Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  shall haue the same Instrumentes & playe clothes. And I most hertelye requyre the said Sir Thomas to be ffrendlye vnto ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte nowe dwellynge with me & eyther to take theym vnto his Servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master as my tryste is he Wyll[.] 3

  The phrase 'dwelling with me' is an odd one to use of servants, unless they 'dwell' in a special capacity. Also we cannot say that Shakespeare's name was not assimilated to the more familiar northern name

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  of "Shakeshafte" by Hoghton, or by his attorney or clerk. Surnames were not thought to be unalterable or fixed. 4

  This much of course does not prove the case, but it does leave open the possibility that Shakespeare spent some months in the north of England. In Lancashire the Hoghtons were second in influence only to the earls of Derby, their friends; and the young Stratford poet was to be associated with a Lancashire patron -- none other than the fourth earl of Derby's son, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A troupe or troupes under the Strange or Derby name performed two-perhaps four or more -- of Shakespeare's early plays.

  Moreover it is rather unlikely that he entered the theatre without influential help; we have no record of a Tudor playing company recruiting on the road, though a notion of his suddenly joining a travelling troupe of players is prized by romantic biographers. Some of his early work was to be linked with the men of Ferdinando, and we cannot deny that men under that patron formed the nucleus of the Lord Chamberlain's company. If Shakespeare never knew Hoghton or Derby, it is odd that he was known by their friends.

  Certainly too in his youth, he knew a topography unlike Stratford's -- and knew it well. In childhood he was sheltered by a well-run market town with its good borough council, mainly placid trades, seasonal festivals, and 'free scole' -- and the climate was propitious: north of the Avon the low ridges are drained by the Salwarpe, the Arrow, the Alne, and other mild streams. This clement region produced excellent fleece (and a 'considerable' wool-dealer such as his father for a time had thrived). But western Lancashire has no such protection as the Welsh Hills. Climatic differences between the Midlands plain and the north enabled Warwickshire wool-dealers to market some of their best fleece in sheep-raising regions of Lancashire. In his early plays there are fine, closely observed images of mountains, the sea, and, it seems, of an estuary landscape such as appears in a soliloquy of Richard of Gloucester in 3 Henry VI:

  Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty Like one that stands upon a promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing his foot were equal with his eye,

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  And chides the sea that sunders him from thence, Saying he'll lade it dry to have his way -( III. ii. 134-9) 5

  These topographical images correspond with nothing in Warwickshire's landscape. They may suggest that William has followed the fleece, that he knows vistas around Lea, and that one of his teachers has sent him north, with John Shakespeare's compliance.

  Grammar-school boys were often under scrutiny because the law enjoined masters to recommend promising pupils. Among five King's New School masters in William's youth, no fewer than three were Lancashire men -- Walter Roche (whom John Shakespeare knew), John Cottom, and Cottom's successor Alexander Aspinall.

  Thomas Jenkins -- the retiring master at Church Street -- was duly replaced by John Cottom. We know that on 9 July 1579 Jenkins received £6 from Cottom, a sum advanced to the latter by the borough council, and so it is fairly evident that by around 9 July Cottom was assuming the duties of master at Stratford's school. (The chamberlains accepted his receipt, from ' John Cottom, Scholemaster of the foresaid towne of Stretford', when they paid him wages 'for one half yere ended' on 21 December that year. 6 ) Cottom (who preferred that spelling) was a son of Lawrence Cottam, whose ancestral estate was at Dilworth in Lancashire; adjacent to Cottam's estate was Alston, a country seat of Alexander de Hoghton.

  It has become clear late in the twentieth century that Cottams and Hoghtons had had close family connections, and both families were Catholic. John Cottom was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford; he had taken his BA on 19 June 1566 (in the same year as Jenkins). Three months before Cottom began to teach at Stratford, his brother Thomas Cottam, also a graduate of Brasenose, entered the Jesuit novitiate of St Andrew in Rome -- on 8 April 1579. A year later, in June 1580, Thomas Cottam left Rheims carrying on his person tokens of identification -- including a medal, several coins, a gilt crucifix, and two pairs of beads -- intended for delivery at Shottery. Whether or not Cottam considered Shottery a stronghold ripe for missionary work, the tokens were for members of the family of his fellow priest

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  Robert Debdale. One token was for Debdale's brother-in-law John Pace, who in the next year is mentioned as a chief creditor and as 'my neighboure' in the will of Richard Hathaway, the father of Anne Hathaway. 7

  Father Cottam's journey to Shottery was cut short. He was captured, arraigned and tried, and then executed at Tyburn on 30 May 1582. Leaving Stratford at about the time of his brother's death, John Cottom went back to Lancashire with his religious convictions evidently stiffened, since his name (along with his wife's) later appeared on northern returns for recusants, or those who failed to attend church.

  However, there is no sign that obdurate Catholics succeeded one another as masters at King's New School in Shakespeare's time. Jenkins had Roman Catholic connections, and a London and Oxford background as Cottom did, and so may have helped to secure his successor. But even Cottom had to accept Anglican practices as a Stratford teacher, and indeed he could not have continued teaching after Michaelmas in 1579 without a certificate of conformity from the Bishop of Worcester. It would seem that Jenkins and Cottom alike -while at Stratford -- met the approval of the borough council, whose clerk routinely cites them in the Minutes and Accounts. Yet the new master's Lancashire background is also clear. If Alexander de Hoghton did ask Cottom to recommend to him a clever, sympathetic young person to teach in the north, Cottom had Jenkins's former pupils to turn to.

  Among them was William Shakespeare. We still lack a note in the hand of Hoghton, Cottom, or anyone else to show that he went north, though the risks of working for a distant, influential landowner may have seemed to his parents smaller than the benefits. Other bright, educated sons were leaving town; the times were uncertain. It is relevant, too, that the employer's religion was not necessarily a drawback; John and Mary Shakespeare appear to have been Catholics who conformed, as thousands of similar conviction did, and they raised a son who conformed: Shakespeare would show a close familiarity with Catholic practices, and at least as much intimacy and sympathy with the 'old faith', as any Protestant writer of his time. After his school years, he put his Latin to use, presumably 'in the Countrey',

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  and so we may ask what a country experience would have held for him. We can only be tentative; an 'alternative narrative' can give us no more than pictures from beyond the edges of Shakespeare's known experience. But since there is a good possibility that he went to Hoghton, we may suppose that he had experiences not wholly unlike those a grammar-school boy would have had at Hoghton Tower and Lea, and that in 1579 or 1580, after what may have been rough journey, a ' William Shakeshafte' found himself in the employ of a great family in the north.

  Upon a promontory

  May we see this person in Lancashire?

  If he was like Shakespeare just then, ' Shakeshafte' was no more than a country lad of 16, about as shiny and neat in doublet and hose, or as angular and graceful, as other boys would be. After school recitals he would have been articulate, yet he had been trained in civility, restraint, and the decorum of manners, so would have known enough to be mainly silent and deferential. He would have to merit the approbation of an employer in an odd milieu. If he had a prime Shakespeare family trait, it was his ability to please, or rather to ingratiate himself so as to win loyalty and trust, as William's father held the loyalty of burgesses who kept him on the council (long
after his absenteeism began), or as Mary Arden had pleased her father enough to be a legal executor as a young woman. To inspire affection and trust -- that, after all, counted for more than brains, talent, or other assets in a strict, hierarchical milieu, in which the young pleased in order to survive. If ' Shakeshafte' was like our William, he also had enthusiasm and energy, with enough imagination to offset the effect of any overtaught, Latin-ridden cleverness of his own, and an impressionable nature eager to absorb what it could.

  Alexander de Hoghton was near the end of his life. A portrait, said to be of him, shows a lean-cheeked man with thin eyebrows and an intent, sidelong glance. Married to Dorothy Ashton and then to Elizabeth Hesketh, he was close to 60 when in 1580 he came into full possession of the Hoghton inheritance. A few years later this included

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  over 20,000 acres of land, some two dozen mills and 400 cottages, and the manors of Alston, Hoghton, and Lea. Much of Lancashire was then a thinly peopled feudal domain with wide areas given over to moss and marshland. Justices of the peace were few; several of the gentry kept armed bands of retainers, and there was occasional violence, as when the house of Alexander's half-brother, his heir Thomas, was attacked at midnight by about eighty of Thomas Langton's armed men, using the rallying-cry 'The crow is white!' 'Black, black!' shouted servants within, but their master died in the mêlêe. 8

  Giving the country a semblance of peace and order were the Stanleys, the family of Alexander's close friend Henry, the fourth Earl of Derby. With nearly regal powers and the county lieutenancy, the fourth earl lived in as ostentatious a manner as his father had -- and, at least since 1536, the Crown had acknowledged the family's importance. In Lancashire, the queen in effect ruled through the Stanleys.

  This meant that ' Shakeshafte' -- and any other Hoghton servantlived in a milieu that was partly anachronistic. On visits to Alexander de Hoghton, the Earl of Derby personified a regal political authority and grandeur as if he were in fact the domain's monarch. An earl whose household was the largest in Elizabethan England after the royal one, and whose family spent £1,500 a year on food and had 140 people in his entourage, expected ceremony and displays of loyalty. 9 Shakespeare himself may well have observed such an earl -- when 'in the Countrey' or later -- inasmuch as he shows an easy familiarity with the habits and psychology of men of enormous, medieval political power. In Alexander's time, a certain tension was developing between the earl and his son and heir Ferdinando, whose troupe were to have some of Shakespeare's early work. In a friendly letter in 1571, the Queen had asked the earl to send his heir, as a young boy, to her at Windsor. 10 Influenced by his training at court, Ferdinando became obsessed with something besides the theatre, namely religion in his county. He began to denounce his own father in discreet letters to William Chadderton, Bishop of Chester, whose diocese linked Cheshire and Lancashire. 'I ame throughe with my father', wrote Ferdinando on 15 March 1582. Separating himself from the ignominy of papistry in Lancashire the next year, he hoped that 'your lordship

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  will proceide to frame some better reformation in this so unbridled & bade an handful of England', and signed himself, 'Youre lordships assured, yow know even verie assured, Fer. Strange.' To add to that, he told the Lord Bishop a little afterwards about the earl's backwardness in reducing Catholic recusancy, and referring to two actions that might avail, he added of his father:

  I find him rather an enemye in substance to both actions, than anie frende to ether. . . . To be constant is noe common vertew, althoughe it be most commendable, most fitt, & least founde in noblemen. . . . But we must be patient per force, & make a vertew of necessitie, & folowe his humor. . . . This secreat letter I sent your lordship. The other his lordship [Earl of Derby] is privie to. 11

  By 1582 Ferdinando may well have over-dramatized his feelings about his father -- but it is clear that the Hoghtons knew a troubled county: spies were common and families were divided. Yet, to an extent, recusancy thrived; even late in the century Hoghton's friend Lady Hesketh, of Rufford in Lancashire, was reported as a 'reliever of papists'. 12 A connection, faint enough, but interesting, has been traced between Shakespeare and this same Lady Hesketh: ' Shakeshafte' was recommended to the Heskeths of Rufford, in Hoghton's will of 1581, and eighteen years later Shakespeare with four colleagues chose as a Globe trustee (when its ground-lease was arranged) the Rufford-born London goldsmith, Thomas Savage, who left a bequest of 2Os. to a close friend of Lady Hesketh.

  How much would a visitor have heard of the county's past? Among the Hoghtons one was likely to hear at least of the Pilgrimage of Grace (the rebellion of 1536 against which the Crown had enlisted the third Earl of Derby's help, at a price), when two Cistercian abbots of Lancashire were hanged on the same day and when banners painted with emblems of Christ crucified, or showing the chalice and host, were hacked down. Many died. The quarters of one abbot's body were displayed, and the body of one of his monks was secretly cut from the gibbet and taken to Cottam Hall. 13 People prayed on All Hallow's Eve for such faithful; the northern Catholic sentiment was elegiac, intense, and yearningly nostalgic over the spiritual past and a thousand years of the Roman faith in England.

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  Shakespeare, it is true, may have acquired his own intense feelings for the past in another family, or at home. Eight or ten years after he left school, he knew more than most contemporary playwrights. He would devote nine of his first eighteen or nineteen plays to the history of his country; he knew a good library before he wrote his Henry VI plays, and he could hardly have made deft use of historical sources without developing his reading habits after grammar school. Any time as a 'Schoolmaster in the Countrey' perhaps helped him to seek in books for what might appeal to his hearers. One warm, favourable catalyst for an emergence of his talent, at any rate, was a milieu not indifferent to learning and to history.

  Alexander de Hoghton, as we know, was anxious to attach ' Shakeshafte' and ' Gillom' either to his half-brother, or else to send them on with his stock of play clothes to Sir Thomas Hesketh. New measures, receiving the royal assent on 18 March 1581, were partly directed against the keeping of unlicensed schoolmasters. If hired as teachers, ' Shakeshafte' and ' Gillom' would have been in less danger as players, and after Alexander died in August 1581 they may indeed have gone, in accordance with his will, either to his half-brother, or to Sir Thomas Hesketh's players at Rufford Hall south of Lea.

  Returning

  We have only incomplete, uncertain evidence as to what may have happened to both servants. It seems that Fulke Gillom did cross the Ribble to serve at Hesketh's Rufford, ten miles to the south. His name is unusual, and 'ffoulke gillame' and 'ffoulke Gillam' occur in two papers in the Hesketh archives. 14 Since their names are linked three times in the will of 3 August, it would seem that ' William Shakeshafte' went with Gillom, some time late in 1581, to join Hesketh's players.

  Our William was then past his seventeenth birthday. If he had something like the experience of a Hesketh servant by then, he already had taught children to sing and play the virginals. And both Hoghton and Hesketh had players skilled in 'mewsicks'. A later inventory of Robert Hesketh names a small orchestra of instruments -- some or all could be those bequeathed by Hoghton -- which includes 'vyolls,

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  vyolentes, virginalls, sagbutts, howboies and cornetts, cithon, flute and taber pypes'. 15 A lad in Hoghton's ménage may have had a good chance to perform. At Hoghton Tower east of Lea, there was a grand banqueting hall with a minstrels' gallery; the hall could have accommodated an audience of 150 people and the gallery, if needed for a theatrical, could have served as an upper stage. Hoghton had lived chiefly at Lea, near the north shore of the Ribble estuary. Here, too, was an oak-framed hall where players could entertain. The locale -- with its long vistas changing with swift regularity -- was unusual. Nearby the tide brought in a sudden rush of ocean to part the shore, with a visual effect not unlike that of a striking image in Shakespeare's Sonnet 56:


  Let this sad int'rim like the ocean be Which parts the shore where two contracted new Come daily to the banks, that when they see Return of love, more blessed may be the view.

  Shakespeare as a young playwright is almost too attentive to England's west; he has the west in mind when he means the Kentish coast and so has the 'day' sink in an easterly direction ( 2 Henry VI, iv. 1-2). In three scenes in 3 Henry VI, the effort of crossing tidal waters against wind and tide is evoked, as if the playwright had known the crossing from Lea to Rufford, and, indeed, apparent images of an estuary have been noted in the same early play. 16 The young playwright is familiar with a sight that is common on a flat northern seashore when rough waves, in a strong offshore gust, after breaking appear to hesitate and retreat before the wind. Perhaps he would have needed to see this, as well as a play of light on low mountains such as those at the end of the Pennine chain, to depict such details as freshly as he does. Other images in 2 Henry VI and Titus Andronicus suggest a sight of northern hills and seascapes.