Peter Ackroyd - Shakespeare

It is generally agreed that Shakespeare wrote the first two scenes of the first act, involving court intrigue as well as the appearance of the king and the cardinal. He then went on to write the first two scenes of the next two acts, sketching out the main lines for his collaborator or collaborators to follow. He also wrote the great set scene of the Consistory Court, as well as the more intimate and lubricious dialogue between Anne Boleyn and an “old lady”; these are, in a sense, his specialities. The court scene is in fact largely transcribed from his main source, Holinshed’s Chronicles , and perhaps lacks the quick alchemy of his earlier borrowings; but the verse is forceful and supple enough to suggest no lessening of dramatic power. He wrote the scene in which Wolsey contemplates his fall, another great transition that Shakespeare had mastered in the early history plays; whenever any man fails, Shakespeare’s sympathy envelops him. He also wrote the first scene of the last act which sets up the denouement. He gave a structure, and a tone, to the whole production. He may also have gone over the finished playscript, adding phrases or images here and there. There may even have been a third collaborator, the elusive Beaumount, but at this point speculation becomes useless.

There seems to be no doubt, however, that The Two Noble Kinsmen was the next collaboration between William Shakespeare and John Fletcher. On the title page of the first edition, published in quarto form in 1634, it is described as being “presented at the Blackfriers by the Kings Maiestie servants, with great applause: Written by the memorable Worthies of their time: Mr. John Fletcher, and Mr. William Shakspeare. Gent.” It is worth noting that Fletcher’s name is mentioned first.

Shakespeare once more established the essential structure of the play, by writing the whole of the first act and parts of the final three acts; he may also have gone over the completed work, rephrasing and augmenting as he saw fit. It is a reworking of “The Knight’s Tale” from Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales; characteristically Shakespeare takes a more ritualistic, and Fletcher a more naturalistic, attitude towards the original source. The fact that it was not included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s plays may suggest that it was considered to be a company, rather than an individual, play. All Is True had escaped that fate by being the culmination of a long sequence of history plays already accredited to Shakespeare.

Two of Shakespeare’s most alert and astute interpreters, however, found the signs that he had inhabited Two Noble Kinsmen all but overwhelming. Charles Lamb noted of its Shakespearian passages that he “mingles everything, he runs line into line, embarrasses sentences and metaphors: before one idea has burst its shell, another is hatched and clamorous for discourse.” 4Schlegel, writing on the same play, considered its “brevity and fullness of thought bordering on obscurity.” 5There are occasions when meaning seems to run away from him, losing itself among a plethora of rich phrases, and there are occasions when the language is pushed to extremity (I.i.129-31):

But touch the ground for us no longer time

Then a Doves motion, when the head’s pluckt off:

Tell him if he i’th blood cizd field, lay swolne

Showing the Sun his Teeth; grinning at the Moone

What you would doe.

There are lines that seem purely Shakespearian, as when one queen speaks of her humble suit as (I.i. 184-5):

Wrinching our holy begging in our eyes

To make petition cleere.

There are times when the syntax is very complicated indeed, seeming to express the concept of difficulty itself. And there are occasions when Shakespeare seems to rebuke his own contorted prolixity. He had forged so supple and subtle a medium that, effectively, he could do as he liked with it. So it is perhaps worth quoting the last lines of the play, delivered as customary by the most well-born of the remaining characters on the stage. They are the words of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and they have some claim to being the last that Shakespeare ever wrote for the stage (2780-6):

O you heavenly Charmers,

What things you make of us? For what we lacke

We laugh, for what we have, are sorry, still

Are children in some kind. Let us be thankefull

For that which is, and with you leave dispute

That are above our question: Let’s goe off,

And beare us like the time.

In retrospect this may seem a fitting epitaph for Shakespeare’s career, with its resolution and its stoicism, its subdued gaiety and its sense of transcendence.

In the spring of 1614 a preacher was staying overnight at New Place. He was supposed to preach at the Guild Chapel, next door to Shakespeare’s dwelling, and the corporation paid the Shakespeare family 20 pence for the expense of “one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine” 1purchased to entertain the unnamed minister. It is not known if the master of the house was present on this occasion, but the likelihood must be that he spent more time in Stratford than in the gatehouse of Blackfriars. His seems to have been a kind of retirement, or semi-retirement, if only because of the evident fact that he neither wrote nor collaborated in more drama. But he still travelled to and from London.

His earliest biographer, Nicholas Rowe, states that the

latter part of his life was spent, as all Men of good Sense will wish theirs may be, in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion and, in that, to his Wish; and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford. 2

There is no reason to doubt the essential narrative here, although it does tend to discount the purchase of his gatehouse in Blackfriars. The reasons given for his retreat have been various. He came back because he was tired and in ill-health. He came back because he knew that he was dying. He came back in order to revise his plays for future publication. All, or none, may apply.

Nicholas Rowe reports further that “his pleasurable Wit and good Nature engag’d him in the Acquaintance, and entitled him to the Friendship, of the Gentlemen of the neighbourhood.” 3These “gentlemen” would of course include the town worthies, many of whom he had known all his life and some of whom he would remember in his will. There were the Combes, for example, who lived in the largest house in Stratford and who were among the wealthiest families in Warwickshire. There was the Nash family, large landowners, who lived next door to New Place. And there was Julius Shaw, a very prosperous dealer in wool and high bailiff of the town; he lived two doors down from New Place. There were of course many other neighbours — as well as his immediate family — living in close proximity. These were the people whom he saw every day, and with whom he exchanged greetings and small talk. Shakespeare was now much more identified with his family, and with his native background, than he had been at any time since his childhood. He had, in a sense, completed the circle. The themes of restoration and regeneration, so familiar in his late drama, could now be applied to life itself.

There were also the local dignitaries with whom he would have had an acquaintance if not necessarily a friendship. Among these were Sir Henry and Lady Rainsford, who lived at Clifford Chambers very close to Stratford. John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, was their doctor; but they were also closely associated with another Warwickshire poet of note, Michael Drayton. John Hall had also once treated him with a concoction described as “syrup of violets.” Drayton, like Shakespeare, had risen from obscure Warwickshire origins to distinction in English letters and, perhaps more importantly, to gentlemanly status. They had followed different paths, with Drayton achieving the most obvious literary and poetical eminence after first fashioning a career as a dramatist; he became the English “laureate” and was granted a monument in Westminster Abbey, whereas Shakespeare had to be content with one in the local church. Shakespeare alluded to Drayton’s work in his drama, and Drayton himself praised Shakespeare in a set of public verses. Drayton was also a close friend of Shakespeare’s “cousin,” Thomas Greene, who had lived for a while in New Place. The vicar of Stratford blamed Shakespeare’s death upon a “merry meeting” in Stratford between Drayton, Shakespeare and Ben Jonson. We may safely conclude that they were well acquainted, and that they saw each other in their local neighbourhood.