Shakespeare: A Life

by Park Honan

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  except on the strict condition they did not remarry. In Stratford and other parts of the Midlands, right of dower may well have been withheld. 'Wills usually provide for the widow with extreme care', Ms Spufford reports; a testator wishing to ensure customary rights for a wife usually expressed her entitlement. 27 (The will of the poet's own lawyer, Francis Collins, does just that.) Shakespeare's 'second best bed', then, may possibly have an indirect purpose, if by acknowledging Anne's existence with a named, specific item, he is able to deny her dower right to one-third of his estate. One purpose of his will, which seems urgent, is to deprive her of power; and this casts no light, of any kind, on his affection for her, or the possible lack of it. He knew the Halls would look after her, but, again, he seems to wish to deny Anne control of any portion of his heritable estate.

  He adds a few more bequests. His sister Joan Hart is given £20, along with his wearing-apparel, and will be permitted to stay on at Henley Street for 12d. a year, a nominal rent. Leaving £5 to each of her three sons, he remembers the names of William and Michael Hart, but forgets that of Thomas. He bequeaths £5 to the obliging Thomas Russell, and £13. 6s. 8d. to the attorney Francis Collins. Money for memorial rings, at 26s. 8d. each, is left to his Stratford friends ' Hamlett' Sadler, William Reynolds (the son of Catholic recusants), and the Nash brothers, John and Anthony. Possibly because of recent criticism of his handling of fire-relief funds, the name of 'mr. Richard Tyler the elder', the butcher's son, is now deleted and replaced by that of Sadler. To his 7-year-old godson William Walker, Shakespeare leaves 20s. in gold. Not forgetting three actors whom he had known for many years, he stipulates: 'to my fellows John Hemynges,Richard Burbage and Henry Condell xxvis. viiid. apiece to buy them rings'.

  When the will was completed, he began to sign its third sheet with an emphatic, 'By me William Shakspeare', when energy abruptly failed him. (The first three words are vigorously made.) He signed the other two sheets in a feebler, scrawling hand.

  He appointed Thomas Russell and Francis Collins as the will's overseers. His five legal witnesses were Collins, July Shaw, John Robinson, Hamnet Sadler, and Robert Whatcott, but one doubts that all of them crowded into the sick room, and it is probable that Collins, or his

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  clerk, signed two or three of the signatures (which are remarkably similar). Robinson was a labourer, and Whatcott had testified for Susanna in her defamation case. It is said that these two were servants of the Halls or Shakespeares. As an executor of the will, John Hall later had the duty of taking the document to the appropriate church court. Inasmuch as the testator's goods and chattels (bona notabilia) were not within one diocese, but in London as well as at Stratford, the executor was obliged to take the will for probate to the archbishop's Prerogative Court of Canterbury in London, where the will was proved on 22 June 1616. 28

  Before returning to the topic of Shakespeare's illness in March, let us look into the consequences of his will and briefly into times ahead. Predictably, the chief legatees to benefit over the years were the Halls. Later Mr Hall fought for an independent-minded vicar against the Stratford council, and gave the church a new, well-carved pulpit, 'which did duty until 1792', says Sir Sidney Lee.

  Hall's sympathies hardly extended to irascible aldermen, but he remained popular in the community. When his health deteriorated, he observed his own symptoms with a cool eye. At the age of 60, John Hall died at New Place on 25 November 1635. In the parish register he was described as 'medicus peritissimus' (most expert physician) on the day he was interred in the chancel. His arms, 'Three talbots' heads erased', are impaled with Shakespeare's. Over a Latin epitaph which praises his skill and his wife's strong loyalty, the inscription reads:

  HEERE LYETH YE. BODY OF JOHN HALL GENT: HEE MARR: SUSANNA, YE. DAUGH & coheire TER, OF WILL: SHAKESPEARE, GENT. HEE DECEASED NOVER. 25. Ao. 1635, AGED 60.

  In a curious incident during the Civil War, Susanna received at her door Dr James Cooke of Warwick, Lord Brooke's surgeon, who asked to see 'the books left by Mr. Hall'. In his preface to Hall SelectObservations on English Bodies

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  Observations on English Bodies ( 1657), Dr Cooke describes how Mrs Hall showed him those 'books' (unprinted casebooks, no doubt) and said she had others, by a colleague of Hall's, to sell as well. 'She brought them forth, amongst which there was this with another of the author's, both intended for the press', reports Cooke. He was embarrassed, since she did not seem to know Hall's writing. There was tension: 'I being acquainted with Mr. Hall's hand, told her that one or two of them were her husband's, and showed them her; she denied, I affirmed, till I perceived she began to be offended. At last I returned her the money'. 29 Susanna possibly did fail to recognize her husband's hand, unless Cooke confused somebody else's writing with John Hall's. Anyway, she 'began to be offended'. The word offence had been used twice, long before, to describe Shakespeare's own reactions to verbal injury. This and other allusions suggest that Susanna was not unlike her father, at least in independence of mind, but she apparently lacked his tact, ease, and worldliness.

  She did not, however, lack pluck. Her daughter Elizabeth (who for her health had eaten 'Nutmegs often') in 1626 at the age of 18 married a man almost twice her age, Thomas Nash, the son of Anthony Nash whom the poet had remembered in his will with a ring. 30 At Lincoln's Inn, Thomas had studied the law, but there is no sign he ever practised it. Inheriting local land as well as the Bear inn, he lived presumably for a time with Elizabeth in the building now called Nash's House, adjacent to New Place. His own will, made on 20 August 1642, about five years before he died, caused much difficulty. It disposed of Mrs Hall's property as if it were his own, and left New Place itself to his cousin, Edward Nash. Taking legal steps, Susanna was to defeat the worst claims of Nash's 'dead hand'.

  She had less luck in another matter. Such books and papers as Shakespeare had owned must have gone in the first instance to the Halls, and it is very probable that some were forcibly taken from Susanna. Baldwin Brooks, later to be bailiff, broke into her house in 1637 after failing to collect a judgement against John Hall's estate. This time Susanna's son-in-law was helpful: with Nash, she charged in Chancery that Brooks, with 'men of meane estate', did 'breake open the Doores and studdy of the said howse, and Rashlye [did] seise uppon and take

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  Divers bookes, boxes, Deskes, moneyes, bonds, bills, and other goods of greate value'. 31 Were these, one asks, ever fully restored to the owner? On that point, the record is silent. 'Witty above her sexe' and 'wise to salvation', reads the epitaph on Mrs Hall's gravestone, and 'Some of Shakespeare was in that.' Susanna died at the age of 66, on 11 July 164-9, and was buried beside her husband in Holy Trinity.

  The poet's other daughter, Judith Quiney, eked out a fairly penurious existence with her vintner husband, but she led a long life by standards of the time. Somewhat more than a week after her seventyseventh birthday, Judith was buried on 9 February 1662. 'Judith, uxor Thomas Quiney, Gent.' evidently merited a grave in the churchyard, not the chancel. The latter was getting crowded.

  Thomas Nash died in 1647, at the age of 53. Two years later the poet's granddaughter Elizabeth took as her second husband, John Barnard (or Bernard), a widower and country squire of Abington Manor, Northamptonshire who had had eight children by his first wife. The wedding took place at Billesley, four miles west of Stratford, on 5 June 1649. Twelve years later in return for services in the Civil War, King Charles II favoured Barnard with a baronetcy. As the Halls' and the Shakespeares' inheritor, Elizabeth owned New Place and the Birthplace, but the couple chose to live at Abington Manor. Still childless and nearly 62, Lady Barnard died in 1670, and no monument, headstone, or marker from the time survives for her.

  The poet had left modest -- but not negligible -- bequests to his sister Joan, whose husband William Hart, the impecunious hatter, was buried on 17 April 1616. From her famous brother, Joan in all had £20, a life-tenancy at Henley Street for a mere pepper
corn rent, plus 'all my wearing apparel', and £5 each for her three sons. Her sons were too young to wear their uncle's clothes. There was also a provisional bequest of £5o, depending on Judith Quiney's dying in three years. In that event, Joan Hart would not get the principal, only the interest, but 'after her decease the said £50 shall remain amongst the children of my said sister'.

  The lion's share of the Birthplace was occupied by Lewis Hiccox, his busy and quarrelsome wife, and other leaseholders (until 1670 when Lady Barnard left the double house at last to the Harts). While

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  Joan Hart was alive, the renting innkeepers had ten rooms, as well as a kitchen, cellar and brewhouse, whereas her own share was no more than 'three rooms' (as Jeanne Jones's work has shown) though Joan may have had extra space in outbuildings near the garden. 32 The Maidenhead's lease at last passed from Lewis Hiccox's nephew Henry, to John Rutter, perhaps around 1640. When Joan Hart died in 1646, her boys had settled into the crafts. Her son Thomas's third son, George, who became a tailor, had a son named Shakspeare Hart, who in due course took up plumbing. The Birthplace, meanwhile, was besieged by the curious. The later Hart descendants were helped, not always selflessly, by antiquarians such as William Oldys ( 1696-1761) as they tried to preserve various beloved 'relics' of Shakespeare. On the whole, they profited very little from their great connection. In recent times, a copy of Poems on Several Occasions by Walter Harte (possibly no relation) turned up at the Folger Library in Washington, DC with this inked note on the verso of the last leaf:

  A gift from My Dear

  Father

  Thomas Hart With manye other items of my Noble Ancestors [sic] Joan Shakespeare Had it not been for the great Spirit of kindness of Mr William Oldys I should not of [sic] had the joy of having in my safe keeping our great Poets Bible. in the little Chest with the keys

  If genuine, that was probably written by John Hart ( 1753-1800), a turner and chair-maker in the sixth generation of lineal descendants of Shakespeare's sister. 33 A tiny sketch of a box, or small chest, is drawn under the note. If the box and Bible are ever 'found', they are likely to be hoaxes; and the sad fact is that a lovingly made box, by an eighteenth-century craftsman, could be thought more valuable in later times than an old Bible. The only personal effects of a Tudor actor known to survive today are Edward Alleyn's silver-gilt chalice,

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  seal, and ring. The ring, a gold hoop with a bezel of reddish sardonyx, is two sizes larger than average for the time (equal to size 'P' today); it is hard to believe that Alleyn wore it on his little finger while acting in Tamburlaine. As for Shakespeare's relics, they gradually disappeared, and his supposed chair was torn apart to satisfy a souvenir-hunter.

  But the Harts, even in poverty, kept the Birthplace. Finally when they sold it in 1806, debts in connection with the house exceeded the sale price (£210), so they received nothing for a historic dwelling they had preserved for nearly two centuries. In 1817, an interview with a direct descendant of Shakespeare's sister was printed in the Monthly Magazine. Having sought out William Shakspeare Hart, who was a Tewkesbury chair-maker, the Monthly's editor noted with concern the status of this family. 'In one room of the ground-floor of a wretched hovel lived this man, his wife, and five children', the editor wrote.

  In a corner stood a stocking-frame, in which the mother said she worked after her children were in bed. . . . In answer to enquiries about the great bard, Hart said his father and grandfather often talked of the subject, and buoyed themselves with hopes that the family might sometime be remembered; but, for his part, the name had hitherto proved of no other use to him than as furnishing jokes among his companions, by whom he was often annoyed on this account. On the writer presenting him with a guinea, he declared it was the first benefit which had arisen from his being a Shakespeare. 34

  By coincidence, when the Birthplace was bought and vested in trustees in 1847 before its restoration, the Hart family had begun to prosper, and today descendants can be found all over the Englishspeaking world.

  If Shakespeare's legal will fell short of its hopeful aims, he clearly had not displeased his town. He was to be honoured notably with the waist-length effigy or 'bust' in the parish church, which is carved in soft, pale bluish limestone by Gheerart Janssen and set in the north chancel wall. One assumes that the local council, if not the poet's family, approved the effigy's workmanship. Mouth open, Shakespeare stands with a quill in his right hand, a paper under his left, and rests his hands on a cushion. The bust's colours, often retouched in the damp chancel and then painted over with white in 1793, had in all probabil-

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  ity shown the buttoned doublet as scarlet, under a black loose gown, the eyes as hazel, and the hair and beard as auburn. Beneath is an inscription which begins in Latin, JUDICIO PYLIIUM, GENIO SOCRATUM, ARTE MARONEM: | TERRA TEGIT, POPULUS MÆRET, OLYMPUS HABET. (THE EARTH COVERS ONE WHO IS A NESTOR IN JUDGEMENT; THE PEOPLE MOURN FOR A SOCRATES IN GENIUS; OLYMPUS HAS A VIRGIL IN ART.) This legend continues in legible English, although the stone-cutter erringly has carved 'SIEH' FOR'SITH':

  STAY PASSENGER, WHY GOEST THOU BY SO

  FAST?

  READ IF THOU CANST, WHOM ENVIOUS DEATH

  HATH PLAST,

  WITH IN THIS MONUMENT SHAKSPEARE:

  WITHWHOME,

  QUICK NATURE DIDE: WHOSE NAME DOTH

  DECK Υ+S TOMBE,

  FAR MORE THEN COST: SIEH ALL, ΥΤHE HATH,

  WRITT,

  LEAVES LIVING ART, BUTPAGE, TO SERVE HIS

  WITT.

  OBIIT AÑO DO1 1616

  ÆTATIS. 53 DIE 23 APR.

  In addition, a darkly concise legend was cut in the playwright's grave slab, though it was said in the seventeenth century that this was devised by Shakespeare. Nobody has thrown about his bones, anyway:

  GOOD FREND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE, TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE: BLESTE BE ΥE MAN ΥΤ SPARES THES STONES, AND CURST BE HE ΥΤ MOVES MY BONES.

  Stratford honoured him, but the tribute paid to him by his fellows was far more remarkable. The book trade had become livelier than ever, and some of the thirty or so bookshops at Paul's Churchyard often stocked foreign offerings. Twice a year a Catalogus Universalis listing worthy German and Latin books exhibited at the Frankfurt Fair reached London (such a list, one feels, would have amused Prince

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  Hamlet and Horatio). In 1622 as it happened, an English reprint of the Catalogus with an English supplement listed the following: 'Playes, written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaack Jaggard, in fol[io].' 35 No such book really existed in 1622, but at the office of old, blind William Jaggard, who once had irritated the dramatist, printers were then at work on the great Folio of thirty-six of Shakespeare's plays. The Folio, issued in November 1623, involved an unusual act of retrieval and restoration on the part of its editors John Heminges and Henry Condell. 36 Eighteen of the poet's dramas were printed here for the first time, and so saved from possible loss. The volume was costly to produce; and its syndicate of publishers, in which the chief spirits were Edward Blount and old Jaggard's son, Isaac, faced a loss. The work was not undertaken chiefly for profit. Nobody knows who proposed it. The typesetting of thirty-six plays, some from printed copy but others from scripts in varying hands and in varying degrees of legibility, for double-columned folio pages, was a colossal task. It may have involved sweat, and we know that it involved urine, which printing-house workers used each night to soak the leather casing of the balls that inked the press. Residual traces of urine and ingredients such as juniper gum, linseed oil, and lampblack are found in the greatest secular book in the English language.

  Thrice -- in their dedicatory letter in the Folio -- Heminges and Condell refer to Shakespeare's plays as 'trifles'. That, it appears, is all that Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, Twelfth Night, The Winter's Tale, The Tempest and the ten greatest history plays in the language can be. Three times, thirty-six of the dramas are judged 'trifles'. No word ever ap
plied to the plays tells us more about Shakespeare's life and times perhaps; but, in fact, the editors were theatre men dependent on the goodwill of the earls of Pembroke and of Montgomery, to whom the Folio is dedicated. The word 'trifles' might befit the editors' sense of their own low rank, and the triviality of public plays, in contrast to the glowing worth and stellar rank of the 'most noble and incomparable paire of brethren' whose prestigious names the editors use. The earls were not to be insulted. The first was Lord Chamberlain, and the second was later to hold the same post. They were among the few grandees who aided the King's actors. Plays, so far, had little status or

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  even monetary worth, and few believed that a drama could be artful or literary. Ben Jonson had called a folio of his own plays and poems his Workes, in 1616, and people had mocked him by saying he couldn't tell the difference between 'work' and 'play'.

  In their preface 'To the great Variety of Readers', Heminges and Condell, however, are much warmer: 'Reade him, therefore; and againe, and againe'. The Folio is also graced by a ten-line poem by Jonson as well as by his elegy 'To the memory of my beloved, The AUTHOR Mr. William Shakespeare: And what he hath left us'. The latter is generous, discerning, and prophetic: 'Soul of the age! | The applause! delight! the wonder of our Stage!' Jonson writes without reserve and adds, 'He was not of an age, but for all time!' If Shakespeare here becomes rather Horatian or a replica of Jonson, he is said as a tragic writer to equal Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, and in comedy or Jonson's own speciality to eclipse Aristophanes, Terence, and Plautus.