Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

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  especially when the blame for the heroine's death is left as ambiguous as it is. The hero's touching integrity appeals to the author at least partly because Othello is undone by the narrow profession he serves. The soldier's vocation is sketched here with a terrible, evocative precision in parallel with the actor's own, and in a tragedy of the highest art. Shakespeare does not condemn actors, but he subjects his calling to an implicitly sharp scrutiny. So he abets his objectivity -- he appears to insist on his own inner distance from the theatre, before he turns to the minds of Macbeth or King Lear in the great sequence that he already has under way.

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  16

  THE TRAGIC SUBLIME

  All blest secrets,

  All you unpublished virtues of the earth,

  Spring with my tears

  ( Cordelia, King Lear)

  Ein alter Mann ist stets ein König Lear

  (An aged man is always a King Lear)

  (Goethe)

  I'll do, I'll do, and I'll do.

  (First Witch, Macbeth)

  Jennet's guest and Marie's lodger

  In King James's reign, Shakespeare was acquainted with a plucky, intelligent, and reputedly beautiful woman known to her family as 'Jennet', who was four years younger than himself. Since the seventeenth century she has been seen in a haze of gossip, but there is no need to romanticize her.

  Jennet was baptized at St Margaret's Westminster, on 1 November 1568, as Jane Sheppard. Three Sheppard brothers served the late Tudor Queen before being employed by the Stuart monarch. Her brothers Thomas and Richard were skilled court embroiderers, glovers, and perfumers who served Queen Anna even as the milliner Marie Mountjoy -- in whose house Shakespeare lived -- pleased Anna by supplying her with hats and headdresses. A third brother, William Sheppard, held an office in the Catery, which procured foodstuffs in bulk for the royal household.

  Jennet had married John Davenant who, as a worldly, practical,

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  cultivated man, had been to Merchant Taylors' school before joining his father as a merchant broker and wine-importer. From her house near the church of St James Garlickhithe on Maiden Lane, she could see ships carrying her husband's wine. These often came in from Bordeaux and, with unfurled sails, berthed pale wooden casks which were then ferried upstream by broad-decked lighters to the Three Cranes wharf. Everyone knew of the wine ships. 'There's a whole merchant's venture of Bordeaux stuff in him', as Doll Tearsheet says of Falstaff in 2 Henry IV, 'you have not seen a hulk better stuffed in the hold.' Moreover, the Davenants were nearly opposite the Globe across the river and within earshot of the actors' brash trumpets. It is not surprising that the playwright was attracted to a wine-importer with a charming wife; and Davenant -- as Anthony à Wood wrote of him in that century -- was 'an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare'. 1

  Any friend of this couple, though, would have known of their misfortune. Up to 1600, Jennet had given birth to infants who were stillborn or who quickly died. She had buried five children when in her thirtieth year she gave birth to a sixth, a 'John', who must have died as well, since yet another infant was to have his name. In distress she turned any way she could for help or consolation, perhaps to Shakespeare, and certainly to the eccentric, fashionable astrologer and physician Simon Forman. Nothing compensated her husband for his human losses, and at last to escape the plague-ridden city he threw over his prosperous London life. Around 1601, Davenant took Jennet up to Oxford to run a wine-tavern.

  On the cast side of Cornmarket on the main street leading up to Stratford, this tavern was then owned by New College. It was not a 'two-storey' edifice as is stated in a documentary life of the poet, but a four-storey building of twenty or more rooms and running back about 120 feet from the Cornmarket. Though reduced and with a modernized front, No. 3 Cornmarket Street still exists near an old inn at No. 5 -- now the Golden Cross -- which has served 'without a break', as Mary Edmond notes, 'for some eight hundred years'. 2 Here up at Oxford Jennet's luck changed, as she was to give birth to seven children, most of whom lived to old age. Her first robust son, Robert, later

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  recalled, as a parson in a small parish, that Shakespeare had once given him as a boy'a hundred kisses'. Born in 1606, her next boy became the poet and dramatist Sir William Davenant, who was helped by Dryden in an adaptation of The Tempest, and there is no reason to doubt the Oxford tradition that Shakespeare was his godfather. According to John Aubrey who knew him, Sir William in later life over a glass of wine would sometimes say to his cronies 'that it seemed to him that he writt with the very spirit that [did] Shakespeare, and was contendended [sic] enough to be thought his Son'. 3 This in time -- with other rumours -gave rise to stories about William's running to see his famous godfather, when the latter visited Oxford, and being told not to take the name of God in vain. Jennet was 'very beautiful!', and so, as people felt, why not believe Stratford's poet had bedded her?

  Happily, the room of Shakespeare's supposed dalliance with Jennet at last came to light in 1927, when alterations at No. 3 Cornmarket exposed a painted chamber. It was rapidly guessed that this was the 'best bedroom', an assumption echoed by Schoenbaum, who supposes that if the poet took Jennet to bed, this was the place. 'There the best bedroom had a great fireplace', he tells us; 'the walls were decorated with an interlacing pattern of vines and flowers'. A pretty spot for adultery -- but, in fact, a New College inventory of 1594 clearly shows that this and other rooms at the tavern were covered with wainscoting well before the Davenants arrived. 4

  The reality of Shakespeare's visits at Oxford does not quite correspond with myth. John Aubrey, who reported accurately on what he heard, was able to consult two of the Davenant sons; he was also acquainted with their daughter Jane ( 1602-67), who, first with her husband, and then after 1636 on her own, ran the Cornmarket tavern until Restoration days. On his way up to Warwickshire 'once a yeare', Aubrey states, Shakespeare'did commonly in his journey lye at this house in Oxon: where he was exceedingly respected'. 5 The Wine Act of 1553 had allowed Oxford three wine-taverns, and, unlike an inn, the large building which Shakespeare knew did not offer public accommodation, so if he stayed there at all he stayed as his friends' guest.

  The university's system of common rooms had not yet been developed: in Shakespeare's day the Oxford colleges were using

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  wine-taverns as their common rooms, and because as clientele the academic ranks from the colleges often drank and dined separately from one another, the Davenants and their servants had to busy themselves in many chambers. Far from knowing quiet, idyllic rooms painted with vines and flowers, Shakespeare on arriving would have entered a smoky, well-lighted building filled with the din of Masters, Bachelors, and undergraduates. Among her infants Jennet was amenable -- 'of very good witt' or intelligence, says Aubrey, 'and of conversation extremely agreable'. Her husband was conversant with French, alert to literature and drama, and had civic interests that led him to become Mayor of Oxford.

  But his mood contrasted with his wife's. Others confirm that Davenant as Aubrey says, was 'a very grave person' -- as if he had given up London for a reason he could not forget. He remembered the deaths of six children there; and one might note that his mood corresponds with an underlying gravity in his visitor's Sonnets -- but in any case, having lost his son Hamnet, Shakespeare had something in common with the Davenants. What is unmistakable is that, as a 'respected' guest, he was warmly received, and no doubt he had his reasons for covering their first healthy, surviving son with a storm of 'kisses'. 6

  Shakespeare was very loyal to John and Jennet; they received him over a period of years. As for his choice of London lodgings, he was not especially consistent. Five documents now in the Public Record Office, although they concern his defaulting on taxes, tell us a little more about his London locales and acquaintances than we have already seen. First, a Certificate in the Subsidy Roll of 15 November 1597 lists Shakespea
re as one who had failed to pay 'the second payment of the last Subsydye' or 5s., due on goods rated at £5 in St Helen's parish, The next four documents all concern his failure to pay 13s. 4.d. (not a large sum, or about half of his basic weekly profit as an actor) on goods again valued at £5 at St Helen's, in an assessment of 1 October 1598. The fact that the last tax was referred to the Bishop of Winchester (for collection in the liberty of the Clink in Surrey) suggests that he had moved south of the river by the winter of 1596-7, or, anyway, not later than 1599. The whole sum of taxes collected by the bishop was within 4d. of what he had to collect in 1600-1, so it is

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  probable that Shakespeare paid the 13s. 4d. tax when he had to, or by the time the authorities caught up with him. It is not known that he ever paid the 5s. due, a slight amount; he could have evaded payment (there were many evasions), but the data we have about his taxes is extremely meagre. 7

  At St Helen's he had been living close to -- possibly in the same tenement with -- Thomas Morley, who was given exactly the same tax assessment. 8 It is amusing to speculate that, if the poet in his St Helen's rooms had quills, ink, and a writing-desk (as is likely), he heard music, some days, as he wrote. His neighbour Morley was obliged to practise: he was a skilled musician, who had trained with a boys' troupe (the Children of Paul's). Also it is interesting to find Shakespeare surrounded by émigré families at St Helen's, or by those whose names often suggest France, or the Lowlands, such as 'Meringe', 'de Bewly', 'de Clarke', 'de Boo', 'Varhagen', 'Vandesker', 'Vegleman', 'Vander Stylt'. In fact, an unusual number of those in Shakespeare's circle, whether friends, associates, or casual acquaintances, were of Dutch, Flemish, or French origin. Coincidence does not quite account for this. Apparently, he found himself comfortable with 'strangers', and the respect he had for London's émigrés was to be returned. He knew very well Peter Streete, a joiner of Dutch origin, who built the Globe. The printer Richard Field, the poet's Stratford schoolmate, had married his employer's widow Jacqueline Vautrollier of the close-knit French Protestant community. Misconceptions about the Fields are plentiful. They certainly lived in the Blackftiars until about 1610, but at some point before 1615 moved to a new shop, in Great Wood Street in St Michael's parish, so they could not have been living at ' Wood Street, close to the Mountjoy house' when Shakespeare lodged with the Mountjoys, as has been supposed. 9 The Protestant Vautrollier, who dedicated a book to his Catholic patron the Earl of Arundel, and later supplied James VI of Scotland with texts, was no more bigoted in religion than his widow Jacqueline. Her own French Protestant Church tolerated marriages with Catholic émigrés more easily than it condoned its members marrying Londoners who were not of French descent. The Fields, inevitably, printed Anglican texts, but held no narrow line, and in fact,

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  in 1599, were among printers listed by the archbishop as all too likely to offend episcopal authority.

  Shakespeare also made contacts with imigris through the theatre. Although related to people at Burmington near Stratford, Nicholas Tooley, his fellow actor and shareholder with the King's men, was born in Antwerp to a Flemish mother, whose husband died there ill 1583 in the house of Hans Lanquart. Having returned to London, the Flemish mother thereafter was wed to Thomas Gore, whose own mother, Ellen Davenant, was John Davenant's aunt. The Davenants and Gores, in turn, had émigré friends among the city's prominent wine traders and brewers. At least one brewer of Dutch descent, the wealthy and unmarried Elias James, who owned a 'great Brewhouse' (as Stow says) near the Blackfriars theatre, is of special interest to us, since this bachelor has been linked with Shakespeare in two ways. We know that Elias's brother's widow married a John Jackson, who seems to be the man of that name who joined Shakespeare in purchasing the Blackfriars gatehouse in 1613. 10 Also a brief epitaph written on the death of Elias James -- he died in his early thirties -- is attributed in a seventeenth-century MS (now at the Bodleian) to 'Wm: Shakespeare':

  When God was pleas'd, (the world unwilling yet)

  Elias James, to Nature paid his debt,

  And here reposeth: As he liv'd, he died,

  The saying strongly in him verified,

  Such life, such death: then a knowne truth to tell,

  He liv'd a godly life, and died as well. 11

  It is highly probable that the dramatist wrote these lines, which say no more than what an epitaph on an honest brewer ought to say, and that he knew when to write less than brilliant verse (as Elsie Duncan-Jones has noted). At any rate, ge knew the Blackfiriars bachelor, Elias, and his acquaintance with émigrés from the Lowlands has a particular importance: this is the matter of what Shakespeare in his late thirties or early forties looked like.

  Someone from a Dutch family of artists, or known to them, must have sketched his portrait with care. One's interest focuses on the well-known copper engraving of Shakespeare on the title-page of the

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  1623 Folio which is signed ' Martin Droeshout sculpsit London'. Baptized on 26 April 1601, Martin Droeshout was only 15 when the poet died (at the age of 52), so the engraving which shows a younger Shakespeare was not made from the life; so far as we can tell it would have been commissioned in 1623 when the artist was 21 or 22. Droeshout belonged to a third generation of Flemish artists residing in London: his grandfather John was a painter from Brussels (then in the South Netherlands); his uncle Martin was a painter, his father Michael an engraver. In most respects the engraving is amateurish, but other experts tend to agree with M. H. Spielmann that Droeshout based his work on a very competent miniature or a limning -- a careful drawing showing 'perhaps delicate flat washes of colour' -- which was made in Shakespeare's late thirties or early forties. 12 That the engraving of the head is accurate is supported by the bust at Holy Trinity which has comparable skull proportions and the same famous perpendicular forehead. Even if we dismiss Ben Jonson's strong approval of the 1623 engraving (he could have approved it conventionally, perhaps, before seeing it), still, that likeness of Shakespeare's face would have had to satisfy the syndicate which at financial risk published the costly Folio of thirty-six plays.

  In popular mythology, Shakespeare is a witty and tavern-haunting poet who writes of famous Dark Ladies whom he takes to bed, and hardly has time for plays. The engraving suggests a different side of him, for which there is plenty of evidence. 'Not a company keeper', as Aubrey heard from the actor son of Shakespeare's fellow player Beeston, 'wouldnt be debauched, and if invited to [be, ] writ that he was in Paine.' 13 The Poet of the Sonnets regrets he makes of himself 'a motley to the view' on the stage, and none of Pembroke's or Southampton's friends ever reports a sight of him at any locale among littérateurs. Droeshout's engraving portrays a thoughtful man with delicate if not fastidious features, an observer who, though 'of an open and free nature', is most unlikely to have impressed anyone as a flamboyant extrovert. If the portrait lacks the 'sparkle' of a witty poet, it suggests the inwardness of a writer of great intelligence, an independent man who is not insensitive to the pain of others, and who could have written Timon of Athens, Macbeth, or King Lear.

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  Shakespeare was skilful and natural in his habits of ingratiation and self-preservation: he had learned to protect and save himself among egotists. In his forties he was largely proof against temptation, and his indiscretions -- to the extent that we can know of them from Stratford records or the Sonnets -- were half-regretted ones of youth or early manhood. He was not ravished by sensual enjoyments, nor is it clear that he was eager to live as long as he could; but he 'loved the surface of the earth and the process of life', as George Orwell has said. 14 He had curiosity. He admired the self-disciplined Davenants, as he did the businesslike Condell, and he could have found few in London more diverse in background or unusual in their viewpoints than the skilled émigrés -- whose energy and success aroused popular envy.

  Plague in the suburbs made Bankside alleys less attractive: and married actors, with children to raise, went north. So did a few
others. By 1604 at the latest, he was living in north-west London between St Paul's and Cripplegate. Here, in St Olave's parish, he had taken rooms in a double tenement at the north-east corner of Mugwell (later Monkswell) and Silver Streets; the former street had not taken its name, after all, from monks, but from Algarus de Muchewella, who had held a deed to its land in the twelfth century (the street is 'Mukewellestrate' in 1277, and ' Mugwell streete' as late as the 1570s). 15 The premises here were leased by Christopher Mountjoy, a French Protestant who, with his wife Marie and only daughter Marie or Mary, manufactured ladies' wigs and ornamental headgear. From Crécy where he was born Mountjoy had fled with other Huguenots after the St Bartholomew's Day massacre of 1572; in England he had waited for years before paying a denization fee and becoming naturalized, but had still prospered, not least because the Mountjoys, with apprentices, supplied headwear to the royal court.

  Their shop was on the ground floor. Apprentices often roomed in garrets, and it is likely that Shakespeare had ample space (perhaps one flight up) in a double tenement. John Stow refers to 'divers fayre houses'on Silver Street which afforded a respectable neighbourhood; nearby on Monkswell Street were the large, well-built stone and timber premises of Neville's inn and the great Hall of the Barber Surgeons, with Holbein's celebrated painting of Henry VIII granting the