Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

Catholics were taught in this period to be particularly fearful of a sudden death, a death that would prevent the ritual opportunity to settle the sinner’s accounts with God and to show the appropriate contrition.

Interior of the new Globe, showing the general dimensions of the yard and the surrounding galleries. By courtesy of Shakespeare’s Globe; Photograph by Donald Cooper.

As a person with deep roots in country life, Shakespeare would have heard of and perhaps directly known cases where sick cattle or damaged crops or children dying of lingering illnesses were blamed upon the malevolent magic of neighbors.

Shakespeare, as Macbeth shows, took careful note. He may also have gone out of his way to acquaint himself with the king’s actual dealings with witches.

was also a wonderful show. As Shakespeare grasped, the king was aroused by witches to “a wonderful admiration”—precisely the effect that the King’s Men were hoping to achieve.

He wrote under pressure—judging from its unusual brevity, Macbeth was composed in a very short time—and he went where his imagination took him.

SHAKESPEARE SEEMS TO HAVE begun contemplating the possibility of retirement—not so much planning for it as brooding about its perils—as early as 1604, when he sat down to write King Lear. The tragedy is his greatest meditation on extreme old age; on the painful necessity of renouncing power; on the loss of house, land, authority, love, eyesight, and sanity itself.

Even for actors extraordinarily well trained in the arts of memory—and even for the playwright who wrote the plays—it must have been exhausting to mount so many complex productions in such a short time. But, of course, the invitation to perform before the king and the court was a signal honor, as well as a rich source of income: receiving a handsome £10 per performance, the company made £100 in the Christmas and New Year’s season of 1605–6, £90 in that of 1606–7, £130 in 1608–9 and again in 1609–10, and £150 in 1610–11. These are very large sums of money, earned in the short holiday season.

And instead of Romeo and Juliet or Rosalind and Orlando, as Shakespeare’s quintessential vision of what it means to be in love, he gives us “grizzled” Antony and his wily Cleopatra, “wrinkled deep in time”

The Tempest is the last play Shakespeare wrote more or less completely on his own—no collaborator and, as far as is known, no direct literary source—and it has the air of a farewell, a valediction to theatrical magic, a retirement.

The central preoccupations of almost all his plays are there in The Tempest: the story of brother betraying brother; the corrosive power of envy; the toppling of a legitimate ruler; the dangerous passage from civility to the wilderness; the dream of restoration; the wooing of a beautiful young heiress in ignorance of her social position; the strategy of manipulating people by means of art, especially through the staging of miniature plays-within-plays; the cunning deployment of magical powers; the tension between nature and nurture; the father’s pain at giving his daughter to her suitor; the threat of social death and the collapse of identity; the overwhelming, transformative experience of wonder.

How could Shakespeare give all of this up? The answer is that he couldn’t, at least not entirely. When he actually left London is not known. He may have moved back to Stratford as early as 1611, just after he finished The Tempest, but he did not cut all of his ties. He was no longer overwhelmingly present, but he collaborated with John Fletcher on at least three plays. And in March 1613 he made the last of his real estate investments, not this time in Stratford, but in London.

news would have reached Shakespeare of a disaster that must have had a powerful impact upon him: on June 29, during a performance of the new play he had co-authored with Fletcher, the Globe Theater—the structure he himself had helped to build back in the winter of 1599—had burned to the ground.

Still, it was bad enough. This was a world without disaster insurance, and the cost of rebuilding the playhouse would have to be shouldered by Shakespeare and the other owners. Even though he was a relatively wealthy man, this was precisely the kind of outlay of capital that Shakespeare, having left London and distanced himself from the daily operation of the King’s Men, would not have wished to make, and he may well have decided to get out there and then.

The contraction of his world helps perhaps to explain how quietly he passed from it. His burial on April 25, 1616, is noted in the Stratford register, but there are no contemporary accounts of his last hours. He was not at all slighted: he was buried, as befitted such an important person, in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, and already by the 1630s, the painted funerary monument, familiar to innumerable tourists to Stratford, had been erected. But no one at the time thought to record the details of his illness or his passing, or at least no documents doing so have survived.

SHAKESPEARE’S DEATH ON April 23, 1616, went largely unremarked by all but a few of his immediate contemporaries. There was no global shudder when his mortal remains were laid to rest in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford.

It was not until seven years after his death that Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies were gathered together

It goes without saying that Shakespeare was a genius who left his mark on everything he touched.

On April 23, 2014—the 450th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth—a company of actors from London’s Globe (the modern reconstruction of the Elizabethan playhouse) embarked on a two-year tour with the ambition of performing Hamlet in every country of the world.