Shakespeare turned 40. Like millions of other men when they hit that midlife speed-bump, he felt a little old, a little anxious about the younger, faster, more fashionable men lining up to replace him.
Shakespeare's birthday is traditionally celebrated on April 23. However, that date is wrong -- because, as historians know, the English in Shakespeare's lifetime were using the wrong calendar.
By the 16th century, the annual timetable imposed by Julius Caesar had fallen 10 days behind the solar year. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII officially promulgated the much more accurate "Gregorian" calendar. Most of Europe skipped ahead 10 days to correct the accumulated error. But the English steadfastly rejected mere scientific proof, on the grounds that anything endorsed by the Pope and the French must be wrong. As a result, 400 years ago today the Venetian ambassador in London would have dated his diplomatic dispatches May 3, while the Englishmen around him were dating their letters, contracts, and official documents April 23. The English kept defying the sun (perhaps because they could so seldom see it) until 1755, when they grudgingly surrendered to reality.
So, 400 years ago today Shakespeare turned 40. The theater is not kind to aging talent. Contrasting his own autumnal face with the cruel energy of spring, middle-aged Shakespeare must have wondered whether he had passed his prime. In fact, he had. Shakespeare at 40 was already, like the Julian calendar, conspicuously behind the times.
Between 1593 and 1600, Shakespeare dominated the English theatre. He wrote one stage hit after another, prompting at least 10 sequels by himself and other people. He published a string of bestsellers, six in six years -- a success even Stephen King would envy. Unlike King though,
Shakespeare, by the time he turned 36, was much quoted in posh anthologies. He was declared the equal of Ovid, Plautus and Seneca. He was so confident of his own talent that, for a decade, he stopped collaborating with other playwrights -- a practice that was common in Elizabethan theater.
But things started to sour after 1600. Although publishers and readers were increasingly willing to invest in printed texts of plays, they stopped investing in new plays by Shakespeare.
Shakespeare wrote at least 16 plays after Hamlet, but only one succeeded in print. That play was Pericles -- which Shakespeare co-wrote with a playwright and pimp called George Wilkins.
About the time he turned 40, the once cockily independent Shakespeare had begun collaborating again. As John Jowett's superb new Oxford edition of Timon of Athens shows, that play was probably written in 1605, and Thomas Middleton wrote about a third of it.
After Middleton, Shakespeare collaborated with Wilkins (Pericles), then John Fletcher (Cardenio, All is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen). In each case, an older man who had not had a hit in years teamed up with a young man who had just written a hit play, or several hit plays.
Those young men did not need Shakespeare. He needed them. They had the juice. He didn't.
Like many other has-beens, Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s. In about 1604, he collaborated with several other playwrights in adapting and reviving Sir Thomas More, an English history play originally written in the early 1590s. King Lear was an adaptation of the even older playKing Leir. He turned an old bestselling prose romance by Robert Greene into the much less popularThe Winter's Tale. By contrast with his 1593 Venus and Adonis (which went through 15 editions in 34 years), the 1609 edition of his sonnets was the first and the plays Shakespeare wrote in the last decade of his life were not successful enough to prompt sequels.
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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