drama of Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. It was here, a few years earlier, that audiences had heard ‘the Ghost who cried so miserably at the Theatre like an oyster-wife, “Hamlet, revenge!’” (not Shakespeare’s play, but an earlier, now lost Hamlet). As the men approached the hulking building, the Theatre itself must have seemed a ghostly presence, vacant now for two years in the aftermath of a fall-out between the Chamberlain’s Men and their prickly landlord, Giles Allen. Local residents, seeing the armed troupe approach, may well have been confused about what was happening during this week of holiday revels, for at the head of the group was the leading tragedian in England, the charismatic star of the Chamberlain’s Men, Richard Burbage. But this was no impromptu piece of street theatre. Burbage, his older brother Cuthbert and the rest of the men bearing weapons were there in deadly earnest, about to trespass and take back what they considered rightfully theirs and, if necessary, come to blows with anyone trying to stop them.

The Chamberlain’s Men were in trouble and the only way out was to get in a bit deeper. Things had begun to go wrong two years earlier, when James Burbage (Richard and Cuthbert’s father and the man who had built the Theatre) had decided to build an indoor stage in the wealthy London neighbourhood of Blackfriars. The venue would have enabled his son Richard and the other shareholders of the Chamberlain’s Men to act year-round for a more upmarket and better-paying clientele, providing more security than they had at the Theatre, where the lease was expiring. James Burbage had sunk the considerable sum of £600 into the venture. As the Blackfriars theatre neared completion, influential neighbours who were worried about the noise and riff-raff that the theatre might attract had succeeded in having playing banned there. James Burbage had died soon after, having also failed to renegotiate an extension on his lease at the Theatre. His sons Richard and Cuthbert had no better luck changing Giles Allen’s mind. With the Burbages’ capital tied up at Blackfriars and the Theatre now in Allen’s hands, the Chamberlain’s Men, lacking a permanent playing space, were in danger of becoming homeless.

By early December Richard Burbage had quietly approached five of his fellow actor-shareholders in the company - William Shakespeare, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, Thomas Pope and Will Kemp - with a plan. The first thing they needed to do was find a new site for a theatre, one that was accessible to London’s playgoers but outside the city limits (where playhouses weren’t subject to the authority of the often hostile city fathers). Members of the company, probably Heminges and Condell, who lived in the parish of St Mary Aldermanbury, had learned that a

Allen, litigious, well connected, and brother of a former Lord Mayor, was not a man to be trifled with. But what alternative was there?

The Chamberlain’s Men didn’t have much time. They knew that Allen was away for the Christmas holidays at his country home in Essex. They had also heard that Allen was preparing to dismantle the building and keep its valuable timber for himself. If that happened, they’d be ruined. They certainly had to act before word of their new lease got out. They had performed before Queen Elizabeth at Whitehall Palace on 26 December (the day after their new lease went into effect) and were expected again at court on New Year’s Day. Assuming that the job would probably take more than a day, they were left with a very narrow window. The snow and cold were unfortunate, and would make the work misery for the carpenters handling the frozen timber, but that couldn’t be helped.

When the armed group arrived at the playhouse they set to work immediately. Even with an early start there wouldn’t be much daylight; the sun had risen that morning after eight and would set before four in the afternoon. It was four days short of a full moon, but with the snow coming down there was little prospect of working by moonlight. According to evidence submitted in the heated legal battle that followed, their appearance quickly drew a crowd - friends and tenants of Allen as well as supporters of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Ellen Burbage, James’s feisty widow. And we can be pretty sure that the other shareholders whose livelihoods were at stake - Shakespeare, Phillips, Heminges, Kemp and Pope - were at the scene as well, among the unnamed ‘diverse other persons’ accompanying the Burbages.

Outmanned, a couple of Giles Allen’s friends, one with power of attorney, tried to stop the trespassers - to no avail. A silk weaver named Henry Johnson demanded that they stop dismantling the playhouse, but was put off by Peter Street, the master-builder who had been brought in to supervise the job. Street explained that he was only taking the pegged vertical posts and horizontal ground-sills apart in order to put them together again ‘in another form’ on the same site. Johnson, who was privy to the failed negotiations over the lease, probably knew better, but he backed off. By the time they were done, the workers had made a mess of the place, causing forty shillings’ worth of damage.

Of all those gathered at the Theatre that day, none stood to gain or lose as much as Shakespeare. Had the escapade failed, had Allen been forewarned or had he succeeded in his subsequent court battle against the seizure, Shakespeare’s alternatives would have been limited. It’s hard to

As darkness fell on 28 December, the old frame of the Theatre, loaded onto wagons, with horses slipping and straining from the burden of hauling the long half-ton, foot-square oak posts, began to make its way south through streets carpeted with snow. The wagons headed through Bishopsgate and south-west to Peter Street’s waterfront warehouse near Bridewell Stairs, where the timber was unloaded and safely stacked and stored. The popular story of the dismantled frame being drawn across or over the Thames (which was ‘nigh frozen over’) to the future building site is a fantasy: it would have been too risky sledding the heavy load across thin ice and the steep tolls on London Bridge for wheelage and poundage would have been prohibitive; and had the timber been left exposed to the elements through the winter months at the marshy site of the Globe, it could have been warped beyond repair (if not subject to a counter-raid by Giles Allen’s friends). Not until the foundations were ready would the frame of the Theatre be ferried across the Thames to Southwark, where by late summer, phoenix-like, it would be resurrected as the Globe.
*
On the eve of the dismantling of the Theatre, Shakespeare stood at a professional crossroads. It had been five years since he had last found himself in such a situation. At that time he was torn between pursuing a career in the theatre and one in which he sought advancement by securing aristocratic patronage through his published poetry. For a while he had done both, but the rewards of patronage (he had fulsomely dedicated two published poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, to the young and charismatic Earl of Southampton) either didn’t materialize or proved unsatisfying. Theatre won out, though Shakespeare kept writing sonnets, which he didn’t care to publish but shared with his friends. After joining the Chamberlain’s Men in 1594, Shakespeare hit his stride in the next two years with a great burst of innovative plays: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, King John, Richard the Second, The Merchant of Venice and The First Part of Henry the Fourth.

By the end of 1596, however, following one of his most successful efforts, The First Part of Henry the Fourth, this creative surge diminished and his range contracted. Over the next two years he seems to have only written three plays: a second part to Henry the Fourth and two comedies, The Merry Wives of Windsor and the witty Much Ado about

Inn, while resident children’s companies began playing at St Paul’s and Blackfriars. In 1600, in an England of four million, London and its immediate environs held a population of roughly two hundred thousand. If, on any given day, two plays were staged in playhouses that held as many as two to three thousand spectators each, it’s likely that with theatres even half-full, as many as three thousand or so Londoners were attending a play. Over the course of a week - conservatively assuming five days of performances each week - fifteen thousand Londoners paid to see a play. Obviously, some never went at all, or rarely, while others -including young and generally well-to-do law students at the Inns of Court - made up for that, seeing dozens of plays a year; but on average, it’s likely that over a third of London’s adult population saw a play every month.

Which meant that Shakespeare and his fellow dramatists were writing for the most experienced playgoers in history. Unlike modern theatres, in which actors perform the same play for weeks, months, even years, in Elizabethan playhouses the play changed daily, with resident companies introducing as many as a score of new plays annually and supplementing them with revivals of old favourites. Unsuccessful plays disappeared from the repertory after only a handful of performances. Shakespeare could count on an unusually discriminating audience, one sensitive to subtle transformations of popular genres like romantic comedy and revenge tragedy. But the pressure that he and his fellow playwrights were under to churn out one innovative and entertaining play after another must have proved exhausting.

It’s no surprise, then, that play writing at the close of the sixteenth century was a young man’s game. None of the men who wrote plays for a living in 1599 were over forty years old. They had come from London and the countryside, from the Inns of Court, the universities, and various trades. About the only thing these writers had in common was that they were all from the middling classes. There were about fifteen of them at work in 1599 and they knew each other and each others’ writing styles well: George Chapman, Henry Chettle, John Day, Thomas Dekker, Michael Drayton, Richard Hathaway, William Haughton, Thomas Heywood, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Anthony Munday, Henry Porter, Robert Wilson and, of course, Shakespeare. Collectively this year they wrote about sixty plays, of which only a dozen or so survive, a quarter of these Shakespeare’s. Their names - though not Shakespeare’s - can be found in the pages of an extraordinary volume called Henslowe’s Diary, a ledger or account book belonging to Philip Henslowe, owner of the

didn’t help matters that many Elizabethan actors were skilled fencers. Just the previous September, Ben Jonson had quarrelled with Gabriel Spencer, a rising star (and shareholder) in the Admiral’s Men, and, in the ensuing duel near the Curtain, killed him. Jonson, who was briefly imprisoned, only escaped hanging by reading his ‘neck verse’ - a legal loophole dating from medieval times whereby the literate were spared the gallows by reading from the Bible in Latin, a task easy enough for the classically trained Jonson. But he did not escape unscathed: Jonson was branded with a T’ for Tyburn, Elizabethan London’s site of execution, on his thumb. The next time he committed a felony he would hang there. Spencer was no stranger to violence, having two years earlier stabbed to death James Feake, who had come at him with a candlestick. His fatal encounter with Jonson took place the very month when Jonson’s first play for the Chamberlain’s Men - Every Man In His Humour - was performed at the Curtain. Ironically, at the time of their quarrel Spencer was probably learning his part in Jonson’s collaborative (and, in retrospect, ironically titled) play for the Admiral’s Men, Hot Anger Soon Cold. And in June 1599 Henry Porter came to blows with fellow playwright John Day in Southwark. Day drew his rapier and killed Porter. The cause of their fight is also unknown; jurors found Day guilty of manslaughter, not murder. Day was subsequently pardoned and resumed writing for the Admiral’s Men, mostly in collaboration with Dekker, Chettle and Haughton, who either accepted Day’s version of the fight or put professional needs above loyalty to a former writing partner. Ben Jonson, who had also worked with Porter, was less forgiving, and classed Day among the ‘rogues’ and ‘base fellows’.

London’s civic leaders didn’t share the popular enthusiasm for the rough-and-tumble world of theatre. Their view of things is offered in a petition submitted to the Privy Council in the summer of 1597 requesting that London’s playhouses be closed. What was staged there, they argued, was immoral (‘containing nothing but profane fables, lascivious matters, cozening devices, and scurrilous behaviours’) and the audience itself a collection of misfits (‘vagrant persons, masterless men, thieves, horse stealers, whore-mongerers, cozeners, coney-catchers, contrivers of treason, and other idle and dangerous persons’). But the city fathers could do little about it, since the playing companies were patronized by influential aristocrats, including members of the Privy Council (after the Queen, the most powerful political body in the realm). It must have come as something of a shock to the resident acting companies to learn at this time that the Privy Council had decided to act against them, ordering

of his young son and namesake Benjamin, Shakespeare left no testimonial for Hamnet. But then, unlike Jonson, Shakespeare lived at a great distance from his family, returning home infrequently. Hamnet and his twin sister Judith had been baptized on 2 February 1585, born two years after their elder sister Susanna. By the end of the 1580s Shakespeare had left his wife and three young children behind in Stratford to seek his fortune in London. He may have barely known his son, which is not to say that he did not feel his loss deeply. It may even have accounted for his diminished output in the year or so that followed. We just don’t know.
The invitation to become part-owner of a new theatre on Bankside came at a critical moment in Shakespeare’s career. And the venture would play a major role in the redirection of his art. The Globe offered Shakespeare a fresh start, the possibility of writing for a new set of playgoers with as yet unhardened expectations, unlike those who had been frequenting the Theatre and Curtain for so many years. Since at least 1596 - when James Burbage had tried and failed to move the company to a theatre that catered to a more privileged audience - the sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men had been divided over what kind of audience they wanted to attract. Some, like the comic star Will Kemp, were deeply invested in the traditions of popular entertainment of the theatres of the northern suburbs. For other sharers - and their ranks included Shakespeare, who was most constrained by these conventions - the move to the Globe reopened the possibility of dispensing with a dependence on improvisational clowning and raucous jigs that playgoers at the Curtain and Theatre had come to love and expect. With a move to the Globe now imminent, suppressed differences over these issues resurfaced.

The Chamberlain’s Men depended upon the thousands of Londoners willing to pay a penny or more, day in, day out, to see them perform. For that reason, every play they staged was written with a popular audience in mind and premiered in the public theatres. But the company’s longterm political security depended on patronage at court. Fortunately for London’s actors and playwrights, the Queen and her court enjoyed seeing plays; but Elizabeth didn’t want to pay to keep a retinue of actors for half a dozen or so command performances a year. She found it easier and much less expensive to reward the players with a gift of £10 each time they played at court (though her courtiers patronized the playhouses,

of a larger problem Shakespeare faced, having to do with how he was seen as an artist. Though he had written an early Roman tragedy, eight path-breaking English histories, and some of the best comedies that the English stage had ever seen, it was only in the past year or so that contemporary critics had finally begun to acknowledge his talent, and even more frustrating that when they had done so it had invariably been his more sexually charged work - the two long poems Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, his love tragedy Romeo and Juliet and those sonnets that only a privileged few had read or heard - that had won their praise. In 1598, for example, the poet Richard Barnfield celebrated Shakespeare’s ‘honey-flowing vein’ in Lucrece and Venus and Adonis. John Weever likewise calls him ‘honey-tongued Shakespeare’ in a poetic tribute that year, where ‘fire-hot Venus’ and ‘rose-cheeked Adonis’ once again come in for special praise. Weever wanted to compliment the plays but was stumped when it came to their names: ‘Romeo, Richard; more whose names I know not.’ Shakespeare would not have been flattered.

The most striking praise for Shakespeare at this time appears in Francis Meres’s Palladis Tamia: Wit’s Treasury, also published in 1598. No contemporary writer comes off more favourably in Meres’s book than Shakespeare, though once again it’s Shakespeare the honey-tongued love poet that commands attention: ‘The sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous and honeytongued Shakespeare,’ Meres writes, ‘witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared Sonnets among his private friends, etc.’ Meres predictably includes Shakespeare among ‘the most passionate among us to bewail and bemoan the perplexities of love’. Shakespeare must have been relieved to see this caricature balanced by attention to his plays, for Meres also writes: ‘As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for comedy and tragedy among the Latins, so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage. For comedy, witness his Gentlemen of Verona, his [Comedy of] Errors, his Love Labour’s Lost, his Love Labour’s Won, his Midsummer’s Night Dream and his Merchant of Venice. For tragedy, his Richard the Second, Richard the Third, Henry the Fourth, King John, Titus Andronicus, and his Romeo and Juliet.’ But only seven of Shakespeare’s plays had been published before 1598 and it wasn’t until that year that his name even appeared on a title page of a play.

The ‘English Ovid’ - the poet of the ‘heart-robbing line’, as an anonymous contemporary put it a couple of years later - was a hard reputation to shake off. The same anonymous writer even took Shakespeare to task for steering clear of more serious subject matter:

Revels, Edmund Tilney, who gave his stamp of approval to the play, must have winked at. And Shakespeare also included a gently mocking allusion in the Merry Wives to an actual German duke (named Mompelgard) who had been hovering around the English court waiting to be admitted to England’s Order of the Garter.

By 1598 Shakespeare’s relationship with the court had become increasingly reciprocal. He was not only a regular presence at court but also shaped how England’s leading families in turn gave voice to their political experiences and his words entered the court vocabulary as a shorthand for the complicated manoeuvring and gossip that defined court life. Tobie Matthew, for example, can write to Dudley Carleton: ‘Sir Francis Vere is coming towards the Low Countries, and Sir Alexander Ratcliffe and Sir Robert Drury with him. “Honour pricks them on, and the world thinks that honour will quickly prick them off again’” - here paraphrasing Falstaff’s unvarnished truth about the dangers of pursuing honour in The First Part of Henry the Fourth: ‘Honour pricks me on. Yea, but how if honour prick me off when I come on? ... What is that “honour”? Air’ (V, i, 129-35). The gist of Matthew’s multi-layered observation seems to be that while these ambitious men are spurred (‘pricked’) on by honour, the consensus at court is that this pursuit will prove disastrous (‘to be pricked off’ means ‘to be marked to die’).

It’s not the only such example committed to writing to survive (and who knows how many similar allusions in conversation went unrecorded?). At the end of February 1598 the Earl of Essex wrote to Secretary of State Cecil in France: ‘I pray you commend me also to Alexander Ratcliff and tell him for news his sister is married to Sir John Falstaff.’ This time, the allusion to Shakespeare’s character is part of an in-joke about Lord Cobham (now nicknamed ‘Falstaff’ for his family’s opposition to Shakespeare’s use of the name Oldcastle) playing the marital field, pursuing Ratcliff’s beautiful sister Margaret. Rumour had it that Cobham was also in pursuit of the merchant Sir John Spenser’s rich daughter. Essex was at court on 26 February 1598 - a day or so, perhaps, before he wrote this letter - where he might have seen the Chamberlain’s Men perform The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which a sexually rapacious Falstaff gets his comeuppance. Essex loathed Cobham and alluding to Shakespeare’s character was a way of tweaking him (by linking him with Falstaff’s multiple wooing in the play) while not alienating Cobham’s powerful brother-in-law, Cecil. A year later the Earl of Southampton’s wife could write to her husband concerning the latest gossip about Cobham’s sexual escapades in similarly veiled Shakespearean terms: ‘All

Bankside - he had always rented in London, restlessly moving around, to the frustration of tax collectors - could only have added to the sense of a fresh start, his new surroundings contributing in unpredictable ways to the great surge of creative energies that followed.

As all this was going on, Shakespeare was trying to finish Henry the Fifth, which he had been thinking about for several years - as far back as 1596, when he had decided to stretch the plot of his main dramatic source, the anonymous Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, to cover the two parts of Henry the Fourth as well as Henry the Fifth. And events, professional and political, kept overtaking the play. The scars of revision that Henry the Fifth bears - inconsistencies, locales that are specified then altered, characters that are introduced then mysteriously disappear, repetitions that seem to be ghostly remnants of earlier drafts - testify to the extent to which Shakespeare’s conception of the play kept changing. It seems to have taken him a lot longer than usual to complete and it’s unlikely that it was ready to be performed before late March 1599. Shakespeare knew by then that it would be the last play he would write for the loyal playgoers of the northern suburbs as well as one of the first that would enter the repertory of the Globe. As Shakespeare’s melancholy epilogue to Henry the Fifth acknowledges - with its backward glance at a decade’s worth of history plays with which he had entertained Shoreditch audiences - Henry the Fifth marked the end of one stage of his career and the uncharted beginning of another.