Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  Stratford's records tell us more about this man than appears in any biography of his son, and we see him at first as a yeoman farmer from nearby Snitterfield, who had set up as a craftsman and merchant. He had become a glover and whittawer (a dresser of soft, white-coloured leather) on Henley Street, and he would have had other interests. In the hand of a clerk, his name appears typically as 'Jhon shacksper' or ' John Shaxpere', once in a London record as John 'Shakespeare', 8 and we find it beneath terse, efficient reports.

  In September 1556 John was chosen as one of the council's two tasters of ale and bread, a job for an able and 'discreet' man. He was burly enough to be a constable who had to deprive 'single-men' of weapons, and astute enough to be an affeeror, or assessor of fines. On 3 October 1561, he was sworn in as one of the two chamberlains in charge of the borough's property and finances. 9

  We have no example of his writing -- though he drew his mark as a cross or as a pair of glover's compasses (an instrument used for making designs on the back of gloves); one of his marks resembles a glover's stitching clamp, or 'donkey'. Men such as John Shakespeare

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  could often read, but not write, as writing was an advanced, fairly specialized, skill, and Tudor people learned to write only after getting the basic skill of reading; he probably would not have kept the borough's accounts, as he did for over three years, if he had been unable to read sums. His wife had given birth so far to infants who died -- her first child, Joan, evidently died in infancy, 10 and a second child, Margaret, was baptized on 2 December 1562 and buried four months later.

  During the period when John Shakespeare was keeping the accounts, the Gild chapel was defaced. Near its orchard border of sundried clay, workmen moved into the chapel to see its painted walls with legends -- the town's old Catholic poetry:

  WHEN ERTH UPON ERTH HATH BYLDED HIS BOWERS THEN SHALL ERTH FOR ERTH SUFFER MANY HARD SHOWERS

  Over the chancel arch was a Doom, or Last Judgement, with the Virgin in blue and St John in bright brown. Heaven was a palace with St Peter in a red alb and green cope, and burning souls fell through a hell-mouth into a cauldron. A crucifixion rose on the south wall, and on jambs for the tower arch were Thomas à Becket and the names of his murderers. 11 After the Doom had been whitewashed, for which the workmen were paid 2s., but before the rood-loft was taken down and seats were installed for the vicar and his clerk, the acting chamberlain's account noted on 10 January 1564:

  Item payd for defasyng ymages in ye chappell ijs

  The altar may have been removed then -- but otherwise the chapel was mainly untouched. The council replaced stained glass with 'quarrells', or glass panels, yet kept forbidden 'George' armour for their Catholic St George festival well scoured. No one knew if the old faith would return; and there were more dire problems. A plague had ravaged London -- where a fifth of the population died -- and Spaniards, it appeared, had found a way to destroy Protestant England. They had closed down the main market abroad for broadcloths and kerseys at Antwerp. Forty English ships in the Thames had to be unloaded and cloth worth up to £700,000 had to be stored at the risk of damp, moth, and total loss.

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  Warwickshire would suffer with no cloth market. The Queen had used her wiles on the Spanish envoy -- but early in 1564. the only Spanish envoy in England was a corpse, and creditors prevented the release of his body. With the cloth fleet blocked, merchants were desperate. The plague had begun to move north, killing children and the poor. On 14 March, before it struck Stratford, the vicar recorded the loss of his own sister Cicely, 'Sicilia Bretchgerdle soror Vicarij.' 12 With death and ruin on his doorstep, he even had to think of his unlucky chamberlain, whose wife had borne yet another child. As the father of two dead infants John Shakespeare, on this occasion, presented a boy. William, or Gulielmus, the vicar wrote on 26 April 1564, when infants were dying within two days' ride of Stratford parish,

  Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere.

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  2

  MOTHER, OF THE CHILD

  At first the infant, Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

  ( Jaques, As You Like It)

  Mary Shakespeare at Henley Street

  When her first son was born, Mary Shakespeare's town lay in the path of the worst plague since the Black Death. Yet the town's corporate council had been warned about the contagion, and for years the aldermen and chief burgesses had been trying to keep the streets clean. As early as April 1552 John Shakespeare had paid a small fine for keeping an unauthorized muck-heap (or sterquinarium) on Henley Street. At the town's northern end, this was an old, built-up street, traversed by horsemen riding through on the way up to Henley-inArden. Wagons drawn by oxen bumped over a cross-gutter in front of Gilbert Bradley's house, a few doors to the cast of his fellow glover John Shakespeare. Once, in 1560, nearly every tenant had to pay for pavings broken by the damaging wagons. 'All the tenauntes in Henley street from ye cros gutter befor bradleys doore', it was stated, were to blame, as many of 'the pavementes are broken befor ther doores & for not mendynge of them they stand amerced'. 1 A street also had to be kept clear, and Robert Rogers and others paid for leaving carts at their doors.

  Wagons and pack-horses were less likely to use the parallel way known as the Gild Pits, or royal highway, since it was rutty. Crossing Clopton's bridge, a traveller would be led by a walled causeway into Bridge Street, and on past two inns showing the Bear and the Swan. This was a major market area, divided in the centre by a row of houses

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  called Middle Row into Fore Bridge and Back Bridge streets. Riding up opposite the Crown inn and past the Angel inn, one turned into Henley Street, where orchards and gardens lay behind the façades. Here doors abutted pavings, and on the north side, leading east to west, stood a row of half-timbered tenements, some of which served as shops. A tradesman let down a wooden board or shelf before a ground-floor window to display his wares, and a glover would show an array of purses, belts, gloves of various quality, and other soft-leather goods.

  In the street's north row, John Shakespeare's two houses were separate but adjoining. In later times the eastern one became known as the Woolshop, and the western as the Birthplace. He held these libere of the lord of Stratford manor on a burgage tenure (nearly the equivalent of a freehold) and paid a small annual chief-rent, or ground-rent, of 6d. for the Woolshop and 13d. for the Birthplace; with these rents, we find both houses linked to his name in 1590 in a list of manorial tenants of the late Ambrose, Earl of Warwick:

  Vicus Vocatus

  Henley Strete

  [The Street Called

  Henley Street]

  Johannes Shakespere tenet libere unum tenementurn cum pertinentiis per redditurn per annum Vjd secta curie vjd

  [ John Shakespere freely holds one tenement wi th appurtenances for a rent per year of 6d. by suit of court 6d.]

  Idem Johannes tenet libere unum tenementum cum pertinentiis per redditum per annum Xiijd secta curie xiijd

  [The same John freely holds one tenement with appurtenances for a rent per year of 13d. by suit of court 13d.] 2

  He had bought the Woolshop from Edward West, in October 1556, when its small chief-rent of 6d. is mentioned. We do not know when he began to inhabit the western house, or Birthplace, but the tradition that he lived in it early enough for his son William to be born there is respectable. After his son's time, workmen broke through a wall to

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  join the two tenements, so that on Henley Street today there is a much-restored house of three gables as a shrine for Stratford's visitors.

  John had a barn in the Gild Pits well behind the frontages, and he needed ample work-space. As a whittawer, he would have had to boil and scrape some of his animal skins -- a job often given to a boy apprentice since it involved steam, human sweat, and stinking refuse. In 1556 he had bought an estate with garden and croft in Greenhill Street ('unum tenementum cum gardino et crofto'), and our improving knowledge of the town in his time suggests that he
may either have transferred some of his work there, or leased that property to his helpers. Greenhill Street was then an area with open lots and storage buildings, and it was easily accessible to the Woolshop by way of Meer Lane.

  In any case, he had more space. Soon after that purchase, or on a day between 25 November 1556 and mid-December of the year following, he married Mary Arden, whose father had leased a Snitterfield farm to John's father. Mary came from Wilmcote, a hamlet on a ridge of grassy land in Aston Cantlow parish where meadows rose to 400 feet at the Alne Hills and stone was quarried to repair Stratford's bridge, With its 'auncient name' Arden, as Leland found, the area north of the river was 'much enclosyd', lacking in corn if not in meadow-grass. Billesley, near Wilmcote, once had seventeen peasants and eight slaves; the Trussell family held its manor in declining circumstances which included the sentencing to death of one Trussell for highway robbery. 3 Poor families lost their homes as arable ground was fenced into sheep pasture, and fifteen families had been evicted over at Ardens Grafton. Enclosures of parkland tempted others; so many deerpoachers hunted at Shelfield Park that two commissions had had to look into the stealing.

  Land seems to have changed hands rather quickly in this region. Thomas Finderne or Fynderne, a man of wealth, made two interesting purchases: he acquired --just when, we do not know -- a holding that was called the manor of Great Wilmcote, as well as the farm that we know today as ' Mary Arden's House'. He sold both, five years after Mary's father died, to George Gibbes and to Adam Palmer; the latter had been a legal overseer of Robert Arden's will in 1556. These slim

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  facts do not prove the Ardens' farm was ' Mary Arden's House', but the property that we see today on Featherbed Lane is of about the right size. The farmstead's sturdy, narrow main dwelling has low gables, close-timbered oak beams, a fair-sized kitchen. Outside is a dovecote, which supplied eggs and meat for winter. Either at this farm or at one close by, Mary Arden was born in about 1540, the youngest of eight daughters.

  When Mary was young, her mother died. In 1548 her father married Agnes Hill, who brought two boys and two girls of her own to live near adze-roughened surfaces. Life on a Tudor farm could be bleak; the oddity of Robert Arden's household was that he lacked sons, and lost the help of his own daughters. Two years after Agnes Hill arrived, Margaret Arden was already married to Alexander Webbe of nearby Bearley, and Joan Arden to Edmund Lambert of Barton Henmarsh (or Barton on the Heath) fifteen miles south of Stratford. Other Arden daughters were wed later -- Anne (or Agnes) first to John Hewyns of Bearley, and then to Thomas Stringer of Stockton in Shropshire; Katherine to Thomas Edkins of Wilmcote; and Elizabeth to a Skarlett. At all events, by 1556 Robert Arden found some merits in his youngest, unmarried girl and named Mary one of his will's two executors despite her youth; he also favoured her, leaving her not only the sum of 10 marks (£6. 13s. 4d.) but his most valuable property, Asbyes, at Wilmcote. 4

  The skills of Shakespeares mother have been unknown, but it is not unlikely that she could read and write, and we have a sign of her hand. When selling her share in a land-holding to her nephew Robert Webbe, in 1579, she made her 'marke' on a deed and on a bond. 5 The deed (unlike the bond) is a large enough piece of parchment to have lain flat and offered her ample space to sign. Did she intend to write her initials on the deed? If she did, why does she appear to have written them in reverse, as S M and not M S, in between the scrivener's words 'the marke' and 'of Marye Shacksper'? Instead of drawing a stolid cross on the Webbe deed, Mary Shakespeare drew a small, neat, rather complex design suggesting the letters S M in a Tudor secretary style of script which her son William appears to have used; the 'S', in this design, is exampled in the handwriting of literate persons; the 'M'

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  (if such was intended) lacks a final stroke or minim. She may have intended only a pretty design, and alphabetic letters in a 'marke' would not be proof of her ability to write. But what has become quite clear, partly because time has worn away some of her clotted ink, is that she drew her mark in one continuous movement. She appears to have been familiar with a quill pen.

  If she was indeed able to write phrases and sums and to read them, she would have been of considerable use to her father. However that may be, Robert Arden's belief in her dependability is evident. She can hardly have been much older than 17 or 18 when he made his will. Young women, at that time, were seldom named in wills as executors, and Robert Arden's will is that of an alert, shrewd Catholic, who does not wholly trust his own wife. Whether or not he came from a cadet branch of the Catholic Park Hall Ardens, in Castle Bromwich in the parish of Aston near Birmingham, he seems to have shared the Arden piety. His father Thomas in 1501 had been able to use as a trustee the first of the intently pious Throckmortons, of Coughton Court, who died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and whose son, Sir George, spoke out against Henry VIII's divorce. Robert Arden joined Stratford's pious foundation. He chose as his will's first witness (as he had no need to do) a curate so stubbornly Catholic as to be dismissed later from a Snitterfield vicarage for adhering to the old faith. Wedded to John Shakespeare, Mary may have found his religious views problematic or unlike her father's, but John seems to have been brought up as a Catholic, and their son William was raised in the shadow of the old faith.

  By the late autumn in 1557 she was living at Stratford. Young enough to have a chance of bearing a healthy child, Mary Shakespeare failed at first. Her son William's life itself was at risk in plague-time, and his birth-date was important to her and would have been lovingly recalled until Mary died. The wishful notion that he was born on 23 April was first mooted, so far as we know, by William Oldys in a marginal note written in all probability between 1743 and 1750, and properly belongs to legends about Shakespeare 'The actual day of William's birth is unknown', wrote E. K. Chambers in a statement that still holds good; 'a belief that it was April 23, on which day he died in 1616, seems to rest

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  on an eighteenth-century blunder.' 6 Oldys, writing a century and a quarter after Shakespeare died, presumably had no evidence as to the birth-date other than the ambiguous words on the tablet in the poet's monument at Holy Trinity, 'obiit anno . . . Ætatis 53' (he died in his fifty-third year), and Chambers believed that Oldys probably made 'an incorrect use' of these. 7 Edmond Malone, the exacting eighteenthcentury Shakespeare scholar, expressed doubt that Joseph Greene, a curate of Stratford and Oldys's contemporary, had any authority for declaring 23 April as the birth-date other than the monument. It has been said to be 'especially appropriate' that Shakespeare should have been born on St George's Day, the day of England's patron saint; but the wish certainly does not add up to a fact. Had his birth and death really occurred on two 23rds, of April, such a coincidence would surely have been noted within a hundred years of his death. Yet we have no sign of this. Strong family loyalty may well have moved Shakespeare's granddaughter Elizabeth Hall to honour his memory, just ten years after he died, by marrying on 22 April. Elizabeth's honouring his birthday as the 22nd remains only a good possibility, suggested at first by De Quincey; but it is supported by what we know of the closeness of John and Mary Shakespeare's people. Despite a record that includes lawsuits and a family fray, Ardens and Shakespeares knew the force of family ties (as when many of them helped young Robert Webbe, Margaret Arden's son, to acquire their own individual shares in an estate). 8 In brief, it is possible that Shakespeare was born on either the 21st, 22nd, or 23rd, but the day is still unknown. It is no more likely that his birth-date was Sunday, 23, than Saturday, 22 April 1564.

  As a young woman who had known the death of her infants Mary Shakespeare must have been apprehensive that month. She perhaps lay on a bed supported by the same simple, cross-cross system of ropes used in most Elizabethan homes, and heard advice from servants or housewives in their stiff, practical white bodices of 'durance' -- that stout cloth that appears in Stratford's records typically as 'boddies of durance'. 9

  Christening was a festival with apostle-s
poons and a white chrisomcloth, basins, ewers, and towels at the parish church. And yet the

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  chances of a boy baptized in time of plague were not good. If a baby died, the town's bell might be sounded, as when the clerk records a 'ringing of ye grete bell' for three small children. 10 A boy who survived would wear swaddling-clothes until he was ready for a little russetcoloured dress.

  Hic incepit pestis'

  In June plague broke out at Leicester, and soon after at Coventry. On 11 July, when the vicar wrote 'Hic incepit pestis' in his burials register, the plague was at Stratford. It burst into the town's centre, two houses from Ely Street where Thomas Deege lost an apprentice and then his wife Joanna. (The transmitting flea settled on black rats living in wattle-and-daub houses, in thatch or walls.) Plague was then 300 yards from Henley Street. John Shakespeare, as an officer of the council, did not leave town, and as a leading burgess in the Stratford Corporation he was unlikely to allow his wife to leave.

  At these times, fires were lit in streets. Windows were sealed; doors admitted no visitors. William in infancy probably knew a hot, airless house -- and yet work carried on in the town. The fright of Henley Street neighbours would have been evident, and the fear of a young mother -- with her first-born son to protect -- must have been considerable. In any case, death came close to the Woolshop. The terror of an epidemic was greater because people knew it was infectious -- but no one could say why it crept into one house and not another. What was clear, in August, was that the infection had spread out from Deege the weaver's into High Street and Ely Street and beyond; it had seemed to fly over the Avon, not bothering with the bridge. Shakespeare's echoing in Timon of Athens of the belief that plague is caused by poison 'in the sick air' ( IV. iii. 110-11) corresponds to his town's known experience.