As John Berryman’s first marriage was falling apart, his attention turned to the subject of Shakespeare’s youth. It was the spring of 1951 and Berryman, thirty-six years old, was not yet a poet of national renown. Things were looking up, however. He had just been awarded the prestigious Alfred Hodder Fellowship at Princeton University, which gave him the financial means and time to work on several projects and to announce himself and his work to a wider academic community. Working on a play he would never complete about the French revolutionary Mirabeau, he plotted out another about treachery and continued work on a long poem, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, that would help make his name.
But, central to his fellowship award, and the subject of the four public lectures that the fellowship required him to deliver, was a book he planned to write about Shakespeare. Much depended upon these lectures, and his wife, Eileen, was all too aware of the pressure her husband felt. The couple had returned to the Princeton area after an unsuccessful three months at the University of Washington, where, as Eileen notes, John had “constantly made and broken resolutions to cut down on drinking and smoking.” It was in these months that Berryman’s studies turned to Shakespeare in a dedicated way. The first public lecture was planned for March 1951. Its title: “Shakespeare at Thirty.”
Berryman was a nervous public speaker, whose “telltale trembling of the hands” and “sweat-drenched shirts” revealed his trepidation. His lecture subject made him more anxious still. It was one thing to write, as he had done, a well-respected biography of Stephen Crane, the author of The Red Badge of Courage, but quite another to lecture on Shakespeare to a room of Princeton faculty, “many of whom… questioned the credentials of a man without a Ph.D. to take on so hallowed a subject.” Dressed in a “grey flannel suit and shirt with button down collar” Berryman approached the lectern and invited his listeners to join him on a journey of the imagination:
Suppose with me a time a place a man who has waked, risen, washed, dressed, fed, been congratulated, on a day in latter April long ago—about April 22nd, say, of 1594, a Monday—whether at London in lodgings or at a friend’s or tavern, a small house in the market-town Stratford some hundred miles by miry ways northwest, or at Titchfield House a little closer southwest, or elsewhere, but somewhere in England at the height of the northern Renaissance; a diferent world. Alone at some hour in one room, his intellectual and physical presence not as yet visible to us although we know its name, seated or standing, highlone in thought. He is thirty years old today and few enjoy this jolt from decade to decade.
Few do enjoy this jolt, it is true; and John Berryman, closer to forty than thirty, knew this too. It is perhaps hard not to see something of the author himself in his reading of Shakespeare aged thirty. He was born and raised in a small rural community in Oklahoma, hundreds of miles west of the Ivy League powerhouses to the east. Now in his thirties, Berryman was also an “intellectual and physical presence not as yet visible” to this notional ‘us.’ His time, too, would arrive; we know this now, but he could not then.
Shakespeare had a long career…and for the first many of these years he little resembled the major canonical figure of English writing he becomes.
At the lecture’s close, Berryman observes how in 1594 “Shakespeare’s path has strangely cleared,” noting the deaths and retirements of his early dramatist peers such as John Lyly, Thomas Kyd, and Christopher Marlowe, and how next we move on “to the wilderness of dramatic literature, or garden, or palace, to be created in the six years coming:”
Richard II, 1 and 2 Henry IV, Henry V, King John, comedies of the Dream, the Merchant, the Shrew, Merry Wives, Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night, and Caesar; and beyond.
Extraordinary as this list of Shakespeare’s plays might seem, the six years following that burst of creativity would include the “big four” tragedies of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, and King Lear, while the final seven or so years of his career, up to early 1614, include such mature works as Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest. But all of this, as Berryman notes, was ‘beyond’ this very specific moment in Shakespeare’s life, his thirtieth birthday. That story was not yet known on that day; it was yet to be told. And that is the story that is well known today: that Shakespeare ascends to the top of his profession; that his company of fellow actors gains the patronage of the King; that he retires merrily to Stratford, a good life lived; that his collected plays would be published together in a “First Folio” some years after his death; that his poems and plays would become cornerstones of the Western critical tradition; that his cultural pre-eminence means the name “Shakespeare” is recognized worldwide; that his genius becomes a matter of fact rather than subjective assessment.
To assess Shakespeare’s contribution to knowledge is, of course, to assess all that he wrote. But Shakespeare had a long career, significantly longer than most of his contemporaries, and for the first many of these years he little resembled the major canonical figure of English writing he becomes. He was a relative nobody trying to find his way.
The actual situation for Shakespeare in April 1594 was considerably bleaker than Berryman’s assessment. London had been ravaged by plague since the summer of 1592, with high mortality rates in the city and suburbs meaning the playhouses were closed for business for twenty of the following twenty-two months. This outbreak or ‘visitation’ was extraordinarily potent. At least fifteen thousand Londoners died over the following twenty-four-month period, some 10 percent of the city’s population. The fear of contagion posed an existential threat to London’s burgeoning theater industry. Physical distancing measures meant that public gatherings were prohibited. Like any young person without job security, Shakespeare was especially vulnerable to the economic chaos introduced by the plague. But as an emerging actor and dramatist with a young family, such an extended outbreak could end his career, forcing him to pursue another livelihood.
The biggest problem with the plague was that no one knew when it would be fully curbed. London’s wealthiest tended to panic and flee to their country residences. The “middling sort,” of which Shakespeare belonged, stayed to themselves, supported by what help they could receive in their homes and lodgings. The poorest died in the greatest numbers, confined together in small spaces. But no social group was entirely spared its effect. London’s streets were soon deserted. Homes with the infected were identified with marks on their doors. Entire families died together, with bodies found weeks after they had perished. Shakespeare’s fellow dramatist Thomas Dekker, writing of the effects of plague, describes seeing “hand-wringing widows” beating their “bosoms over [their] departing husbands” while “woefully distracted mothers that with dishevelled hair fallen into swoons…lie kissing the insensible cold lips of [their] breathless infants.”
Such horrors were a lived reality. The sheer number of corpses meant that traditional burial ceremonies were forgotten for a time, and mass unmarked grave sites were used outside the city walls. There was little understanding of how contagion might spread, but the civic leaders intuited that physical distancing measures could lessen its effect. For Shakespeare, writing for public playhouses that crowded upwards of three thousand souls into their cramped space, the plague closures meant zero income and zero prospects. People learned to fear one another.
Biographers of Berryman, including Eileen, tend to record the Shakespeare lecture as a turning point of sorts for the American poet. The lecture “held his audience spellbound” as the university’s professors recognized Berryman as “a serious scholar who knew his stuff.” Word of the event spread across the Princeton campus and beyond, and his second lecture, a discussion of the character of Macbeth, was filled beyond capacity. The four Shakespeare papers he presented “made John’s reputation as a lecturer,” according to Eileen, and, most significantly, “convinced him he was good at it.” It also led to his appointment as the Elliston Chair of Poetry at the University of Cincinnati, where, for his inaugural lecture he, of course, offered a reprisal of the “Shakespeare at Thirty” lecture. Eileen describes the onset of ‘Berrymania’ among the literati of Cincinnati. Even Eileen, who had been considering leaving John, became reconciled to him. The couple next returned to Princeton, and other honors soon followed for the poet. A lecture about another poet-dramatist’s burgeoning potential had, it seems, helped Berryman to realize his own.
What happened next for Berryman is well-trodden ground. He would win the 1965 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 77 Dream Songs and draw national and international attention as a generational poetic talent. He was celebrated then, and is still celebrated now, as a poet of rare distinction. In 1969 he would win both The National Book Award for Poetry and The Bollingen Prize for his volume His Toy, His Dream, His Rest. A difficulty for Berryman was dealing with the attendant pressure of success. Three-times married, his was to be a literary career pock-marked by substance abuse issues leading to a peripatetic existence drifting from one august institution to another. He took his life in January 1972, jumping from the Washington Avenue Bridge in Minneapolis which crosses the great Mississippi, aged fifty-seven.
A little more than twenty years earlier, Berryman had assessed Shakespeare’s prospects at thirty in optimistic terms. He identified a “path that has strangely cleared” for what is “beyond.” Berryman knew what Shakespeare went on to achieve, as we do, and drew a line between that which went before and what was to come next. This is the gift of hindsight: all’s well that ends well. Or not. This is a critical temptation that pervades much biographical work about poets such as Shakespeare and Berryman: that there is something inevitable about what they would do next, that it is their calling. Berryman’s own father had committed suicide, and the thought that this was somehow to be his destiny too haunted him. That we know that Berryman and Shakespeare did do what they did should not take away from the once very real possibility that they would not. Reading retrospectively, we are tempted to recognize the potential for certain actions in others that they may not have recognized in themselves. We can also overstate the inevitability that such potential would be realized; nothing seems inevitable until it has been actualized. Post hoc ergo propter hoc, as the common fallacy goes: “after this, therefore because of this.” Rarely is life that simple.
Berryman knew what Shakespeare went on to achieve, as we do, and drew a line between that which went before and what was to come next.
Before the plague broke out in 1592, business was booming for London’s theaters. This was a scene that was still very new, unconsolidated, and at some risk of collapse. Writing in 1631, an English historian comments that “Before the space of threescore years [that is, sixty years]… I never knew, heard, nor read, of any such theaters, set stages, or playhouses.” After some false starts, the commercialization of theater in London began in earnest in 1576 with the construction of a purpose-built playhouse, the Theatre, in Shoreditch, north of the city. To meet market demand, other performance venues soon appeared, such as the Curtain, nearby in Shoreditch, and the Rose, south of the city, across the Thames, in Southwark. It is important to stress the newness of these permanent performance spaces. Though performance had long been part of English culture, the permanency of the sites in London granted the business of playing new cultural legitimacy and esteem.
If you were to meet a socially distanced Londoner in the summer of 1592 and ask who the most famous dramatist of their day was, they might have suggested the names of several writers lost to the passage of time: men like Robert Wilson, John Lyly, Thomas Watson, Thomas Nashe, Anthony Munday, Robert Greene, Thomas Lodge, George Peele, and Thomas Kyd. They might tell you about some of Lyly’s witty comedies or Kyd’s bloody revenge play The Spanish Tragedy. They might tell you about well-known plays such as The Three Ladies of London, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, and The Battle of Alcazar. Robert Greene was the most notorious of the dramatists they mention, a pugnacious figure in the literary scene. They might also mention a young writer named Christopher Marlowe, who had achieved some recent success with his plays about Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus. If pushed to think about other dramatists in the scene, they might also mention someone named “Shakespeare,” a minor presence. He had contributed parts of a set of hit history plays about the Wars of the Roses. He had also written a strange comedy about how to control a ‘shrewish’ wife and an unusually violent play (in a period when stage violence was in vogue) set in Rome. Shakespeare was someone with talent but hardly a leading light; a recently published pamphlet had mocked this “Shake-scene” as an “up-start crow.” If you asked about Ben Jonson or Thomas Middleton or John Webster, they would have looked at you with a puzzled expression and said they have never heard of them.
The book-length study Berryman had planned about Shakespeare never came to fruition. But the published lecture “Shakespeare at Thirty” remains an electrifying account of the best of mid-twentieth-century criticism about Shakespeare’s early working life, inflected tellingly by Berryman’s personal intuitions about the experiences of a fellow poet. His study is dense in a scholarly way—he insists that he offers an objective summary and evaluation of the known facts, perhaps reflecting his own insecurities about lecturing about Shakespeare—but he cannot quite hide his admiration. Here he describes the first-state copy of the Droeshout engraving on the 1623 First Folio: “There are faces that seem merely reserved. This speaks, it is all but ardent. Yet, proud without assertion, harmonious, formidable, less than any face I have seen does it yield up its subject.” Here he writes of Love’s Labour’s Lost: “Shakespeare’s playful, imperturbable superiority must sometimes have galled more dogmatic intellectuals.” Such a statement may have rankled in Princeton’s hallowed halls.
Much of the outline sketch that Berryman presents remains the same. Shakespeare was born in the Warwickshire market town of Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564. He married Anne Hathaway in late 1582 at the age of eighteen, with whom he had three children by the age of twenty-one. By the late 1580s, when Shakespeare was in his mid-twenties, he worked in London as an actor and dramatist. By 1592, at the age of twenty-eight, he had become so familiar in dramatic circles that an opaque allusion to an “upstart crow” in print identified him as an author of note. In 1593-94 his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis and Lucrece, were published and Shakespeare, as the dedicator, was first identified in print as an author.
Sometime in 1594, most likely late that year, he joined the Lord Chamberlain’s Men playing company and became their de facto company dramatist. These are the facts, plain and simple, but there is much to be filled in. Indeed, several generations of early modern scholarship since Berryman’s lecture complicate and nuance his short account. Research into Shakespeare’s biography and social networks, and early modern Warwickshire and London more generally, means we now know much more about Shakespeare’s early life and career, or at least the context into which he was born, educated, married, and first began his career. We are much better informed about when he wrote what, with whom he worked, and the companies and audiences for whom his works might be most plausibly associated. The subject is no longer essay-length.
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From Shakespeare at Thirty by Rory Loughnane. Copyright © 2026. Available from Princeton University Press.