The Life and the Changing Plays

Around 1601, Shakespeare’s dramatic career changes. The sustained run of festive comedies ends with Twelfth Night; darker comedies and the great tragedies follow. At the same turning point, Henry Neville lost his embassy, his liberty and his public reputation in the aftermath of the Essex rebellion.¹

The change belongs to a larger pattern: the plays’ shifting interests and forms follow the course of Neville’s documented life.

Classical learning and Italy

Neville’s preparation began well before the surviving plays. In 1578 he left England with his Oxford tutor, Henry Savile, for about four years of travel and study. The journey brought him into the company of scholars, collectors and readers of ancient texts. At Padua in 1581 he encountered the university world evoked by Lucentio’s arrival in The Taming of the Shrew. In January 1582 Dudith’s correspondence places him with Savile at Venice. Dudith’s earlier letter to Neville discusses the books he had left at Breslau and asks him and Savile to obtain unfamiliar mathematical and philosophical works.²

The early plays combine precisely these two interests: classical literature and Italy. Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare’s earliest tragedy, builds its Roman world through sustained engagement with ancient authors. Ovid’s story of Philomela supplies the means of recognizing Lavinia’s suffering; the revenge plot works with Senecan tragedy; Virgil and Livy contribute further patterns of action and memory. Pramit Chaudhuri’s study of the play’s Latin quotations shows how carefully their meanings change with their dramatic setting. Its classicism is part of the machinery of the play.³

Savile’s English Tacitus appeared in 1591. As the early Shakespeare plays took shape, Neville’s former tutor was translating the historian of imperial power, succession and conspiracy.⁴

Italy, meanwhile, supplies the young travellers and lovers of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, the educational and marriage world of The Taming of the Shrew, and the feuding households of Romeo and Juliet. Verona, Milan, Padua, Venice and Mantua recur across the plays. Neville’s documented Italian experience gives that concentration a substantial biographical setting.

Melissa Emerson Walter’s The Italian Novella and Shakespeare’s Comic Heroines traces Italian storytelling, courtesy and women’s verbal authority in the early comedies: young men learning social conduct, women testing suitors, households negotiating marriage. Neville’s Italian education was followed by marriage into the learned Cooke–Killigrew family. Chapter 19 examines the Padua setting and the Cooke–Killigrew family connections.⁵

The English histories

The Italian plays overlap with the English histories. Through the 1590s, the Henry VI plays, Richard III, Richard II, King John and the two parts of Henry IV return to inheritance, disputed succession, noble service and rebellion.

Back in England, Neville became a husband, landowner and parliamentary representative, with responsibilities in Sussex and Berkshire. His own family’s role in the Wars of the Roses is prominent in the Henry VI plays. Allegiance and legitimate rule belonged both to his ancestry and to his working political life.⁶

The embassy and the French plays, 1599–1601

In 1599 Neville became Elizabeth’s ambassador to Henri IV. Three plays cluster around these years: Henry V, As You Like It and Twelfth Night.

Henry V, conventionally dated 1599, makes the relationship between England and France its central business. Ambassadors carry challenges and negotiate claims; French speech occupies whole exchanges; the conclusion joins diplomacy to courtship. Neville was now professionally engaged in the relations between those two kingdoms. The fifth-act Chorus is usually read as anticipating Essex’s return from Ireland in 1599, the year Neville took up the embassy. France and Essex—the man whose fall would ruin Neville two years later—thus meet within the same play.⁷

As You Like It turns to a French setting and gives one of the exiled duke’s companions the name Amiens. Neville’s embassy brought him through the Amiens region in 1600, during the peace negotiations. The place and the play belong to the same French phase.⁸

Twelfth Night is set in Illyria, but its names and diplomatic language bring it close to Neville’s correspondence. He investigated the claimant to the identity of King Sebastian of Portugal and reported the visit of Don Virginio Orsino to Elizabeth’s court. Within eleven weeks in the winter of 1600–01, Neville’s letters discuss both Sebastian and Orsino, a year before the comedy’s first recorded performance. Robert K. Turner Jr already used Neville’s letter as evidence for the play’s Orsino context.⁹

The break: Essex, imprisonment and the dark plays

On 8 February 1601 Essex’s rising failed. Its consequences transformed Neville’s life. His close friend Henry Cuffe was executed; Southampton was sentenced to death and then reprieved; Neville was disgraced and imprisoned. In his declaration of 2 March he explained conversations about the proposed seizure of the court, drawing on Tacitus to judge the danger of a conspiracy that could be justified only by success. By April he was pleading with Cecil to limit what would be published about him. His name, as well as his freedom, was at stake.¹⁰

The change in the plays is equally conspicuous. The sustained festive-comedy phase ends around Twelfth Night and does not return. After this boundary, the comedies themselves change. Troilus and Cressida corrodes the ideals of love and honour; All’s Well forces a marriage through conditions and deception; Measure for Measure places a condemned prisoner, sexual coercion and the abuse of office at its centre. Marriage no longer guarantees the generous comic release familiar from the earlier plays.¹¹

The former ambassador became a prisoner fearful of public disgrace. The plays examine confinement, judgment, compromised authority and the destruction of a good name. Measure for Measure makes imprisonment and mercy central; Hamlet, at the chronological boundary, joins corrupted counsel and surveillance to concern for a reputation that will survive death.

A. L. Morton contrasts the martial confidence of Henry V with the disillusionment of Troilus and Cressida, associates Hector’s destruction with Essex’s fate, and places the great tragedies within a broader political and social crisis. The connection between Essex and the darker drama was recognized by many scholars independently of the Neville argument.¹²

Freedom without restoration

Release from the Tower in April 1603 did not restore Neville to state employment. On 16 February 1604 he told Winwood that he could not repay his news with equally valuable intelligence:

To requite your advertisements with others of like worth, I cannot; and I know your other friends which know more than I, will not leave you ignorant of such things as pass here.

The former ambassador now depended on people better informed than himself. In the same letter he described life at court “without any office, business or regard” and said that he would leave public affairs to those entrusted with them. On 21 June 1605 he returned to the subject:

But I am out of my proper orb when I enter into state matters; I will therefore leave these considerations to those to whom they appertain, and think of my husbandry in the country […].¹³

He still asked Winwood for news. Parliamentary and county work continued, but those responsibilities did not replace the central employment and access he had lost. The darkest plays belong to these years of frustrated service and exclusion, not simply to the two years of imprisonment. Othello and Measure for Measure were performed at court in 1604; King Lear and Macbeth are usually placed around 1605–06, followed by Antony and Cleopatra and Coriolanus. Neville’s complaints of 1604–05 fall within this sustained tragic period.¹⁴

The man who had represented Elizabeth before Henri IV now described himself as outside his proper sphere. The plays repeatedly show authority lost or abused, honour destroyed, and service repaid with rejection.

Chapter 14’s vocabulary study finds a corresponding increase in selected diplomatic and administrative terms through the embassy and its aftermath.¹⁵

Recovery and the romances

From about 1608 come the romances: Pericles, Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Broken families reunite, rulers discover their errors, and apparent death gives way to recognition. Suffering remains, but loss can be repaired.

Neville’s prospects were broadening too. His parliamentary standing grew, and his campaign for the secretaryship offered renewed national influence. By 1612 he was proposing a reconciliation between James and the Commons.¹⁶

The recovery was gradual: new ventures could coexist with exclusion from central office. Neville served on the Virginia Company’s first council in 1606–07. On 23 May 1609 the Second Virginia Charter named Neville, Southampton and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, to the governing council resident in England.

Three days earlier, on 20 May, Thomas Thorpe had registered Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Its dedication references the “adventurer in setting forth.” Katherine Duncan-Jones reads that language as an allusion to the Virginia enterprise, joining the publisher’s venture to the colonial interests of William Herbert, whom she identifies as “Mr. W.H.”¹⁷ The dedication and the charter thus bring the publication into the same circle of patrons and company councillors to which Neville belonged. Chapter 58 sets out this connection.

In July 1609 the company’s flagship, the Sea Venture, was wrecked on Bermuda. Accounts of the survivors and the colony reached England in 1610, before The Tempest’s recorded court performance on 1 November 1611. Neville belonged to the institution directing the venture whose shipwreck and deliverance supplied material for The Tempest. The company, the Sonnets dedication and the late play converge in these years of his renewed public prospects.¹⁸

He did not obtain the secretaryship. Yet these years of renewed opportunity coincide with plays imagining the recovery of what had seemed lost.

The closing years

The final collaborations with John Fletcher, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen, are usually dated 1613 and 1613–14. Neville’s health was gravely impaired by early 1615; he died on 10 July. The conventional sequence of the final plays falls within his lifetime. Four years after his death, Thomas Walkley’s dedication to Beaumont and Fletcher’s A King and No King acknowledged that Neville’s eldest son, Sir Henry Neville, had supplied the play and requested its publication. The family thus had a documented role in bringing a play by Shakespeare’s final collaborator into print, as Chapter 51 explains.¹⁹

The force of the argument lies in the sequence. The interests change, the festive comedies end, the darkest plays follow, and restoration becomes imaginable again. With Henry VIII, Neville caps his dramatic career by returning directly to his own family’s story. His great-uncle George Neville, Lord Abergavenny, appears in the opening scene; the banquet scene reworks the chronicle episode involving his grandfather, Sir Edward Neville, while omitting his part in Wolsey’s mistaken identification of the king. Chapter 38 examines both connections. The career that began with classical learning, Italy and the English histories closes by circling back to Neville’s own relatives.²⁰