Shakespeare

by Paul Edmondson

  A story from the poet and playwright William Davenant (1606–1668), first published in Nicholas Rowe’s biographical account of 1709, says that the Earl of Southampton gave Shakespeare £1,000 ‘to enable him to go through with a purchase which he heard he had a mind to.’ Davenant himself liked to say he was Shakespeare’s godson and illegitimate son. His parents owned the Crown Inn in Oxford, a likely place for Shakespeare to stay during his journeys from Stratford-upon-Avon to London. If Davenant was right, even though he may have exaggerated the actual sum of money, then a large gift from the Earl of Southampton would help to explain Shakespeare’s spending in the mid-1590s. A useful comparative income to bear in mind is the Stratford-upon-Avon schoolmaster’s salary: £20 a year.

  In 1594 Shakespeare was one of seven (possibly eight) men to co-found a brand-new acting company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The Shakespeare scholar Andrew Gurr has reckoned that Shakespeare would have paid between £50 and £80 for his shares.4 From 1594, he took up his role as a company man and their leading dramatist. That Christmas, Shakespeare is mentioned as having taken part in two royal performances before the Queen at her palace in Greenwich. An acting company was paid £10 for performing at court, which the Lord Chamberlain’s Men regularly did, usually during the winter months and especially for the long Christmas season (thirty-three times before the Queen between 1594 and 1603).5 It is difficult to be precise about how much playwrights were paid more generally, but even writing and performing in plays did not generate quite enough income to support a wife and family. It was because Shakespeare held shares in the new company that, from the age of thirty, he started to earn serious money.

  Two years later his only son Hamnet died at the age of eleven. He was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard on 11 August 1596, while his father was probably away on tour. Referring to high infant mortality rates sometimes hides the pain of grief in statistics. To lose any infant is terrible. But Hamnet was eleven years old, and the death of a child can cast a long shadow. Two months later, on 20 October, Shakespeare’s father was granted a coat of arms (there had been an earlier application after his time as bailiff). John Shakespeare became a gentleman, a status and title that Shakespeare would inherit. But Shakespeare now had no direct male heir. In fact, after the death of his brother, Richard, in 1613, Shakespeare knew that his family name would die out.

  During the years he was working in London, Shakespeare lodged at various places including (in order of residence) the parishes of St Giles Cripplegate, St Helen’s Bishopgate, St Saviour’s near the Clink, Southwark, and with the Mountjoy family on the corner of Monkswell and Silver Streets, again in the Cripplegate ward. Amid the headiness of theatrical life – audiences, box-office receipts, fellow playwrights, the next project, company tours – it was Stratford-upon-Avon that provided his domestic base. Significantly, he never owned a home in London. From 1597 he did not need to because he was able to buy the second largest house that Stratford-upon-Avon had to offer: New Place. He defaulted on paying his taxes twice in London while registered in the parish of St Helen’s, Bishopgate (in 1597 and in 1598). It looks as if he left his lodgings in London at around that time while settling into his new Stratford-upon-Avon home.

  New Place had been built in the 1480s by Hugh Clopton who had gone on to become the Lord Mayor of London. It was an impressive house with five gables and at least ten fire-places, and was described by the Stratford Rent Roll of 1561 as a mansion house. Shakespeare had passed it every day on his way to school and it dominated the middle of the town, opposite the Guild’s medieval chapel. There was plenty of space for Shakespeare’s family and his move there was life-changing both personally and professionally. In February 1598, less than a year after taking possession, Shakespeare was listed with thirteen other neighbours in the Chapel Street ward for hoarding more malt at New Place than was permissible during a time of grain shortage. Malting was the town’s main industry and needed for the common domestic practice of family beer brewing (since water was not usually safe to drink).

  Only the site of New Place survives. The house that Shakespeare knew was substantially renovated by 1702 and then entirely demolished in 1759. Archaeology led by The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust from 2010 to 2015 confirmed the size of Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon home, a tangible sense of the kind of status he achieved. There were extensive grounds at the back, some barns and an orchard with vines. He was continuing along the aspiring social trajectory he had learnt from his parents. One eyewitness account is revealing about Shakespeare’s family life there. Rev. Joseph Greene (1712–1790), the headmaster of the grammar school, learnt the following about New Place from Hugh Clopton (a descendant of the original owner, born 1672) who recalled:

  several little epigrams on familiar subjects were found upon the glass of the house windows, some of which were written by Shakespeare, and many of them the product of his own children’s brain: the tradition being, that he often in his times of pleasantry thus exercised his and their talents, and took great pleasure when he could trace in them some pretty display of that genius which God and Nature had blessed him with.

  Shakespeare crafts words into the windows while his children watch his imagination unfold.

  In October 1598, townsman, neighbour and friend, Richard Quiney (bailiff in 1602), was in London seeking parliamentary subsidy for relief after the devastating fires in Stratford-upon-Avon (in 1594 and 1595). We know where he was on Wednesday 25 October: The Bell Inn on Carter Lane, near St Paul’s Cathedral. There he wrote to his ‘Loving countryman’, William Shakespeare, the only piece of Shakespearian correspondence that survives. Quiney asks Shakespeare to provide security for a loan of £30 to cover the debts he owes in London, while he, Quiney, is on his way to the court to fulfil his business on behalf of the town. The letter seems not to have been sent – perhaps Shakespeare saw Quiney before it was dispatched – because it was found among Quiney’s own papers. What the letter confirms is that Quiney knew Shakespeare to be a man of means. Quiney’s visit to the court was successful and the Queen granted relief to the town. Money was granted to help with the rebuilding, and Quiney’s own expenses were reimbursed by the town council.

  Shakespeare’s means increased substantially in 1599 when he made another shrewd investment. Along with four other company men he spent £100 on shares in a new theatre, the biggest London had seen: the Globe. It was made from the recycled timbers of The Theatre, which had stood on a site for which the ground lease was about to expire. The wood was carried south across a frozen Thames and the Globe opened for business later in 1599. You could stand in the yard and watch a play for a penny or you could pay a few more pence and have a cushion, or sit in one of the galleries. Sixpence bought you a place in the Lords’ Room (where you could be seen by the audience, even though your view of the actors was poor). The audience capacity in the new theatre was around three thousand and Shakespeare, as the company’s leading dramatist, would make more money the more successful his plays became. But income fluctuated year on year and takings were always contingent on the plague. In a lucrative year, it is estimated that Shakespeare earned around £200 from his company shares and Globe receipts.6

  FAME AND CONTROVERSY

  The audience who crammed into the Globe to watch Shakespeare’s plays were invited to share strong human emotions and political argument. State censorship was always on the lookout for anything seditious and all new plays had to gain the formal approval of the Master of the Revels, the state censor. Playwrights were thrown into jail and theatres closed if these laws were contravened. Around 1599 Shakespeare’s printed works attracted the notice of William Scott who wrote a university dissertation called The Model of Poesie. Scott quotes directly from The Rape of Lucrece (criticising Shakespeare’s tautology in line 935: ‘to endless date of never-ending woes’) and Richard II. In 1601 the Earl of Essex attempted a coup against Elizabeth with which Scott himself had some involvement. Essex’s supporters employed the Lord Chamberlain’s Men to perform
Richard II on the night before the rebellion was due to take place. This is the play in which Shakespeare dramatises the deposition of the monarch (in act four, scene one), a scene so sensitive that it was not allowed to be printed until after Queen Elizabeth died (‘I am Richard the second’, she is reported to have said, ‘know ye not that?’). Theatre, on that occasion, failed to ignite the audience into supporting a revolution. However good the performance, the revolt was a failure. But it was a dangerous episode in the life of the company, some of whom had to give evidence. Essex was tried for treason. Shakespeare’s patron the Earl of Southampton was himself involved and imprisoned in the Tower (with his cat). Essex was beheaded; Southampton was set free early in the reign of James I (1603–25).

  On James I’s accession to the throne, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men became the King’s Men – Shakespeare and some of his colleagues were invited to take part in the coronation procession (there survives the receipt for the scarlet cloth they were granted for their royal liveries). A year later, for Christmas 1604, the Earl of Southampton asked the King’s Men to perform Love’s Labour’s Lost in his house on The Strand. They had all survived the political scare of 1601 and, as far as Shakespeare was concerned, Southampton’s patronage was now in its eleventh year. As the premier company of the day, the King’s Men continued to perform regularly at the court (eighty-five times before the King between 1603 and 1616), with Shakespeare’s plays regularly featuring in their repertoire.7

  Some aspects of Shakespeare’s life are controversial, including speculations about his sexuality. It is possible to interpret a gay sensibility from a close reading of some of the Sonnets, but the only surviving account about his personal life is found in the diary of John Manningham, a trainee lawyer at Middle Temple, for 13 March 1602:

  Upon a time when Burbage played Richard the Third there was a citizen grew so far in liking with him, that before she went from the play she appointed him to come that night unto her by the name of Richard the Third. Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained and at his game ere Burbage came. Then, message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third.

  The story has a once-upon-a-time feeling about it. Manningham seems to be recording table talk, but another version of it appeared in Thomas Wilkes’s A General View of the Stage in 1759, long before Manningham’s diaries were discovered and published in 1831. If Shakespeare did have any gay inclinations, he also had heterosexual ones, which appear to have led to at least one bout of marital infidelity.

  SHAKESPEARE THE COMMUTER

  On the whole, Shakespeare was able successfully to divide his time among his friends and family and business concerns across the two social worlds of Stratford-upon-Avon and London over about twenty years.

  There are fewer references to Shakespeare in London after 1604, which suggests he was spending more time in Stratford-upon-Avon. He had many business affairs to attend to there. There were the one hundred and seven acres of land he had bought in 1602 for £320 (a significant investment which suggests he might have inherited money from his father), and in 1605 he spent £440 on a 50 per cent share in the annual tithes payable to the church, ‘“of corn, grain, blade, and hay” from Old Stratford, Welcombe, and Bishopton and in the “tithes of wool, lamb, and other small and privy tithes” from the parish of Stratford.’ Together, these Stratford-upon-Avon investments yielded around £60 a year.

  On 5 June 1607, his daughter Susanna (1583–1649) married the physician John Hall (1575–1635). They stayed in Stratford-upon-Avon where Hall had set up his practice. Their daughter Elizabeth was born nine months later. No other children followed and she was the only grandchild born during Shakespeare’s lifetime. Hall was a solid and reliable figure, a Puritan pillar of the church and town. Some of his casebooks survive: the earliest record dates from 1611, but none of the entries relate to Shakespeare. The Halls would weather a social scandal when, in 1613, Susanna was obliged to sue John Lane, who had put about rumours that she had contracted venereal disease from an adulterous affair, for defamation of character. She won her case.

  Shakespeare’s mother died in 1608, the same year that the King’s Men took over the running of the Blackfriars Theatre, an indoor playhouse which used to be part of a Dominican monastery. A group of investors was formed, as they had been for the founding of The Globe, and once again a successful business was established. Although fewer people could attend each performance the cheapest admission price was six times higher (sixpence) and the theatre could operate more easily during the winter months. The plays were lit by candles and there was more scope for special effects than in the Globe. As a venue it had a strong reputation for music, having been used for the previous eight years by a playing company made up of boys.

  In May 1612, Shakespeare testified in a court case about a disputed marriage settlement between Christopher Mountjoy (with whom Shakespeare used to lodge in Silver Street) and his son-in-law, Stephen Belott. Mountjoy had promised a dowry of £60 and in the end only £10 had been paid. Although the events under question had occurred ten years before, Shakespeare had to give evidence and admitted to acting as a go-between for the Mountjoy daughter, Mary, and Belott. Could Shakespeare recall the sum involved? No, he could not. His memory on this occasion failed him, but this legal case is the only record we have of words that Shakespeare actually spoke.

  In March 1613 he bought a gatehouse at Blackfriars for £140, the only property he ever owned in London and one that looks more like a financial arrangement with other members of the theatre company than anywhere he intended to live. In fact, he leased it to a Stratford-upon-Avon neighbour called John Robinson, who would, three years later, be one of the witnesses to his will.

  In 1613, Shakespeare collaborated with Richard Burbage on an impresa, an allegorical, heraldic-like device, painted on a shield with a motto, for Francis Manners, the sixth Earl of Rutland to use during the tilting to mark the tenth anniversary of King James I’s accession (24 March). Neither Shakespeare’s words nor Burbage’s design survives. Both men were paid forty-four shillings in gold.

  Disaster struck later that year on 29 June when fire broke out at the Globe during a performance of All is True (Henry VIII). Sir Henry Wotton was there and wrote to his nephew about it: ‘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.’ A ballad produced shortly afterwards describes the event and includes the refrain ‘O sorrow, pitiful sorrow, / And yet all this is true’ (echoing the original name of Shakespeare’s play). The theatre was rebuilt and ready for business by a year and a day later. But Shakespeare’s shares in The Globe are not mentioned in his will, which suggests he sold them. The fire could have broken his spirit, especially if any manuscripts had been lost in the blaze. Shortly after the new Globe had opened, a major fire swept through Stratford-upon-Avon on 9 July 1614, destroying fifty-four houses, as well as outbuildings, though Shakespeare and his family were not directly affected.

  There is a long-established (and lazy) assumption in Shakespearian biography that Shakespeare disappears to London soon after his marriage, is away from Stratford-upon-Avon for nearly twenty years and then ‘retires’ back to the town. But the notion of ‘retirement’ is anachronistic and suggests that Shakespeare thought he was getting old and was ready to leave the world of the theatre. Not a bit of it. Fifty-two was no great age then, any more than it is now. Similarly, his collaborative work with John Fletcher during what is sometimes referred to as ‘the end of Shakespeare’s career’ is misleadingly interpreted as Shakespeare somehow signalling his withdrawal from professional playwriting. The two men worked on three plays together: All is True (Henry VIII), the lost play Cardenio (based on Cervantes’ Don Quixote) and The Two Noble Kinsmen. This last is as innovative as anything that Shakes
peare ever produced. The scenes he wrote are characterised by their difficult language, imagery and strangeness of style. On Shakespeare’s part The Two Noble Kinsmen represents another new departure in a career that was full of innovations. Any work he produced after 1613 seems not to have survived, and who knows what he would have gone on to write had he lived longer?

  LAST THINGS

  In what was to be the last year and a half of his life, Shakespeare was involved in a local issue that would have affected the land he owned on the Welcombe hills and in Old Stratford, and the income he derived from it. There was a serious proposal to enclose a large area of open meadow that almost came to pass. Had it done so, the fields on which the towns-folk grew their crops would have become no more than pasture for sheep. Along with his cousin, Thomas Greene, Shakespeare took precautions to ensure that this source of income would be safe, whatever the outcome.

  Shakespeare drafted his will in January 1616 and made revisions on the Feast of the Annunciation, or Lady Day, 25 March 1616. It survives only in draft form and bears three feeble-looking signatures, which has led to the conjecture that he was suffering from a stroke. We do not know what he died of but typhus has been reasonably suggested. An anecdote recorded in 1662 by John Ward, the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, says that Shakespeare caught a fever from drinking too hard while out on a ‘merry meeting’ with Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton (a poet closely associated with Clifford Chambers, about a mile from Stratford-upon-Avon).