As the Field and Shakespeare families were in contact in the months following Henry Field’s death in 1592, we might ask ourselves whether Richard, being a publisher of poetry, might not have suggested that Shakespeare, cooling his heels in Stratford, should try his hand at an ‘epyllion’. Since its first publication in 1589, copies of Thomas Lodge’s mythical—erotic narrative poem Scilla’s Metamorphosis had been walking out of the bookshops. Christopher Marlowe was known to be writing an epyllion of his own, an adaptation of Musaeus’ story of Hero and Leander, part of which was already circulating in manuscript.
Perhaps Shakespeare penned his sixains at Ann’s kitchen table; he might have read them out to her, to see if they made her blush or laugh. The household may have been rather more bookish than is usually thought. Ten-year-old Susanna could both read and write, and perhaps eight-year-old Hamnet too. The children could have been schooled together with their cousin Richard Hathaway, who could also read and write. Richard Quiney’s son Richard was about to turn eleven when he wrote to his father in 1598, in Latin, so Susanna could certainly read an English text by the time she was ten.
Perhaps Shakespeare joined the train of the Earl of Southampton, and worked in peace and quiet far from Stratford. The dedication of his poem to Southampton doesn’t of itself indicate that he was already enjoying Southampton’s patronage. If Shakespeare followed the correct procedure, before publishing a poem with a dedication to the Earl of Southampton, he should have presented him with a copy, and waited for him to read it and give his gracious permission for it to be printed, usually accompanied by a reward of a couple of guineas or so. Because it is literally unthinkable that anyone would dare to sign a dedication to a person of Southampton’s rank using an alias, the signature on the dedication is the best proof we can have that there really was a poet called William Shakespeare. The poem itself is proof that he was already a pretty good poet.
Venus and Adonis is the one work of Shakespeare’s for which scholars feel almost as much distaste as they do for his wife. Year after year of multifarious shakespeareanising goes by without producing a single discussion of the work that was the Bard’s principal claim to fame among his contemporaries. Scholars would rather bicker for years over corrupt texts of the plays than address themselves to this authentic and acknowledged text that Shakespeare himself saw through the press.
If Shakespeare didn’t put a copy of his published poem into Ann’s hands, somebody else surely would have. She may have recognised herself in the desirous older woman and her boy husband in the reluctant young man, and followed with interest the shifts in the poem’s mood from stanza to stanza, enjoying the poem’s lightness of touch, even as she shrank from its rampant sensuality. However matters transpired, the appearance of Venus and Adonis must have changed Ann Shakespeare’s quiet life. Everybody was reading it; no fewer than eleven editions of the poem would appear in her lifetime and each had so many readers that only single copies of each edition have survived, the rest being read to pieces. And in every single copy could be seen the full name of the author at the end of the dedication.
What may have made life even more difficult for Ann at this juncture is that the poem was decidedly erotic. In the past erotic poetry had been reserved for the delectation of educated gentlemen, who read it in Latin and Greek. Written in the language of the people, Venus and Adonis was one erotic poem that would be passed from hand to hand by excited housewives. In Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters, first performed in 1605, printed in 1608, Harebrain informs us that he has removed from his wife’s possession ‘all her wanton pamphlets, as Hero and Leander, Venus and Adonis—oh! two luscious marrow-bone pies for a young married wife’ (I. ii. 44–6).
The disgruntled schoolmen sneered. In The Return from Parnassus, a self-serving play written by students at St John’s College Cambridge, and staged in about 1600, in which they whinge about the decay of learning and their own poor prospects, it is the nincompoop Gullio who can quote Venus and Adonis by the yard. ‘Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I’ll worship sweet Mr Shakespeare, and to honour him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillow…’8
Having produced one best-seller, and the theatres still being closed, Shakespeare set about writing another. This time the publisher would be John Harrison, who was also preparing to acquire the copyright to Venus and Adonis from Richard Field. The poem must have been finished or nearly finished by 9 May 1594 when Harrison entered a ‘book entitled the Ravishment of Lucrece’ in the Stationers’ Register. On 25 June 1594 Field sold him the rights to Venus and Adonis as well, probably for rather more than he had paid for them the year before. This seems to mark the end of the active collaboration between Shakespeare and Field. Field can be identified as the printer of Love’s Martyr, or Rosalind’s Complaint in 1601 only by his device on the title-page. Most of the text was by Robert Chester; the rest was by Marston, Chapman, Ben Jonson and ‘Ignoto’—but the little volume also contained Shakespeare’s most mysterious poem, The Phoenix and the Turtle. Field did not stoop to play—printing, which was generally of a lower and more ephemeral order than his elegant productions. He went on to become master of the staunchly puritan Stationers’ Company in 1619 and again in 1622.
In The Second Return from Parnassus, Cambridge students grudgingly admitted that Shakespeare’s poems were seductive:
Who loves not Aden’s love or Lucrece rape?
His sweeter verse contains heart-robbing lines,
Could but a graver subject him content,
Without love’s foolish lazy languishment.9
Lucrece was admired by the wiser sort, but was less successful than Venus and Adonis, which was reprinted year on year. The poem’s reputation as pornography endured. Epigram 92 of Freeman’s Epigrams, written in about 1614, instructed readers
Who list read lust, there’s Venus and Adonis,
True model of a most lascivious lecher.10
In 1625 John Davies of Hereford weighed in:
Making lewd Venus with eternal lines
To tie Adonis to her lewd designs,
Fine wit is shown therein, but finer ’twere
If not attired in such bawdy gear,
But, be it as it will, the coyest dames
In private read it for their closet games.11
Venus and Adonis might have made Shakespeare famous but it didn’t make him rich. Royalties had yet to be invented. An author who sold his copy to a publisher was paid once and once only. The copyright was the publisher’s property.
Ann, who was probably as puritan as Field, might have dreaded her husband’s return to the stage, but she could hardly have thought that there was a future in writing more ambitious poetry. In 1593 Spenser, acknowledged by his contemporaries as their ‘principal poet’, was at the height of his career, and yet Carew, Jonson and Fletcher all allege that he was living in poverty, even with a royal pension of £50 a year. Perhaps Shakespeare went back to the theatre because he was sickened by what he had seen of the life led by Southampton and his cronies. He may well have felt incapable of functioning as a flunkey poet, living as a menial in Southampton’s or some other noble household. Samuel Daniel, employed by the Earl of Pembroke as tutor to young William Herbert, later co-patron of the publication of the First Folio, produced no poetry for the five years that he was in post.
Meanwhile the level of hardship suffered by the people of the west midlands, never negligible, was set to rise steeply. In 1594 the harvest failed. The weather in June had been ‘wonderful cold, like winter’12 Stow records, ‘It commonly rained day and night until St James’s Eve,’ that is, until 24 July.13 On the second Sunday of September, a devastating fire swept through Stratford. The dwellings of the poor, made of ‘poles’ filled with plaster and thatched, without chimneys, were so obvious a fire-hazard that for years the Corporation had been exhorting householders to reroof their dwellings with tile. On 7 May 1583 the Corporation had issued an order to the ‘inhabitants to make sufficient chim
neys in their habitations or rooms for preserving the rest of the inhabitants from the danger of fire’.14 The poorer people didn’t have the choice of tiling their roofs, because their cottage walls were not strong enough to support the added weight. The cause of the conflagration in 1594 was almost certainly the making of malt, which required drying with a fast-burning fire of straw. Among the causes of fire identified in 1583 were fires being left under kilns overnight, straw litter lying around the kiln house, and children under twelve and even the blind left to look after the fire.15
Within days the Stratford aldermen had been sent into the surrounding shires to collect money.16 The rebuilding had barely begun when, a year later almost to the day, another fire ripped through the town. Not a single house remained in Wood Street; between them the two fires had destroyed 120 dwellings, more than half the housing stock, had been destroyed, as well as 80 other buildings. The cost of the damage was estimated as £12,000; some 400 people had been left homeless and destitute. Judith and Hamnet Sadler were among those whose houses had been burnt to the ground:
the accounts of the following years and the rent roll of 1598 indicate that many buildings destroyed or damaged by fire were not immediately reconstructed but remained ‘ruinous’ with consequent loss of rent to the Corporation and adding to the distress of the towns-people.17
In November 1595, in a belated effort to ease the shortage of food grain, maltsters were bound over not to make malt. In obedience to a royal edict, an inquiry was set up to ascertain whether richer citizens were hoarding corn, waiting for prices to rise even further, while their neighbours starved. Anyone who could was taking advantage of the situation. ‘Thomas Rogers, bailiff of the borough, did buy a cartload of barley, 30 October, and what more we know not, before it came into the market and did forestall the market, and he doth say he will justify it, and that he careth not a turd for them all…’ Altogether Rogers had in his house fifteen quarters of malt and two of barley, plus twenty quarters of malt that he claimed to be storing for his son-in-law.
Master Parsons and Master Sturley bought of Thomas Yate of Broad Marston 15 weigh of barley at 20s a quarter. Master Parsons and Master Tovey bought of Nicholas Tybbots eight lands of wheat, 12 lands of barley…Master Sturley and Richard Quiney and Master Badger all these being great corn-buyers and buyers of wood and such-like…18
In fact the mercery mafia were buying up grain futures as well; they would prove to be a very good, if illegal, investment, the price of corn having gone up from seventeen shillings a quarter in 1592 to fifty shillings in 1596.19
Master Richard Quiney useth the trades of buying and selling of corn for great sums. We are given to understand that he hath bought since midsummer…a hundred quarters of grain viz. barley and peas, his barley for 3s the strike and peas at 2s 6d the strike for twelve months day of payment…and hath in his house and in his barn unthrashed forty-seven quarters of barley and thirty-two quarters of malt, and peas eleven and a half quarters, and of wheat two strikes…20
And so on. Quiney could have argued that he was a merchant, and that his trade was buying cheap and selling dear, but the law was taking a dim view of engrossing in the circumstances, partly because of the mounting danger of riot. That winter mortality was higher than usual, but Ann brought her children through it. It was in the high summer of 1596 that she lost her only son.
Hamnet Shakespeare was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard on 11 August. The parish register offers no clue to what might have killed him. There were only four other burials that month, three of them newborns, the other an old man, so it was not a season of unusual sickness. After the third bad harvest in a row, the whole country was in the grip of dearth but it seems unlikely that the Bard’s only son died of hunger, or one of the many diseases that attack malnourished children. The summer was the easy time, when the bills of mortality were at their lightest. In November that year mortality would rise steeply to more than double the usual rate. Over the following five months more people would die than usually died in a year, probably of the diseases of malnutrition. Hamnet’s death appears unconnected.
If, as often happened with fraternal twins, Hamnet was weaker than his sister, he might have been vulnerable from birth. As Professor Duncan-Jones has it:
It is not uncommon for one of a pair of twins to be markedly smaller and frailer than the other, having received less nourishment from the placenta before birth. Perhaps the little boy had always been rather frail. The disparity between his life-span and that of his sister, who lived to the great age of seventy, is striking.21
As a fraternal rather than identical twin, Hamnet would have had a placenta of his own which may not have been as efficient as his sister’s, for any one of a number of reasons to do with its positioning in the uterus. Discordancy in twins is common, and was more pronounced before multiple pregnancies were diagnosed early and managed with special care. It would follow that as the weaker of the twins Hamnet could have been starved of oxygen at the time of birth. He may have suffered a birth injury; birth injuries were after all common, and commonest in multiple births, yet no thought has ever been given to the likelihood that the Bard’s child was disabled. At the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, thought to have been written for performance at about the time that Hamnet died, Oberon pronounces a blessing on the three marriage beds:
So shall all the couples three
Ever true in loving be,
And the blots of Nature’s hand
Shall not in their issue stand,
Never mole, hare-lip, nor scar,
Nor mark prodigious such as are
Despisèd in nativity,
Shall upon their children be. (V. i. 37–44)
No one has ever considered the possibility that Shakespeare’s son suffered from cerebral palsy. Instead we find airy certainties, such as that he attended Stratford grammar school, or that he was a bright and lively child, all mere supposition. Shakespeare is not the kind of writer to jerk tears with tales of crippled children. He shows scant sympathy for Richard III, who was not ‘shaped for amorous tricks’, but ‘rudely stamped’, ‘curtailed of…fair proportion’.
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature
Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time
Into this breathing world scarce half made up—
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them…(I. i. 19–24)
Congenital deformity was construed by Shakespeare’s contemporaries as evidence of sin, evil in both cause and effect. (If Greenblatt was looking for a reason for the revulsion he claims Shakespeare felt for Ann, a deformed child could fit the bill, especially if the multiple birth itself was construed as evidence of inordinate sexual desire.) Queen Margaret calls Richard an ‘elvish marked, abortive, rooting hog’—
Thou that was sealed in thy nativity
The slave of Nature and the son of hell,
Thou slander of thy heavy mother’s womb,
Thou loathed issue of thy father’s loins…(I. iii. 226–9)
The damaged child slanders the womb that bore it because its disability is interpreted as evidence of the mother’s sin: the same idea surfaces in a disturbing speech of Constance to her small son Arthur in King John:
If thou that bidd’st me be content wert grim,
Ugly and slanderous to thy mother’s womb,
Full of unpleasant blots and sightless stains,
Lame, foolish, crooked, swart, prodigious,
Patched with foul moles and eye-offending marks,
I would not care. I then would be content
For then I should not love thee, no, nor thou
Become thy great birth, nor deserve a crown. (II. ii. 43–50)
More unnerving possibly is this utterance in the poet’s own persona speaking of his brainchild, Venus and Adonis: ‘But if the first heir of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorry it had so noble a godfather, and never after ear so barren a land, for fear it yield
me still so bad a harvest.’22
Perhaps Ann had succeeded in bringing her frail little boy through the annual visitations of epidemic illness, until he hit the hurdle of adolescence, which is often a time of crisis for spastic children. However, there is no need to posit a birth defect to explain Hamnet’s death; children of the same age died every year in Stratford, most of them boys. The cause was usually infectious disease which, coinciding with the growth spurt of adolescence, could be more than usually virulent.
Since Christmas 1594 Shakespeare had been a member of the new company of players formed by Lord Hunsdon, now Lord Chamberlain. When his son sickened, he was touring with the company in Kent; on 1 August the Lord Chamberlain’s Men played the ‘market hall’ at Faversham.23 Though Peter Ackroyd tells us that ‘There is every reason to suppose that Shakespeare hastened from Kent for Stratford, for the funeral,’24 there is no reason to suppose any such thing. The family had no way of knowing exactly where Shakespeare was. The companies of players did not follow a preordained itinerary but travelled, announced their arrival and sought permission to play. If it was refused they travelled on. In high summer burial followed swiftly upon death; it would have taken a messenger four days to get to Kent, more time to track Shakespeare down, and four days to get him back again to Stratford. If Shakespeare could not have made it in time to take a last leave of his boy, there was no point in his coming back at all. No one in Stratford would have interpreted his absence from his son’s simple obsequies as indicative of callousness.
Ann would have nursed her boy in his final illness, and when it was over, closed his eyes and prepared him for burial. Her gossips would have come to help her wash the loved body, wind it in its clean white linen shroud with aromatic herbs tucked into it, and then watch by it until the time came to carry it to the churchyard. As a godparent, Judith Sadler would certainly have been there to support the bereaved mother. Six of Judith’s children had died; five of them lived less than forty days, and, as they were buried before she had been churched, she could not attend their funerals. She would have followed John, her second son to bear that name, when he was buried at the age of six months. Isabel Hathaway too had lost at least one newborn child. Losing even a newborn was painful, but to lose an eleven-year-old was immeasurably worse.
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