The theatre is not kind to ageing talent. Middle‑aged Shakespeare must have wondered whether he had passed his prime. In fact, he had. Shakespeare at 40 was already conspicuously behind the times.

Between 1593 and 1600, Shakespeare dominated the English theatre. He wrote one stage hit after another, prompting at least 10 sequels by himself and other people. He published a string of bestsellers, six in six years ‑ a success even Stephen King or Jeffrey Archer would envy. Unlike King and Archer, Shakespeare, by the time he turned 36, was much quoted in posh anthologies. He was declared the equal of Ovid, Plautus and Seneca. He was so confident of his own talent that, for a decade, he stopped collaborating with other playwrights ‑ a practice that was common in Elizabethan theatre.

But things started to sour after 1600. Although publishers and readers were increasingly willing to invest in printed texts of plays, they stopped investing in new plays by Shakespeare.

About the time he turned 40, the once cockily independent Shakespeare had begun collaborating again. Timon of Athens was probably written in 1605, and Thomas Middleton wrote about a third of it. After Middleton, Shakespeare collaborated with George Wilkins (Pericles), then John Fletcher (Cardenio, All is True, The Two Noble Kinsmen). In each case, an older man who had not had a hit in years teamed up with a young man who had just written a hit play, or several hit plays. Those young men did not need Shakespeare. He needed them.

Like many other has‑beens, Shakespeare in his 40s tried to rescue his sinking reputation by recycling his 20s and 30s. In about 1604, he collaborated with several other playwrights in adapting and reviving Sir Thomas More, an English history play originally written in the early 1590s. King Lear was an adaptation of the even older play King Leir.

Shakespeare complained about the boy actors in the reopened indoor theatres who threatened to "carry it away" with their overacting. The boys were playing in indoor theatres ‑ with lighting effects, better music, and more comfortable seating. Indoor theatres were the future. All Shakespeare's hits were written for the old‑fashioned outdoor stage.

But the greatest threat to Shakespeare were not the boy actors or the theatres they played in. What "carried it away', was the new talent writing for those rival companies. The two most successful Jacobean playwrights were Fletcher and Middleton, 16 and 15 years younger than Shakespeare.

Why did Shakespeare, after his 40th birthday, write plays about old men like Leontes and Pericles, who sought, above all else, to recover the love they had experienced when they were younger? Shakespeare certainly suffered, but there's nothing heroic in an older man's anxiety or bitterness about his younger rivals.

You can see someone like Shakespeare every day on TV: a man who, having been a spectacularly successful fresh face in the 1990s, must watch how his popularity shrinks.

Why did Shakespeare retire to Stratford? Maybe because he was no longer wanted in London. Maybe, like most ageing actors, he spent the last years of his life waiting for the call that never came. (564 words)

Tasks

Deal with the following tasks as far as possible in one coherent text
- marking with numbers where each task begins.
Tasks 3a and 3b are alternatives, you ought to do only one of them!

1. What, according to the text, was Shakespeare’s personal and professional situation after 1604?

2. The author does not describe Shakespeare as the literature icon that he usually is, but as a man with problems and character flaws. Show how he does this - consider the examples as well as the style and choice of words.

3a. The writer compares Shakespeare with modern authors. To what extent is this comparison justified, and what differences must one keep in mind (audiences, theatres, media, political situation, etc.). Write an argumentative or an expository text.

3b. Imagine the following situation: William Shakespeare has been at his home “New Place” in Stratford for some years, he has nothing to do and is dissatisfied and morose. Write a little scene with a dialogue between William and his wife Anne. (This scene might be part of a new film “Shakespeare out of Love”)

Annotations:

speed bump – a bump in the road forcing motorists to drive more slowly; here: a time in life when you feel that you are getting old and have to do things a bit more slowly; prime – best time in life; Stephen King (born 1947), Jeffrey Archer (b. 1940) – authors of very successful novels; posh – (colloquial) upper class (vornehm); Ovid (Publius Ovidius Naso, 43 BC-17 AD), Titus Maccius Plautus (254-184 BC), Lucius Annaeus Seneca (4 BC-65 AD) – Roman authors and playwrights; cocky – too confident and sure of oneself; Thomas Middleton (1580-1627), John Fletcher (1579-1625), George Wilkins (?) – playwrights; boy actors - troupes of actors in England, which consisted of 8-12 boys and were very popular at the time; to “carry it away” - here: to win the affection of the audience; Jacobean - referring to the time of King James I (from New Latin Jacobaeus; cf. Elizabethan); Leontes – a character in the play “The Winter’s Tale”.


Jeffrey Archer	Stephen King	John Fletcher	Thomas Middleton

(By the way, if you have nothing else to do as a homework, you can try to find out why May 3, and not April 23, is here given as the birthday of Will Shakespeare. Tip: Gregorian Calendar)

Shakespeare's midlife crisis

Tasks

Annotations: