by Park Honan
There is no evidence that he spent money on London property until near the end of his life, but there is every sign that he was concerned to establish himself respectably at Stratford. His wife, his two daughters, and his small son Hamnet awaited him there in 1596. John Aubrey twice records that Shakespeare went into Warwickshire 'once
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a yeare', and there is a good tradition that he favoured summer visits when the city's theatres might be shut. On 22 July, an outbreak of plague had closed all of the suburban theatres. This was a hard, miserable, testing time, since Lord Hunsdon died at Somerset House next day; and later the old lord's cortège was followed (as one manuscript account puts it) by large numbers of yeomen in 'black coates'. 1 So the Chamberlain's men lost their patron. His successor, in the chamberlaincy, the seventh Lord Cobham, was less partial to the public theatre, indeed he was descended from the Oldcastle who is mocked in Henry IV; but for other reasons there was a danger now, if not a likelihood, that he might collude with the Lord Mayor against the playhouses. 2
Sponsored by their former patron's son, the Chamberlain's men became Lord Hunsdon's Servants. When they toured after 22 July in Kent, Shakespeare apparently had a chance to return home, and he was to be in Stratford well before he bought a house there. What would he have found as he crossed Clopton's bridge, and went up beside Middle Row at last into Henley Street?
Stratford was feeling the effects of harvest failure -- and of two serious local fires. One saw charred timbers and ruined barns. Though houses and shops in the main streets were usually tiled, on 22 September 1594 and again in the following September the flames had leapt to street frontages. Leather fire-buckets, ladders, and fire-hooks to pull down burning thatch had not saved many dwellings, and it was said that damage and loss of property and goods amounted to £12,000. The second fire had reached the Henley Street tenements of Cox and Cawdrey -- though John Shakespeare's double house was spared. Funds had poured in from nearby shires, and the city of Oxford, for instance, had sent 'tenne shillings towards the relief of those that had their howses burnt'. 3
William Shakespeare, in his will, left twenty times that amount to Stratford's poor -- a generous bequest. In his expenditures he ran a tight ship, but he was not simply tight-fisted, obsessed with land, or
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harsh with debtors. A man of his means recovered debts through Stratford's Court of Record with its jurisdiction over sums up to £30, and we know that he took local debtors to court just twice -- once to get Philip Rogers the apothecary to pay for twenty bushels of malt plus a borrowed sum in 1604, and again to recover a debt of £6, plus damages, from John Addenbrooke in 1608. This may be the Addenbrooke who speculated on land rights at Tanworth, near Henley, or the one who sold starch licences at Warwick, but he lived within the borough.
Apart from rebuilding in the High, Stratford was much as it was in the poet's youth. Time moved slowly here, and the townspeople were in touch with their communal past. The council still met regularly at the Gild hall's annexe, outside which the public sweeper ' Lame Margaret' had at last given way to old 'Mother Ashfield'. Margaret Smith had long since lost her full name, to be called Lame Margaret as if she were an animal, but the burgesses had admitted her to an almshouse. In succession she and Mother Ashfield swept the channel of a small, often noxious, stream as it crossed the road from Tinkers Lane to Chapel Lane at New Place, which the poet was to buy. It is likely that he knew their old, coarsened or reddened faces. 4 From his viewpoint many women in the town might have been younger versions of Lame Margaret, valued for childbearing or hard work.
At his parent's house on Henley Street, there was incessant work for women to do. In any home there was wool to card, after it had been treated with swine's grease, and spinning to do, with the spinner leaning forward over her work. There would be netting for coverlets and curtains, and sewing for most garments worn indoors or out, as well as weaving hats and baskets, and candle-making with kettles of boiling water and melted tallow for wicks.
Even a poet had to rely on quills from some source. A stocking was pulled over a goose's head and down would fly everywhere as quills were plucked. Shakespeare's wife Anne would have known comparable tasks, even if she had servants. This summer she was nearly 40. Hard work etches lines in a face and colours the hands. 'I saw her hand', says Rosalind in As You Like It, as she mocks a love-letter from Phoebe the shepherd-girl,
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She has a leathern hand, A free-stone coloured hand. I verily did think That her old gloves were on; but 'twas her hands. She has a housewife's hand. ( IV.iii. 25-8)
But there is sympathy for the plight of rural women in several of Rosalind's remarks: 'Maids are May when they are maids', Shakespeare writes for that heroine, 'but the sky changes when they are wives' (IV. i. 140-1). Along with his wife Anne, he of course found his ageing parents at Henley Street. In this same year, he apparently ensured that his father John had a grant of arms from the Heralds' College. Two surviving drafts of the grant suggest it was Shakespeare who sat with the heralds in London to supply data and pay fees. His father was optimistically declared to be worth £500, and there was comic trouble with the family motto (which the poet never used). A clerk jotted it as 'non, sanz droict' and then as 'Non, Sanz Droict' and finally in capitals without the comma as 'NON SANZ DROICT', meaning 'Not without right'. Supposedly this later incited Ben Jonson in Every Man Out of his Humour to have the clown Sogliardo (who pays £30 for arms) mocked and deflated by a motto suggested to him, 'Not without Mustard', a pnhrase which Jonson lifts from Nashe. 5
At any rate, John Shakespeare and his offspring were granted for all time a shield or arms showing:
Gould. on A Bend Sables. a Speare of the first steeled argent. And for his Creast or Cognizance a falcon his winges displayed Argent. standing on a wrethe of his Collors. supp [MS torn] A Speare Gould steeled as aforesaid sett vppon a helmett with mantell & tassel
[Gould, on a bend sables, a spear of the first steeled argent, and for his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold, steeled as aforesaid, set upon a helmet with mantles and tassels 6
A sketch of this fairly simple trick of arms appears in the upper lefthand corner of both drafts of the grant made at the Heralds' College in 1596. Three years later, John gained the right to impale his arms with those of Arden, his wife's family, as C. W. Scott-Giles points out,
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so that the shield could be 'divided vertically into two halves, the Shakespeare coat being placed in the dexter and the Arden coat in the sinister half'. 7 John, evidently, chose not to impale with Arden.
Shakespeare seems to have been amused by these prodigious efforts. The heralds -- it seems at the poet's own bidding -- had lifted up the rank of his grandfather Robert Arden from 'gent'. or generosus to the higher rank of 'esquire', armiger. In The Merry Wives, the insipid Slender proudly hails his uncle -- Justice Shallow -- as one 'who writes himself "Armigero" in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation: "Armigero." ' (1. i. 8-9). For their part, Shakespeare's fellow actors were hardly amazed by his minor triumph of arms. Augustine Phillips, his colleague and friend, simply bought one day from a heraldic painter the arms of Lord Bardolph ( William Phillips), and the actor Thomas Pope bought the arms of Sir Thomas Pope, the Chancellor of the Augmentations. Richard Cowley and Shakespeare had legitimate claims to arms, but, as actors, both were later cited in a complaint of Ralph Brooke, the York Herald, to the effect that Sir William Dethick as Garter King-of-Arms had made grants to 'base and ignoble persons'. 8
Gentlehood had a serious bearing on the chances of younger Shakespeares. Possibly the least helped was the poet's sister Joan, soon to marry William Hart, a hatter down on his luck. Shakespeare's three living brothers were more likely to benefit. Gilbert Shakespeare, who never married, was in this year 29. His brother Richard was 22, and Edmund 16. Gilbert tried to succeed in the nation's capital, since he was a haberdasher at
St Bride's in 1597 when he and a local shoemaker put up £19 bail, in the court of Queen's Bench, for the clockmaker William Sampson. Gilbert must have been back in the Midlands in 1602. Then or a little later he became associated, probably in business, with Peter Roswell (or Ruswell) and Richard Mytton, who are both mentioned in the only existing letter addressed to Shakespeare.
In the twentieth century, Mark Eccles discovered a court case involving Gilbert Shakespeare and his rather unsavoury acquaintances living in, and also to the south-west of, the parish. We know that Gilbert had to appear at the Court of Requests with Roswell, Mytton, Mary Burnell, and others in November 1609 to answer certain
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charges. The charges are still unknown, but we know that Roswell and Mytton had been in the employ of Stratford's Lord of the Manor, whose men, as will emerge, were involved in the killing of the Shakespeares' friend Richard Quiney when Quiney was bailiff. Roswell appears as a brutal bully, among other bullies, even at the outset of the case involving Shakespeare's brother Gilbert. Tempers flared when Elionor Varney, a serving-girl of 21, first handed Roswell the subpoena to appear in court: 'he did violently snatch from [Elionor] the said writ and refused to re-deliver 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'. 9 It is of interest to find Gilbert Shakespeare among violent associates who in themselves worked for a vicious manorial lord, but a dark curtain falls over this obscure court case; we may yet learn more about it. The poet's brothers Gilbert and Richard, anyway, drew little opprobrium down upon their own heads, and left almost no mark in life. Gilbert was to die in his forty-sixth year; he was buried as a bachelor (adolescens) at Holy Trinity, Stratford, on 3 February 1612. Richard admitted a fault at the church court in July 1608, for which he was fined 12d., but he was blameless in the local court's eyes after that. Having nearly reached his fortieth year, he was buried at Stratford on 4 February 1613.
The case with Shakespeare's youngest brother was otherwise, for Edmund, unluckily, became a city actor. Among the dangers that threatened an actor were indiscipline and sexual disease, and the young man was rashly imprudent. In London he sired a son who was baptized at St Leonard's parish in July 1607 and buried a month later, at Cripplegate, as ' Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere Player base borne'. The father barely survived the infant: Edmund died at 27 and was buried on 31 December 1607 at St Saviour's church, Southwark, where Shakespeare must have paid to have the great bell rung for him.
Would the 'Dark Lady' sonnets, in their fitful story of sensuality, have been lost on Edmund? In our time, fanciful writers of course suppose that Shakespeare himself fell into the clutches of a dark-haired vamp, such as Lucy Negro, bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's stews, or Hunsdon's mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly paramour Mary Fitton (despite a lack of factual proof that he ever met
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any of them). It is not difficult to imagine that actors were terrified of syphilis, and, in a 'homosocial' culture, very close male friendships could help a few actors to avoid fornication. Homosexual relationships must have been common, though boy apprentices were likely to be well protected. No one knows if Shakespeare was especially chaste, but when living with Huguenots later, he was respectable enough to be trusted in a delicate family matter. The Sonnets suggest he knew sexual liaisons, but that his horror of adultery is unusually strong.
Nevertheless if he was a penitent husband, it is odd that Anne Shakespeare bore him children in only three years of married life. His own mother had offspring over a span of twenty-two years, but Anne gave birth to no child after Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith were born. It is perhaps less likely that she was hopelessly estranged from her husband, than that damage to her reproductive system, caused by the carrying and birth of twins, had made it impossible for her to have more children. This of course is no more than a possibility. Robert Bearman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust notes that of 'thirty-two instances of twin births in Stratford between 1560 and 1600, both children survived at least the first three months of infancy in eighteen cases'. In eight cases of twin births, however, the mother bore no more children -- at a time when children were much desired in all of the social ranks. 10 Twin births could be particularly horrendous as a barber-surgeon stood by, with his unsterilized instruments, to cut, crush, and extract the unborn to save the mother, who might suffer irreparable harm even if the births were successful. Shakespeare and his wife would presumably have had more children if they could, and it is by no means certain that they had a choice in the matter. A child was a fragile treasure, and, among the gentry, it was normally felt that a family's well-being and the likely survival of one's estate depended on one's having a living male heir.
At the time, belief in the sacredness of marriage reinforced unions, and Shakespeare had much to benefit from harmony at home. 'In his dramas from Hamlet to Coriolanus, he is, interestingly, less concerned with opposition between husband and wife than with problems a son faces in coming to terms with images of a parent. He was to take Anne from the double house at Henley Street, and live with her among
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pleasant amenities at Chapel Street; the poet's house was convenient and hospitable enough for Thomas Greene to stay there as a guest for at least a year. Anne's looks, dress, or manners can hardly have surprised Shakespeare, and, certainly, his family had known her own family since his infancy. But to judge from the available facts, her Hathaway relatives gave him cause for alarm. We recall that Anne was close in age to her eldest brother Bartholomew, who was back at Shottery. As an act of family piety Bartholomew had given the name of his father, Richard, to his first-born. There was persistence in that, since Bartholomew and Anne had earlier lost two brothers named after their father. At Shottery Anne's father had thrived, but the rewards for his energy, or good luck, were not bound to be equalled by fresh, young Hathaway men in need of advancement in depressed times. Anne's brothers were unlikely to offend her, and there is no sign that she renounced any of them. It has been said that one reason why Shakespeare's will appears to treat his wife shabbily, or negligently, is that she became mentally ill -- but nothing supports that. If Anne held money in trust for her father's shepherd in 1601, she was not ineffectual then, nor do Whittington's phrases hint at any incompetence on her part. What does clearly emerge, though, is the fact of strong family loyalty among the Hathaways as Bartholomew's children began to settle not only in Shottery but within the town itself. Their warm interest in Anne Shakespeare was normal, but since Bartholomew's branch produced churchwardens, aldermen, and a bailiff there was a trace of social ambition in their friendly ways. Bartholomew had very good credentials for his attentions to Anne. His own father, a friend of John Shakespeare, in his will had urged Bartholomew to look closely after his sisters, or to be a 'Comforte' to them 'to his power'. Returning from Tysoe, he was not simply a farmer; he took an interest in the town and had a lease in Ely Street by 1583. Visiting Anne, he came to be on friendly terms with her children; and through the poet's daughter, Susanna, Bartholomew later developed a trusting relationship with her physician husband, John Hall. Shakespeare's will firmly excludes Bartholomew and literally every other Hathaway, while chiefly empowering Susanna and her spouse. Ironically, Susanna's spouse was to be appointed as an overseer of Bartholomew's own will. 11
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What, then, in all likelihood irritated Shakespeare? The friendliness of Bartholomew and his sons was hard to guard against, if Anne's loyalty to them was keen. As they were by no means disreputable, he could hardly have turned them from his door. Absent for long periods, he cannot have returned home to find matters exactly as they were when he left, and his brother-in-law's needs evidently confronted him. Just how Bartholomew came to have £200 in 1610 to buy back Hewlands and adjacent property at Shottery is unknown, but E. I. Fripp believes the money came from Shakespeare. It was a large sum; the buyer was not wealthy. Other Hathaways were very near
ly the poet's neighbours. Bartholomew's son Richard set up as a baker in Fore Bridge Street, and became host of the Crown inn, before rising to the bailiwick. 12 Whether or not the poet welcomed early signs of such success, the weak point of his own estate was soon to become its terrible lack of a male heir. If he died before his wife, there was a possibility that her relatives might try to get, through her, some access to his heritable wealth, or to the entity of an estate intended for male Shakespeares. He was vulnerable to his in-laws through Anne, and even if she at last did nothing worse than to receive or encourage them, that could have aroused his anger.
The unusual arrangements he made for his Blackfriars property kept it safe from Anne even three years before he made his will. His will is an extraordinary document when compared with other actors' wills, and it reflects further troubles in 1616. One oddity is not its lack of endearing phrases for Anne (such as 'my loving' or 'my beloved' wife), since other testators could omit those, but his failure to leave Anne any jewel, keepsake, or other artefact that might show tenderness. One might be reminded of the Sonnets' speaker who resents those to whom he is emotionally close. The poet had a sudden, dark temper, it has been implied, since two men he knew used the word 'offence' to describe him. He was forgiving with Henry Chettle, but Chettle added that Groats-worth was 'offensively taken' by the poet, and Thomas Heywood reported that Shakespeare was 'much offended' by Jaggard the printer who presumed 'to make so bold with his name' on the title-page of The Passionate Pilgrim. Ben Jonson wrote with conventional hyperbole that his 'beloved' was capable of rage: 'Shine
