Shakespeare also at this time produced (though he may of course have written earlier) an untitled allegorical poem, which history has come to know as The Phoenix and the Turtle, for a book of poems published in 1601 called Love’s Martyr: or Rosalind’s Complaint, compiled by Robert Chester and dedicated to Chester’s patrons, Sir John and Lady Salusbury. What relationship Shakespeare had with Chester or the Salusburys is unknown. The poem, sixty-seven lines long, is difficult and doesn’t always get much notice in biographies (Greenblatt in Will in the World and Schoenbaum in his Compact Documentary Life both, rather surprisingly, fail to mention it at all) but Frank Kermode rates it highly, calling it “a remarkable work with no obvious parallel in the canon,” and praising its extraordinary language and rich symbolism.
Yet-and there really is always a “yet” with Shakespeare-just as he was feverishly turning out some of his greatest work and enjoying the summit of his success, everything in his private life seemed to indicate a pronounced longing to be in Stratford. First he bought New Place-a strikingly large commitment for someone who had not owned a home before-and followed that with a cottage and plot of land across the road from New Place (probably to house a servant; it was too small to make a rentable investment). Then he acquired 107 acres of tenanted farmland north of Stratford for £320. Then, in the summer of 1605, he spent the very substantial sum of £440 to buy a 50 percent holding in tithes of “corn, grain, blade and hay” in three neighboring villages, from which he could expect earnings of £ 60 a year.
In the midst of these purchases, in the early winter of 1601, Shakespeare and his fellows faced what must have been an unnerving experience when they became peripherally but dangerously involved in an attempt to overthrow the queen. The instigator of this reckless exercise was Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex.
Essex was the stepson of the Earl of Leicester, Elizabeth ’s longtime favorite and consort in all but name for much of her reign. Essex, though thirty years Elizabeth’s junior, was in his turn a favorite, too, but he was also headstrong, reckless, and foolishly, youthfully disobedient. Time and again he tried her patience, but in 1599 royal exasperation turned to furious displeasure when Essex, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, concluded a truce without authority with Irish insurgents, then returned to England against orders. Enraged, the queen placed Essex under strict house arrest. He was forbidden to have contact with his wife or even to stroll in his own garden. Worse, he was deprived of the lucrative offices that had supported him. The confinement was lifted the following summer, but by this point the damage to his pride and pocket had been done, and he began, with a few loyal followers, to cook up a scheme to foment a popular uprising and depose the queen. Among these loyal followers was the Earl of Southampton.
It was at this point, in February 1601, that Sir Gelly Meyrick, one of Essex’s agents, approached the Lord Chamberlain’s Men enjoining them to present a command performance of Richard II for a special payment of £2. The play, according to Meyrick’s specific instructions, was to be performed at the Globe, in public, and the company was expressly instructed to include the scenes in which the monarch was deposed and murdered. This was a willfully incendiary act. The scenes were already so politically sensitive at the time that no printer would dare publish them.
It is important to bear in mind that to an Elizabethan audience a history play was not an emotionally remote account of something long since done; rather, it was perceived as a kind of mirror reflecting present conditions. Therefore staging Richard II was bound to be seen as an intentionally and provocatively seditious exercise. Only recently a young author named John Hayward had found himself clapped into the Tower after writing sympathetically about Richard II’s abdication in The First Part of the Life and Reign of King Henry IV- an error of judgment he further compounded by dedicating the work to the Earl of Essex. This was no time to be trifling with regal feelings.
Yet the Lord Chamberlain’s Men dutifully performed the play as commanded on February 7. The next day the Earl of Essex, supported by three hundred men, set off from his home in the Strand toward the City. His plan was first to take control of the Tower and then Whitehall and then to arrest the queen. It was a harebrained scheme. His hope, evidently, was to replace Elizabeth with James VI of Scotland, and it was his confident expectation that he would accumulate supporters along the way. In fact, no one came forward-not a soul. His men rode through eerily silent streets, their rallying cries unanswered by a sullen and watching citizenry. Without a mob behind them, they had no hope of victory. Uncertain what to do next, Essex stopped for lunch, then fell back with his small (and swiftly evaporating) army toward the Strand. At Ludgate they ran into a party of startled soldiers, who in some confusion drew weapons and managed to fire some shots. A bullet passed through Essex ’s hat.
His revolution descending into farce, Essex fled back to his house, where he spent what remained of his liberty trying desperately-and a little pointlessly, one would have thought-to destroy incriminating documents. Soon afterward a detachment of soldiers turned up and arrested him and his arch-supporter, Southampton.
Augustine Phillips spoke for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men at the investigation that followed. We know little about Phillips, other than that he was a trusted member of the company, but he must have made a persuasive case that they were innocent dupes or had acted under duress, for they were excused of any transgression-in fact were summoned to stage another play before the queen at Whitehall on the very day that she signed Essex’s death warrant, Shrove Tuesday, 1601. Essex was executed on the day following. Meyrick and five other supporters were likewise beheaded. Southampton faced a similar unhappy fate, but was spared execution thanks to his mother’s influential pleadings. He spent two years imprisoned in the Tower of London, albeit in considerable comfort in a suite of apartments that cost him £ 9 a week in rent.
Essex would have saved his own head and a great deal of bother if only he had been born with a little patience. Just over two years after his farcical rebellion, the queen herself was dead-and swiftly succeeded by the man whom Essex had given his life to try to put on the throne.
Chapter Seven. The Reign of King James, 1603-1616
BY THE WINTER OF 1603, if an account left by a French envoy, André Hurault, is entirely to be trusted, Queen Elizabeth I had become a little odd to behold. Her face was caked permanently in a thick mask of white makeup, her teeth were black or missing, and she had developed the distracted habit of loosening the stays of her dress so that it forever hung open. “You could see the whole of her bosom,” noted Hurault in some wonder.
Shortly after Twelfth Night, the court retired to the royal palace at Richmond and there in early February the Chamberlain’s Men, presumably with William Shakespeare among them, performed before the queen for the last time. (The play they performed is not known.) Soon afterward Elizabeth caught a chill and slipped into a dreamy, melancholic illness from which she never emerged. On March 24, the last day of the year under the old Julian calendar, she died in her sleep, “mildly like a lamb.” She was sixty-nine years old.
To the joy of nearly everyone, she was uneventfully succeeded by her northern kinsman James, son of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was thirty-six years old and married to a Danish Catholic, but devotedly Protestant himself. In Scotland he was James VI, but in England he became James I. He had ruled in Scotland for twenty years already and would reign in England for twenty-two more.