Shakespeare

There are times when the syntax is very complicated indeed, seeming to express the concept of difficulty itself. And there are occasions when Shakespeare seems to rebuke his own contorted prolixity. He had forged so supple and subtle a medium that, effectively, he could do as he liked with it. So it is perhaps worth quoting the last lines of the play, delivered as customary by the most well-born of the remaining characters on the stage. They are the words of Theseus, Duke of Athens, and they have some claim to being the last that Shakespeare ever wrote for the stage (2780-6):

O you heavenly Charmers,

What things you make of us? For what we lacke

We laugh, for what we have, are sorry, still

Are children in some kind. Let us be thankefull

For that which is, and with you leave dispute

That are above our question: Let’s goe off,

And beare us like the time.

In retrospect this may seem a fitting epitaph for Shakespeare’s career, with its resolution and its stoicism, its subdued gaiety and its sense of transcendence.

CHAPTER 89. My Selfe Am Strook in Yeares I Must Confesse

In the spring of 1614 a preacher was staying overnight at New Place. He was supposed to preach at the Guild Chapel, next door to Shakespeare’s dwelling, and the corporation paid the Shakespeare family 20 pence for the expense of “one quart of sack and one quart of clarett wine”¹ purchased to entertain the unnamed minister. It is not known if the master of the house was present on this occasion, but the likelihood must be that he spent more time in Stratford than in the gatehouse of Blackfriars. His seems to have been a kind of retirement, or semi-retirement, if only because of the evident fact that he neither wrote nor collaborated in more drama. But he still travelled to and from London.

His earliest biographer, Nicholas Rowe, states that the

latter part of his life was spent, as all Men of good Sense will wish theirs may be, in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion and, in that, to his Wish; and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford.²

There is no reason to doubt the essential narrative here, although it does tend to discount the purchase of his gatehouse in Blackfriars. The reasons given for his retreat have been various. He came back because he was tired and in ill-health. He came back because he knew that he was dying. He came back in order to revise his plays for future publication. All, or none, may apply.

Nicholas Rowe reports further that “his pleasurable Wit and good Nature engag’d him in the Acquaintance, and entitled him to the Friendship, of the Gentlemen of the neighbourhood.”³ These “gentlemen” would of course include the town worthies, many of whom he had known all his life and some of whom he would remember in his will. There were the Combes, for example, who lived in the largest house in Stratford and who were among the wealthiest families in Warwickshire. There was the Nash family, large landowners, who lived next door to New Place. And there was Julius Shaw, a very prosperous dealer in wool and high bailiff of the town; he lived two doors down from New Place. There were of course many other neighbours – as well as his immediate family – living in close proximity. These were the people whom he saw every day, and with whom he exchanged greetings and small talk. Shakespeare was now much more identified with his family, and with his native background, than he had been at any time since his childhood. He had, in a sense, completed the circle. The themes of restoration and regeneration, so familiar in his late drama, could now be applied to life itself.