Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  The Grafton Portrait. An oil painting, on oak, reputedly owned by the dukes of Grafton and now in the John Rylands University Library of Manchester. If the inscription at the top (Æ SUÆ 24 1 • 5 • 8 • 8 • ') is genuine, the young man was born in the same year as Stratford's poet. No evidence links the work with Shakespeare, but the facial proportions are similar to those in Droeshout's engraving.

  London Bridge and the city. A copy of a detail in a panoramic view of London from the south, made by the Amsterdam engraver Claes Janszoon de Visscher in 1616. In the foreground is St Saviour's church in Southwark, also called St Mary Overy, the parish church for the Globe.

  (Below) The Bear Garden and the Globe, from a copy of another detail in Visscher's view.

  The Chandos Portrait, painted in oil on English canvas, is typical of British portraiture of about 1600-10. Though its origins are obscure, there is a good possibility that it shows Shakespeare; he has greyish eyes, brown moustache and beard, and a gold ring in his left ear. The drawstrings of the shirt hang down over a black doublet. Once owned by the Duke of Chandos, later by the Earl of Ellesmere, in 1856 the work was the first picture to be presented to the National Portrait Gallery.

  (Above) Shakespeare's two greatest clowns. Will Kempe dances on the road to Norwich in 1600, and the dwarfish Robert Armin strikes a pose in a long coat, in Armin's Two Maids of Moreclacke, printed in 1609.

  (Below) Two enemies. Six years after attacking Shakespeare, Robert Greene rises from the grave to write again, in a cartoon of 1598. (Below,right) The York Herald's disgusted note that Shakespeare, 'ye Player', qualified for a coat of arms in 1596.

  The title-page of the First Folio. This copy was given to the herald Augustine Vincent in 1623 with an inked inscription at the upper right by the printer ' William Jaggard Typographi'. Martin Droeshout was about 22 years old when he engraved Shakespeare's portrait.

  Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton, in a painting, by an unknown artist, in 1600. 'The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end', Shakespeare told him in the open letter with Lucrece.

  (Above, left) Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange, patron of an amalgamated troupe which staged Shakespeare's early dramas.

  (Above, right) Richard Burbage, who excelled in roles such as Richard III, Hamlet, and King Lear. (Below, lift) Ben Jonson, who offered friendship, suggestiveness, and goading rivalry, and (right) John Fletcher, with whom Shakespeare wrote three late plays.

  The 'Agas' woodcut map, Civitatis Londinium, depicts London as it was in 1553-9. This is from a copy at the Folger Library. The Mountjoys' house, where Shakespeare was living in 1604, appears in conventionalized fashion at the corner of Silver Street and Mugle Street not far from the city's walls, below the left-centre of the picture. To the north lay two useful routes to the Midlands.

  Shakespeare's profile at Holy Trinity church, and five signatures. (From top to bottom) 1. 'By me William Shakspeare'on the third sheet of his legal will. 2. His brother Gilbert Shakespeare's hand in a neat 'Italian' style. 3. The hand of Shakespeare's elder daughter Susanna Hall, and two signatures of his only granddaughter: 4. Elizabeth Nash, and 5. Elizabeth Barnard.

  The Church of the Holy Trinity at Stratford. The poet's monument in the chancel was in place by 1623.

  (Below) Shakespeare's Birthplace before it began to be restored in the 1850s.

  fused the town's welfare and funds with his own. Neither was on easy, intimate terms with Shakespeare, who treated them with caution.

  Should the poet invest in Shottery land? Old Adrian sees no gain to anyone in that, and wishes to get him to buy a share in the town's tithes, as Sturley tells Quiney on 24 January. That will bring needed cash to the Corporation and help the poet too, so it is up to Quiney to persuade Shakespeare: 'By the instructions you can give him thereof and by the friends he can make therefore', Sturley writes, 'we think it a fair mark for him to shoot at and not impossible to hit. It obtained would advance him indeed and would do us much good. Hoc movere et quantum in te est permovere ne negligas [don't neglect to move in this and, as much as in you lies, move deeply].' 25

  But, probably without seeing Shakespeare, Quiney rushed back to Stratford. Further news in his friend's letter was alarming. The town was in an uproar with citizens 'assembled together in great number' to attack those forcing up grain prices. One man, who had complained to Sir Fulke Greville, said 'he hoped within a week to lead some of them in a halter, meaning the malsters'. A local weaver trusted 'to see them hanged on gibbets at their own doors'. 26 If a mob attacked Quiney's barn they could take torches to New Place, too. Shakespeare's wife and daughters were in jeopardy, and this may be the closest analogue to his showing later, in Coriolanus, an intent Roman mob ready to riot over corn.

  Stratford's grain survey, a few days after Sturley's letter, may have pacified hot heads, and it shows that excess stocks have magically vanished from barns. In an earlier survey, Sturley was alleged to hold twenty-six quarters of malt and Quiney thirty-two of malt, and fortyseven quarters of barley -- all of 632 bushels. But by 4 February, Quiney's hoard on paper has shrunk to a mere fourteen quarters of malt, and Sturley's barn is a place of moral purity and beatitude since his holdings have dropped to only five quarters, half as much as his friend Shakespeare holds!" 27

  Still, the populace had come close to insurrection and the poet was alarmed, or at any rate his investment plan changed. So far as we know, he invested not a penny at Stratford for the next four years, or until after his father's death and well into 1602. In a time of dearth he

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  had held too much malt, but he may not have been so rash again (it was only after good harvests that he sold twenty bushels to his neighbour Rogers). The Queen's Council called grain speculators 'wolves', and by coincidence Sturley echoed that in a newsy, worried letter: 'Man is a god to man, man is a wolf to man', he told Quincy in Latin. 28 It is only a myth of modern biography that Shakespeare closely befriended either alderman (who can refer to him with distant respect, even as they try to use him), but, then, he may have been amused enough to draw hints from both in his work.

  Late in 1598 Quincy was back in London. He and Sturley, over the past few years, had consoled each other, rather as Antonio is consoled in The Merchant of Venice, and as profiteering aldermen they had reason to be wary (since their exposure as grain speculators back in 1595). 'Farewell, my dear heart', Sturley salutes his friend this autumn, 'and the Lord increase our loves and comforts one to another.' 29 In fact, both aldermen were then in debt, and Sturley's standing with a moneylender was in peril. In January he had told Quincy that he was 'left I assure you in the greatest need of £30 that possibly may be', for he had borrowed £80 from the moneylender and relied on Quincy to get £40 of the repayment deferred for six months. Now on 16 October, things were worse: a bond for £100 was due for repayment in six weeks, and to meet other creditors Sturley urgently needed £25, which he hoped Quincy's 'good labour' could procure. 30 But Quincy needed money as well, and a few days later at the Bell inn on Carter Lane, he penned a famous letter to Shakespeare.

  It is a hurried letter, but Quincy mentions Thomas Bushell, Richard Mytton, and Peter Roswell, who were all in the service of Stratford's lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville. The poet's brother Gilbert had dealings with two of them, as we recall, and Quincy now proposes Bushell and Mytton as sureties for a loan. 'Loving Countryman', he writes to Shakespeare on 25 October, 'I am bold of you as of a friend, craving your help with £30 upon Mr Bushell's and my security, or Mr Mytton's with me. Mr Roswell is not come to London as yet, and I have especial cause.' Since Quincy was ostensibly in the city on town business, he hoped to get expense money from Sir Edward's agent Roswell, but the agent has not appeared. 'You shall friend me

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  much in helping me out of all the debts I owe in London', Quiney assures Shakespeare.

  I thank God & much quiet my mind which would not be indebted. I am now towards the Court in hope of answer for the despatc
h of my business. You shall neither lose credit nor money by me the Lord willing, & now but persuade yourself so as I hope, and you shall not need to fear. But with all hearty thankfulness I will hold my time & content your friend, & if we bargain further you shall be the paymaster yourself.

  Probably the poet was not being asked for his own funds, but for help with a money-dealer who would tend £30, and indeed this is suggested in a note Quiney received a few days later from Sturley, who, then, was glad to hear that 'our countryman Mr Wm Shak[speare] would procure us money, which I will like of as I shall hear when, where, and how'. Moneylending at up to 10 per cent interest was then permissible, but less than respectable, and risky if not professionally managed. Still, what is a little odd about Quincy's letter is a dark undercurrent of inexplicit, half-suppressed worry or anxiety, and he concludes in a rush:

  My time bids me hasten to an end, and so I commit this [to] your care & hope of your help. I fear I shall not be back this night from the Court. Haste. The Lord be with you & with us all, Amen. From the Bell in Carter Lane the 25 October 1598.

  Yours in all kindness Ryc. Quyney

  Quiney folded, sealed, and addressed this 'To my Loving good friend & countryman Mr Wm Shackespere deliver these'. The letter perhaps was not sent, unless the poet returned it with a reply, but Quiney made some contact with him that day. Back at Stratford, his father had got wind that an approach to the poet was being made, and sent a note to advise his son to buy knit stockings for resale at home, if 'you bargain with Wm Sha[kespeare] or receive money there'. 31 The son may have bought the stockings, but he was disturbed not to see his lord's agent, Roswell, and he was soon to know the open hostility of the lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville -- whose men were to crack Quiney's skull.

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  Lately, Shakespeare's own relations with Stratford had changed. He was a householder, at last, in his mid-thirties, among citizens almost driven to barn-burning or worse. Did his eighty bushels trouble him after February? He was likely to sympathize at first with local maltsters, but a prospect of civic rebellion worried townsmen he knew. One intuits that Shakespeare feared a threat of social dissolution with an increase in violence and a fading of the notion of responsible community. His last series of happy comedies, from As You Like It to Twelfth Night, might be a good bulwark against his disenchantment; but in view of his own hoarding, in a time of famine and miserable deaths, he perhaps had, on reflection, some very prime, ugly evidence of man's callous, cold social indifference in modern times.

  'This is the Forest of Arden'

  As You Like It -- Shakespeare's happiest play -- was composed not long after Richard Quiney had asked for the poet's help in London. Most likely the comedy was written after its author's thirty-fifth birthday, in 1599; it was registered on 4 August 1600. Though it has a relation to problems that involve Quiney, the Grevilles, Stratford, and the Arden forest, the play was not meant to advertise injustice in the English Midlands. As an exuberant comedy it suggests its author's sanguine temperament. Its manner reveals his delight in pastoral romance and in Sidney's nuances of tone in the Arcadia, even as its romantic setting flatters the rural nostalgia of Londoners. On a May Day milkmaids paraded in London's streets with pails, and maypoles and morris dancers suggested a yearning for a 'golden' rural world. 32 Aching with love for Orlando, Rosalind dominates her milieu in disguise as the boy Ganymede. She avoids the worst complications of passion, wittily educates a Petrarchan lover (who carves her name on trees), and orchestrates a plot which ends in four marriages and her own Epilogue. The plot nevertheless relates to a malaise of brutality, alienation, and injustice, so that one's enquiries turn after all to the Midlands. To what extent might Quincy's difficulties bear on the poet's attitudes in this play and later?

  On the very day he negotiated with Shakespeare, Quiney, in

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  October 1598, as it appears, was trying to gain benefits for his town. Keeping up that pursuit in the city, he was fretful, but he had word from a loving fellow alderman. Sturley told him in November to give half of anything he could get from the Queen's authorities for the Stratford Corporation to Sir Edward Greville, lest 'he shall think it too good for us and procure it himself'. 33 Sir Edward had a sense of his legal, well-protected power, which John Shakespeare, the Quineys, Sturley, and others who served at 'halls' well understood.

  For the town, after all, had an odd status. Despite its corporate charter, Elizabethan Stratford had kept a few features of an old manorial borough, subject to a manorial lord; yet no prior lord had had the greed of Sir Edward, who lived south-west of the town at Milcotewhich he had inherited after his father, Lodowick, was executed for killing a tenant. Sir Edward's aggression became more overt a few years after As You Like It was written, as when he claimed Stratford's toll corn or corn tax, and enclosed the meadowy Bancroft at the River Avon with hedges. (The Bancroft was a common where townsmen grazed cows, sheep, or a few pigs if they were ringed.) Quiney, with others, tore up the lord's hedges in disgust. Sir Edward responded with a lawsuit, and then vowed to win 'by the sword'.

  A prophetic claim. Having opposed Quiney's elevation to the bailiwick, Sir Edward relied on bullying tactics with the help of a steward. But it was on a May night, some months after his second election as Stratford's High Bailiff, that Quiney was struck down. Having entered a house full of Sir Edward's men who were taunting its owner in a 'hurly burly' of shouts, the bailiff, as it was noted, 'in his endeavour to still the brawl had his head grievously broken'. 34 Perhaps his skull was fractured. Richard Quiney certainly made no legal will; the only Stratford bailiff to be killed in office, he died a few weeks later and was buried at Holy Trinity on 31 May 1602. He left behind his widow, and nine children all under the age of 20: Elizabeth, Adrian, Richard, Thomas, Anne, William, Mary, John, and George. (It was his third son, Thomas, who later became a vintner and married Shakespeare's daughter Judith.)

  The brutal death of a Stratford bailiff was not lost on Shakespeare, and helps to account for a deepening social pessimism in his writing.

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  Plays such as Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens are not uninfluenced by the violence and anarchy he knew in the town where Anne, Susanna, and Judith had to live. It is also significant that (as the Sonnets suggest) he could take his own deficiencies as subject-matter, and find elements of a community's failures in his own egoism, obtuseness, or inconsistencies as these appeared to him. It would be foolish to impose any fancied limit on Shakespeare's reactions to experience, or to say that as a mature artist he learned only or mainly from books, or to suppose that the two deaths linked with New Place, or the killing of Quiney, had nothing to do with his attitude to tragedy. It is not clear that his reactions to individuals were ever simple; he may not have been horrified even by Sir Edward Greville, as rapacious as that figure was, and Gilbert Shakespeare's connection with two of Sir Edward's men is on record. But the disintegration of order at Stratford would have seemed to Shakespeare, at times, bitter and irreversible. In the late 1590s, Quiney's problems with a manorial lord had precedents; the poet's father and old Adrian together once had tried to wrestle privileges for the town from its former lord, the Earl of Warwick, and Adrian was aware of his son's efforts and worries around 1598.

  By that year, too, rapaciousness was not limited to Greville's domain. North of the town was the scrubby, wooded Arden where Sir Edward's cousin -- Sir Fulke Greville -- without warrant denuded large tracts of their trees. This struck at the landless poor, or at squatters depending on wood for fuel, even as landowners enclosed Arden fields once cultivated by their tenants. Enclosure drove some to vagrancy, and those left behind faced hunger and destitution. In the real 'Forest of Arden' there was a high incidence of infant mortality; and many of its thin, flat-breasted women later stopped ovulating. Protesters troubled the authorities, of course, but a rebellion against land enclosures -- led by Bartholomew Steer in 1596 -- had sputtered out even before its leader was executed. 35

>   In a folk-tale context, As You Like It does include the bleakest evil. The usurper Duke Frederick, it seems, after seizing his brother's lands has driven a good 'Duke Senior' and retinue into exile. Oppressed by his elder brother Oliver who makes him eat with the hogs, Orlando

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  asserts his rights, whereupon Oliver arranges with the tyrant's wrestler to have his brother's neck broken. To be sure, Orlando defeats the killer-wrestler and at once falls idealizingly in love with Rosalind, as she does with him.

  In her self-confidence and nerve, the heroine steps out of Thomas Lodge's rather gory romance Rosalynde or Euphues Golden Legacy ( 1590), the play's main source. Shakespeare softens Lodge's violence, but he develops Rosalynde's theme of the difference between gifts of fortune which do not matter, and gifts of human nature which do. Disguised in the greenwood, Rosalind speaks and acts as a man, while keeping the privilege of feeling as a woman, and the playwright sets psychological realism in tension with a delightful mock-pastoralism which includes sudden love, comic episodes, exuberant rhetoric, and five songs -- more songs than in any of his earlier plays. Myths of a 'golden age' are offset not only by Touchstone, but by Jaques, who in his Seven Ages of Man speech saves his very worst for old age. 'Last scene of all', Jaques offers with sombre smartness,