Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

  In business deals he could be lax, but he also took peculiar pains here. The title deed shows that he had three co-purchasers, William Johnson, John Jackson, and John Hemmyng, none of whom put up a penny. The latter presumably was his colleague in the King's troupe, Johnson was landlord at the Mermaid, and Jackson perhaps was the man who had wed the sister-in-law of Elias James, the young brewer. One effect of this arrangement was that Anne Shakespeare was denied a dower right in the gatehouse, even if her husband died intestate. In English common law, a widow was barred from a claim on property of which her husband was not the sole proprietor. It is said, in a modern account of the purchase, that this was a speculative investment, 'pure and simple', because the poet had a tenant at the gatehouse. 30 But that badly neglects dates. The tenant, John Robinson, was there in 1616. Three years earlier, Shakespeare possibly had other aims and requirements. He was to stay over in London for weeks, as we know from Greene Diary, and as a pied-à-terre the gatehouse would have been on the doorstep of one theatre, and just across the water from the Globe. His troupe's stock of his playbooks was close at hand, and there is no sign that he did not, at first, aim to live and work at Blackfriars.

  Still, a disaster may have affected his plans. This occurred less than four months after his new purchase on a day when the Globe was crowded. At the thatched amphitheatre on Tuesday, 29 June 1613, the players had a new drama called All is True, 'representing some

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  principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII', as Sir Henry Wotton wrote on 2 July. The phrase 'a new play' may only mean that Henry VIII was then relatively new, since on 4 July Henry Bluett, a young merchant, wrote that the drama 'had been acted not passing 2 or 3 times before'. Wotton, though, best tells us how some thatch caught fire, and flames ran around inside the roof, but fanned by the wind, so that in a short time the whole grand Globe was consumed. The play itself, he writes, 'was set forth with many extraordinary circumstances of pomp and majesty, even to the matting of the stage; the Knights of the Order, with their Georges and garters, the Guards with their embroidered coats and the like'. The garish spectacle, on stage, held nearly every eye.

  Now, King Henry making a masque at the Cardinal Wolsey's house, and certain chambers [i.e. pieces of small ordnance] being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff, wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where being thought at first but an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to the show, it kindled inwardly, and ran round like a train, consuming within less than an hour the whole house to the very grounds.

  This was the fatal period of that virtuous fabric, wherein yet nothing did perish but wood and straw, and a few forsaken cloaks; only one man had his breeches set on fire, that would perhaps have broiled him, if he had not by the benefit of a provident wit put it out with bottle ale.

  Bluett adds that nobody was hurt in the fire, 'except one man who was scalded . . . by adventuring in to save a child which otherwise had been burnt'. 32 Was he the one whose breeches were doused with bottled ale? Puritans saw God's hand in the 'sudden fearful burning', and a wit produced a ballad on the terrible conflagration:

  Had it begun below, sans doubt,

  Their wives for fear had pissed it out.

  Oh sorrow, pitiful sorrow, and yet all this is true. 33

  Yet almost at once the King's men decided to build a new Globe, on the same site, with a tiled roof. That was to cost approximately £1,400-£1,500, an enormous sum, and each sharer was assessed heavily at £50 or £60, and later more.

  The landlord negotiators for the new Globe were Heminges, Con-

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  dell, and the two Burbages. Heminges had already given up acting, and two other King's sharers -- Alexander Cooke and William Ostler -- were to die in the next year. Despite his house at Blackfriars, Shakespeare probably felt that it was time to sell his theatre shares. He would thus have avoided paying towards the new Globe, which, with incrementing costs, took a year to build. His shares, at any rate, were sold before he made his will. The limited number of 'housekeepers' who put money into the new Globe may explain why Richard Burbage, then near the end of his days, was worth little more than £300 a year when he died. Shakespeare may have felt that his own new work was of less use to the King's men; and his writing in Two Noble Kinsmen is far from Fletcher's mode. That play was staged in 1613-not later than the autumn -- and Shakespeare was to be in London again, near his ageing, sweating colleagues. He may not have given up acting, but his writing career was over by the end of the year.

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  18

  A GENTLEMAN'S CHOICES

  We make trifles of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.

  ( Lafeu, in All's Well Tbat Ends Well)

  Why, thou owest God a death.

  ( Prince Hal to Falstaff)

  We cannot but know [your] dignity greater, than to descend to the reading of these trifles: and, while we name them trifles, we have depriv'd our selves of the defence of our Dedication. But since your Lordships have beene pleas'd to thinke these trifles some-thing . . . we hope, that (they out-living [MR. Shakespeare], and he not having the fate, common with some, to be exequutor to his owne writings) you will use the like indulgence toward them.

  ( John Heminges and Henry Condell, in their dedication of MR. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies ( 1623) to the earls of Pembroke and Montgomery)

  Stratford friends and family affairs

  He had the good Fortune to gather an Estate equal to his Occasion', wrote Nicholas Rowe in 1709 about Shakespeare, 'and is said to have spent some Years before his Death at his native Stratford'. 1 Rowe, one feels, is right in believing that the poet's estate was ample, but the notion of retiring from all useful work was generally speaking

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  not a common one. With energy, health for travel, and an active mind Shakespeare did not spend all of his time at home. He had his reasons no doubt for a long stay in the capital in 1614, at just the time the King's men played at court. He did not hurry home.

  Stratford was not a tomb, but there the tempo and scope of his life were reduced, and the exciting and challenging unpredictability as well as the strange illusory grandeur of a calling that had marked him were absent. Public-theatre plays 'were conceived for production on a generous scale before large audiences' -- and always there had been 'a need for grand effect and gesture' in chancy, provisional staging. 2 The grandest gestures could fail, no troupe's viability was ever certain, and little had been secure for his fellows in his whole working life.

  There were losses for him as he reached his fiftieth birthday in April 1614. His brothers Gilbert and Richard had died almost within a year of each other, and Shakespeare and his sister Joan were the only ones left of the Henley Street family. His Aunt Margaret, the last of his mother's sisters, was to be buried at Snitterfield on 26 August of the present year.

  At New Place unfamiliar visitors might see him if only because the house was adjacent to the chapel, and not far from the church. This year a preacher stayed overnight, and to Anne the town allowed 20p. for a quart of sack and a quart of 'clarett' to wet his throat. Preachers arrived to give the foundation sermons -- the Oken in September, the Hamlet Smith at Easter, the Perrott at Whitsuntide.

  To his immediate neighbours on the north side of his house at Chapel Street, the poet was hardly a stranger. Nearby was Widow Tomlins, whose husband John, a tailor, had once sued the poet's uncle Henry Shakespeare. Close to the widow lived Henry Norman, his wife Joan, and their four children, as well as George Perry the glover. In an odd, stumpy dwelling, its garden bordering on New Place's 'great garden', were the childless Shaws. Later a witness to the poet's will, July or Julyns Shaw had joined the Gunpowder Plot inquiry. He slept upstairs over his hall in a dining-room which served as a bedroom and looked perhaps like the month of July -- it had a green rug, a large green carpet, and five green curtains. A shrewd al
derman, with funds from malt and wool trading, he rose to the bailiwick in the last year of Shakespeare's life. 3

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  Julyns was to prove useful to the poet. Also helpful was Thomas Greene, whose Diary this year records scraps of Shakespeare's talk during a crisis over land enclosure, in which Mrs Bess Quincy (the bailiff's widow) and the town's women were defiant. The poet's daughter Judith had helped Mistress Quiney, and the land crisis itself is illuminated by Greene. He and his brother John, who was also active at Stratford, were called to the bar; John was a lawyer of Clements Inn. From the Middle Temple, Greene had been solicitor for the Stratford Corporation, before he served from 1603 to 1617 as borough steward (by patent) and as town clerk. While waiting for a house, he had noted in September 1609, 'I mighte stay another yeare at New Place'. 4 At the time, he and his wife Lettice, of West Meon in Hampshire, and their small children Anne and William, born in 1604 and 1608, were living as Anne Shakespeare's guests, but within a few months they had settled at St Mary's House near Holy Trinity.

  Mainly the poet had been an absentee, and local clerks forgot him. That may explain why, at first, his name was omitted from a subscription list in 1611, drawn up to get funds 'towards the charge of prosecuting the bill in parliament for the better repair of the highways'. On a roster, leading men of Stratford are listed in a column of seventy names; against one, the sum of 2s. 6d. is marked. Far to the right, the name 'mr William Shackspere'is added, it seems as an afterthought, as if someone had recalled he was still alive.' 5

  A year or two later, he was almost too much in the light, and the town's temper was uneasy. His elder daughter had had trouble. In 1613 Susanna Hall had sued John Lane junior, for slander in a case she brought before the consistory court at Worcester cathedral on 15 July. Susanna claimed that Lane 'about 5 weeks past' had reported that she 'had the running of the reins & had been naught with Rafe Smith at John Palmer'. (The 'reins' were the kidneys, or loins. To have 'running of the reins' meant to have gonorrhoea, which did not always denote venereal infection, though that is what is meant in this context.)

  Susanna was then 30, with a child of 5; later she is called 'fidessima conjux' (faithful wife) on her husband's gravestone. When M r Hall travelled, gossip fixed on his wife. Rafe or Ralph Smith, the supposed

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  lover, was a hatter and haberdasher of 35. John Lane himself, only 23, was of an old, respectable, but eccentric family who fittingly had as a coat of arms 'three fireballs, flaming'. His grandfather Nicholas Lane had attacked a man with a crabtree cudgel; and the old man's nephew, another Nicholas, was killed with a cowlstaff by Robert Fisher, who was indicted for murder, but acquitted because he had acted in selfdefence. John Lane was rowdy, and the churchwardens once accused him of drunkenness.

  But the matter is not so simple. As a leader of the anti-Puritan cause in town, John Lane became one of the five 'gentlemen' who organized a riot against the intellectual incoming Puritan vicar, Thomas Wilson, who was strongly approved by Mr Hall. What is fairly certain is that, even if he also had a personal grudge, Lane -- as a leader of anti-Puritan cohorts -- had political motives in defaming the church-going, forthright Mr Hall, who had his own Puritan allies. At any rate, Susanna was vindicated. Robert Whatcott, later to witness the poet's will, appeared at the court at Worcester cathedral for the plaintiff. Lane stayed away. Within a fortnight, he was excommunicated. 6

  Susanna herself had defied a church court twice. Unlikely to forget his daughter's troubles whether or not he feared her rashness, Shakespeare was prudent. The times were troubled, and he settled on a policy of strict neutrality in the Welcombe crisis to come. In touch with lawyers and wealthy landowners, he was keenly concerned for his own heritable assets.

  The Welcombe crisis, as it turned out, excited most of the town. It was heralded by yet another town fire, which, on 9 July 1614, as Levi Fox notices, involved fifty-four houses and caused £8,000-worth of damage in less than two hours. That very heavily burdened the council, which had to aid those who had lost goods or houses, as well as help about 700 of the poor.

  Only a day after the fire, old John Combe the money-broker died; he was said to be the richest soul in town. He left £5 to Shakespeare, who is said to have penned an epitaph on John Combe and his 10 per cent loans -- but these lines echo a couplet on usury written by one 'H.P.' nine years earlier:

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  Ten in the hundred here ties engraved; A hundred to ten his soul is not saved. If anyone ask who lies in this tomb, 'O ho!' quoth the devil, ''tis my John-a-Combe.'

  Most of the old man's fortune went to his nephew Thomas Combe, to whom Shakespeare was to leave a very personal item, his sword. 7

  It was Thomas's older brother William Combe who hoped to profit by enclosing the open fields in Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe in 1614. At 28, William Combe was rich, aggressive, and determined, but it was Arthur Mainwaring of Shropshire, steward to Lord Chancellor Ellesmere, who first promoted the scheme with the help of his cousin, William Replingham of Great Harborough. The parish fields, some owned by Mainwaring, had grass for pasture as well as hay for mowing, and if they were enclosed by hedges the arable tracts would all be given over to sheep pasture. Agricultural efficiency might of course result, but Sir Edward Greville had failed with his own hedging plans. There was stubbornly angry resistance to any scheme for enclosing open fields not only because public rights to the 'stubble and harvest aftermath' would end, but because enclosure reduced employment. Sheep husbandry required less work than arable farming (sheep devoured men, as Sir Thomas More put it), and in the eyes of most folk it led to hardship, poverty, and depopulation.

  If the plan went ahead, Shakespeare could lose in two ways. The value of his tithe-shares could drop, if pasture yielded less income for the parish. Also, his Old Stratford land was affected (as we learned with explicit details in 1994). For example he held 4 acres 'shooting and lying into Fordes Greene', a furlong to be partly enclosed, and his grasslands in the Dingles and about Welcombe Hills were involved. 8 The tithes and furlongs represented what Shakespeare had earned from a life's work, or a portion of the total estate he meant to leave to his heirs.

  On 5 September, Greene as the town's clerk drew up a neat list of freeholders whom the plan would touch, and he described first (though mostly in excluding negatives) the related land-holdings of 'Mr Shakspeare':

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  4. yard Land. noe common nor ground beyond Gospell Bushe, noe grownd in Sandfield, nor none in Slowe Hill field beyond Bishopton nor none in theenclosure beyond Bishopton. 9

  On 23 September Greene next worriedly noted the council's unanimous vote to resist enclosure. As Stratford's executive officer he feared violence, it seems, with himself in the middle. Alerted, Shakespeare on 28 October conferred with Replingham, who agreed to compensate ' William Shackespeare' or his heirs or assigns for any 'loss, detriment and hindrance' with respect to the annual value of the tithes. 10 Greene himself had a tithe-share, so his name was added to the covenant on the advice of Thomas Lucas, the poet's attorney.

  With little to lose whether the plan went ahead or not, Shakespeare thus might play a neutral role in any struggle to come. Greene, clearly, was beset by nervous anxiety. Charged to see that the enclosures got nowhere, he had a covenant with Replingham, and might face popular wrath. In this state, Greene kept hectic notes from 15 November 1614 to 19 February 1617 -- his diary.

  In November, he was in London -- looking for a more toothy shark even than Mainwaring, namely William Combe. Not finding him, he called upon Shakespeare, who had reached the city with his son-in-law John Hall on the 16th. 'My cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to town', wrote Greene, 'I went to see him how he did.' The poet was well informed, very precise and specific, but also in an alert, tactfully mollifying mood as the town clerk questioned him. There was nothing for Greene to worry about it seems, as the planners never dreamt of going too far. They had told him, Shakespeare declared, 'they meant to enclose no farther than to
Gospel Bush, and so up straight, leaving out part of the Dingles to the Field, to the gate in Clopton Hedge and take in Salisbury's piece'. 11

  Such preciseness, it seems, did little for Greene's nerves. Perhaps noticing this, the poet changed his tack. He talked on 17 November in London as if the enclosure crisis were months away (though it would begin in December), and then as if it might never exist. Mr Hall picked up this colourful, changing thread and agreed with his father-in-law. Shakespeare added that 'they mean in April to survey the land, and

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  then to give satisfaction and not before'. One thinks of Goneril reducing Lear's knights, until the threat to herself comes to nothing. Anyway, Mr Hall joined in the reassuring talk. The poet 'and Master Hall', Greene scribbled later, 'say they think there will be nothing done at all'.

  But back at Stratford on 10 December, Greene sensed a storm and looked in vain for Replingham, first at the Bear inn, then at New Place. The fact that he hoped to find one of the planners at New Place, in its owner's absence, might suggest that Greene's famous 'cousin' was not so neutral. Shakespeare was close to the Combe family, and, in a crisis of this sort, he may have been tempted to side with men of wealth who had large estates to advance. At Stratford, the planners' cause was at last openly joined by the wilful, ferocious William Combe, to whom the council sent a deputation of six 'to present their loves', and plead with him to desist. Thanking them, Combe would not budge; he might begin, he let it be known, with a thaw, to dig ditches and plant hedges. On 23 December, the council sent letters, signed by 'almost all' of their members, to both Mainwaring and Shakespeare to get their support. 'I also', Greene noted, 'writ of myself to my cousin Shakespeare the copies of all of our oaths made then, also a note of the inconveniences would grow by the enclosure.'