It was against the odds that Ann would keep her twins alive. First of all she had to produce sufficient breast-milk to feed two babies. If one or other was or both babies were too weak to suck properly, her milk would have failed; in such cases the babies usually died. One option was to farm one of the babies out to a wet-nurse. Interestingly, wet-nursing was a trade followed by the wives of artisans; in the 1570s a glover’s wife is listed in the records as a wet-nurse.29 Mary Shakespeare, who had borne her last child in 1580, could conceivably have come to the aid of her son’s wife, but no similar circumstance has ever been recorded. It is doubtful too whether Will and Ann could have afforded a wet-nurse.
Judging from the Dee family in the late sixteenth century, different nurses either merited or demanded different amounts in the same neighbourhood during the same period. Between 1580 and 1592 these ranged from four shillings to twelve shillings a month, plus soap and candles. Sir William Petre of Ingatestone Hall in Essex paid his son’s wet nurse ten pence a week in 1550, whilst her own child was nursed by another woman for nine pence a week. Between 1602 and 1604 Sir William Herrick paid two shillings for one nurse in Surrey, and two shillings and sixpence for another in Middlesex.30
Both these children of Sir William’s died at nurse and were buried in the parishes where they died, rather than brought home to be buried from their father’s house. Such deaths of nurslings were far from uncommon. Champions of maternal breast-feeding criticised the diet of the poor women who breast-fed for money.
I pray you what else is the cause that many children nursed in the country are so subject to frets, sharpness of urine and the stone; but that their nurses for the most part eat rye bread strong of the leaven and hard cheese and drink nothing but muddy and new ale.
All things considered, we may conclude that Ann Hathaway undertook the rearing of her twins herself, with the help perhaps of one of her half-sibs, who would have run errands, and done household chores for her in return for food and lodging. ‘To increase a woman’s milk you shall boil in strong posset ale good store of coleworts and cause her to drink every meal of the same, also if she use to eat boiled coleworts with her meat, it will wonderfully increase her milk.’32 Like Ann, Dekker’s Patient Grissill has ‘two beauteous twins, A son and a daughter’. When her husband throws her out of his palace with nothing but her russet gown, her hat and her pitcher, two footmen are told ‘to help to bear her children home’ but she says ‘It shall not need; I can bear more.’ When told she must give them up, she pleads and displays her breast:
see here’s a fountain
Which heaven into these alabaster bowls
Instilled to nourish them. Man, they’ll cry
And blame thee that this runs so lavishly.
Here’s milk for both my babes, two breasts for two…
…
I pray thee, let them suck. I am most meet
To play their nurse. They’ll smile and say ’tis sweet
What streams from hence. If thou dost bear them hence
My angry breasts will swell and, as mine eyes
Let fall salt drops, with these white nectar tears
They will be mixed…33
Ann’s success in rearing her twins may have been just a matter of luck. Both she and they may have been unusually strong, but it’s at least as likely that Ann met the challenge and managed it, that she found ways to keep her milk supply adequate for her two babes, and to keep them both interested and feeding properly. For the forty days of her lying-in Will would have had no option but to help her, yet there are some of his admirers who want to believe that he had left her even before the twins were born, to face her ordeal alone.
CHAPTER NINE
pondering how and when it was that young Shakespeare quit Stratford, leaving wife and children to fend for themselves, and whether he dared risk his health and theirs by consorting with prostitutes
When the twins were christened in Holy Trinity Church on 2 February 1585 by Richard Barton of Coventry, the Shakespeares had been married three and a half years. Greenblatt, for whom Shakespeare was ‘someone who had married a woman older than himself and then left her behind in Stratford’,1 alleges that Shakespeare ‘contrived after three years’ time not to live with his wife’, which suggests that he left even before the twins were born. E. A. Honigman too thinks this to be the case.2 The lost years are simply that; from the christening of the twins to Shakespeare’s emergence on the London stage we have no idea what he might have been doing or where he, or he and his family, might have been. That he separated from Ann is accepted by all but a very few scholars. Some, in the tradition of De Quincey and Wilson Knight, hold that he stayed with his family only until he attained his majority in April 1585. Twentieth-century scholars suggest that he took the place in the Queen’s Company left vacant by the murder of the player William Knell in June 1587.
The harvest of 1586 was poor. That autumn grain prices, always higher in Stratford than elsewhere, rose steeply. The Vicar of Stratford exhorted the faithful from the pulpit to fast twice a week and give the food they saved for the relief of the starving, to give as much in alms as they could spare, and to join in public prayers of repentance. Grain prices had been rising steadily since 1520, as demand outstripped supply; the pattern of earlier enclosures of arable land to increase available pasture for sheep reversed, as scattered parcels of pasture were enclosed and ploughed for the growing of corn. In the fertile fielden of Warwickshire the new methods of convertible cultivation using crop rotation were guaranteed to double seed-yields and eventually to bring grain prices down, but in the 1580s this desirable outcome was not yet in sight.
The re-orientation of English agriculture from subsistence to commercial production disrupted rural communities by emphasizing the difference between large farmers and smallholders. Many of the latter failed to survive the prolonged late-Elizabethan and early-Stuart crises, and rural as well as urban communities faced worsening problems of providing poor relief and regulating masterless men. In the countryside, vagrants and artificers frequently squatted upon wastes in woodland-pasture regions, while paupers were housed in poor-law cottages built upon the village common.3
Though Stratford was a market town rather than a village, all these processes and problems can be traced through the archives. By 1600 Shottery, in the woodland-pasture area or ‘arden’, was home to people so poor that they had no names; when they died of privation they were buried in the Stratford churchyard as simply ‘a poor boy’ or a ‘poor man’ of Shottery.
Around Stratford, enclosures, engrossments and depopulations were gathering pace. In 1584, three years after Ann’s father’s death, his Shottery neighbours were called to London to testify in a Chancery case. Fulke Sandells of Shottery, ‘yeoman’, testified on 29 April that he and other jurors had given witness in the manor court for Old Stratford that eleven butts of land in Shottery were believed to belong to the Earl of Warwick, ‘upon the report of one Hathway alias Gardner, the said Gardner being then dead’. Two days later Richard Burman, husbandman, corroborated this testimony, citing ‘the report of one Richard Hathway alias Gardner deceased, and of one Roger Burman’. The land in question adjoined the moor otherwise known as Baldon Hill, which the earl claimed by a charter of AD 709. As long as anyone could remember it had been taken to be, not part of Shottery manor, but of the ‘ferme ground’ of Old Stratford. Roger Burman, who, according to Sandells, had lived on the manor ‘by the space of fourscore years or very near’, said ‘he had heard his elders say so’ and Richard Hathaway ‘said he heard his father say the same’. Stephen Burman too gave evidence.
The earl’s claim to the land was being challenged by Francis Smith of Wootton Wawen, lord of the manor of Shottery, who had leased the land in question to Richard Woodward as part of the manor of Shottery. A meeting between the earl’s agents and Master Smith in the parlour of the inn of his kinsman the vintner John Smith had ended in violent disagreement, hence the litigation in Chancery. Woodward was gra
dually engrossing Shottery manor by taking up all the waste, disputed and common ground and enclosing it. Husbandmen like the Hathaways and their neighbours could not survive without access to manorial wastes where they could pasture their team animals, milch kine, pigs and geese. If Smith’s claim had been upheld, the Shottery farmers stood to lose many of their use-rights, so they may have been economical with the truth. The case seems to have been decided in the earl’s favour, but landlords looking to fiscalise their holdings were not easily dissuaded; when push came to shove the small farmers generally had to give way. In extreme cases frustrated landholders would resort to wholesale beatings and intimidation. Despite the best attempts of the jurists to protect the ancient rights of the people, no fewer than eighty-three Warwickshire villages were depopulated, most of them before Ann Hathaway was born.
One of the longest-lived explanations of Shakespeare’s sudden departure from Stratford is that he had been caught stealing vension from Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlcote: this is Nicholas Rowe’s account of the circumstances, written in 1709, more than a hundred years after the event.
He had, by a misfortune common enough to young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlcote near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely, and, in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him…said to be so very bitter, that it redoubled the persecution against him to that degree that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire for some time and shelter himself in London.4
To this account is made the objection that Sir Thomas Lucy was not licensed to impale a park, that is, to fence parkland to make an enclosure for deer, until 1618.5 The same tradition is recollected by Richard Davies, who died in 1708, before Rowe’s account was published. Shakespeare, he writes, was ‘much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits from Sir [blank] Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometime imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement’.6
We are not after all talking about a peccadillo. The penalties for poaching were severe, more severe if anything in time of dearth when fear of riot ran high. Then the managers of country estates increased their vigilance, even to the point of hiring armed men to protect their orchards and storehouses. It may be that Shakespeare and other young men, desperate to provide for their families and disgusted by the failure of the magnates to give of their superfluity, did raid Sir Thomas Lucy’s well-provided establishment where there was a free-warren. A brace of rabbits would have gone a long way in Ann’s stew-pot, but conveying a dead deer any distance from Charlcote would have been a far more challenging assignment. It would have been necessary to butcher the creature on the spot, thus ruining the meat which could not be properly bled and hung, and making the kind of bloody mess of themselves and the surroundings that would have been difficult to conceal. Still, that Shakespeare and other young toughs may have killed deer at Charlcote is just possible. Sir Thomas may have taken the opportunity afforded by his free-warren to run wild roe deer, for which he did not need to create a fenced enclosure, and Shakespeare and his mates may well have killed some, as Falstaff has apparently done before the opening scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor. Shallow, the landowner and a member of the Commission of the Peace for Gloucestershire, accuses Falstaff directly: ‘Knight, you have beaten my men, killed my deer, and broke open my lodge’ (I. i. 103–4). Falstaff is hardy enough to admit the crime. Slender, Shallow’s kinsman and a member of his household, names his accomplices, the ‘coney-catching rascals, Bardolph, Nym and Pistol’. Such a crime, as has been discussed earlier in the scene, amounts to ‘riot’, a serious offence against duly constituted authority, which might well have brought Falstaff and his gang before the Court of the Star Chamber.7
If Shakespeare had ever been a member of such a deer-stealing gang he had aligned himself with the most seditious elements in Warwickshire, which hardly sorts with his eventual emergence as a servant of the lord chamberlain. Stranger sequences of events could happen in Tudor England, but we need better evidence than unsupported anecdote and a reference to deer-stealing in one of Shakespeare’s plays before we can decide once for all that Shakespeare was a deer-stealer. The Merry Wives of Windsor was first performed in 1597, more than ten years after Shakespeare’s deer-stealing episode is thought to have taken place. It would have been the height of folly for Shakespeare to have risked all by making reference in a play to be performed before the queen at the Garter Feast in Whitehall Palace to a forgotten and unpunished crime of his youth. Such a pointless in-joke, if it had been understood at all, could well have put a premature end to Shakespeare’s brilliant career. If as a younger man he had been identified as a ringleader of attacks on the barnyards and game warrens of local landowners, his family would have been well advised to send him out of harm’s way.
In 1586 John Shakespeare had to yield up his furred gown because he had been finally struck off the list of aldermen. In the same year William was a party to attempts by his parents to raise a further £10 on the property that they had mortgaged to Edmund Lambert. As his father’s son and heir, and therefore party to decisions about the disposal of family property, William simply didn’t have the option of disappearing altogether. Indeed, he would have needed his father’s express permission before he could absent himself for any considerable period of time. To leave Stratford for parts unknown without his father’s blessing would have been tantamount to a crime. We have no option but to countenance the possibility that whenever and wherever William went, he went with the blessing of his wife and his parents.
Almost every day carters travelled in convoy taking goods and people and correspondence backwards and forwards from Stratford to London. In term-time everybody who was anybody had business in London; in between, everybody who could get out of London did. The terms were three in number, Michaelmas, October to December, Hilary or Lent, January to March, and Trinity or Easter, April to June. The three terms each lasted eighty days; the days in between were vacation or recess; between June and October there was the long vacation or the summer recess. Lawyers, litigants, politicians, courtiers, traders, all went home from London for Christmas and Easter and for the summer, if they had homes to go to. The country folk who were obliged to spend part of the term in London, waiting for their cases to come up or their petitions to be heard in court or parliament, all except a few of the very rich, lived in lodgings. Back in the country their families worried whether they were getting wholesome food to eat, and sent homemade cheeses and pies to supplement tavern fare.
As we have no way of proving that Shakespeare was anywhere else, we cannot be entirely sure that during the so-called lost years he wasn’t with his wife and children in Stratford. We cannot even be sure that Ann did not become pregnant again; all we know is that no more children of hers were christened at Holy Trinity Church, or anywhere else that we know of, and no more are mentioned in Shakespeare’s will. So we assume that conjugal intercourse between Will and Ann had ceased. Even this is not a safe assumption. In giving birth to twins, Ann had run an increased risk of birth accident and post-partum haemorrhage and infection. She might have been left infertile; she might even have been left incapable of sexual intercourse. We simply don’t know.
There were many wives in Tudor England who did not see their husbands for months on end. A gentleman did not normally take a wife who was ‘breeding’, that is pregnant or trying to become so, when he made his necessary visits to London. A woman with children was understood to be better off at home in the country than roosting in digs in the foul air of London, while her husband transacted his business. Besides, a wife was needed in the country to run her husband’s affairs in his absence. We have only to think of Margaret Paston, living in rural Norfolk while her lawyer menfolk haunted the law courts and danced attendance on th
e king, to realise how necessary was her management of their estates in their absence.
A wife left at home by her husband could not set off on her own and go to find him without his express permission. She had no right to intimacy, or to a share of his time, or even to support for herself and her children. As long as he was living with her, her husband had a right to anything she owned or could earn, and she had no right to set any of it aside for herself or her children. If Shakespeare was unable to find suitable work in Stratford or to keep it if he found it, he and Ann both may have been aware that separation was their only chance. He could try his luck in London, while Ann, relieved of a fourth hungry mouth to find food for, looked out for herself and her children. If Will had gone for a soldier or been pressed into the army she would have had to do as much.
With John Shakespeare foundering, William may well have represented the only hope of repairing the family fortunes. When Valentine bids farewell to his friend Proteus at the beginning of The Two Gentlemen of Verona, he chides him gently, ‘Home-keeping youth have ever homely wits’ (I. i. 2). He is on his way to see ‘the wonders of the world abroad’. Perhaps Ann comforted herself with the same thought as Proteus: ‘He leaves his friends, to dignify them more’. (I. i. 64). Proteus’ father Antonio is criticised by his brother for keeping him at home:
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