London Bridge and St. Paul's
You might have heard a lot lately about how Shakespeare wrote King Lear while he was quarantined in London during an outbreak of the plague. He didn’t. But what he did do when the theaters closed is even more impressive—and more helpful for those of us who might not have a masterpiece of dramatic tragedy set to pour forth: He adapted.
The plague epidemic was a nearly constant fact of life in Shakespeare’s time, and it shut down the theaters repeatedly throughout his career. Along with the other London-based companies, Shakespeare’s would routinely tour the provinces when the city theaters were shuttered.
This was less of a forward evolution than a retrieval of an old business model. English playing companies had been nomadic for decades, touring a circuit of rural towns before the rise of urban public theaters in the 1570s.
But it was not the default mode of operation when a harrowing outbreak of the plague closed the London playhouses in 1592. Still, as the only hope for any kind of income under the circumstances, they wasted no time in reverting to it.
We don’t know if Shakespeare himself went out on the road with them, but we do know that what he did during the nearly two years the theaters stayed shut not only altered the trajectory of his own professional life but with it all of Western culture.
In 1592, Shakespeare had just started out as a playwright. He’d probably written early comedies like Two Gentlemen of Verona and Taming of the Shrew, as well as the three parts of Henry VI, but he was still mainly an actor, only in his late 20s, and had yet to make any kind of a name for himself.
That all changed, as swiftly and dramatically as a revelation in one of his plays. Staring down a seemingly endless period of unemployment, Shakespeare reinvented himself as an artist and a laborer. The actor-turned-playwright turned to poetry.
With it unsafe to gather and the playhouses shuttered, he realized the only sure and remunerative way to reach an audience was in the comfort of their own homes. Luckily there was a relatively new technology at his disposal that was capable of communicating with very large numbers of people: the printing press.
For this modern medium, Shakespeare wrote something unlike anything he had before or since: an epic erotic poem called Venus and Adonis. At over 1,200 lines, it narrates the goddess of love’s seduction of the impossibly handsome young hunter in language so suggestive it can raise eyebrows and quicken pulses over 400 years later. It flew off the shelves.
The speed and magnitude of the success and its impact on his life can hardly be overstated. Suddenly “the honey-tongued Shakespeare” was on everybody’s lips. Venus and Adonis was a runaway bestseller and made its author a household name—especially among the upmarket elite who did things like read and buy books.
In 2014, the musician Sting told James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio that he was “very grateful to ‘Roxanne’ because she gave me my life. Having a hit is very difficult. Having a first hit is almost impossible.” The effect on an artist can be transformative. The freedom, confidence, and cachet that came Shakespeare’s way from his first literary hit helped launch him on arguably the greatest artistic hot streak in the history of the world.
Between this and the next major plague closure in 1603, he churned out Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, Hamlet, Twelfth Night, and a full dozen other plays, plus another epic poem and 154 sonnets. If Venus and Adonis were Shakespeare’s Roxanne, then to the end of his days he must’ve been eternally grateful to them.
Which brings us back to Lear. As many have noted, the first recorded performance of the play was at King James’s court in December 1606. This followed an extended closure of the theaters that began that July due to another plague outbreak, which has apparently led to the assumption that Shakespeare wrote his magnum opus under quarantine.
In all likelihood, however, he had completed at least a version of it before the shutdown. In fact, the oft-cited Shakespearean James Shapiro writes in his book The Year of Lear that “the evidence suggests” the play was “begun by the autumn of 1605” and premiered at the Globe in “the early months of 1606”. And that is the scholarly consensus. Which means that he actually wrote it in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, or Jacobean England’s version of 9/11.
So don’t feel bad if you haven’t written your King Lear in the last three weeks. (You should’ve written that in October 2001). It’s much more likely that Shakespeare spent the four months of enforced seclusion in 1606 finishing off Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra. He no doubt wanted to be sure he had a fresh batch of new plays ready for whenever the “inhibition” was lifted, the theaters reopened, and box offices started humming again.
For him, it was just another way of doing what we all now have to do: adapt.
Tom Ridgely is the producing artistic director of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis and the director, most recently, of its touring production of Cymbeline.
