1    First light

Within a 36-month halo centered in 1590, and against all odds, young “Will” Shakespeare (1564-1616) arose professionally in a violent, desperate, and very smelly London. This crowded and dangerous place was the incubator of Elizabethan theatre, the great glory of English literature rising like a lotus from mud. That theatrical world produced Will Shakespeare, he began writing his mature plays, and the plays went on to “invent,” as Professor Harold Bloom has aptly put it, the modern Western concept of the human experience.1

By the summer of 1594, the just-turned-30-year-old adult “William Shakespeare” was firmly established as a major force in the reorganized Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the most important acting company in the history of English literature, and consequently Shakespeare had become the dominant writer for the London/Elizabethan stage. He remained successful and popular until he retired home to Stratford-upon-Avon around 1611. He died in 1616, financially secure and a grandfather, at 52 years of age. No collection of his plays was published during his lifetime, although both authorized and pirated editions of individual plays had been printed throughout his career.

But the most critical, formative, and interesting events in Shakespeare’s early professional life happen “off stage,” just as such events do in many plays, including many of his. Beginning in June of 1592, at the very moment Shakespeare was becoming a bright and early-rising dramatic star, suddenly there was no London theatre. The government suspended all public gatherings, which of course included the public performance of plays, to prevent further violent riots, called “Apprentice Riots” although they swept up many other have-nots into their recurring firestorms.2

Following that lock down, but before the suspension period (until Michaelmas, the beginning of autumn) was reached, the Yersinia pestis bacterium, the “Black Death” of Bubonic plague returned like a tide to England and the London stages remained shuttered for another 18 months, except for a tiny window early in 1594.3 This closure, the two years of “dark” theaters, was a catastrophe: along with all the rest of the theatrical community of London, the young, up-and-coming Will Shakespeare was out of work, at least as a playwright, for the next two years.

Or so the story goes, and so it has been repeated and taught for 20 generations.

But that is not what really happened...

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In fact, for Shakespeare, those two years could not have happened that way.

The theaters were indeed closed, but during those months Shakespeare remained wide open for business, both as playwright and exceedingly shrewd entrepreneur. His artistic metamorphosis had already begun by the 1592 closures, but its revolutionary dimensions were made possible, with historical irony, only by Shakespeare’s greatly increased dramatic and artistic opportunities during the years of Dark Theaters. With a two-year career suspension, or even a significant interruption, Shakespeare simply would not have produced the number of plays that he did in the short time that he had prior to 1592 and immediately following the 1594-1595 stage re-openings, from which time we can track his professional production more confidently.4 There are simply too many plays or too little time to match Shakespeare’s total dramatic output, and his lifelong creative pattern, if his script production went dormant along with performances in London. His professional metamorphosis of status and influence during that time is even less explicable: rising from promise to dominance in a vacuum may happen in other fields, but the arts and athletics brutally demand demonstrated skills, with no substitutions allowed. So Will Shakespeare enters this period as one person and emerges as quite another.

Something remarkable happened in there... in the “dark.”

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The real story itself makes for a great play.

At the theater closures in June of 1592, shortly after his 28th birthday, William Shakespeare either chanced upon or himself engineered (likely both) two great, related, life-changing opportunities. The first gave him liberty and resources to write his own plays entirely in his own way, without significant interruption, and to write not only without restraint or restriction but to satisfy actual demand for innovative, edgy and frankly erotic literature, a theme much to the racy tastes of his patron.5 The second opportunity was Shakespeare’s chance, based on the merit and genius of those plays, to win artistic leadership of the Elizabethan stage as playwright for its dominant acting company before performances began again in London. These two extremely high-stakes “auditions” took place independently of London’s dark stages, riots, and burials.

The young Shakespeare emphatically “nailed” both of these try-outs before May of 1594, and the world has not been quite the same since.

Figure 1: Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron from 1592 to 1594, at the age of 21 (painted ca. 1594-1595)

Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton (1573-1624), was not yet 21 in June 1592, a young man determined to live with style befitting his station. He idolized slightly older Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex (1567-1601), and together they spent a lot of time at theaters and little on their law studies at Gray’s Inn, where they were supposed to be acquiring practical skills to manage their inherited wealth and property.6 Patronage being a virtual requirement for the refined nobility1, Southampton reasonably placed his artistic investments in personal favorites: things Italian (supporting the first Italian-English dictionary, for example, by John (Giovanni) Florio (1553-1625)), poetry (the more erotic the better), and drama (the family home at the former Titchfield Abbey had a private theater, built by Henry’s steely grandfather, Thomas Wriothesley, 1st Earl of Southampton (1505-1550)).7

This 3rd Earl of Southampton, young Henry Wriothesley, was Shakespeare’s patron during the 1592-1594 closures.

Their association changed history, as it placed Shakespeare in heightened contact with the dominant theatrical forces of his time, some of whom he had known and worked with in London well before 1592. One was the acting troupe known as Lord Strange’s (rhymes with “fangs”) Men, the company of Ferdinando Stanley, 5th Earl of Derby (1559-1594), who had that title, “Lord Strange,” as well as the 5th Earl of Derby. Another force in Southampton was the acting company of Henry Carey (1526-1596), who was Lord Hunsdon and later Lord Chamberlain, as well as Carey’s son George Carey, 2nd Baron Hunsdon (1547-1603), and the elder Carey’s brilliant mistress, the remarkable Emilia (sometimes “Aemelia”) Bassano (1569-1654) and then, after her pregnancy and speedy marriage, Bassano-Lanier. Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham (1536-1624), was also there, patron of Lord Howard’s Men, and later the Admiral’s Men after Howard became Lord High Admiral in 1585, commander of the English fleet in the 1588 defeat of the Spanish Armada. These Southampton-connected players and patrons would create the post-closure theatrical world of Elizabethan London, some of them forming the reconstituted, hand-picked “all-star” Lord Chamberlain’s Men with Will Shakespeare at its heart. Passing through the vital port and family home of Shakespeare’s patron, on tour as actors, as visitors, as guests, and some in connection with military responsibilities, these personalities and their acting companies were Elizabethan theatre. While London’s stages were dark, Titchfield Abbey was a beacon, a lighthouse, safely removed on the far southern coast, and all theatrical roads ran through Southampton.

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During this time and for this audience, and in addition to some notable poetry, Shakespeare produced four plays long generally associated with each other but which actually fit together symmetrically and intentionally like the sections of a neatly-quartered apple: Romeo and Juliet (tragedy), Love’s Labour’s Lost (comedy), Richard II (history), and A Midsummer Night’s Dream (fantasy). These shows have points of tangency with each other, with Southampton’s circumstances and interests, with his guests and peers, and not least with Will Shakespeare’s professional artistic objectives.

(As just one quick example, dating Romeo and Juliet as roughly contemporary with Shakespeare’s early “propaganda” sonnets is a common association. Sonnets 1-17 explicitly urge young Southampton to reproduce, (although notably never specifically to marry), and the play shares considerable and obvious aesthetic DNA with the poems. If both the play and the sonnets can be placed at Titchfield Abbey in 1592-1593, Shakespeare’s later play production and professional association, as well as his maturation as playwright and businessman, will finally harmonize with what is known of his previous (London) and subsequent (London) careers. Shared themes and even language, specific images, network this Love Quartet of plays as it dissects love in youth, love in adulthood, love of honor, and love of art, beginning with a street fight and ending in a dream.)

These four shows are the “off-stage” pebble dropped into a still pond: all of his subsequent plays will be rings generated by the increasing energy released during the 23 months of Dark Theaters. Shakespeare’s comic, tragic, romantic, and historical constellations, over the next 15 years, all spring from the unseen Big Bang of the four shows in the “darkness” of 1592-1594.

This little book is a re-assembly of the shows, personalities, and circumstances of Shakespeare’s “Lost Years” (at least this set of his “Lost Years”) from early 1592 until mid-1594. It is an admitted act of forensic anthropology, but it has been some time in the making and great care taken that those fragments of the figurative skull-in-the-dig-site which are still unavoidably missing have been filled and shaped with the utmost anatomical respect. Professor Bloom has explained with genius what Shakespeare did, thereby fulfilling the noblest goals of scholarship; these notes rather compulsively puzzle out how, when, with whom, where, and why Shakespeare did what he did, piece by piece, thereby satisfying only obsessive and probably unhealthy curiosity, considering the years spent fitting and cementing these mundane fragments together in a ghostly reconstruction.

Yet even dubious obsessions need care from time to time, no less than loftier goals, so if these notes provide even a bit of relief for like-minded sufferers of nagging questions which sometimes make sleep impossible, and specifically about how Shakespeare A became Shakespeare B, any such satisfaction any single reader may possibly find herein will more than meet these notes’ modest objectives.

1. Harold Bloom, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human.

2. Mihoko Suzuki, “The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney.”

3. Amanda Mabillard, “Worst Diseases in Shakespeare’s London.”

4. E.K. Chambers, “Chapter II: The Stage in 1592,” William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems, p.45.

4. Ibid., “Chapter III: Shakespeare and His Company,” p.64.

5. G.P.V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, p.5.

6. Ibid., p.31.

7. Ibid., p.223.

(For full references, please see bibliography. The traditional in-text numbering system is used in hope that it is less bothersome and intrusive than the latest parenthetical MLA style, particularly for readers from other languages. The chapter notes themselves, however, use the much simpler MLA bibliographic system of name reference. Scholars, please allow readers as untroubled a journey as possible. Readers, please allow scholars as detailed a journey as necessary. This combination/hybrid documentation format intends to combine the best of both systems, leaving nothing out while distracting as little as possible. Thanks to all for their patience and accommodation. As Virginia Woolf noted, however, the world is wide and there is room for all of us to be wrong, so any difficulty encountered or offense given to any reader is deeply regretted.)