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SHAKESPEARE'S LOST YEARS IN LONDON
1586-1592
SHAKESPEARE'S LOST YEARS IN LONDON
1586-1592
Giving new light on the pre-Sonnet period; showing the inception of
relations between Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton and displaying
JOHN FLORIO
AS
SIR JOHN FALSTAFF
BY
ARTHUR ACHESON
AUTHOR OF "SHAKESPEARE AND THE RIVAL POET"
"MISTRESS DAVENANT, THE DARK LADY OF THE SONNETS", ETC.
NEW YORK
BRENTANO'S
1920
_All rights reserved_
TO MY SONS
ARTHUR MURRAY ACHESON
AND
ALEXANDER G. ACHESON
I DEDICATE THIS VOLUME
"The purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was, and
is, to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own
feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his
form and pressure."
_Hamlet_, Act III. Scene ii.
CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I. INTRODUCTORY 1
II. THE STRATFORD DAYS, 1564-1586 19
III. SHAKESPEARE, THE BURBAGES, AND EDWARD ALLEYN,
1586-1591 38
IV. SHAKESPEARE AND THE EARL OF PEMBROKE'S COMPANY,
1591-1594 72
V. SHAKESPEARE AND THE SCHOLARS, 1588-1592 90
VI. THE POLITICAL PURPOSE OF _KING JOHN_, 1591-1592 131
VII. INCEPTION OF THE FRIENDSHIP BETWEEN SHAKESPEARE
AND THE EARL OF SOUTHAMPTON, 1591-1594 150
VIII. JOHN FLORIO AS SIR JOHN FALSTAFF'S ORIGINAL 181
APPENDIX--
1. Dedication of Florio's _Second Fruites_, 1591 223
2. Address to the Reader from Florio's _Second Fruites_,
1591 229
3. Dedication of Florio's _Worlde of Wordes_, 1598 233
4. Address to the Reader from Florio's _Worlde of
Wordes_, 1598 242
5. John Florio's Will, 1625 252
INDEX 257
SHAKESPEARE'S LOST YEARS
IN LONDON
1586-1592
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
The most interesting and important fifteen years in the records of
English dramatic literature are undoubtedly those between 1588 and 1603,
within which limit all of Shakespeare's poems and the majority of his
plays were written; yet no exhaustive English history, intelligently
co-ordinating the social, literary, and political life of this period,
has ever been written.
Froude, the keynote of whose historical work is contained in his
assertion that "the Reformation was the root and source of the expansive
force which has spread the Anglo-Saxon race over the globe," recognising
a logical and dramatic climax for his argument in the defeat of the
Spanish Armada in 1588, ends his history in that year; while Gardiner,
whose historical interest was as much absorbed by the Puritan Revolution
as was Froude's by the Reformation, finds a fitting beginning for his
subject in the accession of James I. in 1603. Thus an historical hiatus
is left which has never been exhaustively examined. To the resulting
lack of a clearly defined historical background for those years on the
part of Shakespearean critics and compilers--who are not as a rule also
students of original sources of history--may be imputed much of the
haziness which still exists regarding Shakespeare's relations to, and
the manner in which his work may have been influenced by, the literary,
social, and political life of this period.
The defeat of the Armada ended a long period of threatened danger for
England, and the following fifteen years of Elizabeth's reign were
passed in comparative security. The social life of London and the Court
now took on, by comparison with the troubled past, an almost Augustan
phase. During these years poetry and the drama flourished in England as
they never did before, or since, in any such space of time. Within a few
years of the beginning of this time Shakespeare became the principal
writer for, and later on a sharer in, a company of players which, at
about the same time, was chosen as the favourite Court company; a
position which--under various titles--it continued to hold
thereafterwards for over forty years.
When we compare the plays of Shakespeare with those of his
contemporaries and immediate successors, it becomes evident that this
dominant position was maintained by his company largely through the
superior merit of his work while he lived, and by the prestige he had
attained for it after he had passed away.
In the time of Elizabeth the stage was recognised as one of the
principal vehicles for the reflection of opinion concerning matters of
public interest; the players being, in Shakespeare's phrase, "the
abstract and brief chronicles of the time." The fact that laws were
passed and Orders in Council issued prohibiting the representation of
matters of Church or State upon the stage, clearly implies the
prevalence of such representations. It is altogether unlikely that the
most popular dramatist of the day should, in this phase of his art, have
remained an exception to the rule.
I hold it to have been impossible that such an ardent Englishman as
Shakespeare, one also so deeply interested in human motive, character,
and action, should have lived during these fifteen years in the heart of
English literary and political life,--coming, through his professional
interests, frequently and closely in contact with certain of its central
figures,--and should during this interval have written twenty original
plays, three long poems, and over one hundred and fifty sonnets, without
leaving in this work decipherable reflections of the characters and
movements of his time. That these conscious, or unconscious, reflections
have not long ago been recognised and interpreted I impute to the lack
of an intimate knowledge of contemporary history on the part of the
majority of his critics and biographers.
Competent text critics, in their efforts to establish the chronological
order of the dramas, have long since displayed the facts that
Shakespeare's earlier original plays were largely comedies of a joyous
nature, and that, as the years pass, his work becomes more serious and
philosophical; in time developing into the pessimistic bitterness of
_Lear_ and _Timon of Athens_, but softening and lightening, at the end
of his career, in the gravely reflective but kindly mood of _Cymbeline_,
_A Winter's Tale_, and _The Tempest_; yet no serious attempt has ever
been made to trace and demonstrate in the personal contact of the writer
with concurrent life the underlying spiritual causes of these very
palpable changes in his expression of it. Until this is done no
adequate life of Shakespeare can be written.[1]
Now, in order to be enabled to find in Shakespeare's personal
observation and experience the well-springs of the plainly developing
and deepening reflections of human life in action, so evident in his
dramas when studied chronologically, a sound knowledge of contemporary
social, literary, and political history is the first essential;
possessing this, the serious student will soon realise in the likenesses
between Shakespeare's dramatic expression, and his concurrent
possibilities of observation and experience, that he portrayed life as
he himself saw and felt it, and that he used the old and hackneyed
stories and chronicles which he selected for his plots, not because he
lacked the power of dramatic construction, but in order to hide the
underlying purposes of his plays from the public censor. While no
intelligent student needs any other warrant for this belief than the
plays themselves, when chronologically co-ordinated with even an
elementary knowledge of the history of the period, we have Shakespeare's
own assertion that this was the actual method and spirit of his work.
When he tells us in _Hamlet_ that "the purpose of playing, whose end,
both at the first _and now_, was, _and is_, to hold, as 'twere, the
mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own
image, and _the very age and body of the time_ his form and pressure,"
he is not attempting to describe the dramatic methods of ancient
Denmark, but is definitely expounding the functions of dramatic
exposition as they prevailed in actual use in his own day, and as he
himself had then exercised them for over ten years.
Any attempt to visualise Shakespeare in his contemporary environment,
and spiritually to link his work year by year with the life of his time,
would be impossible unless there can first be attained a far clearer
idea than now exists of his theatrical connections, the inception of his
dramatic work, and of the literary and social affiliations he formed and
antagonisms he aroused, during his first six or eight years in London.
The purpose of this book is--by casting new light upon this period of
Shakespeare's career--to show the inception and development of
conditions and influences which continued from that time forward
materially to affect his and his friends' lives, and in turn to shape
and colour the expression of life in action which he gives us in his
works.
Though there is nothing known definitely concerning Shakespeare between
1587--when his name is mentioned in a legal document at Stratford
regarding the transfer of property in which he held a contingent
interest and which possibly infers his presence in Stratford at that
date--and 1592, when Robert Greene alludes to him in his posthumously
published _A Groatsworth of Wit_, it is usually assumed that he left
Stratford in 1586 or 1587 with a company of players, or else that he
joined a company in London at about that time.
As the Earl of Leicester's company is recorded as having visited
Stratford-upon-Avon in 1587,--some time before 14th June,--and as James
Burbage, the father of Richard Burbage, with whom we find Shakespeare
closely affiliated in later years, was manager of the Earl of
Leicester's company as late as 1575,--the year before he built the
Theatre at Shoreditch,--it is generally assumed that he was still
manager of this company in 1586-87, and that Shakespeare became
connected with him by joining Leicester's company at this time. This
assumption is, however, somewhat involved by another, nebulously held by
some critics, _i.e._, that James Burbage severed his connection with
Leicester's company in 1583, and joined the Queen's company, and that
the latter company played under his management at the Theatre in
Shoreditch for several years afterwards. It is further involved by the
equally erroneous assumption that Burbage managed the Curtain along with
the Theatre between 1585 and 1592.[2]
Certain biographical compilers also assert that Shakespeare, having
joined the Earl of Leicester's company, continued to be connected with
it under its supposed varying titles until the end of his London career,
and that he was never associated with any other company. They assume
that Leicester's company merged with Lord Strange's company of acrobats
in 1589, the combination becoming known as Lord Strange's players; and
that when this company left James Burbage and the Theatre, in 1592, for
Philip Henslowe and the Rose Theatre, that Shakespeare accompanied them
and worked for Henslowe both as a writer and an actor. They suppose that
Edward Alleyn became the manager of a combination of the Admiral's
company and Strange's men for a "short period," but that the companies
"soon parted," "Strange's men continuing with Henslowe for a prolonged
period."[3] It is also asserted that "the Rose Theatre was the first
scene of Shakespeare's successes alike as an actor and a dramatist," and
that he "helped in the authorship of _The First Part of Henry VI._,
with which Lord Strange's company scored a triumphant success in
1592."[4]
These assumptions, which were advanced tentatively by former scholars
and merely as working hypotheses, have now, by repetition and the
dogmatic dicta of biographical compilers, come to be accepted by the
uncritical as ascertained facts.
While it is now generally accepted that Greene's "Shake-scene" alludes
to Shakespeare, and that his parody of a line from _The True Tragedie_:
"O Tyger's heart wrapt in a Player's hide"
denotes some connection of Shakespeare's with either _The True Tragedie
of the Duke of York_, or with _The Third Part of Henry VI._ before
September 1592, when Greene died, and while the title-page of the first
issue of _The True Tragedie of the Duke of York_ informs us that this
play was acted by the Earl of Pembroke's company, and no mention of the
play appears in the records of Henslowe, under whose financial
management Shakespeare is supposed to have been working with Strange's
company in 1592, _nothing has ever been done to elucidate Shakespeare's
evident connection with this play or with the Earl of Pembroke's company
at this period_.
In the same year--1592--Nashe refers to the performance by Lord
Strange's company under Henslowe of _The First Part of Henry VI._, and
praises the work of the dramatist who had recently incorporated the
Talbot scenes, which are plainly the work of a different hand from the
bulk of the remainder of the play. This also is generally accepted as a
reference to Shakespeare and as indicating his connection with Henslowe
as a writer for the stage. It is erroneously inferred from this supposed
evidence, and from the fact that Richard Burbage was with Strange's
company in 1592, that Shakespeare also acted with and wrote for this
company under Henslowe.
No explanation has ever been given for the palpable fact that not one of
the plays written by Shakespeare--the composition of which all competent
text critics impute to the years 1591 to 1594--is mentioned in
Henslowe's Diary as having been presented upon his boards. It is
generally agreed that _The Comedy of Errors, King John, Richard II.,
Love's Labour's Lost, Love's Labour's Won, The Two Gentlemen of Verona,
Richard III._, and _Midsummer Night's Dream_, were all produced before
the end of 1594, yet there is no record nor mention of any one of these
plays in Henslowe's _Diary_, which gives a very full list of the
performances at the Rose and the plays presented between 1592 and 1594.
During the same years in which records of Shakespeare are lacking[5]
they are also very limited regarding Edward Alleyn, whose reputation as
an actor and whose leadership in his profession were won during these
years--1586-92. Nothing is at present known concerning him between 1584,
when he is mentioned in the Leicester records as a member of the Earl of
Worcester's company, and 3rd January 1589, when he bought Richard Jones'
share of theatrical properties, owned conjointly by Edward Alleyn, John
Alleyn, Robert Browne, and Richard Jones. As Edward Alleyn, Robert
Browne, and Richard Jones were all members of Worcester's company in
1584, it is erroneously assumed that they were still Worcester's men in
1589, and that it was Jones' share in the Worcester properties that
Alleyn bought at this time to take with him to the Admiral's company,
which he is consequently supposed to have joined some time between 1589
and 1592. The next record we have of Alleyn is his marriage to Joan
Woodward, Henslowe's stepdaughter, in October 1592. In the following May
we find him managing Lord Strange's company in the provinces, though
styling himself a Lord Admiral's man. _Where, then, was Edward Alleyn
between 1585 and 1589; where between 1589 and 1593; and when did he
become a Lord Admiral's man?_
Worcester's company, with which Alleyn was connected in 1584, is last
mentioned in the records as appearing at Barnstaple in 1585;[6] it then
disappears from view for five years, and is next mentioned in the
provincial records as appearing at Coventry in 1590.[7] Between 1590 and
1603 it is mentioned regularly in the provincial records. _Where was
Worcester's company between 1585 and 1590?_
I propose to demonstrate by new evidence and analysis that James Burbage
ceased to be an active member of Leicester's company soon after he took
on the responsibilities of the management of the Theatre; but continued
his theatrical employees under Leicester's protection as Lord
Leicester's musicians until 1582, when he began to work under the
licence of Lord Hunsdon, his company being composed of his own employees
and largely of musicians, to act as an adjunct to the companies to whom,
from time to time, he let the use of the Theatre during the absence in
the provinces of the companies, such as Leicester's and the Admiral's,
with which I shall give evidence he held more permanent affiliations,
and, seeing that he was owner and manager of the Theatre, that these
affiliations were somewhat similar to those maintained by Henslowe--the
owner of the Rose Theatre--with Lord Strange's company between 1592 and
1594, and with the Lord Admiral's, and other companies, at the several
theatres he controlled in later years. I shall indicate that from the
time Burbage built the Theatre in 1576 until early in 1585, he
maintained such a connection with Leicester's company, and shall show
that the disruption of this company in 1585 by the departure of seven of
their principal members for the Continent--where they remained until
July 1587--necessitated a similar connection with some other good
company to take its place, and that he now secured Edward Alleyn and his
fellows, who, ceasing to be Worcester's men at this time, and securing
the licence of the Lord Admiral, affiliated themselves with the remnant
of Leicester's men and joined Burbage and Lord Hunsdon's men at the
Theatre. In this year the latter became the Lord Chamberlain's men
through the elevation of Lord Hunsdon to that office. These companies,
while retaining individual licences, continued to play when in London as
one company until the end of 1588, or beginning of 1589, when another
reorganisation took place, a number of the old men being eliminated and
new blood being taken in from the restored Leicester company and Lord
Strange's company of youthful acrobats, who had now become men. I shall
give evidence that this organisation continued to work as one company
for the next three years, though the Admiral's men still retained their
own licence, and consequently that the company as a whole is at times
mentioned in both Court and provincial records under one title and at
times under the other. The principal reason that a number of companies,
combining at a London theatre as one company, preserved their several
licences was no doubt the greater protection afforded them by the
patronage of several powerful noblemen against the hostility of
puritanically inclined municipal authorities. Recorder Fleetwood, who
was noted as an enemy of the players, in his weekly reports on civic
affairs to Lord Burghley, frequently complains of the stoppage by Court
influence of his prosecutions of alleged offenders. Upon one occasion he
writes: "When the Court is farthest from London then is the best justice
done in England."
Some time between the beginning of 1591 and the end of that year, James
Burbage's disfavour with certain of the authorities, as well as legal
and financial difficulties in which he became involved, made it
necessary for the combined companies, which in December 1591 had
attained to the position of the favourite Court company, to seek more
convenient quarters and stronger financial backing than Burbage and the
Theatre afforded. Under its various titles Strange's company continued
to be the leading Court company for the next forty years. I shall
indicate the probability that Strange's company in supplanting the
Queen's company at Court at this time _also supplanted it at the Rose
Theatre_, which was built by Henslowe in 1587 as a theatre.[8] Henslowe
repaired and reconstructed it late in 1591 and early in 1592 for the
uses of Strange's men. I will show the unlikelihood that this was
Henslowe's first venture in theatrical affairs, and the probability that
the Queen's players, under his financial management, occupied the Rose
Theatre from the time it was built in 1587 until they were superseded by
Strange's men in 1591.
I shall also give evidence that Shakespeare did not accompany Strange's
men to Henslowe and the Rose, but that he remained with Burbage, who
backed him in the formation of Pembroke's company, and that he and
Marlowe wrote for this company until Marlowe was killed in 1593, and
that Shakespeare was probably its sole provider of plays from the time
of Marlowe's death until the company disrupted early in 1594. I shall
show further that during the time Shakespeare and Marlowe wrote for
Pembroke's company, and for some years later, George Peele revised old
and wrote new plays for Henslowe and Alleyn, and that it was he that
revised _Henry VI._ and introduced the Talbot scene in 1592, and
consequently that it was to Peele, and not to Shakespeare, that Nashe's
praises were given at this time. Evidence shall be given to show that
Nashe was antagonistic to Shakespeare and co-operated with Greene
against him at this period.
It shall be made clear that _Titus Andronicus_, which was acted as a new
play by Sussex's company under Henslowe on 23rd January 1594, was also
written by Peele, or rewritten from _Titus and Vespasian_, which is now
lost, but which--being written for Strange's men in the previous
year--we may assume was also Peele's, or else his first revision of a
still older play.
Some time before the middle of 1594 a new reorganisation of companies
took place, the Admiral's and the Lord Chamberlain's separating and
absorbing men from Pembroke's and Sussex's companies, which ceased to
exist as active entities at this time, though a portion of Pembroke's
men--while working with the Admiral's men between 1594 and
1597--retained their own licence and attempted to operate separately in
the latter year, but, failing, returned to Henslowe and became Admiral's
men. A few of their members whom Langley, the manager of the Swan
Theatre, had taken from them, struggled on as Pembroke's men for a year
or two and finally disappeared from the records.
A consideration of the affairs of Lord Strange's men--now the Lord
Chamberlain's men--while under Henslowe's financial management between
1592 and 1594, and of Pembroke's company's circumstances during the same
period, with their enforced provincial tours owing to the plague in
London, will show that these were lean years for both organisations, and
for the men composing them; _yet in December 1594--as is shown by the
Court records of March 1595--Shakespeare appears as a leading sharer in
one of the most important theatrical companies in England_. I shall
advance evidence to show that his position in this powerful company, and
its apparent prosperity at this time, were due to financial assistance
accorded him in 1594 by his patron, the Earl of Southampton, to whom in
this year he dedicated _Lucrece_, and in the preceding year _Venus and
Adonis_.
If these hypotheses be demonstrated it shall appear that though
Shakespeare, as Burbage's employee in the conduct of the Theatre, had
theatrical relations with the Earl of Leicester's company that he was
not a member of that company, and that if he may be regarded as having
become a member of any company in 1586-87, when he came to London, he
was a member of the Lord Chamberlain's company,--which was owned by
James Burbage,--_but as a bonded and hired servant or servitor to James
Burbage for a term of years which ended in about 1589_; that his work
with Burbage from the time he entered his service was of a general
nature, and more of a literary and dramatic than of an histrionic
character, though it undoubtedly partook of both; that he worked in
conjunction with both Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn from the time he
came to London in 1586-87 until 1591; that neither he nor Burbage were
connected with the Queen's company, nor with the Curtain Theatre, during
these years, _and that the ownership by the Burbage organisation of a
number of old Queen's plays resulted from their absorption of Queen's
men in 1591, when Pembroke's company was formed, and not from the
supposed fact that James Burbage was at any time a member or the manager
of the Queen's company_; that Robert Greene's attack upon Shakespeare as
"the onely Shake-scene," in 1592, was directed at him as the manager of
Pembroke's company; that the Rose Theatre was not "the scene of
Shakespeare's pronounced success, both as a writer and a dramatist,"
_and that in fact he never was connected with that theatre, nor with
Henslowe, either as a writer or an actor_; that Nashe's laudation of the
Talbot scenes in _Henry VI._ was complimentary to his friend Peele, and
that whatever additions Shakespeare may have made to this play were made
after he rejoined the Lord Chamberlain's men in 1594; that he had no
hand in the composition of _Titus Andronicus_, acted by Sussex's company
and published in 1594, which is the same as that now generally included
in Shakespeare's plays; and finally that his business ability and social
and dramatic prestige restored Burbage's waning fortunes and enabled his
new organisation to compete successfully with the superior political
favour and financial power of Henslowe and Alleyn, and started it upon
its prolonged career of Court and public favour.
As a clear conception of Shakespeare's theatrical affiliations between
1586 and 1594 has not hitherto been realised so a knowledge of his
relations with contemporary writers during his entire career still
remains nebulous. Greene's attack in 1592 in _A Groatsworth of Wit_ and
Chettle's apology are the only things regarding Shakespeare's early
relations with other writers that have been generally accepted by
critics. Until the publication of _Shakespeare and the Rival Poet_ in
1903, nothing was known of his prolonged enmity with Chapman; while the
name of Matthew Roydon was unmentioned in connection with Shakespearean
affairs until 1913.[9] The revelations of the present volume regarding
the enmity between Florio and Shakespeare, and Shakespeare's dramatic
characterisations of Florio, have never been anticipated, though the
possibility that they may have come at odds has been apprehended. The
Rev. J.H. Halpin suggested in 1856 that the "H.S." attacked by Florio in
his _Worlde of Wordes_ in 1590 may have been directed at Shakespeare,
but advanced no evidence to support his theory, which has since been
relegated by the critics to the limbo of fanciful conjecture. I was not
aware of Mr. Halpin's suggestion when I reached my present conclusions.
There has hitherto been no suspicion whatever on the part of critics
that anything of the nature of a continuous collusion between the
scholars existed against Shakespeare in these early years, and
consequently, when at a later period it was manifested in plays
presented upon rival stages, it was regarded as a new development and
named "The War of the Theatres"; but even this open phase of the
antagonism and the respective sides taken by its participants are still
misunderstood. This critical opacity is due largely to the fact that
Shakespearean criticism has for many years been regarded as the province
of academic specialists in literature who have neglected the social and
political history of Shakespeare's day as outside their line of
specialisation. It was probably Froude's recognition of this nebulous
condition in Shakespearean criticism that deterred him from continuing
his history to the end of the reign of Elizabeth, and prevented Gardiner
beginning his where Froude's ended. These great historians realised that
no adequate history of that remarkable period could be written that did
not include a full consideration of Shakespeare and his influence; yet,
making no pretensions themselves to Shakespearean scholarship, and
finding in extant knowledge no sure foundations whereon to build, they
evaded the issue, confining their investigations to the development of
those phases of history in which they were more vitally interested.
Froude's intimate knowledge of the characters and atmosphere of
Elizabethan social and political life, acquired by years of devoted
application to an exhaustive examination of documentary records and the
epistolatory correspondence of the period, convinced him that
Shakespeare drew his models and his atmosphere from concurrent life. He
writes: "We wonder at the grandeur, the moral majesty of some of
Shakespeare's characters, so far beyond what the noblest among ourselves
can imitate, and at first thought we attribute it to the genius of the
poet who has outstripped nature in his creations, but we are
misunderstanding the power and the meaning of poetry in attributing
creativeness to it in any such sense. Shakespeare created but only as
the spirit of nature created around him, working in him as it worked
abroad in those among whom he lived. The men whom he draws were such
men as he saw and knew; the words they utter were such as he heard in
the ordinary conversations in which he joined.... At a thousand unnamed
English firesides he found the living originals for his Prince Hals, his
Orlandos, his Antonios, his Portias, his Isabellas. The closer personal
acquaintance which we can form with the English of the age of Elizabeth,
the more we are satisfied that Shakespeare's great poetry is no more
than the rhythmic echo of the life which he depicts."
As this book is intended as a precursor to one shortly to be published
dealing with the sonnets and the plays of the Sonnet period, the only
plays here critically considered are _King John_ and _The Comedy of
Errors_, which I shall argue are the only plays--now extant--written by
Shakespeare before the inception of his intimacy with the Earl of
Southampton, which I date, upon good evidence, in the autumn of 1591. In
the former we have probably the best example of the manner in which
Elizabethan playwrights dramatised contemporary affairs. In this
instance Shakespeare worked from an older play which had been composed
with the same intention with which he rewrote it, and as the old play
had passed the censor and been for years upon the public boards, he was
enabled to develop his intention more openly than even he dared to do in
later years, when, owing to the influence of Lord Burghley and his son,
Sir Robert Cecil, the enforcement of the statutes against the
representation of matters of State upon the stage became increasingly
stringent.
Though the political phases of Shakespeare's dramas become more veiled
as the years pass, I unhesitatingly affirm that there is not a single
play composed between the end of 1591 and the conclusion of his dramatic
career that does not, in some manner, intentionally reflect either the
social, literary, or political affairs of his day.
In order that the reader may approach a consideration of the rearranged
sonnets with a clear perspective, and to keep the Sonnet story
uninvolved by subsidiary argument, I now demonstrate not only the
beginning of the acquaintance between Shakespeare and the Earl of
Southampton--which has not hitherto been known--but also take a forward
glance of several years in order definitely to establish the identity of
John Florio as Shakespeare's original for Falstaff, Parolles, and
Armado. His identity as the original for still other characters will be
made apparent as this history develops in the Sonnet period.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 1: Dr. Georg Brandes' _William Shakespeare: A Critical Study_,
is by far the best attempt at an interpretation of Shakespeare's plays
upon spiritual lines that has yet been made; but the biographical value
of this excellent analysis is involved by the fact that Dr. Brandes, at
the time he wrote,--now over thirty years ago,--accepted Thomas Tyler's
Pembroke-Fitton theory of the sonnets, and with it the distorted
chronology for the plays of the Sonnet period, which it necessarily
involves.]
[Footnote 2: _A Life of William Shakespeare_, by Sir Sidney Lee, 1916,
p. 59.]
[Footnote 3: _Ibid._ 61.]
[Footnote 4: _A Life of William Shakespeare_, by Sir Sidney Lee, 1916,
pp. 61, 55.]
[Footnote 5: "Between 1586 and 1592 we lose all trace of Shakespeare."
_William Shakespeare: A Critical Study_, Georg Brandes, p. 18.]
[Footnote 6: _English Dramatic Companies, 1558-1641_, vol. i. p. 57. By
John Tucker Murray.]
[Footnote 7: _Ibid._]
[Footnote 8: It is probable that previous to 1587 the Rose was an inn
used for theatrical purposes.]
[Footnote 9: _Mistress Davenant, the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's
Sonnets._]