The conventional view of Shakespeare’s background is that his father sought and won public approval, position and wealth in the first part of his career and then made some bad errors of judgement, with the result that from the middle of the 1570s he fell on hard times. He bought two more houses in 1572, and that same year he was caught illegally dealing in wool (the laws had tightened) and prosecuted for charging too much interest on a loan. He stopped attending council meetings from 1576 until 1586, when it was finally assumed he had lost interest. In 1578 he mortgaged his wife’s inheritance, and in the 1580s sold land in Wilmcote, Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon and the house he owned on Greenhill Street. John Shakespeare’s financial misfortunes made his eldest son determined to acquire wealth and security.
That is the traditional interpretation. The revisionist view suggests that the wool dealing is actually how John Shakespeare made a significant amount of money, that his eldest son was helping him, and that his father’s wool and other business concerns were the main reason why William Shakespeare went to London in the first place.2 John’s selling of property and land is interpreted as his wanting to invest the money elsewhere. By 1590 he owned the larger, western wing of the Henley Street house, which became part of the home he had kept all his life. John’s will has not survived so we do not know how wealthy he was, but if there were money in the family this would help to explain how William Shakespeare could afford to co-found and buy shares in the new theatre company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, in 1594, and purchase a great house, New Place, in 1597. The possibility that Shakespeare inherited money from his father would help to explain his considerable investments after his father died in 1601.
RELIGIOUS CRISES
William Shakespeare’s was the first generation to be raised within an established, reformed and ‘settled’ religious environment. It was a time of spiritual turmoil. Depending on your point of view, Elizabeth I (1558–1603) either instigated a religious settlement or continued a religious revolution. Her father, Henry VIII (1509–1547), in seeking to divorce Katherine of Aragon, had denied papal authority and introduced religious reforms (1532–37) that led to the founding of a new state church, The Church of England. Elizabeth’s half-brother, Edward VI (1537–1553), had continued and furthered these reforms. Then her half-sister, Mary, had taken the English church back to Roman Catholicism. Elizabeth urgently needed to settle the matter and anything she did was going to be controversial. Re-establishing a reformed church made her the automatic enemy of France and Spain and risked tipping the balance of power in Europe. Strictly speaking the Church of England was not founded as a Protestant church; it was and remains Catholic, but not Roman Catholic. The Act of Supremacy (1559), which made Elizabeth Supreme Governor of the Church of England, removed papal authority and brought in an oath of allegiance to the monarch. Her Act of Uniformity in religion (1559), the main legislation which properly founded the Church of England, only just got through parliament by a majority of three votes: twenty-one to eighteen (and none of the Bishops present voted for it). The Act made it compulsory for the whole nation to attend a state-church service every Sunday: you were fined for not attending church (an offence called recusancy) because not to do so raised the suspicion that you might be a practising Roman Catholic and potentially seditious.
Shakespeare was six years old when Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth and called on all Roman Catholics to rebel against her, making her ‘fair game’ for any would-be Roman Catholic assassin. From 1571 Elizabeth responded with anti-Catholic laws which meant that being a Roman Catholic, promoting Roman Catholicism, or harbouring a Roman Catholic priest could be construed as treason, punishable by being hanged, drawn and quartered (thirty-nine Jesuit priests suffered this death-by-butchery from 1570–1603).
We can but guess at the psychological trauma experienced by a people who saw their church’s images of Jesus, Mary, the saints, biblical stories, mythological animals, wild beasts, flora and fauna, being scratched out or whitewashed over, their religious effigies smashed, and some of their priests being torn apart before their eyes, but the memory of this turmoil is part of what helped to form the children of Shakespeare’s generation.
Even as religious practices were being reformed, medieval stories and literature, bristling with a Roman Catholic sensibility, were enjoying a long shelf life. Many texts and authors from a century or so earlier were reprinted throughout Shakespeare’s lifetime, making the medieval mind very much a part of the living present. While Shakespeare grew up with a sense of an older order having vanished, its legacy continued to influence what he read and heard. Images were disappearing from churches and more emphasis was being placed on the spoken word itself; at same time the professional theatre was developing rapidly and becoming popular. Performances fed a public desire for both spectacle and word, and they did not judge or condemn.
Shakespeare himself was raised and lived as a mainstream member of The Church of England. If we go seeking his spirituality (which to some extent is synonymous with a person’s imagination) we find that it embraces the visual and sensual with a particularity of poetic expression. In As You Like It, the exiled Duke Senior
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
(As You Like It, 2.1.15–17)
The frail, old, confused and heartbroken King Lear enters carrying the dead body of his favourite daughter, and says:
Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so
That heaven’s vault should crack.
(The Tragedy of King Lear, 5.3.232–4)
In addressing the heavens, the desperate Princess Innogen says: ‘if there be / Yet left in heaven as small a drop of pity / As a wren’s eye, feared gods, a part of it!’ (Cymbeline, 4.2.305–7). If clues about Shakespeare’s spirituality can be gleaned from what he writes, then he seems equally open to God through the small and miniature as through the grand and the awe-inspiring. His lyrical descriptions of the natural world and powerful human emotions are the theatrical substitute for those vanishing medieval wall paintings in the churches.
LANGUAGE IS POWER
Importantly, Shakespeare was also inspired by the classical world, especially Latin literature. A new grammar school had opened in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1553 (though there had been a school there before), during the reign of Edward VI. It offered all the boys of the town a free education and John Shakespeare was able to give his eldest son every opportunity to receive the schooling he himself had missed. From around the age of five or six, William would have attended Petty School (for boys and girls), where he learnt his alphabet, the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. From around the age of seven or eight up to as late as sixteen, he could attend ‘the King’s new school’, or Big School. Its records, like those of many schools of that time, do not survive, but we know about the curriculum.
The humanist education that Shakespeare experienced is one of the greatest cultural gifts that England has ever made available to its sons. Grammar schools were part of the government’s machinery to ensure that, as worded in one charter, ‘good literature and discipline might be diffused and propagated throughout all parts of our Kingdom, as wherein the best government and administration of affairs consists.’ The boys were taught Latin rigorously six days a week throughout the whole year, going to school from 6 a.m. in summer and from 7 a.m. in winter until dusk (with Thursday and Saturday afternoons off). The few days of annual holiday observed only the major Christian festivals.
The grammar-school system recognised that language is power, and poetry, an inextricable part of a curriculum, was used to teach the pupils how to persuade and argue, how to succeed in politics. One of the reasons for the great flourishing of English literature from the 1590s was that two generations of writers had benefited from a grammar-school education.
Behind a good imagination and a well-formed mind there is often a great schoolteacher and encourager. Shakespeare’s teachers were Simon Hunt, sc
hoolmaster from 1571 to 1575 (possibly the same Hunt who left to become a Jesuit priest and who died in Rome in 1585) and Thomas Jenkins, schoolmaster from 1575 to 1579. Jenkins was from London and a graduate of St John’s College, Oxford, where he was Fellow from 1566 to 1572 (during which time he had the lease on Chaucer’s house in Woodstock). He was followed by John Cottom (1579–81), a Roman Catholic whose Jesuit brother was tortured on the rack and executed with the famous martyr Edmund Campion in 1582.
The boys were expected to speak Latin to each other even in the playground and at home. Greek was studied through the New Testament. Authors studied in their original Latin included playwrights, poets, philosophers and orators such as Terence, Virgil, Sallust, Palingenius, Mantuanus, Cicero, Susenbrotus, the Renaissance writer Erasmus, Quintilian, Horace and Juvenal. The Roman poet Ovid was Shakespeare’s favourite writer and provided the source material for his two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). Ovid’s Metamorphoses, made up of many poetic stories about the transformation of human beings and gods into other states, showed the young Shakespeare the vivid power of the imagination. On Shakespeare’s stage, as in Ovid’s poetry, a person’s physical state reflects their inner, imaginative and moral experience, from Bottom’s magical ass’s head in A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Gloucester’s eyes, which are plucked out on stage in King Lear.
The syllabus was demanding but limited and did not, for example, include numeracy. Nevertheless, the boys who benefited from the grammar schools became part of the intellectual elite of their day. Shakespeare, like many of his contemporaries, was trained to be a lateral thinker with a keen eye for detail. He did not need to go to university in order to write and think as he did because his mind was already full of rhetorical sounds and shapes that he could put to expert use. Indeed, it is often said that the grammar-school curriculum was so rigorous that it made its pupils as proficient in classical languages and literature as a modern university graduate.
THE FUTURE CLOSES IN
By 1580, Shakespeare was probably helping out with the family business and informally teaching his family and neighbours; education was something to be respected and shared. Then, just two years later, came his girlfriend Anne Hathaway’s (?1555–1623) unlooked for pregnancy.
Shakespeare was only eighteen and still underage. Between 1570 and 1630 the average age for men to marry in Stratford-upon-Avon was twenty-four. In that sixty-year period, and out of 106 cases, there were only three men who married under the age of twenty. Of those three men, Shakespeare was the youngest and the only one whose wife was already pregnant.3 Anne was twenty-six and only by marriage could Shakespeare avoid social disgrace. The ceremony itself, quickly arranged, was enabled by a special licence from the Bishop of Worcester in November 1582. What this all meant, of course, was that Shakespeare’s life choices and opportunities had, by the time he was eighteen and a half, drastically narrowed. Although Anne had brought with her six pounds, thirteen shillings and four pence as a marriage settlement from her father’s will, the burden of supporting the family would nonetheless fall mainly on Shakespeare.
How could the young couple begin to make ends meet? If he had had any prospects as a professional apprentice in his father’s leather-working and glove-making trade, these were now ruined (apprentices had to remain unmarried until their seven-year term was completed). Their first child, Susanna, was born about six months after their wedding. Twins followed in 1585, Hamnet and Judith, named after the Shakespeares’ good friends Hamnet and Judith Sadler who lived on the corner of High Street and Sheep Street. If Mr and Mrs William Shakespeare were living in the Henley Street house with Shakespeare’s parents and his four siblings in 1585, it would by then have been getting rather crowded.
LOST YEARS?
There is almost no documentary evidence for what Shakespeare was doing from 1585 to 1592, but ‘lost’ undocumented time is not unusual in the period. Description of these as the ‘lost years’ seems more indicative of biographical disappointment than of anything more meaningful. Some biographies send Shakespeare away to sea during this time, or have him training as a lawyer or a soldier. A brief account by the diarist John Aubrey (1626–1697) tells us that Shakespeare was for some years ‘a school master in the country’, which could, since Aubrey was writing in London, mean Stratford-upon-Avon itself. That one of the brightest boys in the school should help out with the teaching seems perfectly plausible. Nicholas Rowe published the first attempt at a life of Shakespeare at the front of his edition of the plays in 1709. He sent the actor Thomas Betterton to Stratford-upon-Avon to collect oral history from people who remembered Shakespeare and his family. Rowe reports that Shakespeare was caught and prosecuted for poaching deer from the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote (about five miles from Stratford-upon-Avon) and that he left (or escaped?) from Warwickshire and went to London.
The deer-poaching story, although likely to be exaggerated, may not be as mythical as has been thought. Its earliest mention was in 1688 (within the life time of great-nephews and nieces) by Richard Davies, Chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, who also recorded that Sir Thomas Lucy ‘oft [had Shakespeare] whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native county to his great advancement’. Deer provided some of the skin that his father used in glove making. But perhaps Shakespeare first went to London after joining a travelling troupe of players such as The Queen’s Men. Or perhaps poaching and play-acting combined to take him away from Stratford-upon-Avon. Or perhaps he was representing his father’s business affairs. Whatever the reason, it was in London that he started to become established in what was to become his life’s career.
SHAKESPEARE THE FREELANCER
Shakespeare is first mentioned as a playwright in 1592 in Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit Bought with a Million of Repentance by the popular writer Robert Greene (though Greene’s authorship of the work is disputed). Shakespeare is resentfully referred to as a jack-of-all-trades, ‘an upstart crow’ and one who thinks himself ‘the only Shake-scene in a country.’ Greene then goes on to allude to a line from Henry VI Part Three, one of Shakespeare’s early plays about the Wars of the Roses. Scholarship of the last thirty years has started to understand how some of Shakespeare’s early plays, until 1594, might have been written in collaboration, a common practice for playwrights of the time. Whether on his own or in collaboration, Shakespeare had started to write successfully as a freelance and his was the name that caught Greene’s jealous attention.
Shakespeare was twelve years old when the first major playhouse, The Theatre, opened in Shoreditch. By the time he arrived in London, professional theatres were becoming hugely popular. He was first associated with The Rose, the fifth purpose-built theatre in London and the first on Bank-side, on the south bank of the River Thames. It had opened for business in 1587 and was the venue for some of Shakespeare’s earliest work: Henry VI Part One and his bloodiest and most outrageous play, Titus Andronicus. The yard in front of its stage was big enough for about 740 people to stand and watch a show, and there was space for several hundred more in the galleries. It was there that Shakespeare began to be influenced by one of the most vivid and brilliant of his contemporaries, Christopher Marlowe, whose Dr Faustus, The Jew of Malta, and Tamburlaine the Great were also performed at The Rose.
The London theatre courted controversy with the Puritans who held sway in the City of London and with other anti-theatricalists who believed play-acting was amoral. The whole area of Bankside, which belonged to the Bishop of Winchester, was known as the Liberties and technically outside of the jurisdiction of the City. The playhouses stood cheek-by-jowl with brothels and sports arenas, spaces used as much for cockfighting and bear baiting as for revenge tragedies and pastoral comedies. If you stand facing the exhibition entrance of the modern-day Shakespeare’s Globe and turn right you will see ‘Cardinal Cap Alley’ on the left. Although this sounds like a place where you might buy ecclesiastical headgear, it is actually named af
ter a famous brothel, the Cardinal’s Hat (which itself was named after the shape and colour of the top of a penis). Prostitutes of the Bankside were known as the Bishop of Winchester’s geese (alluded to in the context of venereal disease in Troilus and Cressida, Additional Passages, B). But the theatre claimed social respectability. Each playing company needed an aristocratic patron. In theory, every theatre performance was a dress rehearsal for the time when that same play would be performed before the company’s patron.
During outbreaks of plague the theatres closed to prevent the spread of infection. There were severe attacks in 1592–3 and, in 1603, the plague killed 38,000 Londoners (in a population of around 200,000). Outbreaks continued from 1604 to 1610. Whenever the theatres closed because of the plague, the companies usually went on tour. But they also closed for the six weeks of Lent, so there were plenty of opportunities in the working theatrical year for Shakespeare to make the three-day journey to Stratford-upon-Avon on horseback, to see his family, give them the money he was earning, and think about the next play in peace and quiet.
SHAKESPEARE’S BIG BREAKS
Shakespeare’s name burst into print with his humorously erotic narrative poem, Venus and Adonis, dedicated to the nineteen-year-old Henry Wriothesley (1573–1624), the third Earl of Southampton. It was carefully printed by Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon school friend, Richard Field, who had become a successful London publisher. Venus and Adonis was a sensation (it still can be to the first-time reader) and became the most printed, and therefore the most read, of all Shakespeare’s works in his lifetime. There were ten editions by 1616. It was followed in 1594 by the deeply serious, equally erotic, and almost as popular Lucrece (which has come to be known as The Rape of Lucrece). Shakespeare dedicated this to the Earl, too, and this time in closely loving terms: ‘the love I dedicate to your lordship is without end […] what I have done is yours; what I have to do is yours, being part in all I have devoted yours.’
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