John Shakespeare didn’t get to enjoy his gentlemanly privileges long. He died in 1601, aged about seventy, having been a financial failure by this point for a quarter of a century-more than a third of his life.
Quite how well off Shakespeare became in these years is impossible to say. Most of his income came from his share of ownership of the theatrical company. From the plays themselves he would have earned comparatively little-about £6 was the going rate for a finished script in Shakespeare’s day, rising perhaps to £10 for a work of the first rank. Ben Jonson in a lifetime earned less than £200 from his plays, and Shakespeare wouldn’t have made a great deal more.
Various informed estimates suggest that his earnings in his peak years were not less than £ 200 a year and may have been as much as £700. On balance Schoenbaum thinks the lower figure more likely to be correct, and Shakespeare wouldn’t always have achieved that. In plague years, when the theaters were closed, all theatrical earnings were bound to have been much reduced.
Still, there is no question that he was by his early thirties a respectably prosperous citizen-though we gain a little perspective on Shakespeare’s wealth when we compare his £200 to £ 700 a year with the £3,300 that the courtier James Hay could spend on a single banquet or the £190,000 that the Earl of Suffolk lavished on his country home in Essex, Audley End, or the £ 600,000 in booty Sir Francis Drake brought home from just one productive sea venture in 1580. Shakespeare was well off but scarcely a titan of finance. And it appears that no matter how prosperous he got, he never stopped being tightfisted. In the same year that he bought New Place, he was found guilty in London of defaulting on a tax payment of 5 shillings; the following year he defaulted again.
Though it isn’t possible to say how much time he spent in Stratford in these years, it is certain that he became a presence in the town as an investor and occasional litigant. And it is apparent that he was known by his neighbors as a man of substance. In October 1598 Richard Quiney of Stratford (whose son would eventually marry one of Shakespeare’s daughters) wrote to Shakespeare asking for a loan of £30-roughly £ 15,000 in today’s money, so no small sum. In the event, it appears Quiney had second thoughts or was somehow deflected from his course, for the letter seems never to have been sent. It was found among his papers at his death.
Rather oddly, this period when Shakespeare was displaying wealth in an unusually debonair manner coincided with what must have been a financially uncertain period for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. In January 1597 James Burbage, their guiding light and most senior figure, died at the age of sixty-seven, just as the company’s lease on the Theatre was about to expire. Burbage had recently invested a great deal of money-£1,000 at least-in purchasing and refurbishing the old Blackfriars Monastery in the City with the intention of turning it into a theater. Unfortunately the residents of the neighborhood had successfully petitioned to stop his plan.
James Burbage’s son Cuthbert pursued negotiations to renew the Theatre’s lease-normally a straightforward process-but the landlord proved difficult and strangely evasive. The likelihood is that he had other plans for the site and the building that stood upon it. After a year of getting nowhere with him, the men of the company decided to take action.
On the night of December 28, 1598, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, aided by a dozen or so workmen, secretly began to dismantle the Theatre and conveyed it across the frozen Thames, where it was reerected overnight, according to legend. In fact (and not surprisingly) it took considerably more than a single night, though exactly how long is a matter of persistent dispute. The contract for the construction of the rival Fortune Theatre indicates a building time of six months, suggesting that the new theater is unlikely to have been ready before summer at the earliest (just the time when the London theatrical season came to an end).
The new Globe, as it came to be called, stood a hundred feet or so in from the river and a little west of London Bridge and the palace of the bishops of Westminster. (The replica Globe Theatre built in 1997 is not on the original site, as visitors often naturally suppose, but merely near it.) Although Southwark is generally described as a place of stews, footpads, and other urban horrors, it is notable that in both Visscher’s and Hollar’s drawings much of the district is quite leafy and that the Globe is shown standing on the edge of serene and pleasant fields, with cows grazing right up to its walls.
The members of Shakespeare’s company owned the Globe among them. The land for the theater was leased in February 1599 for thirty-one years to Cuthbert Burbage and his brother Richard and to five other members of the troupe: Shakespeare, Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope, and Will Kemp. Shakespeare’s share varied over time-from one-fourteenth of the whole to one-tenth-as other investors bought in or sold off.
The Globe is sometimes referred to as “a theatre built by actors for actors” and there is of course a good deal in that. It is famously referred to as “this wooden O” in Henry V, and other contemporary accounts describe it as round, but it is unlikely to have been literally circular. “Tudor carpenters did not bend oak,” the theater historian Andrew Gurr has observed, and a circular building would have required bent wood. Instead it was probably a many-sided polygon.
The Globe had a distinction in that it was designed exclusively for theatrical productions and took no earnings from cockfighting, bearbaiting, or other such common entertainments. The first mention of it in writing comes in the early autumn of 1599 when a young Swiss tourist named Thomas Platter left a pretty full account of what he saw-including, on September 21, a production of Julius Caesar at the Globe, which he said was “very pleasingly performed” by a cast of about fifteen players. It is the first mention not only of the Globe, but also of Julius Caesar. (We are much indebted to Platter and his diary for a large part of what we know about Elizabethan theatrical performances in London-making it all the more ironic that he spoke almost no English and could not possibly have understood most of what he was seeing.)
The new theater immediately outshone its chief competitor, the Rose, home of Edward Alleyn and the Admiral’s Men. The Rose was only a stroll away down a neighboring lane, and only seven years old, but it was built on boggy ground that made it always dank and uncomfortable. Unable to compete, Alleyn’s company retired to a new site across the river, on Golden Lane, Cripplegate Without, where they built the Fortune, which was even larger than the Globe. It is the one London theater of the period for which architectural details exist, and so most of our “knowledge” of the Globe is in fact extrapolated from it. It burned down in two hours in 1621, leaving the Admiral’s Men “utterly undone.”
The Globe itself didn’t last long. It likewise burned down in 1613, when sparks from a stage cannon ignited the roof thatch. But what a few years they were. No theater-perhaps no human enterprise-has seen more glory in only a decade or so than the Globe during its first manifestation. For Shakespeare this period marked a burst of creative brilliance unparalleled in English literature. One after another, plays of unrivaled majesty dropped from his quill: Julius Caesar, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, Measure for Measure, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra.
We thrill at these plays now. But what must it have been like when they were brand new, when all their references were timely and sharply apt, and all the words never before heard? Imagine what it must have been like to watch Macbeth without knowing the outcome, to be part of a hushed audience hearing Hamlet’s soliloquy for the first time, to witness Shakespeare speaking his own lines. There cannot have been, anywhere in history, many more favored places than this.