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The reknowned Shakespeare authority Stanley Wells thinks Shakespeare might have taken time off from the company to return to Stratford to write plays. “He retained a close interest in Stratford throughout his life, and there is nothing to suggest that he didn’t retire there from time to time to write in peace,” Wells told me. “The company may well have said to him, ‘We need a new play-go home and write it.’ He owned a rather grand establishment. It is not unreasonable to suppose that he might have wanted to spend time there.”
Except that he was creatively productive, nothing of note can be stated with certainty about Shakespeare’s life from 1603 to 1607 and 1608, when first his brother Edmund and then his mother died, both of unknown causes. Edmund was twenty-seven years old and an actor in London. Shakespeare’s mother was over seventy-a ripe old age. More than that we do not know about either of them.
In the same year that Shakespeare’s mother died, the King’s Men finally secured permission to open the Blackfriars Theatre. The Blackfriars became the template from which all subsequent indoor theaters evolved, and so ultimately was more important to posterity than the Globe. It held only about six hundred people, but it was more profitable than the Globe because the price of admission was high: sixpence for even the cheapest seat. This was good news for Shakespeare, who had a one-sixth interest in the operation. The smaller theater also permitted a greater intimacy in voice and even in music-strings and woodwinds rather than trumpet blasts.
Windows admitted some light, but candles provided most of the illumination. Spectators could, for an additional fee, sit on the stage-something not permitted at the Globe. With stage seating, audience members could show off their finery to maximum effect, and the practice was lucrative; but it contained an obvious risk of distraction. Stephen Greenblatt relates an occasion in which a nobleman who had secured a perch on the stage spied a friend entering across the way and strode through the performance to greet him. When rebuked by an actor for his thoughtlessness, the nobleman slapped the impertinent fellow and the audience rioted.
Apart from the stage itself, the best seats were in the pit (or so it is presumed) because the hanging candelabra must at least partly have obscured the view of those sitting higher up. With the Blackfriars up and ru
On May 20, 1609, a quarto volume titled Shakespeare’s So
“Probably more nonsense has been talked and written, more intellectual and emotional energy expended in vain, on the so
In some critics’ view, the so
Certainly they contain some of his most celebrated lines, as in the opening quatrain to So
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date
What is unusual about these lines, and many others of an even more direct and candid nature, is that the person they praise is not a woman but a man. The extraordinary fact is that Shakespeare, creator of the tenderest and most moving scenes of heterosexual affection in play after play, became with the so
So
As published, the 154 so
Many authorities believe that Shakespeare was alarmed and surprised-“horrified” in Auden’s view-to find the so
Nearly everything about the so
The problem with either of these candidates is that they were both aristocratic, while the dedicatee is addressed here as “Mr.” It has been suggested that Thorpe may not have known any better, but in fact Thorpe addressed Pembroke directly in a separate volume in the same year and did so with the usual obsequious flourishes: “To the Right Honourable, William, Earl of Pembroke, Lord Chamberlain to his Majesty, one of his most honourable Privy Council, and Knight of the most noble order of the Garter, etc…” Thorpe knew how to address a noble. A more prosaic likelihood is that “Mr W.H.” was a stationer named William Hall, who, like Thorpe, specialized in unauthorized productions.