Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  CHAPTER 3

  The Great Fear

  EVEN IF WILL in his late teens or early twenties had decided clearly that he wanted to become an actor, he was in fact not likely simply to have headed off to London to seek his fortune onstage, stopping along the way to pick up a few pennies for food and lodging by singing and juggling. A person uprooted from his family and community in Elizabethan England was generally a person in trouble. This was a society deeply suspicious of vagrancy. (Shakespeare would later make much in his works of the tribulations of the uprooted and unprotected.) The age of questing knights and wandering minstrels was over—if indeed it ever existed except as a fantasy. Itinerant friars and pilgrims had certainly existed, and within living memory, but the religious orders had been dissolved by the state and the pilgrimage sites had been shut down and smashed by zealous reformers. There were wanderers on the roads, but they were exceedingly vulnerable. Unaccompanied, unprotected women could be attacked and raped almost with impunity. Unaccompanied men were less desperately at risk, but they too needed all the protection they could get. Trades that required travel were heavily regulated—every peddler and tinker was required to have a license from two justices of the shire in which he resided, and anyone not so licensed could be officially or unofficially victimized. An able-bodied beggar or idle vagrant could by statute be seized and brought before the local justice of the peace for interrogation and punishment. Being able to sing and dance, juggle or recite speeches was no excuse: among those who were to be classed as vagrants, the Vagabond Act of 1604, continuing earlier statutes, includes players of interludes, fencers, bearwards, minstrels, begging scholars and sailors, palmists, fortune-tellers, and others. If the vagrant could not show that he had land of his own or a master whom he was serving, he was tied to a post and publicly whipped. Then he was either returned to his place of birth—to resume the work he was born to do—or put to labor or placed in the stocks until someone took him into service.

  A very small number of people lived lives of privileged idleness, but most inhabited a society of scarcity with no patience for anyone who did not, as Shakespeare put it, commit his body to painful labor. And the fruits of that labor, in theory at least, were supposed to be earned by people who knew and kept their place. Social regulations were amazingly harsh: lest the whip and the stocks seem too lenient, a mid-sixteenth-century statute ordered that vagabonds were to be branded and put to forced labor as slaves. Even if such draconian statutes were not strictly enforced—and the evidence is too scanty to be certain—this clearly was not a culture in which a provincial young man uncertain of his future and in need of an income to feed his wife and three small children would venture off fancy-free to the big city in the hope that, as Dickens’s Mr. Micawber puts it, something would turn up.

  The seventeenth-century gossip John Aubrey jotted down something that strongly suggests that Will did not immediately find a place in a theater company or move directly from Stratford to London in search of employment. “He had been in his younger years,” Aubrey wrote, “a schoolmaster in the country.” Most of Aubrey’s gossip about Shakespeare needs to be taken with a grain of salt, but this particular item has more authority than most, for he noted its source as the actor William Beeston. Beeston was the son of Shakespeare’s former colleague in the Lord Chamberlain’s company, Christopher Beeston. This, therefore, is a piece of biographical information that can be traced directly back to someone who actually knew Shakespeare. (They acted together, records show, in the 1598 production of Every Man in His Humour.) No one has been able to establish with certainty where “in the country” Shakespeare was a teacher, but many scholars have come to take seriously a controversial claim, first made in 1937, that he spent a period of time, perhaps two years, in Lancashire, employed by an immensely wealthy Catholic gentleman, Alexander Hoghton, and then, upon Hoghton’s death, by his friend Sir Thomas Hesketh, of nearby Rufford.

  The vicious, murky world of Tudor religious conflict will help to explain why an adolescent boy, fresh from school, might have ventured from the Midlands of England to the north, how he could have had a connection with a powerful Catholic family there, and why that family would have bothered to employ someone like him rather than a licensed schoolmaster with an Oxford or Cambridge education.

  Stratford had nominally become Protestant, like the rest of the kingdom, when in 1533 Henry VIII—bent on getting a divorce and on seizing the enormous wealth of the monasteries—had himself declared “Supreme Head of the Church in England.” Officially, England had decisively broken away from Rome. But in matters of religious belief, families in early-sixteenth-century England were characteristically fractured, and many individuals were similarly fractured inwardly. It would have been an unusual extended kin group that did not have at least some of its members holding on to the old faith, an unusual convert to Protestantism who did not feel on occasion at least some residual Catholic twinges, and an unusual lay Catholic who did not feel a current of national pride and loyalty when Henry VIII defied papal authority. This ambivalence remained true even during the reign of Henry’s son, Edward VI, from 1547 to 1553, when England’s ruling elite moved decisively to a serious embrace of Protestant doctrine and practice. But significant steps were taken in these years to make a return to Catholicism, even in imagination, more difficult.

  Salvation, the leaders of the new English church said, came not through the Mass and the other rituals of Roman Catholicism, but through faith and faith alone. Now it was not only the venerable monasteries and the celebrated pilgrimage sites that came under attack. The altarpieces, statues, crucifixes and frescoes that filled the churches were declared to be idols, designed to lure the people into ignorance and superstition. They were defaced, whitewashed over, or smashed, and the zealous vandals went on to attack other time-honored ways of acting out the faith, including rituals, pageants, and plays.

  The most exalted moment in the Catholic service had been the Elevation of the Host. The gorgeously arrayed priest, his back to the congregation and partly concealed behind a screen surmounted by a large crucifix, would lift up the consecrated wafer. At that moment, a bell was rung, and the faithful would look up from their private prayers and strain to see the piece of bread that had miraculously been transformed into the body and blood of God. Protestant polemicists had a range of hostile nicknames for the Host—“Round Robin,” “Jack in the Box,” “Worms’ Meat,” and the like—and comparably insulting terms for the Mass, including “the Pope’s Theater.”

  The Mass was an impressive performance, they conceded, but it was all a histrionic fake, a tissue of lies and illusions. The theater might have its value—zealous Protestants like John Bale, who wrote anti-Catholic plays, clearly thought so—but it had no business infecting worship. There was no miraculous transformation of the substance of the bread, as the Catholics claimed, only a solemn act of commemoration, which should be conducted not at an altar but at a table. Faith should rest not on a gaudy spectacle but on the word of God, not on alluring images but on texts. The only certain guide was Scripture. It was a scandal, religious reformers repeatedly complained, that the Holy Bible had been deliberately kept out of the hands of lay men and women (English translations deemed heretical had been burned in great bonfires by the Catholic authorities) and thereby confined to a Latin translation mumbled by priests. In the 1520s, aided by the printing press, Protestants moved to make an English version, shaped by the principles of the Reformation, widely available and to encourage the literacy that would give ordinary people access to what they called the plain, unvarnished truth. They moved as well to translate the liturgy into English and promulgate the Book of Common Prayer, so that all believers would understand the service and pray in unison in their own mother tongue.

  This was the crucial moment in the development of the English language, the moment in which the deepest things, the things upon which the fate of the soul depended, were put into ordinary, familiar, everyday words. Two men above all others, W
illiam Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer, rose to the task. Without them, without the great English translation of the New Testament and the sonorous, deeply resonant Book of Common Prayer, it is difficult to imagine William Shakespeare.

  The achievement did not come lightly. Too radical for the doctrinally conservative Henry VIII, Tyndale was driven in the 1520s to the Continent, where eventually he was captured and garroted to death by the Catholic authorities. During the reign of Edward VI, Cranmer, as archbishop of Canterbury, led the Protestant reforms, but when the sickly Edward died in 1553 the throne passed to his sister, the Catholic Mary Tudor. Mary moved at once to reverse direction, and Cranmer, along with other leading Protestants who had not managed to escape to Germany or Geneva, was burned at the stake at Oxford in 1556. The memory of these executions—which formed the core of John Foxe’s great Protestant Book of Martyrs—haunted the later sixteenth century and sharpened the violently anti–Roman Catholic sentiments of the committed reformers.

  When Mary died childless in 1558, the wheel turned once again: the twenty-five-year-old Elizabeth quickly made it clear that she would return the country to the religious course upon which it had embarked under the reign of her father and, still more, that of her brother. Though cautious about unleashing extreme reforms, the queen signaled her Protestant views at a procession on January 14, 1559, the day before her coronation. At the Little Conduit in Cheapside, she took the English Bible proffered to her by an allegorical figure of Truth, kissed the book, held it aloft, and then clasped it to her breast. When some days later at Westminster Abbey monks bearing incense, holy water, and candles approached to offer her their blessings, she dismissed them roughly: “Away with those torches,” she commanded; “we can see well enough by daylight.” In the months that followed, altarpieces and statues that had been reerected were taken down, altars were again transformed into simple tables, and the ancient Catholic liturgy was replaced by the Book of Common Prayer. The Catholic priests who had emerged from what they regarded as the nightmare years under Edward VI were compelled either to conform to the Protestant doctrine or to vanish once again. Either they fled into exile abroad, or, more dangerously, they took on disguises and hid themselves in the houses of Catholic gentlemen.

  At first repression was relatively mild. Queen Elizabeth made it clear that she was interested more in obedience and conformity than in purity of conviction. She had, as Bacon said, neither the desire nor the intention to “make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts.” What she wanted was an outward act of adherence to her authority and to the official religious settlement. Specifically, she wanted regular attendance at the state-sanctioned church services, whereupon the authorities would abstain from asking such questions as, Do you inwardly long for the old Catholic sacraments? Do you believe in the existence of purgatory? Do you think that priests have the power to grant absolution? Do you think that if a mouse eats a consecrated communion wafer, it has eaten the body and blood of Christ? Her officials generally followed suit, if sometimes grudgingly, until the moment came in which they felt that the Protestant religious settlement was in danger.

  That moment came when William Shakespeare was six years old. In May 1570 a well-to-do Catholic, John Felton, nailed to the door of the bishop of London’s house a papal bull excommunicating Queen Elizabeth. The pope, Pius V, added an order to all her Catholic subjects “that they presume not to obey her, or her monitions, mandates, and laws,” lest they too be excommunicated. Felton was tortured, convicted of treason, and executed. English Catholics were regarded with greatly intensified suspicion.

  Why should the pope—who was subsequently beatified and made a saint—have put the faithful in such an impossible position? Because in his view and that of many others, Elizabeth was the only serious obstacle to the return of wayward England to the Catholic faith. He was confident that most ordinary English men and women retained their ancient religious loyalty, and his agents had conducted a survey in 1567 that disclosed that fifty-two of the English peers were either staunch Catholics or well disposed to the Catholic Church and only fifteen were firmly committed Protestants. The question was whether this religious loyalty could be turned into political action, and the pope decided that it could. The papal bull initiated a nightmarish sequence of conspiracy and persecution, plot and counterplot that continued throughout Elizabeth’s long reign.

  STRATFORD EXPERIENCED THE same sudden shifts, tensions, and ambiguities that marked much of the realm all through the sixteenth century. The monasteries and nunneries in the area had been sacked in the 1530s and ’40s, and certain local families—among them the Lucys of Charlecote—had enriched themselves with the spoils. Then in the 1550s, when John Shakespeare moved to Stratford, the surrounding area was dotted with pyres on which local Protestant leaders—Laurence Saunders, at Coventry; John Hooper, at Gloucester; Hugh Latimer, at Oxford; among many others—were burned to death by the resurgent Catholics under Queen Mary. At the accession of Elizabeth, Catholic leaders were now in their turn in serious trouble, though in the first years of her reign the queen, both by temperament and policy, preferred fines, dismissal, and imprisonment to judicial murder. In Stratford the Catholic priest Roger Dyos, who had baptized the Shakespeares’ first child, Joan, was dismissed, replaced by the staunchly Protestant John Bretchgirdle. It was Bretchgirdle who on April 26, 1564, christened the Shakespeares’ first son, “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.” Religious upheaval aside, it was not a propitious moment to enter the world: by July the town was ravaged by bubonic plague, killing fully a sixth of the population before the winter. Nearly two-thirds of the babies born that year in Stratford died before they reached their first birthday. Perhaps Mary Shakespeare packed up and took her newborn to the country for several months, away from the pestiferous streets.

  For parents of John and Mary Shakespeare’s generation, the world into which they brought their children must have seemed strange, unsettling, and dangerous: within living memory, England had gone from a highly conservative Roman Catholicism—in the 1520s Henry VIII had fiercely attacked Luther and been rewarded by the pope with the title “Defender of the Faith”—to Catholicism under the supreme headship of the king; to a wary, tentative Protestantism; to a more radical Protestantism; to a renewed and militant Roman Catholicism; and then, with Elizabeth, to Protestantism once again. In none of these regimes was there a vision of religious tolerance. Each shift was accompanied by waves of conspiracy and persecution, rack and thumbscrew, ax and fire.

  Most people found it possible to keep their heads down, do what they had to do in order to conform to the official line, and reconcile their conscience to the shifts in doctrine and practice. Accommodation in the interests of survival led some to acquire a certain skeptical detachment from the strong claims made by both sides, claims made in the name of love and yet enforced by torture and execution. But for those who believed that the fate of their eternal souls depended upon the precise form of worship—and that, after all, is what the strong claims were about—the shifts in official belief and regulated practice must have been excruciating. Local communities were ruptured, friendships were broken, families were torn asunder—parents against children, wives against husbands—and inner lives tormented with pity and fear.

  It was not only the pious who found it difficult to keep their heads down (or, more precisely, their heads on); it was also the ambitious. Major figures—powerful aristocrats, important magnates, members of the queen’s Privy Council—were of course expected to stand up and be counted, and so too were small-scale civic leaders like John Shakespeare. As a constable in 1558–59, he had to keep the peace between Catholics and Protestants in the tense year of transition from the reign of the Catholic Mary to that of the Protestant Elizabeth. No doubt he had difficult moments, but at least he could maintain, if he wished, an air of studied neutrality. But as chamberlain, alderman, and bailiff, he had to act to carry out the policies of the regime, and that meant something more than keeping the peace.
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  A few months before Will’s birth and in the years that followed, Chamberlain John Shakespeare oversaw the “reparations” of Stratford’s fine Guild Chapel. “Reparations” here was a euphemism. What it meant was that he paid the workmen who went in with buckets of whitewash and ruined the medieval paintings—St. Helena and the Finding of the Cross, St. George and the Dragon, the murder of St. Thomas à Becket, and, above the arch, the Day of Judgment—that covered the church walls. Their task was not quite finished: the workmen also broke up the altar, putting a simple table in its place, and pulled down the rood loft—a gallery, surmounted by a cross, that separated the nave from the choir and displayed to the faithful the image of the crucified God. Town authorities proceeded to sell off the gorgeous vestments worn by the Catholic priests who had once celebrated the mystery of the Mass. It is worth pausing over these acts: John Shakespeare did not directly do any of them, and, in all likelihood, he did not single-handedly make the decision to have them done, but he was responsible for them, answerable both administratively—in the form of signed accounts presented on January 10, 1564, March 21, 1565, and February 15, 1566—and morally.