Shakespeare

But there was one other consideration for Shakespeare. The death of Marlowe occurred while he was on tour with Pembroke’s Men, but the report reached him soon enough. This was for him a climactic event. The dramatic poet whom he most admired and imitated was dead. To put it more bluntly, his principal competitor was dead. From this time forward he would have a clear run. It is perhaps not surprising that his great lyrical plays-Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost and Richard II – emerge in the succeeding four years. In these plays he exorcises, and surpasses, Marlowe’s poetical spirit. The untimely death of Marlowe left Shakespeare as the principal playwright of note in late sixteenth-century London.

The continuation of the plague throughout the summer, however, obliged Pembroke’s Men to tour again. They sold their text of Marlowe’s Edward the Second to a stationer, William Jones, no doubt to raise a modest but necessary sum. The sensation of his death might encourage sales. Then they travelled into the south of England, where they played at Rye for the relatively small sum of 13s 4d. They came back to London in August, and disbanded. They were bankrupt and could no longer cover their costs. On 28 September Henslowe wrote to Edward Alleyn, who was also still “on the road”: “As for my lord of Pembroke’s, which you desire to know where they may be, they are all at home, and have been this five or six weeks; for they cannot save their charges with travel, as I hear, and were fain to pawn the apparel.”⁴

So Shakespeare was out of employment. But it is not to be believed that such an enterprising and energetic young man would remain idle for very long. With the closure of the theatres at the beginning of the year he must already have been considering the future. Who could tell if, or when, the plague would abate? Would the doors of the London theatres be closed for ever? He must have given serious thought to a possible change in the direction of his career, since in this period he began work on a long poem. From an early stage, too, he may have had in mind the possible benefits accruing from a wealthy patron. Such a patron might offer him employment, in the lean time of the theatres, as well as gifts. Thus in the summer of 1593 his old Stratford acquaintance, Richard Field, published a volume entitled Venus and Adonis. It was priced at about 6 pence, and sold at the sign of the White Greyhound in the haunt of booksellers at Paul’s Churchyard. Field’s shop was no doubt Shakespeare’s haunt, also, where he would have found the new books of the day – among them George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie. That treatise had recommended the six-line stanza for English narrative poems, precisely the form that Shakespeare employed in Venus and Adonis. In Field’s shop he would have seen fresh copies of Plutarch’s Lives as translated by Sir Thomas North but, equally significantly, he would have been able to read and perhaps to borrow Field’s new edition of Ovid. He took two lines from that poet as his epigraph for Venus and Adonis. The little shop in Paul’s Churchyard, smelling of ink and paper, helped to give birth to one of the most fluent and eloquent of all English narrative poems.

No author was named on its title-page, but its dedication was signed “Your Honour’s in all duty, William Shakespeare”; the dedicatee himself was a young nobleman by the name of Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton. This dedication is the first example of Shakespeare’s non-dramatic prose to have survived.

The first sentence alone reveals his mastery of cadence and of emphasis.

Right Honourable, I know not how I shall offend in dedicating my vnpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take aduantage of all idle houres, till I have honoured you with some grauer labour.