Free Cymbeline by William Shakespeare Page A

James I, who had held the Scottish throne as James VI since he was an infant, immediately took the Lord Chamberlain’s Men under his direct patronage. Henceforth they would be the King’s Men, and for the rest of Shakespeare’s career they were favored with far more court performances than any of their rivals. There even seem to have been rumors earlyin the reign that Shakespeare and Burbage were being considered for knighthoods, an unprecedented honor for mere actors—and one that in the event was not accorded to a member of the profession for nearly three hundred years, when the title was bestowed upon Henry Irving, the leading Shakespearean actor of Queen Victoria’s reign.
    Shakespeare’s productivity rate slowed in the Jacobean years, not because of age or some personal trauma, but because there were frequent outbreaks of plague, causing the theaters to be closed for long periods. The King’s Men were forced to spend many months on the road. Between November 1603 and 1608, they were to be found at various towns in the south and Midlands, though Shakespeare probably did not tour with them by this time. He had bought a large house back home in Stratford and was accumulating other property. He may indeed have stopped acting soon after the new king took the throne. With the London theaters closed so much of the time and a large repertoire on the stocks, Shakespeare seems to have focused his energies on writing a few long and complex tragedies that could have been played on demand at court:
Othello, King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus
, and
Cymbeline
are among his longest and poetically grandest plays.
Macbeth
survives only in a shorter text, which shows signs of adaptation after Shakespeare’s death. The bitterly satirical
Timon of Athens
, apparently a collaboration with Thomas Middleton that may have failed on the stage, also belongs to this period. In comedy, too, he wrote longer and morally darker works than in the Elizabethan period, pushing at the very bounds of the form in
Measure for Measure
and
All’s Well That Ends Well
.
    From 1608 onward, when the King’s Men began occupying the indoor Blackfriars playhouse (as a winter house, meaning that they used the outdoor Globe only in summer?), Shakespeare turned to a more romantic style. His company had a great success with a revived and altered version of an old pastoral play called
Mucedorus
. It even featured a bear. The younger dramatist John Fletcher, meanwhile, sometimes working in collaboration with Francis Beaumont, was pioneering a new style of tragicomedy, a mix of romance and royalism laced with intrigue and pastoral excursions. Shakespeare experimented with this idiom in
Cymbeline
and it was presumably with hisblessing that Fletcher eventually took over as the King’s Men’s company dramatist. The two writers apparently collaborated on three plays in the years 1612–14: a lost romance called
Cardenio
(based on the love-madness of a character in Cervantes’
Don Quixote
),
Henry VIII
(originally staged with the title “All Is True”), and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, a dramatization of Chaucer’s “Knight’s Tale.” These were written after Shakespeare’s two final solo-authored plays,
The Winter’s Tale
, a self-consciously old-fashioned work dramatizing the pastoral romance of his old enemy Robert Greene, and
The Tempest
, which at one and the same time drew together multiple theatrical traditions, diverse reading, and contemporary interest in the fate of a ship that had been wrecked on the way to the New World.
    The collaborations with Fletcher suggest that Shakespeare’s career ended with a slow fade rather than the sudden retirement supposed by the nineteenth-century Romantic critics who read Prospero’s epilogue to
The Tempest
as Shakespeare’s personal farewell to his art. In the last few years of his life Shakespeare certainly spent more of his time in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he became further involved in property dealing