King Lear

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 more than 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 coauthorship probable)

1591–92

The Two Gentlemen of Verona

1591–92; perhaps revised 1594

The Lamentable Tragedy of Titus Andronicus (probably co-written 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