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That same year, Shakespeare's eleven-year-old son Hamnet died. This was one of three events that probably clouded the sunlit hours of the early comedies and prologued the dark vision of the great tragedies. The second was Shakespeare's-embittered love affair with the unknown "dark lady of the sonnets." Biographers have found traces of this siren's raven hair, pitch-black eyes, jigging walk, panting breath and wanton ways in the characters of Ophelia, Cressida and Cleopatra. The third event was the arrest and imprisonment of Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, for helping Essex plot against the Queen. In combination, these events seem to have left Shakespeare at times with a bleak view of man's fate, and a nausea of sex. No existentialist has found life more meaningless than Shakespeare's "tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."
The disgust with sex not only inspires one of the finest sonnets ("The expense of spirit in a waste of shame is lust in action"), but it erupts with sour rancor in all the major tragedies but Macbeth. With almost prurient relish, Hamlet chides his mother not to let the "bloat king" with his "reechy kisses" tempt her again to bed. The eightyish Lear, who might be presumed past sex obsession, works himself up into a fury on the devil in woman's flesh:
Down from the waist they are Centaurs, Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the fiends'. There's Hell, there's darkness, there's the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption, fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Give me an ounce of civet, good apothecary, to sweeten my imagination.
The Revels Ended. Shakespeare's own imagination invariably sweetened itself, for in the long run he never saw only the dark side of man—or woman. He retired to Stratford around 1611, his sense of evil seemingly muted, as is suggested by the enchanted isles, fairy-tale plots, masques and marvels of the last plays. For his final comment on man's existence in The Tempest (1611), Shakespeare returned instinctively to the stage with its quality of make-believe:
Our revels now are ended. These our actors, As I foretold you, were all spirits, and Are melted into air, into thin air. And, like the baseless fabric of this vision, The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself—Yea, all which it inherit—shall dissolve And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff As dreams are made on, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep.
Shakespeare died five years later, at 52, of unknown causes—though one 17th century chronicler reported that "Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted." Anne outlived him by seven years, and asked to be buried in the same grave, but the authorities dared not flout Shakespeare's doggerel epitaph:
Good friend, for Jesus' sake forbear To dig the dust enclosed here . . .
The Rewriters. The future was