Later income.
His remuneration as dramatist between 1599 and 1611 was also by no means contemptible. Prices paid to dramatists for plays rose rapidly in the early years of the seventeenth century, [202] while the value of the author’s ‘benefits’ grew with the growing vogue of the theatre. The exceptional popularity of Shakespeare’s plays after 1599 gave him the full advantage of higher rates of pecuniary reward in all directions, and the seventeen plays which were produced by him between that year and the close of his professional career in 1611 probably brought him an average return of £20 each or £340 in all—nearly £30 a year. At the same time the increase in the number of Court performances under James I, and the additional favour bestowed on Shakespeare’s
company, may well have given that source of income the enhanced value of £20 a year. [203]
Thus Shakespeare in the later period of his life was earning above £600 a year in money of the period. With so large a professional income he could easily, with good management, have completed those purchases of houses and land at Stratford on which he laid out, between 1599 and 1613, a total sum of £970, or an annual average of £70. These properties, it must be remembered, represented investments, and he drew rent from most of them. He traded, too, in agricultural produce. There is nothing inherently improbable in the statement of John Ward, the seventeenth-century vicar of Stratford, that in his last years ‘he spent at the rate of a thousand a year, as I have heard,’ although we may reasonably make allowance for exaggeration in the round figures.