in 1603. James I succeeded her, and he preferred the romances. Shakespeare's health was impaired, and he died about five years after The Tempest, the last play he wrote by himself. The shift indicates that he was giving up composition. He retired to Stratford following completion of his final play. The scholar Catherine Alexander has suggested that the plays were not specifically autobiographical in respect of Shakespeare's advancing old age, but reflected the fact that the actors themselves were older. The King's Men occupied a second playhouse, the Blackfriars, which had been out of use for several years. The playhouse had been shut down because of objections by local residents, but was reopened during the second half of 1608. In the interim the actors had aged, and Shakespeare adjusted the age of his characters. The King's Men were allowed to change their name from the Lord Chamberlain's Men in 1603, when James I came to the throne. They would put on as many as two new plays a week. Many plays had only a few performances, and there was no director: actors were expected to know fairly standard blocking patterns. Audiences at the Blackfriars were generally upper class, as the cost of admission was so high that the lower classes were unlikely to attend many performances. Because of the sophistication of the audience, the romances leaned more toward aesthetics and culture. Performances The romances create a challenge for directors, as they require spectacular effects to be shown onstage. For Pericles, in 1854, Samuel Phelps created the effect of a storm by using rowers manning oars to carry Pericles from one location to another while a panorama moved behind them to create the illusion of travel. Cymbeline often offers two different directions for staging: grand and simple. In the spring of 1896, Henry Irving staged the play at the Lyceum Theatre, London with elaborate Celtic sets for Cymbeline's palace gardens and interior rooms, a Roman banqueting hall for Posthumus's visit to Rome, a handsomely decorated bedchamber for Imogen, and a spectacular dream setting for the descent of Jupiter. Ben Greet at The Old Vic in 1918, on the other hand, chose a simple, Elizabethan approach. The Winter's Tale poses the challenges of time passing and a bear pursuing Antigonus off stage. In 1976, Trevor Nunn and John Barton cast John Nettles as both Time and the bear. At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1986,