This is not the first time we have encountered the phenomenon of vanishing girls. Ann Shakespeare’s sister Catherine Hathaway is one such, and her half-sister Margaret another. Their disappearance from the Stratford records is most likely the result of their going into service and marrying, possibly, and dying, certainly, elsewhere. In their case, the family survived in Stratford for generations; in the cases of many in Judith’s cohort the families too disappeared, so we probably have to conclude that in a period of intense social disruption they moved away beyond our ken, to developing manufacturing and commercial centres, to Coventry and Birmingham and to London. One who remained was Eleanor Verney, who went into the service of Joan Bromley, widow of the carrier Edward Bromley who died in 1606. We know of Eleanor only because in 1609 she was sent by her employer to serve a subpoena on Sir Edward Greville’s henchman Peter Rosswell. In the Court of Requests she deposed that, as she handed him the writ, he ‘did violently snatch from her the said writ and refused to redeliver it unto her, and delivered his staff he then had in his hand to a stander-by who therewith did assault and beat this deponent out of the house’.3 Disturbingly enough, among those called to answer in the case was Gilbert Shakespeare.4 Eleanor was probably placed in Joan Bromley’s service in 1596 by the Overseers of the Poor, after her father’s burial as a pauper.5
At every level of society, households could not be run without servants, who were often poor relations. Richer households took on servants of a higher class, better educated and better paid; the poorest households kept foot-boys and maids of all work on rations even harder than their own. Once in service a woman became a member of the family, and might seldom if ever hear her own family name. Time and again we encounter in the records references to servants by their masters’ names; they may even be buried without their own names, which neither the clergy nor their parishioners could supply.6 It would be no disgrace to the Bard to learn that both his daughters lived and worked in the houses of others; even the noblest families in the land would have to say the same. The most glamorous household to work in was, of course, the court of James I, where Shakespeare himself was a servant.
In 1611 when Judith was twenty-seven, she and Master Thomas and Mistress Lettice Greene witnessed a deed of enfeoffment for widowed Elizabeth Quiney and her son Adrian.7 Lettice misspelt her own name in careful italic script that contrasts with her husband’s beautiful signature (very different from the scribble of his memoranda), but Judith could only manage the kind of wobbly double squiggle that shows that she was quite unused to holding a pen. Widow Quiney did not sign either, but her mark, an E entwined with a dribbly Q, was a better effort than Judith’s. Perhaps Ann’s star boarders haled Judith along with them from New Place to make up the numbers for the necessary witnessing of the deed, which transferred ownership of the lease of a house in Wood Street to William Mountford in return for the very large sum of £131. The appearance of Judith’s name on the document might be no more than coincidence but, as the family’s private affairs were involved, it seems improbable that a stranger would have been chosen to act as witness.
Judith was unlikely to have been Bess Quiney’s gossip; spinsters of twenty-seven are not often chums of widows of forty-seven. As a grass widow herself for so many years, Ann Shakespeare is a likelier candidate for that role. The Quiney house, which stood in the High Street, two streets away from New Place, housed no fewer than sixteen people. It seems as likely as not that at some point Judith did become one of them. She may have entered Bess Quiney’s household in the sequel to the events of May 1602, or she may have already been there for years, nursemaiding the younger children, governessing or helping Bess Quiney continue the mercery business. It may seem odd that Ann Shakespeare would take on servants of her own, while her daughter worked for a wealthier woman, but it was not in the least unusual. In fact, the pattern is so universal as to constitute a principle of social organisation and mobility that can be seen at work in Tudor and Jacobean society from the top down.
If Judith Shakespeare had entered the service of the Quiney family it was probably long before 1602 when Richard Quiney was killed. By then she would have been seventeen. Usually girls of eleven or so, but sometimes as young as nine, were taken on for training in the special skills needed by the employers’ household. Until at least the mid-1590s Shakespeare was certainly not a wealthy man, and no attention would have been paid to providing Judith with an education that she did not need. By the time the family acquired New Place, it would have been too late. We may be sure, I think, that Judith could read her Bible, and she evidently couldn’t write with a pen, but she might well have been able to enter transactions in chalk on a slate or keep track of them with wooden tallies. Richard Quiney was a country mercer and Bess Quiney was a country mercer’s daughter. If, as seems likely, Richard Quiney made use of his enforced sojourns in London to buy stock, it would have been up to his wife to keep track of it, and keep the ‘mercer’s book’ up to date. Besides the fact that she was so often pregnant or recovering from a confinement, Bess Quiney had the additional challenge of her husband’s working almost full-time for the Corporation, having to spend months on end in London, when she had to run the business single-handed. If Judith had been taken on as an assistant in their retail trade she should have had to serve an apprenticeship, in which case her parents would have had to pay for her indentures. If this was the case she would have become a member of the Quiney household at about the same time that her twin brother died, in 1596.
Perhaps Judith was employed to help care for the Quiney children. As we have seen, her mother’s child-rearing skills were rather better than average, as she brought the twins through the hazard of multiple birth and all three of them through the annual visitations of epidemic disease. Bess’s children were not strong. The spacing of her eleven pregnancies suggests either that she fed her children for a shorter time than usual or that she used wet-nurses. Either way, the consequences for the children could be serious. Bess’s seventh child, William, was born in mid-September 1590 and was probably put out to nurse in the neighbourhood of Alveston because all we know of him is that he was buried there on 10 October 1592. Children who died at nurse were usually buried in the wet-nurse’s parish rather than brought home for burial. When she buried her husband, Elizabeth had nine surviving children: Elizabeth was twenty, Adrian fourteen, Richard twelve, Thomas not yet eleven; Anne was ten; her second William was not yet nine; Mary was seven, John five and George two years old. A little more than a year later, in August 1603, John died. Ensuing events in Widow Quiney’s family support the notion of a settled intimacy with the household at New Place. Soon after her husband’s death, Bess began negotiations for the marriage of her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, to William Chandler, stepson of Thomas Greene’s wife Lettice.
At about the time of Richard Quiney’s death, in 1602, Shakespeare wrote a play about a poor young woman who entered the household of a wealthy widow and endeared herself to her. All’s Well That Ends Well is a disturbing play, the text of which we know only from the 1623 Folio. As G. K. Hunter put it:
Various palliatives and explanations for the peculiarity of the play have been advanced—ranging from anatomisations of Shakespeare’s soul to analyses of his text—and these undoubtedly have their place…The problem that presents itself is: how are we to describe the genuine effects of this play so that readers (or audiences) can see it as a whole, or at least as a work with a centre? The play has undoubtedly a strongly individual quality, but it is difficult to start from this, since it is mainly a quality of strain.8
Helena is the orphan daughter of a physician, who bequeathed her to the ‘overlooking’ of the Countess of Rossillion.
I think not on my father,
And these great tears grace his remembrance more
Than those I shed for him. What was he like?
I have forgot him. (I. i. 78–80)
So might a little girl say whose father left her for months, perhaps years, at a time to go
to an unseen place called London. There were probably repeated scenes in the Shakespeare household like the one described by Thomas Deloney in Thomas of Reading:
when I set toward this my last journey to London, how my daughter took on, what a coil she kept to have me stay, and I could not be rid of the little baggage a long time, she did so hang about me, when her mother by violence took her away, she cried out most mainly, ‘O my father! My father! I shall never see him again!’9
The abandoned child in All’s Well That Ends Well wins the love and esteem of the mistress of the household, so that the countess has no difficulty in forgiving her for her presumption in falling in love with the son and heir: ‘Her father bequeathed her to me, and she herself, without other advantage, may lawfully make title to as much love as she finds. There is more owing her than is paid, and more shall be paid her than she’ll demand’ (I. iii. 96–101). It is a recurrent theme in the literature of women that they are abandoned by those with a duty of love and care and left to fend for themselves in households peopled by indifferent strangers who exploit and abuse them. Judith may be a precursor of the lonely governess of Victorian novels. Like many women raising children in the absence of their father, Ann may have found it very difficult to manage Judith’s resentments and have been relieved when she left home to struggle for acceptance by another family.
It was only to be expected that all the effort would go into securing the most advantageous match possible for the Shakespeares’ elder daughter, and smaller provision made for her younger sister. The lot of a younger sister in 1600 was almost as disadvantaged as that of a younger brother. Left to their own devices, younger daughters often came to grief. In service they were more likely to be seduced than courted. Abraham Sturley, gentleman, had ten children; among the disappearing women of Stratford are two of his daughters—Catherine, his fifth child, born in 1585, and Frances, his seventh, born in 1589. Hanna, born in 1591, reappears in the Holy Trinity register, not as a bride, but as the unmarried mother of a bastard daughter who was buried there on 23 December 1611, when she was twenty. Shocking as this may seem, it was not all that unusual even for eminent families; in every case the shamed woman is a younger sister. On 22 March 1598, the bastard daughter of thirty-year-old Joan Gilbert alias Higgs was brought to the font at Holy Trinity and five days later brought to be buried, much to the shame of Joan’s father, the Curate of Holy Trinity. He had been married three times, and was the father of at least twelve children, two baptised at Wootton Wawen, and ten at Holy Trinity, of whom Joan was the fourth.
Judith Sadler, third last of Hamnet and Judith’s children, born in April 1596, bore a bastard son Robert when she was twenty and buried him two years later; four years after that, in January 1622, she bore a second illegitimate child, a daughter Judith, and buried her ten days later. The court acts for 28 May reveal that she was cited for incontinence but did not appear.10 The court acts also reveal that a William Smith of Bridgetown had been required to perform his compurgation on a charge of having committed fornication with Judith Sadler, which means that he had to provide a number of witnesses, neighbours of long standing, who would vouch for his conduct and character and swear that they believed him when he said that he was not guilty. On 19 July Smith was excommunicated for failing to produce his compurgators.11 On 3 August Smith did appear in the Vicar’s Court and brought witnesses to testify that ‘the said Judith Sadler with whom the said Smith is accused of incontinency did in the house of Thomas Buck upon her knees swear and protest that the said William Smith had not ever or at any time carnal knowledge of her body, and the said Judith did acknowledge she had done him great wrong by raising such a fame, and did there with tears protest that she was heartily sorry she had done him that injury, and that one—Gardiner was the true father of her child’.12 (The Gardner in question could have been a Hathaway.) In a side note to the original entry we find a clue to the unimaginable sequel: ‘She went away.’
Though the Hathaways believed it their duty to find good husbands for all their girls rather than a rich husband for one of them, in January 1602 orphaned Rose Hathaway, the youngest child of Thomas Hathaway, sister of the little girls who were left a sheep each in Richard Hathaway’s will, bore and buried illegitimate twin daughters. If Ann Hathaway grieved over this, and hoped that her younger daughter would not be ignored while a brilliant match was being put together for the elder, she was to be disappointed.
Shakespeare might have felt that he had short-changed Judith; rather than leaving her his expertise, as Helena’s father did in All’s Well, he seems to have left her defenceless. It is the more surprising then that the abandoned daughter married a son of her employer. It was not the son and heir, Adrian Quiney, who married an older woman in 1613, lost his wife in November 1616 and died in October 1617 aged only thirty-one, and it was not Richard, who became a merchant adventurer and made a fortune, who was to seal Judith’s fate, but Thomas, who was an eleven-year-old schoolboy when his father was brought home unconscious and bleeding in May 1602. At that age the shock of his father’s violent and agonising death could easily have shaken him so profoundly that he never recovered his equilibrium. For whatever reason, Thomas was to turn out to be a handful. Perhaps Judith had always loved him, and he her, but if her parents would not make the match for her, if they settled none of their property on her, there was no way the match could be made. She could have ‘got herself pregnant’, but manners were changing. Perhaps it would have seemed too great a betrayal of Bess Quiney to steal her boy away into a disadvantageous match. Judith remained, like so many other young Shakespeares, unmarried.
Judith may of course have been living and working at New Place, rather than at Bess Quiney’s. We know that her mother’s business entreprises had expanded to include the making of malt and lending of money. ‘As local capitalists, moreover, brewers and maltsters often became the money-lenders of the rural community, and sometimes obtained a powerful hold over feckless tradesmen or husbandmen.’13
In 1608 ‘Shakespeare’ brought an action in the Court of Record seeking recovery of £6 plus damages from a John Addenbrooke. Addenbrooke was apprehended but released when a Stratford blacksmith called Thomas Hornby agreed to stand surety for him. The court awarded Shakespeare his £6 with costs and damages, but when Addenbrooke was nowhere to be found, they were obliged to attempt to recover the money from Hornby.14 Addenbrooke may have been an associate of the Grevilles; in 1584 when Greville was buying up rectories all over Warwickshire, Addenbrooke bought the advowson of Tanworth as an investment and sold it the next year. In 1600 he is recorded as selling licences to make starch, in what was perhaps another of Greville’s ill-starred ventures. How he could have come to be indebted to Shakespeare is unclear; it seems far more likely, as he was a businessman who came and went from Stratford, where he successfully sued a John Armstrong for forty shillings in 1594, that his business was with Ann.15 Ann may have supplied him with malt or lent him money; she may even have become involved in the starch-making business. Unfortunately Hornby was not the right person to guarantee Addenbrooke’s debt; when Margaret Smith, Hamnet Sadler’s sister and widow of Alderman John Smith, died in 1625, Thomas Hornby still owed her the sum of £5 that he had owed since 1610, when because he defaulted she had been unable to pay the Corporation the £10 left to it by her son, Hamnet Smith.16 In 1613 the Corporation sued him as surety for the bequest.
Ann’s mother-in-law is supposed by most scholars to have been still living in Henley Street with her three sons and her daughter, her daughter’s husband and their growing family. If I am right and most of the Henley Street property was leased away, her situation would have been uncomfortable enough without the addition of the Hart family, unless her sons had found themselves somewhere else to live. At some point Mary Shakespeare’s youngest son took off for London, where he hoped to find success as a player. At the beginning of 1608 came the news that he was dead. Mary probably never knew that she had a baby grandson who had died six months before hi
s father and was buried as ‘Edward, son of Edward Shakespeare, player, base-born’ on 12 August at St Giles, Cripplegate. On the last day of 1607 Edmund himself was buried at St Saviour’s in Southwark ‘in the church with a forenoon knell of the great bell’ which cost the person who paid for it the considerable sum of twenty shillings. Peter Ackroyd is sure he knows who paid for it, and the other commentators would agree with him: ‘The money for the bell no doubt came from the purse of his brother, who in the bitter cold accompanied the coffin to the burial place.’17
The other commentators would probably not agree with Ackroyd’s notion that Edmund was living with his brother at Silver Street and working at the old Curtain Theatre in Shoreditch. If it was Shakespeare who paid for his brother’s obsequies it is the more surprising that, when his mother died, nothing of the sort was arranged. As the King’s Men were on tour it seems unlikely that Shakespeare could have been present when Mary was buried on 9 September 1608; the chief mourners were probably her bachelor sons, forty-one-year-old Gilbert and thirty-four-year-old Richard. The register records the burial of plain ‘Mary Shakespeare, widow’, as if there was no one to remind the clerk that this was the widow of Master Shakespeare, erstwhile alderman, let alone that her son’s endeavours had made her husband a gentleman. Six weeks or so before her death Richard Shakespeare had been presented to the Vicar’s Court: ‘the said Shakespeare appeared, admitted, petitioned the favour of the court. And for the fault committed is admitted to pay before the next court twelve pence to the use of the poor.’18 Two other men, Ralph Burnell and Richard Kelly, were fined the same amount at the same sitting. What they had all been up to is anybody’s guess. As fines in the Vicar’s Court went, twelve pence was rather steep. The tariff for ploughing with oxen on the sabbath, for example, was only one or two pence even though the worst offenders were rich landowners.
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