Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  But if Will was moving away from this longing, John Somerville was being drawn more and more dangerously into its power. The priest Hugh Hall—according to the prosecutor’s account, at the trial of Hall and Somerville—had talked to him about the plight of the Catholic Church in England; the hopes that lay in the beautiful, shamefully mistreated Mary, Queen of Scots; and the moral corruption of Henry VIII’s bastard daughter, the excommunicated Queen Elizabeth. He rehearsed some of the scabrous gossip about the queen’s favorite, Robert Dudley; reminded the young man that the pope had explicitly freed Englishmen from any obligation to obey her; and approvingly recounted a Spanish Catholic’s recent attempt to assassinate the Protestant Prince of Orange.

  At the same time, probably by coincidence, Somerville’s sister gave him a translation of a book by the Spanish friar Luis de Granada, Of Prayer and Meditation. Printed in Paris in 1582, the book opened with a letter by the translator, Richard Harris, lamenting the rise of Schism, Heresy, Infidelity, and Atheism in England. These evils were dark signs that the world was nearing its end, Harris argued, and that Satan was frantically struggling to make a last demonic triumph. It behooved young noblemen and gentlemen in particular, he wrote, to “remember what great inclination ye have unto virtue more than others of obscure parentage, and base estate.”

  Somerville was deeply moved. The book seems to have pushed the young man toward a desperate determination: he would single-handedly rid the country of the viper on its throne. On October 24, 1583, attended by a single servant whom he soon dismissed, he slipped away from his wife and two small daughters and set out for London. He did not make it very far. At an inn about four miles distant, where he stopped for the night, he was overheard shouting to himself that he was going to shoot the queen with his pistol. He was immediately arrested, and a few days later found himself under interrogation in the Tower of London.

  The authorities clearly understood that the young man was deranged, but, taking his wild threats seriously or simply using them as an excuse to settle old scores, they immediately moved to arrest his wife, his sister, his father-in-law and mother-in-law, the priest Hugh Hall, and others. Convicted of treason, Somerville and his father-in-law were condemned to be executed. The young man managed to hang himself in his cell the night before the sentence was to be carried out, but that did not prevent the authorities from cutting off his head to display as a warning. Edward Arden, who was probably not guilty of more than overt Catholic piety and the choice of a mad son-in-law, met the full, grisly fate of a traitor. Their severed heads, impaled on pikes, were set up on London Bridge.

  In Stratford-upon-Avon Will would at the very least have heard endless talk of these events, and if the distant family link meant something to him—and the fact that he eventually attempted to “impale” the Shakespeare coat of arms with that of the Ardens implies that it did—then he would clearly have been interested in them. He may simply have felt relief that he had distanced himself from whatever Catholic intrigues he may have encountered, but there are several odd clues that suggest a more complex attitude.

  Shakespeare had evidently read and absorbed the Catholic book that had fatally influenced Somerville. Behind Hamlet’s melancholy brooding in the graveyard—“Dost thou think Alexander looked o’ this fashion i’th’ earth? . . . And smelt so? Pah!” (5.1.182–85)—probably lies Luis de Granada’s meditation on the horror of the grave: “What thing is more esteemed than the body of a prince whiles he is alive? And what thing is more contemptible, and more vile, than the very same body when it is dead? Then do they make a hole in the earth of seven or eight foot long, (and no longer though it be for Alexander the Great, whom the whole world could not hold) and with that small room only must his body be content.” This and many other echoes may only show that the two young Warwickshire men, so different in their character and fate, shared some of the same cultural points of reference.

  A more intriguing link between Somerville and Shakespeare is not a shared book but a shared persecutor. The principal local agent in the sweep of the neighborhood after Somerville’s arrest—the justice of the peace who busied himself with the arrests, the searches of suspected Catholic houses, the examination of servants, and the like—was Sir Thomas Lucy.

  Lucy, born in 1532, had long wielded considerable influence in the area. Married at the age of fourteen to a wealthy heiress, he had built a great house at Charlecote, where Queen Elizabeth herself had visited in 1572 and presented his daughter (as noted in the careful list of gifts that the Crown compiled) with an enameled butterfly between two daisies. Lucy’s account books show that he employed about forty servants, including a troupe of actors, referred to in the Coventry records as “Sir Thomas Lucy’s Players.”

  Lucy had strong Protestant credentials. As a boy he had been tutored for a period by John Foxe, who subsequently wrote a Reformation classic. Acts and Monuments, better known as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, is a history of those who sacrificed their lives in the service of the true, Reformed religion. The book, which all English churches were required to purchase, includes near contemporaries who had been burned at the stake during the reign of Mary Tudor and also their precursors, famous proto-Reformers like Sir John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, who had been executed in 1417.

  In the months when Foxe lived as a tutor at Charlecote, his hugely influential history was not yet written and perhaps not even conceived, but the deep conviction behind it—the belief that England was God’s chosen agent in the apocalyptic struggle against the Antichrist and his demonic agent, the Roman Catholic Church—was already strong within him and seems to have influenced his young charge. Thomas Lucy became an energetic agent of the most militant Protestant faction in the state. Knighted by the Earl of Leicester, he served in Parliament, where he distinguished himself for his work on a bill against priests disguising themselves as servingmen and, more generally, for his vehement support of the cause of the Reformation.

  At the time of Somerville’s arrest, Lucy was a principal figure in the commission empowered, in the wake of the Jesuit mission, to ferret out Catholic conspirators. He was a dangerous man, not treacherous or malicious perhaps, but tough, fiercely determined, and ruthless in the pursuit of what he regarded as God’s own cause. He was specifically interested in the kin of Edward Arden—the government seemed to regard this as a family conspiracy—and he could have heard rumors that John Shakespeare’s wife Mary was related to Edward Arden’s wife Mary. John Shakespeare, from the time that he was bailiff of Stratford, would have known Lucy and understood what he was capable of. If the Shakespeares harbored Catholic sympathies, they would have had cause for alarm.

  The local Catholic community was frightened and hastened to hide any incriminating papers or religious objects. “Unless you can make Somerville, Arden, Hall the Priest, Somerville’s wife and his sister to speak directly to those things which you desire to have discovered,” wrote the secretary of the Privy Council to his superiors in London, “it will not be possible for us here to find out more than is found already, for that the Papists in this county greatly do work upon the advantage of clearing their houses of all shows of suspicion.” The remark provides a glimpse of something rarely reported in detail, though it must have been a frequent enough occurrence: Catholic families scurrying to burn or bury incriminating evidence—a rosary, a family crucifix, a picture of a favorite saint—while the government agents hammer at the doors, impatient to begin their search. On Henley Street in Stratford, the Shakespeare family may have been busy hiding their “shows of suspicion.”

  Their fear would not have ended with the deaths of Somerville and Arden. In 1585 Sir Thomas Lucy returned to Warwickshire from a year in Parliament with a new achievement to boast of: he had helped to promote a bill “against Jesuits, seminary priests, and other such-like disobedient persons.” The bill met with unanimous approval, but on its third reading a solitary member of Parliament, William Parry, arose and denounced it as “a measure savoring of treasons, full of blood,
danger, and despair to English subjects, and pregnant with fines and forfeitures which would go to enrich not the queen, but private individuals.” He was immediately arrested and examined. When it came out that Parry was ambiguously implicated in a tangle of Catholic conspiracies against the queen, Lucy was at the forefront in petitioning for his execution as a traitor. Parry was hanged and disemboweled on March 2, 1585. All the ministers in the land were instructed to deliver sermons condemning attempts to assassinate God’s chosen ruler, Queen Elizabeth, and celebrating her escape from the wicked traitor.

  The triumphant Lucy must have been more militant and more vigilant than ever. And, after all, in the mid-1580s, with constant talk of conspiracies to kill the queen and put her imprisoned cousin, the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, on the throne, it made sense to be vigilant. Members of the Privy Council and hundreds of Protestants throughout the country took an oath to kill any Catholic pretender to the throne, in the event that Elizabeth was assassinated. There were dark rumors that Spain’s Philip II was assembling a fleet large enough to carry an army across the English Channel in an invasion that would be abetted by treasonous English Catholics. It was in this time of extreme tension that Shakespeare may have run afoul of Lucy and decided that he had to get out.

  Judging from the birth of his twins in February 1585, it seems likely that Shakespeare remained in Stratford at least until the summer of 1584, but at some point shortly after he turned his back on his wife and children and made his way to London. A piece of personal good fortune may have come his way, making the escape possible. Perhaps he had encountered Lord Strange’s Men during his sojourn in the north and had renewed contact with them, perhaps he learned of another troupe of touring players that happened to be in need of an extra actor. The Earl of Leicester’s Men were at nearby Coventry and Leicester in 1584–85 and in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1586–87, as were the Earl of Essex’s Men. The Lord Admiral’s Men were at Coventry and Leicester in 1585–86 and again in Leicester in 1586–87, and the Earl of Sussex’s Men followed a similar itinerary.

  The most intriguing possibility that scholars have explored in recent years concerns the Queen’s Men, at the time the leading touring company in the country. The Queen’s Men were in Stratford in 1587, and they were shorthanded. For in the nearby town of Thame, on June 13 between 9 and 10 P.M., one of their leading actors, William Knell, had been killed in a drunken fight with a fellow actor, John Towne. The inexperienced Shakespeare was not likely to have stood in for the celebrated Knell, but in the sudden shifting of the parts, the Queen’s Men may have had a place for a novice. And if this were the company in which Shakespeare got his start, he would have had particular reason to be cautious about disclosing any residual Catholic loyalties or any trouble, aside from deer poaching, with Thomas Lucy. For the Queen’s Men, scholars have argued, had been established in 1583 to spread Protestant propaganda and royalist enthusiasm through the troubled kingdom.

  If any of these companies offered to take him on as a hired man, however modest the salary, Shakespeare would have had the happy occasion to leave Stratford. Of course, to his wife and three very small children, the departure might not have seemed such a piece of good fortune: even if he promised to send them money and to return home as soon or as often as possible, his leaving would inevitably have seemed an abandonment. The meaning of that abandonment—its justification, if there was any—could not at this moment have been at all clear. From an ethical point of view, if he cared to reflect about what he was doing, he might have been hoping for what a modern philosopher, thinking about Paul Gauguin’s abandonment of his family in order to pursue his art, has termed “moral luck.” That is, if Shakespeare felt he had something important within him that he could only realize by turning away from his domestic obligations, he could only hope to justify his actions if he actually succeeded. He stood in need of moral as well as financial luck.

  Assuming that Shakespeare attached himself as a hired man to a playing company, it is not likely that this company headed immediately for London. If in June 1587 he was taken on by the Queen’s Men, for example, the company would have continued to tour the towns and hospitable noblemen’s houses of the Midlands. By August of that summer, the company, or part of it—for the Queen’s Men often divided into touring branches—had gone to the southeast, perhaps providing the young man his first glimpse of the chalk cliffs at Dover (which later figure so powerfully in King Lear). The company then worked its way through towns like Hythe and Canterbury toward the capital. Such a route would have given Shakespeare the chance in a comfortingly familiar provincial setting to hone his skills: to learn some of the dance steps, figure out how to change his costume quickly, convincingly swell out a crowd scene or a battle, and begin to grasp the repertoire. He had to be a quick study—no one who did not possess an exceptional memory and a remarkable gift for improvisation could have survived in the competitive world of the Elizabethan theater. His work suggests that he had an almost unique gift for plunging into unfamiliar worlds, mastering their complexities, and making himself almost immediately at home. Still, the most seasoned actor, let alone a neophyte, must have felt a rush of nervous energy on approaching London.

  LONDON WAS A CITY of newcomers, flooded every year with fresh arrivals from the country, mostly men and women in their late teens and early twenties, drawn by the promise of work, the spectacle of wealth and power, the dream of some extraordinary destiny. For many their destiny was an early death: rat-infested, overcrowded, polluted, prone to fire and on occasion to riot, London was a startlingly unsafe and unhealthy place. To the ordinary degree of hazard—appallingly high by our own standards—was conjoined the ravages of epidemic diseases. The worst of these, bubonic plague, swept through the city again and again, spreading panic, wiping out whole families, decimating neighborhoods. Even in years spared by the plague, the number of deaths recorded in London’s parish records always exceeded the live births. And yet the city kept growing, a seemingly irresistible lure.

  The bulk of the burgeoning populace lived and worked within the small area bounded to the south by the Thames and on the other sides by a high crenellated stone wall originally built by the Romans some fourteen hundred years earlier. The wall was pierced by a series of gates some of whose names—Ludgate, Aldgate, Cripplegate, Moorgate—still resonate for Londoners today, long after the structures themselves have vanished. Even in Shakespeare’s time, when the wall was more or less intact, it was becoming less visible: the old, wide moat, still deep enough earlier in the century to drown unwary horses and men, was being filled up, and the new land was leased out for carpenters’ yards, garden plots, and tenements “whereby,” as one contemporary observer noted, “the city wall is hidden.”

  The eastern edge of the walled city was marked by the massive, grim Tower of London, begun by William the Conqueror; the west, by old St. Paul’s Cathedral, which boasted the longest nave in Europe. Further to the west, along the north bank of the Thames, was a succession of mansions, formerly the London residences of the princes of the church and now, in the wake of the Reformation, the seats of powerful aristocrats and royal favorites. The glittering upstart Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, entertained his guests where the bishops of Durham had once held court, and the Earl of Southampton lived in the grand house of the bishops of Bath and Wells. Each of these residences had its own riverside mooring from which the wealthy owners with their liveried attendants could be rowed further upriver to the royal palace at Whitehall for an audience with the queen or to a session of Parliament close by. If they were less fortunate, they could also be rowed downriver to the Tower of London, where they would enter, heartsick and trembling, by Traitor’s Gate.

  With its crush of small factories, dockyards, and warehouses; its huge food markets, breweries, print shops, hospitals, orphanages, law schools, and guildhalls; its cloth makers, glassmakers, basket makers, brick makers, shipwrights, carpenters, tinsmiths, armorers, haberdashers, furriers, dyers, goldsmiths, fishmongers, b
ooksellers, chandlers, drapers, grocers, and their crowds of unruly apprentices; not to mention its government officials, courtiers, lawyers, merchants, ministers, teachers, soldiers, sailors, porters, carters, watermen, innkeepers, cooks, servants, peddlers, minstrels, acrobats, cardsharps, pimps, whores, and beggars, London overflowed all boundaries. It was a city in ceaseless motion, transforming itself at an unprecedented rate. In his old age, the great London-born antiquary, John Stow, wrote at the end of the sixteenth century a remarkable survey of his city, carefully noting the thousands of changes he had witnessed in his own lifetime. A single example: when he was a boy, Stow recalled, there was an abbey of nuns of the order of St. Clare, known as the Minories, where he went to fetch “many a halfpenny of milk . . . always hot from the kine” from the abbey farm. The abbey was demolished—a casualty of the Reformation—and in its place, Stow wrote, there were now “fair and large storehouses for armour and habiliments of war.” As for the farm, its new owner first used it for the grazing of horses and then subdivided it into garden plots that produced enough revenue so that the farmer’s son and heir now lived “like a gentleman.”

  The oligarchy of aldermen, with the sheriffs and mayor, struggled to keep some control of the city through an elaborate system of regulations, but enforcement was complicated by the sheer pressure of numbers and by the existence of numerous precincts, known as liberties, that were exempt from their jurisdiction. Decades earlier, these precincts—the Black Friars, the Austin Friars, the priory of Holy Trinity, Aldgate, or the Minories where Stow went for his halfpenny of milk—had been large monasteries, with outbuildings, spacious gardens, and farms, and as such had enjoyed ecclesiastical exemptions from city codes. After the Reformation, the monks and nuns were all gone, and the buildings and land had passed into private hands. But the exemptions remained, enabling the owners to flout any attempt by the city fathers to stop activities—such as performing plays—that they regarded as nuisances or scandals.