Shakespeare

The plague raged through London for the entire year of 1609. Dekker lamented the condition of the period when “Pleasure itself finds now no pleasure but in sighing and bewayling the Miseries of the Time.” He recorded that “play-houses stand (like Tavernes that have cast out their Maisters) the dores locked up, the Flagges (like their Bushes) taken down; or rather like houses lately infected, from whence the affrighted dwellers are fled, in hope to live better in the Country.” And he added that “Playing vacations are diseases now as common and as hurtful to them as the Foul Evil to a Northern Man or the Pox to a Frenchman.”¹ The King’s Men were once more on a provincial tour to escape the miasma of the capital. They visited, among other places, Ipswich, New Romney and Hythe. For much of this journey they sailed around the coast.

Shakespeare, probably relieved of his acting duties, was certainly now considering a permanent removal to Stratford. His tenant or house-guest, Thomas Greene, was urgently enquiring whether a new house would be ready for him by the spring of 1610. This suggests that a date for Shakespeare’s return had been agreed. But in this year, too, Shakespeare had business finished and unfinished in Stratford. In June 1609, for example, he settled his dispute over debt with John Addenbrooke. In the records of the Stratford court Shakespeare himself is described as “generosus, nuper in curia domini Jacobi, nunc Regis Anglie.” ² He was, in translation, a gentleman recently at the court of James, now King of England. His status as the king’s servant was very well known in Stratford. He was something of a resident dignitary. In this year, too, he and Thomas Greene sent a suit of complaint to the Lord Chancellor over some matters concerning the Stratford tithes which Shakespeare had been granted. Later in the year his brother, Gilbert, had to appear in court for some unspecified offence; to judge from those cited with him, he had some violent companions in the neighbourhood.

Shakespeare had not finished accumulating land in the vicinity. In the following year he bought for £100 a further 20 acres from the Combe family, adding to his previous purchase of 127 acres eight years before. In this period his brother-in-law, Bartholomew Hathaway, paid £200 for the farm and farmhouse at Shottery where Anne Hathaway had been brought up. It was their real family home. It is likely that Shakespeare helped his relative to find that large sum. One astute scholar of Shakespeare’s imagery has noted that in Cymbeline, the play he was composing in this period, there is a continual vein of allusion to “buying and selling, value and exchange, every kind of payment,”³ as if Shakespeare’s mind was running upon such matters even without his realising it.

He may also have needed the seclusion of New Place to arrange in shape and order the sonnets he had written on various occasions in the past. Now that his mother was dead, he may have felt able to publish their somewhat scandalous content. It is not certain whether he considered the sensibilities of his wife – unless he believed, as many scholars have since maintained, that the contents would be understood to be manifest fiction. Deprived of income from the closed theatres, he may also have considered this an opportune moment to sell the manuscripts to a publisher.

They were duly published in 1609 under the title “SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS Neuer Before Imprinted.” They were printed by George Eld and were to be sold for 5d a copy, by John Wright whose shop was at Christ Church gate on Newgate Street. The dedication was signed by Thomas Thorpe, the publisher, rather than by Shakespeare himself. It must be the most famous dedication in all literary history, consisting of the mysterious and much debated lines.

TO THE ONLIE BEGETTER OF THESE INSVING SONNETS MR.

W H ALL HAPPINESSE AND THAT ETERNITIE PROMISED BY

OVR EVER LIVING POET WISHETH THE WELL-WISHING

ADVENTVRER IN SETTING FORTH. TT.