Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back

  Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath

  That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

  ( 11. i. 149-52)

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  It was never unwise to flatter the Queen, and even in the 1570s she protected the players. She enjoyed theatre, and very nearly squashed proposals to ban plays, games, and fairs on Sunday; she knew and spoke Latin, but had sat through so many university plays in that language ( Plautus Aulularia at Cambridge; modern Latin works at Oxford) that she was the keener to enjoy works in English. Her fondness for spectacle was shared by many, but she was the one who did most to ensure that her reign would be known for encouraging the drama.

  Yet for months on end lawful touring groups were absent from Stratford. Amateur mummers, or a Lord of Misrule who presided over antics from Christmas to Twelfth Night, were the town's main dramatic relief. With card-playing in fashion, paper kings and queens were in anyone's power. Boys took up football, prison-base, wrestling, or cudgel-playing with a sharp, smacking violence that shook off the tedium of school hours; they also escaped into the countryside.

  The town's common fields began near the Woolshop behind the Gild Pits, and here, a few hundred yards from Henley Street, one entered an arable Stratford field. William's sense of the country -- and its terms -- has a relation to the borough fields, one of which lay within sight of his father's barn, and the Bishopton and Welcombe fields were not far off. Borough fields were laid out in furlongs, and the furlongs were divided into yard-lands, separated by balks, or grassy ridges. Each yard-land had ninety little strips, or 'lands', of a third of an acre, which were 'eared'. Later, as a hopeful poet, he could write with simple elegance to his patron that if Venus and Adonis proved deformed, he would 'neuer after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a haruest'.

  Rural Warwickshire impressed him, and nature and his feelings for it supplied a rich thematic basis for his imagery -- and its keynote. He gorged on farming terms and would refer to meers, or banks and hedges (as in Enobarbus's 'the meered question'), or to leas, or tilled lands (as in Timon's command to mother earth, 'Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn leas'). Ploughed fields led up-river to Charlecote, where 'at the bake-syde of Mr Lucies huse', as Leland wrote, 11 a brook met the Avon. Among several Thomas Lucys of the same title, the Sir Thomas Lucy who was born in 1532 was tutored by

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  John Foxe and wed at the age of 14 to Joyce Acton, aged 12. Tearing down an old demesne structure, he built the great red-brick Chartecote House, where the Earl of Leicester knighted him and the Queen visited. With forty servants or retainers, a fine library and a touring group of 'Sir Thomas Lucies players', 12 he was as well known at Stratford as the wealthy Sir Fulke Greville, of Beauchamp's Court, who served as town recorder after 1591; both men once arbitrated in a suit brought by William's friend Hamnet (or Hamlet) Sadler. With reminiscent humour, but not necessarily to settle a score as has been imagined, Lucy perhaps was recalled in Justice Shallow's armorial coat of 'luces' in The Merry Wives. Anyone could see, beyond his barbican at Charlecote, the fine glass in a hall's bay window which showed a fishy coat of arms -- three white pikes or 'luces' on a crimson ground.

  To the south lay other elegant, ornamental domains such as the Rainsfords' at Clifford Chambers, where from the turf one had a view of Holy Trinity. The Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton was to summer with the Rainsfords and at last write an elegy on Sir Henry Rains ford, who married Drayton's beloved Anne Goodere. In youth or early manhood, William knew the locale if not the owners of Clifford Chambers, and both south and north of his town a line between affluence and poverty met his eyes. Beggars were in the lanes and ditches, at fairs and in streets. Wages sank and prices rose, and if farmers had pewter, glass, and feather-beds as luxuries, a surplus of labourers added to the homeless. Indeed, even market towns came into difficulties.

  In the mid- 1570s inflation began to affect the leather crafts at Stratford. In poorer times glovers became victims of their own workers, and William's father -- whether or not he suffered from thievery -- had begun to speculate and break several laws himself. In fact, Tudor laws affecting trade might have been kept in force for the purpose of being broken, so that the state gained a revenue in fines.

  Debts and a downfall

  Far from keeping all his eggs in one basket, John Shakespeare had been dealing in wool and lending money. In 1570, when William was

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  barely of school age, John was twice accused of breaking a usury law by charging interest -- high interest, £20 in both cases -- on loans of £80 and £100 to one Walter Musshem, or Mussum, of Walton D'Eiville near Stratford. 13 Musshem appears as a sheep farmer and one of John's business partners; he may be the Musshem whose inventory is in the Worcester County Record Office and who possessed 117 sheep in 1588: we know that he and John failed to appear when Henry Higford, formerly town steward, sued them for debts of £30 each in 1573. 14 John's usury cases came before the Royal Exchequer and in one instance he paid a fine; but the wool trade relied on credit, and the unworkable usury laws amounted to a random tax on trade. (The system relied on informers who could receive for their services half the fine levied against a violator.)

  Such a fine would not have disgraced a leading townsman; but John Shakespeare's other troubles were more dangerous, as when he was twice accused at the Exchequer in 1572 for illegal wool-dealing. The wool statutes were unevenly enforced, but violations annoyed the Merchants of the Staple, the main legal dealers. Glovers in particular were tempted to transgress: with no use for fell wool removed from pelts, a glover sold it as a matter of course to wool-dealers; yet it was only a small step to take from selling cheap, superfluous fell wool to breaking the law seriously to deal in fleece wool, and some Midlands glovers made large profits in fleeces. A 'wool brogger' had to be discreet, and it is more likely that John Shakespeare rode to Walton D'Eiville and beyond with his eldest son, or Others he trusted, than with casual helpers. William learned facts of the wool trade that apply to his father's time, such as that eleven Midlands rams yield a tod of 28 pounds, or that a tod's worth at Stratford was 21 shillings. 15 He acquired a knowledge of shepherds and sheep farmers, sympathy for them, and an accurate sense of sheep-shearing feasts and of the farmers' talk, tones, and drollery. His sense of these men and their womenfolk is unusually sure, and so in The Winter's Tale he could go beyond his romance source ( Greene Pandosto) to write of more than pastoral puppets and give Warwickshire life to Bohemia's shepherds. His knowledge of details a 'brogger' knew in the 1570s suggests that he was aware of his father's dealings and was trusted. The Shakespeares of

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  Henley Street were close, defensive, and mutually dependent (so much we may infer), but they were not isolated, and John in his graver troubles was to depend on the leniency of the 'Brotherhode'.

  Any brogger, by the mid- 1570s, would have found it harder to get contracts for June shearings without risk of heavy fines. John had farming as well as his shop to fall back on. With acreage at Asbyes, an interest in 100 acres at Snitterfield, and a lease on 14 acres, in 1568, at Ingon Meadow, he was involved in corn-growing. He had sued the tanner Henry Field for a debt owing on eighteen quarters of barley (nearly 5 hundredweight), and he had at least 22 acres of meadow and pasture suitable for grazing; not all of his land was arable. Also, he was still buying land. In 1575 he paid to Edmund and Emma Hall, of Hallow, the sum of £40 for two houses with gardens and orchards at Stratford -- his last recorded property purchase. In that year or the next, his application to the Heralds' College for a coat of arms and hence for gentlehood came to nothing, though he got a 'pattern' or sketch of his arms, before the matter was broken off. 16 In October 1576, the Privy Council ordered wool-buyers from London, Northampton, and other locales in for questioning. Wool middlemen were then being blamed for a sharp rise in wool prices (following a resumption of normal trade with the Netherlands, after some four years'
interruption), and legal dealers of the Staple raged for the heads of broggers. Intervention and questioning by the Privy Council, just then, could be dangerous for Catholic families. Though he had married one of the strongly Catholic Ardens, John, it is true, was reticent about his own belief. Catholics had been accommodated in Elizabeth's tolerant Church, but, increasingly, the nation's climate of opinion had turned against the old faith.

  How defiant in religion John truly was, we do not know; but he added to his troubles by not attending Anglican services. Did a Jesuit missionary in the 1580s persuade him to declare his faith? A paper booklet of six leaves stitched together, found by a bricklayer in April 1757 between the rafters and tiling of what had been John's western house at Henley Street, has turned out to be an authentic formulary; a ' John Shakspear' here makes a Catholic profession of faith, and appears to sign, as the last paragraph indicates, in his own hand. The

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  formulary found in the rafters follows Borromeo's Last Will of the Soul, which Jesuit missionaries in England were making use of by 1581. But the booklet itself has vanished; and if John did mark or sign it, he kept his religious feelings as well hidden as the testament in his rafters. When cited in 1592 for recusancy, or failure to attend church, he evidently declared he had stayed away from Anglican service to avoid his creditors. 'It is sayd that', the wardens' not very rigorously enquiring 'Seconde Certificat' states, 'Mr John Shackespere' among eight others 'coom not to Churche for feare of processe for Debtte.' 17 But by then almost any creditor could have caught him at the Court of Record juries on which he served; he was not in fact in hiding, but available to make probate inventories and press claims at law.

  It is true that his practical, financial position was poor by 1576. In a new effort to stamp out brogging, the Privy Council temporarily suspended all licensed wool-dealing that November; thus six months before the whole network of justices of the peace became involved in collecting £100 bonds from the broggers as security against their dealing in wool, 18 John Shakespeare -- if he had any large debts -- would have found his hands tied. By then a marked man and known offender at the Exchequer, he could not with impunity have made good to any of his creditors by buying or selling wool after about December 1576.

  This was a turning-point for the Shakespeare family. We have good evidence that John failed to meet claims on his funds, and that his downfall was known in the Gild hall. He avoided borough council meetings. His affairs were so poor that when a levy to equip soldiers was passed, John was 'excepted' and had to pay only 3s. 4d. (just half the amount levied on other aldermen). He was excused from paying a fine for being absent on election day, in 1578, and excused again that November from paying 4d. weekly towards poor relief. 'mr John shaxpeare', it was ordered, 'shall not be taxed to paye any thinge'. 19 It would be wrong for us to suppose that he avoided council meetings only because he feared trouble as a Catholic, at any rate. Incurring debts and lacking cash, he was able to raise £40 in 1579 by mortgaging a house and 56 acres at Wilmcote to his wife's brother-in-law Edmund Lambert, to whom he owed money. When the borrowed £40 fell due, John could not pay it -- and so Lambert held the property until he

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  died, after which John tried in vain to recover it from Lambert's heir, whom he sued at the court of the Queen's Bench. Later he renewed his effort in the court of Chancery, but John and Mary Shakespeare never did get back their land, which was a part of the Arden inheritance.

  John had dealt illegally in a wool trade that relied much on credit. It is clear from borough records that he lacked ready cash to pay creditors after the assault on broggers, and that his colleagues freed him from fines, cut normal levies, and dropped him as an alderman after his nine years' absence (during which he appeared once to vote for his friend John Sadler as bailiff): 'mr, Shaxpere dothe not Come to halles when they be warned nor hathe not done of Longe tyme', as a clerk wrote in 1586. 20 John was concerned with self-preservation, and his long avoidance of halls may not be wholly attributable to a fear of debt. He kept his head down, it would seem, partly because he feared questions about his beliefs and background; and he was disgraced by absences before the town council expelled him. Yet he was not sent to ruin. He was in business or speculating after being dropped by the council, and in his last years was looking into toll-corn or pursuing Lambert's heir. As late as 1599 he tried to recover a thirty-year-old debt for 21 tods (588 lb.) of wool from John Walford, a clothier of Wiltshire and thrice mayor of Marlborough; and he was slow to give up a glover's shop.

  Shakespeare 'was a glovers son', Thomas Plume, Archdeacon of Rochester, records around 1657 (and is thus more accurate than early biographers in identifying the poet's father's trade), ' -- Sir John Mennis saw once his old Father in his shop -- a merry Cheekd old man -- that said -- Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crakt a jeast [or jest] with him at any time'. 21 ( Mennis was born in 1599 and could not have recalled a glover who died in 1601, but may have quoted someone else who heard and recalled John Shakespeare.)

  That report of a merry-cheeked old man who jests with his son is credible, and John was not broken in 1576. In between William's twelfth and thirteenth birthdays, the father's behaviour simply changed. After being an honoured town servant, John became an absentee, plagued by threats of creditors and informers, and needing help rather than giving it. He was in shadow, and his household had less money but more mouths to feed. William's parents had named a

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  second child Joan Shakespeare on 15 April 1569. She was the only one of their four daughters to survive childhood. Their last daughter, Anne, was baptized on 28 September 1571, and buried at the age of 7. Their son Richard was taken to the baptismal font at Holy Trinity on 11 March 1574, and their last child, Edmund, on 3 May 1580.

  These births accentuated an eldest son's pride of place, and, far from being displaced in the family, William thrived. His well-being appears in his later dedicatory letters to his patron and also in light jokes and allusive, affectionate mockery -- all of which seem to point back to happiness, self-love, and his family pride in the Stratford years. No deep distaste for Stratford would appear in any of his known actions, attitudes, or allusions. If he consciously made light of his sister Joan, in later times, by calling a hawk 'Old Joan' in 2 Henry IV, or by playing on a name common for upstarts and servants (as in 'greasy Joan' or 'I can make any Joan a lady'), he kept his sister close to him in such references; and he was not likely to have forgotten the constables at Stratford, including his father, when conjuring up Dull, Elbow, or Dogberry and the watch in Much Ado. He had every reason to be amused and complacent in boyhood as his father's heir apparent. His ease or boredom in early schooling can only have left his mind free. In a town various in work, the comic human spectacle was instructive. But there would also be the profound enquiring force of his disillusionment --

  Othello's occupation's gone!

  ( 111. iii. 362)

  What happens when our preconceived notions of life are abruptly changed, or when trust in a beloved person is shattered by experience? His father had risen to a bailiff's robes, and then after being exposed for usury and illegal dealing, neglected his role as an alderman until the council would have no more of him. What do the furred honours or rank, office, and reputation conceal?

  Through tattered rags small vices do appear;

  Robes and furred gowns hides all.

  ( Lear, 1608 quarto, xx. 158-9)

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  In densely peopled Henley Street, an alderman's actions would in any case be judged by gossip, and his refusal to attend halls would be known. John Shakespeare had abandoned the 'Brotherhode'. The evidence would suggest that William was alert to his father's daily work, and well aware of his brogging. The neighbourhood cannot have been blind to an alderman's behaviour, and gossip and William's own eyes and ears would have told him about his father's setback. Yet many an idolized father has been found to have feet of clay, and for the sensitive young the act of growing up
is perhaps inherently disillusioning. William is likely to have felt the strongest loyalty, sympathy, and love for his father, while being aware of depressed circumstances. At 13 he was being changed by one of the great experiences of Tudor life, inasmuch as he was going to a grammar school, and his education would have carried his mind away from his family's troubles with debts and credit. John Shakespeare's downfall is a matter of record nevertheless, and the household at Henley Street was affected by it.

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  4

  TO GRAMMAR SCHOOL

  Sweet smoke of rhetoric! ( Don Armado, Love's Labour's Lost)

  A classroom

  John Shakespeare knew his advantages well enough to take large risks in the early 1570s, and he won local notoriety as an entrepreneur. Once he was accused of illegally sharing in a joint purchase of 200 tods (5,600 lb.) of wool. Even before applying for a coat of arms, he must have looked with immense hope to his son and heir. As a deputy bailiff, he was unlikely to have sent William to any school but the borough one, the only grammar school for miles around. This was the King's New School on Church Street -- scriveners refer to it as the 'free scole' or 'Kynges ffree Schoole'. Its registers are missing, but Nicholas Rowe writes in 1709 that 'Mr. John Shakespear' was a 'considerable Dealer in Wool' who bred William 'for some time at a FreeSchool' -- and, though he was not always reliable, we have no reason to discredit Rowe's words in this instance. 1 Much more direct, certain evidence that William was in grammar school comes from his plays. The Latin authors he recalls are mainly those he would have studied in class -- the 'grammar gods' -- and since the school was open to sons of burgesses, he would have been enrolled in 1571, when he was 7.