On 4 May 1597, less than a year after the death of his son and heir, Shakespeare bought New Place, the second biggest house in Stratford. According to the ‘foot of fine’ the property was handed over to him in return for ‘sexaginta libras sterlingorum’, £60 in silver, which seems unbelievably little, especially if the house already consisted, as it did in 1663, often hearths. The recorded price is usually treated as a legal fiction, although the house had changed hands not long before for only £40. Even Schoenbaum, usually so careful to arrive at the single nugget of irreducible fact, assumes what should need to be proved. ‘In 1597 Shakespeare bought a fine house for himself and his family.’12
Big New Place certainly was but there is no evidence that it was ‘fine’. The frontage of the property extended for sixty feet along Chapel Street and seventy feet down Chapel Lane. Such a extent could not well have been roofed; we must presume then that what ran along Chapel Street and round the corner was a range of buildings surrounding various open spaces or garths. The evidence also suggests that the property had never been properly maintained. The three storeys of brick and timber looming over Chapel Street right opposite the guild chapel might well have been ruinous. The title Shakespeare acquired had been in contention for more than twenty years. The rightful owners were the heirs of the Clopton family, but it was not to them that Shakespeare paid his pieces of silver. It was to be five years before he could secure even a dubious title, and yet the restoration of the building is thought to have begun immediately. If it had been Shakespeare’s wife who took on the project of restoring and running this vast pile, the legal record would give no indication of the fact, because Ann was, feme coverte. What is obvious is that in 1597 and for some years thereafter Shakespeare had enough to do as shareholder, dramaturge, playwright and performer with the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, without involving himself in the restoration of a big tumbledown house a hundred miles away.
It is assumed that Shakespeare bought New Place because he could, because he was rich, but how rich was he? He had joined the Chamberlain’s Men only three years before as one of ‘six or seven sharers’.
Theirs was the overall control of income and expenditure. They would divide among themselves what remained after they had paid the wages of the hired players and musicians, the scribes, money-gatherers, tiremen, book-keepers and stage-hands, after they had covered the costs of each individual production, and after they had handed over to the theatrical landlord his agreed share of the takings.13
In the real world rent would be paid first rather than last, and would be payable whether the company performed or not. It makes sense for the Chamberlain’s Men to embark on building their own theatre in 1598–9, only if they were finding the rent of their performing space a drain on their resources. If Henslowe’s memoranda are any guide Shakespeare can only have expected £4 or £5 per playscript. His small share in the theatre may have been offered in lieu of cash. Thomson makes no mention of what appears to be the costliest item in Henslowe’s theatre accounts, namely costumes. On 29 September the Admiral’s Men paid Dekker and Marston £6 for the play Civil Wars; they then borrowed £19 from Henslowe to pay for a single garment, a ‘rich cloak’. Henslowe’s memoranda should suffice to illustrate how hard it was for players or poets to earn significant money in the theatre. Most of the playwrights were shareholders, because as proprietor Henslowe found it expedient to involve them in the business as a way of putting pressure on them to produce playscripts on demand. Many of them were in debt to him.
Few of Shakespeare’s contemporary playwrights had more conspicuous success than Thomas Dekker.
From 1598 until 1602 he contributed regularly and prolifically to the work of the Lord Admiral’s Men. In 1602 he wrote for both the Earl of Worcester’s Men…and briefly for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He worked for Prince Henry’s…Men from 1604 and for other companies, including the boys of St Paul’s, after that. He pressed himself hard. Henslowe’s papers show that between 1598 and 1602 he had a hand in between forty and fifty plays…14
In 1599 Dekker was arrested at the instance of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and Henslowe had to put up £3 10s to procure his discharge from imprisonment in the Counter. In 1612 he was flung into the King’s Bench prison. He had just received a fee of £181 for devising a lord mayor’s pageant called Troia-Nova Triumphans, which, though apparently high, was not sufficient to cover the costs of mounting the show. With no hope of satisfying his creditors, Dekker was to languish in prison for seven years. Henry Chettle too was arrested for debt in 1599, and Henslowe had to come to his rescue with twenty shillings. Yet we assume that, on the strength of writing forty-four plays and having a small share in the company, Shakespeare got very rich and stayed that way. The hard evidence does not bear out the assumption.
In October 1596 the Petty Collectors of the Bishopsgate ward listed seventy-three residents of St Helen’s Parish who were liable for local taxes. Among them was a William Shakespeare, whose goods were assessed at £5 on which five shillings was payable in February 1597. Schoenbaum interprets this as meaning that Shakespeare was a ‘householder’, though what kind of housing he might have been holding is not clear, £5 being hardly enough to cover a bed and bedding, table and chair. The assessment was low but apparently not low enough, for Shakespeare did not pay it. On 5 October 1598 he was assessed again with goods still to the value of £5 and a total to pay of 13s 4d, and once again he did not pay. The collectors reported him, learnt subsequently that he had left the area, and referred the matter to a different authority. On 6 October 1600 the Exchequer records show that the 13s 4d was still unpaid.
Perhaps to buy New Place it was not necessary to be rich. In 1597 large parts of Stratford were still lying derelict after the devastating fires of 1594 and 1595. Many of the buildings destroyed belonged to the Corporation, which had rented them out at reasonable rates, but maintenance and repairs had always been the responsibility of the tenants who now had to find the money and the materials for rebuilding. Many were still struggling in 1598 when Richard Quiney travelled to London to petition the queen for tax relief, which was granted on 17 December 1598. In 1599 Abraham Sturley still hadn’t finished rebuilding his house in Wood Street, burnt down in 1594. New Place may have been standing vacant, the owner having moved to Fillongley, near Coventry. As the house was not the property of the Corporation it doesn’t appear in the accounts; for all we know Ann, or legally her husband, had been a tenant there ever since her marriage. As the people of Stratford were struggling to find materials to rebuild their houses, New Place’s tiles, bricks and even timbers must have been disappearing overnight.
New Place escaped the fires, but otherwise it seems to have been an unlucky house. Even Sir Hugh Clopton, who built it, seems never to have lived there. After his death the house was leased to various tenants. In 1540 or so Leland saw it, and entered it in his memoranda as a ‘pretty house of brick and timber’.15 In 1543 William Clopton leased it for two lives to Dr Thomas Bentley, physician to Henry VIII, and a former president of the Royal College of Physicians. When Bentley died his widow brought an action in Chancery complaining that Clopton was trying illegally to evict her; Clopton counterclaimed that the terms of the lease had been broken because Bentley had ‘left the said manor place in great ruin and decay and unrepaired and it doth still remain unrepaired ever since…to the great damage and loss of the defendant’.16 In 1560, Clopton’s heir, another William Clopton, in an effort to raise cash for his sisters’ portions under the terms of his father’s will, and to finance his own travels in Italy, sold and mortgaged as much of his inheritance as he could. In some of these dealings he used the lawyer William Bott of Snitterfield as his agent, which was, to say the least, unwise.
In 1557 Bott had acted as overseer of the will of one Hugh Porter, even though he had mortgaged land in Hatton to Porter to the value of £30. In 1560 he sued the Deputy Steward of Stratford for slander, because he had accused him of accepting a fee for representing a client in a lawsu
it and then making an opponent’s plea against him. In 1563 Bott sued for slander again, claiming that Roland Wheler had said to him, ‘William Bott thou art a false harlot, a false villain, and a rebellion, and I will make thee to be set on the pillory.’17 Bott had no option but to try to silence Wheler, who was the principal witness to Bott’s murder of his own daughter, the first of two dastardly crimes to be connected with New Place. According to evidence given under oath by Wheler in the Court of Star Chamber in 1571, in April 1563 Bott had managed to negotiate a match between his daughter Isabella and John Harper of Henley-in-Arden, a minor. As part of the settlement it was agreed that if Isabella should die without issue, the lands entailed on Harper would pass to the Botts:18
the said Bott having in this wise forged the said deed and so conveyed the said lands, the said Bott’s daughter, wife of the said John Harper, did die suddenly and was poisoned with ratsbane and therewith swelled to death. And this deponent knoweth the same to be true, for that he did see the wife of the said Bott in the presence of the same Bott deliver to the said Harper’s wife in a spoon the said poison of ratsbane to drink, which poison she did drink in this deponent’s presence, the said William Bott by, and at that time leaning to the bed’s feet…19
Isabella was buried at Holy Trinity on 7 May 1563. Bott was never prosecuted for her murder. In the Court of Star Chamber in 1564 Clopton testified that Bott had kept the rents he received from Clopton’s tenants and forged a deed that gave him a claim to his lands. Soon after, Clopton brought a suit against Bott in Chancery for recovery of deeds and jewels. The tortuous case seems to have resulted in part from the desperate machinations of Lodowick Greville to finance his housebuilding at Mount Greville:20
Bott acknowledged that he had evidences belonging to Clopton, but declared that he had delivered to Lodowick Greville of Milcote, to redeliver to Clopton, bonds dated in 1564 by which Greville promised to pay Clopton one hundred pounds and forty pounds, and a recognisance by Greville in two thousand pounds…21
Clopton was then obliged to sue Greville in the Court of Star Chamber and in Chancery for conspiring to convey his lands to William Porter by a false deed, and Bott too sued Greville in the Court of Star Chamber.22 The Cloptons may have been hampered in the proceedings because they were known recusants, and their property at risk of confiscation whatever the outcome. The actions in the Court of Star Chamber and Chancery went on for many years with Bott’s dubious title to New Place remaining for the moment unchallenged. It was not until 1720 that New Place became once more property of the Clopton family.
In 1567 Bott divested himself of New Place, selling it to William Underhill of the Inner Temple, clerk of the assizes at Warwick, for £40, and apparently retired to Snitterfield where he was buried on 1 November 1582.23 This Underhill’s heir, another William Underhill, is described as a resident of Stratford in the return of ‘names and dwelling-places of the gentlemen and freeholders dwelling in the county of Warwickshire’ in 1580. In 1583 Underhill acquired for a down payment of £20 a twenty-one-year lease of the tithes of Little Wilmcote but it seems that he never paid the annual rent of £3.24 In 1588, he entertained the Recorder of Stratford at New Place, but soon afterwards moved to Fillongley in Coventry. In 1597, when the town of Stratford was suing him for the unpaid tithe rent, he sold New Place to the Shakespeares. The conveyancing had not been completed when Underhill suddenly died, of poison. By the will he managed to declare in his last moments, and left everything to his eldest son Fulke. Two years later twenty-year-old Fulke Underhill was hanged at Warwick for his father’s murder. As he was a convicted felon his estate was forfeit. Shakespeare’s purchase could not actually be completed until the estate was regranted to Underhill’s second-born son, Hercules, when he came of age in 1602.
Though he had not actually secured title to New Place Shakespeare was duly listed on 4 February 1598 as a householder in Chapel Street ward, which doesn’t of course mean that he was actually living there. In 1598 the Corporation paid ‘Mr Shakespeare’ ten pence for a load of stone. ‘Mr Shakespeare’ is assumed to have been the Bard, and the load of stone to have been ‘left over from the repairs executed at New Place’,25 and therefore the restoration work must have been complete. The stone, which was used in repairs to Clopton Bridge, could have been what was left over from repairing pavements, sills and stairs around the brick and timber house, or it could simply have been removed to be replaced by something else, and the repairs to the actual structure could have gone on for years afterwards. Three years of dearth had reduced many people to penury and near-starvation even before the fires; increased demand had driven up the costs of building materials and the number of skilled building workers was unequal to the demand. The restoration of New Place would have been a challenge at any time, but at no time more than when the Shakespeares undertook it.
Shakespeare’s acquisition of a townhouse is usually assumed to have been part of his gentrification project, but, if it was, he bought the wrong house. The source of gentility is land and a rent roll, not a rambling house with no land. New Place, smack in the centre of a half-incinerated market town, was not a gentleman’s house but a merchant’s house. Those who say that Shakespeare was country-bred and longed for the leafy lanes of Warwickshire should bear in mind that in 1597 London was still pretty rural; there were woods and green fields aplenty within a few hundred yards of the theatres on the Bankside. Besides, Shakespeare must have known that he would soon inherit the freehold (but probably not the tenancy) of the double house in Henley Street, so whose idea was it that he should take on the huge wreck of a house that dominated Chapel Street and rambled halfway down Chapel Lane?
If the scholars who have assumed that Ann and her children had been living all this while with her in-laws in the house on Henley Street are correct, Ann had been married for nearly fifteen years without ever having had a chance to manage her own household. It would have been only fair if the Bard had bethought him of her awkward situation and made a priority of finding a house for her as soon as he had sufficient cash, but not if he had switched from providing no kind of a roof over her head to overwhelming her with a dilapidated pile. If he was expecting her to fail, he was to be disappointed. Supposing the New Place project was Shakespeare’s idea, he must have thought that in Ann he had the person he needed to manage the restoration of the house and get it up and running. If he had employed a steward we would probably have come across such a person in the Stratford records; if on the other hand he employed his wife as the clerk of works, all her commands and all her transactions would have been attributed directly to him.
There was nothing unusual in a woman’s directing the restoration of her own house, even a house as big as New Place. When the house known as the Shrieve’s House in Sheep Street, Stratford, was destroyed by the fire of 1595, and the householder William Rogers died six months later, it was his widow Elizabeth who rebuilt it. In 1599 it was listed in a Corporation survey as ‘new-built’, with three bays in Sheep Street, and a range of six bays on the back-side.26 Lady Mary Wroth, wife of Ben Jonson’s friend Sir Robert Wroth, raised funds for the restoration of her husband’s house at Loughton Hall by direct petition to Anne of Denmark, and in 1612 it too was described as new-built.
In 1597 the affairs of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men required Shakespeare’s attention. In January James Burbage died, and in April his lease on the Theatre, the company’s headquarter, ran out. Burbage and the landlord, Giles Allen, had been unable to agree terms for a new lease, so Burbage had decided upon a new site, the old refectory of the dissolved Blackfriars monastery, and had invested £600 in a lease, and hundreds more in refurbishing the building for use as a theatre. This money he had borrowed. According to evidence later given by the younger James Burbage his father had built the Theatre:
with many hundred pounds taken up at interest…he built this house upon leased grounds by which means the landlord and he had a great suit in law, and by his death, the like troubles fell on us, his sons: we t
hen bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built The Globe with more sums of money taken up at interest.27
The interest would have been 10 per cent per annum. Once Shakespeare became a shareholder in the theatre he would have been liable for his share of the costs of servicing the loans and fighting the various legal actions. When the residents protested to the Privy Council and the Blackfriars project was abandoned, interest was still payable on the money borrowed by Burbage. Burbage’s son Cuthbert entered into new negotiations with Giles Allen and agreed to pay a much higher rent for the Theatre site, but the deal fell through when Allen refused to accept Burbage as the guarantor. For years Giles Allen pursued the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants through the courts, demanding the crushing amount of £800 in damages.
At this critical juncture in the company’s fortunes Shakespeare is believed to have squandered money on a huge house three days’ ride from London. The acquisition of residential real estate was not at all the kind of thing that theatre people went in for. What with playing in London during the terms and touring the countryside in the vacation, few of them had any use for a permanent residence of any kind. Most of Shakespeare’s colleagues in the theatre, even those who called themselves gentlemen and had a university education, lived a hand-to-mouth existence in lodgings, and spent the little money they made on good cheer. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Day and Henry Chettle never became heads of households. According to Aubrey, Beaumont and Fletcher ‘lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors, lay together, had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire, the same clothes and cloak etc. between them’.28 Fletcher never married. Beaumont eventually gave up the theatre and married a gentlewoman who bore him one child and was pregnant at the time of his death in March 1616.
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