by Park Honan
Why did he buy this land? His motives were unlikely to be as simple or clear-cut as writers have supposed. Land ownership conveyed status, influence, or respectability with local political overtones, and heritable factors were often crucial; moreover, recent evidence in this case is suggestive. A document arising from an inquiry of about 1625 by Simon Archer, lord of Bishopton manor, describes the 107 acres in detail and states rather ambiguously that Shakespeare gave away 'the said land with his daughter in marryage to Mr Hall of Stratford'. If the
____________________ * The names of Shakespeare's furlongs, lost to us for several centuries, are of more than antiquarian interest; they relate to fields and names he had known since his youth. Some of the furlongs' names are found today in the New Town area of Stratford. In 1602, about a week after he turned 38, Shakespeare acquired in the Old Stratford fields (capitals added): 12 acres at Clopton Nether furlong, and 10 acres more at Clopton Over; 1 acre at Whetegate; 6 acres at Little Rednall; 8 acres at Great Rednall; 2 acres at the Nether Gill Pitt; 6 acres at Lime furlong; 2 acres at the Over Gill [?Pitt]; 4 acres at Homes Crosse; 2 acres at Hole furlong; 4. acres at Stoney furlong; 4. acres at Base Thorne 'shooting into' Clopton Hedge; 4 acres at Nether furlong 'shooting into' the Base Thorne; 4 acres at the upper end of Stoney furlong; 4. acres at the Buttes 'between Welcome Church way and Bryneclose way'; 8 acres 'lying upon the top of Rowley' and 10 'lying under Rowley'; 4 acres 'shooting and lying into' Fordes Greene, and 10 acres of leas ground at 'the Hame'. So much for 105 acres. He also bought about 2 more acres in leas or grassy strips, which are described as 'lying in the Dyngyllis and about Welcome hilles down to Millway and the Procession Bushe'. See Màiri Macdonald, "A New Discovery about Shakespeare's Estate in Old Stratford", Shakespeare Quarterly, 45 ( 1994), 87-9.
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land did figure in his negotiations for Susanna's marriage settlement, in 1607, it would have been the usual or common practice for him to retain a life interest before he bequeathed the estate to Susanna and her husband in his will. 18
His deep, anxious concern for Susanna is evident. Even by 1602 a new political mood could be felt, so that he would have been obliged to be tactful, far-sighted, and politic in his acquisitions. This mood at Stratford might be called a puritanical one so long as one bears in mind that puritanism had its degrees and shades, not necessarily based on any religious doctrine, and that local crises to come in Shakespeare's lifetime involved other factors, too. But there was a strong rise in local feeling against his own profession. The council did not think less of him because of that -- they were to court him urgently enough -- although in the parish church he was to be fixed in effigy not as an actor, but as a poet. In these years, he was conspicuous in his absences from New Place. He was a major landowner known to have made money as an actor, and as feeling against play-acting became sharper the aldermen officially echoed it. In December 1602 they passed a measure forbidding all 'plays or interludes' in their Gild hall or other Corporation property, and a fine of 10s. (payable by anyone giving 'leave or licence' to contravene that order) was to be raised to a stiff £10.
The council's animus against acting was much more severe, for example, than Sir Edward Coke "Charge at Norwich" in 1607 merely against unlicensed, strolling players. The money that bought New Place would not have been thought tainted, but even as his fellows were applauded in London, Shakespeare came back to a town where the corporate council impugned his means of living. 19 In the wake of this a few years later, he thought of the Corporation's tithes.
His last major outlay at Stratford had a politic aspect, since the hardpressed council, with too many of the poor to care for, depended on returns from tithe leases. The dramatist had more to gain than a tangible reward in this investment. Any share in the tithes could provide a local outlet for his cash, likely profits not for himself, but for his heirs, and a suggestion of his and his family's loyalty to those at 'halls'. Ironically Adrian Quiney's plan thus bore real fruit, after all On 24. July
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1605 from Ralph Hubaud of Ipsley, Shakespeare bought a half-share in the Corporation's tithes for £440. This was his largest outlay of cash, the equivalent of roughly £300,000 or a little more at the end of the twentieth century. His purchase involved the tithes of corn, grain, blade, and hay from Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton, and tithes of wool, lamb, and other 'smalle and privie tythes' from the whole parish, except that a few tithes of Luddington and Bishopton and certain rights of Lord Carew and Sir Edward Greville were reserved. The tithes -- originally a payment to the rector of a parish of a tenth of its produce -- had mainly devolved to the Corporation and had been leased out.
How much did his moiety yield? It did entail some continuing costs. For his half-lease he had to pay £5 yearly to John Barker, a subtenant, and an annual fee of £17 to the Corporation (as the owner). Shakespeare was never the town's chief tithe-holder, and around 1611 the aggregate value of all of Stratford's tithe estates was given as £293 6s. 8d. The annual value of his own moiety was then £60, or about a fifth of the whole. 20 With fees deducted, he was left with a surplus of about.£40, and so in ten or eleven years he might make good his outlay. His lease had thirty-one years to run when he bought it, so Shakespeare clearly expected his heirs to benefit (as they were indeed to do, before selling most of the half-share back to the Corporation in March 1625). He left the farming of his tithe fields to Anthony Nash, whose father had farmed them for the Hubauds.
With his normal prudence, he put other assets to use. At the Worcester County Record Office, papers which tell us much about the layout of the Birthplace (or the Birthplace and Woolshop together) came to light in the 1990s. 21 One of them is a detailed inventory of ten rooms of the Henley Street premises and of a kitchen, cellar, and brewhouse which was made on the death in 1627 of Lewis Hiccox, who had taken a long lease on the property about two decades earlier. At Wood Street, Hiccox's wife, on a modest scale, had brewed malt. Lewis himself acquired a licence to sell ale, but a few years earlier he seems to have tried his hand at the plough, inasmuch as ' Thomas Hiccoxe and Lewes Hiccoxe' are cited -- in 1602 in the Combes' deed -- as holding tenures 'nowe or late' in the Old Stratford acres. 22
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Soon after John Shakespeare died, the Hiccoxes began to thrive in the Birthplace's eastern wing. Here Lewis and his wife Alice, 'Old Goody Hiccox' who fought with a neighbour, set up an inn, at first called the Maidenhead and later the Swan and Maidenhead. The poet derived a modest, regular rental, and he let his sister Joan Hart stay on in the western wing, where she seems to have been living with her husband in the old glover's days.
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15
THE KING'S SERVANTS
These fellows have some soul,
And such a one do I profess myself -- for, sir,
It is as sure as you are Roderigo,
Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.
In following him I follow but myself
Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
But seeming so for my peculiar end.
For when my outward action cloth demonstrate
The native act and figure of my heart
In compliment extern, 'tis not long after
But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.
( Iago, Othello)
What, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph?
( Lucio, Measure for Measure)
King James's arrival
Hamlet's success doubtless encouraged Shakespeare, and might have led his troupe to believe their solvency and prestige were assured. Yet their situation offered little ground for optimism in 1602. They had no representative at court, and if the ageing, irritable Queen died they could be closed down once and for all. Their patron was incapacitated ( Baron Howard of Walden carried out duties at the Lord Chamberlain's office) and actors were obliged to plan for a dark, worrisome future. A costly Spanish war dragged on, and extremes of
wealth and poverty glared in London -- where inflation was as relentless as it had been in the 1590s. Troilus and Cressida itself suited a public mood of ennui and anxiety, and its somewhat coarse, cynical
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language of commodity might have indicated a modern time. 1 The troupe's fate depended on much that was far beyond their control, such as the unpredictability of state politics, the unresolved succession, and the whims of England's next monarch: it was clear at any rate that the nobility would not countenance another female on the throne.
Queen Elizabeth's fondness for drama lasted from the Christmas holiday season on through January -- altogether she saw eight plays put on by five troupes. Had she ever favoured Shakespeare? She gave little sign that she cared for the man or his work, and distanced herself from Hunsdon and Howard's theatrical plan of 1594, though Lord Hunsdon's daughter, Catherine Carey, could have told her what she needed to know of the public theatres. In February 1603 the unexpected death of Catherine Carey (then Countess of Nottingham) coincided with the physical decline of the Queen. Catherine's widower, the 68-year-old Lord Admiral, soon married an heiress of 19, who was said to have sung on the wedding-night. This prompted debate as to whether the heiress had meant to send her husband to sleep, or had simply tried to keep him awake. The Queen had not credited the Lord Admiral's brains of late, but the death of his Catherine affected her. 'No, Robin, I am not well!' she told Sir Robert Carey in March. She sat up on the floor, until persuaded to her chamber, where her archbishop (says Carey) 'told her plainly what she was, and what she was to come to; and though she had long been a great Queen here upon earth, yet shortly she was to yield an accompt of her stewardship to the King of Kings'. Lord Cecil, her chief minister, had arranged for James VI of Scotland to succeed her, and to this she consented before she died. Upon news of Elizabeth's death on 24 March 1603, Carey rode straight up to Edinburgh, where he arrived with a bloodied head after a fall from his horse to tell James of Scotland that he was King of England. 2
The new King -- whose mother was Mary Queen of Scots -- was a sound Protestant with at first a sympathy for Catholics and a partiality for Essex's followers. When still in the north, he released Shakespeare's patron the Earl of Southampton from prison on 5 April and saw him on the 24th. Meanwhile the nation mourned their late
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Queen, although Henry Chettle who had been quick to see that Greene's remarks on an 'upstart Crow' and 'Shake-scene' were printed, took care to note this year that Chapman, Jonson, and Shakespeare had forgotten to write elegies upon Elizabeth's death. In Chettle's Englands Mourning Garment, Shakespeare is a 'silver tongued Melicert', who has not loosed 'one sable tear'
To mourn her death that graced his desert,
And to his lays opened her Royal ear.
Shepherd, remember our Elizabeth,
And sing her rape, done by that Tarquin, Death. 3
A torrent of verses greeted the new King, who styled himself rex pacificus or royal peacemaker. An outbreak of plague kept most Londoners from seeing him in 1603, but the euphoria over his advent appears to be mentioned in Sonnet 107. 'The mortal moon hath her eclipse endured', writes Shakespeare with an allusion to Queen Elizabeth's loss, if the word endured can mean 'undergone' or 'suffered',
And the sad augurs mock their own presage;
Incertainties now crown themselves assured,
And peace proclaims olives of endless age.
Now with the drops of this most balmy time
My love looks fresh, and death to me subscribes,
Since spite of him I'll live in this poor rhyme. . .
With echoes of Horace and Ovid, and an allusion in the couplet to 'tyrants', the writer maintains a cool detachment from events. Shakespeare's detachment is worth bearing in mind as we follow him in the new reign.
To most theatre people, the King was as unknown as his rainswept Scotland. Two years younger than Shakespeare, James was an affable, robust figure addicted to hunting, but politically astute, fond of talk about theology, and capable of writing unpedantic books on kingship, demonology, and tobacco. He had two sons, a daughter, and a young wife (known as Queen ' Anna' not 'Anne' at his court) who danced and acted in masques. He was in a difficult position as the King of Scotland and of England. Beneath the keen flattery he met with in the south were fears that the Scots would grab at lands, offices, places
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in overcrowded universities, and other privileges under English noses. Partly to counter anti-Scottish feeling, he kept the Scots out of office but gave them money, and feeling that he had inherited no loyalties he created allegiances with an 'inflation' of honours (he bestowed 906 knighthoods in four months). James required a court of splendour with art, masques, and stage-plays to hold the devotion of his entourage, beguile domestic enemies, and impress foreign envoys. Ten days after arriving in London he unexpectedly ordered through his secretary that the Keeper of the Privy Seal, pro tem -- Lord Cecil --
issue 'letters patent' to elevate Shakespeare's actors. Drawn up two days later, and dated 19 May 1603, the royal patent (here quoted in modern spelling) has a touch of Polonius's style in authorizing and licensing: 'these our servants Lawrence Fletcher, William Shakespeare, Richard Burbage, Augustine Phillips, John Heminges, Henry Condell, William Sly, Robert Armin, Richard Cowley', and the rest of their acting associates
freely to use and exercise the art and faculty of playing comedies, tragedies, histories, interludes, morals, pastorals, stage plays and such like as they have already studied or hereafter shall use or study, as well for the recreation of our loving subjects, as for our solace and pleasure when we shall think good to see them during our pleasure. . . 4
Under Queen Elizabeth, actors had noble patronage. In James's reign they had royal patronage, and the patent (renewed in 1619 and again with slight changes after James's death) testifies to the prominence of the troupe henceforth known as the King's Servants, or the King's men or players.
When the epidemic lets up, declares the patent, Shakespeare's troupe may act in their 'usual house called the Globe', or in any city, university town, or borough in the realm. Justices, mayors, and other officers are to 'permit and suffer' them to perform in shows without hindrance, and must allow 'such former courtesies as hath been given to men of their place and quality'. The patent adds that any 'further favour you shall show to these our servants for our sake we shall take kindly at your hands'. 5
Contrary to what Shakespeare's biographers imply, James delayed
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before incorporating other troupes under royal names, and his actors were to be slightly favoured. The King's men would have a 'free gift' of £30 for 'mayntenaunce and releife' in the plague 6 (which kept theatres shut from 19 May 1603 until the following 9 April). Only late in 1603 did Worcester's men become the 'Queen's Players' under the patronage of Queen Anna, who also sponsored the Chapel Children as 'Children of the Queen's Revels' by a patent of 4 February 1604. In turn the Lord Admiral's men became 'Prince Henry's Servants' early in 1604. (though their patent was issued two years later).
A royal patent authorized a troupe to play in town halls -- whether or not a council forbade acting. Stratford's council might still bar actors from the Gild hall, but it would have had to appeal to the Privy Council to justify that ban.
For a spendthrift King, the actors, all in all, were a bargain. Despite inflation James paid them just £10 for a performance, exactly what his predecessor had paid. The troupe's gross receipts from his royal court in 1603 through to February 1604. were about £150, a small amount in plague-time if each of a major troupe's actors had been receiving about £1 a week. Whereas Elizabeth had enjoyed plays, King James was not very fond of them, nor did he, nor any of his immediate court so far as is known, find Shakespeare unusual. 'The first holydayes', observed Sir Dudley Carleton at Hampton Court early in 1604, 'we had every night a publicke play in the great halle, at which the King was ever present, and liked or disliked as he saw cause: but it
seems he takes no extraordinary pleasure in them. The Queene and Prince were more the Players frends, for on other nights they had them privatly.' 7 James was to countermand the decisions of play -- licensers, not always to the benefit of a play, while at times tolerating stage satire aimed at himself. If a play struck at an issue about which he felt strongly (such as his plan for a union between Scotland and England), he could be ruthlessly quick to respond.
Shakespeare's troupe played at court far more often than before. They seem to have changed, in a few playbooks, offensive references to the Scots. In new works such as Measure for Measure, Macbeth, King Lear, or Cymbeline, the poet, in effect, touched his cap to his sovereign. The gesture is clear, firm, distinct, and limited as if
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obligatory, although his supposed flattery of King James is a delicate and somewhat controversial topic. It is complicated, from time to time, perhaps, by a tendency on Shakespeare's part to find himself in general accord with the views of a Stuart sovereign. That must be set against his clear, matter-of-fact view of his own and his troupe's low status even as royal servants. Unlike Jonson, he kept at a distance from the Stuart court at which he and the actors performed.
Yet the King's men were encouraged. They were optimistic: they took on new shareholders either in June, or, anyway, before the end of the year. But they had no assurance that they could meet rising costs, or maintain their holdings including the Globe in plague-time. In 1603 Bryan had left, and Pope was dying. Kempe had been replaced by the clown Robert Armin, a former goldsmith's apprentice recruited from Lord Chandos's men in Gloucestershire. One of the new sharers was Burbage's protégé, Nicholas Tooley; and another was Alexander Cooke, who must have been Heminges' apprentice. A third was Lawrence Fletcher, who had led a troupe in Scotland in 1595, 1599, and 1601, won King James's favour as a 'comediane to his Majestie', and been granted the freedom of Aberdeen. 8 Though unnamed in the Folio list of actors in Shakespeare's plays, Fletcher was recalled in Augustine Phillips's will in 1605.
