Play: Bingo

Overview
Edward Bond’s 1973 play Bingo: Scenes of Money and Death reimagines the last months of William Shakespeare’s life as a bleak morality tale about property, complicity, and the price of artistic silence. Set in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1615–1616, the play rejects the comforting aura of the national poet and scrutinizes him as a retired investor whose wealth is tied to the enclosure of common land. Bond’s Shakespeare is inward, melancholy, and pragmatic; his refusal to act against injustice becomes the drama’s central crime.

Setting and premise
The action unfolds in a garden and adjoining rooms at Shakespeare’s Stratford house while the town is convulsed by an enclosure scheme that will fence off common fields and destroy the poor’s subsistence. Local gentry and agents push documents across tables; constables enforce vagrancy laws; and townspeople plead, protest, or harden. Shakespeare, wealthy from theatre and property, sits at the crossroads: his signatures, investments, and influence carry weight, yet he insists on detachment.

Key events
A destitute Woman appears, hounded as a vagrant and suspected prostitute. Shakespeare offers alms but will not intervene when authority bears down on her; his charity is a veil for his withdrawal. Pressured by a landlord and legal men, he signs papers that, while presented as routine, align him with enclosure and the expropriation it entails. The town cracks: a youthful protester is seized as an agitator; a father is broken by fear and hunger. Violence erupts offstage and at its edges, hangings, floggings, and the cumulative brutalities of law. In one of the play’s most harrowing images, the Woman, cornered by humiliation and despair, dies violently within sight of Shakespeare, who sits motionless, watching and doing nothing. A later visit from Ben Jonson frames the ethical debate: Jonson talks, jests, and prods about art, money, and power; Shakespeare remains laconic, haunted, and finally impenetrable. He revises his will, coolly apportioning goods, most infamously the “second-best bed” to his Wife, while avoiding responsibility for the social wreckage around him. At the end he takes his own life, an act of private despair that offers no redemption to those harmed in public by his choices.

Characters
Shakespeare is neither monster nor hero but a compromised man of means, whose great imaginative powers are quarantined from his civic life. The Woman concentrates the fallout of policy into a single body, turning statistics into agony. Jonson punctures reverence and provides a rough companionship that cannot penetrate Shakespeare’s fatal reserve. The Wife and Daughter carry domestic disappointment and the pressure of legacy, while local officials, landlords, and a fearful Old Man and Young Man map the system’s working parts.

Themes
Bond explores how property restructures conscience, showing that violence can be fully legal yet morally obscene. The play interrogates the artist’s responsibility: can genius absolve a refusal to act, or does silence in the face of injustice make art complicit with power? Fame, legacy, and the will become emblems of how formal order can coexist with human abandonment. Public cruelty and private despair are twinned; money organizes the scene, death closes it.

Form and tone
Composed as a sequence of spare, elliptical scenes, the play is coolly staged and unsentimental, its shocks arising from ordinary procedures, signatures, arrests, bequests, rather than melodrama. Bond strips away period romance to reveal modern mechanisms of dispossession operating in early modern dress. Shakespeare’s garden is both refuge and crime scene, a place where beauty, comfort, and guilt accumulate in silence until they implode.