London's reward
Shakespeare had no clear reason to complain of London. The city had brought him fame, admiration and wealth. In the surviving literature of the period he is mentioned about two hundred times, nearly always favorably. In 1598 Francis Meres, in his Palladis Tamia: Wit's Treasury, listed Sidney, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Warner, Shakespeare, Marlowe and Chapman as the leading writers of England and named Shakespeare the greatest dramatist. In the same year Richard Barnfield, a poet and rival, declared that Shakespeare's works had written his name in the book of immortal fame. Even his rivals liked him. Drayton, Jonson and Burbage were his close friends; and although Jonson criticized his pompous style, his careless composition and his open neglect of the classical rules, it was Jonson who in the first collected edition ranked him above all ancient and modern dramatists and called him not of an age but for all time. In papers he left beside his bed at death, Jonson wrote of Shakespeare: I loved the man, and honor his memory this side idolatry.
It is said that Jonson and Shakespeare took part in the learned debates at the Mermaid Tavern in Bread Street. Francis Beaumont, who knew both, wrote in wonder of the things done there and the words heard, so nimble and so full of subtle flame, as if each man came meaning to put his whole wit into one jest and to live the rest of his life a fool. Thomas Fuller, in his Worthies of England, pictured the wit-combats between the two men, Jonson like a great Spanish galleon, tall in learning but slower in his movements, and Shakespeare like an English man-of-war, smaller in bulk but lighter in sailing, able to turn with every tide and take advantage of every wind by quickness of wit and invention.
Aubrey in 1680 repeated a credible report that Shakespeare was very ready and pleasant and smooth in his wit, and a handsome, well-shaped man of good company. Two likenesses survive: the bust over his grave in the church at Stratford and an engraving at the front of the first collected edition. They resemble each other and show a man half bald, with a mustache (in the bust), a long straight nose and thoughtful eyes, but with no trace of the flame that burns in his plays. Perhaps the plays do not show his character truly, for they suggest a man highly nervous and sensitive, now on the heights of thought and poetry, now in the depths of dejection and despair, while his contemporaries thought him courteous, upright and gentle, of an open and free nature, who enjoyed life, cared nothing for posterity and had an active nature ill suited to poetry.
A man of property
Whether by talent or by thrift, by 1598 Shakespeare had earned enough to help run the Globe with others, and in 1608 he joined six others in taking over the Blackfriars theater. His shares in these ventures, together with his income as actor and playwright, gave him considerable sums, which have been estimated at figures between two hundred and six hundred pounds a year (according to the book). The higher figure better explains how he could buy property in Stratford.
Aubrey writes that he was in the habit of visiting his native place once a year, and he sometimes broke the journey at Oxford, at an inn kept by John Davenant. In 1597 Shakespeare bought a new house, the second largest in Stratford, for sixty pounds (as the book has it), but he went on living in London. His father died in 1601, leaving him two houses in Henley Street. The next year he bought 127 acres near the town for 320 pounds, probably renting them to farmers. In 1603 he bought a share, for 440 pounds, in the future tithes of the church and three other districts. While he was writing his greatest plays in London, Stratford knew him as a successful businessman, often busy with lawsuits over property and with private investments.
The farewell to the stage
In 1596 his son Hamnet had died. In 1607 his daughter Susanna married John Hall, a skilled physician, and the next year a child was born to them. Shakespeare now had new interests drawing him home, and around 1610 he withdrew from London and the stage to his new house.
It was probably there that he wrote Cymbeline, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest. The first two were not of great importance, but The Tempest proved that Shakespeare had not lost his powers. In one scene Miranda shows her nature when she sees a ship wrecked from the shore and says that she has suffered with those she saw suffer. Elsewhere Caliban stands as Shakespeare's answer to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (the book's own comparison, though Rousseau lived a century and a half later). And Prospero, a kindly magician, gives up his staff and takes an affectionate leave of his imagined world. In the eloquent lines he speaks we may hear an echo of Shakespeare's own melancholy: our revels now are ended; these actors were all spirits and melted into air, into thin air; and like the baseless fabric of this vision, the cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, the solemn temples, the great globe itself, and all that it inherits shall dissolve and leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.
Yet this is not the real mood of Shakespeare. On the contrary, the play shows him at rest, speaking of brooks and flowers and singing songs such as Full fathom five and Where the bee sucks, there suck I. Despite the objections of cautious critics, it is the aged Shakespeare who takes leave of everyone through Prospero: graves at his command have waked their sleepers, oped and let them forth by his so potent art; but this rough magic he here abjures, he will break his staff, bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and drown his book deeper than did ever plummet sound. And perhaps it is Shakespeare again, delighted by his daughters and grandchild, who speaks through Miranda: how many goodly creatures are there here! How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world that has such people in it!
The last months
On 10 February 1616 Judith married Thomas Quiney. On 25 March Shakespeare made his will, leaving the bulk of his property to Susanna, 300 pounds to Judith, smaller sums to his fellow actors, and his second-best bed to his wife, who had held herself apart from him. Perhaps he had arranged with Susanna that she should look after her mother. Anne Hathaway lived seven years more. In April, according to John Ward, vicar of Stratford, Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and apparently drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever contracted there (a footnote in the book adds that Sir E. K. Chambers saw no reason to reject this report). Death came on 23 April 1616. He was buried in the chancel of Stratford church, and near floor level there is a nameless, unmarked stone with verses which, by the tradition that has come down to us, Shakespeare wrote himself. They say in substance: good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear to dig the dust enclosed here; blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he that moves my bones.