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Authors: William Shakespeare

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We know little about Shakespeare’s own acting roles—an early allusion indicates that he often took royal parts, and a venerable tradition gives him old Adam in
As You Like It
and the ghost of old King Hamlet. Save for Burbage’s lead roles and the generic part of the clown, all such castings are mere speculation. We do not even know
for sure whether the original Falstaff was Will Kempe or another actor who specialized in comic roles, Thomas Pope.

Kempe left the company in early 1599. Tradition has it that he fell out with Shakespeare over the matter of excessive improvisation. He was replaced by Robert Armin, who was less of a clown and more of a cerebral wit: this explains the difference between such parts as Lancelet Gobbo and Dogberry, which were written for Kempe, and the more verbally sophisticated Feste and Lear’s Fool, which were written for Armin.

One thing that is clear from surviving “plots” or storyboards of plays from the period is that a degree of doubling was necessary.
2 Henry VI
has over sixty speaking parts, but more than half of the characters only appear in a single scene and most scenes have only six to eight speakers. At a stretch, the play could be performed by thirteen actors. When Thomas Platter saw
Julius Caesar
at the Globe in 1599, he noted that there were about fifteen. Why doesn’t Paris go to the Capulet ball in
Romeo and Juliet
? Perhaps because he was doubled with Mercutio, who does. In
The Winter’s Tale
, Mamillius might have come back as Perdita and Antigonus been doubled by Camillo, making the partnership with Paulina at the end a very neat touch. Titania and Oberon are often played by the same pair as Hippolyta and Theseus, suggesting a symbolic matching of the rulers of the worlds of night and day, but it is questionable whether there would have been time for the necessary costume changes. As so often, one is left in a realm of tantalizing speculation.

THE KING’S MAN

On Queen Elizabeth’s death in 1603, the new king, James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he had been an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King’s Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare’s career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors early in the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors—and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of
the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria’s reign.

Shakespeare’s productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King’s Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court:
Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus,
and
Cymbeline
are among his longest and poetically grandest plays.
Macbeth
only survives in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare’s death. The bitterly satirical
Timon of Athens
, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in
Measure for Measure
and
All’s Well That Ends Well
.

From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they only used the outdoor Globe in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called
Mucedorus
. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in
Cymbeline
and it was presumably with his blessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called
Cardenio
(based on
the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’
Don Quixote
),
Henry VIII
(originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays,
The Winter’s Tale
, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and
The Tempest
, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.

The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to
The Tempest
as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing and litigation. But his London life also continued. In 1613 he made his first major London property purchase: a freehold house in the Blackfriars district, close to his company’s indoor theater.
The Two Noble Kinsmen
may have been written as late as 1614, and Shakespeare was in London on business a little over a year before he died of an unknown cause at home in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1616, probably on his fifty-second birthday.

About half the sum of his works were published in his lifetime, in texts of variable quality. A few years after his death, his fellow actors began putting together an authorized edition of his complete
Comedies, Histories and Tragedies
. It appeared in 1623, in large “Folio” format. This collection of thirty-six plays gave Shakespeare his immortality. In the words of his fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, who contributed two poems of praise at the start of the Folio, the body of his work made him “a monument without a tomb”:

And art alive still while thy book doth live
And we have wits to read and praise to give …
He was not of an age, but for all time!

SHAKESPEARE’S WORKS: A CHRONOLOGY
1589–91
?
Arden of Faversham
(possible part authorship)
1589–92
The Taming of the Shrew
1589–92
?
Edward the Third
(possible part authorship)
1591
The Second Part of Henry the Sixth
, originally called
The First Part of the Contention Betwixt the Two Famous Houses of York and Lancaster
(element of coauthorship possible)
1591
The Third Part of Henry the Sixth
, originally called
The True Tragedy of Richard Duke of York
(element of co-authorship probable)
1591–92
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
1591–92; perhaps revised 1594
The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus
(probably cowritten with, or revising an earlier version by, George Peele)
1592
The First Part of Henry the Sixth
, probably with Thomas Nashe and others
1592/94
King Richard the Third
1593
Venus and Adonis
(poem)
1593–94
The Rape of Lucrece
(poem)
1593–1608
Sonnets
(154 poems, published 1609 with
A Lover’s Complaint
, a poem of disputed authorship)
1592–94/1600–03
Sir Thomas More
(a single scene for a play originally by Anthony Munday, with other revisions by Henry Chettle, Thomas Dekker, and Thomas Heywood)
1594
The Comedy of Errors
1595
Love’s Labour’s Lost
1595–97
Love’s Labour’s Won
(a lost play, unless the original title for another comedy)
1595–96
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
1595–96
The Tragedy of Romeo and Juliet
1595–96
King Richard the Second
1595–97
The Life and Death of King John
(possibly earlier)
1596–97
The Merchant of Venice
1596–97
The First Part of Henry the Fourth
1597–98
The Second Part of Henry the Fourth
1598
Much Ado About Nothing
1598–99
The Passionate Pilgrim
(20 poems, some not by Shakespeare)
1599
The Life of Henry the Fifth
1599
“To the Queen” (epilogue for a court performance)
1599
As You Like It
1599
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar
1600–01
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
(perhaps revising an earlier version)
1600–01
The Merry Wives of Windsor
(perhaps revising version of 1597–99)
1601
“Let the Bird of Loudest Lay” (poem, known since 1807 as “The Phoenix and Turtle” [turtledove])
1601
Twelfth Night, or What You Will
1601–02
The Tragedy of Troilus and Cressida
1604
The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice
1604
Measure for Measure
1605
All’s Well That Ends Well
1605
The Life of Timon of Athens
, with Thomas Middleton
1605–06
The Tragedy of King Lear
1605–08
? contribution to
The Four Plays in One
(lost, except for
A Yorkshire Tragedy
, mostly by Thomas Middleton)
1606
The Tragedy of Macbeth
(surviving text has additional scenes by Thomas Middleton)
1606–07
The Tragedy of Antony and Cleopatra
1608
The Tragedy of Coriolanus
1608
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
, with George Wilkins
1610
The Tragedy of Cymbeline
1611
The Winter’s Tale
1611
The Tempest
1612–13
Cardenio
, with John Fletcher (survives only in later adaptation called
Double Falsehood
by Lewis Theobald)
1613
Henry VIII (All Is True)
, with John Fletcher
1613–14
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, with John Fletcher
KINGS AND QUEENS OF ENGLAND: FROM THE HISTORY PLAYS TO SHAKESPEARE’S LIFETIME
                                   
Lifespan
              
Reign
Angevins:
Henry II
1133–1189

1154–1189

Richard I
1157–1199

1189–1199

John
1166–1216

1199–1216

Henry III
1207–1272

1216–1272

Edward I
1239–1307

1272–1307

Edward II
1284–1327

1307–1327 deposed

Edward III
1312–1377

1327–1377

Richard II
1367–1400

1377–1399 deposed

Lancastrians:
Henry IV
1367–1413

1399–1413

Henry V
1387–1422

1413–1422

Henry VI
1421–1471

1422–1461 and 1470–1471

Yorkists:
Edward IV
1442–1483

1461–1470 and 1471–1483

Edward V
1470–1483

1483 not crowned: deposed and assassinated

Richard III
1452–1485

1483–1485

Tudors:
Henry VII
1457–1509

1485–1509

Henry VIII
1491–1547

1509–1547

Edward VI
1537–1553

1547–1553

Jane
1537–1554

1553 not crowned: deposed and executed

Mary I
1516–1558

1553–1558

Philip of Spain
1527–1598

1554–1558 co-regent with Mary

Elizabeth I
1533–1603

1558–1603

Stuart:
James I
1566–1625

1603–1625 James VI of Scotland (1567–1625)

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