is a continual vein of allusion to “buying and selling, value and exchange, every kind of payment,” 3as if Shakespeare’s mind was running upon such matters even without his realising it.