Shakespeare's first tipping point

A brief account of his lyrical phase

This Sunday we are discussing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at 19.00 UK time. Here is the full Shakespeare schedule.

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Plague

In 1592, the plague arrived in London. This was the last great plague of the century, but it hit hard. London lost 8% of its population, with some twenty thousand dead. Shakespeare was a young playwright and actor at this time. Now the theatres were closed for two years.

When they opened again in 1594, Shakespeare began an extraordinary period of creativity. Between 1594 and 1597, he wrote Comedy of Errors, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, King John, Richard II. This is the second phase of his career. It is a highly lyrical phase, full of intricate rhetoric and vivid poetry. The Comedy of Errors is a lovely play, but Richard II is a jewel in the Shakespearean crown. In this brief period, Shakespeare wrote several of his most sparkling, most loved plays. He wrote in three years thousands of lines that are still performed, memorised, and anthologised.

This is the first tipping point of his career. Several times, Shakespeare’s innovations come flaring out, as he competes with other writers and adjusts to the tastes of the times.

Before the plague, in his early apprentice phase, Shakespeare developed his history plays in Henry VI and Richard III and wrote the early comedies Taming of the Shrew and Two Gentlemen of Verona. After the plague, he was writing masterpieces that show huge development in dramaturgy and lyricism.

Two developments contributed to this leap forward: a new theatre company and the poetic culture of the 1590s.