Financial position before 1599.
The financial prosperity to which this correspondence and the transactions immediately preceding it point has been treated as one of the chief mysteries of Shakespeare’s career, but the difficulties are gratuitous. There is practically nothing in Shakespeare’s financial position that a study of the contemporary conditions of theatrical life does not fully explain. It was not until 1599, when the Globe Theatre was built, that he acquired any share in the profits of a playhouse. But his revenues as a successful dramatist and actor were by no means contemptible at an earlier date. His gains in the capacity of dramatist formed the smaller source of income. The highest price known to have been paid before 1599 to an author for a play by the manager of an acting company was
£11; £6 was the lowest rate. [197a] A small additional gratuity—rarely apparently exceeding ten shillings—was bestowed on a dramatist whose piece on its first production was especially well received; and the author was by custom allotted, by way of ‘benefit,’ a certain proportion of the receipts of the theatre on the production of a play for the second time. [197b] Other sums, amounting at times to as much as £4, were bestowed on the author for revising and altering an old play for a revival. The nineteen plays which may be set to Shakespeare’s credit between 1591 and 1599, combined with such revising work as fell to his lot during those eight years, cannot consequently have brought him less than £200, or some £20 a year. Eight or nine of these plays were published during the period, but the
publishers operated independently of the author, taking all the risks and, at the same time, all the receipts. The publication of Shakespeare’s plays in no way affected his monetary resources, although his friendly relations with the printer Field doubtless secured him, despite the absence of any copyright law, some part of the profits in the large and continuous sale of his poems.
But it was as an actor that at an early date he acquired a genuinely substantial and secure income. There is abundance of contemporary evidence to show that the stage was for an efficient actor an assured avenue to comparative wealth. In 1590 Robert Greene describes in his tract entitled ‘Never too Late’ a meeting with a player whom he took by his ‘outward habit’ to be ‘a gentleman of great living’ and a ‘substantial man.’ The player informed Greene that he had at the beginning of his career travelled on foot, bearing his theatrical properties on his back, but he prospered so rapidly that at the time of speaking ‘his very share in playing apparel would not be sold for £200.’ Among his neighbours ‘where he dwelt’ he was reputed able ‘at his proper cost to build a windmill.’ In the university play, ‘The Return from Parnassus’ (1601?), a poor student enviously complains of the wealth and position which a successful actor derived from his calling.
England affords those glorious vagabonds,
That carried erst their fardles on their backs,
Coursers to ride on through the gazing streets,
Sweeping it in their glaring satin suits,
And pages to attend their masterships;
With mouthing words that better wits had framed,
They purchase lands and now esquires are made. [199a]
The travelling actors, from whom the highwayman Gamaliel Ratsey extorted a free performance in 1604, were represented as men with the certainty of a rich competency in prospect. [199b] An efficient actor received in 1635 as large a regular salary as £180. The lowest known valuation set an actor’s wages at 3s. a day, or about £45 a year. Shakespeare’s emoluments as an actor before 1599 are not likely to have fallen below £100; while the remuneration due to performances at Court or in noblemen’s houses, if the accounts of 1594 be accepted as the basis of reckoning, added some £15.
Thus over £130 (equal to £1,040 of to-day) would be Shakespeare’s average annual revenue before 1599. Such a sum would be regarded as a very large income in a country town. According to the author of ‘Ratseis Ghost,’ the actor, who may well have been meant for Shakespeare, practised in London a strict frugality, and there seems no reason why Shakespeare should not have been able in 1597 to draw from his
savings £60 wherewith to buy New Place. His resources might well justify his fellow-townsmen’s opinion of his wealth in 1598, and suffice between 1597 and 1599 to meet his expenses, in rebuilding the house, stocking the barns with grain, and conducting various legal proceedings. But, according to tradition, he had in the Earl of Southampton a wealthy and generous friend who on one occasion gave him a large gift of money to enable ‘him to go through with’ a purchase to which he had a mind. A munificent gift, added to professional gains, leaves nothing unaccounted for in Shakespeare’s financial position before 1599.