Shakespeare: The Biography

CHAPTER 55 Therefore Am I of an Honourable House

In the early days of May 1597, Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford. It was called New Place and had been erected at the end of the fifteenth century by the most celebrated former resident of the town, Sir Hugh Clopton. Its ownership set the seal on Shakespeare’s standing in the place of his birth. Its frontage was some 60 feet, its depth some 70 feet, and it reached a height of 28 feet. Shakespeare’s new house was made of brick upon a stone foundation, gabled, and with bay windows on the eastern or garden side. The topographer, John Leland, had called it a “pretty house of brick and timber,”¹ and to the people of Stratford it was known as the “Great House.” As a boy Shakespeare had passed it every day, on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence. It represented his childhood dream of prosperity. It was exactly the same spirit that persuaded Charles Dickens to buy Gad’s Hill Place in Kent; that house was for him, too, the measure of his childhood longing for success and notability. “If you work hard,” John Dickens had told his son, “you may one day own such a house.” These were perhaps also the words of John Shakespeare.

It was on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, a commodious residence with its servants’ quarters at the front looking over Chapel Street; behind these was an enclosed courtyard and the main house. It was a prosperous, but not necessarily a quiet, neighbourhood. Chapel Street had many good houses, but Chapel Lane was squalid and malodorous; there were pigsties and common dunghills there, together with mud-walls and thatched barns. New Place itself stood immediately opposite the Falcon hostelry, and the local cheese market took place just outside the front door. Further down the street, on the other side of the lane, was the guild chapel and schoolroom where he had spent his early years. He had come back to the very site of his childhood.

He purchased the house and grounds for “sixty pounds in silver,” representing the first large investment he had ever made. In this he differed from his theatrical colleagues who tended to make their first investments in London property for themselves and their families. It is an indication that Shakespeare still readily and naturally identified himself with his native town; in London he remained, to use a Greek term, a resident alien. It may be doubted, however, whether he was really at home anywhere.

The deeds mention this sum of £60 but the complication of Elizabethan property negotiations is such that the actual cost was probably twice as much. Before Shakespeare bought it, however, the property had been described as “in great ruin and decay, and unrepaired, and it doth still remain unrepaired.” It was going cheap, in other words, and Shakespeare saw a likely opportunity for investment. According to a Clopton descendant Shakespeare “repair’d and modell’d it to his own mind.”² He ordered stone to fulfil his vision. The building work must have been extensive, therefore, and almost instinctively found its way into the play he was writing at the time. In the second part of Henry IV there are three references to the building of a house, with its plots and models and costs.

It comprised at least ten rooms (there were ten fireplaces that were taxed at a later date), with two gardens and two barns; a later reference to two orchards may mean that Shakespeare and his family converted part of the gardens to more practical use. A similar if less spacious house, two doors away from Shakespeare’s dwelling, contained a hall, a parlour bedchamber, a “great chamber” and two other chambers beside a kitchen and cellar. Was there also in New Place a study, or perhaps even a library, for the master of the house? On this, of course, the public records are silent. But if Shakespeare now returned more often to Stratford, as some people surmise, then he would have required a place to read and to write.

He enlarged the garden by buying additional land and by demolishing a cottage. There were two ancient wells here, which can still be seen on the now empty site. Shakespeare was at ease in these surroundings, on his frequent or infrequent returns to Stratford. It is very likely that he owned a copy of John Gerard’s The Herball or generall historie of plantes, which was published in the year he purchased New Place. In that compendium of garden lore there is a reference to a blue-petalled speedwell that the Welsh called “fluellen.” Fluellen was the name he gave to the Welsh captain in Henry V. He is also supposed to have planted a mulberry tree in the garden, from which in later years an inexhaustible supply of wood was provided to cater for “tourist” items such as paperweights and walking sticks. If he did indeed plant a mulberry tree, he would have done so twelve years after the purchase of the house; in 1609 a Frenchman named Verton distributed young mulberry plants through the midland counties at the request of James I. There were also fruitful grape-vines here. A few years after Shakespeare’s death a local dignitary asked to be given from New Place “2 or 3 of the fairest of those budes on some few shutes of the last yeares vines.”

The two barns were used to store corn and barley although, in these years of harvest failures and short supplies, Shakespeare might be deemed guilty of hoarding such materials. The year of his house purchase was the fourth year of bad harvests, and the grain shortage was such that its price had risen fourfold. Shakespeare was always an astute businessman. Some historians have described him as one of the first “venture capitalists” in an emerging “market economy,” ready to trade in cash or credit, but this is perhaps too theoretical an interpretation for what must have been for him a sensible speculation. A few months after his purchase of New Place he was recorded as hoarding 10 quarters, or 80 bushels, of malt; this was no doubt used for the purposes of brewing by Mrs. Shakespeare or her daughters, but it provoked censure.

There is a curious story concerning the Underhills, a family of Catholic recusants from whom Shakespeare bought the house. William Underhill was a devoted Catholic who was often fined and “presented” for recusancy. He seems to have been forced to sell New Place as a result of debt, which again is testimony to Shakespeare’s business acumen rather than to any religious sympathy on his part. Two months after relinquishing New Place, Underhill died in mysterious circumstances; it transpired that he had been poisoned by his son and heir, Fulke Underhill, who was later executed for the crime. By strange chance a former owner of New Place, William Bott, was accused of murdering his daughter by poison on the premises; he gave her ratsbane, according to a witness, and she “swelled to death.”³ It can be surmised that Shakespeare was not superstitious about the possibility of unlucky or unhappy houses.

That house itself has long gone, having been levelled to the ground by a subsequent owner who was tired of unannounced visitors coming to his door and asking to view the surroundings of the late dramatist. But there survives one description from a small boy of Stratford in the late seventeenth century; he recalled “a small kind of Green Court before they entered the House … fronted with brick, with plain windows, Consisting of common panes of Glass set in lead, as at this time.”⁴ There are also some early eighteenth-century sketches, the work of George Vertue, who seems to be relying on the testimony of the descendants of Shakespeare’s sister. The principal drawing does indeed show a dwelling that might easily be described as the “Great House.” Certainly it was grand enough for Henrietta Maria, the wife of Charles I, to keep her court here for three weeks in the summer of 1643. We might see it at this time, and no doubt before, as a stronghold for monarchists. It should be recalled that Shakespeare was only thirty-three years old when he became the owner of this substantial property. His advance had been rapid indeed. New Place should be seen, then, in connection with the grant of arms to Shakespeare’s family. It was a way of demonstrating the dramatist’s gentility to his neighbours. It banished the normal associations surrounding a London player, and confirmed his status as one of the richest of Stratford’s inhabitants.

CHAPTER 56 Pirates May Make Cheape Penyworths of Their Pillage

In the summer of this year, a theatrical scandal threatened to take away the livelihood of all players. In July 1597, the Earl of Pembroke’s Men performed a satirical play entitled The Isle of Dogs at the Swan in Paris Garden. It lampooned various members of the administration and thus elicited the wrath of the authorities. It was considered to be a “lewd plaie” stuffed with “seditious and sclanderous matter.”¹ One of the authors, and certain of the players, were arrested and imprisoned for three months. The part-author was in fact the young Ben Jonson; he had also acted in the production, and was promptly despatched to the Marshalsea. Jonson was twenty-five at the time, and The Isle of Dogs was the first play he had written or had helped to write; his was certainly a fiery baptism. He later recalled “the tyme of his close imprisonment” when “his judges could gett nothing of him to all their demands but I and No.”² It is difficult to imagine Shakespeare in such unpleasant circumstances, but he would not have dreamed of writing anything remotely seditious or slanderous. He was not a rebel or incendiary; he was firmly within the boundaries of the Elizabethan polity.

The Privy Council then demanded that “no plaies shalbe used within London … during this tyme of sommer” and furthermore that “those playhouses that are erected and built only for suche purposes shal be plucked downe.” ³ It was one of those announcements that flew in the face of all urban realities — equivalent to the proclamations demanding a halt in the growth of the city itself — and was never properly enforced. Tudor edicts sometimes give the impression of being rhetorical gestures rather than legal requirements. It is possible that the declaration was aimed at the Swan since it demanded the destruction of those playhouses that were erected “only” for the performance of plays. Henslowe at the Rose, for example, might argue that his venue was also used for other forms of entertainment; in any case he continued as if nothing untoward had happened. The justices of Middlesex and Surrey specifically ordered the owners of the Curtain Theatre “to pluck downe quite the stages, gallories and roomes” but again the order was not obeyed. If the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still playing here, as seems likely, they could shelter in the shadow of their great patron.

They did, however, decide to go on tour. In August they went down to the fishing port of Rye, built on a sandstone hill, and then journeyed to Dover; from there they moved on in September to Marlborough, Faversham, Bath and Bristol. There is every reason to believe that Shakespeare was with them on their travels.

The “inhibition” upon playing in London was lifted in October, and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men returned to the Curtain. It may have been in this season that “Curtaine plaudeties”⁴ were heard for performances of Romeo and Juliet, which was one of three plays by Shakespeare published this year in volume form. They were three of his most popular dramas, and it is likely that they were all being performed in this period. Publication would then be a way of exploiting their success in a different market. In August The Tragedie of King Richard the Second appeared on the book stalls. It proved such a success that two further editions were published in the succeeding year. It was followed in October by The Tragedy of King Richard the Third. This play was reprinted four more times in Shakespeare’s lifetime. Then in the following month Romeo and Juliet appeared in volume form.

There is a difference, however, in the nature of the publications. The first two were published by Andrew Wise and printed by Valentine Simms, but An Excellent Conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Juliet was simply printed by John Danter without a named publisher. Earlier that year Danter’s presses had been raided by the authorities and Danter charged with printing The Jesus Psalter “and other things without aucthoritie.” ⁵ This edition of Romeo and Juliet was one of those printed without requisite authority. Two years later another edition appeared under the title of The Most Excellent and Lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet with the addition, “Newly corrected, augmented, and amended.” This amplified edition was printed from the text used by the playhouse — there is a direction for “Will Kempe”—which may imply that the author did not have his own version of the play. Danter’s premises were raided in the spring of 1597, and it seems very likely that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men then gave Richard II and Richard III to Andrew Wise as a way of pre-empting any other possible thefts. In subsequent years they employed a printer, James Roberts, to place “blocking” entries in the Stationers’ Register; he would register a manuscript with the proviso that it could not be printed “without licence first had from the right honorable the Lord Chamberlain” or some such wording.

It seems likely that the version of Romeo and Juliet used by Danter was a corrupt or maimed text. It could, for example, have been the product of a hack writer working with someone who knew the play well and who had seen it many times in performance. Such a person might have been Thomas Nashe, who was associated both with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and with the printer John Danter.⁶ Another candidate as midwife for the corrupted text is Henry Chettle, the dramatist who had clashed with Shakespeare over Greene’s remarks about the “upstart Crow.” Chettle participated in the writing of forty-nine plays in the course of his short life; he was one of a number of Elizabethan writers who lived literally from hand to mouth, working incessantly for the voracious medium of the public theatre. A contemporary traveller remarked that “there be, in my opinion, more Playes in London then in all the partes of the worlde I have seene,”⁷ and it is calculated that between 1538 and 1642 some three thousand plays were written and performed.

There are six editions of Shakespeare’s plays that have been described by some textual scholars as “bad quartos”—The Contention, The True Tragedy, Henry the Fifth, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and the first quartos of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. They are significantly shorter than the versions eventually published in the Folio or collected edition of Shakespeare’s plays that was published after his death. In these quartos lines are paraphrased, characters are omitted, and scenes are placed in a different order from other versions. It may be that an adapter shortened them, for purposes now unknown, and that adapter may even have been Shakespeare himself. It is generally agreed that the Folio edition is transcribed from Shakespeare’s “foul papers” or manuscripts, however, while the shorter quartos reflect an actual performance of the play; the stage-directions are often unusually full and vivid. In the same spirit of performance the cuts in the shorter quartos are designed to add pace and simplicity to the plot, removing undue complexity or awkwardness of staging. The poetry goes, where it is not germane to the story, and extraneous dialogue or characterisation is also removed.

It is not at all clear who was responsible for these adaptations. They might have been put together by a book-keeper or even by Shakespeare himself. It has also been suggested, as we have seen, that they were the product of “memorial reconstruction” by certain of the actors involved in the original production. The nature and purpose of such an activity, however, remain unclear. It has even been proposed that the plays were the product of certain members of the audience who, wishing to pirate them, transcribed them in shorthand or what was then known as brachygraphy. One playwright complains of a pirated edition that was produced “by Stenography … scarce one word trew.”⁸ Given the relatively strict conditions of publication, however, the hypothesis seems untenable.

There is of course no reason to call these six shorter plays “bad” quartos; they are simply different. They do illustrate, however, the somewhat brutal way in which Shakespeare’s texts could be treated. At the time of first rehearsal or first performance whole soliloquies could be taken out, lines reassigned and scenes transposed for the sake of narrative efficiency. If they were indeed performed in that fashion, Shakespeare must have concurred in the changes. His position as an eminently practical and pragmatic man of the theatre once more becomes clear.

CHAPTER 57 No More Words, We Beseech You

By becoming resident playwright of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare had avoided the unhappy fate of those freelance dramatists who lived upon their increasingly frayed wits. There were not many of them, and they were all known to one another. In the manner of such things the now respectable and “gentle” Shakespeare would have been the object of some scorn and derision, as well as implicit envy, in their tavern sessions. The writers were employed either by the actors or by the managers of the theatre; they wrote singly or in groups, according to the exigency of the moment. The diaries of Philip Henslowe at the Swan reveal that, of the eighty-nine plays he supervised, thirty-four were written by a single author and the other fifty-five were the result of collaborative enterprise. Collaboration was the single most important method of providing a play. That is one reason why we never read of “author” or “playwright” concerned with any play before 1598. In an earlier period the actors themselves had written the plays, so little did the text matter compared to the spectacle and action. In Histriomastix the actors arrive in a town and proclaim their play, at which point they are asked: “What’s your playes name? Maisters whose men are ye?” The identity of the author is not a question.

The writer or writers might have proposed the story, or the story might have been suggested to them by the actors or theatre managers; they would then set to work on the “plot” or narrative scheme which, proving successful, they would fashion into the play itself. They tended to write in instalments, being paid for each stage of their delivery. “I haue hard fyue sheets of a playe,” one member of the Admiral’s Men wrote to Henslowe, “& I dow not doute but it wyll be a verye good playe.” But the playwright admitted that they were “not so fayr written all as I could wish.”¹

It is of the greatest importance to note that these men were the first of their kind. There were no rules. There had never existed professional writers before, by which is meant writers who were dependent upon the commercial market for their success or failure. Chettle, Nashe and Shakespeare — whether they knew it or not — were the harbingers of a new literary culture.

The playwrights finished their “sheets” quickly. It was the literary equivalent of factory farming, and Jonson was scorned when he admitted to spending five weeks on a play. They were also called upon to augment or revise existing plays, and to adapt them to different casts and circumstances. New plays were needed all the time but, equally importantly, new kinds of play were constantly in demand. In this recently created world of play-making and play-going there were instant fashions and fancies. For a decade the fashion had been for history plays, revenge tragedies and pastoral comedies; they were then supplanted by comedies of “humours” and city comedies; the city comedies became more and more concerned with sex, and satires also came to the fore. Then there was a fashion for Roman plays. There was a vogue for plays concerned with rulers in disguise. There was a period when romances and plays containing masques became popular. Shakespeare himself was not immune to these changes of direction, and we will see how his own plays were subtly attuned to the demands of the moment.

That is why play-writing was also considered to be the most lucrative employment for any writer of the period. The average rate for a new play was approximately £6, and it can be estimated that the most successful or popular playwrights were able to compose at least five plays each year. Their annual income, therefore, was more than twice as much as they could have earned as schoolmasters. There were others who were not so fortunate, however, and were reduced to menial literary employment for the sake of a bottle of wine and a few shillings. It was an energetic, boisterous, drunken and on occasions violent world that naturally spilled over into the circles of the theatrical profession.

There was no question, then, of creating an eminent “career” out of writing for the playhouses; these men were not established poets such as Samuel Daniel or Edmund Spenser, patronised by royalty and financed by nobility. They were journeymen or workmen. Whether Shakespeare considered himself in this light is an open question. His pursuit of armigerous status suggests that he had higher aspirations, but in the actual practice of his trade he was no doubt as pragmatic and as workmanlike as any of his contemporaries.

There was, however, one great change in the printing and publication of Shakespeare’s plays. On 10 March 1598, the volume edition of A Pleasant Conceited Comedie called Loues labors lost was issued as newly “corrected and augmented” by “W. Shakspere.” This was the first of his plays in which he was announced as the author, and heralded the growing importance of his name in the dissemination of his work to the public. He had managed to fight his way through the general anonymity of the play-writing profession and had become an identifiable “author.” In the same year new quarto versions of Richard II and Richard III proclaimed that they, unlike their anonymous predecessors, had been composed solely by “William Shake-speare.” In the following year the spurious volume, The Passionate Pilgrim, also made use of Shakespeare’s name as an evident attraction for the reading public. It is sometimes suggested that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men sold these plays to their respective publishers as a ploy for raising much-needed finance. This is most unlikely; plays were by no means a large part of any publisher’s stock and would not have commanded extraordinarily high prices. It is much more likely that publication of the plays was a way of advertising them in periods when they were simultaneously being performed on the public stage.

The publication of Love’s Labour’s Lost can be seen, however, as a highly significant event in the creation of the modern conception of the writer. It was not the least of Shakespeare’s accomplishments to elevate, and perhaps even to create, the status and the reputation of the commercial author. After the spring of 1598 the number of his plays entering publication, with his name attached to them, multiplied. It has also been suggested by theatrical historians that from this time forward dramatists became more “aggressive”² about their roles and reputations with players and publishers alike. The author may have come out of the printing press rather than the theatre, as this narrative suggests, but the literary and cultural identity of the individual writer could no longer be ignored.

It may not be coincidence that in the autumn of the same year there appears the first public praise for Shakespeare as a dramatist rather than as a poet. In Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasury Francis Meres remarks that “as Plautus and Seneca are accounted the best for Comedy and Tragedy among the Latines: so Shakespeare among the English is the most excellent in both kinds for the stage.” Among Shakespeare’s comedies he mentions “Midsummers night dreame & his Merchant of Venice” and, among the tragedies, he refers to King John and Romeo and Juliet. He augments his praise by declaring that “I say that the Muses would speak with Shakespeares fine filed phrase, if they would speake Englishe.”³ He goes on to mention Shakespeare’s name in five other passages. This is high praise, only slightly modified by the general extravagance of Meres’s encomia. It signals Shakespeare’s eminence in his profession and the fact that as an author he can now legitimately claim a place beside “Philip Sidney, Spencer, Daniel, Drayton” and the other poets whom Meres mentions. Shakespeare had made the profession of dramatist culturally respectable, in a way unimaginable even twenty years before.

Meres had recently published a sermon entitled God’s Arithmetic and in the same year as Palladis Tamia he brought out a pious book entitled Granado’s Devotion; later he became a rector in Rutland. So Shakespeare now appealed to the “godly” as well as to the “lower sort” who filled the pit of the playhouses. Meres was severe on the generally dissolute lives of Marlowe, Peek and Greene but placed Shakespeare himself in the more elevated company of Sidney and Daniel and Spenser. The publication of Palladis Tamia marked a very important stage in Shakespeare’s literary reputation, also, since from this time forward begins the serious commentary upon his plays.

There is a curious addendum to Meres’s praise. Among the comedies of Shakespeare he identifies is one entitled Loue labours wonnne. The name also emerges in a publisher’s catalogue at a later date. No such play survives. It has been suggested that it is an alternative title for an existing play, such as Much Ado About Nothing, but it may well be one of those Shakespearian productions that, like the mysterious play Cardenio, has been lost in the abysm of time.

Shortly after Meres published his comments the scholar and close friend of Edmund Spenser, Gabriel Harvey, inserted a note in his newly purchased copy of Speght’s edition of Chaucer. He wrote that “the younger sort takes much delight in Shakespeares Venus, & Adonis: but his Lucrece, & his tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, haue it in them, to please the wiser sort.” He then includes Shakespeare among a group of “flourishing metricians”⁴ including Samuel Daniel and his friend Edmund Spenser. Leaving aside the apparently early date for the production of Hamlet, and the fact that Harvey seems to regard that play as a text to be read, this is also significant praise from a representative of what might be called Elizabethan high poetics. Harvey had already scorned the lives and works of the jobbing playwrights of the period, in particular Thomas Nashe and Robert Greene, but in this private notation he places Shakespeare in much more elevated company — including that of his beloved Spenser.

There is one other piece of evidence that confirms Shakespeare’s standing among the “younger sort.” In this period some students at St. John’s College, Cambridge, devised a trilogy of satirical plays on current literary fashions. They have become known as the Parnassus Plays and the second of them, The Second Part of the Returne from Parnassus, has a considerable interest for the student of Shakespeare. In this play a feeble character named Gullio, who may or may not be a satirical portrait of Southampton, sings aloud the praises of Shakespeare to the amusement of the more alert Inge-nioso. “We shall have nothing but pure Shakspeare,” Ingenioso declares at an outpouring by Gullio, “and shreds of poetrie that he hath gathered at the the-ators.” When Ingenioso is obliged to attend to Gullio’s verses he cries out, sarcastically, “Sweete Mr. Shakspeare!” and “Marke, Romeo and Juliet! O monstrous theft!” Gullio then goes on to ask: “Let mee heare Mr. Shakspear’s veyne” which suggests that his “vein” was well enough known to be admired, imitated and occasionally disparaged. “Let this duncified world esteeme of Spencer and Chaucer,” Gullio goes on, ‘Tie worship sweet Mr. Shakspeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe.”⁵ There is no doubt, then, that Shakespeare was indeed the “fashion.” Another character in the Parnassus trilogy seems designed to be a parody of the dramatist himself. Studioso is both playwright and schoolteacher, and he speaks in the accents of Shakespeare with plentiful natural analogies and melodious conceits. A recognisably Shakespearian style could be parodied in front of an audience, who would know precisely the object of the parody.

In 1599 a student of another Cambridge college, Queens’, wrote an encomium on “honie-tong’d Shakespeare” in which he praises the two long poems, Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, as well as Romeo and Juliet. That same play was also mentioned in The Second Part of the Returne from Parnassus, which suggests that it was very popular indeed among the young scholars of the university. Shakespeare was known for his “sweetness,” but the next play of the Parnassus trilogy also mentions Richard III. The fact that Gabriel Harvey names Hamlet as one of his principal productions suggests that the dramatist was now being taken seriously on a number of levels. In the same year John Marston satirises a contemporary from whose lips flow “naught but pure Iuliat and Romio.”⁶ All in all, Shakespeare had become a phenomenon.

CHAPTER 58 A Loyall Just and Vpright Gentleman

Shakespeare’s purchase of New Place located the dramatist firmly at the centre of Stratford’s life. His wife and daughters moved into their newly refurbished residence, and perhaps looked forward to spending more time with the head of the household. He was of course de facto the guiding hand of the family’s own finances. He must have been instrumental in November 1597, for example, for re-entering at Westminster Hall the Shakespeares’ suit for the recovery of Arden property in his mother’s native village of Wilmcote; they were pressing their case against their relatives, the Lamberts, who had refused to hand over a house there. It was a difficult and somewhat technical legal challenge, apparently hanging upon a dispute over actual payment of, or promise to pay, the sum of £40. In the deposition John and Mary Shakespeare are described as “of small wealthe and verey fewe frendes and alyance.”¹ It may have been “small wealth” that persuaded John Shakespeare, in this same year, to sell a strip of land beside his property in Henley Street to a neighbour for the sum of 50 shillings.

The witnesses brought forward in the case against the Lamberts were in fact colleagues of William, rather than John, Shakespeare, which argues the dramatist’s personal investment in the matter. Amongst this tangled procedure it is clear that the Shakespeares were assiduously and energetically pursuing their case, to the extent that John Lambert accused them of harassment. He claimed that they “doe now trowble and moleste this defendante by unjuste juste sutes in law”;² “sutes” implies that he was being accused in other courts as well. The case dragged on for more than two and a half years, eventually to be settled, apparently in Lambert’s favour, out of court. In the course of the proceedings, however, the Shakespeares were rebuked for “wasting Chancery’s time.” ³ It is an indication of how far Shakespeare would go in defence of family honour and in pursuit of family property. He may have been relentless in such matters. He forfeited 40 acres with the loss of the Wilmcote property, but soon enough he was buying up more Stratford land.

At the very beginning of 1598 the bailiff of Stratford, Abraham Sturley, was ready to approach Shakespeare with news of a likely investment. He had informed a close relative, Richard Quiney, alderman, “that our countriman mr Shaksper is willinge to disburse some monei vpon some od yardeland or other att Shottri or neare about vs; he thinketh it a veri fitt patterne to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes.” Sturley went on to say that “Bi the instruccions you can geve him theareof, we thinke it a faire mark for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to hitt. It obtained would advance him in deede, and would do vs muche good.”⁴

So the new owner of New Place was already a gentleman of financial consequence in Stratford. It seems likely that he was being asked to consider the purchase of the house and land of his wife’s stepmother, Joan Hathaway, in Shottery; the old woman died in the following year, leaving 21/2 yardlands (a yardland being approximately 30 acres) as well as the farmhouse now known as “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.” He was also considered to be in the market for the purchase of “tithes,” money in lieu of a percentage of crops or farm-stock on land possessed by tithe-holders; it had once been a religious obligation which had become a matter of lay ownership.

It is not clear which particular tithes Quiney and Sturley had in mind— although they were the “farmers” of the “Clopton tithe-hay”—but the essential point is that Shakespeare did not take up their offer. He did not in fact purchase tithes until 1605, which suggests a measure of prudence on his part. In the 1590s, Stratford was in a condition of economic and social depression. In the same letter Abraham Sturley notes that “our neighbours are grown, with the wants they feel through the dearness of corn, malcontent.” The succession of bad harvests had weakened the financial strength of the town, and there had been two recent widespread and devastating fires that had further depressed the price of property. It was one of the reasons why Shakespeare had been able to purchase New Place so cheaply. Richard Quiney was in fact in London on pressing local business when he received the letter from Abraham Sturley. As alderman he had been charged with the responsibility of pleading Stratford’s case with the national administration. The town asked to be made exempt from certain taxes, and wished to be given more ample provision from a fire-relief fund.

And then later in the year Richard Quiney decided to approach Shakespeare on another matter. He needed a loan on behalf of the Stratford Corporation. Who else to ask but the man who was arguably now the wealthiest householder in Stratford? So in October 1598, from his London lodgings at the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, he wrote a letter to his “Loveinge Countreyman” declaring that “I am bolde of yowe as of a ffrende, craveing yowre helpe with xxx li [£30] … Yowe shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde.” He then noted that he had gone to “Cowrte” at Richmond over Stratford affairs and pledged that Shakespeare “shall neither loase creddytt nor monney by me, the Lord wyllinge … & yf we Bargaine farther yowe shalbe the paiemaster yowre self.” It seems likely that Richard Quiney needed the money to sustain his advocacy of Stratford’s business in the capital. News of his attempts to borrow money from Shakespeare reached Stratford itself, and eleven days later (the speed of the post was not great) Abraham Sturley wrote to him saying that he had heard “our countriman Mr. Wm Shak, would procure vs monei, which I will like of as I shall heare when, and wheare, and howe.”⁵ It does not take an over-sensitive ear to detect a note of scepticism or caution on Sturley’s part. Did Shakespeare have a reputation for meanness or avariciousness? It is not an impossible assumption. He took small debtors to court. Yet it is more likely that his financial reputation, if such it was, was that of canniness rather than avarice. The idea that Shakespeare would “procure” the requisite sum suggests that Shakespeare may have been ready to deal with a money-lender on Quiney’s behalf. There have even been suggestions that, like his father, Shakespeare himself acted as a part-time moneylender. In the conditions of the time, and in the absence of banks, this was not an unusual activity for a wealthy man. It will seem inappropriate only to those who hold an excessively romantic opinion of eminent writers.

The letter to Shakespeare was in fact never sent, and was later found among Quiney’s papers. Perhaps the alderman had decided to pay a call on his countryman. But where was he to find him? In November 1597 the dramatist had failed to pay 5 shillings in property tax to the collectors of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. He was one of those who were “dead, departed, and gone out of the said ward.” It may be that he had already removed to Southwark, out of the reach of the Bishopsgate collectors. In the following year, 1598, he was listed again by the parish authorities for non-payment of 13s 4d. He had certainly moved to Southwark by 1600, for in that year he is reported to the officers of the Bishop of Winchester for having still failed to pay his property tax. The Bishop of Winchester had jurisdiction over that area of Southwark known as the Clink. It was a common enough offence but it is still difficult to understand why the wealthy Shakespeare seems deliberately to have withheld payment of a standard tax. Was it laziness or meanness? Or did he feel that he had discharged his obligations by paying taxes in Stratford? Did he not consider himself to be thoroughly “settled” in London? Did he feel that he owed London nothing or, perhaps more likely, that he owed the world nothing?