Shakespeare

One of Shakespeare’s new neighbours was Richard Burbage, who owned a great deal of property in Blackfriars. In fact, shortly after purchasing the gatehouse, Shakespeare collaborated with his colleague in a surprising venture. They designed an impresa for the Earl of Rutland, to be worn by that young nobleman on the occasion of the Accession Day tilt of 24 March. An impresa was a badge or token which acted as a kind of cipher for the wearer’s moral characteristics; it generally included an emblem, and a motto, painted upon pasteboard. Shakespeare’s motto for Rutland may have been suitably cryptic. A courtier of the time noted that some of the imprese were so obscure “that their meaning is not yet understood, unless perchance that were their meaning, not to be understood.”¹⁰ Shakespeare was paid 44 shillings in gold pieces for the design of the device, and Burbage the same amount for constructing and painting it. The object itself has not survived, but clearly the young earl considered that Shakespeare and Burbage were the two most prominent of the courtly makers. Burbage also had a considerable reputation as a part-time artist. The Earl of Rutland may also have seen the impresa created by Shakespeare for the tournament of Pericles, and had been suitably “impressed.”

It should not be a surprise that Shakespeare, at this late stage of his career, was called upon to perform relatively minor tasks. He had in his youth been called a “Johannes factotum,” after all, and he may have enjoyed the opportunity of creating on a small scale. It has for some time been suspected, for example, that he composed epitaphs for his friends and colleagues – sometimes in game and sometimes in earnest. There is extant an epitaph to Elias James, the brewer whose premises were on Puddle Dock Hill. It is to be found in a manuscript that includes a poem, “Shall I die?” which has also been tentatively attributed to Shakespeare. The seventeenth-century antiquary Sir William Dugdale, who has a reputation for accuracy, stated that the epitaphs on the tombs of Sir Thomas Stanley and Sir Edward Stanley in Tonge Church “were made by William Shakespeare, the late famous tragedian.”¹¹ They strengthen the dramatist’s connection with the Stanley family, and increase our understanding of the acquaintance of “gentle” Shakespeare. It seems likely that Shakespeare also composed the epitaph for his friend and neighbour in Stratford, John Combe, and in fact Combe’s tomb was constructed by the partnership of Garret and Johnson close to the Globe on Bankside. Shakespeare evinces a particular interest in, and fondness for, funereal monuments; no doubt the Combe family left the commissioning in his hands. It has also been suggested that Shakespeare’s own epitaph, containing the famous curse on anyone who moves his bones, was written by the incumbent himself.

CHAPTER 88. I Haue Not Deseru’d This

An incident on the afternoon of Tuesday 29 June 1613 threw all of Shakespeare’s plans into confusion. The King’s Men were playing All Is True at the Globe, a play concerning the marital affairs of King Henry VIII upon which Shakespeare collaborated with Fletcher. It was a new play, having been performed only two or three times previously. The courtier, Sir Henry Wotton, has left a complete account of the disaster that ensued. “Now,” he wrote:

King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey’s house, and certain cannons being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds. This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.¹

Another observer of less sardonic temper noted that “the fire catch’d amp; fastened upon the thatch of the house, and there burned so furiously as it consumed the whole house, amp; all in lesse than two houres (the people having enough to doe to save themselves).”² A third account confirmed that all of the spectators escaped without injury “except one man who was scalded with the fire by adventuring in to save a child which otherwise had been burnt.”³

It was a disaster for the King’s Men, who had been deprived of a venue and an investment in one swift action. It might have been an enactment of Prospero’s words that “the great Globe it selfe” shall “dissolue” and “Leaue not a racke behinde.”