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None of this suggests much of a commitment to living in London by comparison with the sustained, substantial, and frequent investment in and around Stratford. But the move to be near the Globe Theatre marks a new stage in Shakespeare's professional career and it is an apt moment to take stock.

He had become a widely known and admired playwright and poet. The Parnassus plays, performed by students of St John's College, Cambridge, at the Christmas celebrations between and , mock Gullio who speaks ' nothinge but pure Shakspeare , and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the theators ' and praises ' sweet Mr. Poets like Richard Barnfield , John Marston , Robert Tofte , and John Weever referred to Shakespeare's plays and poems in their own poems and epigrams published in and In , in Palladis tamia: Wits Treasury , Francis Meres praised Shakespeare fulsomely all Meres's praise is fulsome : ' As Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage ', going on to list six comedies and six tragedies four of which would now be identified as histories as proof of Shakespeare's status F.

Meres , Palladis tamia , fol. In March John Manningham , a barrister at the Middle Temple where Shakespeare's Twelfth Night had been performed the previous month, noted a bawdy story about Shakespeare and Burbage in his diary; whether true or not, the story of Shakespeare having sex with a woman who had wanted an assignation with Burbage whom she had fallen for as Richard III indicates that Shakespeare was a figure to be gossiped about, though Manningham had to remind himself of Shakespeare's first name.

Sir George Buck , unsure who had written George a Greene , wrote on his copy that Shakespeare had told him it was by ' a minister who acted the pinners part in it himself ' Nelson , 74 ; Shakespeare's information was probably wrong but Buck saw him as someone worth consulting on such matters.

Finally, in this sequence of contacts, Shakespeare's success was sufficient to make one of his colleagues mock him: Jonson's Every Man out of his Humour has a number of satirical allusions to Shakespeare's recent plays as well as to his gentrified status. This amounts to more than a private dig at a friend: Jonson appears to have expected the audience to understand the barbs, yet another sign of Shakespeare's popularity.

Shakespeare's plays were also starting to appear in print both in versions that give unauthorized and often inaccurate versions of the plays and in reasonably carefully prepared versions, the latter often in response to the former: for example the quarto of Romeo and Juliet published in , ' Newly corrected, augmented, and amended ', in answer to the imperfections of the quarto.

The suspect quartos often bear apparent traces of performance in their more elaborate stage directions. Some of these published editions of his plays now carried the author's name on their title-pages—for example, Love's Labour's Lost , the second quartos of Richard II and Richard III all published in , or the third quarto of 1 Henry IV in —another indication of Shakespeare's growing reputation and significance, since playwrights were not usually named on their plays in print.

In the placing of Shakespeare's name on the title-page of The London Prodigal , a play certainly not by Shakespeare , is a further sign that his name was a good marketing ploy; the same presumably deliberate misattribution happened with the publication of Middleton's A Yorkshire Tragedy in though some have argued that the play is by Shakespeare.

Similarly, in William Jaggard published the second edition of a collection of poems called The Passionate Pilgrim the date of the first edition is uncertain which the title-page also attributed to Shakespeare , much to Shakespeare's annoyance that Jaggard , as Thomas Heywood noted, ' altogether unknowne to him … presumed to make so bold with his name ' Schoenbaum , Documentary Life , Very little of the collection was by Shakespeare but it included pirated and unattributed printings of three extracts from Love's Labour's Lost offered as poems and of two of Shakespeare's sonnets and Meres , Palladis tamia , fols.

Whenever the sonnets were written, these two at least were by available in versions Jaggard could use. Having completed the second tetralogy in his history cycle, with the epilogue to Henry V gesturing to the earlier sequence ' Which oft our stage hath shown '; epilogue, l. He turned to Roman history, a field he had ignored since Titus Andronicus but a rich resource for political analysis of contemporary society. Julius Caesar was probably the first play the Chamberlain's Men performed at their new theatre, the Globe, where Thomas Platter , a Swiss traveller, saw it on 21 September Shakespeare's main source was North's Plutarch —perhaps he had now acquired a copy from Richard Field —and Shakespeare kept closer to his source than ever before, dramatizing Plutarch often simply by turning North's prose into verse.

Roman historical tragedy may have been successful but Julius Caesar , like Titus , was not to be the start of a sequence, though Antony and Cleopatra would later take up the story. Something, perhaps the expertise of a particularly brilliant boy player, made the prospect of making this transformation especially central to a comedy clearly appealing.

For As You Like It , his principal source was Thomas Lodge's prose romance Rosalynde but, where Lodge's work is unequivocally placed in the forest of the Ardennes, Shakespeare's play is set ambiguously in France and in the Forest of Arden that had covered the centre of England and from which his mother's family derived its name. In this play Shakespeare also paid a small tribute to Marlowe as Phoebe remembers the words of the ' Dead shepherd ': ' Who ever loved that loved not at first sight?

Twelfth Night 's first recorded performance was at the Middle Temple; John Manningham noted its likeness to Plautus's Menaechmi and ' most like and neere to that in Italian called Inganni ' Chambers , 2.

In both plays Shakespeare made use of the talents of the Chamberlain's Men's latest recruit, Robert Armin , who replaced Will Kemp in ; Armin's skills as a singer are clear in Touchstone and Feste, the first signs of the line of fools that Shakespeare wrote for him, far more bitter than those for Kemp. Between the two comedies Shakespeare wrote Hamlet , rewriting the 'Hamlet' play that had been playing on the London stage by and may have been written by Thomas Kyd.

Now lost and probably never printed, the earlier play and its own sources can be presumed to have provided a similar narrative but a simpler one. Nothing in them would have been as complex or provocative as Shakespeare's creation of the prince whose thought processes have been so profoundly influential on Western literature. Whatever else made the writing of Hamlet happen at this time, the extraordinary talents of Richard Burbage were a major determinant on the creation of the role, his lifelike acting deeply affecting Shakespeare's portrayal of the prince's mind.

But, in creating Ophelia, Shakespeare seems also to have remembered a Stratford event, the inquest into the drowning, just outside Stratford in December , of the aptly named Katherine Hamlett. Hamlet has its topical references to the work of the boys' companies, the popular rivals to the success of the Chamberlain's Men , but Shakespeare's Henry V had made a more direct and political reference in its anticipation of the return of Essex , ' the General of our gracious Empress ' v, chorus, l.

But when Essex did return, unexpectedly and without permission, the eventual tension placed Shakespeare and the Chamberlain's Men in danger: Essex's ally Sir Gilly Meyrick and others of Essex's faction paid for the company to perform Shakespeare's Richard II two days before Essex's attempt at a coup in February , daring to suggest to the audience that Essex would be Elizabeth's Bolingbroke.

Shakespeare's play was clearly perceived as dangerous and the scene of Richard's deposition was never included in published versions until the fourth quarto The performance did no lasting damage to Shakespeare or to the theatre company which continued to be summoned to play at court for the Christmas festivities. Other events of link Shakespeare and Stratford upon Avon. Quite why the money had been loaned or deposited with Anne is unclear but it seems to indicate Shakespeare's absence from her.

On 8 September John Shakespeare was buried in Stratford. No will survives but William , as the eldest son, would have inherited the house in Henley Street, though, with New Place, he had no need of it: his mother and his sister Joan , who had in the s married William Hart , a hatter, together with her family continued to live there. Unsurprisingly, most of the documents that speak of Shakespeare in connection with Stratford over the next few years concern legal matters: in spring he sold malt to a neighbour, Philip Rogers , and subsequently lent him 2 s.

Clearly Shakespeare was not willing to let such matters drop whether the sums were substantial or not, though in he may have been short of income with the theatres again shut by plague. Shakespeare's densely enigmatic allegorical poem 'The Phoenix and Turtle' was published in , appended to Robert Chester's Love's Martyr in a group, Poeticall Essaies , including poems by Marston , Chapman , Jonson , and others, offered as a tribute to Sir John Salusbury with whom Shakespeare has no other known connection.

In the following year Shakespeare wrote Troilus and Cressida , in part a response to George Chapman's translation of Homer's Iliad , a section of which had been published in , and in part an engagement with Chaucer's long poem and Henryson's continuation, the first time Shakespeare had made extensive use of Chaucer since A Midsummer Night's Dream. Cynical about sexual desire and war, the play's bleakness may have been aimed at a different audience from that of the Globe—if it was performed at all—since, when it was published in , it carried an epistle identifying it as ' a new play, never stal'd with the Stage, never clapper-clawd with the palmes of the vulger ' Troilus and Cressida , , sig.

The accession of James I brought the Chamberlain's Men an extraordinary honour: soon after arriving in London, James took over the patronage of the company, now to be known as the King's Men. For the king's entry into London in May , Shakespeare and the other players, like the members of the Queen's Men , Prince Henry's Men , and many other members of the royal household, were each given four and a half yards of red cloth, possibly to march in the procession or line the route.

The King's Men frequently performed at the new court: between November and October they played eleven different works, seven of which were by Shakespeare , including new plays such as Measure for Measure and Othello and older ones such as The Merchant of Venice twice and The Merry Wives of Windsor ; between the patent of May and Shakespeare's death they performed at court on at least occasions.

Yet royal patronage could not solve some of the company's problems: performances at the Globe in —4 had been frequently stopped for lengthy periods because of a sequence of plague, Elizabeth's final illness, public mourning, and further outbreaks of plague. Not until April was public playing allowed again. Shakespeare had hardly been idle during this difficult time for the company: Measure for Measure , Othello , and All's Well that Ends Well belong to —4.

They follow the ambiguity of genre that characterizes Troilus and Cressida which was variously identified as a comedy in the prefatory epistle, a history on the title-page of the quarto of , and a tragedy in the first folio.

They share a world of misplaced sexual desire where one body can be substituted for another either unknowingly, as in the bed-tricks of Measure and All's Well , or in fantasy, as in Iago's report that Cassio had taken Othello's place in the marriage-bed. While Othello is a tragedy using the materials of comic cuckoldry, the other two can be wrenched from potential tragedy towards an uncertain comic ending. In and Shakespeare's playwriting energies were spent on unequivocal tragedies: the astonishing sequence of Timon of Athens , King Lear , Macbeth , and Antony and Cleopatra.

In Timon , for the first time since the early stages of his career depending on exactly when Shakespeare contributed to 'Sir Thomas More' , Shakespeare collaborated with another dramatist, the younger and equally successful Thomas Middleton , the two dividing the play up between them.

Middleton was probably also responsible for some of the witches' scenes in Macbeth in the only form in which they reached print and he revised Measure for Measure in shortly before it was first printed in the first folio.

Shakespeare was not a dramatist who worked in isolation from his fellow playwrights: he was strongly influenced by their plays and by their audiences' responses, just as his work also influenced them.

Collaboration became increasingly a part of his playwriting method for the remainder of his career. Political and other contemporary events affected the plays too. Both King Lear and Macbeth reflect in some ways the accession of King James : James's concern to unite Scotland and England seems to underpin the division of the kingdom in Lear , a warning of the consequences of disunity, while his claim of descent from Banquo is explicitly imaged in Macbeth where the witches show Macbeth the line of Banquo's descendants stretching towards James himself.

King Lear also reflects a recent case in when Brian Annesley's eldest daughter tried to have her father declared insane and was prevented by the loving care of Annesley's youngest daughter, Cordell. As Antony Scoloker commented in in the epistle to his poem Diaphantus : a good poem should be ' like Friendly Shakespeare's Tragedies , where the Commedian rides, when the Tragedian stands on Tip-toe: Faith it should please all, like Prince Hamlet ' Chambers , 2.

Lear and Macbeth are both based on events that, for Shakespeare and his audiences, were the stuff of the chronicles: the source material for both lay in Holinshed ; both are histories, as the first published edition of Lear is identified on its title-page.

Shakespeare continued to rely on sources that had served him well so far: Holinshed and Plutarch above all but also the repertory of the Queen's Men for the anonymous King Leir , Apuleius's The Golden Ass , and Ovid. Records of Shakespeare's friends and family provide other suggestions about his life at this time. Augustine Phillips , a fellow sharer in the King's Men , died in , leaving ' my ffellowe william Shakespeare a Thirty shillings peece in gould ' Schoenbaum , Documentary Life , , as he did to other players but naming Shakespeare first.

It is reasonable to assume that his fellows in the theatre company were among his closest friends. William Barksted , a minor playwright, wrote warmly of Shakespeare as ' so deere lov'd a neighbor ' Chambers , 2. Perhaps to this period too belong the stories, anecdotal but not contradicted by the evidence of surviving comments, of his close friendship and genial rivalry with Jonson. As becomes apparent from the records of a case in , Shakespeare was living from to as a lodger with Christopher Mountjoy and his family in Silver Street in the respectable neighbourhood of Cripplegate.

The case provides rare glimpses of Shakespeare's London life in —4 and in Mountjoy , a French Huguenot refugee, with his wife and daughter, was a successful tiremaker who made wigs and headdresses; Shakespeare might have met them through the French wife of the printer Richard Field who lived nearby, but theatre companies always needed the services of wigmakers and the Lord Chamberlain's Men may have been the connection. The case of was brought by Stephen Belott , Mountjoy's former apprentice, who had married Mountjoy's daughter in and claimed that Mountjoy had failed to pay the dowry promised.

Shakespeare was called as a witness and is mentioned by other witnesses. He helped in the marriage negotiations: Mountjoy asked him to encourage Belott to agree to the match and the young couple made their troth-plight in his presence. Six months after the wedding, the Belotts moved out and stayed with George Wilkins , a petty crook who ran a tavern and a brothel. Wilkins was also a writer whose work included a play and a novella, The Painful Adventures of Pericles Prince of Tyre , which combines material from Twine's romance The Pattern of Painful Adventures reprinted in and from Shakespeare's Pericles , written in , probably in collaboration with Wilkins who may have contributed the first two acts.

Shakespeare was one of three witnesses examined on 11 May His deposition brings the closest record of Shakespeare speaking, albeit through the court style of the examiner's clerk.

Shakespeare attested that Belott was, in his view, ' A very good and industrious servant ' who ' did well and honestly behave himselfe ', though he also said that Mountjoy had not ' confesse[d] that he hath gott any great proffitt and comodytye ' from Belott's service. He also deposed that the Mountjoys showed Belott ' great good will and affecceon ' and that Mrs Mountjoy ' did sollicitt and entreat [him] to move and perswade [ Belott ] to effect the said marriadge and accordingly [he] did '.

On the matter of money Shakespeare could not remember or chose not to remember how large the marriage portion was to have been, nor whether there was to have been a sum in Mountjoy's will, nor ' what Implementes and necessaries of houshold stuffe ' Mountjoy gave Belott as part of the marriage settlement Schoenbaum , Records , Further witnesses were examined on 19 June but Shakespeare , though named in the margin of the interrogatories, did not depose again. In the event the matter was referred to the elders of the French church, who ordered Mountjoy to pay Belott 20 nobles ; but Mountjoy , who had fathered two bastards and was excommunicated for his dissolute life, never paid.

Whatever the neighbourhood may have been, the Mountjoys were hardly the respectable family they might at first have appeared. The case is trivial enough but it shows Shakespeare caught up in the kind of arguments over money and marriage that figured in many plays of the period.

Events in Shakespeare's family in Stratford in this period balanced good and bad news. In May his daughter Susanna was listed with other residents of Stratford for refusing to take holy communion at Easter, perhaps a sign that she might be a covert Catholic since such actions were bound to be noticed in the tense aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot.

There appears to have been a substantial marriage settlement in which Shakespeare settled on Susanna acres of his land in Old Stratford, probably retaining a life interest in it; it amounts to a very valuable dowry. Shakespeare's younger brother Edmund had become a player, following his eldest brother to London, where both he and his infant son died in ; William may well have been the person who paid 20 s.

In February Shakespeare became a grandfather with the birth of Elizabeth Hall. In September his mother died. In the meantime, he was developing new forms for his drama. Pericles marked a new departure for Shakespeare , a drama whose narrative spreads to and fro across the Mediterranean, with a chorus, the poet John Gower whose poem Confessio amantis is one of the play's sources, returned from the grave to tell the tale.

From the finality of losing the beloved daughter at the end of King Lear to the possibility of a family being reunited at the end of Pericles is an enormous distance.

Pericles was the only play largely written by Shakespeare not to be included in the first folio but it appeared in a quarto edition in Its immediate popularity may be indicated by the presence of the French and Venetian ambassadors at a performance in If the play marked the start of a new phase in Shakespeare's writing, he made a last exploration of tragedy: Coriolanus , once again derived from Plutarch , is his fiercest study of the politics of the state and its citizens, spurred on by the immediate threat of the midlands uprising of —8, a series of outbreaks of popular unrest caused by bad harvests and inflationary food prices.

The riots occurred close to Stratford and William Combe , from whom Shakespeare had bought the land in Old Stratford in , warned Lord Salisbury of the risk of sedition.

By about half of Shakespeare's plays had appeared in print. His long narrative poems continued to be reprinted. The foregrounding of Shakespeare's name in the very title of the volume suggests that it may well have been authorized by Shakespeare , who could have sold the sequence to Thorpe for publication; the frequent closures of the theatres yet again because of plague in —9 could have encouraged him to find another source of income. Thomas Heywood indicated in that Shakespeare's annoyance with the earlier unauthorized publication of some of the sonnets in The Passionate Pilgrim had made him take action: ' hee to doe himselfe right, hath since published them in his owne name ' Schoenbaum , Documentary Life , The Sonnets were prefaced by an enigmatic dedication with each word followed by a period signed with Thorpe's initials, mimicking the form of Ben Jonson's dedication of Volpone to the universities published by Thorpe in : ' To the onlie begetter of these ensuing sonnets Mr W.

One of the sonnets may date back to his courtship of Anne Hathaway in ; Meres had spoken of his ' sugred Sonnets ' circulating in manuscript in ; a few had been printed in But when the bulk of them and 'A Lover's Complaint' were written is a matter for argument. So too are the identities of Mr W. Shakespeare , the consummate dramatist, may of course be constructing a drama set out in sonnets without any real figures behind it, but if the poems do tell of events in Shakespeare's life the identities of the participants come to matter greatly.

None of the many attempts at identifying the dark lady or the rival poet are finally convincing. But the case for the young man's being William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke , is more thorough and effective, even if there is a strong counter-claim that ' Mr W.

Shakespeare had little known contact with Herbert , though Herbert and his brother were the dedicatees of the first folio in and praised there for having ' prosequuted both [ Shakespeare's plays], and their Authour living, with so much favour ' sig.

The sonnet sequence begins with a group of seventeen poems, apparently commissioned by the young man's family, that attempt to persuade him to marry and leave versions of himself behind in his children; Herbert had repeatedly refused proposed marriages and it is tempting to date these poems to his seventeenth birthday in , perhaps the ones to which Meres referred.

Equally well, if this part of the sequence is earlier than , they could have been written to Southampton. In the absence of any significant external evidence, tests of vocabulary tend to suggest that some of the sonnets belong to the mids, while other internal indications, including possible allusions to the death of Elizabeth , suggest a date about , when 'A Lover's Complaint' is most likely to have been written as a deliberate coda to the sequence.

There is no reason to assume that the sequence was written at one time, nor that its differing segments were originally intended to belong together. Most of the poems, with their account of homoerotic desire between the older poet and a younger and unfaithful man sonnets 1 — , the counter-attractions of heterosexual desire — , and a continual return to self-humiliation, self-loathing, and sexual disgust, may well have been revised.

All one can be sure of is that the poems could not have reached their final form as a sequence, ending with the 'Complaint' , until at least and it is just as likely that they were finally revised shortly before publication. Perhaps the two periods of plague and closure provided Shakespeare with opportunities and reasons to work on his sonnets.

In the whole outpouring of sonnets in England in the period, only Richard Barnfield , in Cynthia , wrote poems directed to a man. The Sonnets in their repeated punning on Shakespeare's first name make the embedding of the poet himself into the sequence plain. Their explicit homoeroticism suggests that Shakespeare's sexuality was consciously bisexual in its desires, though the modern concept of bisexuality and one appropriate to Shakespeare's lifetime may be significantly different.

Whether Shakespeare's homoerotic desires led to or were connected with sexual acts with the young man or indeed any other man is far from clear. Read as biographical, they also make plain that fidelity to Anne was not something Shakespeare was much concerned about, though adulterous sex with the ' dark lady ' induced deep shame.

Whatever their biographical secrets, the poems have an emotional intensity and poetic complexity that make them among Shakespeare's greatest achievements. In the King's Men had acquired the lease of the Blackfriars Theatre, an indoor playhouse with a far smaller capacity than the Globe and with far higher admission prices; they acted there from the autumn of The company played in both venues but Blackfriars was by far the more prestigious.

With its greater range of stage machinery, its increased use of music, its habitual division of plays into acts with music between the acts , and its narrower social range of audience, Blackfriars offered Shakespeare a set of new challenges that he responded to in The Winter's Tale , Cymbeline , and The Tempest , and in his final collaborations with John Fletcher.

It appears that Shakespeare was writing plays less frequently than earlier, perhaps now no more than one a year. The Winter's Tale , Cymbeline , and The Tempest belong to the years —11 but the exact order in which they were written is impossible to determine, for all that critics prefer to see a simple sequence according to their own preference for a linear dramaturgical development.

Shakespeare turned, as for Pericles , to the materials of prose romance narrative, for The Winter's Tale using Greene's old tale Pandosto All three play self-conscious games with narrative and its amenability to dramatic form: The Winter's Tale is broken-backed, something it shares with Timon of Athens , moving from compressed urban tragedy to leisurely pastoral comedy before returning redemptively to the location of its tragic phase; Cymbeline ostentatiously foregrounds the long sequence of its own multiple revelations that lead to the drama's resolution, as if teasing the audience to find it merely comic; The Tempest uses Prospero's magic to achieve compression into three hours on a metamorphic island.

All three are particularly aware of their artifice and of the playwright's own art. If they seem to belong only to the world of romance, they are also full of topicality: Cymbeline 's movement to Milford Haven harks back to Richmond's landing to overthrow Richard III , and the play is full of comment on King James's vision of Britain as a newly united nation; The Tempest plays on the colonizing of America and the encounters with the New World transposed into the Mediterranean.

The clashes of worlds, old and new, ancient and modern, near and far, search for new unities. The style of these plays connects with the drama that Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher were writing at the same time, though the direction of influence is far from clear.

Certainly Shakespeare found a new and systematic collaboration with Fletcher desirable and satisfactory, for his next three plays were shared with the younger dramatist who had already written, probably in , a sequel to The Taming of the Shrew as The Woman's Prize, or, The Tamer Tamed. As with so many contemporary examples of collaboration it is difficult to be sure of the precise shares: each play is perfectly coherent in performance. Its worries about competing politics and nostalgia for the optimism at the birth of Elizabeth testify to a cultural nervousness.

Finally, if the assumed sequence of the plays is correct, came The Two Noble Kinsmen , a return to the chivalric world of Chaucer's 'Knight's tale' but coupled with an unnerving depiction of obsessive desire. Least known of all his work, Shakespeare's final collaborative plays show him continuing to experiment, returning to familiar topics but always in unfamiliar ways.

Following Shakespeare's writings chronologically has obscured two important kinds of work. The first is difficult to determine: a number of lyrics and occasional epigrams have been attributed to Shakespeare but there is little hard evidence for any of them. There are epitaphs on people, with some of whom Shakespeare had a known or possible connection—for example, the verses on John Combe which were claimed to have been on his monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford, or the one on Elias James , a brewer who worked close to the Globe Theatre—and with some of whom there is no known link.

It is not even certain that Shakespeare wrote the lines that appeared on his own grave, though they were recorded as his by the mid-seventeenth century. It is, though, probable that he wrote some occasional verse, whether songs, epigrams, or epitaphs. In March he certainly composed the impresa an allegorical insignia with a motto carried by the earl of Rutland at the king's accession day tilt; he was paid 44 s.

It is a rare moment linking Shakespeare directly with court events; unlike Ben Jonson , for instance, Shakespeare wrote masques as part of his plays, not for the court, and, though his plays were often performed at court, he was never one of the writers working for court circles.

The second kind of work is Shakespeare's repeated revising and rewriting of his plays. For some plays there is occasional evidence of revision in the stages of the original composition evident in the single text that reached print: a passage repeated with variants in Love's Labour's Lost , for instance, seems to show Shakespeare's first and second thoughts for the speech.

But for a number of plays that were printed both in quarto and in the first folio, the variants often indicate large- and small-scale revision. Characters' roles are expanded for example, Emilia in Othello ; speeches are rethought; lines are added here and there to produce different echoes and connections; lines, speeches, and whole scenes are deleted to alter the dramatic form and the theatrical pacing. In the cases of King Lear and Hamlet the alterations between the versions are so substantial as to suggest that each survives as two rather significantly different plays, a quarto and a folio text.

Texts in the theatre are often unstable entities; actors change lines they dislike and playwrights alter in response to the experience of rehearsal and production. Shakespeare is unlikely to have made the changes only once; rather, many plays, particularly the most popular ones, are likely to have undergone continual alteration over the years, but leaving only two snapshots of the long process, from first composition through years of performances, surviving in the printed texts.

Burbage had also bought property in the area and Shakespeare's purchase may have been simply an investment, since one John Robinson was a tenant there in But the gatehouse was large enough for Shakespeare to have let part of it and used the rest himself.

Wherever he was living in London after leaving the Mountjoys , he could have been in the Blackfriars gatehouse from Though he was the purchaser, the property was held by him with three others as trustees: John Heminges of the King's Men , William Johnson , the landlord of the Mermaid Tavern, and John Jackson , possibly the husband of the sister-in-law of Elias James the brewer.

The effect may well have been, whether by Shakespeare's design or not, to exclude Anne Shakespeare from having a widow's claim on a third share of the property for her life, her dower right, unless Shakespeare survived the other trustees.

The King's Men remained successful: at the celebrations for the marriage of James I's daughter to the elector palatine in February they performed fourteen plays, four of which were by Shakespeare including the not exactly propitious Othello. But in June , during a performance of Shakespeare's Henry VIII , the Globe Theatre burnt down after some of the stuff shot out of a small cannon, for a sound effect, lodged in the thatch.

Shakespeare had certainly sold his share in the company by the time he made his will in ; this may have been a good moment to get out. In Nicholas Rowe suggested that Shakespeare spent his last years ' in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends … and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford ' Works , ed.

But, though the story has taken permanent hold, there is no evidence for Shakespeare's having retired to Stratford.

In November Thomas Greene , Stratford's town clerk from to , who repeatedly refers to Shakespeare as his cousin, was in London and noted that, Shakespeare ' commyng yesterday to towne I went to see him howe he did ' Schoenbaum , Documentary Life , Where Shakespeare came from he does not say—it might well have been Stratford—but Shakespeare still came to London. Greene had been at Middle Temple when Twelfth Night was performed there and, with his wife and his children, Anne and William perhaps the Shakespeares had stood godparents to them , were living in New Place in Events in Stratford continued to involve Shakespeare , whether he was there or not.

He was one of seventy-one Stratford citizens who subscribed to contribute to the cost of promoting a bill in parliament for the repair of roads, being named first, added in the margin, after the town's officials.

A visiting preacher was entertained at New Place in , though it is not clear whether Shakespeare was there at the time. There were family sadnesses too: two of his brothers died, Gilbert in February and Richard in February , leaving only William and his sister Joan alive in that generation. In July his daughter Susanna brought a case in the bishop's consistory court that John Lane , a wild young man, had slandered her with an accusation of adultery with Rafe Smith and of having gonorrhoea; she won.

There was a local crisis too that affected Shakespeare. Combe and Arthur Mainwaring , steward to Lord Ellesmere , wanted to enclose land at Welcombe from which Shakespeare and Thomas Greene had tithe income. The Stratford corporation opposed the enclosure. Greene's notes on his conversation with Shakespeare in London in November showed that Shakespeare knew how much land was intended to be enclosed and that compensation would be fixed the following April. Neither Shakespeare nor his son-in-law, John Hall , believed that the enclosure would go ahead.

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Alva Noto. Amanda Gookin. Forward Music Project 2. Bright Shiny Things. Amelia Cuni. Parampara Festival Black Truffle Records. American Young. Ana Seva. Andalucia Big Band. Dr Frankenstein. Andrea Coen. Telemann: Menuets TWV Brilliant Classics. Andrea Lundquist. Andrea Parkins. Two Rooms From the Memory Palace. Infrequent Seams. Andreas Staier. Harmonia Mundi. Andrei Freitas. Andrew Crawford. The Lonesome Season. Bonfire Records. Mar de Fogo. Agencia Dutra. Happy Together.

Universal Music. Andy Shauf. Mieczyslaw Weinberg: Children's Notebooks. Animal Music. Angel Garcia "El Verde".

Tres Deseos. Angelo Reira. Tunnel Visjon. Animals as Leaders. Anne Clark. Anneleen Lenaerts. Vienna Stories. Warner Classics.

Annie Jump Cannon. Up Creek Without a Paddle. No Sleep Records. Anthony B. One Wise Studios. Anthony Sahyoun. Proof by Infinite Descent. Antonio Rugolo. Gilardino: Guitar Music Inspired by Spain.

Aquiles Delle-Vigne. ARS Produktion. Bleed the Future. Greatest Hits, Vol. Ari Balouzian. Some Kind of Heaven. Vivaldi: Cantate per Soprano I. Arlo Parks. Collapsed in Sunbeams. Armored Saint. Symbol of Salvation: Live. Arnau Griso. Eric Blanch. Wireless Internet. Inertial Frame.

The Big Beat. Blue Note. Arthur Russell. Another Thought. Be With Records. Arturo Serra. As You Like It. Ages Come and Ages Go. Dark Descent Records. Auf Togo. Ausecuma Beats. Austin Ato. Hot Jams, Vol. Classic Records. Passing Through. Interchill Records. Avalokite Duo. Soundstripe Productions. Aviv Quartet. Schubert: The Last Quartets.

Aya Hamada. Drunk Wizard. Digital Drugs Coalition. Breaking Point. Rhythm Bomb. Baby Big Cuz. Wolo So. Barbara Lewis. The Stars. Bardainne Jaumet. Heavenly Sweetness. Barnaby Robson. Orchid Classics. Barrie James. Strange Desire. Amplified Media Services. Bartolome Ruiz. Cancionero Del Guadarrama. Beach Fossils. Bayonet Records. Bears In Trees. And Everybody Else Smiled Back.

Counter Intuitive. Begin Again. Ben LaMar Gay. Open Arms to Open Us. Benedict Sheehan: Vespers. Cappella Romana. Benhur Alvarez. Fly Club. Benjamin Alard. Benjamin Francis Leftwich. Tinsel in the River. Dirty Hit. Season's Swingin' Greetings. Cellar Live Records. Two of Swords. Berk Icli. Glimpses of an Eternal Bloom. Musiques Suisses. Hopeless Records.

Big Rich the Dreamer. Protect Artist Entertainment. Big Sad Big Tank D. On Sight. Big Yawn. Pressure Acts. Billie Piper.

The Billage of Perception: Chapter One. Billy Dee Regal. Citico Muzik. Bing Crosby. Guest Star Time. Birds of Passage. The Last Garden. Black Crucifixion. Faustian Dream. The Devil's Elixir. Black Dice. Mod Prog Sic. FourFour Records. Black Spiders. Black Swan. Close to Me. Blackmore's Night. Winter Carols. Blaine L. Wounds and Blessings.

Blake Morgan. Down Below Or Up Above. ECR Music Group. Dude Ranch. Blonde Diamond. Red Flags. The Color Blu e. Miles Davis. Blue Foundation. Silent Dream. Blue Packs. Bob Marley. Trenchtown Rockers. Songs of Freedom: The Island Years. Bobbi Humphrey. Fancy Dancer. Bobby Hustle.

The Right Place. Stakk En Tur Pa Klubben. Bola Sete. O Barquinho. Tompkins Square. Into Blackness. Heavy Psych Sounds. Leave It to Binky. Brand New. Triple Crown Records. Brave Belt. Brazilian Gentleman. Molly Ringwald. Brill 4 the Thrill. Modus Operandi. Active Music. Bruce Springsteen. The Legendary No Nukes Concerts. Sony Music. Midnight in the Switchgrass. Mascagni: Cavalleria Rusticana. Buzz Cuivres.

Travis Kr8ts. No Feelings. Northern Organized Recordz. Noi Non Ci Saremo. Cairo Dyvine. Heresy Records. California Storm. A Silent Movement. Carpe Sonum. Death Shall Rise. Spirit in Flames. Cannabis Chris. Coviello Classics.

Capella Musicale Enrico Stuart. Valentini: Recorder Sonatas, Op. It's None of Your Business. Surgical Steel. Carla Williams. Merry Christmas, Darling. BelleFire Records. Carlo Ditta. Hungry for Love. Orleans Records. Carly Rae Jepsen. Carter Clouse. Playing Retention. Mahakala Music. Casper Skulls.

Knows No Kindness. Cassandra Jenkins. An Overview on Phenomenal Nature. Ba Da Bing Records. BMG Rights Management. Cat Stevens. Teaser and the Firecat. Cate Le Bon. Mexican Summer. La Vita Davanti.

Social Anthems, Vol. Origin Records. Into the Cauldron. No Love. Cecilia Bartoli. Cenario Liquido. Noite Sem Fim. GL Music Producoes. Chaka Khan. Japanese Single Collection: Greatest Hits. Charles Mingus. A teenage girl and her single father. Rose is coming of age, and coming out of the closet. Dad wants to make sure Rose's coming out is as easy and painless as possible. Sometimes he tries a little too hard. A series of independent episodes with only their secluded seaside setting as the common link.

In each episode, attractive young men and women end up in bed on the couch, in the shower, on Jake yearns to understand the secret life of his late fiancee. To find the answer, he solicits the most heartfelt, passionate, and intimate entries in other women's diaries. These are their stories Set in a high-class brothel, this new series creates a hyper-reality in which the viewer is privy to the private lives and emotions of five beautiful young women.

TV-MA 30 min Drama. Votes: 13, Four female New Yorkers gossip about their sex lives or lack thereof and find new ways to deal with being a woman in the late s. A groups of women in modern America going through life and the intense challenges that are part of every relationship. Despite being from different backgrounds. An adult show where Julie Strain heard cases of sexual infidelity, and gave outrageous sentences. Two friends in bar narrate American urban legends with an additional strong sexual tone.

Stars: Emmy Rossum , William H. But her fascination with the Votes: 3, A radio show host invites listeners to call in and relate their own personal story of "the best sex you ever had". TV 42 min Comedy, Drama, Romance. Carrie Bradshaw is in her junior year of high school in the early s.

She asks her first questions about love, sex, friendship and family while navigating the worlds of high school and Manhattan. Votes: 26, TV 42 min Crime, Drama. Riley is a single mother living in a small Texas town and leading a shocking double life. Votes: 11, The series uses TV-MA 30 min Comedy. Sick of getting screwed, Sam and Lizzie decide to take their dating life into their own hands, following the rules they find in "The Girl's Guide to Depravity".

Not just your average single TV-MA 27 min Drama. Votes: 10, Votes: 7. Stars: Elisa M. Well past his glory days, an aging pornographer resists change and clashes with his children, who aim to take the family empire in a new direction.

Drama, Romance.