Shakespeare: Thinking of Death
Written by Tom Fasano on April 23, 2009 – 9:21 pm
Shakespeare lost his ring at the 1616 wedding of his daughter Judith; it was found near Stratford Church in 1810.
Shakespeare died on this day in 1616, also his birthday. He’d drawn up his will earlier the new year although he wasn’t that old at fifty-one, but in those days people drew up their wills when they felt death approaching. That’s what Tudor people did, and there was an abundance of self-help books on the subject, one of which Shakespeare no doubt used for Claudio’s famous speech (”Ay, but to die, and go we know not where”) in Measure for Measure. The idea that you played your part on the stage and then promptly left was a commonplace.
What brought on his sense of impending death we may never know, although his younger brothers were already dead, and by most accounts his health was fading. There’s the supposition that he suffered from syphilis, which would not have been impossible since he had lived as a single man in London for several decades, and there is the reference to venereal disease at the end of the sonnets — the “strange maladies” contracted in the late 1590s during his “hell of time.” His signature certainly gives evidence of shakiness and perhaps illness. But the story I like most surrounding his death is the one of a fever brought on after a night of drinking with Warwickshire poet Michel Drayton and the Bard’s old friend Ben Jonson.
The illness that took Shakespeare’s life is unknown and is likely to remain so. We do know that he was tended by his son-in-law Dr. John Hall — only thirteen years Shakespeare’s junior. It is known that Dr. Hall kept a careful record of his patients’ illnesses, but sadly, of the two casebooks he left behind, the surviving one begins the year after Shakespeare’s death. About the man we know next to nothing before his marriage to Susanna Shakespeare in 1607. About all we know is that his medical practice was extensive, and he must have remained on friendly terms with his father-in-law because he and Susanna were executors of Shakespeare’s will. Dr. Hall proved the will in June, 1616, in the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Registry in London.
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A New Portrait of Shakespeare
Written by Tom Fasano on March 21, 2009 – 10:53 amThe old bladder-faced portrait plastered on every Shakespeare anthology ever published is soon to be replaced. But I think the Bard’s actual image is a modern-day version of Elizabethan navel-gazing, despite the musings of the august Stanley Wells. Maybe publishers should do a collage of portraits?
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