Frederick Fleay - A Chronicle History of the Life and Work of William Shakespeare

In January 1610 the Revels children left the Blackfriars Theatre, and set up with a new organisation under Rossiter at Whitefriars the new private stage. It appears from the statement of C. Burbadge, in the 1635 documents discovered by Mr. Halliwell, that that family then bought up the remainder of the lease from Evans, and took some of the Revels boys, now grown up, to strengthen the Globe company. Among these were Underwood and Ostler; but as C. Burbadge also names Field, who did not join the King's men till 1615 or 1616, his subsequent statement that they set up men-players, Shakespeare, Hemings, Condell, &c., in Blackfriars at that date , is not to be taken as necessarily exact. The King's men undoubtedly took possession of Blackfriars for their own performances in 1614 or 1615, after the Globe had been burned and rebuilt; but there is not a trace of them until then in connection with this private house except this ex parte statement of C. Burbadge, made for a special purpose, in a plea which is studiously ambiguous. But there is evidence that other companies acted there. Field's Amends for Ladies was performed there by the Lady Elizabeth's company and the Duke of York's (afterwards Prince Charles'). This performance must have taken place during a temporary union between the Prince's men and the Lady Elizabeth's, to which latter the play and its author were properly attached; but that the Duke of York's acted continuously at Blackfriars from 1610 to 1615, is very probable. It is not likely that a company under such patronage, and admitted to Court performances every Christmas, should have been merely a strolling company, and there was no other theatre for them to perform in. The King's men held the Globe, Prince Henry's (afterwards the Palgrave's) the Fortune, the Queen's the Bull and the Curtain, the Queen's Revels' boys Whitefriars, and Lady Elizabeth's at first the Swan till 1612, and after its abandonment the newly renovated Hope in 1614, and then the rebuilt Cockpit or Phœnix. There is no proof that Shakespeare ever acted at Blackfriars; there is strong presumption to the contrary as to his supposed shares in that theatre: it was the "private inheritance" of the Burbadges, and that the King's men had shares in it at this time rests on the evidence of forged documents and mischievously fertile imaginations, to which the purchase of twenty acres of land at Stratford by Shakespeare from the Combes in June seems to require access of capital to make this new acquisition feasible. Winter's Tale was certainly produced early this year, before Jonson's Alchemist , which was acted and entered S. R., October 3, but was, however, "stayed" for the usual reasons, and did not get published till 1612. The Address to the Reader (no doubt dating 1610) contains one of Jonson's numerous allusions to the "dance of antics" in Winters Tale . Jonson, who had produced Epicene for the Chapel children in 1609, had returned to the King's men when the boys left Blackfriars. Shakespeare's last play this year, and final finished contribution to the stage, was The Tempest , produced about November, after the news that the ships of Sir T. Gates at the Bermudas had not been destroyed. This play as we have it has unfortunately been abridged for Court performances, probably by Beaumont in 1612 or 1613, to whom the insertion of the Masque may confidently be attributed. There were fifteen winter performances at Court in 1610-11.

The loss of Shakespeare was repaired as well as circumstances would permit by the accession of Beaumont and Fletcher to the King's company in 1611. In that year they produced their masterpieces Philaster, a King and no King and The Maid's Tragedy : in 1612 The Woman's Prize (by Fletcher alone), the play of Cardenas (probably the original form of Love's Pilgrimage ), and The Captain . Jonson contributed Catiline in 1611, and Webster The Duchess of Malfi in 1612. The Second Maiden's Tragedy (by the author of The Revenger's Tragedy , I think) was also produced in 1611. At Court the unusual number of twenty-two plays was acted in the 1611 winter and twenty-eight in 1612. These must have included nearly every play they possessed; and the fact that the whole, or nearly so, of Shakespeare's plays were revived at Court in these two years makes his retirement in 1610 to my mind nearly a certainty, and accounts for the not very felicitous praise of his "copious industry" by Webster in the Dedication of his White Devil in 1612. Webster couples the retired Shakespeare with Dekker and Heywood: but Jonson's works he speaks of as "laboured and understanding," Beaumont's and Fletcher's as "no less worthy composures." This higher praise is given to the writers who like himself were then contributing to the Globe repertory. He mentions no one else but Chapman of "full and heightened style." Are we to attribute to this mention of him the tradition that Chapman wrote The Second Maiden's Tragedy ? On 11th September 1611 Shakespeare's name occurs "in the margin, as if a later insertion" (says Mr. Halliwell) of a list of Stratford donors "towards the charge of prosecuting the bill in Parliament for the better repair of the highways." In 1612 Lane, Greene, and Shakespeare filed a bill before Lord Ellesmere complaining that some of the lessees of the Stratford tithes refused to contribute their proper shares of a reserved rent. It appears from this document that Shakespeare's income from this source was £60. In the same year Heywood, in his Apology for Actors , complained of W. Jaggard's having printed in The Passionate Pilgrim , 3d edition, two love epistles taken from his Troia Britannica , as by W. Shakespeare, "which might put the world in opinion I might steal them from him;" he adds that he knows the author was much offended for Jaggard's presuming to make bold with his name. The name was in consequence withdrawn altogether from the title-page. Notwithstanding this, many modern editors print The Passionate Pilgrim as Shakespeare's. On 4th February 1613 Richard Shakespeare was buried at Stratford; whether the Gilbert Shakespeare, "adolescens," who was buried 3d February 1612, was also a brother of William's, is doubtful, but likely. On l0th March 1613 Shakespeare bought of Henry Walker a house and yard near Blackfriars Theatre for £140, of which £60 remained on mortgage (one of the trustees being in 1618 John Heming, Shakespeare's fellow-actor): he leased the house to John Robinson for ten years. On 29th June the Globe was burned down. It caught fire during the performance of All is True ( Henry VIII. ) This was not the play as we have it – which is a later version by Massinger and Fletcher, written for the Blackfriars Theatre, and containing only three scenes that can be attributed to Shakespeare – but a play in which there was a fool's part. Wotton describes it as "the play of Henry VIII. ," but Lorkin says it was a new play called All is True , representing some principal pieces of Henry VIII. Whether new play or not it was probably by Shakespeare, written c. 1609, and portions of it remain imbedded in that now extant by Fletcher and Massinger c. 1617, the original MS. having perished in the fire. Just at the same time one Lane had been maligning Mrs. Hall, Shakespeare's daughter, in connection with Ralph Smith. Lane was summoned before the Ecclesiastical Court at Worcester on 15th July and excommunicated on the 27th. There were only seven plays performed at Court by the King's men in the winter 1613-14, all their principal writers – Fletcher, Beaumont, Jonson, Webster – having left them after the Globe fire. Surely this is not consistent with the statement of C. Burbadge that they had taken the Blackfriars building to their own use. No new play can be traced to them till 1615, when the Globe had been 2 2 It had been reopened in June 1614. rebuilt, and the Prince Charles' men had gone to the Curtain. Then they certainly did take the Blackfriars to themselves, and with an excellent staff of writers – Jonson, Fletcher, Massinger, and Field – they occupied it as well as the new Globe. A letter of John Chamberlain's to Sir Dudley Carleton, 5th January 1615, says of the stage in general: "Of five new plays there is not one that pleases, and therefore they are driven to furbish over their old." Yet Jonson's Bartholomew Fair was one of these 1614 plays acted at Court. I suspect that Lady Elizabeth's players were not so well liked as the King's, and that Shakespeare and Beaumont were greatly missed. Fletcher and Massinger were not yet able to replace them even at Court.