The Complete Works of William Shakespeare - Israel Gollancz William Shakespeare [3402]
His interest in the Blackfriars Theatre was comparatively unimportant, and is less easy to estimate. The often quoted documents on which Collier depended to prove him a substantial shareholder in that playhouse have long been proved to be forgeries. The pleas in the lawsuit of 1635 show that the Burbages, the owners, leased the Blackfriars Theatre after its establishment in 1597 for a long term of years to the master of the Children of the Chapel, but bought out the lessee at the end of 1609, and then ‘placed’ in it ‘men-players which were Hemings, Condell, Shakespeare, etc.’ To these and other actors they allotted shares in the receipts, the shares numbering eight in all. The profits were far smaller than at the Globe, and if Shakespeare held one share (certainty on the point is impossible), it added not more than £100 a year to his income, and that not until 1610.
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, 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.
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.
Incomes of fellow-actors.
Shakespeare realised his theatrical shares several years before his death in 1616, when he left, according to his will, £350 in money in addition to an extensive real estate and numerous personal belongings. There was nothing exceptional in this comparative affluence. His friends and fellow-actors, Heming and Condell, amassed equally large, if not larger, fortunes. Burbage died in 1619 worth £300 in land, besides personal property; while a contemporary actor and theatrical proprietor, Edward Alleyn, purchased the manor of Dulwich for £10,000 (in money of his own day), and devoted it, with much other property, to public uses, at the same time as he made ample provision for his family out of the residue of his estate. Gifts from patrons may have continued occasionally to augment Shakespeare’s resources, but his wealth can be satisfactorily assigned to better attested agencies. There is no ground for treating it as of mysterious origin.
Formation of the estate at Stratford 1601-10.
Between 1599 and 1611, while London remained Shakespeare’s chief home, he built up at Stratford a large landed estate which his purchase of New Place had inaugurated. In 1601