It was not quite as simple as Smith’s wry account suggests. To be an “armiger,” someone entitled to bear a heraldic device, one had to meet certain requirements overseen by a bureaucracy headed by the Garter King-of-Arms, the chief of the College of Heralds. In John Shakespeare’s case, it was civic office that helped to confer eligibility: “If any person be advanced into an office or dignity of public administration,” one expert on these matters held, “be it either Ecclesiastical, Martial, or Civil . . . the Herald must not refuse to devise to such a public person, upon his instant request and willingness to bear the same without reproach, a coat of Arms.” The bailiff of Stratford was just such a “public person,” and accordingly, when he submitted a sketch for his arms to the college, John Shakespeare must have been confident that his application would be granted. But though you could not legitimately simply buy a proper coat of arms—one that you and your descendants could proudly bear forever, as an acknowledged right—you most definitely had to pay for it. The heralds’ fees were high. When his financial circumstances worsened, ascent to the status of gentleman must have seemed a hopeless extravagance or perhaps a mockery, like a beggar dreaming of a crown. John Shakespeare’s application was shelved and forgotten.
But not, it seems, by his oldest son. Decades later, in October 1596, the process was renewed. The old sketch—“Gould. On A Bend Sables, a Speare of the first steeled argent. And for his Creast or Cognizance a falcon, his winges displayed Argent. Standing on a wrethe of his Coullors. Suppourting a Speare Gould. Steeled as aforesaid sett uppon a helmett with mantelles & tasselles”—was pulled off the shelf, where it had gathered dust; once again John Shakespeare’s claim was reviewed and, this time round, approved. Who reinstituted the application, provided the necessary information, and paid the fees to the notoriously greedy, arrogant, and irascible head of the London College of Heralds, Sir William Dethick? Not the elderly glover and his wife, whose financial situation had not, in all likelihood, greatly improved, and not, with any likelihood, the provincial haberdasher Gilbert, the apparent nonentity Richard, the unsuccessful actor Edmund, or the unmarried sister Joan. The obvious answer is William, already prospering handsomely in the London theater.
Why should he have gone to the trouble? Most obviously, by helping his father complete the process, the playwright, in an act of prudential, self-interested generosity, was conferring gentle status on himself and his children. Will had by this time no doubt played gentlemen onstage, and he could carry off the part outside the playhouse as well, but he and others would always know he was impersonating someone he was not. He now had the means to acquire legitimately, through the offices his father had once held, a role he had only played. He could legally wear outside of the theater the kinds of clothes he had been wearing onstage. For a man singularly alert to the social hierarchy—and Shakespeare spent most of his professional life imagining the lives of kings, aristocracy, and gentry—the prospect of this privilege must have seemed sweet. He would sign his last will and testament “William Shakespeare, of Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick, gentleman.” His heirs and their offspring would be ever further from the glover’s shop and, for that matter, the playhouse; they would have the luxury of taking their gentility for granted and laying claim without irony to the motto that someone—again, in all probability, Will himself—had devised to accompany the shield and crest: Non sanz droict.
“Not without right.” Is there a touch of defensiveness in that motto, a slight sense that the claim to gentlemanly status might raise eyebrows? If so, the insecurity would not belong to the impecunious glover but to his successful playwright son. For whatever John Shakespeare’s problems—drink or foolish loans or whatever—he did in fact legitimately possess the social standing, through the offices he had held in Stratford, to lay claim to the status of a gentleman. Not so his son. There were few occupations for an educated man more stigmatized socially than player. That Shakespeare was acutely aware of the stigma can be surmised from the sonnets, where he writes that, like the dyer’s hand, he has been stained by the medium he has worked in. It was with such a consciousness of social shame—the sense of what it means to go up and down, making oneself a motley to the view—that he may have come up with the family motto, half-defiant, half-defensive.
The clerk who wrote down the words on the draft of the grant of arms made a telling mistake—either unconsciously or with sly sarcasm—that he had to strike out: he twice wrote “Non, Sanz Droict.” The comma in effect turns the motto into an official rejection: “No; without justification.” The correction was made, the motto was finally written correctly, and the arms were granted. But for Will the insecurity—or at least the sense of incongruity—is unlikely to have vanished, for there were jokes and unpleasant reminders. Most manifestations of social policing—raised eyebrows, wry faces, ironic witticisms, teasing—are evanescent and hardly outlast a day or two, let alone four hundred years. But in this case, perhaps because the volume of insult was high, perhaps because Will was sufficiently a public figure, traces of it survive. In the satiric comedy Every Man Out of his Humour, performed at the newly erected Globe by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599, Ben Jonson has a rustic buffoon named Sogliardo pay thirty pounds for a ridiculous coat of arms, to which an acquaintance mockingly proposes the humiliating motto “Not Without Mustard.” As a member of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Will would have listened to this insult again and again in rehearsal and in performance. He probably laughed uncomfortably—how else does someone get through this kind of teasing?
In 1602 his discomfort would have been renewed when a disgruntled genealogist, the York herald Ralph Brooke, filed a formal complaint against the Garter King-of-Arms, Sir William Dethick, for abusing his authority by elevating base people to a status they did not merit. Brooke drew up a list of twenty-three such cases. “Shakespear ye Player” was the fourth name on the list.
Shakespeare was a witty mocker of pretensions and must have known that he would be exposing himself to this embarrassment. He may have felt that the social cachet was worth wincing for, but a further key to his action may lie in the specific remarks penned on the drafts that Dethick drew up in granting the renewed request on behalf of John Shakespeare. These remarks must have been based on information provided by the person paying for the application, information that could then be verified, if the officials were acting responsibly, by the College of Heralds. There is, of course, no reference to the glover’s shop or the illegal trade in wool and other commodities. Along with a vague reference to the distinction of the petitioner’s ancestor, who allegedly did “faithful and valiant service” to King Henry VII, though no record of this service or its reward has emerged, Dethick notes that “the said John hath married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wilmcote,” that he had served as a justice of the peace and the bailiff of Stratford, and that he had “lands and tenements of good wealth and substance,” worth five hundred pounds.
By 1596 this was all something of a dream, akin to Christoper Sly’s “we came in with Richard Conqueror.” John Shakespeare was hardly destitute—despite his losses, he still had possessions—but he had ceased to be what the application claimed he was: a “man of good substance.” The story Will likely told the Garter King-of-Arms—a story about a man whose ancestors had served the king, a man who had married an heiress bearing a distinguished name, a man who had risen to high civic office, in short a man of good substance—erased or undid the man who mortgaged away his wife’s property, who could not leave his house for fear of arrest for debt, and whose relations with his fellow townspeople had so deteriorated by 1582 that in that year he petitioned for sureties of the peace against four men “for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs.” In this application, John Shakespeare had not only been restored to his lost position; he had been raised to a position he never quite held.
The dream of restoration haunted Shakespeare throughout his life. In The Comedy of Errors, a merchant of Syracuse,
in search of his lost twins, is arrested in the rival city of Ephesus and is threatened with death if he cannot pay a heavy fine. At the end of a zany tangle of confused identities, in which one of his sons is arrested for debt by a leather-clad officer (of the type that used to accompany the bailiff John Shakespeare), the father is reunited with the twins and with their mother, the beloved wife from whom he had been separated in a shipwreck thirty-three years before. The merchant’s life is spared, his fine is forgiven, the son’s debt is settled, and the family is magically restored. In The Merchant of Venice, a wealthy merchant loses all of his wealth in a series of shipwrecks and is about to be carved up by a merciless Jewish creditor, until, through a clever interpretation of the law, he regains everything he has lost and acquires the creditor’s money as well. In Twelfth Night, the son and daughter of a nobleman are separated from one another and shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. The son wanders through his life as if he is in a dream. The daughter takes a new name and pretends she is a young man, Cesario. In her assumed identity, she has suffered a steep loss in social standing—Cesario is a servant—but even in her disguise she clings to her origins. “What is your parentage?” asks the proud countess, and the servant replies, “Above my fortunes, yet my state is well. / I am a gentleman.” The countess is smitten:
I’ll be sworn thou art.
Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions, and spirit
Do give thee five-fold blazon.
(1.5.247–49, 261–63)
“Five-fold blazon”: in his speech, looks, movements, though not in his clothes or occupation, Cesario bears a gentleman’s coat of arms. And when the brother and sister finally encounter one another by chance, they lay claim to their displaced identities:
SEBASTIAN: What countryman? What name? What parentage?
VIOLA: Of Messaline. Sebastian was my father.
(5.1.224–25)
Not only are they restored to their proper social identities, but they each make a marriage above their station, the young woman to the Duke of Illyria, the young man to a great heiress.
In none of these cases is restoration entirely straightforward. The Syracusan merchant gets back a family that had, because of the disastrous shipwreck, never actually lived as one. The Venetian merchant, who despises usury, not only recoups his maritime losses; he is also given “in use” half the accumulated wealth of the Jewish moneylender. The twin brother and sister are not so much restored to one another or to their lost identities as they are linked through their new spouses, Viola marrying the duke who has long been madly in love with the countess, Sebastian’s immensely wealthy bride. And the social-climbing success is strangely shadowed by the figure of the countess’s steward Malvolio, who dreams of making the match that Sebastian succeeds in making.
Malvolio serves as the shadow side of Shakespeare’s own fascination with achieving the status of a gentleman. He is, says the waiting gentlewoman Maria, who hates him, “an affectioned ass that cons state without book and utters it by great swathes”—that is, he memorizes and recites the dignified and high-flown language of his betters. And he is a narcissist: “the best persuaded of himself, so crammed, as he thinks, with excellencies, that it is his grounds of faith that all that look on him love him” (2.4.132-35). He suffers from what Shakespeare in the sonnets characterizes as his own besetting “Sin of self-love”: “Methinks no face so gracious is as mine. / No shape so true, no truth of such account” (62.1, 5–6). Out of these qualities, Malvolio’s enemies will work their revenge, which will be to make him a “common recreation” (2.3.121).
What is ridiculed in Malvolio, then, is not simply ill nature or puritanical severity but rather the dream of acting the part of a gentleman. And the ridicule comes very close to describing the process by which any actor, including Shakespeare himself, must have learned his trade. “He has been yonder i’ the sun,” Maria tells her fellow conspirators, “practising behaviour to his own shadow this half-hour” (2.5.14–15). When he comes close enough to be overheard, what the mockers witness is someone rehearsing a fantasy: “To be Count Malvolio!” “Now he’s deeply in,” one of the conspirators whispers. “Look how imagination blows him” (2.5.30, 37–38). The audience is then invited to watch someone enter a part—“deeply in”—and improvise a scene, complete with costume, props, dialogue, and what actors call a backstory:
Having been three months married to her, sitting in my state . . . Calling my officers about me, in my branched velvet gown, having come from a day-bed where I have left Olivia sleeping . . . And then to have the humour of state and—after a demure travel of regard, telling them I know my place, as I would they should do theirs—to ask for my kinsman Toby. . . . Seven of my people with an obedient start make out for him. I frown the while, and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my—[touching his chain] some rich jewel. (2.5.39–54)
Malvolio is about to be lured into the trap that has been laid for him, the trap that will lead to yellow cross-garters, inappropriate smiling, imprisonment as a madman, and cruel humiliation. One of the greatest comic plots in all of Shakespeare, it draws deeply on the playwright’s inner life, including a strong current of ironic laughter at the whole project—his own and that of his parents—of laying claim to a higher status.
Shakespeare found the pleasures and ironies of restoration inexhaustibly fascinating, even in his tragedies and tragicomedies. At the climax of King Lear, the old king’s wicked daughters are defeated, and, after all his losses and his atrocious sufferings, the king is restored to “absolute power” (5.3.299). But it is too late: his beloved daughter Cordelia is dead in his arms, and he dies in an agony of despair mixed with the delusive hope that she might still be alive. A similar fate befalls Timon of Athens, who finds when he has lost his wealth that he has no friends and goes off to live alone in the woods. Digging in the earth for roots to eat, he finds gold, the last thing he desires, and once again becomes, to his virtually fatal disgust, an immensely wealthy man. And in The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes, after sixteen years, recovers the wife and daughter whom his paranoid jealousy had seemed to destroy. But the wide gap in time is not so simply erased: his wife, Leontes remarks, “was not so much wrinkled, nothing / So agèd” as the woman he has recovered (5.3.28–29), and other victims of his jealousy—his only son, Prince Mamillius, and his faithful counselor Antigonus—do not miraculously return from the grave. The emotion of restoration is powerfully present—the sense that what was seemingly irrevocably lost has been reclaimed against all hope and expectation—but the recovery is never quite what it seems: the past that is recovered turns out to be an invention or a delusion or, in the worst case, an intensification of loss.
Near the very end of his career Shakespeare returned one more time to this plot structure, giving it in almost pure form in The Tempest: a ruler is thrust from his dukedom, cast out to sea in a leaky boat with his infant daughter, and shipwrecked on a strange island; years later, through the exercise of his magic, he triumphs over his enemies and recovers his lost realm. These are familiar, highly traditional motifs, and yet the peculiar intensity with which Shakespeare repeatedly embraces the fantasy of the recovery of a lost prosperity or title or identity is striking.
There is no direct relation between the staging of various forms of restoration in Will’s plays and the renewal of the lapsed application for the status of gentleman. Art rarely emerges so transparently from the circumstances of life and would be far less compelling if it did. Shakespeare was in the business of reaching thousands of people, none of whom had any reason to be interested in the business affairs and social status of a Stratford glover. But there were many ways in which he might have tried to reach his audience, and his fascination with a particular set of stories—his sense that these might work and, still more, that he might have it in him to work with them—does not seem entirely random. Though his imagination soared to faraway places, the fantasies that excited his imagination seem often to have had their roots in the actual circumstan
ces of his life or rather in the expectations and longings and frustrations generated by those circumstances. Hence, in settings as remote as the mythical Athens of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or the romantic Bohemia of The Winter’s Tale, there are notes that take us back to the young man who grew up on Henley Street in Stratford and dreamed that he was a gentleman. Sometime in his late adolescence, the young man awoke to find that the dream had fled, along with his mother’s dowry and his father’s civic stature. But, as we have seen, he did not give it up, either in his life or in his art.
Again and again in his plays, an unforeseen catastrophe—one of his favorite manifestations of it is a shipwreck—suddenly turns what had seemed like happy progress, prosperity, smooth sailing into disaster, terror, and loss. The loss is obviously and immediately material, but it is also and more crushingly a loss of identity. To wind up on an unknown shore, without one’s friends, habitual associates, familiar network—this catastrophe is often epitomized by the deliberate alteration or disappearance of the name and, with it, the alteration or disappearance of social status. Shakespeare’s characters repeatedly have to lay claim to a gentility that is no longer immediately apparent, all of its conventional signs having been swept away by the wild waves.
In Will’s imagination his father’s failure might have seemed a shipwreck, but the Shakespeares had no secure grasp of gentlemanly status to begin with. The family was at best only just about to become gentle, acquiring the coat of arms for which his father had applied. It is possible, of course, that his mother had filled her eldest son with tales of the Ardens of Park Hall or even of Turchill of the Forest of Arden, the lordly ancestor whose lands merited four columns in the Domesday Book. In that case, Will could have dreamed that the family was just about to recover, through his father’s civic offices, the status that had at one time belonged by birthright to the Ardens. This dream too seems to have stayed with him. In 1599, three years after the old application for the coat of arms was revived, almost certainly at his instigation and expense, Will was in all likelihood the person behind another successful application to the College of Heralds, this time for the right to add (the technical term is “impale”) the Arden arms to what is now described as “the Ancient coat of Arms” of the Shakespeares. In the end only the Shakespeare arms appeared on his funeral monument, but the symbolic statement is clear: I am not someone who can be treated like a hired servant or whipped like a vagabond; I am someone who does not merely pretend onstage to be a gentleman; I am a true gentleman, entitled to bear arms both by virtue of my father’s distinguished service to the queen and by virtue of my mother’s distinguished family. And, half-concealed, another symbolic statement: I have with the fruits of my labor and my imagination returned my family to the moment before things began to fall apart; I have affirmed the distinction of my mother’s name and restored my father’s honor; I have laid claim to my lost inheritance; I have created that inheritance.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 8
