Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 1. There Was a Starre Daunst, and Vnder That Was I Borne

William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23 April 1564, or St. George’s Day. The date may in fact have been 21 April or 22 April, but the coincidence of the national festival is at least appropriate.

When he emerged from the womb into the world of time, with the assistance of a midwife, an infant of the sixteenth century was washed and then “swaddled” by being wrapped tightly in soft cloth. Then he was carried downstairs in order to be presented to the father. After this ritual greeting, he was taken back to the birth-chamber, still warm and dark, where he was laid beside the mother. She was meant to “draw to her all the diseases from the child,”¹ before her infant was put in a cradle. A small portion of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains reduced to jelly.

The date of Shakespeare’s christening, unlike that of his birth, is exactly known: he was baptised in the Church of the Holy Trinity, in Stratford, on Wednesday 26 April 1564. In the register of that church, the parish clerk has written Guilelmus filius Johannes Shakespere; he slipped in his Latin, and should have written Johannis.

The infant Shakespeare was carried by his father from his birthplace in Henley Street down the High Street and Church Street into the church itself. The mother was never present at the baptism. John Shakespeare and his newborn son would have been accompanied by the godparents, who were otherwise known as “god-sips” or “gossips.” On this occasion the godfather was William Smith, a haberdasher and neighbour in Henley Street. The name of the infant was given before he was dipped in the font and the sign of the cross marked upon his forehead. At the font the gossips were exhorted to make sure that William Shakespeare heard sermons and learned the creed as well as the Lord’s Prayer “in the English tongue.” After the baptism a piece of white linen cloth was placed on the head of the child, and remained there until the mother had been “churched” or purified; it was called the “chrisom cloth” and, if the infant died within a month, was used as a shroud. The ceremony of the reformed Anglican faith, in the time of Elizabeth, still favoured the presentation of apostle-spoons or christening shirts to the infant, given by the gossips, and the consumption of a christening cake in celebration. They were, after all, celebrating the saving of young William Shakespeare for eternity.

Of his earthly life there was much less certainty. In the sixteenth century, the mortality of the newly born was high. Nine per cent died within a week of birth, and a further 11 per cent before they were a month old;² in the decade of Shakespeare’s own birth there were in Stratford 62.8 average annual baptisms and 42.8 average annual child burials.³ You had to be tough, or from a relatively prosperous family, to survive the odds. It is likely that Shakespeare had both of these advantages.

Once the dangers of childhood had been surmounted, there was a further difficulty. The average lifespan of an adult male was forty-seven years. Since Shakespeare’s parents were by this standard long-lived, he may have hoped to emulate their example. But he survived only six years beyond the average span. Something had wearied him. Since in London the average life expectancy was only thirty-five years in the more affluent parishes, and twenty-five years in the poorer areas, it may have been the city that killed him. But this roll-call of death had one necessary consequence. Half of the population were under the age of twenty. It was a youthful culture, with all the vigour and ambition of early life. London itself was perpetually young.

The first test of Shakespeare’s own vigour came only three months after his birth. In the parish register of 11 July 1564, beside the record of the burial of a weaver’s young apprentice from the High Street, was written: Hic incipit pestis. Here begins the plague. In a period of six months some 237 residents of Stratford died, more than a tenth of its population; a family of four expired on the same side of Henley Street as the Shakespeares. But the Shakespeares survived. Perhaps the mother and her newborn son escaped to her old family home in the neighbouring hamlet of Wilmcote, and stayed there until the peril had passed. Only those who remained in the town succumbed to the infection.

The parents, if not the child, suffered fear and trembling. They had already lost two daughters, both of whom had died in earliest infancy, and the care devoted to their first-born son must have been close and intense. Such children tend to be confident and resilient in later life. They feel themselves to be in some sense blessed and protected from the hardships of the world. It is perhaps worth remarking that Shakespeare never contracted the plague that often raged through London. But we can also see the lineaments of that fortunate son in the character of the land from which he came.

CHAPTER 2 Shee Is My Essence

Warwickshire was often described as primeval, and contours of ancient time can indeed be glimpsed in the lie of this territory and its now denuded hills. It has also been depicted as the heart or the navel of England, with the clear implication that Shakespeare himself embodies some central national worth. He is central to the centre, the core or source of Englishness itself.

The countryside around Stratford was divided into two swathes. To the north lay the Forest of Arden, the remains of the ancient forest that covered the Midlands; these tracts were known as the Wealden. The notion of the forest may suggest uninterrupted woodland, but that was not the case in the sixteenth century. The Forest of Arden itself included sheep farms and farmsteads, meadows and pastures, wastes and intermittent woods; in this area the houses were not linked conveniently in lanes or streets but in the words of an Elizabethan topographer, William Harrison, “stand scattered abroad, each one dwelling in the midst of his own occupying.”¹ By the time Shakespeare wandered through Arden the woods themselves were steadily being reduced by the demand for timber in building new houses; it required between sixty and eighty trees to erect a house. The forest was being stripped, too, for mining and subsistence farming. In his survey of the region, for his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine of 1611, John Speed noticed “great and notable destruction of wood.” There never has been a sylvan paradise in England. It is always being destroyed.

Yet the wood has always been a token of wildness and resistance. In As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Cymbeline and Titus Andronicus, it becomes a symbol of folklore and of ancient memory. The great prehistoric forest of the Arden gave refuge to the British tribes against the Roman invaders of their land; the name of Arden itself derives from Celtic roots, meaning high wooded valleys. It was the Celts who named the Ardennes in the region of north-eastern France and Belgium. The same woods provided cover for the Celtic people from the marauding Saxon tribes of the Hwiccas. The legends of Guy of Warwick, imbibed by Shakespeare in his infancy, tell of the knight’s hermitic concealment in the forest. His sword, used in his fight against the encroaching Danes, was kept as a memorial in Warwick Castle.

So Arden was a place of concealment as well as of industry; it was an area that outlaws and vagrants might enter with impunity. That is why wood-dwellers were regarded with some disfavour by those from more open habitations. Wood-dwellers were “people of lewd lives and conversation”;² they were “as ignorant of God or any course of civil life as the very savages amongst the infidels.”³ Thus the history of rebellion mingles with that of savagery and possible insurrection. The history runs very deep, and is inseparable from the land itself. When in As You Like It Touchstone enters the wood, he declares that “I, now am I in Arden, the more foole I” (761). Shakespeare’s mother was Mary Arden. His future wife, Anne Hathaway, dwelled in the outskirts of the forest. His consciousness of the area was close and intense.

Beyond the Wealden, in the south of the county, lay the Fielden. In Saxton’s map of Warwickshire, issued in 1576, this region is almost wholly devoid of trees except for those growing in groves and small woods. The rest of the land had been changed to scrub and pasture, with the arable territory sweeping across the hills. In his Britannia William Camden described it as “plain champaign country, and being rich in corn and green grass yieldeth a right goodly and pleasant prospect.” John Speed saw the view from the same spot as Camden, on the summit of Edgehill, and noticed “the medowing pastures with their green mantles so imbrodered with flowers.” It is the quintessential picture of rural England. It was as much part of Shakespeare’s vision as the forests beyond. It has been surmised that the Fielden was rich and Protestant, while the Wealden was poor and Catholic. This is the shorthand of popular prejudice, but it suggests a context for that balancing of oppositions that came so instinctively to Shakespeare.

The climate of Stratford was of a mild temper, protected by the Welsh hills. There was much moisture in the land and in the air, as the various streams running through Stratford itself would have testified. The clouds from the south-west were known as “Severn Jacks” and presaged rain. Only “the Tyrannous breathing of the North,” as Imogen remarks in Cymbeline, “Shakes all our buddes from growing” (257-8).

But what, in the larger sense, has this landscape to do with Shakespeare or Shakespeare with the landscape? Some future genius of topography may elucidate what has become known as the territorial imperative, the sense of place that binds and determines the nature of those who grow up on a certain spot of ground. Yet, in relation to Shakespeare, we may already venture one conclusion. The evidence of his work provides unequivocal proof that he was neither born nor raised in London. He does not have the harshness or magniloquence of John Milton, born in Bread Street; he does not have the hardness of Ben Jonson, educated at Westminster School; he does not have the sharpness of Alexander Pope from the City or the obsessiveness of William Blake from Soho. He is of the country.

CHAPTER 3 Dost Thou Loue Pictures?

Stratford is a meeting place of roads crossing the Avon river; afon is the Celtic name for river. The area had been settled from the Bronze Age. There were barrows and stone circles, lying now neglected, and there were “lowes” or graves where meets or open courts once gathered. A Romano-British village was established on the outskirts of the present town, lending weight and substance to the weathered and enduring atmosphere of the place.

Stratford means a Roman straet, a paved road or highway, crossing a ford. In the seventh century a monastery was established, by the banks of the river; this was first in the possession of Aethelard, subordinate king of the Hwiccas, but was then transferred into the ownership of Egwin, Bishop of Worcester. Since this was soon after the conversion of the Saxons to the Christian faith, we may say that Stratford had a connection with the old religion from the earliest times. The church in which Shakespeare was baptised was erected on the site of the old monastery, and the dwellings of the monks and their servants were once on land now known as “Old Town.” The Domesday surveyors of 1085 carefully noted the presence of a village on this spot, comprising farmers and labourers as well as the ecclesiastical community; there was a priest, together with twenty-one “villeins” and seven “bordarii” or cottagers.

It began to prosper in the thirteenth century. A fair of three days was instituted in 1216; it was supplemented by four other fairs held at various times of the year, one of which lasted for fifteen days. A survey of 1252 reports 240 “burgages,” or properties held on a yearly rental from the lord of the manor, as well as numerous shops, stalls and tenements. Here were shoemakers and fleshmongers, blacksmiths and carpenters, dyers and wheelwrights, engaged in trades that Shakespeare would still have seen on the streets of his childhood. The medieval town itself was approximately the same size as it was at the time of Shakespeare’s birth. To be aware of continuity — to be settled within it — was in a real sense his birthright.

The open country beyond the town has been described as “tumbled down,” covered with thorn bush and populated by rabbits. There were few trees and no hedges, but flat land all around sprinkled with cowslips and clover and yellow mustard. This unenclosed territory comprised meadow land, arable land and rough pasture stretching towards the hills. Of all writers, Shakespeare has the widest vocabulary on the variety of weeds to be found in such places, disentangling the hemlock from the cuckoo-flower, the fumiter from the darnel.

There had been a church in Stratford, dedicated to the Holy Trinity, since the early thirteenth century. It was erected beside the river, of local undressed stone and yellow stone from the Campden quarries, in the utmost harmony with the landscape; it possessed a wooden steeple and was surrounded by elm trees, with an avenue of lime trees leading to the north porch.

Shakespeare would have known the ancient bone-house on the north side of the chancel, where the skeletons of the long-dead had been deposited; it had also been a dormitory for the singing boys and a study for the minister. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were familiar with death, although this did not prevent Juliet from crying out against the “Charnel house” with its “reekie shanks and yealow chaples sculls” (2259). Local legend suggests that the playwright had this bone-house in mind when he wrote this passage in Romeo and Juliet, and local legend may be right. His own grave was to be situated just a few feet from it, within the church itself, and his solemn curse against anyone who “moves my bones” acts as a reminder. There were other intimations of mortality: a college, or house for chantry priests praying in perpetual intercession for the dead, had been erected on the western side of the churchyard in 1351.

Of equal antiquity was the Guild of the Holy Cross, established in Stratford at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This was a society of lay people devoted to the festivals and institutions of their faith; it was a “friendly society” where, by payment of an annual subscription, its members would be assured of a fitting funeral. But it was also a communal society, with its own wardens and beadles who supervised the interests of the town as well as the benefactions of the church.

If Shakespeare knew one public building in Stratford thoroughly well, it was the chapel of this guild; it was erected beside the school where he was taught, and each weekday morning he attended prayers here. And then there were the bells. The little bell called the boy to school in the morning; the great bell tolled at dawn and dusk, and was “the surly sullen bell” of the sonnet that tolled at the time of dying and the time of burial. It eventually tolled for Shakespeare when he was laid in the Stratford ground.

CHAPTER 4 For Where Thou Art, There Is the World It Selfe

Shakespeare was born five years after the coronation of Elizabeth I, and much of his life was spent within the constraints and uncertainties of her highly individualistic reign. Her principal concern was always for the stability and solvency of the country (and of her own position), so that all the imperiousness and ingenuity of her character were dedicated to the avoidance of civil disturbance and external conflict. She feared disorder more than anything else, and fought only when it became absolutely necessary to do so. An unmarried queen also created an inherently unstable polity, especially when she created competing “favourites” at her court, but Elizabeth managed to thwart or divert a number of conspiracies against her throne. Her impatient and often indecisive rule lifted the horizons of the country. It was an age of exploration, of renewed commerce and of literature. In retrospect it has even been called the age of Shakespeare. There is no reason to assume, however, that Shakespeare himself either liked or admired her. As a child, of course, he was part of a quite different world.

Stratford lay on the north bank of the Avon. The river was the most familiar presence in a landscape filled with trees, with orchards and with gardens. When it was in flood, whether in summer or in winter, it could be heard in every street. When “Avon was up,” according to Leland, the people attempting a crossing “stood in jeopardy of life.” In the summer of 1588, for example, it rose 3 feet an hour continuously for eight hours. A prominent local gentleman, Sir Hugh Clopton, financed the building of the stone bridge that survives still. But the flooded river has another important memorial. No Elizabethan dramatist invokes the river more often than Shakespeare; and, of the fifty-nine separate references, twenty-six concern the river in flood.¹ The river was part of his imagination. There is a particular and peculiar image in The Rape of Lucrece, where an eddy of water is forced back by the current in the same direction from which it came; the phenomenon can be observed from the eighteenth arch of the stone bridge² at Stratford.

The bridge led by a walled causeway into Bridge Street, running through the middle of the town. It was part of a matrix of six or seven streets that supported 217 houses and two hundred families; the population of Stratford in the late sixteenth century has been estimated at approximately nineteen hundred. The streets themselves retained their medieval identity, as Sheep Street and Wood Street and Mill Lane still testify. Rother Street was named after the rother or local cattle that were sold there. Yet the majority of the houses were of relatively recent construction, having been erected in the fifteenth century by the close-timbered method. The timber was oak, felled in the adjacent forest, and the wooden frame was filled with the familiar wattle-and-daub. The foundations were of lias stone quarried in the neighbouring village of Wilmcote, from which Mary Arden came, and the roofs were of thatch. The windows were not glazed but were protected by thick wooden bars. These were natural and local dwellings in every sense.

It was a well-watered town with various streams or streamlets running through the streets, with adjacent wells and ponds as well as standing water and cess-pools. Two doors down from Shakespeare’s house was a smithy that made use of the water from a stream called the Mere. He was never very far from the sound of water. The streets of Stratford were wide enough for wagons to pass each other, yet not so wide that they were not pestered by dunghills and gutters, ditches and mud walls. They were “paved” or cobbled on each side, but anything might flow down the middle channel. They were also encroached upon by uncultivated land, marked by makeshift and shapeless roads.

Pigs, geese and ducks were not supposed to wander freely through the town but the presence of the pigs, in particular, was signalled by the numerous sties and yards in every street. There were many goodly houses, to use the expression of the day, but there were also hovels and tenements for the poorer sort, thatched barns for the storage of corn and many decayed outbuildings. There were stone crosses to show humankind the way; there was a pillory, stocks and a whipping post for those who defied the authority of the town’s governors, one of whom was Shakespeare’s father; there was also a gaol, a structure known as “the cage,” and a ducking stool. This was no Tudor idyll. The engravings of Stratford — of the mills and the market crosses, the church and the chapel — naturally display a world of stillness and of silence, populated by merchants or labourers in picturesque costume. The earliest photographs also show a world preternaturally solemn and still, the wide streets almost bare of human habitation. They do not evoke the pressing and chaotic life that was Shakespeare’s reality.

Each trade had its own place and station. Pigs were sold in Swine Street, and horses in Church Way; sellers of hides took their place at the cross in Rother Market, while the salters and sugarers put up their stalls in Corn Street. The ironmongers and ropers were to be found in Bridge Street, while the “fleshers” or butchers were at the top of Middle Row. There were various markets for corn, cattle and cloth. When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in later life, there was a butter and cheese market at the White Cross just outside his front door.

By four o’clock in the morning, the town had awakened; by five, the streets were filled with people. The traders and labourers breakfasted at eight, and took their dinner or nuncheon at noon; they finished their work at seven in the evening, at the end of a fourteen-hour day. The Statute of Artificers, however, promulgated in 1563, allowed one hour of sleep after the noonday meal. There were no holidays but the various holy days.

Many of the Stratford trades had been followed for centuries. A survey of occupations, from 1570 to 1630, shows that the town had twenty-three butchers, twenty weavers, sixteen shoemakers, fifteen bakers and fifteen carpenters.³ These were “primary” occupations; townspeople, such as Shakespeare’s own father, engaged in a variety of different trades. John Shakespeare’s principal occupation was that of glover, one of twenty-three in the town, but he also earned his living as a trader in wool, a money-lender and a maker of malt. The brewing and selling of ale was a speciality in Stratford; no fewer than sixty-seven households were involved in the trade.⁴

Yet underlying these trades, and the whole of the town’s economy, was the larger rhythm of the agricultural year with the February sowing and harrowing, the March pruning, the June haymaking, the reaping of August, the threshing of September and the pig-killing of November. There were horses and sheep and pigs and cattle and bees. There was tillage land and fallow land, meadow and pasture. “Again, sir, shal we sow the hade land with wheate?” a servant asks Justice Shallow in the second part of King Henry IV. “With red wheat, Dauy” (Part Two, 2704-5). Shakespeare evidently understood the language of the land.

In 1549 the Bishop of Worcester was obliged to cede his manorial rights over Stratford to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick; the town was in that sense secularised. In 1553 it was granted a charter whereby the erstwhile officers of the Guild of the Holy Cross became aldermen; fourteen townsmen were given this role, and out of their number a bailiff or mayor was to be elected. They in turn chose fourteen other “burgesses,” and together they comprised the town council.

They met in the old guildhall beside the chapel where their duties included the supervision of the bridge, the school and the chapel itself; the properties that once belonged to the guild were now used to garner income for the council. Although many regretted the demise of church authority, it represented a signal advance in local self-government. The bailiff and a chosen alderman acted as Justices of the Peace in place of the church court. There were two chamberlains and four constables, all appointed from this oligarchy of the more respectable townsmen. This was the world in which Shakespeare’s father flourished for a time; it was part of the fabric of Shakespeare’s childhood.

The stocks and the pillory of Stratford, not to mention the gaol and the ducking stool, afford good reason to believe that the way of life in the town itself was thoroughly supervised. It has become customary to describe the England of Elizabeth I as a “police state,” but that is an anachronism. Yet it was a world of strict and almost paternal discipline. It was in other words still governed by medieval prescription. There was a keen sense of the difference between social classes and of the power granted to those who owned land. These were principles observed faithfully by Shakespeare himself. It was a world of patronage and prerogative, of customary observance and strictly local justice. Anyone who spoke disrespectfully of a town officer, or who disobeyed a municipal order, was placed in the stocks for three days and three nights. No one could lodge a stranger without the mayor’s permission. No servant or apprentice could leave the house after nine in the evening. Bowling was permitted only at certain times. Woollen caps were to be worn on Sundays, and it was obligatory to attend church at least once a month. There were no secrets in Stratford; it was an open society in which everyone knew everybody else’s business, where marital or familial problems became the common gossip of the immediate neighbourhood. There was no notion of “private” life in any sense that would now be recognised. It is suggestive, therefore, that Shakespeare has often been credited with the invention of private identity within his dramas. He was keenly aware of its absence in the town of his birth.

It is generally assumed that the nature or atmosphere of the town did not alter in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and did not materially change until well into the nineteenth century, but this is incorrect. Changing agricultural methods brought their own problems and uncertainties; in particular the enclosure of common fields, and the intensive rearing of sheep, sent many labourers away from the land. There were more vagrants and landless workers in the streets of the town. In 1601 the overseers of Stratford remarked upon the presence of seven hundred poor people, and these would in large part comprise labourers coming from the surrounding countryside. The migration of the poor also increased underlying social tensions. Between 1590 and 1620 there was a rapid increase in “serious offences” tried at the county assize.⁵

The presence of the landless and unemployed exacerbated a problem that at the time seemed insoluble. How to prevent the poor from becoming ever more destitute? It was a period of rising prices. Sugar was 1s 4d a pound in 1586, 2s 2d in 1612. Barley was sold at 13s 13d a quarter in 1574, but by the mid-1590s this price had risen to £1 6s 8d. The increase of population also depressed the earnings of wage labourers. A mason was paid 1s 1d a day in 1570 but thirty years later, after a time of steeply rising prices, he was earning only 1s. These conditions were rendered ever more severe with a succession of four bad harvests after 1594; in the latter half of 1596, and the first months of 1597, there were many Stratford deaths that seem directly related to malnutrition. It was a time of famine. The mutinous citizens of Coriolanus, “in hunger for Bread” (21), were not some historical fantasy.

Yet as the poor were reduced to the level of subsistence, or worse, yeomen and landowners became steadily richer. The growing population, and the demand for wool in particular, favoured land speculation on a large scale. It was a means of making easy profit that Shakespeare himself enjoyed, and he can in fact be cited as a major beneficiary of the economic change that proved so disadvantageous to the labouring poor. He was not in the least sentimental about such matters, and arranged his finances with the same business-like acumen that he applied to his dramatic career. But he saw what was happening.

The nature of the new secular economy was becoming increasingly clear, in any case, and many studies have been devoted to Shakespeare’s expression of the change from medieval to early modern England. What happens when old concepts of faith and authority are usurped, when old ties of patronage and obligation are sundered? It is the transition from Lear to Goneril and Regan, from Duncan to Macbeth. There also emerged a disparity between polite and popular traditions that grew ever more pronounced; Shakespeare was perhaps the last English dramatist to reconcile the two cultures.

CHAPTER 5 Tell Me This: Who Begot Thee?

There were two cultures in a more particular sense: old and reformed. The English Reformation of religion was begun in fury and in greed; such violent origins beget violent deeds. It was only during the cautious and pragmatic reign of Elizabeth that a form of compromise or settlement was reached.

As a result of his anger and impatience with the Pope, Henry VIII had proclaimed himself to be the head of the Church in England, despatching several churchmen to their deaths for daring to deny his supremacy. His more ardent advisers, moved by the prospect of enrichment as much as by religious fervour, suppressed the monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands. It was the single largest blow to the medieval inheritance of England. The king was also responsible for the introduction of the English Bible into parish churches, an innovation which had more beneficent effects.

Edward VI, after the death of his father, was more eagerly devoted to the destruction of Catholicism. He was the young Josiah, ready to tear down the idols. In particular he was emboldened to reform the prayer book and the liturgy, but his early death interrupted his programme of renewal. His measures were then reversed during the equally brief reign of Mary I, leaving the English people in some doubt as to the nature and direction of the nation’s faith. It was Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, who successfully found a middle path. She seemed intent upon placating as many factions as possible.

It was part of her church “settlement” in which the vagaries of Catholicism and Protestantism were chastened. She ordained that church services should be held in English, but permitted the use of such papist tokens as the crucifix and the candlestick. By the Act of Supremacy she affirmed her position as the head of the Church of England, and by the Act of Uniformity she installed the Book of Common Prayer in every church. It was a somewhat rickety structure, stitched together by compromise and special pleading, but it held. She may have underestimated the power of the Puritan factions, as well as the residual Catholicism of the people themselves, but her control of religious affairs was never seriously in doubt.

The Virgin Queen, however, was not necessarily mild with her more recalcitrant subjects. Recusants as they were known — those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England — were fined, arrested or imprisoned. They were considered to be traitors to their sovereign and their realm. Catholic priests and missionaries were tortured and killed. Commissioners made periodic and much advertised “visits” to towns where the old faith was said to persist, while the bishops made regular inspections of their dioceses in pursuit of renegade piety. It was perilous to be a Catholic, or a suspected Catholic.

All these conflicts and changes found a vivid reflection in the life of John Shakespeare. The father of the dramatist was described in later life as “a merry Cheekd old man — that said — Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crackt a jeast with him at any time.”¹ Since this sketch was first published in the mid-seventeenth century, from an ambiguous source, it need not be taken with any high degree of literalness. It is perhaps too close to the image of Falstaff, although we may surmise that the merry-cheeked roisterer of the history plays may bear some passing resemblance to a domestic original. What we know about Shakespeare’s father, and forefathers, can be more carefully measured by documentary reports.

The ancestry of the Shakespeares stretches far back. Shakespeare’s own name had more than eighty different spellings — including Sakspere, Schakosper, Schackspere, Saxper, Schaftspere, Shakstaf, Chacsper, Shasspeere — perhaps testifying to the multifarious and polyphonic nature of his given identity. The variations suggest prolificity and universality. In Stratford documents alone there are some twenty different and separate spellings.

The original family may have been of Norman derivation. In the Great Rolls of Normandy, dated 1195, there is found “William Sakeespee”; a late thirteenth-century Norman romance, Le Chatelain de Couci, was composed by “Jakemes Sakesep.” It is also true that the Shakespeare families of England preferred Christian names that were characteristically Norman. The surname itself seems to have had some militaristic association, and in Shakespeare’s lifetime there were some who were impressed by its martial ring. An early sixteenth-century text suggests that it was “imposed upon the first bearers … for valour and feats of arms.”² It is suggestive, then, that when Shakespeare’s father applied for a coat of arms, he claimed that his grandfather had been rewarded by Henry VII for “faithfull & valeant service.”³ Shakespeare was also used as a nickname “for a belligerent person, or perhaps a bawdy name for an exhibitionist.”⁴ For this reason it was sometimes regarded as a “base” name. In 1487 Hugo Shakespeare wished to change his surname because “vile reputatum est”⁵ (it was considered “low”). Similar obloquy was later heaped upon the name of Dickens.

The first mention of the name in English records is of “William Sakspeer” in 1248; he came from the village of Clopton, just a few miles outside Stratford. From the thirteenth century the name often occurs in Warwickshire records; it was a family name of long local settlement, in a literal sense part of the landscape. This may help to explain the rootedness of Shakespeare himself within English culture. Thomas Shakespere was living in Coventry in 1359. William Shakespere dwelled in the southern part of Balsall in 1385. Adam Shakespere was part of the manor of Baddesley Clinton in 1389. The religious guild of Knowle had as its members Richard and Alice Shakspere, in 1457, subsequently joined by Ralph Schakespeire in 1464. Thomas and Alice Shakespere, of Balsall, entered the same guild in 1486.

There are many other Shakespeares of later date in Balsall, Baddesley, Knowle, Wroxall and neighbouring villages; the names and dates provide clear evidence of an extended family of siblings and cousins living within a geographical area a few miles in extent. Many of them were part of the guild of Knowle, fulfilling certain secular and religious obligations, and can therefore be considered good and observant Catholics. The prioress of the nuns’ house in Wroxall in the first years of the sixteenth century was Isabella Shakespeare; in 1526 that position, in characteristically medieval fashion, was in turn granted to Jane Shakspere. It was from this cluster of Shakespeares that William Shakespeare’s immediate ancestors came.

His grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a farmer of Snitterfield, a village four miles north of Stratford. He was the son either of John Shakeschaffte of Balsall, or of Adam Shakespere of Baddesley Clinton; whatever his exact paternity, his origin is clear. He was an affluent farmer, commonly known as a husbandman, with two sets of land in the vicinity. Snitterfield itself was a scattered parish with a church and manor-house, ancient farmhouses and cottages, presiding over a mixed landscape of woodland and pasture, heath and meadow. This was the landscape for part of the dramatist’s childhood.

There was a further familial bond. Richard Shakespeare’s house and grounds were leased from Robert Arden, the father of Mary Arden, whom John Shakespeare later married. The dramatist’s mother and father knew each other from an early age, therefore, and doubtless met in Richard Shakespeare’s old house on the High Street whose land stretched down to a little brook. It had a hall and several bedchambers; by the standard of the time it was an imposing dwelling. John Shakespeare himself grew up in the life and atmosphere of the farm. He was born in 1529, the year that his father is first known in Snitterfield, and it seems likely that Richard Shakespeare moved to this area with his new wife and anticipated family.

Richard Shakespeare left in his will the sum of £38 14s 0d, which demonstrates that he was by the standard of his age and position living in modest affluence. He was fined on occasions, for not attending the manorial court and for not controlling his livestock or yoking his swine, but he was a man of some substance in the little community of Snitterfield. A friend of his living in Stratford, Thomas Atwood, bequeathed him a team of oxen. He sat on juries in order to appraise his neighbours’ goods, and seems to have also been enrolled in the religious guild of Knowle. He was in that sense the image of the Shakespeare family itself, in its affluence, in its solidity, and also in its occasional recklessness. It is sometimes conjectured that Shakespeare sprang from a race of illiterate peasants, but that is emphatically not the case.

Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, embarked at an early age on a prosperous career. Although there were already Shakespeares settled in Stratford, he was a native of Snitterfield. His younger brother, Henry, remained a Snitterfield farmer, but John did not choose to work only in the family business. He wished to pursue other trades as well. He was, in the tradition of striving first sons, moving upwards through the world. His own son would follow him. John Shakespeare left the farm in order to be enrolled as an apprentice to a glover in Stratford. The most plausible candidate for his master is Thomas Dixon, who was the innkeeper of the Swan, at the bottom of Bridge Street, as well as a master glover. His wife came from Snitterfield.

John Shakespeare’s apprenticeship lasted for seven years, and in the Stratford records of 1556 he was listed as a “glover.” He was then twenty-seven, and he would already have pursued the trade for a few years. In later documents he is described as a “whittawer” or dresser of “tawed” or un-tanned white leather. He soaked and scraped the skins of horses and deer, sheep and hounds, before softening them with salt and alum; they were placed in pots of urine or excrement before being laid out in the garden to dry. It was a messy and smelly business. From the evidence of his drama Shakespeare had a pronounced aversion to unpleasant smells. When the skins had been rendered tender and pliant they were cut to pattern with knife and scissors as they assumed the shape of gloves, purses, belts and bags. They were then hung on a rod by the window in order to attract custom. Shakespeare often mentions the trade, and its products, in his plays. He knows the varieties of leather, from dog-skin to deer-skin, and lists the assortment of items that his father sold, from shoes of neat’s leather to bridles of sheep’s leather and the bags of sow-skin carried by tinkers. “Is not Parchment made of sheepe-skinnes?” Hamlet’s question is answered by Horatio with a further refinement: “I, my Lord, and of Calues-skinnes to” (3082-3). Gloves, particularly those made of cheveril or kid-skin, are praised by Shakespeare for their softness; there are references to a “soft chiuerell Conscience” (All Is True, 996) and “a wit of cheuerell, that stretches from an ynch narrow, to an ell broad” (Romeo and Juliet, 1139-40). Shakespeare describes gloves continually, whether worn in the hat or thrown down as a pledge. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly remarks upon “a great round Beard, like a Glouer’s pairing-knife.” This is the language of close observation.

John Shakespeare had a ground-floor shop at the front of his house, looking out upon Henley Street, with outbuildings at the back for stretching and drying. He found employment here for one or two apprentices or “stitchers.” His “sign” was a pair of glover’s compasses. He also set up a stall on market-days by the High Cross, where the cheapest gloves sold at 4 pence a pair; lined and embroidered items were of course far more expensive. It would be interesting to see his eldest son helping to attract custom at this Thursday morning market; but on most weekday mornings he was at school. Nevertheless every business was in some sense a family business.

John Shakespeare was a member of the glovers’ guild. The making and selling of gloves was a well-developed and thriving Stratford trade. Between 1570 and 1630, there were some twenty-three glovers in the town. But he had other occupations as well. He was still a yeoman farmer, and farmed land with his father in Snitterfield and with his younger brother in the neighbouring village of Ingon. Here he reared and slaughtered the animals whose skins were later converted into leather; hence derive later Stratford reports that Shakespeare’s father was a butcher and that the young Shakespeare had become a butcher’s apprentice. Behind all local legends, there lies a modicum of ascertainable fact. There are indeed a number of references to butchers and to butchery in Shakespeare’s dramas, most notably connected with the relationship between sons and fathers; Shakespeare knows the various shades and textures of blood, as well as the “uncleanly sauours of a Slaughterhouse” (King John, 2002). There is a suggestive connection.

John Shakespeare, recorded in an official document as “agricola” or farmer, dealt in barley and in wool. He also traded in timber. It was perfectly natural, and proper, that a man should be possessed of many skills and trades. Of his business in wool-dealing, there is ample evidence. Like many other glovers he needed the skins and wished to pass on the fleece. Part of the house in Henley Street was known as “the Woolshop,” and when a later tenant “re-laid the floors of the parlour, the remnants of wool, and the refuse of wool-combing, were found under the old flooring, imbedded with the earth of the foundation.”⁶ John Shakespeare sold 28-pound parcels of wool, or “tods,” to mercers and clothiers in surrounding towns. The clown in The Winter’s Tale does his arithmetic—“Let me see, euery Leauen-weather toddes, euery tod yeeldes pound and odde shilling: fifteene hundred shorne, what comes the wooll too?” (1508-9).

But, like other glovers, John Shakespeare also acted as an unlicensed wool-broker or “brogger”; information was laid against him in court that on two occasions he had illegally purchased wool at 14 shillings per “tod.” His actions were illegal because he was not a member of the wool “Staple,” a kind of guild, but more importantly he laid down the sums of £140 for one transaction and £70 for the other. These were very large amounts indeed. They suggest that John Shakespeare was a wealthy man.

That is why he could afford to speculate in property. He bought a house in Greenhill Street, just down the road from Henley Street, and rented it out. He bought two further houses, with gardens and orchards, for £40. He rented another house to one William Burbage, who may or may not have been related to the London acting family. Ordinary life is filled with coincidence.

He also lent money at an illegal rate of interest to his neighbours, a trade which passed under the unhappy name of “usury.” The legal rate was 10 per cent, but John Shakespeare lent £100 to a business colleague at interest of 20 per cent, and a further £80 to another contemporary at the same rate. He charged the excess because it had become standard practice. He could get away with it, in other words. Money-lending was itself widely accepted, in a period where there were no banks or credit facilities, and it was even one in which his son engaged from time to time. According to one social historian such financial dealings were “extremely widespread,”⁷ and in fact necessary for the smooth running of the community. Of usury William Harrison wrote that it is “practiced so commonly that he is accounted a fool that doth lend his money for nothing.”⁸ The sums in which John Shakespeare dealt were nevertheless very large. When observing his payment of £210 for wool, and his loans of £180, a contrast might be made with his father’s entire estate amounting to less than £40. The son had far outstripped the affluence of his father. It was a tradition of striving that his own son would inherit.

So John Shakespeare was a canny and prosperous businessman. There has been much speculation, however, about his literacy. He signed with a mark rather than a signature, which suggests that he could not write. There is something deeply satisfying, to some commentators, in the prospect of the greatest writer in the history of the world springing from an illiterate family. It adds to the supposed drama. The fact that John Shakespeare could not write, however, does not necessarily imply that he could not read. Reading and writing were taught separately, and were considered to be different skills. It would in any case have been difficult for him to engage in his multifarious trades and businesses without being able to read. He was also left some books, in a bequest, which points towards the same conclusion.

And then there is the vexed question of his religion. For centuries scholars have argued over the possibility that Shakespeare’s father was a secret adherent of the old faith. The question is confused by the perplexing circumstances of the time, when a person’s professed faith might not have been his or her real faith and when there were nice distinctions and gradations in any religious observance. There were conflicting loyalties. You might be a Catholic who attended the reformed services for the sake of propriety, or to escape a fine; you might be a member of the new communion, yet one who loved the rituals and festivals of the old Church. You might be undecided, leaning one way and then another in the quest for certainty. You might have no real faith at all.

The evidence for John Shakespeare is similarly equivocal. He had his son baptised within the rites of the Anglican communion, and the minister Bretchgirdle was a Protestant. But John Shakespeare might also have concealed within the rafters of the roof at Henley Street an explicit “spiritual testament.” There are many scholars who doubt the authenticity of this document, believing it to be a fabrication or a plant, but its provenance seems genuine enough. It has been shown to be a standard Roman Catholic production, distributed by Edmund Campion, who journeyed to Warwickshire in 1581 and stayed just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. Campion himself was a Jesuit priest who had travelled from Rome on a secret and ultimately fatal mission to England, both to bolster the faith of native Catholics and to convert those who were wavering in their allegiance. Jesuit missionaries were not welcome in England, especially after the Pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, and Campion was eventually apprehended, tried and sentenced to death.

The spiritual testament found in Henley Street included John Shakespeare’s obedience to “the Catholike, Romaine & Apostolicke Church” and invocations to the Virgin Mary and “my Angell guardian,” as well as to the succour of “the holy sacrifice of the masse.” It could not be a more orthodox or pious document. It was printed or transcribed, with blanks left for the specific details of the testator. Here John Shakespeare’s mark or signature appeared, as well as the information that his particular patron saint was “saint Winifrede.” This saint had her shrine in Holywell, Flintshire, which was a place of pilgrimage for the wealthier Catholic families of Warwickshire. If the testament is a forgery, only a well-informed forger would know the details of a local saint. More doubts are raised by the notation. If John Shakespeare could not write, then who added the reference to Winifred? Was there another member of the Shakespeare family who could read and write by 1581? There is one clue. In this Catholic testament there is reference to the danger that “I may be possibly cut off in the blossome of my sins.” In Hamlet the ghost laments that he was “Cut off euen in the blossomes of my sinne” (693) and invokes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. This ghost is of course that of the father.

The identity of the amanuensis must, however, remain a matter for speculation. But if we believe that the testament was signed by John Shakespeare, and then concealed in the attic of his house, the suggestion is that he was or had become a secret and practising Catholic. There are other pieces of evidence. His family history included pious ancestors, among them Dame Isabella and Dame Jane of the nuns’ house in Wroxall. His wife, Mary Arden, also came from an old Catholic family. On several occasions he himself was included in lists of recusants “presented for not comminge monethlie to the Churche according to hir Majesties lawes.” In this context, he may also have conveyed his properties to members of his family to avoid the possibility of confiscation.

On the other side of the argument is the contention that he would have subscribed to the oath of supremacy in order to take up various official posts in Stratford; he was also instrumental in ordering and overseeing the lime-washing of the religious imagery in the guild chapel as well as the removal of the “rood loft” or crucifixion scene. But he was an ambitious man, one of many sixteenth-century officials who continually balanced their careers against their convictions. He could fulfil his administrative duties on these occasions without necessarily compromising or admitting any deeply held private faith.

By 1552 John Shakespeare is recorded as a tenant or householder in Henley Street; at the age of twenty-three he had passed through his apprenticeship, and had set up business on his own account. In 1556 he purchased the adjoining house in Henley Street that has since become known as the “Wool-shop.” The two houses were eventually knocked together to create the comfortable and commodious house that survives still. In the same year he bought the tenement and garden in neighbouring Greenhill Street. He was expanding.

In the spring or summer of the following year he married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father’s old landlord. In 1556, too, he began his slow rise in the Stratford hierarchy when he was appointed one of two “tasters.” These were the borough officials who ensured the quality of the bread and ale purveyed in the district. He was moving forward on all fronts with his family, his business, and his civic career, being organised simultaneously.

He was fined for missing three meetings of the Stratford court, but that did not prevent him from being appointed as one of four “constables” in 1558. He was obliged to supervise the night watch, quell disturbances in the street and disarm those bent on an affray. It was not a sinecure and suggests that, at the age of twenty-nine, John Shakespeare was a person of considerable respect among his neighbours. His judicial duties increased in the following year, when he was appointed to be “affeeror” or fixer of fines. Within a short space of time came a greater honour, when he was elected as a burgess of Stratford; he now attended the monthly council meeting and was permitted to educate any of his sons at the King’s New School free of charge. His first son, however, would not be born for another six years.

In 1561 he was elected as chamberlain, in charge of the property and revenues of the Stratford corporation; he filled that office for four years, in which period he supervised the building of a new schoolroom in the upper storey of the guildhall, where his son would one day be taught.

He was appointed as one of fourteen aldermen in 1565, the year after his son’s birth. From this time forward he was addressed as “Master Shakespeare.” On holy days and days of public festival he was obliged to wear a black cloth gown faced with fur; he also wore an aldermanic ring of agate that his young son knew very well. In Romeo and Juliet the playwright refers to “an Agot stone / on the forefinger of an Alderman” (515-16). And then in 1568 John Shakespeare reached the height of his civic ambition, when he was elected bailiff or mayor of Stratford. He exchanged his black robe for a scarlet gown. He was led to the guildhall by a Serjeant bearing the mace of office. He sat with his family, now including the four-year-old William Shakespeare, in the front pew of the Church of the Holy Trinity. He was also a Justice of the Peace, presiding over the Court of Record. When his term of office expired in 1571 he was appointed high alderman and deputy to his successor as mayor; he was clearly held in great respect. The extant and sporadic records of council business suggest a man of tact and moderation — referring to his colleagues, for example, as a “brotherhode”—as well as one of sound judgement. We will see some of those virtues in his son. Like many other “self-made” men, however, he may also have been excessively confident in his own abilities. This was also a familial trait.

His younger brother, Henry, continued the family tradition of farming; he rented land in Snitterfield and in a neighbouring parish. What little is known of him suggests pugnacity and a certain independence of mind. He was fined for assaulting one of his close relations — the husband of one of Mary Arden’s sisters — and in his eighties he was excommunicated from the church for failing to pay his tithes. He was also fined for breaching the Statute of Caps; he refused, in other words, to wear a cap on Sundays. He was fined on other occasions for various agricultural misdemeanours, and gaoled at different times for debt and for trespass. He was, perhaps, a “black sheep” in the Stratford farm landscape. But he exhibited a fierceness and hardiness that would inspire any young relative. Shakespeare might have inherited the vices of his uncle as well as the virtues of his father. Despite his reputation as a bad debtor Henry Shakespeare was good at acquiring and keeping his money. At his death a witness deposed that there was “plenty of money in his coffers”; his barns, too, were filled with corn and hay “of a great value.”⁹ Shakespeare came from a family of undoubted affluence, with all the ease and self-confidence that such affluence encourages.

CHAPTER 6 A Witty Mother, Witlesse Else Her Sonne

It is an undoubted fact,” Charles Dickens once wrote, that “all remarkable men have remarkable mothers.” In the lineaments of the mature William Shakespeare, then, we might see the outline of Mary Arden. She is a formidable figure. She could plausibly claim to be part of a family that extended beyond the Norman Conquest. The Ardens had been “Lords of Warwick” and one of their number, Turchillus de Eardene, was credited in the Domesday Book with vast extents of land.¹ The immediate beneficiaries of this wealth and gentility were the Ardens of Park Hall, in the north of the county of Warwickshire. They were a strongly Catholic family who were eventually harried and persecuted for their faith.

There is no proof that the Ardens of the village of Wilmcote were related to the wealthy landowners of Park Hall. In matters of lineage, however, what can be asserted or suggested is more important than that which can be proved. The shared surname was probably enough. It seems likely that the Ardens from whom Mary Arden was descended considered themselves to be connected, in however distant a fashion, with other branches of the Ardens and indeed with the grand families who were related to other Ardens— families such as the Sidneys and the Nevilles.

It has often been suggested that male actors are prone, in their earliest years, to identify with the mother; they internalise her behaviour and adopt her values. This at least is one explanation for the overriding concern for nobility and gentility in Shakespeare’s subsequent drama; he was known for playing kingly roles, and the aristocratic world is at the heart of his design. Could his mother have taught him his fastidiousness and his disdain? In the quest for an alternative Shakespeare, it has often been suggested that the dramatist was actually a well-known aristocrat; among these hypothetical aliases can be found the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and the sixth Earl of Derby. So it is a matter of the greatest irony that Shakespeare may have already considered himself to be of noble stock. He may even be alluding to his parents’ marriage at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (82-3):

Since once he plaide a Farmers eldest sonne,

“Twas where you woo’d the Gentlewoman so well.

Mary Arden’s father, Robert Arden, was an affluent yeoman farmer who owned two farmhouses and possessed more than 150 acres of land. Of such farmers William Harrison wrote that they “commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travel to get riches … and with grazing, frequenting of markets and keeping of servants do come to great welthe.”² Robert Arden was in fact the most prosperous farmer, and the largest landowner, in Wilmcote. The village itself was three miles from Stratford, situated in cleared woodland; it was close to the very edge of the forest from which the family derived its name. The Ardens were nourished with a specific sense of belonging.

They lived here in a single-storey farmhouse, built at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with its barns and its cowsheds, its dovecote and its woodpiles, its pump and its apiary. Robert Arden possessed oxen and bullocks, horses and calves and colts and sheep, bees and poultry. There were plentiful quantities of barley and oats. Shakespeare’s mother, just like Shakespeare’s father, was brought up as an integral part of a working farm. This may be the best way of describing Robert Arden himself: he was of ancient farming stock, with pretensions to gentility.

An inventory of his possessions has survived. Among these were the farmhouse at Snitterfield, where Richard Shakespeare and his family had recently lived, as well as the house in Wilmcote. In that household there was a hall and a second chamber for sleeping, as well as a kitchen, but the accommodation was still somewhat cramped; Mary Arden had six sisters, and she grew up in an environment where there was much competition for attention and affection. In the inventory, too, there are references to table-boards and benches, cupboards and little tables in the hall or principal room; there were shelves, too, and three chairs. From these bare memoranda we can fill a sixteenth-century room in imagination. The second chamber contained a feather bed, two mattresses and seven pairs of sheets, as well as towels and tablecloths kept in two wooden coffers.

In the rooms were hung painted cloths for decoration and edification. These depicted classical or religious scenes, such as Daniel in the Lions’ Den or the Siege of Troy, and would have dominated the interiors of this relatively modest farmhouse. Mary Arden was bequeathed at least one of these painted tapestries in her father’s will, and it is most likely to have ended up on a wall in Henley Street. In Macbeth Shakespeare refers to the “Eye of Childhood that feares a painted Deuill” (595-6), and Falstaff mentions “Lazarus in the painted cloth” (1 Henry IV, 2287).

When Mary Arden brought the painted cloth with her from her family home, and became the mistress of Henley Street, she was probably in her seventeenth or eighteenth year. Her husband was a decade older and already, as we have seen, a rising man. She was the youngest of Robert Arden’s daughters, and may have some claim to being the most favoured. Alone among her kin she was left a specific piece of land. Her father bequeathed to her “all my lande in Willmecote cawlid Asbyes and the crop apone the grounde sowne and tyllide as hitt is.”³ From this we may deduce that she was dependable and practical. No farmer would leave land to an incompetent daughter. She was also healthy and vigorous, giving birth to many children and living to the age of sixty-eight. We may plausibly imagine her also to be energetic, intelligent and quick-witted; in a household of seven sisters she would also have learnt the virtues of tact and compliance. It is not known whether she was literate, but her mark upon a bond is well formed and even graceful. She could wield a pen in a single movement. Her private seal was of a galloping horse, an emblem of agility and industry. The fact that she had a seal at all is a sign of affluence and respectability. Shakespeare has left no record of her, but it has been surmised that her outlines can be glimpsed in a number of strong-minded mothers who appear in his dramas — Volumnia extolling Coriolanus’s achievements, the Countess reminding Bertram of his duty, the Duchess of York berating King Richard. It is also possible, and indeed plausible, that the high-spirited and intelligent young women of the comedies owe something to the memories of his mother.

The family house in Henley Street can even now be seen; it is much changed, but still recognisable. It was originally two (or perhaps three) houses, each with a garden and an orchard. It was on the northern side of Henley Street, at the edge of the town, with its narrow rooms looking directly on to the thoroughfare; there was very little privacy. At the back of the house, beyond the garden, was an area known as the “Guild Pits” that was essentially a stretch of waste ground with a ramshackle road threading within it.

The house itself was erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the usual mode of oak timber frame with wattle-and-daub, and with a roof of thatch. The ceilings of the interiors were lime-washed, and the walls decorated with painted cloths or patterned all over with the use of wood-blocks. Its timbers were much lighter in colour than the “mock-Tudor” beams now characteristically stained black or dark brown. The plaster work would have been of light beige. The whole effect was of brightness or, at least, of lightness. The stark black and white of restored Tudor interiors is wrong; Shakespeare’s contemporaries used much paler colours, and more subtly graded shades. The wooden furniture was of the standard household type, as already exemplified by Robert Arden’s inventory — chairs and plain tables and joint-stools (so called because the separate parts were joined together). The floors were of broken Wilmcote limestone, covered by rushes. If there were “carpets,” they were used as covers for the table. There may have been a wall-cupboard to display dishes or plate. In Romeo and Juliet a servant calls out, “Away with the ioyntstooles, remove the Courtcubbert [cupboard], looke to the plate” (579-80).

It was a commodious house with six separate chambers, the lower and upper storeys connected with a ladder rather than a stairway. The hall was the principal room of the house, next to the front door and the cross-passage; there was a large fireplace here, and the Shakespeare family sat for their meals in front of it. There was a kitchen at the back of the house with its usual complements of a hand-turned spit, brass skillets and leathern bottles. Beside the hall was the parlour, a combined sitting room and bedroom where the bed itself was displayed as a prize specimen of household furniture. The walls here were heavily patterned and decorated. Across from the hall, on the other side of the passage, was John Shakespeare’s workshop, where the labour of stitching and sewing was undertaken by him and his apprentices. It was also a shop trading with the outside world, with a casement opening on to the street, and as such had a different atmosphere from the rest of the house. From an early age Shakespeare knew all about the demands of the public. On the floor above there were three bedchambers. Shakespeare would have slept on a mattress of rush, stretched on cords between the wooden frame of the bed. In the attic rooms slept the servants and the apprentices. It was a large house for a tradesman and reinforces the note of affluence in all his father’s affairs.

It was also a noisy house, a wooden sound-box in which a conversation in one part of the house could clearly be heard in another. The creaking of timber, and the noise of footsteps, would have been a constant accompaniment to household tasks. From Shakespeare’s dramas, too, come the unmistakable impressions of childhood in Henley Street. There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping; there are many references to the preparation of food, to boiling and mincing and stewing and frying; there are allusions to badly prepared cakes and unsieved flour, to a rabbit being turned upon a spit and a pasty being “pinched.” There are many references to what was considered to be women’s work within the home, to knitting and to needlework. But there are also images of carpentering, of hooping and of joinery; these were the activities of the yard or of the outhouses at the back of John Shakespeare’s property. No other Elizabethan dramatist employs so many domestic allusions. Shakespeare maintained a unique connection with his past.

That is why the natural world seems to impinge so directly upon him. The house in Stratford, like most others in the vicinity, had a garden and an orchard. The image of the garden occurs to him in many different contexts, whether that of the body or of the state. An ill-weeded garden is an image of decay. He knows of grafting and pruning, of digging and dunging. In Romeo and Juliet there is an image of a trailing plant being pressed down to the ground so that it will put forth fresh roots. This is not a scene, perhaps, that would have readily occurred to an urban writer. In all he alludes to 108 different plants. In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes and apricots.

The flowers of his plays are native to the soil from which he came; the primrose and the violet, the wallflower and the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose, sprang up wild all around him. He need only shut his eyes to see them again. He uses the local names for the flowers of the meadow, such as Ophelia’s crow-flowers and Lear’s cuckoo-flowers; he uses the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness. He employs the local names of bilberry for the whortleberry and honey-stalks for stalks of clover. In that same dialect, too, a dandelion is a “golden lad” before becoming a “chimney sweeper” when its spore is cast upon the breeze. Thus, in Cymbeline (2214-15),

Golden Lads and Girles all must,

As Chimney-Sweepers, come to dust.

The words of his childhood surround him once more when he contemplates meadows and gardens.

No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows, for example, that the martlet builds its nest on exposed walls. Of the singing birds he notices the thrush and the ousel or blackbird. More ominous are the owl and raven, the crow and the maggot-pie. He knows them all, and has observed their course across the sky. The spectacle of birds in flight entrances him. He cannot bear the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared. He loves free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature.

CHAPTER 7 But This Is Worshipfull Society

There was a world beyond the house and garden of Henley Street. Stratford remained a deeply conservative and traditional society. At its centre was the small nuclear family, like that of the Shakespeares, which was closely knit and self-sustaining. Yet family was linked to family, and neighbour to neighbour, in organic fashion. A neighbour was more than the man, woman or child who lived in the same street. A neighbour was the one to whom you turned for support, in times of distress, and the one to whom you offered help in return. A neighbour was expected to be thrifty, hard-working and reliable.

Many inhabitants of Stratford were connected by marriage and kinship alliances so that the town itself might be viewed as an extended family. Friends were often known as “cousins” so that, for example, Shakespeare is noticed as “cousin Shakespeare” by those with whom he seems to have had no blood relationship. This also encouraged the ties of patronage and local community. In his capacity as mayor John Shakespeare was “father” to the town as well as to his more immediate progeny. The inheritance of place was a very powerful one. It encouraged a deep sense of settlement and of possession.

Henley Street may serve as an image of this relatively small and enclosed community. The traveller reached it from Bridge Street, passing the Swan and the Bear inns on either side of the thoroughfare; Bridge Street was divided into two by a line of buildings known as Middle Row. Fore Bridge Street and Back Bridge Street contained some of the more commodious shops as well as inns. By the High Cross, where John Shakespeare kept his stall on market-days, the street branched into Henley Street and a little southward into Wood Street. Henley Street itself contained shops, like that of John Shakespeare, cottages and houses. Like medieval streets in general, it was of mixed occupancy.

Shakespeare’s immediate neighbour, east towards Bridge Street, was the tailor William Wedgewood. His tailor’s shop was next to the glover’s, in other words. He owned two other houses in the same stretch of street, but was eventually compelled to leave Stratford when it was discovered that he had “there marryed an other wife his first wife yet living.” He was also accused of being “very contencious prowde & slaunderous oft buseing himself with noughty matters & quarrelling with his honest neighbours.”¹ So, living next door, he may have been difficult. The young Shakespeare must have soon become acquainted with the vagaries of human conduct.

Next to Wedgewood’s house was the smithy of Richard Hornby who, among other things, forged the iron links to fasten local prisoners. He made use of the stream that ran past his house. The tailor Wedgewood and the smith Hornby seem to make an appearance in Shakespeare’s King John (1815-18) when a citizen, Hubert, remarks that

I saw a Smith stand with his hammer (thus)

The whilst his Iron did on the Anuile coole,

With open mouth swallowing a Taylors newes,

Who with his Sheeres, and Measure in his hand …

It is a moment of observation snatched out of time.

Hornby had five children, and indeed the street was altogether filled with children. One Henley Street family had seven, and another had fourteen. As an infant Shakespeare could never have been alone. It is the open life of the towns memorialised in Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry Wives of Windsor. It irradiates the Venice of Othello and the Ephesus of The Comedy of Errors.

On the further side of the stream resided another glover, Gilbert Bradley. Since he became godfather to one of John Shakespeare’s other sons, it may be assumed that theirs was a friendly rivalry. Further down the street lived George Whateley, a woollen-draper, who was wealthy enough to endow a small school at the time of his death. He was a Roman Catholic, and two of his brothers became fugitive priests. Next to him was the haberdasher, and Shakespeare’s godfather, William Smith, who had five sons. Just beyond his shop, across the road at the corner of Fore Bridge Street, was the Angel Inn. It was owned and managed by the Cawdrey family, who were also staunch Catholics; one of their sons trained as a Jesuit priest in exile. This was a close community in every sense.

So the northern side of Henley Street was populated by clothiers of one kind or another, and is a token of that clustering of trades that took place in most market towns. Shakespeare grew up in an atmosphere of animated business. On the western end of the street John Shakespeare’s closest neighbour was another Catholic, George Badger, a woollen-draper whose principal business was in Sheep Street. He was elected as an alderman but was deprived of his office; he was even sent to prison because of his staunch Catholicism. His was not a model that John Shakespeare chose to follow. Beyond Badger lived a yeoman farmer, John Ichiver, about whom little is known. There were other neighbours in Henley Street. There were six shepherds’ families, for example, two of whom, the Cox and the Davies families, lived directly opposite the Shakespeares. John Cox was well known to the Hathaways, soon to be mingled with the Shakespeares. The shepherds in Shakespeare’s plays are not some pastoral invention.

On the same side of the street resided Thomas a Pryce, a “mettle-man” or tinker. John Shakespeare stood surety for his son when the young man was charged with a felony. Here also lived John Wheeler, an alderman and recusant Catholic; he owned four houses in the street as well as tenements elsewhere. There was also a wool merchant, Rafe Shaw, whose goods John Shakespeare appraised, and Peter Smart, whose son became a tailor. Already we can see the outlines of a close community, with many familial as well as religious and mercantile ties.

It would be otiose to prepare a roll-call of the townspeople of Stratford, except to the extent that they emerge in Shakespeare’s own life. So we find the Quineys, for example, visiting the dramatist in London and calling him “loving good friend and countryman.” One of them eventually married Shakespeare’s younger daughter, Judith, and so we can presume some degree of intimacy. They were fierce Catholics married into the Badger family who, as we have seen, owned a house next door to John Shakespeare. Adrian Quiney was a grocer who lived on the High Street and who was three times mayor of Stratford. In that capacity he knew John Shakespeare very well. It was his son, Richard, who formed the friendship with Shakespeare; the dramatist was probably godfather to his child, baptised William.

The Quineys also married into another family, the Sadlers, who were in turn closely connected with the Shakespeares. John Sadler, who lived in Church Street, was the owner of several mills and barns in Stratford; he was also a landowner and proprietor of the Bear Inn in Stratford. He had been bailiff of the town, and John Shakespeare voted for his second term.

The Bear Inn was eventually sold to the Nash family of Stratford; they too were Catholic, and they also married into the Shakespeare family. The host of the Bear Inn, Thomas Barber, was also a Catholic. A few months before his death Shakespeare was concerned to protect “Master Barber’s interest.” It is important to recognise the line of sympathies and affiliations beneath the surface of Stratford life. A kinsman of John Sadler, Roger Sadler, was also a baker; when he died, money was owed to him both by John Shakespeare and by Thomas Hathaway.

A member of the Combe family left money to Shakespeare in his will, and in turn Shakespeare bequeathed another Combe his sword. It may have been the ceremonial sword that he wore on state occasions, in his somewhat unlikely position as Groom of His Majesty’s Chamber, and therefore of some value. The Combes sold land to the dramatist, and shared with him an income from certain tithes. It was, in other words, a close-knit collaboration between two families. The Combes were described as “one of the leading Catholic families of Warwickshire,”² but they also serve as an example of the conflicting religious commitments of the era; of two brothers, one was a Catholic and one a Protestant. There was also a family tradition of money-lending, not unknown among wealthy Stratfordians, as we have seen, and Shakespeare is popularly believed to have written some doggerel on the subject that was placed on the grave of John Combe.

In his last will and testament, drawn up as he lay dying in his home town, Shakespeare left 26s 8d each to Anthony Nash and John Nash, for the purchase of memorial rings. Anthony Nash farmed the tithe land that Shakespeare owned, and was close enough to him to act as his representative in various Stratford dealings. John Nash, too, acted as a witness on his behalf. They were Catholics who in characteristic fashion entered the network of marriage and kinship with the Quineys and the Combes and of course the Shakespeares. Anthony Nash’s son married Shakespeare’s granddaughter.

The dying dramatist left the same amount to “Hamlett” Sadler, as he calls him, and to William Reynolds. Reynolds was a fervent Catholic who shared prison with George Badger for his beliefs. A priest in disguise found refuge from his pursuers in Reynolds’s house. Shakespeare also left 20 shillings in gold to his godson, William Walker; he was the son of Henry Walker, a mercer and alderman who lived on the High Street. In the way of such things, his grandfather was very well acquainted with Shakespeare’s grandfather. Among the witnesses to the will was one Julius or July Shaw, a trader in wool and malt who lived on Chapel Street. His father, also a wool-dealer, had known John Shakespeare very well. So we have a group of generally affluent and no doubt sharp-witted businessmen, bluff enough but straightforward and practical. They must have been shrewd judges of markets and of people, used to saving money and driving bargains. This was the solution in which Shakespeare was formed.

So Stratford contained a very large Catholic constituency of which the Shakespeares were a part. This does not necessarily imply that Shakespeare himself professed that faith — assuming that he professed any — only that he found the company of Catholics familiar. It seems in certain respects to have been a clannish society. The family of Nicholas Lane, a Catholic landowner who lent money both to John and to Henry Shakespeare, bought their clothes from a Catholic tailor in Wood Street.³ In the same context, therefore, it also seems likely that affluent Catholics preferred to lend money to their coreligionists. In later years Shakespeare purchased his great house from a Catholic, William Underhill, who was compelled to sell as a result of the vast sums of money he had expended on recusancy fines. We may see in Shakespeare’s purchase a mixture of shrewd commercial calculation and semi-fraternal sympathy.

On any conservative reckoning it is possible to identify some thirty Catholic families within the town, and of course the available records are by their nature incomplete and inconclusive. There would have been many more papists, who concealed their private beliefs from the local authorities. They became, in the language of the day, “church papists” whose attendance at the Protestant churches masked their true faith. It has been speculated that the majority of churchgoers in Stratford were of this sort.

The religious situation in Stratford was in any case well known. Hugh Larimer, the reformer and Bishop of Worcester, declared that Stratford lay at “the blind end” of his diocese, and one of Latimer’s colleagues confirmed that in Warwickshire “great Parishes and market Townes [are] utterly destitute of God’s word.”⁴ One of his successors, John Whitgift, complained in 1577 that in the area around Stratford he could obtain no information on recusants; in a tolerant and like-minded community, neighbour would not denounce neighbour. The papistical images in the guild chapel were lime-washed, on the orders of John Shakespeare, more than four years after a royal injunction had ordered their removal. It only finally occurred after the leading Catholic family in the town, the Cloptons, had fled abroad for safety. In any case the lime-washing of the offending images was hardly in direct obedience with the administrative injunction to “utterly extinct and destroy” such images so that “there remains no memory of the same.” John Shakespeare merely covered them over, perhaps in the hope of better days.

Lying concealed upon the walls of the chapel were depictions of two local Saxon saints, Edmund and Modwena, for those who wished to celebrate the blessedness of their region; there was a fresco of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, while kneeling at the altar of St. Benedict in Canterbury; there was a painting of St. George in mortal combat with the dragon, a princess standing behind him. Here also were images of angels and of devils, saints and dragons, monarchs and armed men in battle. Here in this Stratford chapel were hidden the images of the Catholic world. We will see some of them freshly revealed within Shakespeare’s plays.

Certain of Shakespeare’s schoolteachers were Catholic. If John Shakespeare had indeed espoused Catholicism, his example shows there was no hindrance to high office in the town, which in turn suggests a measure of quiescence or even sympathy among its leading citizens. But it represented a fragile compromise. External legislation, and the presence of religious commissioners, could create tensions within the community. Overtly partisan steps, like the concealment of renegade priests, could cause serious problems for those concerned. And in any case the general drift of the time was towards a grudging acceptance of the new religion and the steady abandonment of the practices of the old faith. By the early seventeenth century Stratford had become notably more Protestant in tendency. The town was never ruled by “precise fools” or “Scripture men,” as the more formidable Puritans were known, but it eventually came to accept the ambiguous orthodoxy of the Church of England. Yet in the latter half of the sixteenth century, despite royal injunctions and local purges, fines and sequestrations and imprisonments, the persistence of the Catholic faith in the town can clearly be seen.

This might have had a direct effect upon the Shakespeare household in one important sense. The dislike of the reformed religion meant that piety was transferred from the Church to the family. The children might now be obliged to attend the new forms of worship and listen to Elizabethan homilies. But the lessons of the old faith, and the rites of the once popular religion, might still be taught and practised in the home. It was the place of safety. Since Shakespeare’s eldest daughter, Susannah, remained a firm and prominent Catholic all of her life, can it be assumed that the Shakespeares themselves retained this familial tradition of inherited piety? It has been inferred that the community of Catholics was matriarchal in tendency, and that the woman’s “inferior legal and public identity afforded her a superior devotional status, a fuller membership of the Catholic Church.”⁵ Since the old faith is likely to have been transmitted through the women of the household, it throws an interesting light upon Shakespeare’s attitude towards his closest female relations.

CHAPTER 8 I Am a Kind of Burre, I Shal Sticke

There are some human, beliefs that lie below the level of professed faith and orthodoxy. As a child Shakespeare learned of the witches who created storms and of the Welsh fairies who hid in foxgloves. “Queene Mab” of Romeo and Juliet is derived from the Celtic word, mab, meaning infant or little one. There is a Warwickshire term, “mab-led,” signifying madness. Shakespeare knew of the toad with the medicinal jewel in its head, and of the man in the moon who carried a bundle of thorns. In the Forest of Arden, as his mother might have told him, there were ghosts and goblins. “A sad Tale’s best for Winter,” says the unfortunate child Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, “I haue one of Sprights and Goblins” (538-9). All his life Shakespeare had a very English sense of the supernatural and the marvellous, a predilection that goes hand in hand with a taste for horror and sensationalism in all of its forms. He brings ghosts into the history plays, and witches into Macbeth. The plots of the fairy stories can be glimpsed in his adult drama. Pericles is one of the old tales told round the hearth. In similar fashion ballads and folk tales charge the plot of The Taming of the Shrew. They were part of his Stratford inheritance.

The zealots of the reformed Church were not well disposed towards such idolatrous relics as maypoles and church ales, but local observances survived their displeasure. The bells rang out on Shrove Tuesday, and on the feast of St. Valentine the boys sang for apples; on Good Friday the labourers planted their potatoes and on the morning of Easter Day the young men went out to hunt hares. There were “whitsun lords” in Warwickshire as late as 1580, together with all the panoply of mumming and morris-dancing. The pageant of St. George and the Dragon, for example, was performed on the streets of Stratford every year. Shakespeare saw the sheep-shearing feasts at Snitterfield, and resurrected one of them in The Winter’s Tale. The May-games of his youth return in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is not some saga of “merry England,” but the very fabric of life in a conservative and ritualised society immediately before the permanent changes induced by the reformation of religion.

The stray details of that enduring life emerge in a hundred different contexts. Real names of places and of people are enlisted in Shakespeare’s drama. His aunt lived in the hamlet of Barton-on-the-Heath, and it rises again as Burton-Heath in The Taming of the Shrew; Wilmcote becomes Win-cot. The names of William Fluellen and George Bardolph are found in a list of Stratford recusants, beside that of John Shakespeare. His father also engaged in business with two wool-dealers, George Vizer of Woodmancote (locally pronounced Woncote) and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, and they reappear in a line from Henry IV, Part Two. “I beseech you sir to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkes a’ th hill” (2725-6). In the play Visor is described as an “arrant knave,” which may suggest some familial dispute with him.

The words and phrases of Shakespeare’s childhood are recalled in his writing. He uses “fap” to mean drunk, “third-borough” for constable, and “aroynt” for leave. There is also the matter of pronunciation. The sound of the language spoken by Shakespeare in his native county was nearer to Saxon than to Norman French, as if its original powers had not been dispelled by the culture of the conquerors. You would have heard the Saxon origins in words pronounced as “blewe” and “deawe,” “emonges” and “ouglie,” “togyther” and “woork.” Extra consonants were added to lend emphasis to certain words, in “chardge” and “mariadge,” “priviledge” and “pidgeon,” “sutch” and “druncke.” They appear, too, in “whote” and “womand,” “dogge” and “dinne,” “drumme” and “sinne.” The language of Shakespeare’s region was thicker and more resonant than that of London. Vowels were lengthened, too, in “hond” and “husbond,” “tyme” and “wyde,” “fairnesse” and “wantonesse.” A similar variousness and richness are found in “marrie” and “wittie,” “dutious” and “outragious,” “heretique” and “reumatique.”

This was the language that Shakespeare spoke as a child. It was immediately recognisable as a country accent, and he may have endeavoured to lose it on his arrival in London. His characters are, after all, engaged in a perpetual act of performance and re-invention. But there was then no “standard” English. He used his Stratford idiom in his writing, for example, although the fussiness of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened his native sonority. Any standardisation or modernisation of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength; a shadow is not as dim and veiled as a “shaddowwe,” a cuckoo does not sing like a “kuckow,” and music is not as enchanting as “musique.” In the old language we can still hear Shakespeare talking.

Shakespeare understood the country very well, with what Edgar in King Lear calls its “low fermes / Poore pelting villages, sheep-coates and milles” (1190-1), but his debt to the Stratford of his childhood is particular and profound. He knew the channels that drew off the Avon floods and the conies that come out of their burrows after the rain, the fragile mulberries and the “Tradesmen singing in their shops.” The fact that, all his life, he invested in the lands and properties of the immediate neighbourhood testifies to the hold Stratford exerted upon him. It was the site of his earliest ambitions and expectations and, as we shall see, he wished to restore the fortunes of the Shakespeares there through his personal achievement. He wanted to reassert his father’s name among his fellow townsmen. Stratford was also the permanent home of his family, and the place to which he returned at the end of his life. It remained the centre of his being.

CHAPTER 9 This Prettie Lad Will Proue Our Countries Blisse

In the late sixteenth century, children were customarily trained by means of strict discipline. A boy would take off his cap before addressing his elders and would wait upon his parents at table, standing rather than sitting during the meal. He rose early and recited the morning’s prayers; he washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and then went downstairs where he knelt for his parents’ blessing before breakfast. He would commonly address his father as “sir,” although “dad” does appear in one of Shakespeare’s plays. “Dad” is in fact the formal Welsh word for father, and therefore part of the border patois that Shakespeare knew very well.

Twentieth-century sociologists have emphasised the severity of the sixteenth-century household, where patriarchal authority was dominant and where repression or punishment was the most convenient means of dealing with children of either sex. There must be room for doubt in such a broad analysis, however, and Shakespeare’s plays themselves are often concerned with the failure of parental authority. The children can become “unruly” or “unbridled”; the rod of birch is “more mock’d than fear’d.” Shakespeare’s children are in any case observant and serious, sharp-eyed and often sharp-tongued; they demonstrate respect and obedience, but there is no hint of fear or subservience. In his drama, too, father and son are generally placed in amicable or idealised relationship. So we may prefer the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist.

If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood. It arises unbidden and unannounced in a hundred different contexts. It cannot be denied or misrepresented without severe psychic disturbance on the surface of the writing. It is the very source of the writing itself, and must necessarily remain undefiled. It is of the utmost interest, then, that the children of Shakespeare’s plays are all equally precocious and acute, possessing great confidence in themselves. They are sometimes “wayward” and “impatient.” They are also oddly aware and articulate, talking to their elders without any sign of strain or inferiority. In Richard III one of the little princes, soon to be despatched to an unhappy end, is described (1580-1) by his malevolent uncle as

Bold, quicke, ingenious, forward, capable,

He is all the mothers, from the top to toe.

It has become customary to place the young Shakespeare in the conventional Elizabethan world of childhood, engaged in games such as penny-prick or shovel-board, harry-racket or barley-break; in his own plays Shakespeare mentions football and bowls, prisoner’s base and hide-and-seek, as well as the rural games of muss and dun in the mire. He even mentions chess, although he does not appear to know its rules. But it is likely that he was in certain respects an odd child. He was precocious, too, and observant; but he was one who stood apart.

There can be no doubt at all that he devoured books. Much of his early reading comes back in his drama. Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books? He alludes to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, so beloved by Mistress Quickly, and the old English romances of Sir Degore and Sir Eglamour and Bevis of Southampton. Master Slender lends Alice Shortcake The Book of Riddels and Beatrice refers to The Hundred Merry Tales. Some of his earlier biographers concur that he possessed a copy of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and Richard Robinson’s translation of Gesta Romanorum, the legends of which form the staple of some of his plots. For similar reasons the young Shakespeare has been pictured turning the pages of Copland’s Kynge Appolyne of Thyre, Hawes’s Pass Tyme of Pleasure and Bochas’s The Tragedies of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates. There were also the folk stories and the fairy tales of his neighbourhood, given so long a lease on life in his late plays.

Mary Arden’s own role in Henley Street was of course central. With the help of a servant she was obliged to wash and to wring, to make and to mend, to bake and to brew, to measure the malt and the corn, to tend to the garden and the dairy, to spin with her distaff, to clothe the children and to prepare the meals, to distil the wines and dye the cloths, to “dresse up thy dysshe bord, and set al thynges in good order within thy house.”¹ As a girl growing up on the Arden farm she would have in addition been accustomed to milk the cows, to skim the milk, to make butter and cheese, to feed the pigs and the poultry, to winnow the corn and make hay. She would have been expected to be practical and capable.

A brother was born in Shakespeare’s third year. Gilbert Shakespeare was baptised in the autumn of 1566, and nothing much more is ever heard of him. He died at the age of forty-five, having had an unremarkable life as a tradesman in Stratford; it was inevitable that he followed his father’s profession as a glover. He was in essence the dutiful son. But how much more formidable and threatening might he have seemed to the infant Shakespeare on his first appearance into the world? Other sons followed with the curiously coincidental names of two of Shakespeare’s villains, Richard and Edmund, and there were two daughters, Joan and Anne.

More than any other dramatist of his period Shakespeare is concerned with the family; the nature and continuity of the family are invested with the utmost resonance, and can become a metaphor for human society itself. In his plays violence erupts between brothers more frequently than between fathers and sons. The father may be weak or self-serving, but he is never the target of hostility or revenge.

Much attention has been paid instead to the nature of sibling rivalry in Shakespeare’s plays, more specifically to the pattern of the younger brother usurping the place of the older. Edmund replaces Edgar in his father’s affections, and Richard III mounts upon the bodies of his siblings. The Wars of the Roses, as recounted by Shakespeare, can be regarded as a war between brothers. Claudius murders his brother, and Antonio conspires against Prospero. There are other variations upon this sensitive subject. Shakespeare refers to the murder of Abel by his younger brother, Cain, on twenty-five separate occasions. There is also the pervasive presence of envy and jealousy, most aptly captured in the fear of betrayal manifested by characters as diverse as Leontes and Othello. It is one of Shakespeare’s great themes. The biographer should resist the comfortable position of an armchair psychologist, but the connections are at least suggestive. Rivalry between brothers emerges as effortlessly and instinctively in his drama as if it were a principle of composition.

The conditions in the Shakespeare household were of course wrapped in the vital tedium of daily life, beyond the purview of the dramatic imagination. There are, however, stray intimations of status and aspiration. In 1568, the year he became mayor or bailiff of Stratford, John Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms. It was natural, and practical, for a mayor to have a coat of arms for various memorials and banners. Now that he was appointed to high civic office he was able to seal his prominence by becoming a gentleman. Those known as gentlemen were “those whome their race and blood or at least their virtues doo make noble and knowne.”² They comprised some 2 per cent of the population.

John Shakespeare wished to be enlisted in this “register of the Gentle and Noble”³ and, to qualify, he would need to demonstrate that he owned property and goods to the value of £250 and that he lived without the taint of manual labour; his wife was supposed to “dress well” and “to keep servants.”⁴ He presented a pattern for his coat of arms to the College of Heralds, and his application was duly noted. The formula for his arms contained a falcon, a shield and a spear embossed in gold and silver; the falcon is shaking its wings, and holds a spear of gold in its right talon. Hence we interpret “shake spear.” The motto accompanying the device is “Non Sanz Droict” or “Not Without Right.” It is a bold assertion of gentility. For unknown reasons, however, John Shakespeare did not proceed with his application. He may have been unwilling to pay the heralds’ large fees. Or he may have had only a passing interest in what seems essentially to have been a civic duty.

But then, twenty-eight years later, his son arranged it for him. William Shakespeare renewed his father’s application, with the original coat of arms, and succeeded. At last his father was a gentleman. But if it had been a long-cherished ambition, it may have been done partly to please his mother. He was upholding his mother’s claims to gentility.

CHAPTER 10 What Sees Thou There?

In 1569 the theatre came to Stratford. Under the auspices of John Shakespeare, the mayor, the new players of London were allowed to perform in the guildhall and in the inn-yards of the town. It is an important moment in Shakespeare’s own history, too, when the five-year-old boy was first able to witness the world of pageantry and seeming. His father invited two sets of players to entertain the town, the Queen’s Men and the Earl of Worcester’s Men. It would indeed have been all-round entertainment complete with music and dancing, singing and “tumbling”; actors were also expected to be minstrels and acrobats. There were dumb-shows, and speeches, and pageants with drums and trumpets. There were duels and wrestlings. How much the young Shakespeare saw, or remembered, is an open question. But there is testimony from an exact contemporary who witnessed the players in Gloucester. He recalled that “at suche a play, my father tooke me with him and made mee stand between his legges, as he sate upon one of the benches, where we saw and heard very well.” It was a play of king and courtiers, of songs and transformations and colourful costumes. This contemporary goes on to say that “this sight took such impression in me that when I came towards mans estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if I had seen it newly acted.”¹

There were many more opportunities for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to see the London players. Ten groups of them came to Stratford over the next few years, as part of their touring “circuit.” In one year alone five companies passed through. The Queen’s Men visited the town three times, and the Earl of Worcester’s Men travelled here on six separate occasions. There were performances by the Earl of Warwick’s Men, the Earl of Oxford’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s Men and several other groups of travelling players. They generally comprised companies of seven or eight, unlike the earlier players who numbered three men, a boy and a dog. The young Shakespeare would have been able to watch the best of the London troupes, therefore, imbibing the poetry and the spectacle of the emerging stage. The names of some of the plays in performance convey perhaps the atmosphere of the period—A Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, Cambises, Horestes, Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Damon and Pithias, The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art are only some of a number of dramas that poured forth from the newly secularised profession of play-writing. The playwrights took their material from anything and everything — from histories to collections of romance, from the classical plays performed at the Inns of Court to popular burlesque, from spiritual allegory to fantastic legend. It was a world of witty repartee and declamation, but it was also a world of imaginary countries and mysterious islands, of strange seas and caverns, of unvarnished evil and unearthly goodness, of dramatic lament and generally exaggerated feeling. The young Shakespeare could watch these plays unfolding before him. He would inevitably, if unconsciously, acquire a sense of dramatic space and an ear for heightened dialogue or for declamations. It is appropriate that the English drama was coming to slow maturity in the same period as Shakespeare himself; they were both children of their time, sharing a newly awakened sense of possible achievement.

There were other forms of dramatic entertainment in Stratford. Whitsun “pastimes,” for example, were still being devised in 1583 by Davy Jones, a relative of the Shakespeares by marriage. These were mumming plays with plenty of ritual and symbolic action. Costumes and masks were worn; the characters were given names such as Big Head or Pickle Herring, while the action itself was concerned with slayings and miraculous healings. In Return of the Native Thomas Hardy describes what must have been one of the last true mummers’ plays, with a battle between St. George and a Turkish knight.

It is also likely that John Shakespeare took his son to Coventry, only twenty miles away, to witness the celebrated cycle of mystery plays performed in that city. They were not formally discontinued until Shakespeare had reached his fifteenth year. In five separate dramatic passages Shakespeare mentions the performances of the popular stage villain of these religious entertainments, King Herod. He also uses the expression “All hail” as a harbinger of unfortunate events. In the New Testament Jesus uses this form of address as a blessing. But in the mystery plays it is given to Judas as a sign of threat, on greeting Christ before betraying him. We can infer that Shakespeare has picked up the unhappy connotations of the phrase from watching the mystery plays. So he was acquainted with the pageant wagons and their epic cycle, from Creation to Judgement. He heard the vulgar comedy of the “low” characters and the refined sentiments of their superiors. He saw the characteristic mingling of farce and spirituality, piety and pantomime; he listened to the mixture of lyrical songs and pounding pentameter, of Latinate diction and Anglo-Saxon demotic. It was an inclusive drama containing no less than the history of the world and the character of its peoples, played out against the background of eternity. It has often been suggested that some of the power of Shakespeare’s history plays is derived from his use of the elements of Christ’s Passion that he would have witnessed in the mysteries; the whole notion of his cyclical dramas, taking in so much of the history of the kingdom, seems a direct reflection of his earliest dramatic experiences.

Shakespeare himself refers to the “Death Mouth,” the portal of Hell constructed for the mingled fascination and alarm of the populace. The “Porter of Hell,” who played a large part in the mystery plays, re-emerges as the Porter in Macbeth. Critics have discerned parallels between the mystery plays and the plots of Lear, Othello and Macbeth. The baiting of Jesus reappears in Julius Caesar and Coriolanus. Shakespeare’s was the last era of the medieval mysteries. Yet throughout the history of English culture we see continuity rather than closure. Part of that continuity lies in the achievement of Shakespeare himself, who conveyed all the enchantment, ambiguity and passion of the old religious drama within the new forms of theatre. The masques in his plays are medieval in inspiration, as are the names of such characters as Slender and Shallow and Benvolio. One of Shakespeare’s last plays, Pericles, reverts to the medieval pageant form of the miracles. If he had not seen one when he was a child, then his is indeed a miracle of reinvention.

CHAPTER 11 I Sommon Up Remembrance of Things Past

And when Davy Jones performed the Whitsun pastimes in front of the people of Stratford, was his young relative a part of the cast? The first accounts of his life suggest that in his youth Shakespeare was already an aspiring actor. In 1681 John Aubrey reports that “I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe, he would do it in a high style, and make a Speech.”¹ The “neighbours” may by the time of Aubrey’s visit have realised that their town had harboured a famous actor and tragedian, and shaped their memories accordingly; Aubrey himself is in any case a most unreliable narrator. It has often been proved, however, that behind the most fanciful account there lies a substratum of truth. And there may be a piece of authenticity even here. The act of “killing a calf” was in fact a dramatic improvisation performed by itinerant players at fairs or festivals; it was a form of shadow-play behind a cloth and in the accounts of the royal household in 1521 there is a payment to a man for “killing of a calfe before my ladys grace behynde a clothe.” (It is interesting that the image of the arras or cloth is a leitmotif in Shakespearian drama.) If there is a true memory in the neighbours’ reminiscences, therefore, it would be that of the young Shakespeare acting.

There is nothing so unusual in that. We are told that the young Molière — the actor and dramatist whom Shakespeare most closely resembles — was a “born actor.”² Dickens, with whom there are other similarities to Shakespeare, confessed that he had been an actor from his earliest childhood. The idea of acting here is not simply one of histrionics or bravado; it means the ability and the desire to perform in front of other people. It may represent a longing to be free of restricting circumstance, an urge towards more powerful or more interesting status, what Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida describes as the “spirit” that “in aspiration lifts him from the earth” (2453-4). That is why there are various speculations about the young Shakespeare joining a group of travelling players, during one of their sojourns in Stratford, before accompanying them to London.

There was a tradition and an expectation, however, that the son of a “rising” family would attend the local petty or elementary school as preparation for more orthodox educational advancement. There seems no reason to doubt that this was the case with the five- or six-year-old Shakespeare, who would then become acquainted with the delights of reading, writing and arithmetic. In later life he generally practised a “secretary hand” very close to the one used as a model in the first English book on handwriting. If his mother had already taught him to read, then he could go on to sample the primer and the catechism. These were primarily works of moral and religious instruction, containing the Lord’s Prayer and the Creed, the Ten Commandments and daily prayers, as well as assorted graces and metrical psalms. It is interesting that the schoolmaster or “pedant” he satirises in Love’s Labour’s Lost is the master of a petty school who “teaches boyes the Horne-booke” (1649). A hornbook was used in the very first stages of learning. It was a wooden tablet, supporting a paper protected by thin horn, on which were printed the alphabet, the vowels, certain syllables and the Lord’s Prayer. Shakespeare’s imagination reverts to this early schooling also in Twelfth Night, where Maria refers to “a Pedant that keepes a Schoole i’ th’ Church” (1419-20). The petty school at Stratford was in fact held in the guild chapel, and was supervised by the assistant to the schoolmaster known as the usher.

The church was the site of his early learning. At the age of five or six he would have been expected to attend the sermons and the reading of the homilies, about which he might be questioned by his master; these latter were the doctrines of the Church and state as approved by the queen and privy council. They were essentially lessons in good Elizabethan citizenship and, as such, were later redeployed by Shakespeare in his history plays. In the Book of Homilies, published in 1574, there is, for example, an oration “Against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion” which might be the sub-text for the three dramas concerning Henry VI. Even as a small boy Shakespeare must have been aware of the disparity between his familial religion and the orthodox pieties of the Stratford church; it was a difference of atmosphere more than doctrine, perhaps, but when two faiths compete the alert child will learn the power as well as the emptiness of words.

Somehow or other, he came to know the Bible very well. He may have been blessed with a singularly retentive memory rather than any more religious capacity, but it is one of his most significant sources. He knew the popular Geneva Bible and the later Bishops’ Bible, with a marked preference for the vigorous expressiveness of the former. It was known to be the household Bible, familiar to the folk of Stratford, and many phrases from his plays bear a striking resemblance to the language of this version. It has been calculated that he refers to forty-two of its books, but there is one anomaly. He prefers the beginnings of books, or scriptures, to their conclusions. He quotes extensively from the first four chapters of Genesis and in the New Testament he is most familiar with chapters 1 to 7 of Matthew. The same is often true of his secular reading — he is most at home with the first two books of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—and it leads to the conclusion that he did not necessarily persevere in his study of the various texts he employed. He imbibed a great deal at the beginning, and then tailed off. He was an opportunistic reader, who gathered quickly what he needed. Even at this early age he may have possessed an instinctive grasp of structure and of narrative.

It has often been suggested that the scriptural “colouring” of Shakespeare’s language comes from a dedicated reading of the Old and New Testaments; but it is more likely that he adopted them almost instinctively as the most readily available form of sonorous language. He was entranced by the sound and by the cadence. Of course he was not just a purloiner of local effects. The evidence of his drama suggests that he was also impressed by the book of Job and by the parable of the Prodigal Son; in each case the workings of Providence solicited his interest. Phrases and images returned to him when he needed them, so that the Bible became for him an echo-chamber of the imagination. It is perhaps ironical that the Bible was translated into English at the insistence of religious reformers. The reformers, as it were, gave the sacred book to Shakespeare. He returned the compliment with his own plangent and resourceful language.

CHAPTER 12 A Nowne and a Verbe and Such Abhominable Wordes

From the petty school Shakespeare advanced to the King’s New School, where he received a free education by right as the son of a Stratford alderman. Shakespeare’s first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, states that John Shakespeare “had bred him, ’tis true, for some time at a Free-School, where ’tis probable he acquir’d that little Latin he was Master of …”¹ The school assembled in a classroom behind the guild chapel; it was on the floor above the guildhall itself, and was reached by means of a tile-covered staircase of stone. It is in use to this day, a longevity that suggests the prevalence of tradition and continuity in Stratford life. A long and narrow room with a very high oaked-timbered ceiling, strong and many-beamed with bosses in the middle where the beams join, its windows overlook Church Street, which may have afforded a distraction. Certainly the sound of the world could not be kept out.

One engraving illustrating an Elizabethan schoolroom, dating from 1574, shows a master behind a desk, with a book opened in front of him, while the pupils sit on wooden benches in various stages of attention and inattention. On the floor, curiously enough, lies a dog gnawing a bone. There is no sign of the birch or rod that is supposed to have been so prevalent in sixteenth-century school life. The amount of discipline may have been exaggerated by those who like to emphasise the cruelties of Elizabethan life.

Before he entered this new domain the young Shakespeare would have to demonstrate that he could read and write English, that he was “fit” to study the Latin tongue, and that he was “ready to enter into his Accidence and Principles of Grammar.”² He was about to be introduced to the language of the educated world. He and his father climbed upstairs to the schoolroom where the master read out the statutes of the school, to which the boy agreed to conform; for the sum of 4 pence William Shakespeare was then enrolled in the register. He brought with him candles, fuel, books and writing materials; these would have included a writing book, a glass of ink, an ink horn, and half a quire of paper. He could not have inherited a set of school texts from his father, and so they would also have been purchased. It was an undertaking close to a rite of passage.

The school day was strictly controlled and supervised. It was, after all, the training ground of society itself. The young Shakespeare was present at six or seven in the morning, summer or winter, and replied “adsum” when his name was called. The prayers of the day were then recited, and a psalm sung, succeeded by lessons that continued until nine. There may have been partitions to segregate boys of different ages or different abilities; Shakespeare himself was part of a class of approximately forty-one others at their desks. There was a short space for breakfast of bread and ale, and then more lessons until eleven. Shakespeare then walked home for dinner, and returned on the ringing of the bell at one. During the course of the afternoon fifteen minutes were allotted for game or play, such as wrestling or shooting with a bow and arrow. The school was closed at five. This routine was followed for six days out of seven.

The curriculum of the Stratford school was based upon a thorough grounding in Latin grammar and in rhetoric, inculcated through the arts of reading, memorisation and writing. The first stage of this process consisted in learning simple Latin phrases which could be applied to the ordinary conditions of life and, through an understanding of their construction, in recognising the elementary grammar of the language. To a young child this would be a bewildering and painfully exacting task — to conjugate verbs and to decline nouns, to understand the difference between the accusative and the ablative cases, to alter the normal structure of language so that the verb came at the end of a sentence. How strange, too, that words might have masculine and feminine genders. They became living things, dense or slippery according to taste. Like Milton and Jonson Shakespeare learned, at an early age, that it was possible to change their order for the sake of euphony or emphasis. It is a lesson he did not forget.

In the first months the schoolboy learned the eight parts of Latin speech, before being moved on to a book that Shakespeare invokes on many occasions. William Lilly’s Short Introduction of Grammar is a text on which children have been shipwrecked. Lilly explained the simple grammatical formulations, and then illustrated them with examples from Cato, Cicero or Terence. The children would be expected to imitate these masters by writing very simple Latin sentences. It has been demonstrated that Shakespeare’s punctuation is derived from that of Lilly and that, when he quotes from classical authors, he often uses passages that he read and memorised in Lilly. His spelling of classical names is determined by Lilly. There are many allusions to this process in his drama, not the least being the interrogation in The Merry Wives of Windsor of a pupil named William by a pedagogue of the strictest type. “I pray you haue your remembrance (childe) Accusatiuo hing, hang, hog” (1897-8). This Short Introduction of Grammar was a book that, approached with trepidation as well as concentration, burned itself within his memory.

Shakespeare’s own references to schooldays are not entirely happy. The whining schoolboy creeping like snail unwillingly to school is well enough known, but there are other allusions to the plight of the pupil forced to labour over his texts. In Henry IV, Part Two there is a line concerning “a schoole broke vp,” when each child “hurries towards his home, and sporting place” (2177-8). It is a stray reference but it is, for that reason, even more suggestive. Yet there is a paradox here. Of all the dramatists of the period Shakespeare is the one who most consistently draws on schoolboys, schoolmasters and school curricula as matters for comedy or comment. The notion of schooling was central to him. Perhaps, like most adults, he dreamed of early days.

In the second year the young Shakespeare’s understanding of grammar was put to the test in collections of phrases, aphorisms and commonplaces carefully selected to edify as well as to instruct. These were cast into the memory, also, and it is perhaps worth noting that the child was being continually instructed in the art of remembrance. It was the ground of his education, but of course it proved fruitful in his later career as an actor. The brief sentences were laid out in Sententiae Pueriles, a book to which Shakespeare alludes on more than two hundred occasions. These were dry sayings that, in the alchemy of Shakespeare’s imagination, are sometimes changed into the strangest poetry. “Comparatio omnis odiosa” becomes in the mouth of Dogberry “Comparisons are odorous,” and “ad unguem” turns into Costard’s “ad dunghill.” In this same year of his education he was introduced to selections from the plays of Plautus and of Terence, dramatic episodes that may have quickened his own dramatic spirit. In his account of the proper education for children Erasmus recommends that the master take his pupils through a complete play by Terence, noting the plot and the diction. The master might also explain “the varieties of Comedy.”³ From these authorities, too, Shakespeare gathered some dim intimation of scenes within a five-act structure.

In his third year he read the stories of Aesop in simple Latin translation. He must have memorised these because, in later life, he was able to repeat the story of the lion and the mouse, of the crow with borrowed feathers, of the ant and the fly. There are altogether some twenty-three allusions to these classical fables in his drama. By this time Shakespeare would have been able to compose English into Latin and to translate Latin into English. He scanned the colloquies of Erasmus and Vives in search of what Erasmus called “copia” or plenty. He learned how to pile phrase upon phrase, to use metaphor to decorate an argument or simile to point a moral. He rang changes upon chosen words, and variations upon selected themes. He learnt the art of richness and elaboration from these scholars, whose purpose was to bring classical education into the living world. In Shakespeare, at least, they triumphantly succeeded.

For out of imitation, as he was taught to understand, came invention. It was possible, in the course of a school exercise, to take phrases from a variety of sources and in their collocation to create a new piece of work. It was possible to write a letter, or compose a speech, from a wholly imagined point of view. The imitation of great originals was an essential requirement for any composition; it was not considered to be theft or plagiarism, but an inspired act of adaptation and assimilation. In later life Shakespeare rarely invented any of his plots, and often lifted passages verbatim from other books. In his mature drama he took plots from a variety of sources and mingled them, creating out of different elements a new compound. There is an old medieval saying, to the effect that he who learns young never forgets. Shakespeare was introduced to this method in the fourth year of his schooling, when he was given a selection from the Latin poets, Flores Poetarum; from the study of these flowers of the poets he was supposed to compose his own verses. In the process he became acquainted with Virgil and with Horace, whose words resurface in his own works.

But, more significantly, he began to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid. At an early age he was introduced to the music of myth. He quotes from Ovid continually. In one of his earliest plays, Titus Andronicus, one of the characters brings a copy of the Metamorphoses on to the stage. It is one of the few literary “props” in English drama, but it is a highly appropriate one. Here were Jason and Medea, Ajax and Ulysses, Venus and Adonis, Pyramus and Thisbe. It is a world in which the rocks and trees seem to possess consciousness, and where the outline of the supernatural world is to be seen in hills and running brooks. Ovid celebrates transience and desire, the nature of change in all things. In later life Shakespeare was said to possess the “soul” of Ovid in his own mellifluous and sweetly sounding verses; indeed there is some close affinity. Something in Shakespeare’s nature responded to this swiftly moving landscape. It took him out of the ordinary world. He was entranced by its fantastic artifice, its marvellous theatricality, and what can only be described as its pervasive sexuality. There is little reason to doubt that Shakespeare was a thoroughly sexual being. Ovid was the favourite writer both of Christopher Marlowe and of Thomas Nashe. But Metamorphoses became Shakespeare’s golden book. The words of Ovid entered him and found some capacious residence within him.

In succeeding years, in the classroom above the guildhall, he studied Sallust and Caesar, Seneca and Juvenal. Hamlet is found reading from the tenth satire of Juvenal, which he dismisses as “Words, words, words.” It was a basic grammar-school text. Shakespeare may even have had a slight brush with the Greek authors, although any evidence for this is marginal at best. What is not in doubt, however, is his Latinity. He uses a Latinate vocabulary with consummate ease and proficiency; he writes of “intermissive miseries” and “loathsome sequestration.” He can use the language of the scholar and the pedagogue. It could be claimed that he simply had a good ear, and a poet’s instinct for the succinct and shaping word, but it seems unlikely that this “too ceremonious and traditional” language (to use his own phrase in King Richard III) came to him by nature. Samuel Johnson, who was learned enough to recognise learning in others, remarked that “I always said that Shakespeare had Latin enough to grammaticise his English.” We may see the young Shakespeare, therefore, spending thirty or forty hours of each week in memorising, construing, parsing and repeating prose and verse in Latin. We may hear him talking the language, to his schoolmaster and to his fellow pupils. It may seem an odd perspective in which to place him — especially to anyone accustomed to him warbling “native wood-notes wild”—but Shakespeare is as much part of the revival of Latin culture in the Renaissance as Francis Bacon or Philip Sidney. One formidable scholar of Shakespeare has even suggested that “if letters written by Shakespeare ever turn up, they will be in Latin.”⁴

On the question of Shakespeare’s education, Ben Jonson was decidedly superior. He was “frequently reproaching him with the want of Learning, and Ignorance of the Ancients,”⁵ by which he meant that Shakespeare chose not to follow classical models. Jonson was confusing negligence with ignorance. And when he declared that Shakespeare had “small Latine and lesse Greeke” he was overstating the case for the sake of a phrase. Shakespeare’s Latin was as good as that of any other grammar-school boy, and would rival the knowledge shown by any undergraduate of classics in a modern university. Jonson may also have been implicitly comparing the curriculum of the King’s New School with that of his own Westminster School; but, to judge by the educated and professional schoolmasters of Stratford, the comparison may not all be in Jonson’s favour.

The final stages of Shakespeare’s education were perhaps the formative ones. He moved from grammar to oratory, and learned the arts of elocution. What we call creative writing, the Elizabethans called rhetoric. In the schoolroom Shakespeare was obliged to learn the elementary laws and rules of this now arcane subject. He read a smattering of Cicero and Quintilian. He learned the importance of inventio and dispositio, elocutio and memoria, pronunciatio or action and delivery; he remembered these principles for the rest of his life. He knew how to invent variations upon a theme, and how to ring changes on the sound as well as the sense of words; he knew how to compose themes and to write out formal orations. He also learned how to avoid hyperbole and false rhetoric; in his plays, he gave them to his comic characters. For the alert child it becomes a wonderful means of composition itself. Rhetoric, and the devices of rhetoric, then become a form of creation.

He was trained, as part of this act of creation, to take both sides of any question. The ancient habit of the philosophers and rhetoricians was to argue in utramque partem—on either side of the argument. Any event or action can thus be viewed from a variety of different perspectives. The artist must, like Janus, look in two directions at once. In the process language itself became a form of contest or competition. But, equally importantly for the young Shakespeare, the truth of any situation becomes infinitely malleable and wholly dependent upon the speaker’s eloquence. What better preparation for a dramatist? And what better training could there have been for the making of Mark Antony’s oration in Julius Caesar or the pleading of Portia in The Merchant of Venice?

There were specific lessons in action and in delivery. In one text for use in grammar schools it was ordained that the pupils “be taught to pronounce every thing audibly, leisurely, distinctly & naturally; sounding out especially the last syllable, that each word may be fully understood.”⁶ It was important to cultivate “sweete pronunciation.” In the same book it is demanded that the pupils “utter every dialogue lively, as if they themselves were the persons which did speake in that dialogue.”⁷ It is a good training for the theatre. It was also a curriculum that encouraged self-assertion. In his later life Shakespeare was not averse to staking his claim to dramatic pre-eminence, and we may imagine him to have been a singularly competitive small boy. He may not have become embroiled in fights, like the juvenile Keats, but he was fast and full of furious energy. He was, we surmise, easily bored.

It was not necessarily a print culture. It was also a culture of the voice, its exponents being primarily preachers, divines and actors. That is why the theatre rapidly became the supreme art form of the age. This oral culture was of necessity deeply connected with the old medieval culture of England, encompassing storytellers, poetical reciters, ballad singers and minstrels. Shakespeare is much more likely to have heard, than to have read, poetry. An oral culture relies, also, upon the formation of strong memories. If you cannot consult a book, you must perforce remember. Schoolboys were trained in systems of memory or “mnemonics.” Ben Jonson declared that “I can repeate whole books that I have read,”⁸ and this was not a singular accomplishment. It is the context for the feats of memory exemplified in the ability of Elizabethan actors to perform several plays in one week.

Plays were regularly performed in the grammar schools of England, with Plautus and Terence as the staple of the juvenile repertoire. In the grammar school of Shrewsbury the pupils were obliged, each Thursday morning, to perform one act of a comedy. The boys of King’s School, Canterbury — among them Christopher Marlowe — put on plays each Christmas in a tradition that must have reached many other grammar schools. It is important to remember that drama was one of the foundations of Elizabethan teaching. From the smallest grammar school to the “moots” in the Inns of Court, debate and dialogue were the staple of learning. It is no accident that much of the earliest English drama derives from the Inns, where the legal training of “putting the case” developed into sheer theatre. In the school of Stratford speeches were learned and delivered, and conversations were often treated as contests of wit. “A delivery & sweet action,” it was written, “is the glosse and beauty of any discourse that belongs to a scholler.”⁹ We may believe that it was one in which Shakespeare excelled. It is unlikely that the man who was known for his grace and fluency did not demonstrate those virtues at an early age. We do not know whether plays were performed at the King’s New School, but there is evidence in Shakespeare’s drama of a favourite school play entitled Acolastus. Children have a natural gift for dramatisation, and they are fully able to imagine scenes and characters taken from their reading; Shakespeare was exceptional only in preserving these abilities to the end of his life. It suggests some profound irritation, or dissatisfaction, with the limitations of the adult world.

There is further evidence of his dramatic education in the careers of the schoolmasters of Stratford. Two of them, Thomas Jenkins and John Cot-tam, had been educated at Merchant Taylors’ School under the tutelage of Richard Mulcaster; Mulcaster’s pedagogic system “advocated teaching through drama, more specifically through acting.”¹⁰ What more natural than that they should continue the theatrical tradition created by their famous teacher?

The first of the school masters, Walter Roche, is the one about whom least is known. He resigned his post in the year that Shakespeare joined the school, but lived in Stratford for the rest of his life. He has the distinction in any case of formally introducing the young boy to the schoolroom. The career of the next master of the Stratford school is of more interest. Simon Hunt was schoolmaster for the first four years of Shakespeare’s education and, although much of that schooling was no doubt undertaken by his assistant, he remained a powerful presence in Shakespeare’s young life. It is significant, then, that he reverted to his old Catholic faith; he left Stratford in order to train at the seminary in Douai as a Jesuit priest and missionary to England. Whether his Catholic sympathies had any material effect upon the young boy is another matter; but it would surely have compounded the family’s own piety and bolstered what seems to have been the Catholic environment of his growing-up.

Simon Hunt was succeeded by Thomas Jenkins, a Londoner and son of a “poor man” and “old servant” of Sir Thomas White; he had been a student of Latin and Greek at St. John’s College, Oxford, which had been established by the very same Sir Thomas White. White was a Roman Catholic, and St. John’s College was known to be sympathetic to Catholic undergraduates. Edmund Campion, Catholic saint and martyr, was attached to St. John’s College, and taught Thomas Jenkins there. Jenkins can therefore be considered to be indulgent, at the very least, to the Catholic cause. He can also be considered an expert classicist, and it was he who first introduced Shakespeare to the work of Ovid. He was in every sense a dedicated teacher; he had requested two years’ absence from his Oxford college “that he may give himself to teach children.”¹¹

When Jenkins resigned in 1579 he found his own replacement in John Cottam, a fellow scholar from Merchant Taylors’ and Oxford University. Cottam’s younger brother, Thomas Cottam, was a Jesuit priest and missionary who resided at Douai with Simon Hunt. There they were joined by a fellow pupil of Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, the son of a Catholic farmer from Shottery. The associations with Shakespeare are close, therefore, and almost pressing. Thomas Cottam returned to England with a letter from Robert Debdale to his father. Both Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale were later arrested, for their proselytising activities in England, and executed. From allusions in his plays it is clear that Shakespeare followed the career of his erstwhile schoolfellow with some interest. He was, you might say, one of the fraternity.

John Cottam left the King’s New School in the year of his brother’s execution. The last connection with Shakespeare’s schooldays was another master, Alexander Aspinall, popularly supposed to be the model for the pedantic dunce Holofernes. And so the unfortunate man entered the creative imagination of the English. But since he did not enter the school until Shakespeare was eighteen, the connection may not be a close one. The young man no longer attended the New School; but he did know Aspinall, and may have observed his pedagoguery with an eye more objective than that of a school-boy. He is even believed to have written a set of verses, to accompany Aspinall’s present of gloves (bought from John Shakespeare) to an intended bride:

The gift is small

The will is all:

Asheyander Asbenall.

Funnily enough, the little poem sounds like Shakespeare, and may count as some amends for Holofernes.

CHAPTER 13 That’s Not So Good Now

In the early years of Shakespeare’s schooling his father persevered in illegal dealings in wool and in money-lending. They were in a sense conventional offences, and not likely to injure John Shakespeare’s reputation in any significant way. They were noted in the public records but he continued with his normal civic duties, and at the beginning of 1572 he and Adrian Quiney travelled to London in order to represent their town at the lawcourts in Westminster. There was a dispute with the lord of the manor, the Earl of Warwick. A few months later John Shakespeare was in Warwick to attend a post-mortem on a local miller. Throughout this period he attended the requisite “halls” when the council met for business.

There is a pretty story concerning another journey, during which he might have been accompanied by his son. Elizabeth I was engaged in one of her periodic progresses when, in the summer of 1575, she arrived at Kenilworth Castle; this castle was only twelve miles from Stratford, and the dignitaries of the locality were no doubt asked to attend in honour of Her Majesty. The Earl of Leicester’s Men were here to entertain her, but there were also various masques and pageants, dramatic spectacles and games, performed before her. One of these theatrical interludes included the presentation of a mermaid and various nymphs upon an artificial lake, followed by Arion riding upon a dolphin. It was part of the general extravagance of allegory and classical reference employed on such occasions, but many of Shakespeare’s biographers have insisted that it inspired a reference in Twelfth Night to “Arion on the Dolphines backe” (54) and a speech by Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (504-6):

… thou remembrest

Since once I sat vpon a promontory,

And heard a Mearmaide on a Dolphins backe …

It is at least suggestive. And a pretty story does no harm.

It cannot be said that John Shakespeare’s fortunes in this period were in any way declining. In 1575 he purchased two houses, with gardens and orchards, in Stratford for £40. It seems likely that these were contiguous to the dwelling in Henley Street, which he could now enlarge for his ever-growing family. He had also purchased land in Bishopton and Welcombe, which he later bequeathed to his son. He had already leased a house to William Burbage, and had also stood surety for two debts incurred by Richard Hath-away. His relative affluence makes his subsequent conduct all the more puzzling.

At the beginning of 1577, he left the borough council precipitately and abruptly. He had been present at its deliberations for the last thirteen years; after this date, he reappears in “hall” only once. This strange withdrawal does not seem to have been prompted by personal animosities. Indeed he was treated by his erstwhile colleagues with patience and forbearance. He was excused the fines generally levied for being absent, and he remained on the list of aldermen for a further ten years. His gown of office was not confiscated or “deprived.”

Many reasons have been adduced for his decision, ranging from ill-health and a possible stroke to drunkenness. It is unlikely that he was in any financial trouble; he seems to have remained prosperous throughout his son’s time in Stratford. There has been speculation that he avoided paying certain rates, or was deliberately under-assessed upon them, for reasons of penury. But this may simply be a misunderstanding of the difference between rates in the borough, and rates in the parish, of Stratford. A far more likely cause has been found in his espousal of the old religion. The year before his withdrawal a grand ecclesiastical commission was established by the Privy Council to investigate the religious affairs of the nation. Among its ordinances was one established to inquire into “all singular, heretical, erroneous and offensive opinions,” and “to order, correct, reform and punish any persons wilfully and obstinately absenting themselves from church and service.”¹ The members of the borough council were no doubt asked to expedite these matters, perhaps even to draw up lists of recusants who “obstinately” refused to attend church service. To whom else could the commissioners turn? And so John Shakespeare, recusant, absented himself.

Later that year Whitgift was nominated to be the new Bishop of Worcester, in which see Stratford lay. Whitgift was known to be assiduous in the pursuit and prosecution of those who held “erroneous and offensive opinions.” In the year of John Shakespeare’s resignation, he arrived in Stratford on a religious visitation to hunt out heretics. At that time, he must have requested the help of the Stratford council. But John Shakespeare had gone nine months before.

John Shakespeare’s position was all the more precarious because through marriage he had become part of the Arden affinity; in this period the Catholic, Edward Arden, was engaged in full feud with the Protestant Earl of Leicester, who had charge of the county and who sent sectarian preachers to Stratford. Any member of the Arden family, however removed, could become an object of suspicion. So the world of religious politics conspired against Shakespeare’s father and obliged him to withdraw from public life. His colleagues were reluctant to see his departure, but they understood his reasons. This can be no more than a guess, but it does at least make sense of his subsequent behaviour.

Shakespeare was thirteen at the time of his father’s relinquishment of public duty and honour. Any effect upon his son can only be supposed, but the boy was of an age when rank and status are important among his fellows. In such a small and deeply hierarchical society, it seems likely that he felt his father’s departure most keenly. When we try to measure his response it is best to trust the tale rather than the teller. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with authoritative males who have failed. That may of course be a definition of tragedy itself; in which case it will be one of the reasons for Shakespeare’s intense engagement with it. Many of the central male characters of his drama have been disappointed in the practical business of the world; we may adduce here Timon and Hamlet, Prospero and Coriolanus. This failure does not engender aggression or bitterness on the dramatist’s part; quite the contrary. It is invariably the case that Shakespeare sympathises with failure, with Antony or Brutus or Richard II. As his first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, put it of Wolsey in All Is True, “he makes his Fall and Ruin the Subject of general Compassion.”² As soon as the male protagonists begin to lose their status, Shakespeare invests them with all the poetry of his being. It may be that John Shakespeare’s decline also became the context for his son’s preoccupation both with gentility and with the restoration of family honour. It will also help to elucidate, if not to explain, his unprecedented interest in the figure of the king. If the nominal head of the family has failed, it becomes quite natural to create an idealised patriarchy or an idealised relationship between father and son. In any case, Shakespeare himself made sure that he would never suffer his father’s failure.

In the course of the next four years John Shakespeare became enmeshed in further difficulties and negotiations. In 1578 he refused to pay a levy for six additional soldiers, equipped at Stratford’s expense. In the same year he did not attend the meetings on election day. He was not asked to pay the requisite fines for these offences. He was also involved in complicated land deals concerning some Arden property bequeathed to his wife. On 12 November he sold off 70 acres of Arden property in Wilmcote, the ancestral home of the Ardens, to Thomas Webbe and his heirs; the terms were that, after a period of twenty-one years, these lands would revert to the Shakespeare family. Thomas Webbe was a relative of some kind; Robert Webbe was Mary Arden’s nephew. Just two days later John Shakespeare mortgaged a house and 56 acres at Wilmcote to Edmund Lambert, Mary Arden’s brother-in-law. This was security on a loan by Lambert to Shakespeare of £40. The loan was to be repaid two years later, in 1580, when the property would be handed back to the Shakespeares. As it turned out Edmund Lambert never returned the house and land, citing various unpaid loans, and John Shakespeare sued him. It is a confusing history but the pattern is clear: the Shakespeares were selling land to relatives while arranging for its later reversion to them. In the following year they sold their portion of the property in Snitterfield, once belonging to Robert Arden, to their nephew.

The most plausible explanation for these complicated arrangements lies in John Shakespeare’s difficult position as a known recusant. Whitgift had made his visitation to Stratford, and the erstwhile alderman would soon be cited as one who refused to attend church services. One of the penalties of recusancy was the confiscation of land. An official report, published at a slightly later date, noted how recusants employed “preventions commonly … in use to deceive.” One subterfuge or “prevention” was detailed thus—“Recusants convey all their lands and goods to friends, and are relieved by those which have the same lands.” Others “demise their land to certain tenants.”³ The strategy is clear. A recusant such as John Shakespeare could convey his property to safe hands, to relatives rather than to “friends,” and thus avoid the prospect of confiscation. After an agreed interval the property was then returned. The conduct of Edmund Lambert, however, acts as a reminder that events did not always turn out as happily as they had been planned. His refusal to hand over the property at Wilmcote may lie behind some terse words from Horatio in Hamlet concerning “those foresaid lands / So by his father lost” (102-3). John Shakespeare was specifically “losing” lands once bequeathed to Mary Arden. It does not take an expert in marital relations to conclude that there was some unacknowledged tension between wife and husband, the inheritors of the Arden and Shakespeare names. As the example of D. H. Lawrence may suggest, these tensions may be bad for the child but good for the writer.

The whole imbroglio emphasises the increasing difficulty of John Shakespeare’s position, and no doubt the increasing anxiety of his family. The situation was compounded by the death in the spring of 1579 of Shakespeare’s sister. Anne Shakespeare was only eight years old. There is an item in the parish register concerning “the bell & paull for Mr. Shaxpers dawghter.” The sorrows of the Shakespeare family are not open to inspection.

CHAPTER 14 Of Such a Mery Nimble Stiring Spirit

Shakespeare himself was fifteen in that year, 1579, and entering that period of life when, according to the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, there is nothing “but getting wenches with childe, wronging the Auncientry, stealing, fighting” (1313-14). He committed at least one of these offences, and is popularly supposed to have been guilty of two others. But we may prefer to see him as Goethe saw the young Hamlet, as “a good companion, pliant, courteous, discreet, and able to forget and forgive an injury.” If he was also “able to discern and value the good and the beautiful in the arts,”¹ then he reached the borders of manhood at an appropriate time. In this year were published North’s translations of Plutarch, from which he would later borrow, as well as the Euphues of John Lyly and The Shepheardes Calender of Edmund Spenser. New forms of prose, and new kinds of poetry, were all around him.

It is possible that his father paid the £5 necessary for his son to continue his schooling after the age of fourteen; only after that age, according to the conventional school curriculum, could he have acquired even the “lesse Greeke” of which Ben Jonson accused him. The age of fourteen, however, was that hard year when boys became apprentices. The young Shakespeare may have started working for his father in some capacity; this was the standard practice of those who were not apprenticed elsewhere. Nicholas Rowe states that after school his father “could give him no better education than his own employment”;² this surmise is confirmed by John Aubrey, who wrote that “when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade.”³ Rowe assumes that John Shakespeare was in poverty, however, and Aubrey assumes that he was a butcher. These assumptions are not correct.

It has also been suggested that the young Shakespeare worked as a lawyer’s clerk, or that he found employment as a schoolmaster in the country, or that he was called up for military service — a duty for which he would have been liable after the age of sixteen. It is perhaps significant that the only form of recruitment known to Shakespeare was that of impressments, and that there are many allusions in his plays to archery. But his extraordinary capacity for entry into imagined worlds has misled many scholars. His apparent knowledge of the technical terms of seamanship — even to the details of dry ship-biscuits — has, for example, convinced some that he served in the English navy. You can never overestimate his powers of assimilation and empathy.

In the absence of certainty, there have emerged many legends concerning Shakespeare’s early years. The most famous of these is his aptitude for poaching. The story concerns his encroachment upon the estate of a local dignitary, Sir Thomas Lucy, and is first mentioned in print by Rowe. Rowe himself gathered it from the actor, Thomas Betterton, who had travelled to Stratford in order to pick up any Shakespearian lore. “He had,” Rowe writes,

by a Misfortune common enough to young Fellows, fallen into ill Company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag’d him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong’d to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by the Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho’ this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Persecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.⁴

The ballad itself was, according to one elderly Warwickshire resident, “stuck upon the park gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwick to proceed against him.”⁵ And then, at a later date, two versions of the ballad itself were fortuitously discovered, one of them ringing the changes on the consonance of “Lucy” and “lowsie.” It might all be dismissed as minor literary speculation — or indeed fabrication, as many scholars believe— except that, quite apart from the testimony of Rowe, the same story was repeated by a clergyman in the late seventeenth century. Richard Davies told the antiquarian Anthony a Wood that Shakespeare “was much given to all unluckinesse in Stealing venison & Rabbits particularly from Sir — Lucy who had him oft whipt and Sometimes Imprisoned & at last made Him fly his Native Country …”⁶ Two independent accounts, employing approximately the same facts, deserve attention. But there are difficulties with the story as it stands. There was no park in the grounds of Sir Thomas Lucy’s house, Charlecote; it was then a “free warren,” and deer were not brought onto the estate until the eighteenth century. As a result of this discovery the site of Shakespeare’s alleged misdeed was moved, two miles away across the Avon, to another of Lucy’s parks called Fullbrooke. Yet it has been pointed out that the Lucys did not have proprietary rights in Fullbrooke until the last years of Shakespeare’s life. Even if Shakespeare had been able to poach the nonexistent deer in a non-existent park, he could not have been whipped for the offence; he would have been fined or imprisoned. Shakespeare does indeed make the allusive connection between “Lucy” and “lowsie,” through the happy medium of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But the target of his humour is much more likely to have been a bailiff of Southwark, William Gardiner, a notorious hater of the theatre who had threatened Shakespeare with arrest. He had married Frances Lucy, and on his coat of arms were impaled three “lucies” or fish. In any event Shakespeare refers with great respect to one of Sir Thomas Lucy’s ancestors, William Lucy, in the first part of Henry VI.

But there may be a certain truth at the bottom of this well of conjecture. Sir Thomas Lucy was, in Shakespeare’s adolescence, a notable persecutor of Catholics. He was an ardent Protestant, a pupil of John Foxe, famous for Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, and as high sheriff and deputy lieutenant of Warwickshire he inflicted his zeal upon the recusants of that county.

In Warwickshire, too, Catholicism was the faith of the gentry and what has been called a “seigneurial” religion in which clients and retainers espoused the old faith as a matter of duty as well as piety. That is why the high politics of the county can be analysed in religious terms, with reforming families like the Lucys and the Dudleys and the Grevilles pitted against such proponents of the old faith as the Ardens and the Catesbys and the Somervilles.

Thomas Lucy visited Stratford on many occasions, and he was the principal signatory on two documents accusing John Shakespeare of refusing to attend church services. He was also granted lands confiscated from Catholics. It should also be noted that he had introduced a bill into Parliament, turning the trespass of poaching into a felony. In 1610 his son, another Sir Thomas Lucy, did prosecute poachers. It is not difficult to observe the stages of legendary change, whereby enmity between the Lucys and the Shakespeares became transformed into the story of young Shakespeare being whipped and imprisoned for poaching Lucy’s deer.

There is another authentic note: the many allusions in his poetry and drama to poaching. “Chasing the deer,” as it was called, was a normal pursuit for young men of the period. In May-Day Sir Philip Sidney describes deer-stealing as a “pretty service.” The Elizabethan occultist and physician Simon Forman relates how students prefer “to steal deer and conies.”⁷ In Shakespeare’s work the chase is a consistent theme, whether in the form of metaphor or simile or allusion. It is an obsession common to the period, but no other Elizabethan dramatist is so acquainted with all the details of the hunt. He knows the technical language of the sport with such terms as “recheat” and “embossed,” using them as effortlessly and instinctively as any other household words. He has many references to the bow and the crossbow; he knows that the noise of the crossbow will scare the herd. He accompanies the hunter and runs with the hunted, his extraordinary powers of empathy turning the chase into a masterwork of the imagination. He knows about the dogs and the horses; he names the canine breeds from brach to mastiff. In Titus Andronicus (584-5) can be found the lines:

What hast not thou full often stroke a Doe

And borne her cleanlie by the Keepers nose?

Yet in other passages he laments the plight of the “sobbing deer” and the stricken deer who seeks the water. These were commonplaces of Renaissance literature, of course, but they may also reflect his instinctive attitude.

The allusions to hunting also carry a different significance in late sixteenth-century England, where it was still considered to be primarily an aristocratic pursuit. It was a mimic war and, perhaps more significantly for Shakespeare, an exercise for nobility and for gentlemen. In that sense it suited Shakespeare’s abiding preoccupation with gentility. His hunters are noblemen, such as the Lord in The Taming of the Shrew and the Duke of Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It may also be significant that, in both of these plays, the hunt acts as a prelude and context for theatrical performances. The hunt is itself a form of theatre. The lord of the hunt might also be the patron of a group of players, confirming the strangely disconcerting association. The hunt and the theatre both present ritualised forms of conflict and violence, and the killing of the noble stag to the sound of horns may be compared to the mimic murder of a king. The hands of the hunters in the field, and the hands of the assassins in Julius Caesar, are similarly dyed in blood. The writer of the plays confesses to a “dyer’s hand.” The mature Shakespeare has often been described as a poacher of other men’s plays or plots. It is impossible to untangle the web of associations and resemblances that may be glimpsed here. But we may be sure that we are looking into the heart of Shakespeare’s design. The stray story of the poacher Shakespeare has carried us a long way.

There are many other references to outdoor pursuits that suggest the presence of personal experience. He could have played bowls, for example, and the language of falconry becomes almost his private possession. One book upon his imagery fills no fewer than eight pages with his references to trained hawks and hawking, to the “check” and the “quarry,” the “haggard” and the “Jesse.” There are eighty separate and technical allusions to the sport in his published writing, whereas there are very few in the work of any other dramatist of the period. The Taming of the Shrew uses the taming of the falcon as a metaphor throughout. The process of stitching up a bird’s eyelids was known as “seeling.” Thus in Macbeth (991-2) occurs the imprecation—

Come, seeling Night,

Skarfe vp the tender Eye of pittifull Day

Nor does he commit errors or solecisms. His references may of course have been derived from book-learning, or from his attempts to internalise what was in large part an aristocratic sport; but he speaks the language of practice, much of which is still in use.

He alludes to the hunting of hares, and of foxes, on several occasions. It was the practice of countrymen then to hunt hares on foot, with nets at the ready. Shakespeare notes how the quarry “outruns the wind,” and “crankes and crosses with a thousand doubles” (Venus and Adonis, 681-2). In this context he uses the very specific term of “musit” for a round hole in a hedge or fence through which the hare escapes; he could not have learned this from any book.

On the basis of dramatic references one early biographer has also safely concluded that Shakespeare “was an angler” who “did not use a fly but was familiar with bottom-fishing”;⁸ the Avon was close by, but it is hard to imagine a still and patient Shakespeare. He seems preoccupied, too, with the liming of birds. This was the practice of the fowler, who smeared twigs and branches with the white glutinous paste of bird-lime in order to capture his terrified prey. It is one of those images particularly favoured by Shakespeare; it emerges in a variety of contexts and situations, and represents some primitive or primary scene of his imagination. He responds eloquently to the idea of speed being checked or free flight being hampered; the picture of a bird struggling to be free impressed itself upon him. It lies behind the “limed soul” of Claudius in Hamlet, or the bush “limed” for the Duchess of Gloucester in the second part of Henry VI. Shakespeare was familiar with all the sports of the field and the open air — which is, perhaps, no more than to say that he had a conventional rural boyhood.

There is another legend of this period, confirming Shakespeare’s status as a rustic cavalier of free and manly disposition who was shaped by nature rather than by art. It concerns his drinking, that English token of virile and unaffected behaviour. The story goes that he visited the neighbouring village of Bidford, whose male inhabitants were supposed to be “deep drinkers and merry fellows”; he wanted to “take a cup” with them but was told that they were absent. Instead he was invited to join “the Bidford sippers” (could they perhaps have been female?) and became so drunk in their company that he had to sleep beneath a tree. This hallowed crabtree was, by the eighteenth century, shown to visitors as “Shakespeare’s canopy” or “Shakespeare’s Crab.”⁹ The story has the advantage of being entirely unprovable. But it also has an inherent significance. It displays an instinctive tendency, among literary mythographers, to identify Shakespeare with his native soil and to portray him as a kind of genius loci. This is not in itself unwelcome, as long as it does not ignore all the sophistication and wit that Shakespeare brought to his unmistakable rural inheritance.

CHAPTER 15 At Your Employment, at Your Seruice Sir

John Aubrey remarked that Shakespeare “had been in his younger I yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey.” In the margin the diarist writes “from Mr. Beeston,” who was in certain respects a reliable source; William Beeston, actor, was the son of one Christopher Beeston, who had been a player in Shakespeare’s own company in the writer’s lifetime. Aubrey interviewed him towards the end of his life, but it seems to be an authentic piece of information. It would not be at all unusual for a clever young man of fifteen or sixteen to be employed as an “usher” or teacher for younger children.

There is some allusive contemporary evidence also. In one of a trilogy of plays published in 1606 and entitled The Return to Parnassus, a character based upon Shakespeare, Studioso, is parodied as a “schoolmaster” who teaches Latin to children in the country. The reference would have no point if it were not based upon prior information. There are so many references to schoolmasters and school curricula in his plays, far more than in those of any contemporary, that one scholar has been moved to describe Shakespeare as “the schoolmaster among dramatists.”¹ In his plays, too, the quotations and references often derive from passages that were used by masters as illustrations of grammatical rules. When he was laughing at Holofernes the master, perhaps he was also laughing at his own old self. But, if the tradition is correct, the inevitable question then arises. Where in the “countrey” was the young Shakespeare a schoolmaster?

Various locations have been suggested, from Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire to Titchfield in Hampshire. His schoolmastering has also been placed closer to home, under the patronage of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court twelve miles from Stratford; Greville, the father of the poet of the same name, was a local dignitary who took a great interest in matters of education. He was also related to the Ardens. It is interesting conjecture, but conjecture still.

In more recent years, in any case, the favoured locale for Shakespeare’s career as a young teacher has become Lancashire. The omens are good. Turn first to the last will and testament of a local grandee, Alexander Hoghton, of Hoghton Tower and Lea Hall near Lea in that county. Hoghton’s wife was a devout Catholic, and his brother was in exile as a result of his espousal of the old faith. In this will — executed on 3 August 1581—he leaves his musical instruments and players’ costumes to his half-brother, Thomas Hoghton, with this proviso.

And yf he wyll not keppe and manteyne playeres, then yt ys my wyll that Sir Thomas Heskethe, knyghte, shall haue the same Instrumentes and playe clothes. And I most herteleye requyre the said Sir Thomas to be ffrendlye unto ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte nowe dwellynge with me, and eyther to take theym unto his Servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master, as my tryste ys he wyll.²

Ever since this will was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century (and later given prominence in a publication of 1937) it has provoked a great deal of interest and controversy. If the reference is indeed to William Shakespeare, why is his name spelled in so peculiar a fashion? Why at the early age of seventeen has he been singled out in this pronounced manner? In a subsequent part of the will he was also left 40 shillings a year; he is named among forty other household servants, but the bequest does suggest some form of special recognition. How had he come to deserve this? If he had already spent two years in Hoghton Tower, of course, his remarkable gifts would already have become apparent. If we leave aside these doubts and misgivings, however, then we have a description of the young Shakespeare as an actor in a Catholic household where he may have been introduced as a schoolmaster. It is an intriguing possibility.

Many scholars disagree. The movements of the young Shakespeare have become the subject of serious debate, related to the vexed question of his religious allegiances. Was he actually a crypto-Catholic or even a sympathiser with and friend of Catholics? Was he ever in the north of England at all? There can be no certainty in these matters.

But, if the account is accurate, there are further ramifications. The Hoghton and Hesketh families were very well acquainted with the household of the earls of Derby, who exercised enormous influence in Lancashire. In his history plays Shakespeare emphasises the truth and loyalty of the Stanleys, the surname of the Derby family, in defiance of the facts of their actual conduct — in Richard III Sir William Stanley tears the crown from the villainous king’s prostrate head — and it is widely believed that Shakespeare composed epitaphs for two members of the same household. Lord Strange (Ferdinando Stanley, the fifth earl of Derby) was a Catholic or crypto-Catholic nobleman of great wealth and power. He patronised a group of players known naturally enough as Lord Strange’s Men. Some biographers have enrolled Shakespeare in this acting company during the time that he dwelled at Hoghton Tower. Lord Strange’s Men toured the country and were also well known in London. With one deft explanation we can move the young Shakespeare from provincial schoolmastering to the stages of the inn-yards in the capital.

It may be convenient, but it is not necessarily unlikely. There is a long tradition in the Hoghton family that Shakespeare served them in some capacity. This in itself is by no means conclusive, but it is bolstered by other evidence. In the immediate vicinity of the Hoghtons of Lea Hall, near Preston, lived the Cottam family; the Hoghtons and the Cottams, both Catholic, were thoroughly intimate. One of the members of that family, John Cottam, has already entered this history as Shakespeare’s schoolmaster in Stratford. Cottam is mentioned in Alexander Hoghton’s will as his “servant.” It seems to be more than coincidence. What would be more natural than that Cottam should recommend his most brilliant pupil, also a Catholic, to be schoolmaster to the Hoghton children? Alexander Hoghton was named by an apostate priest as one of the Lancastrian gentry who kept “recusants as schoolmasters.”³

So, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, the young Shakespeare may have journeyed away from home. Once you understand the Catholic network of late sixteenth-century England, it seems to be an entirely sensible and explicable course of action. The connection between Lancashire and Stratford-upon-Avon has already been observed, with four out of five schoolmasters at the New School coming from that most strongly Catholic of all English counties. It has been calculated that “nine out of the twenty-one Catholic schoolmasters executed under Elizabeth were Lancastrians.”⁴ Thomas Cottam, the Jesuit priest and brother of John Cottam, stayed in secret at the house of Alexander Hoghton’s cousin, Richard Hoghton; Edmund Campion, the Catholic missionary and proselytiser, in the spring of 1581 visited Hoghton Tower, where he left certain books and papers. He never had the opportunity of reclaiming them, the gallows preventing him. There are deep affiliations here which cannot at this late date be properly or fully recovered.

From the evidence of his will Alexander Hoghton also employed “players.” It has been objected that “players” may simply mean musicians, but the reference is ambiguous. In any case actors were often required to perform music. It may also be significant that schoolmasters in this period were supposed to teach their charges the art and practice of music. There are some lines in The Taming of the Shrew (367-9) that reveal this connection:

And for I know she taketh most delight

In Musicke, Instruments, and Poetry,

Schoolemasters will I keepe within my house …

The young usher would also have been expected to teach Latin from the dramatic passages of Plautus and of Terence. It is easy to see how Shakespeare’s rhetorical and theatrical gifts might find expression in such an atmosphere. There was a Catholic tradition of plays written for schoolboys, exemplified by Campion himself, who wrote a devotional school-play entitled Ambrosia. Fulke Gillam, mentioned with “William Shakeshafte” in Hoghton’s will, came from a family of pageant masters who organised the mystery plays at Chester. So the young Shakespeare was entering a world of Catholic dramaturgy, rehearsed and performed clandestinely in the halls of the Lancastrian recusant gentry.

After the death of Alexander Hoghton, the young Shakespeare might then have been recruited into Sir Thomas Hesketh’s company of players at Rufford Hall. Both Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall had banqueting halls, with a screen and a dais, where plays were performed; Hesketh also possessed a stage orchestra, complete with “vyolls, vyolentes, virginals, sagbutts, howboies and cornets, cithron, flute and tabor pypes.”⁵ It has often been remarked how intimately and precisely Shakespeare in his plays traces the life of noble households, with their servants and their banquets. We may be able to find a source for that knowledge in the noble families of Lancashire, well known throughout England for their local power and authority in an area where the majesty of the Crown was only a distant reality. Was it here that the young man acquired that gentility of manner and address that so impressed his contemporaries?

Once again there is a tradition in the vicinity, dating from the early nineteenth century, of Shakespeare living and working in Rufford Hall. In this house, too, there is a Tudor tapestry that depicts the fall of Troy; in The Rape of Lucrece the heroine inspects “a peece of skilfull painting, made for Priams Troy” (1366-7). At a later date Shakespeare helped to choose, as one of the trustees of the Globe Theatre, a native of Rufford itself.

If Hesketh recognised the extraordinary abilities of the young actor (and possibly, even at this early age, already an aspiring dramatist) it is likely that, according to the injunctions of the will, he recommended Shakespeare “to some good master”—namely Lord Strange and his well-known company of talented players. It should be noted here that Lord Strange’s Men performed at least two of Shakespeare’s earliest plays. Everyone agrees that Shakespeare must have had some full and proper training as an actor before emerging, fully armed, upon the London stage in 1592, when he is described as “excelent in the qualitie he professes.” Every actor in the professional companies had some apprenticeship or previous training. Why could this not have been achieved by Shakespeare with Strange’s Men?

A stray piece of research serves to deepen, if not necessarily to strengthen, the picture. Fifty years ago two Shakespearian scholars, Alan Keen and Roger Lubbock, discovered a copy of Hall’s Chronicles which had been heavily annotated in an unknown hand. Hall’s Chronicles was an indispensable source book for Shakespeare’s history plays, but this particular copy has an independent interest. The annotations have been made in a youthful hand, and display “sympathy with Hall’s patriotic enthusiasm and fury at his anti-Catholicism”;⁶ there are also notes and marginal comments on such matters as the resignation of Richard II. A graphologist, inspecting this handwriting, has concluded that the letterings “indicate the probability that Shakespeare and the annotator were the same man, but do not by any means prove it.”⁷ None of this would be of the slightest consequence were it not for the fact that Keen and Lubbock, pursuing their investigations, discovered that this particular volume was in the joint or communal possession both of Thomas Hoghton and of Thomas Hesketh.

A chronology of the salient events in the summer and autumn of 1581 will create a context for the young Shakespeare. Edmund Campion was arrested on 16 July, and was taken to the Tower for torture on 31 July. On 5 August, two days after Alexander Hoghton had made his will, the Privy Council issued an order for the search of “certain books and papers which Edmund Campion has confessed he left at the house of one Richard Hoghton in Lancashire.” Richard Hoghton was then arrested. Could it be that Alexander Hoghton had made his will because he knew by then that he might be arrested and that perhaps he did not expect to live for very long? On 21 August the Privy Council congratulated the loyal magistrates of Lancashire for seizing Campion’s hosts and for taking “certain papers, in Hoghton House.”

On 12 September Alexander Hoghton died in what appear to have been suspicious circumstances. Then, at the close of this year, Sir Thomas Hesketh — to whom Hoghton had recommended “Shakeshafte”—was consigned to prison on the grounds that he had failed to curb the practice of the Catholic faith amongst his servitors. All of his friends and retainers would naturally come under renewed suspicion from the queen’s emissaries. The net of suspicion was being drawn tightly over these Lancastrian households, and it was perhaps high time that the young Shakespeare made a convenient departure. By the summer of 1582, at the very latest, he is to be found once more in Stratford.

CHAPTER 16 Before I Know My Selfe, Seeke Not to Know Me

He came back to a larger but not necessarily happier family. In the spring of 1580 John Shakespeare had been summoned to the Queen’s Bench in Westminster and, when he did not appear, was fined the large sum of £40. He was not alone in his transgression, since approximately two hundred men and women from different counties were caught up in the same punitive action and fined various amounts to a maximum of £200. The supposition must inevitably be that these “malcontents” were brought to the bar of justice for recusancy or refusal to attend church services. In the following year it was formally proclaimed that those who did not conform to the prescriptions of the Act of Uniformity would be fined the sum of £20 per month, rising to “all their goods and a third part of their land.” For Catholics there was now the clear danger of financial ruin. Half of John Shakespeare’s fine was levied because of his reluctance or inability to ensure that a Nottinghamshire hat-maker, John Audley, came to court. On the same day Audley himself was in turn fined £10 for not bringing John Shakespeare to the Queen’s Bench. Historians have inferred that this system of mutual bail, uniting people from various regions and different jurisdictions, was an attempt by Catholics to circumvent the collection of any fines. Yet Shakespeare’s father did pay his fine, as recorded in the Coram Regina Roll, suggesting that he lived still in relative affluence.

When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in 1582, it was in the face of an uncertain future. At the age of eighteen, what likely career might have been open to him? In recent years there has grown an abiding, if not universal, belief that he had some training as a lawyer’s clerk in Stratford. It was not an unnatural progress. For a quick and intelligent young man there were many possible “openings” in his home town. One of the old schoolmasters at the Free School, Walter Roche, had a lawyer’s practice in Chapel Street. John Shakespeare used the services of William Court in the same street. If he was not clerk to a solicitor, he might have been a copyist or even a scrivener’s apprentice. It is also possible that as a result of his father’s influence he worked in the office of Henry Rogers, the town clerk of Stratford, situated in Wood Street.

His drama is striated with legal terminology, particularly with that concerning property law. There is scarcely a play in which words or phrases from the courts are not employed. The sonnets are filled with similar references, to such an extent that it has even been supposed that they were addressed to a member of one of the Inns of Court. It could just as well be argued that the age of Shakespeare was excessively litigious, and that any Elizabethan would of necessity have acquired a great deal of knowledge about the law. As one contemporary put it, “now every Raskall will tak upon to knowe the laws as well as the best gentleman.”¹ The law was an inevitable part of ordinary social life.

But the most important Shakespearian scholar of the eighteenth century, Edmond Malone, remarked that “his knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill.”² More significantly, perhaps, it emerges in the very texture of his writing. He writes of warrants and conveyances, leases and inventories, presentments and suits, fines and recoveries. There is such a multitude of examples that it is almost absurd to single out any of them. Mistress Page says of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (2132-4), “If the diuell haue him not in fee-simple, with fine and re-couery, he will neuer (I think) in the way of waste, attempt vs againe.” It would take an expert in Tudor law to explain the remark, which may not in any case have come naturally to a wife of Windsor. Lady Macbeth consoles her husband, on the ticklish matter of Banquo and Fleance, with the sentence (983) that “in them Natures coppie’s not eterne,” a reference to the law of copia or copyhold. In The Rape of Lucrece the unfortunate heroine “folds shee vp the tenure of her woe” (1310); “tenure” is the technical legal term for a correctly completed statement. In All’s Well That Ends Well Parolles says of his erstwhile master (2220-1), “for a Cardecue he will sell the fee-simple of his saluation, the inheritance of it, and cut th’intaile from all remainders.” But enough is enough. It need only be said that it is a mark of his “all-comprehending” imagination that the language of law comes to him as effortlessly and as instinctively as the language of nature. In the larger sense he places all his characters before the Court of Equity, where justice is tempered by mercy.

There is other evidence concerning Shakespeare’s early career. The first references allude to him somewhat slightingly as a former “noverint” or legal scrivener. Several palaeographers have agreed that the available remnants of his handwriting, particularly in his signatures, give clear indication of a legal training. One of those signatures appears in a volume entitled Archaionomia, found in 1939. It is a legal text, composed by William Lambarde, which contains a Latin translation of Anglo-Saxon edicts. The signature of “Wm Shakspere” within it is the object of considerable scholarly debate. But Lambarde was an officer of the court in Westminster Hall during the period when John Shakespeare was filing a bill of complaint at the Queen’s Bench. At a later date Lambarde was Master of Chancery when another of John Shakespeare’s fifty separate suits was entered there. He was also Master of the Revels at Lincoln’s Inn, one of whose duties was the staging of appropriate dramas. There was every reason why Shakespeare would have been acquainted with him.

John Shakespeare’s relatively late appearance as a plaintiff at Westminster suggests another explanation for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law — he may have been assisting his father in the various legal manoeuvres in which the Shakespeare family was engaged. That might explain the dramatist’s excellent knowledge of property law. He could have been working for his father. There is a strange note, in the copy of Archaionomia possibly signed by Shakespeare, to the effect that “Mr. Wm Shakspeare Lived at № 1 Little Crown St. Westminster”; it is in an eighteenth-century hand, and the location is genuine. The information may be spurious, or it may apply to quite another William Shakespeare. In a certain set of circumstances, however, it would make perfect sense. If he had lived close to the courts of justice, while pursuing a familial suit, he may have acquired Archaionomia in order to impress Lambarde with ancient precedents. Lambarde’s volume also acted as a source book for the play entitled Edmund Ironside, the surviving manuscript of which (to be found in the Manuscript Collections of the British Library) is written in an unmistakably legal hand and contains many legal abbreviations. The authorship of the play is contested, but some have ascribed it to Shakespeare himself. The connections and associations are there, for those who care to find them. The biographer can thus explore a number of possible Shakespearian identities without traducing the essential nature of the man.

One other quasi-legal digression is of some pertinence. If the young Shakespeare had indeed been working in the office of Stratford’s town clerk, he would have become fully acquainted with the case of a young woman who in 1580 drowned in the Avon. The inference was that she had committed suicide but her family, intent upon giving her a proper Christian burial, insisted that she had fallen accidentally into the river while going down to the bank with her milk-pail in order to draw water. The Avon at this juncture, by Tiddington, is known for its overhanging willows and coronet weeds. If she had been found guilty of “felo de se” or suicide, she would have been buried in a hole by a crossroads, at a spot where local folk were permitted to throw stones or broken pots. Henry Rogers conducted the inquest, and arrived at the conclusion that she had indeed met her death “per infortunium” or accidentally. If this suggests images of Ophelia, then it is interesting that the name of the girl was Katherine Hamlett.

All this is speculation, but — if he did begin his career in a lawyer’s office — he did not particularly care for the work. His emergence in London as an actor and dramatist suggests that, at an early stage, he willingly abandoned it. There was another change. A short while after his return to Stratford in 1582, he was courting Anne Hathaway.

CHAPTER 17 I Can See a Church by Day-Light

In As You Like It, the servant Adam suggests that “At seauenteene yeeres, many their fortunes seeke” (746). Shakespeare may have sought his fortune among the Lancastrian families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall, but he had returned to his native town. If he then set to work in a lawyer’s office, he had at least one consolatory prospect. Anne Hathaway was already well known to him. Fourteen years previously John Shakespeare had paid off some of her father’s debts. The Hathaways were in any case long established in the region. They had been resident in the hamlet of Shottery, at Hewland Farm, since the end of the fifteenth century. Shottery was a mile outside Stratford itself, an area of scattered farms and homesteads on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Anne’s grandfather, John Hathaway, was classified as a yeoman and archer; he was esteemed highly enough to have become one of the “Twelve Men of Old Stratford” who presided at the Great Leet or criminal court. Anne’s father, Richard Hathaway, had inherited from him the farm and the property that in subsequent years became known as “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.”

Richard Hathaway was also a farmer and substantial householder. By his first wife, who came from Temple Grafton, he had three children one of whom was Anne herself. He married again, and had further children. He was eventually “honestly buried” in the manner of the reformed faith, but he named a prominent recusant as an executor of his will; so the religious affiliations of the family, like those of so many other households in the neighbourhood, may have been mixed and ambiguous.

Anne Hathaway was the eldest daughter of the house and as such incurred a fair number of household duties, chief among them the care of her younger siblings. As the daughter of a farming family, too, she learned how to bake bread, to salt meat, to churn butter and to brew ale. In the yard outside the house were poultry and cows, pigs and horses to be fed and reared. Far from being a mésalliance or forced marriage, as some have suggested, the partnership of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway could have been an eminently sensible arrangement. He may even have exercised a good deal of caution, or common sense, in his choice of lifelong partner. This was thoroughly in keeping with his practical and business-like approach to all the affairs of the world.

She was eight years his senior — in the year of their marriage he was eighteen and she was twenty-six — but, in a period of shorter life expectancy, the disparity in age would have seemed greater then than now. It was an unusual arrangement, since in the sixteenth century it was customary for the man to marry a younger woman. The difference in age has of course aroused much speculation, primarily concerned with the wiles of an older female in coaxing an inexperienced young man into bed and eventual marriage. Yet it might, on the contrary, suggest sexual self-confidence on Shakespeare’s part. In any case the suspicion does less than justice to Shakespeare’s judgement and intelligence which, even at the age of eighteen, might have been acute. It is also an insult to Anne Hathaway who, like many of the silent wives of famous men, has endured much obloquy. Those biographers who enjoy dramatic speculation, for example, have noted that Shakespeare’s history plays harbour many manipulative older women, whose beauty seems mysteriously to wither on the vine. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (138) Hermia cries out, “O spight! too olde to be ingag’d to young” and the Duke in Twelfth Night offers some advice—“Let still the woman take /An elder then her selfe”—and goes on to caution (1896-9):

Then let thy Loue be yonger then thy selfe,

Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;

For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre

Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre.

But it is probably best to refrain from maladroit interpretation. In the Duke, Shakespeare has created a notorious sentimentalist. It could just as well be argued that, because the females in Shakespeare’s drama are literate, so must have been the women around him.

It is not known whether Anne Hathaway could read or write. There was no real opportunity which would have enabled her to learn how to do so and, in any case, 90 per cent of the female population of England were illiterate at that time. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare’s two daughters were also illiterate, and so we are faced with the irony of the greatest dramatist in the history of the world surrounded by women who could not read a word he wrote.

There is a sonnet placed as the 145th in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, which seems oddly situated and out of context. The last two lines suggest that it was in fact composed for Anne Hathaway and has some claim to being the first extant work of William Shakespeare—

“I hate” from “hate” away she threw,

And saued my life, saying “not you.”

Hate away is equal to Hathaway. The entire poem is a conventional and youthful paean to a kind and loving mistress, with “lips that Loues owne hand did make.” It is interesting as a token of Shakespeare’s early ambitions as a poet. He must have borrowed the sonnet form from a contemporary collection such as Tottel’s Miscellany, where the work of Wyatt and Surrey was to be found, or perhaps from the first published sonnet sequence in English, Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, which was published in the summer of 1582. It may have proved the spur to Shakespeare’s invention. He reached for the form naturally and instinctively; this early poem is fluent and forceful, a harbinger of his triumphant mastery of that genre.

It is to be hoped that “Loues owne hand” had something to do with the match, since Anne Hathaway was four months pregnant by the time of their marriage day. It was not unusual in this period for couples to cohabit before their wedding. Their Stratford neighbours, George Badger and Alice Court, Robert Young and Margery Field, had a similar arrangement. It was also customary for both parties to make a “troth-plight,” a verbal contract of marriage before witnesses which was also known as “hand-fasting” or “making sure.” So Alice Shaw of Warwickshire declared to William Holder, of the same county, that “I do confesse that I am your wief and have forsaken all my frendes for your sake and I hope you will use me well.”¹ The man took the woman’s hand, and repeated the same pledge. Only after such a “troth-plight” could the woman give up her virginity. The marriage ceremony came later. It was a code of honour, marked out by both social and sexual discipline; there were of course different forms of “making sure,” varying from a private pledge to a ceremony with a prayer book. But its ubiquity can be measured in the fact that between 20 and 30 per cent of all brides bore children within the first eight months of marriage.

This informal contract remained firmly in Shakespeare’s consciousness. There are many allusions to it in his plays, ranging from Claudio’s plea in Measure for Measure that “she is fast my wife” to Olivia’s demand to Sebastian in Twelfth Night that he “Plight me the full assurance of your faith.” It would also have affected the Elizabethan understanding of dramatic action. When Troilus and Cressida plight themselves, Pandarus exclaims: “Go to a bargaine made, seale it, seale it ile bee the witnes here I hold your hand, here my Cozens” (1768-70). He is effectively sealing a “hand-fasting,” thus rendering Cressida’s subsequent unfaithfulness more execrable. When Orlando declares to Rosalind, in the guise of Ganymede, “I take thee Rosalind for wife” he is committing himself much further and more deeply than he supposes. It is a social custom, now long since discarded and forgotten, but it had profound implications for Shakespeare and for Shakespeare’s audience.

There was also a custom of exchanging rings during this informal ceremony (other pre-contract gifts included a bent sixpence and a pair of gloves), a charming ritual which anticipates a no less charming “find” in the early nineteenth century. In 1810 the wife of a Stratford labourer was working in a field, next to the churchyard, when she found a heavily encrusted ring. It was of gold and, when it was cleaned, it was discovered to bear the initials “W S” separated by a lover’s knot. The dating is that of the sixteenth century, and a local antiquarian believed that “no other Stratfordian of that period [was] so likely to own such a ring as Shakespeare.”² There is one other intriguing connection. Shakespeare may have owned a seal-ring, but his will has no seal. The phrase “in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal” has been altered; the word “seal” has been struck out, as if Shakespeare had lost his ring before signing the document.

The “cottage” in which William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway are popularly supposed to have courted was in fact a relatively large farmhouse constructed of timber and of wattle-and-daub (hazel twigs and dried mud can still be seen embedded within the walls) with rooms at different levels, low ceilings and uneven floors. Its timber construction means that it is a box of noise, so courtship would have been untenable as well as uncomfortable. From the upstairs bedchambers you can hear everything in the rooms below and, through the cracks in the floorboards, see everything as well. It was fortunate that there were meadows, and a forest, nearby. He may not have visited her there in the crucial period, in any case, since after the death of her father in 1581 she went to live with her mother’s family in the nearby village of Temple Grafton. She may have wished to remove herself from the company of her stepmother and four surviving children. The absence of paternal watchfulness, however, may have hastened the fruition of the match.

There is one odd incident concerning the wider family in this year of betrothal and marriage. In September 1582, John Shakespeare attended a council meeting in the guildhall in order to vote for his friend, John Sadler, as mayor of Stratford. Sadler declined to serve, on the grounds of ill-health (he died six months later), but John Shakespeare’s reappearance after an absence of almost six years is somewhat puzzling. It may have been a sudden decision, or a desire to be seen to support an old friend, but it may conceivably be connected with his other appearance in the public records at this time. Three months previously he had entered a petition against four men — Ralph Cawdrey the butcher among them—“for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs.” This was a ritual formula and need not be taken as token of a literal threat to John Shakespeare’s life, but the circumstances are obscure. It could not have been a partisan religious quarrel, since Cawdrey himself was a staunch Catholic. It is more likely to have been some kind of trade or financial dispute. One of the other men, against whom John Shakespeare complained, was a local dyer. By attending the council meeting John Shakespeare may have hoped to revive something of his old authority.

The first child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway was probably conceived in the last two weeks of September, for at the end of November the young man or Anne Hathaway’s guardians hastened to Worcester in order to obtain a special marriage licence. Anne Hathaway had been left £6 13s 4d by her father, equivalent to a blacksmith’s or a butcher’s annual wage and enough for her dowry. The licence permitted marriage after a single publication of the banns, and did not specify any particular parish in which the ceremony must take place. The haste was necessary since the period of Advent was at hand, in which marriages were very largely restricted. Another period of prohibition began on 27 January and lasted until 7 April. It was possible, then, that their child might be born when its parents were not formally wedded. Anne’s interesting condition may have become evident, and neither she nor her guardians may have wished her child to be illegitimate.

So on 27 November 1582, William Shakespeare or Anne’s representatives rode to Worcester, and visited the consistory court at the western end of the south aisle of the cathedral there. The fee for this special licence, allowing for a marriage in haste or in privacy, varied from 5 to 7 shillings. Anne Hathaway’s home was given as Temple Grafton, but by some strange slip of the pen she was given the surname of Whateley. So the licence reads as “inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple Grafton.” There has been some unnecessary speculation about an unknown young woman named Anne Whateley, but it is likely that the clerk had simply misheard or misread the name; there was a Whateley appearing at the court on the same day, so the official’s confusion is understandable. Since Shakespeare himself was under the age of twenty-one, he was obliged to swear that his father had given consent to the match. On the following day two of Anne Hathaway’s neighbours in Shottery, both farmers, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, stood surety of £40 in the event of some “lawful impediment” being later discovered. It is not surprising that John Shakespeare did not sign this surety, since he was a known recusant intent upon concealing his wealth and property.

The banns were published on Friday 30 November, and the marriage took place on that or the following day. The most likely venue for the ceremony was Anne Hathaway’s parish church at Temple Grafton, some five miles west from Stratford. The absence of parish records makes it clear that it was not performed in Stratford, where the vicar was strongly attached to the reformed faith. Some scholars place it at Luddington, a village three miles from Temple Grafton where other relatives of Anne Hathaway lived. One old resident claimed to have seen the parish record of the marriage, but the curate’s housekeeper is supposed to have burnt that register subsequently on a cold day in order “to boil her kettle.”³ This does not, on the face of it, seem very likely. Others claim the site of the wedding to be St. Martin’s Church, in Worcester, where the pages of the parish register for the marriages of 1582 have been carefully cut out.

The church of Temple Grafton, however, was convenient in more ways than one. The priest here was a remnant of Mary’s Catholic reign, an old man who according to an official report was “unsound in religion” and who could “neither preach nor read well.” But he was well versed in the practice of hawking and could cure those birds “who were hurt or diseased: for which purpose many do usual repair to him.”⁴

It is not known whether an approximation to the Catholic marriage service took place in the ancient church of Temple Grafton. Given the affinities of the priest, however, this seems likely. If so, the ceremony was conducted in Latin and took place between the canonical hours of eight and twelve in the morning. The favoured day was Sunday. It began at the church porch, where the banns were recited three times. Anne Hathaway’s dower, of £6 13s 4d, was then displayed and exchanged. She was no doubt “given” by Fulke Sandells or John Richardson who had stood surety in Worcester. The woman stood on the left side of the groom, in token of Eve’s miraculous delivery from Adam’s left rib; they held hands as a symbol of their betrothal. In the church porch the priest blessed the ring with holy water; the bridegroom then took the ring and placed it in turn on the thumb and first three fingers of the bride’s left hand with the words “In nomine Patris, in nomine Filii, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, Amen.” He left it on this fourth finger, since the vein in that finger was supposed to run directly to the heart. The couple were then invited into the church, where they knelt together in order to partake in the nuptial Mass and blessing; they wore linen cloths or “care cloths” upon their heads to protect them from demons. It was also customary for the bride to carry a knife or dagger suspended from her girdle, the reasons for which are uncertain. (Juliet possesses a dagger, with which she stabs herself.) The bride’s hair was unbraided, hanging loose about her shoulders. After the Mass it was customary for a festive procession to return from the church to the house where a wedding feast, or “bride-ale,” was prepared. The newly joined couple might then receive gifts of silver, or money, or food. The guests were in turn often given presents of gloves — since Shakespeare’s father was a glove-maker, there was no great difficulty in procurement. So we leave them on this apparently auspicious day.