What happened after Hamlet? In his last personal triumph, Shakespeare went out of his way to complain about the "little eyases," the boy actors in the reopened indoor theaters who threatened to "carry it away" with their overacting. It's easy for adults to mock children, and literary critics and theater historians tend to sympathize when Shakespeare complains about boy actors. But the boys were playing in indoor theaters -- with lighting effects, better music, admission prices based on proximity to the stage, and more comfortable seating. Indoor theaters were the future. All Shakespeare's hits were written for the old-fashioned outdoor stage.
But the greatest threat to Shakespeare was not the boy actors or the theaters they played in. What "carried it away" was the new talent writing for those rival companies. The two most successful Jacobean playwrights were Fletcher and Middleton, 16 and 15 years younger than Shakespeare. Fletcher and Middleton were still alive, successful and writing for the King's Men in 1623. They occasionally wrote blurbs for other playwrights, but they didn't supply blurbs for the Shakespeare first folio.
"Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend," Shakespeare wrote in King Lear in 1605, portraying an old man betrayed by the younger generation. Why did Shakespeare, after his 40th birthday, write plays about men like Antony, whose pole had fallen? Why did he create protagonists like Timon of Athens, Lear, Coriolanus, Prospero, angrily obsessed with other people's ingratitude? Why did he begin writing about old men like Leontes and Pericles, who sought, above all else, to recover the love they had experienced when they were younger?
"How could a man delineate a Hamlet, a Coriolanus, a Macbeth," Thomas Carlyle asked in 1840, "if his own heroic heart had never suffered?" Shakespeare certainly suffered, but there's nothing heroic -- or rare -- in an older man's anxiety or bitterness about his younger rivals. You can see someone like Shakespeare every day on TV: a man who, having been a spectacularly successful fresh face in the 1990s, began to consider his dominance a God-given right; an increasingly gray, increasingly conservative man whose ego grows as his popularity shrinks.
Why did Shakespeare retire to Stratford? Maybe because he was no longer wanted in London. Maybe, like most aging actors, he spent the last years of his life waiting for the call that never came.
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