Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 73

My Lord This Is But the Play, Theyre But in Test

We can see him in another sense.  On 2 February 1602, he walked from the landing-stage by the Thames a few yards northwards to the hall of the Middle Temple.  It was here that a new play, Twelfth Night, was to be performed by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in front of the members of that Inn.  He played to his audience by including a number of legal puns and quibbles.  A literal interpretation of the title would imply that it had been performed on the afternoon of 6 January 1602, so it is unlikely that the performance in the Middle Temple was not the first.

Twelfth Night is suffused with music.  It begins and ends in music.  Shakespeare has used the advent of Armin, and perhaps the acoustic resources of the Globe, to explore a new range of theatrical effect.  It is more than possible that the dramatist himself played Malvolio.  There are many topical allusions in Twelfth Night, but one of the most prominent must surely concern the scenes between Feste and Malvolio.  Feste represents the spirit of festival and entertainment, for example, whereas the rancorous Malvolio is described as Puritan.  Their conflict represents one of the oldest and most divisive controversies of the period, with the Puritan faction ranged against plays and playhouses as agents of the devil.

The Puritans opposed the playhouses on a number of levels.  Playhouses competed with the pulpits in the matter of public instruction.  Dramas were considered to the entertainment of idle, gapers and lookers-on who ought to be more profitably employed in the afternoons.  The actors were deemed to encourage ready emotionalism; they relied upon sexuality and sexual innuendo.  They were, in any case, acting, therefore counterfeiting God’s image, a form of primitive idolatry that only papists could enjoy.

That popular success meant that he had become a relatively affluent man.  It may be that his purse had been enlarged by his father’s recent death but, whatever the source of his funds, he paid the large amount of £320 for Stratford land.  In the autumn of 1602, he bought a plot and half of half an acre of land, with a cottage and garden, just behind his grand house of new place.  The cottage may have been intended for a servant and family, or even for a gardener.  Or could it possibly have been a place in which he might seclude himself?

He was clearly aiming for local respectability as well as prosperity.  The corporation of Stratford were not necessarily sympathetic to the sources of his wealth.  At the end of this year, they formally forbade the performance of plays or interludes in the guildhall.  It has a manifestation of the regional Puritanism that affected other districts of the country.  The fact that he began to spend more time in Stratford suggests that he was not much concerned about such matters.  His life as a dramatist and his life as townsman were separate and not to be confused.