Read The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street for Free Online

for the King’s Men.
    Shakespeare was no stranger to collaboration, but he did not, one suspects, take naturally to it, and as far as the evidence remains his partnership with Middleton was the first for about a decade. Early in his career he had tacked and botched with other writers: the hand of Nashe has been discerned in the Henry VI plays, and that of Peele in Titus Andronicus . In around 1593-4 he contributed to ‘Sir Thomas More’, a play which survives only in manuscript and was perhaps never performed. 47 But once his career gets going he is remarkably solo. Over at the Rose - on the evidence of Henslowe’s accounts and diaries - it was the norm for a play to be written by anything from two to five writers. Few of the collaborations listed by Henslowe made it into print - we have lost such plays as Ben Jonson’s Hot Anger Soon Cooled , written with Henry Chettle - but among the younger writers in the new century collaborations were frequently printed as such - Eastward Ho! by Chapman, Jonson and Marston; Westward Ho! and Northward Ho! by Dekker and Webster; The Honest Whore and The Roaring Girl by Dekker and Middleton; and many works by Beaumont and Fletcher. It seems to have become a selling point - two or three talents (often very different kinds of talent) for the price of one.
    Though Timon cannot be called an unqualified success, the passages now assigned to Middleton - which include almost all of Act 3 - are powerfully written, and it seems his connection with the King’s Men prospered. In about 1606 he turned out two fine tragedies for them: The Revenger’s Tragedy (published anonymously in 1607) and the short, topical A Yorkshire Tragedy (published in 1608). The title-page of the latter credits the play to ‘W. Shakspeare’. 48 Similarly the first edition of Middleton’s comedy The Puritan (1607) is attributed to ‘W.S.’. These are opportunistic title-pages, marketing ploys, but they express accurately a new literary twinning. It is possible Shakespeare contributed some passages to the Yorkshire Tragedy .
    Shakespeare may have been edged into this collaboration by professional pressure. He may have felt (or others in the company may have felt) that he needed the input of younger, sharper-edged writers like Middleton and, a little later, George Wilkins, who was sharp-edged in an altogether more dangerous way.
     
    These are, in broad outline, the literary aspects of Shakespeare on Silver Street - the ‘bitter and complex music’ of the tragicomedies; the flawed collaboration with Middleton; the impending mental tempest of King Lear . It is a period of transition, of experiment, of paradox and contradiction: ‘a mingled yarn, good and ill together’ ( All’s Well, 4.3.67).
    How far this can be related to Shakespeare’s frame of mind during this period is, of course, a matter of debate. It was once fashionable to speak of Shakespeare’s output in the early seventeenth century as the product of a period of depression or illness, or what we might now call a mid-life crisis. This was energetically challenged in a famous lecture by C. J. Sisson, ‘The Mythical Sorrows of Shakespeare’ (1934). Sisson attacked the idea that Shakespeare wrote the tragicomedies as ‘a sufferer from pessimism and disillusionment, a victim of seventeenth century blues’. It simply does not follow, he thought, any more than ‘the proposition that tragic writing in a great creative writer is evidence of a tragic mood or personal unhappiness’. On the contrary, as Coleridge observed, ‘When a man is unhappy he writes damned bad poetry.’ This is a corrective view, and the critical pendulum has continued to swing away from such personal interpretation of the plays (though the great modern maverick of Shakespeare studies, John Berryman, had a point when he said he was looking forward to ‘Professor Sisson’s studies of the mythical sorrows of St Paul, Villon, Dostoevsky, Father [Gerard Manley] Hopkins and Hart