Seconded by his son-in-law John Hall, Shakespeare told Greene that he was not going to back the corporation in protesting the proposed enclosure; indeed, he thought, or claimed to think, that “there will be nothing done at all.” Either Shakespeare was lied to (“they assured him . . .”) or he was lying, for less than two months later, in early January, the work began. The encloser Combe, who seems to have been a nasty and pugnacious fellow, ordered a ditch to be dug; there were arguments, harsh words, and blows. Women and children from Stratford and nearby Bishopton organized themselves, went out, and filled in the ditch; and a long court fight began. Shakespeare stayed out of it, indifferent to its outcome perhaps. For already back in October, he had reached an agreement with the enclosers that if his tithe interests were at all compromised, he would have “reasonable satisfaction . . . in yearly rent or a sum of money.” He did not stand to lose anything, and he did not choose to join his cousin Greene in a campaign on behalf of others who might be less fortunate. Perhaps, as some have said, Shakespeare believed in modernizing agriculture and thought that in the long run everyone would prosper; more likely, he simply did not care. It is not a terrible story, but it is not uplifting either. It is merely and disagreeably ordinary.
The same can be said perhaps about the difficulties surrounding the marriage of his daughter Judith, the ill-fated twin sister of Hamnet. His elder daughter, Susanna, had wed someone Shakespeare liked, but Judith’s proposed match, Thomas Quiney, was designed to make any father of the bride wince. At least he would not have come as a complete surprise. The Shakespeares and the Quineys had been acquainted for many years—as one of the rare surviving letters to the playwright shows, the groom’s father had once asked Will for a loan. Young Quiney was twenty-seven years old, a vintner by trade; Judith was thirty-one: not quite the age difference between William and Anne, but enough perhaps to trigger a twinge of uneasiness if Shakespeare had come to feel that a husband should be older than his wife. The initial problem, in any case, was not the age difference; it was a matter of the marriage license. The couple wanted to marry in 1616 during the Lenten season, when weddings were officially prohibited without special permission. Failing to obtain this permission, they were married anyway and then got caught. When Thomas failed to show up on the appointed day at the consistorial court in Worcester, where he would have faced a fine, he was promptly excommunicated. Judith may have shared in this punishment. Shakespeare was hardly a paragon of piety, but he had always been rather careful to avoid trouble—it was a strategy that went back a long way in his life—and this unpleasantness may have upset him.
He was in for something far more upsetting. A month after the wedding between Judith and Thomas, an unmarried Stratford woman named Margaret Wheeler died in childbirth, and her child died with her. Sexual transgressions—“whoredom, fornication, and uncleanness,” in the words of the official homily—were routinely investigated and punished in this period, and the death of the unwed mother and child did not close the case. It would in any event have been difficult, in a town the size of Stratford, to keep such secrets for long. On March 26, 1616, the newlywed Thomas Quiney confessed in the vicar’s court that he was responsible and was sentenced to a humiliating public penance, which he evaded by donating five shillings to the poor.
Shakespeare may have had very limited physical and psychological strength to deal with the crisis: in less than a month’s time, he would be dead. The public disgrace of his son-in-law no doubt came at the worst possible moment for him. Indeed, some biographers have gone so far as to attribute Shakespeare’s decline to the shock of Quiney’s confession and the public humiliation. This seems highly implausible: Shakespeare was hardly a rigid Victorian moralist. In The Tempest, he had Prospero urge strict chastity before marriage, but he had also written Measure for Measure and other plays that depict sexual appetite with compassion or wry amusement. For that matter, Anne Hathaway had been pregnant when he stood with her at the altar. Shakespeare may have felt some version of the sentiments of the old shepherd in The Winter’s Tale—“I would there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting. . . .” (3.3.58–61)—but he is unlikely to have fallen apart at the revelation of his son-in-law’s behavior. Still, this was an ugly story, and it was his own daughter, not some imaginary Audrey or Jaquenetta, who must have felt the full force of the humiliation.
Shakespeare had probably been feeling unwell for some months, for already in January, just at the time he must have learned of the proposed wedding, he had called for his attorney, Francis Collins, and asked him to draft his last will and testament. The document, for reasons unknown, was not completed at that time, but on March 25, the day before Thomas Quiney’s sentencing in the ecclesiastical court, Collins returned, and Shakespeare finished his will, signing the pages with a very shaky hand. The will was both cursory and sour in relation to his wife, Anne, the recipient of the famous second-best bed. But in relation to his daughter Judith it was much more careful and canny. The great bulk of the estate would go to Susanna and her husband, but Judith would not be excluded entirely. She would be given immediately the reasonably handsome marriage portion of a hundred pounds and could, under highly restrictive conditions, receive more money. Collins, or the clerk who was writing down the words dictated by the dying man, made a telling correction. “I give and bequeath unto my son-in-law,” Shakespeare evidently began and then, at the thought of Thomas Quiney, abruptly changed course: “son-in-law” is crossed out and replaced with “daughter Judith.” There would, the will stipulates, be another £50 in the marriage portion, but only if Judith renounced her claim to one of the properties she might have expected to inherit. And if she or any children she might bear should still be alive after three years, another £150 would be theirs; if Judith were dead and there were no children, then £100 would go to Susanna’s daughter, Elizabeth Hall, and £50 to Shakespeare’s surviving sister, Joan. Not a penny then to Judith’s husband, Thomas Quiney. Indeed, Judith herself, should she live (as in fact she did), would only get the annual interest from the £150, not the principal, and Quiney could claim the sum only if he came up with the equivalent amount in land. In other words, his daughter Judith was not getting much of her father’s wealth, and her husband—not mentioned by name—would not get his hands on any of it.
That is not quite all. Among the numerous small bequests—his sword to Thomas Combe; five pounds to Thomas Russell; money to buy rings for “my fellows” John Heminges, Richard Burbage, and Henry Condell; and so forth—there was a token of remembrance for his younger daughter: Judith was to receive “my broad silver-gilt bowl.” But virtually everything else of value—money, New Place, the Blackfriars gatehouse, and “all my barns, stables, orchards, gardens, lands, tenements,” etc., etc.—went to Susanna and her husband and to their children and children’s children. To the poor of Stratford, this very wealthy man left the modest sum of ten pounds. Nothing for the church; nothing for the local school; no scholarship for a deserving child; no bequest to a worthy servant or apprentice. Beyond the family and a very small circle of friends, there was no extended world of concern. And even within the family, almost everything had contracted to the single line Shakespeare hoped to establish and maintain. Anne and Judith would have understood exactly what it all meant for them.
The contraction of his world helps perhaps to explain how quietly he passed from it. His burial on April 25, 1616, is noted in the Stratford register, but there are no contemporary accounts of his last hours. He was not at all slighted: he was buried, as befitted such an important person, in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church, and already by the 1630s, the painted funerary monument, familiar to innumerable tourists to Stratford, had been erected. But no one at the time thought to record the details of his illness or his passing, or at least no documents doing so have survived. The earliest known account of Shakespeare’s
death was jotted down in the early 1660s by John Ward, vicar of Stratford from 1662 to 1681. Ward dutifully reminded himself to read the works of Stratford’s most famous writer—“Remember to peruse Shakespeare’s plays, and be versed in them, that I may not be ignorant in that matter”—and then noted what he had heard about the great man’s end: “Shakespeare, Drayton, and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting, and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.”
That such a merry meeting could have taken place is not inconceivable: Michael Drayton, an accomplished poet, was from Warwickshire, and perhaps, as some have thought, he and Jonson came to Stratford to celebrate Judith’s wedding. But there are certainly no corroborating signs of paternal joy in Judith’s marriage, and fevers are not ordinarily contracted from hard drinking. Ward’s brief note is probably not to be trusted, any more than is the still briefer comment from the late seventeenth century about Shakespeare’s end: “He died a papist.” This comment, penned by a chaplain of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, named Richard Davies, is intriguing, given Shakespeare’s complex relationship to Catholicism, but, as Davies provides no further evidence, it may only reflect a sense that he had returned at the end of his life to the point from which he had begun.
Even if we strip away the machinations over the enclosures, the probable sense of disappointment in his younger daughter, the disgrace of Thomas Quiney, the sour anger toward his wife; even if we imagine his Stratford life as a sweet idyll—the great poet watching the peaches ripen on the espaliered trees or playing with his granddaughter—it is difficult to escape a sense of constriction and loss. The magician abjures his astonishing, visionary gift; retires to his provincial domain; and submits himself to the crushing, glacial weight of the everyday.
He who had imagined the lives of kings and rebels, Roman emperors and black warriors, he who had fashioned a place for himself in the wild world of the London stage, would embrace ordinariness. Shakespeare would enact a final, fantastic theatrical experiment: the everyday life of a country gentleman, the role he had been slowly constructing for years through the purchase of the coat of arms, the investments, the decision to keep his family in Stratford, the careful maintenance of old social networks. Why would he have done such a thing? In part, perhaps, because of a lingering sense of lack. Shakespeare began his life with questions about his faith, his love, and his social role. He had never found anything equivalent to the faith on which some of his contemporaries had staked their lives. If he himself had once been drawn toward such a commitment, he had turned away from it many years before. To be sure, he had infused his theatrical vision with the vital remnants of that faith, but he never lost sight of the unreality of the stage and never pretended that his literary visions could simply substitute for the beliefs that led someone like Campion to his death. And though he may have had brief glimpses of bliss, he had never found or could never realize the love of which he wrote and dreamed so powerfully. From the perspective of this sense of lack—a skeptical intimation of hollowness in faith and in love—his performance of the role of the ordinary gentleman might be seen as a crucial achievement.
But the embrace of the everyday is surely not only a question of lack and compensation; it is a question of the nature of his whole magnificent imaginative achievement. Throughout his career Shakespeare was fascinated by exotic locations, archaic cultures, and larger-than-life figures, but his imagination was closely bound to the familiar and the intimate. Or rather, he loved to reveal the presence of ordinariness in the midst of the extraordinary. Shakespeare has been criticized from time to time for this quality: pedants have sourly observed that his toga-wearing Romans throw up their hats in the air, as if they are London workmen; critics concerned with decorum have complained that a handkerchief—something you blow your nose in—is too vulgar an object to be mentioned, let alone to serve at the center of a tragedy; and at least one great writer—Tolstoy—thought that an aged Lear who walks about raving wildly was an appropriate object not of awe but of moral revulsion and aesthetic contempt.
It is true: Shakespeare’s imagination never soared altogether above the quotidian, never entered the august halls of the metaphysical and shut the door to the everyday. In Venus and Adonis, we see the sweat on the face of the goddess of love. In Romeo and Juliet, while the grieving parents weep over Juliet’s lifeless body, the musicians who have been hired for the wedding quietly joke with each other while they put away their instruments—and then decide to linger for the funeral dinner. In Antony and Cleopatra, the same observer who describes sultry Cleopatra on her gorgeous barge also paints a very different picture: “I saw her once / Hop forty paces through the public street” (2.2.234–35).
He made a decision early in his life, or perhaps a decision was made for him: he had something amazing in him, but it would not be the gift of the Demiurge; rather, it would be something that would never altogether lose its local roots. There is a letter that was written by Machiavelli shortly after he had lost his position in Florence and had been forcibly rusticated. He writes with disgust of the vulgar arguments and stupid games he was forced to watch at the local taverns. His only relief came in the evenings, when he could put off the clothes sullied by the banalities of the daylight hours. Dressed in a rich gown, he would take down from his shelves his beloved authors—Cicero, Livy, Tacitus—and feel that at last he had companions fit for his intellect. Nothing could be further from Shakespeare’s sensibility. He never showed signs of boredom at the small talk, trivial pursuits, and foolish games of ordinary people. The highest act of his magician Prospero is to give up his magical powers and return to the place from which he had come.
Perhaps Shakespeare was drawn home by something else, a motive that—unlike all the others in his very private life—seems to lie in plain sight. Everyone has noticed the slight in his will to his wife, Anne, along with the slights to his daughter Judith and to her scapegrace of a husband. But that will is also, in its quiet way, a remarkable declaration of love, a declaration that may help to explain what drew him back to Stratford. The woman who most intensely appealed to Shakespeare in his life was twenty years younger than he: his daughter Susanna. It cannot be an accident that three of his last plays—Pericles, The Winter’s Tale, and The Tempest—are centered on the father-daughter relationship and are so deeply anxious about incestuous desires. What Shakespeare wanted was only what he could have in the most ordinary and natural way: the pleasure of living near his daughter and her husband and their child. He understood that this pleasure had a strange, slightly melancholy dimension, a joy intimately braided together with renunciation—that is the burden of those last plays. But it is a strangeness that hides within the boundaries of the everyday. And that is where he was determined to end his days.
A Note to the Reader
AROUND 1598, STILL relatively early in Shakespeare’s career, a man named Adam Dyrmonth, about whom next to nothing is known, set out to list the contents of a collection of speeches and letters that he had transcribed. Evidently, his mind began to wander, because he began to scribble idly. Among the jottings that cover the page are the words “Rychard the second” and “Rychard the third,” along with half-remembered quotations from Love’s Labour’s Lost and The Rape of Lucrece. Above all, the scribbler repeatedly wrote the words “William Shakespeare.” He wanted to know, it seems, what it felt like to write that particular name as one’s own. Dyrmonth might have been the first to be driven by this curiosity, but he certainly was not the last.
As Dyrmonth’s scribblings suggest, Shakespeare was famous in his own lifetime. Only a few years after Shakespeare’s death, Ben Jonson celebrated him as “the wonder of our Stage” and the “Star of poets.” But at the time such literary celebrity did not ordinarily lead to the writing of biographies, and no contemporary seems to have thought it worthwhile to collect whatever could be found out about Shakespeare while his memory was still green. As it happens, more is known about him than about most professional writers o
f the time, but this knowledge is largely the consequence of the fact that England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century was already a record-keeping society and that many of the records survived, to be subsequently combed over by eager scholars. Even with this relative abundance of information, there are huge gaps in knowledge that make any biographical study of Shakespeare an exercise in speculation.
What matters most are the works, most of which (the poems excepted) were carefully assembled by two of Shakespeare’s longtime associates and friends, John Heminges and Henry Condell, who brought out the First Folio in 1623, seven years after the playwright’s death. Eighteen of the thirty-six plays in this great volume, including such masterpieces as Julius Caesar, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, had not appeared in print before; without the First Folio they might have vanished forever. The world owes Heminges and Condell an immense debt. But beyond noting that Shakespeare wrote with great facility—“what he thought,” they claimed, “he uttered with that easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers”—the editors had little or no interest in furthering biography. They chose to arrange the contents by genre—Comedies, Histories, and Tragedies—and they did not bother to note when and in what order Shakespeare wrote each of his plays. After many decades of ingenious research, scholars have reached a reasonably stable consensus, but even this time line, so crucial for any biography, is inevitably somewhat speculative.
So too are many of the details of the life. The Stratford vicar John Bretchgirdle noted in the parish register the baptism of “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” on April 26, 1564. Though anything can be called into question, that much seems beyond a reasonable doubt, but the scholars who subsequently fixed Shakespeare’s date of birth as April 23—on the assumption that there was ordinarily a three-day interval at the time between birth and baptism—were engaged in speculation.
Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare Page 43