CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
in which Shakespeare returns to the town some say he never left and lives the life of an Anglican gentleman while Ann continues to live the life of a puritan townswoman
Scholars cannot agree on why or when Shakespeare returned to Stratford. Those who think that Thomas Greene and his family finally vacated their lodgings at New Place and removed to St Mary’s House in 1611 believe that Shakespeare’s return was probably the precipitating factor. In September 1611 Shakespeare is listed as one of seventy-one residents of Stratford willing to contribute ‘towards the charge of prosecuting a bill in parliament for the better repair of the highways and amending divers defects in the statutes already made’, and that too is taken as evidence that he was physically and permanently present; however, the name is entered in the margin and could well have been suggested by someone else, by Thomas Greene or John Hall, both of whose names appear in the list proper.1 Shakespeare had after all been listed before at times when he is understood to have been in London. Some scholars interpret the fact that on 11 May 1612 Shakespeare was in London giving evidence in a lawsuit and did not reappear when recalled on 19 June as proof that he had withdrawn permanently to the country—or rather to Stratford, which is not the same thing—in the interim. Peter Thomson believes that Shakespeare remained a full member of the King’s Men until 1613, writing Cardenio, Henry VIII, and The Two Noble Kinsmen in collaboration with John Fletcher, as it were training his successor as the company playwright.2
It is possible of course that Shakespeare never really left Stratford. Aubrey stated confidently that ‘Mr William Shakespeare was wont to go into Warwickshire once a year…’3 The trip from London to Stratford still took three days. William Greenaway, who organised the wagon trains in Shakespeare’s youth, was dead, but trade had expanded and we should probably assume that from about 1600 goods left Stratford for London and vice versa most days of the week. The carriers also leased out horses so that gentlemen who had business in London could ride in convoy with them and so avoid the danger of being waylaid and robbed. Most scholars agree that Shakespeare returned from London for the funeral of his father in September 1601, for the issue of the fine for New Place in the summer of 1602, for the wedding of his daughter in June 1607, and for the funeral of his mother in September 1608, mainly because they think he should have. There’s certainly no evidence that he did. To observers like Peter Ackroyd it seems obvious that Shakespeare sought the company of his family: ‘There were of course many other neighbours—as well as his immediate family—living in close proximity. These were the people whom he saw every day, and with whom he exchanged greetings and small talk.’4
If Shakespeare did indeed return to enjoy the company of his brother Gilbert he must have been devastated when he died at the beginning of February 1612. A year later almost to the day Richard died. William had only one sibling left; Joan was apparently living with her husband William Hart and their three surviving sons at the old address in Henley Street behind the Maiden Head Inn.
We do not know whether Shakespeare was in Stratford in June 1613 when John Lane the younger ‘reported’ that his daughter Susanna Hall ‘had the running of the reins and had been naught with Ralph Smith at John Palmer’.5 What is meant is that she had contracted venereal disease causing a copious vaginal discharge by having intercourse with Ralph Smith at the house of a John Palmer. How Lane published this libel is not clear. One way of doing it was to pin a notice to her house door, or to make up a scurrilous rhyme and have people sing it. He may have scribbled it
as it were upon a table, or in a window, or upon the wall or mantel of a chimney in some place of common resort, where it was allowed every man might come, or be sitting to chat and prate, as now in our taverns and common tabling houses, where many merry heads meet and scribble, with ink, with chalk or with a coal, such matters as they would every man should know and descant upon.6
At the worst Susanna may have been balladed, that is her ‘whole story sung to some villainous tune in a lewd ballad’ so that boys in the street hooted at her.7 Something of the sort must have happened for Susanna (or more probably her husband) to think it worth pursuing as far as bringing a suit in the Consistory Court at Worcester five weeks later. By that time the Globe had burnt down during a performance of Henry VIII, another event that is supposed by some to have precipitated Shakespeare’s return to Stratford.
Truly destructive libels were brought before the Court of Star Chamber; less destructive libels were dealt with in the Vicar’s Court.8 The damage done to Susanna must have been somewhere between the two extremes. The offence was the graver because the Lane family were gentry. A week before the case was heard, John Hall and Thomas Greene were asked to act as trustees for John Lane’s cousins, children of Richard Lane, Esquire, of Bridgetown, who, feeling his terminal illness upon him, had settled property on them. One of them, Edward Lane, was to marry twenty-one-year-old Mary Combe, sister of William and Thomas, a few weeks later. John Lane’s sister Margaret was married to Thomas Greene’s brother John, which makes it all the stranger that, in a weird re-enactment of the story from the Apocrypha, he should have chosen to libel Susanna. Ralph Smith, the man he implicated with her—and therefore accused of being poxed—was a haberdasher cum hatter, thirty-five years old, and nine years married to Anne Court. His mother was Margaret Sadler, sister of Hamnet. His father, the vintner John Smith, had served as Bailiff of Stratford in 1598 and had then apparently gone a little crazy; three months before his death in 1601 he lost his position as head alderman for ‘obstinate and wilful hindering of the execution of process out of the Court of Record’ and refused to surrender the mace or the keys to the cupboard where the Book of Orders was kept. According to Fripp, John Palmer was ‘a gentleman of Compton’ and a ‘grandson of the late alderman William Smith’, as was Ralph.9
Neither Susanna nor John Lane attended the Consistory Court hearing. The plaintiff’s case was presented by Robert Whatcott, and Lane was duly declared excommunicate. Susanna might have been vindicated, but that was before the dons began chewing over the case. Here is A. L. Rowse on the subject: ‘I dare say she had the running of the reins, for she was the member of the family who possessed something of her father’s spirit.’10
Lane may have been nothing more than a loose cannon, firing at random, or his obscene libel may have been part of a growing antagonism between the Stratford puritans and the unreformed gentry. As well as obstructing the local gentry in their endeavours to fiscalise their estates, the Corporation was known to be a puritan brotherhood, sworn to be secret in its dealings and severe against the traditional sports and pastimes of the people. In attacking Susanna, Lane was probably aiming not only at her husband but also at her Hathaway cousins who were rising stars of the puritan meritocracy. What Shakespeare thought of the scandal is, needless to say, not known. Nowadays we would tend to think of the whole thing as a fuss about nothing, but in Jacobean Stratford a person whose credit was destroyed could not function as a citizen. Though Ann Hathaway had been living manless for nearly thirty years, no breath of scandal ever attached to her name, which, given the evidence of the surviving records of the Vicar’s Court, is itself remarkable.
The usual view is that Shakespeare left the hurly-burly of London for peace and quiet in Stratford. Rowe sets the scene and most of his successors follow his lead.
The latter Part of his life was spent, as all Men of Good Sense will wish theirs may be, in Ease, Retirement, and the Conversation of his Friends. He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion and, in that, to his Wish; and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford.11
Rowe’s notion of a country gentleman is mildly anachronistic, though probably less so than our own. But Shakespeare was not living within landscaped acres far from the madding crowd of sectarians and troublemakers; he was living in the market town of Stratford, in Chapel Street, where butchers set up their stalls and cried their wares from daybrea
k every Thursday morning.12 Certainly he would not be troubled with theatricals passing through and anxious to remake his acquaintance, nor would he be expected to attend theatrical performances. No plays had been performed in Stratford since the Hall of 27 December 1602 when the Corporation ‘ordered there shall be no plays or interludes played in the Chamber, the Guild Hall, nor in any part of the house or court from henceforward, upon pain that whosoever of the Bailiff, Aldermen and Burgesses of this borough shall give leave or licence thereunto shall forfeit for every offence 10s’.13 This order was renewed on 7 February 1612, with the penalty, already heavy, multiplied twenty-fold.14
Perhaps a break with the theatre was what Shakespeare wanted. Certainly it was what he needed if he were to pass himself off as a gentleman. ‘His pleasurable wit and good nature engaged him in the acquaintance and entitled him to the friendship of the gentlemen in the neighbourhood.’15 If we may judge by Shakespeare’s will, the friendships he chose to cultivate in his retirement, if such it was, were no mere tradesmen. Chief among them were the Combes. John Combe, who with his uncle William Combe had sold Shakespeare the land in old Stratford in 1602, was the richest man in Stratford. His uncle, who died in 1610, had served as MP for Droitwich and Warwick, reader in the Middle Temple, counsel for Stratford-upon-Avon and ecclesiastical commissioner and had taken as his third wife the widow of the Lord Keeper of the Great Seal, Sir John Puckering. John Combe had concentrated on building up a fortune by lending money at 10 per cent per annum; he had also invested in land near Stratford and acquired a lease of Clopton Park from William Clopton. The Shakespeare family had known him at least since 1598 when they appointed him one of their commissioners to examine witnesses in their failed suit against the Lamberts. John Combe was a bachelor; his brother Thomas, who died in 1609, had two sons, William and Thomas, both in their twenties and both members of the Middle Temple. They would have been well informed about current developments in the London theatre, supposing Shakespeare had wished to discuss them. As Thomas Combe lived at the College, he was Shakespeare’s nearest congenial neighbour.
Shakespeare also hobnobbed with the next richest men in Stratford, Anthony and John Nash. They were connected through their grandmother to one of the most active enclosing landlords in the west midlands, Sir John Hubaud. Hubaud not only depopulated the manor of Hillborough and flattened all the houses; he knocked down the parish church as well. John Nash was an old enemy of Richard Quiney, who was forced to seek sureties of the peace against him in 1588. Anthony Nash and Ralph Hubaud, brother of Sir John, who inherited the tithe-rights from him in 1583, made one serious mistake: in 1599 they sold part of Sir John Hubaud’s lease of the tithes to Sir Edward Greville, who instantly mortgaged it for the full sale price and failed to service the loan, so that Nash had to sue him in the Court of Requests in 1615, probably to no avail. Richard Lane was another who was burnt by Greville, who defaulted on a bond for £1,000; after Lane’s death his executors were instructed to sue but there was little point. Greville was to all intents and purposes bankrupt. After losing money on various get-rich-quick schemes, in 1607 Greville invested in a salt monopoly with Sir Arthur Ingram and Sir Lionel Cranfield; by 1610 he was £1,000 in debt to his partners, who took full advantage, appropriating his estates one by one. By retaining just enough of the equity to prevent his being evicted, Greville contrived to hang on at Milcote.16
Greville having become a veritable black hole in the local economy, his defalcations pushed his creditors to ever more desperate schemes to augment the profitability of their landholdings. Combe’s nephew William Combe joined forces with Arthur Mainwaring, steward to the lord chancellor, with his cousin William Replingham of Great Harborough acting as his attorney, to form a consortium to buy up the remaining open arable fields in Milcote, Welcombe and Old Stratford with the aim of engrossing and enclosing them and selling them on at a profit.17 The Corporation had a fight on its hands, for the consortium proposed to enclose the town commons as part of the scheme. The aldermen were well aware that Mainwaring’s relationship to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere was not that of a mere steward; his mother was Elizabeth More, sister of Ellesmere’s second wife. Her death in 1600 after only three years of marriage affected Ellesmere so deeply that in the years following he made various attempts to adopt one or other of her sister’s children. As matters stood in 1614, as well as being Ellesmere’s protégé, Mainwaring looked likely to inherit the bulk of his huge estates. In terms of clout the Corporation was David to the consortium’s Goliath.
It made economic sense to enclose the clusters of yardlands, strips of land four rods wide by forty long, separated by turf balks or slades, that made up Welcombe, obliterate the divisions and operate the area as a single unit, whether for pasture or cultivation. Ideally, all those with rights in the land would be partners in the enterprise and would receive their due share of the yield, but the poor husbandmen of Stratford, who needed to pasture their few beasts on the common to survive, would have faced starvation. The Corporation, struggling to finance poor relief after the fire of July, feared the consequences if the townspeople were to lose their ancient right to the use of the stubble fields after harvest. Shakespeare seems to have expected to do fairly well out of the enclosure, but Ann, who may have acquired the land in the first place, may have had ideas more in line with the misgivings of her old tenant Thomas Greene, Town Clerk of Stratford, who, though he stood to profit by the scheme, opposed it.18
Ann and her children, who had lived all their lives in Stratford, seem at all times to have been closer to the puritan Corporation than Shakespeare was. Ann and Thomas and Lettice Greene must have enjoyed each other’s company, having lived under the same roof for so long, but Shakespeare had no dealings that we know of with Greene and left him out of his will. There seems no reason to believe that Shakespeare exchanged much small talk with his brother-in-law Bartholomew Hathaway either. Hathaway had ceased serving as churchwarden under John Rogers in 1608 and was probably spending more time on improving the freehold estate he had acquired in Shottery, where he built an extra wing on to the old farmhouse. Shakespeare would have had even less in common with Bartholomew’s sons who were working their way up through the Corporation and the parish. As Shakespeare’s heir apparent, John Hall had to be involved in business arising from the estate, and so rode with him to London in November 1614 and stayed there with him until after Christmas, but it is hard to believe that Shakespeare found him particularly congenial company, or that he took him along when he visited the Combes and the Nashes. Ann Shakespeare is even less likely to have made one of the party. Husbands and wives did not go about as couples. Ann had her gossips and William had his.
Though Shakespeare evidently insisted on his rank as gentleman he never offered any of the public services that gentlemen were expected to provide. He neither witnessed the signing of a will nor oversaw the performance of its provisions; he drew up no inventory; he did not serve on the commission of the peace; he played no part in the affairs of the church; he examined no recusants. John Hall resented the time taken up by such chores and excused himself whenever possible, but even he ended up having to do them. If Shakespeare was never asked to render such services, it was probably because he was perceived to be incapacitated. He may have been asked and refused, but we would probably know about it in that case, because the Corporation had the power to fine citizens who refused to do their duty.
In the winter of 1613–14 Ann’s old friend Judith Sadler was dying. The last years of her life had been miserable. At the time of her marriage she was a co-parcenary heiress of a wealthy businessman and Hamnet was a comparatively rich man with three houses in Church Street; in 1595 he had inherited the lease on the house in the High Street only to have it burn down. The cost of rebuilding it beggared him. Sadler was not an ambitious man; while others strove for public office and neglected their honest trade for more lucrative commerce, he had continued working as a baker, despite the constant interference of petty bureaucracy which was
continually harassing bakers who sold bread and cakes on Sunday. In 1597 he went collecting alms for Stratford with Richard Quiney, much to the alarm of Abraham Sturley who was aware that Sadler could not afford even the hire of his mare for twenty-four days at a shilling a day, for which he was eventually sued. By 1613 the house in the High Street, which had probably been rebuilt too cheaply if at all, was described as ‘much out of repair’. Judith’s surviving children had probably all been sent out to service, for there is mention of only one of them in the register and it seems that she had been working in Bridgetown. After fourteen pregnancies Judith was effectively childless. On 24 March 1614, Ann followed her bier to the churchyard.
On 9 July 1614 ‘a sudden and terrible fire’ destroyed fifty-four dwelling-houses, ‘besides barns, stables and other houses of office’:19 ‘the force of which fire was so great (the wind sitting full upon the town) that it dispersed into so many places thereof whereby the whole town was in very great danger to have been utterly consumed’.20 After the heroic attempts since the fires of 1594 and 1595 to rebuild the housing stock and roof the new buildings with tile, there were still too many thatched houses left standing: ‘the wind taketh the thatch and carrieth it very far off and there fireth other thatched houses…very many fair tiled houses have been burned to the ground’.21
By luck and perhaps Ann’s good management New Place sustained no damage, but once again, for the third time in living memory, the town was a stinking wreck. When the royal patent was issued in December, authorising five citizens to gather contributions from neighbouring boroughs for fire relief, one of those named was Richard Tyler. When the collectors’ accounts were examined by Sir Richard Verney, Sir Henry Rainsford and Bartholomew Hales in March 1616, each of the five was declared to have been ‘preferring his own private benefits over the general good’ and was accused of claiming more for expenses than he managed to collect. As Tyler later took action in Chancery to clear his name, we may suspect that the decision to inculpate the nominees of the Corporation for the poor return from the appeal was not entirely disinterested. By March 1616 the gentry were determined to discredit the Corporation by any means possible, legal or not.
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