There is little to tell of his life after he met Mary Fitton, or rather the history of his life afterwards is the history of his passion and jealousy and madness as he himself has told it in the great tragedies. He appears to have grown fat and scant of breath when he was about thirty-six or seven. In 1608 his mother died, and “Coriolanus” was written as a sort of monument to the memory of “the noblest mother in the world.” His intimacy with Mary Fitton lasted, I feel sure, up to his breakdown in 1608 or thereabouts, and was probably the chief cause of his infirmity and untimely death.
It only remains for me now to say a word or two about the end of his life. Rowe says that “the latter part of his life was spent as all men of good sense will that theirs may be, in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends. He had the good fortune to gather an estate equal to his occasion, and, in that, to his wish, and is said to have spent some years before his death at his native Stratford.” Rowe, too, tells us that it is a story “well remembered in that country, that he had a particular intimacy with Mr. Combe, an old gentleman noted thereabouts for his wealth and usury; it happened that in a pleasant conversation amongst their common friends Mr. Combe told Shakespeare, in a laughing manner, that he fancied he intended to write his epitaph, if he happened to outlive him; and since he did not know what might be said of him when he was dead, he desired it might be done immediately; upon which Shakespeare gave him these four verses:
“Ten in the Hundred lies here ingrav'd
'Tis a Hundred to Ten his soul is not sav'd:
If any Man ask, 'Who lies in this tomb,'
Oh! ho! quoth the Devil, 'tis my John-a-Combe.”
But the sharpness of the Satyr is said to have stung the man so severely that he never forgave him.”
I have given all this because I want the reader to have the sources before him, and because the contempt of tradesman-gain and usury, even at the very end, is so characteristic.
It appears, too, from the Stratford records, and is therefore certain, that as early as the year 1614 a preacher was entertained at New Place—“Item, one quart of sack, and one quart of claret wine, given to a preacher at the New Place, twenty pence.” The Reverend John Ward, who was vicar of Stratford, in a manuscript memorandum book written in the year 1664, asserts that “Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Johnson had a merie meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted.”
Shakespeare, as we have seen from “The Tempest,” retired to Stratford—“where every third thought shall be my grave”—in broken health and in a mood of despairing penitence. I do not suppose the mood lasted long; but the ill-health and persistent weakness explain to me as nothing else could his retirement to Stratford. It is incredible to me that Shakespeare should leave London at forty-seven or forty-eight years of age, in good health, and retire to Stratford to live as a “prosperous country gentleman”! What had Stratford to offer Shakespeare—village Stratford with a midden in the chief street and the charms of the village usurer's companionship tempered by the ministrations of a wandering tub-thumper?
There is abundant evidence, even in “The Winter's Tale” and “Cymbeline,” to prove that the storm which wrecked Shakespeare's life had not blown itself out even when these last works were written in 1611-12; the jealousy of Leontes is as wild and sensual as the jealousy of Othello; the attitude of Posthumus towards women as bitter as anything to be found in “Troilus and Cressida”:
“Could I find out
The woman's part in me! For there's no motion
That tends to vice in man but I affirm
It is the woman's part: be it lying, note it,
The woman's; flattering, hers; deceiving, hers;
Lust and rank thoughts, hers, hers; revenges, hers;
Ambitions, covetings, change of prides, disdain,
Nice longing, slanders, mutability,
All faults that may be named, nay, that hell knows,
Why, hers, in part or all, but rather all;
For even to vice
They are not constant, but are changing still
One vice, but of a minute old, for one
Not half so old as that.”
The truth is, that the passions of lust and jealousy and rage had at length worn out Shakespeare's strength, and after trying in vain to win to serenity in “The Tempest,” he crept home to Stratford to die.