Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

by Stephen Greenblatt

  Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England

  Add thus much more: that no Italian priest

  Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;

  But as we, under God, are supreme head,

  So, under him, that great supremacy

  Where we do reign we will alone uphold

  Without th’assistance of a mortal hand.

  (3.1.74–84)

  This coarsely explicit piece of Protestant pope-baiting is by no means the sum of Shakespeare’s mature attitude toward the Catholicism in which he had been immersed as a young man. And it certainly cannot tell us what the young man felt if and when he stood in the presence of the fugitive Jesuit. But the only sainthood in which Shakespeare seems passionately to have believed throughout his life derives precisely from the subject matter and emotions that Campion wished his students at all costs to avoid: erotic sainthood.

  ROMEO: O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do:

  Then pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair.

  JULIET: Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.

  ROMEO: Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take.

  [He kisses her]

  Thus from my lips, by thine my sin is purged.

  JULIET: Then have my lips the sin that they have took.

  ROMEO: Sin from my lips? O trespass sweetly urged!

  Give me my sin again.

  [He kisses her]

  JULIET: You kiss by th’ book.

  (1.5.100–107)

  There are traces of Catholicism here, of a kind that Campion would immediately have recognized, but the theology and the ritual practice have been wittily turned into desire and its fulfillment.

  The beautiful, playful lines from Romeo and Juliet were written in the mid-1590s, some fifteen years after the moment when Shakespeare may have encountered Campion. But the sly blend of displacement and appropriation, the refashioning of traditional religious materials into secular performance, and the confounding of the sacred and the profane are characteristic of virtually the whole of Shakespeare’s achievement as dramatist and poet. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, written relatively early in his career, the beds of the newly wed couples are blessed, as they would have been in a popular Catholic practice outlawed by the Protestants, but it is not with holy water; rather, the fairies sprinkle them with “field-dew consecrate” (5.2.45). And in The Winter’s Tale, written near its end, there is an ecstatic description of a solemn ritual conducted by priests dressed in “celestial habits,” but the “grave wearers” of those habits are not celebrating the Mass; rather, what is being described is the Delphic oracle:

  I shall report,

  For most it caught me, the celestial habits—

  Methinks I so should term them—and the reverence

  Of the grave wearers. O, the sacrifice—

  How ceremonious, solemn, and unearthly

  It was i’th’ off’ring!

  (3.1.3–8)

  This is not a parody of the Mass, but it is also not exactly a sly tribute, slipped under the censor’s eye. Instead, the lines and much else like them in Shakespeare’s work suggest how completely he had absorbed Catholicism for his own poetic purposes. Those purposes were light-years from Campion’s, and the distance might already have been apparent even—or perhaps especially—in Lancashire in 1581.

  There is not only the matter of Will’s temperament—a lack of religious vocation, a skeptical distance from the missionary’s ardent faith, an adolescent’s awareness of the claims of his own flesh. Though he was only a young servant, Will could easily have noticed something beyond its religious conviction about the strange, dangerous world he had come to inhabit. The north was a traditional site of resistance to the centralizing authority of the Crown, and the families in whose houses he lived and worked skirted close to treason. All of Shakespeare’s early history plays—the plays with which he made a name for himself in London in the early 1590s—were concerned with rebellion, which he consistently conceived of as a family affair. These plays were safely set in the England of the fifteenth century, and the events were taken from the chronicles, but Shakespeare had to draw upon more than his reading to give his characters the touch of reality. His imagination was populated by powerful, restive, ambitious men and women who were willing to take extreme risks in playing the dangerous games of power. His image of these people could well have been taken from the families he would have closely observed during a sojourn in the north.

  What this suggests is that if he actually saw Campion in 1581 Shakespeare would even then probably have shuddered and recoiled inwardly, pulling away from the invitation, whether implicit in the saint’s presence or directly and passionately urged, to shoulder the cross and join in a pious struggle for the Catholic faith. Will had, as Hoghton’s will suggests, been making a mark—probably for the first time in his life—as an actor; he had begun to sense what he was capable of doing and what he had within him. And he was not going to get caught up in a glorious, treasonous, suicidal crusade. If his father was both Catholic and Protestant, William Shakespeare was on his way to being neither.

  Shakespeare—assuming that he is the Shakeshafte of Hoghton’s will—stayed in Lancashire at least until August 1581, before heading back to Stratford. Campion had left the area earlier; he had been ordered by Parsons to return to the vicinity of London to oversee the secret printing of his Ten Reasons. Working hurriedly and in great danger, the printers managed to finish the task in time for the Oxford University commencement on June 27: the students and fellows who filed into St. Mary’s Church found hundreds of bound copies waiting for them on their seats. A few weeks later, on his way back to Lancashire, Campion was trapped, arrested, taken to the Tower, and thrust into a cell aptly nicknamed “Little Ease.” After four days of painful confinement—the cell did not permit the prisoner either to stand or to lie flat—he was suddenly taken out, carried under guard to a boat, and rowed to the mansion of the immensely powerful Earl of Leicester, the man who had been poised years before to be his patron. Leicester was joined by the Earl of Bedford and two secretaries of state. More astonishing still, Queen Elizabeth herself was in the room. They asked him why he had come to England. For the salvation of souls, he answered, whereupon Elizabeth asked him directly if he acknowledged her as his queen or no. “Not only as my queen,” Campion replied, “but also as my most lawful governess.” That word “lawful” did not escape the queen’s attention; could the pope, she asked, “lawfully” excommunicate her? Could he discharge her subjects of their obedience? These were what Campion described as “bloody questions, and very pharisaical, undermining of my life.” He could not, he grasped at once, give the answers she was demanding, the answers that would not only enable him to go free but would also, as the queen made clear, bring him riches and honors. He was taken back to the Tower, where he was interrogated, tortured on the rack, tried for treason, and then, with Thomas Cottam and the others, executed.

  Will would only have been able to follow these terrible events through rumor and perhaps through the government’s highly distorted printed reports. He would certainly have heard of Campion’s capture—that was national news—and he would have heard too, no doubt with special anxiety, that Campion had, under torture, revealed the names of many of his hosts. (The extent of his confession, much trumpeted by the authorities, is still in dispute, though the pattern of subsequent arrests in Lancashire and elsewhere, along with Campion’s own words on the scaffold, indicates that he revealed more than he would have wished.)

  Shakespeare might also have heard or read about an extraordinary event that intervened between the Jesuit’s capture and his execution. The authorities clearly had been nettled by Campion’s “brag”—his challenge to debate anyone on the merits of Catholicism—and by the clandestine publication of Ten Reasons. One day at the end of August, Campion was taken from his cell without warning and brought into the chapel of the Tower. There, in the presence of the guards, othe
r Catholic prisoners, and such privileged members of the public as could crowd in, he was confronted with two Protestant theologians, Alexander Nowell, the dean of St. Paul’s, and William Day, the dean of Windsor. The theologians, seated at a table piled with books and notes, were celebrated debaters. At another table two other distinguished but hardly neutral figures, William Chark, the preacher of Gray’s Inn, and William Whitaker, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge, were poised to act as notaries. The prisoner would get his debate, but the government would set the stage and the rules.

  Campion objected that he had had no time to prepare, had no notes and no books, and that he had been subjected to “hellish torture.” The lieutenant of the Tower, Sir Owen Hopton, had the effrontery to declare that the prisoner “was scarce pinched and that it might rather be termed a cramping than racking.” Responding with dignity that he himself “could best report, and be most truest judge, because he felt the smart,” Campion accepted—as he had no choice but to accept—the grossly unfair terms of the debate. He then proceeded, by what appears to be a near-universal consensus, to annihilate his opponents. The authorities were chagrined. In the weeks that followed, bringing in fresh debaters and sharply restricting the scope and form of Campion’s answers, they staged three further debates—this time without permitting any Catholic auditors—until they were satisfied that they could declare victory. They then brought Campion to the scaffold at Tyburn, hanged him, and chopped his body in quarters before a huge crowd of observers. One of the bystanders, a Protestant named Henry Walpole, was close to the place where the hangman was throwing the pieces of Campion’s body into a vat of boiling water. A drop of the water mixed with blood splashed out upon his clothes, and Walpole felt at once, he said, that he had to convert to Catholicism. He left for the Continent, became a Jesuit, and was sent back to England, where he too was arrested and executed as a traitor. Such are the works of saints and martyrs.

  Not surprisingly, Shakespeare never referred openly to Campion. Perhaps in King Lear there is a disguised recollection of the fugitive priest and his fellow missionaries in the figure of the innocent Edgar, viciously slandered by his bastard brother and forced to assume a disguise and flee for his life. “I heard myself proclaimed,” the outlawed Edgar declares;

  And by the happy hollow of a tree

  Escaped the hunt. No port is free; no place,

  That guard, and most unusual vigilance,

  Does not attend my taking. Whiles I may ’scape,

  I will preserve myself. . . .

  (2.3.1–6)

  But Edgar is not a missionary, and Shakespeare may have felt, more than anything else, the desire to distance himself from what had in the winter and spring of 1581 come dangerously close, and an overwhelming relief that he had not been drawn into the nightmare of persecution, torture, and death.

  By the next year, Will was back in Stratford. Perhaps he had, after all, agreed to take one small risk, something to do with the unfortunate Thomas Cottam and whatever matters of “great weight” he had intended to convey to the family of Robert Debdale in the village of Shottery, two miles from Stratford. For shortly after he returned home, Will evidently began to walk along the path that led through the fields to Shottery. Did he have a secret message for the parents of the fugitive priest? It is impossible to say. But that the eighteen-year-old boy was in the village is certain, for there he met the eldest daughter of an old acquaintance of his father, a staunchly Protestant farmer named Richard Hathaway, who had died the year before. Anne Hathaway was twenty-six years old. In the summer of 1582—as if to mark his decisive distance from Campion, from the deep piety and the treasonous murmurs, from the scavenger’s daughter and the horrible scaffold—Will was making love to her. To this secret life too there were momentous consequences, of a very different kind. By November they were married, and six months later their daughter Susanna was born.

  CHAPTER 4

  Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting

  IF WILL RETURNED to Stratford in 1582 in the wake of a tense sojourn in Lancashire, if he agreed to go to Shottery that summer to convey a risky message or pass along a secret religious token to the Debdales, then his wooing of Anne Hathaway was manifestly a rebellion against the empire of fear. Anne’s world was the diametrical opposite of the dangerous world to which he may have been exposed: the powerful all-male bonds formed by Simon Hunt, the schoolmaster who had gone off to the seminary with his student Robert Debdale; the conspiracy to protect Campion, Parsons, Cottam, and the other Jesuit missionaries; the secret sodality of pious, suicidal young men. But even if the circumstances were far less dire, even if Will were merely an inexperienced Stratford adolescent whose principal social points of reference had been his family and the boys at the King’s New School, Anne Hathaway must have represented a startling alternative. Will’s family almost certainly leaned toward Catholicism, and Anne’s almost certainly leaned in the opposite direction. In his will, Anne’s father, Richard, asked to be “honestly buried,” the code phrase for the simple, stark burials favored by Puritans. Anne’s brother Bartholomew also asked for such a burial, “hoping to arise at the Latter Day and to receive the reward of His elect.” “His elect”: these are people far different from Campion or, for that matter, the Catholic Ardens to whom Shakespeare’s mother was related.

  Anne Hathaway represented an escape in another sense: she was in the unusual position of being her own woman. Very few young, unmarried Elizabethan women had any executive control over their own lives; the girl’s watchful father and mother would make the key decisions for their daughter, ideally, though not always, with her consent. But Anne—an orphan in her midtwenties, with some resources left to her by her father’s will and more due to her upon her marriage—was, in the phrase of the times, “wholly at her own government.” She was independent, in a way virtually ordained to excite a young man’s sexual interest, and she was free to make her own decisions. Shakespeare’s lifelong fascination with women who are in this position may have had its roots in the sense of freedom Anne Hathaway awakened in him. He would have felt a release from the constraints of his own family, a release too, perhaps, from the sexual confusion and ambiguity that Elizabethan moralists associated with playacting. If the imaginary schoolboy performance of Plautus had any equivalent in reality—if Will ever experienced a disturbing erotic excitement in acting a love scene with another boy—then Anne Hathaway offered a reassuringly conventional resolution to his sexual ambivalence or perplexity.

  Quite apart from this imaginary resolution—whose appeal, albeit temporary, is not to be underestimated—Anne offered a compelling dream of pleasure. So at least one might conclude from the centrality of wooing in Shakespeare’s whole body of work, from The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew to The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest. Lovemaking, not in the sense of sexual intercourse but in the older sense of intense courting and pleading and longing, was one of his abiding preoccupations, one of the things he understood and expressed more profoundly than almost anyone in the world. That understanding may not have had anything to do with the woman he married, of course, and, theoretically at least, it need not have had anything to do with his lived experience at all. But the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.

  The adult Shakespeare is very funny about the love antics of rustic youths. In As You Like It, for example, he mocks the besotted bumpkin so in love with a milkmaid that he kisses “the cow’s dugs that her pretty chapped hands had milked” (2.4.44–45). But somewhere lurking behind the laughter may be a distorted, wry recollection of Shakespeare’s own fumbling adolescent efforts, efforts that were perhaps more amply rewarded than he had anticipated. By the summer’s end, Anne Hathaway was pregnant.

  Shakespeare’s marriage has been the subject of almost frenzied interest, ever since a great nineteenth-century b
ibliophile, Sir Thomas Phillipps, found an odd document in the bishop of Worcester’s registry. The document, dated November 28, 1582, was a bond for what was in the period a very large sum of money, forty pounds (twice the annual income of the Stratford schoolmaster; eight times the annual income of a London clothworker), put up in order to facilitate the wedding of “William Shagspere” and “Anne Hathwey of Stratford in the Dioces of Worcester maiden.”

  The couple—or someone close to the couple—wanted the marriage to take place without delay. The reason for the haste was not specified in the bond, but for once there is a properly documented explanation: the baptism six months later—on May 28, 1583, to be exact—of their daughter Susanna. The language of the bond notwithstanding, a “maiden” Anne Hathaway of Stratford in the diocese of Worcester was definitely not.

  Normally, a wedding ceremony could take place only after the banns—the formal declaration of an intent to marry—had been publicly proclaimed on three successive Sundays in the local parish church. The interval that this process necessarily entailed could be compounded by the vagaries of canon law (the code of ecclesiastical rules and regulations), which did not permit the reading of banns during certain periods in the church calendar. In late November 1582 such a prohibited period was fast approaching. By submitting a sworn assurance that there were no impediments of the sort that the banns were designed to bring to light, it was possible, for a fee, to obtain a dispensation, enabling a marriage license to be issued at once. But to back up the sworn assurance, there had to be a way to indemnify the diocesan authorities and to guarantee that something—a prior contract to marry, for example, or the objection of a parent to the marriage choice of a minor, or a covenant not to marry until the end of a term of apprenticeship—would not unexpectedly turn up, solemn oaths notwithstanding, and send the whole business into court. Hence the bond, which would become void if no impediment surfaced.