Money. Getting it, spending it, saving it, winning and losing it were as much preoccupations for 16th century Englishmen as for their contemporary counterparts. Money made the world go round in London just as it does today in New York. And Shakespeare seems to have been quite adept at acquiring wealth, starting life as the son of a tradesman in a regional town and ending it as the owner of quite a grand house (the second biggest in Stratford, apparently), not to mention various other parcels of land and associated properties.
But how rich was he really? And how did he make his money? For The Queen’s Player I did quite a lot of research to try and understand the monetary values of the time, and the sources from which a playwright-actor like Shakespeare might have earned an income.
One of the first challenges is to understand just what money meant in the 16th century. Let’s start with the currency itself. I’m (just) old enough to remember pre-decimal currency, when the basic unit of currency was a penny, twelve of which made up a shilling, and twenty of those made up a pound. The currency in Shakespeare’s time was much the same, though there were all sorts of variations in the actual coinage – groats, crowns, half-crowns, sovereigns and so on, all of which represented various combinations of the basic units. Quite a degree of mental dexterity must have been needed to carry out many simple financial transactions.
More complicated is the question of what a penny or a pound might have been worth. One way of approaching this is to think about the value of a commodity that has been a measure of value time out of mind, such as gold or silver, and extrapolate what someone might have paid for that commodity in the 16th century out to modern times. That’s a bit mechanical and subject to all sorts of challenges, not least of which is that the actual value of gold or silver can fluctuate quite wildly because of non-economic factors, such as financial panics.
A more useful approach is to ask what the coinage might have purchased at the time that it was being used. For example, a Londoner in Shakespeare’s time might have paid tuppence (two pennies) for a loaf of bread, a halfpenny for a tankard of ale (a common substitute for water in a city where fresh water was likely to be tainted), or two shillings for a good bottle of French wine. A new shirt might have set our hypothetical Londoner back a full pound, a pair of gloves such as those Will’s father made might cost ten pence, and a good pair of boots anything between four pounds and anything up to three times that much.
When you match this kind of information about expenditure with the other side of the ledger, you start to get a good idea of the meaning of money at the time. At the bottom end of the scale, a farm worker was paid about two to three pennies per day, or one shilling and sixpence a week for six days’ work; a ploughman or shepherd might earn less, perhaps a shilling a week, but that would typically come with board and lodging of some kind. Inside the grand houses of the era, servants were paid between one and three pounds a year, depending on their role and status.
Moving up the social strata a little, a skilled carpenter working in one of England’s bigger cities earned between twelve and fifteen pounds a year, while the merchant who employed him could be making anything between a hundred and many thousands of pounds a year; indeed, the most successful entrepreneurs in an era of great mercantile expansion enjoyed incomes that rivalled those of the hereditary nobility, like the Earl of Derby, who struggled to get by on a mere £25,000! The Queen herself lived on an annual income of £60,000 though of course she had to run the government out of that.
Though that might seem a scattergun of statistics, taken together these data points do give one a good sense of what money meant to the average Elizabethan. I think we can safely say that if you were regularly earning twenty or thirty pounds per annum you were doing fairly well; that figure is, after all, double the income of a skilled craftsman. Of course earnings were much more precarious than in our times. Many workers were paid piece-work rates, and work could dry up in an instant due to all sorts of factors: a bout of the plague, the withdrawal of the favour of some lord or lady upon whom your trade depends, failed harvests, and so on. So to put aside something against the inevitable rainy day, you probably wanted your income to be more like fifty or so pounds a year.
So what about Shakespeare? How much did he earn, and where did his income come from?
He was first and foremost an actor, and actors got paid varying amounts depending on their seniority the company. A hired actor was paid about 6 shillings a week while performing, which would be about fifteen pounds a year if he was performing every week, obviously improbable. Still, a jobbing actor moving from company to company following the work might be able to earn ten to twelve pounds a year, about as much as a good tradesman. The real money as an actor came from having a share in acting company. Sharers, as they were called, took a salary plus a share of the profits. In one year the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company for most of his career, shared £435 between eight players, giving them about £55 each – quite a solid income, if reliably repeated every year. In reality, earnings could fluctuate extraordinarily, from nothing in a plague year to as much as several hundred pounds per sharer in a particularly good year.
Then there were the plays themselves. There were no notions of copyright in those days; a playwright sold his scripts to the company, who then retained the rights not merely to perform them but also to amend them as they saw fit. Typically, a playscript would fetch around seven pounds, equal to more than twenty weeks’ work as an actor. Still, not a huge amount of money, and a writer would have to bash out five or six plays a year to make some kind of living. Not surprisingly, many had to find themselves additional supplementary sources of income as copyists or clerks, or perhaps finding work as a secretary to some wealthy merchant or great lord. Some things haven’t changed very much.
Will Shakespeare was more entrepreneurial than most, and seems to have realised that the only way to make any real money in the theatre was to have a role in every aspect of it – acting, writing, and owning a share in the company (and eventually the physical theatre itself). It’s estimated that by 1605 he was earning something like eighty pounds a year, a handsome sum. With this income, and his status as a sharer in a successful acting company in London, he was able to leverage his way into a portfolio of income earning properties that would eventually enable him to retire and to provide for his family after his death. By the time he passed away in 1616, he wasn’t by any means a really wealthy man, despite owning one of the finest houses in Stratford, but he was comfortably well off, which was no mean achievement.
Anthony R Wildman 