Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

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  forth, thou star of poets', he urges in his elegy on Shakespeare, 'and with rage | Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage'. 13

  The trouble is that the poet had good cause to complain to Chettle of Groats-worth, and about a printer's unauthorized use of his name. It does not follow that he was easily upset. He believed in loyalty and stability, and his wife kept his house and raised his children. There are signs of his satisfaction at New Place, an estate large enough perhaps to emphasize his distinction in social rank from relatives who appeared cap in hand. He mentioned a wish to invest in Anne's 'Shottery' -- and civility prevailed in Shakespeare's household or he would not have tolerated the prolonged stay of any visitor. How did Anne respond to him? Stoical or dutiful compliance, at the time, is noticeable in wives of the privileged. Even as a person from an old, respected Shottery family, Anne may not have been so amenable as two other wives recently widowed, but there is no outward sign, so far, that her attitudes greatly differed from theirs: 'I carryed always that reverent respect towards him in regard of my good conceipt which I had of the good partes I knew to be in him', wrote Lady Mildmay in 1617; 'I could not fynde it in my heart to challenge him for the worst word or deede which ever he offered me'. Or again, Ann Clifford's attitude was not altogether uncommon among the gentry: 'Sometimes I had fair words from him and sometimes foul', she recalled of her husband, 'but I took all patiently and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of my love as I could possibly.' 14 Did Shakespeare believe in a marriage of equals? His dramas show a wide range of marital attitudes, and his outlook on marriage may not even begin to appear in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or Cornwall and Regan, who might represent unions of equals in villainy. In the Merry Wives, there are companionate marriages, despite Ford's air of authority. The Shrew and Comedy of Errors debate the rights of a wife; Capulet in Romeo is shown to be a foolish autocrat in a disastrous marriage. In his plays, Shakespeare at least entertained an idea, not attributable to Puritan notions but to traditions as old as his town's Gild, that marriage is a partnership based on mutual acquiescence. He feared at times that Anne could not protect herself from her brothers; for the likelihood of this, even if we put aside what is known of the Hathaways, we have

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  signs in two kinds of evidence in the Blackfriars transaction and in the poet's legal will. From what is known of Shakespeare's behaviour, he was easy and companionable but also rapid and fluid in his responsiveness and adaptability, and likely to hold to not more than a few central moral principles as he observed and reflected the viewpoints of others; his plays develop their ideas in a complex dialectic. He valued the stability he could have found in normal relations with his wife, and there is enough evidence to suggest that he worried over his heritable estate and thought it vulnerable. Certainly, in 1596, the prospects of that estate depended on a crucial emotional bond he had with Anne in their children.

  And yet that bond, in effect, involved their boy's life. Their son Hamnet Shakespeare, at 11, may have completed Lower School. This would have been normal, and one need not suppose the boy was as precocious as children can be in his father's plays. For the parents of any child, death seemed an ever-present threat. A third of all children born in England never reached the age of 10. Frighteningly, infectious diseases killed quickly, and one was seldom under the illusion that a child might not be lost. As it happened, nothing saved the Shakespeares' only son, who died early in August of some unknown cause. On the 11th, the little boy was buried at Holy Trinity, and a clerk noted in the burials register:

  Hamnet filius William Shakspere 15

  Such a loss could affect a wife even more sharply than it did her husband. If Anne was moved to cry out, that was not quite forbidden, but excess grief showed 'weakness and lack of control' -- and any display of pain was less befitting than joy over an innocent soul saved. 16 Death was very public in Stratford, and one calmly discussed one's dead child. The poet, in his verse, chose not to do so, though it is sometimes said that Sonnet 37 bears on his loss: 'As a decrepit father takes delight', Shakespeare begins,

  To see his active child do deeds of youth,

  So I, made lame by fortune's dearest spight,

  Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

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  But that, at best, vaguely alludes to his young boy. Heavily moved by a son's death, Ben Jonson, for instance, was eloquent in writing of his own boy's loss. In contrast, Shakespeare in these years devoted himself to comedy, to finishing up his history series and turning to Caesar's Rome. Had he died in this decade, he would be well remembered as the best in a group of Tudor playwrights, but he lived on to write plays that hardly allow one to compare him with anyone else, and his son's death changed him. He seems never to have recovered from the loss. What evolved was an intelligent complication of his view of suffering, so that he came to identify with those in extreme, irremediable pain; his grief increased his inwardness while perhaps making him mock any worldly success he might achieve. It is useless to argue that he could not have written his most intellectually assured tragedies had his son not died; he was not yet writing such plays in 1596. But Hamnet's death, this bitter and terrible loss, deepened the artist and thinker: that loss would have helped him to avoid the last, lingering drawbacks of his technical facility, that legacy of his youth, and to gather up his strength for the most emotionally complex and powerful dramas the English stage has known.

  Two murders, New Place, and Mr Quiney's little faults

  About a year after Hamnet died, the playwright was able to settle his wife and two daughters in an ample house just across from the old Gild chapel. The grammar school, of course, was close to the chapel, and in a sense Shakespeare was back where he began. Anne with her children Susanna and Judith, then aged 14 and 12, moved into New Place late in 1597, or in any case not after February 1598. The house was almost excessively roomy and very pleasant, with five gables, three storeys, and wide grassy borders setting it back from the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane (also known as Dead Lane and Walkers Street). Ten rooms were warmed by fireplaces -- at a time when fireplaces were taxed as a luxury. There were two gardens and an orchard, as well as two barns and other outbuildings. Built by Sir Hugh Clopton late in the previous century, New Place was said to be the second-largest house at Stratford with a frontage of over sixty feet,

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  a depth along the lane of about seventy feet, and a height of twentyeight feet at its northern gable. But by odd coincidence, for a poet who made a living in the melodramatic theatre, the house was linked with dire crime, or with two murders, one of which occurred as his wife was about to move in.

  Shakespeare's knowledge of savage, calculated family murder is interesting. It was a murderous time -- but New Place might have been a magnet for victims and killers. First called 'the Newe Place' when Adrian Quiney the elder lived in it, this pretty edifice of brick and timber had been leased by one of the Catholic Cloptons to Thomas Bentley, a physician to Henry VIII. After Bentley, the house fell into bad repair, and while its Clopton owner was away in Italy, William Bott managed to take possession in 1563. In that year, Bott murdered his daughter Isabella, according to the shoemaker Roland Wheler who claimed to be an eyewitness. Others who knew of these events seem to have credited Wheler's deposition. First, it was alleged, Bott cleverly had forged legal deeds to acquire the property of Isabella's husband, if she died childless; then he mixed poison in Isabella's drink. The shoemaker said he was in the house when this happened; he saw the 'spoon', the ratsbane, the drink, and noted that Isabella 'did dye sodenly and was poysoned with rattes bane and therewith swelled to death'. 17 Bott never faced a murder charge, for if he were hanged, the shoemaker said, Isabella's widower as well as the house's true owner would 'lose all their lands which the said Bott had beguyled them of'. 18

  A second major crime, nearly on the heels of Bott's occupancy, jeopardized Shakespeare's right to the house. Bott sold the estate
to William Underhill, whose son and namesake eventually sold it to the poet. Shakespeare paid about £120 for New Place; the exact amount is unknown, but it was likely to be double the £60 cited in the 'fine' or Final Concord pertaining to the sale (the 'fine' usually cited a fictitious price). An existing copy of the Latin 'fine' does not call Shakespeare generosus or mention an orchard (both defects were remedied later), but this document of 4 May 1597 assigns to him a messuage with two barns and two gardens ('uno mesuagio duobus horreis et duobus gardinis'). 19

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  The vendor William Underhill, who lived part of the year at Idlicote, was a Catholic recusant who appeared to Stephen Burman to be 'subtle, covetous, and crafty'. However bad he was, his elder boy was somewhat worse. Two months after the sale to Shakespeare, Underhill was killed by his son Fulke, then a legal minor, to whom he had orally bequeathed his lands. Once again, apparently, a murderer connected with the house used poison, as Claudius does in Hamlet, and Underhill died at Fillongley near Coventry on 7 July 1597. As a result, New Place was forfeited to the state for felony, and Fulke was hanged for murder in 1599. 20 Even when working on Hamlet, Shakespeare virtually had Fulke's parricide at his elbow, since the crime kept his right to the house insecure until the victim's second son Hercules Underhill came of age in 1602. In that year Hercules (who was born on 6 June 1581) secured a clear grant of the estate and confirmed its sale to the playwright. In buying the property, Shakespeare thus got in the strange bargain a father's alleged murder of a daughter, and the murder of a father by his son. He made good use of what he knew, and the Bott and Underhill stories familiarized him with the raw, primitive theme of family murder, which he was taking up with psychological realism. And indeed, what is important about Hamlet's origins is that the play was created not merely out of literary sources, or by a 'supposing' of events, but by a poet who took in ingredients from real life to assimilate them thoroughly with experiences of his own family, schooling, and town, and with his private aspirations, hopes, disappointments, and intellectual life. He knew Underhill, just as his father knew Bott; and the murders in Hamlet are not like pictures out of Ovid, not Titus-like, but intimately known happenings based in part on real, acutely judged events.

  The house was a lucky purchase, whether or not tales of murder distracted his wife from her loss. On three sides, the place was surrounded by greenery. In front was 'a little court yard', according to George Vertue, who in 1737 made a pen-and-ink sketch of the house, and a second drawing showing servants') quarters on either side of the court. New Place was partly torn down and rebuilt on neo-classical lines by Sir John Clopton in 1702 (though the house was not finally demolished until 1759, by vicar Francis Gastrell of Frodsham), so

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  Vertue had to rely, partly, on what others told him. But he is consistent with the memories of Richard Grimmitt (born in 1683) who recalled that in his childhood, he and a Clopton boy, when playing, would cross 'a small kind of Green Court' before entering the house which was 'fronted with brick, with plain windows, consisting of common panes of Glass set in lead, as at this time'. 21

  In the orchard and gardens which ran down parallel with a waterchannel on the other side of the lane, Shakespeare planted roses and apple trees. Writers gravely add up the number of horticultural allusions in the dramatist's works, and sure enough the poet refers to apples about thirty times, and cites a number of varieties -- the crab, pippin, bitter-sweeting, pome-water, applejohn and leathercoat. He also refers to roses on at least a hundred occasions, and gives us no fewer than eight sorts, the white, the red, the variegated, musk, damask, rose of Provence, canker or dog-rose, and sweet-brier. 22 Gardens at the time were often planned with ingeniously laid out beds, paths, arbours, and trellises, all surrounded by a brick wall or a high hedge cut into odd, eccentric shapes.

  Did his keenness as a gardener lead him to a book such as Gerard Herbal ( 1597)? Gerard anyway shows that the pretty, blue-petalled speedwell relates to the leek, and is, in Welsh, called fluellen. The most sympathetic captain in Henry V becomes Fluellen of Wales, but there were Fluellens in the local parish. Tudor gentlemen compared what they found in books with lessons from the soil. And Falstaff, perhaps, would not have gone thirsty here. New Place's vines, evidently grape vines, thrived so well that Sir Thomas Temple later asked a servant to get some of its 'vine settes'. Shakespeare's 'cousin', the attorney Thomas Greene of the Middle Temple, enjoyed 'a pynte of muskadell' of a morning, and his tastes were well served at New Place to judge from his long stay there. 23 There are two allusions to malt on the premises, and monthly brewing would have been normal. Anne Shakespeare no doubt looked after the brewing, and she had plenty of malt in the winter of 1598.

  Yet in connection with using malt for ale-making, tempers were running high at Stratford. Malt derives from barley -- a staple food so costly it was nearly out of reach of the poor. Just then, people

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  were enraged by malt-hoarders, and the town was close to open rebellion.

  In buying a fine house Shakespeare had caught the eye of some of the gentry. Old friends of his father such as Adrian Quiney and his son Richard, a man of genial advice, took a keen interest in him. In fact he was of special use to Richard Quiney and Abraham Sturley. Both were amiable, well-educated aldermen, who happened to be in trouble. Bad harvests had affected the price of grain cruelly, and Quiney and Sturley had been hoarding malt to release their stocks at inflated prices.

  Faced with a starvation crisis in the Midlands, the Queen's Council cracked down on hoarders and ordered a Stratford survey. The results appear in a 'Noate of Corn and Malt', dated 4 February 1598, and, oddly, in Quiney's handwriting. Out of seventy-five local households with grain or malt only thirteen barns have more than Shakespeare's own, with its ten quarters (or eighty bushels):

  Wm Shackespere x quartrs 24 10

  That was a large supply. To be sure, the schoolmaster Mr Aspinall had eleven quarters, and the vicar Mr Byfield six of his own, four of his sister's, but it is hard to believe that Anne needed eighty bushels.

  Her husband was then in London, and lately he had talked of investing. Apparently he had spoken to his father about putting some money into land. On 24 January, Sturley, at any rate, had written to Richard Quiney, who was himself then in the capital, to say that 'our countryman Mr Shakespeare is willing to disburse some money upon some odd yardland [about 30 acres] or other at Shottery or near about us'. This hint comes from Quiney's old father Adrian, a close friend of John Shakespeare for three decades. The Quineys were mercers, or sellers of fine cloth, silk, and oddments, but their trade declined, and malting had become the town's chief industry. Often in London on town-council business, young Quiney typically interviewed the Exchequer, obtained fire-relief funds, pressed for a new town charter, or secured Stratford's exemption from taxes. Much like his friend Sturley, who had been at Queens' College, Cambridge and who sent him news, Quiney was a civic-minded man who, now and then, con-

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  Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford. Richard Greene's watercolour, made around 1762, is one of the first pictures of John Shakespeare's double house on Henley Street. The so-called 'Woolshop' was to the right, and the 'Birthplace' to the left.

  (Below) The earliest known drawing of Mary Arden's house at Wilmcote, in John Jordan's sketch of about 1795.

  Top to bottom: (1) From an engraving of a copy of Richard Greene's South-east Prospect of Stratfordupon-Avon, 1746. (2) A sketch of the High or Market Cross, next to which the glovers sold their wares. (3) Stratford's Middle Row, shortly before it was pulled down. From the south, one rode up beside Middle Row,s houses, before turning into Henley Street.

  Elizabethan gloves, of a kind familiar to the glover John Shakespeare.

  (Below) Between the words 'the marke' and 'of Marye Shacksper', Mary Shakespeare wrote her marke on a deede that conveys interest in a Snitterfield estate to Robert Webbe in 1579. Her neat design, made in one continuous movement, shows some familiarity w
ith a quill pen.

  Macbeth and Banquo meet three 'weird sisters or feiries', in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles, published in 1577 when Shakespeare was at school. (Opposite) Sir Humphrey Gilbert's A Discourse of a Discovery appeared in 1576, with a surprisingly accurate world-map despite its view of a northwest passage between the Atlantic and the Pacific.

  Shakespeare's Consort. This drawing by Sir Nathaniel Curzon is dated 1708. It is less likely to be an authentic portrait than a playful sketch of Anne Shakespeare in her Elizabethan cap and ruff. With verses signed 'NC 1708', it is inserted in a copy of the Third Folio (second issue, 1664), now at Colgate University Library.

  (Below) Anne Hathaway's cottage, as viewed by Samuel Ireland in Picturesque Views on the Upper, or Warwickshire Avon, from its Source at Naseby to its Junction with the Severn at Tewkesbury ( 1795).