The Last Years

How did the world react upon the death of Shakespeare in 1616?

In his new book, The Complete Life of William Shakespeare: Stratford, London, and In Between, scholar Paul Menzer looks at the facts that we know as well as the myths that have arisen to understand more about Shakespeare’s “extraordinarily ordinary life.”

In the excerpt below, he captures the response in the seven years following Shakespeare’s passing, comparing it with the reaction to the death of contemporaries like Francis Beaumont, and how the publication of the Shakespeare First Folio in 1623 changed everything.

ON TUESDAY 23 APRIL 1616, SHAKESPEARE DIED. AND NOTHING HAPPENED. His widow wept. His children grieved. But school was open the next day. Folks in Stratford probably noticed—the death of the big shot in the big house who made a major fortune in a minor industry. Life went on, though, and the people of Stratford soon returned to hoarding grain and arguing about enclosure.

Whatever splash Shakespeare’s death made in Stratford it probably did not take too long for tidings to ripple around London’s theatre world. For if anything is trans-historically true it is that actors love bad news. Shakespeare’s death was probably a topic of morbid fascination or mordant hilarity—such a fine line in the theatre—for actors to chew on backstage at the Globe between hands of Primero. You can even hear, across the years, the jokes they might have made.

Heminges: So what do you think he died of?

Condell: Boredom, after writing The Tempest.

Just think how badly they felt when they found out he had willed them twenty-six shillings and eight pence each. (They paid him back in 1623 by compiling his complete works and making him immortal. Call it even.)

This is pure speculation. And yet, as far as we know, upon hearing of Shakespeare’s death the King’s Servants did not observe a moment of silence before the afternoon show. There is no record of a heartfelt pre-show encomium, no ad hoc curtain-call eulogies, no retrospective season to honor the work of their former fellow. They did not name the Globe’s foyer after him or even erect a short statue to stand in for him.

The silence surrounding Shakespeare’s death is striking. Just fifteen years earlier he had been the talk of the town. A cluster of references from the turn of the century suggests he had been a faddish favorite of London’s chattering class. The marginal writer—in both senses—Gabriel Harvey scribbled in his 1598 edition of Chaucer’s works that ‘the younger sort take much delight in Shakespeare’s Venus, & Adonis.’ By 1616 the younger sort were older types and, if still living, had put aside childish things. Fame is fickle, as Shakespeare knew, and his moment had passed. To invert Jonson’s famous line on Shakespeare’s fame, in 1616 William’s work was not for all time, but for an age.

Consider by contrast that just three days before Shakespeare died, the body of John Grimes was borne through the streets of London towards Westminster Abbey in a glittering catafalque. As was modish at the time, the funeral took place at night, the body illumined by two hundred torches, which flirted with the bejeweled fingers of the Duke of Lenox, the Lord of Roxborough, and a score of ‘grand Scottish men’ who showed up to turn Grimes off. Have you heard of John Grimes? Same here. Largely unknown today, the death of Grimes was as remarkable as Shakespeare’s was not. Shakespeare died and no one noticed.

Sir John Grimes was a Scottish courtier at James’ court, so it is not surprising that he was sent off with a bang reserved for big shots. Consider the death of another playwright, then. Francis Beaumont died about a month before Shakespeare, on 6 March 1616. He was buried just three days later in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer and Spenser. So Francis Beaumont—esteemed at the time but little known today—was buried alongside two of England’s greatest poets while Shakespeare got a spot near the altar in a sweet little church in a tiny market town.

Let us return to that backstage scene of Shakespeare’s former fellows learning of his death. How long had it been since they’d staged one of Shakespeare’s plays? If so, what plays would be the most likely candidates? There was a living link to Shakespeare through his one-time collaborator John Fletcher, who was the man of moment. If, at news of Shakespeare’s death, the King’s Servants had wanted to revive a play that satisfied both nostalgia for Shakespeare and the taste for Fletcher, they had The Two Noble Kinsmen or the now-lost Cardenio. If you wanted to wager on Shakespeare in 1616, then, you might bet on Kinsmen or Cardenio, though it is not clear that those plays would have struck anyone as ‘Shakespearean.’ But this is just guesswork, since there is no record of a play by Shakespeare appearing on the commercial stage in England in 1616.

To find such a record, we must go to court, whose accounts tell us what the King’s Servants were playing at the time. They were playing the hits, it seems, since the courts of James and Charles favored revivals. From 1616 to 1642, the King’s Servants presented twice as many revivals as new plays at court. They opted for the tried and true over the novel and new. Shakespeare’s old play Twelfth Night appeared at Whitehall on 6 April 1617 with The Winter’s Tale presented the very next night. Neither play was very fresh, with Twelfth Night dating back to the beginning of the century, when James I of England was still James VI of Scotland.

This mini revival of Shakespeare at court in the spring of 1617 was his first appearance there since a Cardenio for the Ambassador of Savoy nearly five years earlier on 8 June 1612. What broke the five years fast? It’s possible to fantasize some nostalgia, even a wistful memorial impulse in the revival of two Shakespeare titles at court, on back-to-back days, almost exactly a year after his death. Did anyone notice he wasn’t there?

To answer the question of whether Shakespeare’s name still held any appeal in the years after his death, we can turn from boards to books. If there were any booksellers who thought to profit from Shakespeare’s death, they were awfully slow about it. Had a Londoner learned of Shakespeare’s death in 1616 and wanted to pick up a playbook to remember him by, the pickings were slim. A survey of Shakespeare playbooks in 1616/17 does not take very long. No new quartos of Shakespeare’s plays appeared between Troilus and Cressida and Pericles of 1609 and Othello in 1622.

As with theatrical revivals, we must look to reprints to find the few titles that might still be available in 1616/17, warehoused or otherwise. In the five years before his death, a handful of reprints appeared: Pericles, Titus Andronicus, and Hamlet in 1611; Richard III in 1612; 1 Henry IV in 1613; and Richard II in 1615. Let’s be generous and imagine that Richard II, 1 Henry IV, and Richard III—all reprinted within four years of Shakespeare’s death—let’s imagine they caught the eye of the nostalgic Shakespeare shopper in 1616. These three plays were Shakespeare’s most popular in print, if we judge by reprints alone. One quick conclusion about Shakespeare’s reputation in 1616 was that he was history. All date from before 1595 and were therefore nearly twenty-five years old in 1616.

These quartos produce a forced perspective, one that antiqued Shakespeare, marbelizing his literary profile. That profile is of Kid Shakespeare, Elizabethan poet and playmaker—the writer of erotic juvenilia and Tudor propaganda.

We turn next to the Stationers’ Register, the book trade’s record of copyright information, to see if any publisher thought to re-issue Shakespeare in 1616 to bank upon his death. But there is nothing to be found between 1 March 1614 (for The Rape of Lucrece) and 8 July 1619 (for The Merchant of Venice). The presence of Lucrece in the Stationers’ Register reveals the two titles by Shakespeare that did appear the year of and after his death. An octavo of The Rape of Lucrece was issued in 1616, printed for Roger Jackson, and the very next year Venus and Adonis was printed for William Barrett. In the immediate aftermath of his death, Shakespeare appeared in print with the titles with which he began his printed career, with narrative poetry not verse drama.

So if a book browser wandered past Jackson’s shop near the conduit on Fleet Street, they would find a copy of The Rape of Lucrece advertising the name of William Shakespeare, followed by the unlikely proposition that it was ‘newly revised.’ As for the title page of the 1617 Venus and Adonis, it does not mention Shakespeare at all. In the year of 1617, the single title by Shakespeare to appear in print lacked his name on the title page. He appears in print in the year after his death with the same anonymity with which he began.

His posthumous reputation got off to an ignominious start, then, if we read ‘ignominy’ literally to mean ‘no name.’ The publication of Shakespeare’s early poems in the year of his death traces a circularity of both his body and his body of work. They both display a striking tendency to end up right back where they started from.

If London’s theatre makers weren’t thinking much about Shakespeare in 1616, he was thinking about them. As noted, in his will he left ‘26 shillings 8 pence apiece’ to Burbage, Heminges, and Condell ‘to buy them rings.’ It’s hard to say how long it would have taken for this will to be executed and the money conveyed some 100 miles southwest from Stratford to the City of London (reversing the flow of capital from London to Stratford that subsidized Shakespeare’s splendid standard of living in his later years). By 1616, far from ‘Shakespeare our contemporary’ or ‘Shakespeare for all time,’ or Time magazine’s ‘Man of the Millennium’ in 1999, Shakespeare was ‘an Elizabethan playwright.’ One, it seems, condemned to the relative obscurity that Beaumont and Fletcher enjoy, or suffer, today.

The moment of silence did not last, of course. Still, following his death in 1616, Shakespeare entered an odd phase, a brief but unique stretch between the death of the writer and the birth of the author, a literary purgatory between the decomposition of Shakespeare’s biological corpse and the re-composition of his bibliographical corpus. Today, when Shakespeare scholars speak of his ‘Lost Years,’ they mean the seven-year stretch from 1585–92, when his trail goes cold between his life in Stratford and his time in London. But there’s another seven lost years, between his death in 1616 and the printing of his complete works in 1623. But for the publication of the First Folio in that year, it’s possible the rest would have been silence.

About the author

Paul Menzer is Executive Director and professor of Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin University, where he served as the Dean of Arts and Sciences and as Provost. A renowned Shakespeare scholar, he has written several biographies of the playwright. He has also written several books about performance studies and theater history, scholarly editions of early modern plays, and written about the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Virginia, a repertory theater known for embracing Shakespearean theatrical practices. He is also an acclaimed educator, winning teaching awards at Mary Baldwin and serving as a visiting faculty member for the Folger’s Teaching Shakespeare Institute. He is the inaugural Folger Chair in Shakespeare Studies.