When Shakespeare had resided in Southwark he had been close to the theatre, and subject to the appearance of uninvited colleagues and friends. But he was by no means isolated in Silver Street. He was close to his old Stratford friend, the publisher Richard Field; Mrs. Field, herself a Huguenot, worshipped at the same French church as Madame Mountjoy. In certain respects late sixteenth-century London still resembled a small town or village. He was also a few yards from the bookstalls of St. Paul’s Churchyard, where he would have seen his own plays on sale for sixpence. He could have picked up the short version of The Tragicall Historie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmarke at Nicholas Ling’s new shop by St. Dunstan’s in the West near St. Paul’s in Fleet Street.
The subject of booksellers was close to Shakespeare. He needed books, expensive though the majority of them were, to furnish his art. By 1600 there were some hundred publishers as well as a score of printers and an indeterminate number of booksellers. The figures can only be approximate since one man or shop might combine two or three of these separate trades. All printers were, for example, in some degree also publishers; but not all publishers were printers. Many of the booksellers were established in Paternoster Row, that quarter of the city behind St. Paul’s Cathedral where the trade clustered, and there were at least seventeen bookshops in St. Paul’s Churchyard itself. The area remained the centre of the book-publishing business until the fire-storms of the Second World War entirely destroyed it. It was a relatively small trade, compared to the printing and publishing business of such continental centres as Bruges and Antwerp, but it was well established and well organised. The London publishers were skilful and professional with relatively high standards of type-setting, proof-reading and printing. The publication of plays, Shakespeare’s among them, comprised only a very small part of their overall trade. Books of sermons and of meditations, as well as books of history and domestic etiquette, sold far more. But sales must be set in perspective. The most popular books had an approximate print-run of 1,250 copies.
Close to Paternoster Row stood Stationers’ Hall, the centre of the guild of the publishers, printers and booksellers where were placed the registers of the books published and licensed in the city. They were inspected for any offence against state or religion, and were then duly entered at the cost of 6 pence. Although many books were not entered, any registered book was deemed to be under the copyright of the publisher. Severe penalties were imposed upon any breaches of copyright, which included fines and confiscations as well as the more serious punishment of the printing press being broken up. So it seems unlikely that many of Shakespeare’s plays emerged in “pirated” form, as has sometimes been suggested. But in the case of these plays there was a long history of transference from one publisher to another. John Busby registered The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, and on the same day transferred it to Arthur Johnson, who promptly published it. Andrew Wise registered and published three of the history plays in the late 1590s, and then five years later transferred them to Matthew Law. There are other publishers involved in the transmission of Shakespeare’s texts — Nicholas Ling, John Danter, Thomas Millington, James Roberts and Edward Blount among them. They were tradesmen principally, concerned to earn a profit, and were in no sense “patrons” of the dramatist.
Close to his new neighbourhood, too, was John Heminges; he rented a house in Addle Street owned by Thomas Savage, the goldsmith who was also a trustee of the Globe. Another colleague from the playhouse, Henry Condell, lived in the same parish as Heminges. In that sense the area was an extension of Shakespeare’s theatrical family. It seems very likely that he was the godfather to John Heminges’s son, William, who was christened in the autumn of 1603 at the church of St. Mary’s Aldermanbury a few yards away from Silver Street. If the three friends sometimes travelled together to the Globe, it was a matter of a few hundred yards’ walk to the wherries that would carry them over the Thames.
It has sometimes been surmised, however, that Shakespeare’s removal from Southwark was also a sign of some growing detachment from the life of the playhouse — and that, at some point in this period, he gave up acting without of course abandoning his career as dramatist. He is listed among the players for Ben Jonson’s Sejanus in 1603, but is not mentioned as playing in the production of the same dramatist’s Volpone in 1605. This is a significant omission, if in that interval there lies the decision to leave the stage. He had invested heavily in Stratford land, and did not need an actor’s income. He also earned money from his share in the Globe, as well as from his plays. He was forty years of age, middle-aged in Elizabethan terms, and may have tired of the endless activity of the stage. And was it right, for a landed gentleman, still to tread the boards? From 1603 to 1616, his company was engaged in a great deal of provincial travelling. Touring cannot have been a pursuit he still welcomed. He may have preferred to confine his travels to the route between London and Stratford, making the journey from Silver Street to New Place unencumbered by an actor’s duties.
Silver Street was itself not immune to the plague. In the course of the epidemic a royal musician, Henry Sandon, died together with his daughter. A painter, William Linley, succumbed with his wife. The porter of the Barber Surgeons’ Hall, nearby in Monkwell Street, also expired. So it is likely that in the summer and autumn of 1603 Shakespeare was either residing in Stratford or taking part in what would have been his last provincial tour.
The doors of the London theatres were of course shut for most of this year. The playhouses were automatically closed when mortality from the plague reached thirty a week, and the outbreak of 1603 far surpassed that figure. By October the companies had returned from their touring, and were hoping that the theatres might reopen. In a letter from their house on Bank-side Edward Alleyn’s wife wrote to her husband, staying at Bexhill, “my own self (your self) and my mother, and the whole house, are in good health, and about us the Sickness doth cease, and is likely more and more, by God’s help, to cease. All the companies be come home, and are well, for aught we know …”1
Yet all cannot have been entirely well, since the King’s Men then decamped to the estate of Augustine Phillips in plague-free Mortlake by the Thames. In this small riverine town also lived John Dee, the magus and scientist whose predictions and exploits had made him famous in late sixteenth-century society. He had even been consulted by Queen Elizabeth. It is possible that the actors encountered the notorious Doctor Dee during their residence in Mortlake. It would at least give a context to the persistent reports that Shakespeare in part modelled the character of Prospero on this contemporary magician.
The removal of Phillips from London did not delay his death. In the spring of 1604 he died at Mortlake, bequeathing “to my ffellowe William Shakespeare a Thirty shillings peece in gould.” To a former apprentice Phillips left a purple cloak, a sword and a dagger; to a newer apprentice he bequeathed his musical instruments. Shakespeare heads the list of colleagues and house-keepers in the will, however, a prominence which suggests that Phillips had an especial attachment to him.