Shakespeare's Wife
Page 21
Perrott sold these on 25 August, to ‘Mr Shakespeare one book, Mr Barber one coverlet, ii daggers, the three books, Ursula Field [Young’s sister] the apparel and the bedding clothes, at Whitsuntide was twelvemonth’.89 The court decided that Young should be ‘damnified’ to the value of £6 9s 6d, and pay 6d costs. Young seems to have been unable to cope with being left to rear three children on her own; in October 1595 she had been cited in the Vicar’s Court for ‘continually quarrelling and not attending church’. She did not appear, was excommunicated and fined 2s l0d.
Avice Clarke, a single woman and a ‘stranger’ who died in Stratford in 1624, was a pedlar. Her inventory lists the contents of her pack, all of it haberdashery:
nine coifs of black and tawney [assessed at]
3s
six handkerchiefs
2s
eleven drawn work coifs
3s
nine coifs
2s 3d
six crest cloths
12d
six plain coifs
2s
thirteen bands
3s
six pairs of garters
3s
six pairs of gloves
l0d
coarse gartering
20d
five other garters
12d
seven dozen laces
2s 4d
seven dozen points
1s
two dozen white inkles
1s
six yards of loom work
12d
one ounce of thread
8d
two dozen bandstrings
18d
one paper of handkerchief buttons
18d
nine silk points (?)
12d
pins
2d
one box of brooches
6d
eight boxes
2d
thimbles and two bound graseies
4d
forty-two yards of bone lace
4s
four and a half dozen yards of loom work lace
4s…91
Avice kept a servant called Mary Beddson, whom she remembered in her will, and she made a small legacy to Peter Woodhouse, ‘chapman of small wares’, who seems to have been her colleague. Such rare and precious documents give us our only glimpses of women working alongside mercers, haberdashers and pedlars. The wares that were cried by women up and down the streets of London include:
Bands, shirts or ruffs,
Handkerchiefs or cuffs,
Garters, knives or purses
Or Muscova silken muffs92
For an Elizabethan working girl a visit from a pedlar was one of very few opportunities for retail therapy. In the jest book of Sir Nicholas Le Strange we read of ‘a gentlewoman [who] loved to bubble away her money in bone-laces, pins and such toys, often used this short ejaculation, “God love me as I love a pedlar.”’93
Somewhere in an intricate and elastic web of retail trading of small wares, Gilbert Shakespeare plied the haberdasher’s trade. It seems unlikely that he was himself a chapman or a pedlar, but equally unlikely that he kept a shop in competition with the mercery mafia who controlled Stratford. Of 232 aldermen elected to the Corporation between its institution and the Civil War, 71 were Quineys or Quiney connections; the trading network extended through the west midlands, to Coventry and Birmingham to the north and southwards to London. We have no record of Gilbert as a shopkeeper in Stratford or in London. Besides, the stock in trade of a mercer was costly, and the Shakespeares were broke. It seems more likely that Gilbert traded in a modest way in wares of local manufacture that he sold on in London, and bought imported wares in London for resale in the provinces. He seems more likely to have organised, supplied and co-ordinated groups of chapmen than actually to have been himself a pedlar.
The haberdasher’s stock in trade was affordable. Most of the items in Avice’s pack were made by women in their homes, who had to be supplied with their materials, and with patterns to enable them to follow the current fashion. The finished work had also to be collected and conveyed to the nearest or best market to be sold on. The matter was not as straightforward as it might seem; the overseer of this female cottage industry had to make sure that the work was clean, saleable and of good quality, and that he could hold his own against those who peddled cheap and gaudy imports at a lower price. This is the level at which one can see Gilbert Shakespeare finding his niche, especially if one of the women who was making and organising the making of merchandise for him was his sister-in-law.
Shakespeare’s Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale is a thief, stealing linen from the hedges, picking pockets, ‘a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles’, a haunter of ‘wakes, fairs and bear-baitings’. At the sheep-shearing feast he impersonates a pedlar, equipping himself with typical haberdashery, including a large range of gloves:
no milliner can so fit his customers with gloves…He hath ribbons of all the colours i’the’rainbow; points [the tags that finished the ends of the laces attaching bodices, sleeves and hose]…inkles [linen tapes], caddisses [worsted tapes used for tying up stockings], cambrics, lawns…
Autolycus sings his wares in rather more high-falutin’ fashion:
Lawn as white as driven snow,
Cypress black as ne’er was crow,
Gloves as sweet as damask roses,
Masks for faces, and for noses,
Bugle-bracelet, necklace amber,
Perfume for a lady’s chamber,
Golden quoifs and stomachers
For my lads to give their dears,
Pins and poking sticks of steel…
Autolycus himself is neither pedlar nor haberdasher, so Shakespeare cannot be accused of pillorying his haberdasher brother as a rogue. The role he assumes as a pedlar is an attractive one that could have been an affectionate remembrance of a younger brother’s brilliant career as an uncommonly gifted travelling salesman.
We have no indication at all that Shakespeare was ever aware of his brother, or ever in his brother’s company as an adult, but we do know that from about 1604 Shakespeare lived in the house of a Huguenot tiremaker called Christopher Mountjoy, on the corner of Monkswell and Silver Streets in Cripplegate. This was the haberdashers’ quarter; the Haberdashers’ Hall was close by on the corner of Staining Lane and Maiden Lane. Tires were ornamental headdresses of twisted wire, and as such part of the haberdashers’ stock in trade. Mountjoy’s, which were top of the range, being of gold and silver and studded with gems, were made to order, but tires of cheaper materials would have been offered on street stalls and by travelling chapmen. It is usually thought that Shakespeare was introduced to the Mountjoys by Richard Field. Field, the original printer of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece, was married to the widow of the Huguenot printer Vautrollier. They lived close by in Wood Street and worshipped at the French Church. If Field was embarrassed by the association with the notorious author of a mildly pornographic best-seller, it seems more likely that, ten years after their successful collaboration had come to its rather swift end, neither Field nor Mrs Field was often in contact with Shakespeare, which leaves his brother the haberdasher as the possible connection with Mountjoy.
If Ann had provided for her children during their father’s absence by becoming involved in the textile industry, she would have done nothing unusual. In The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1600), when newly married Rafe Damport, journeyman to the master shoe-maker Simon Eyre, is pressed for a soldier, his young wife wails: ‘What shall I do when he is gone?’ Eyre rallies her: ‘Let me see thy hand, Jane. The fine hand, this white hand, these pretty fingers must spin, must card, must work. Work you bombast cotton-candle-quean, work for your living with a pox to you!’94
Gilbert, born in October 1566, would have reached his majority in 1587, which is about when most scholars think Shakespeare took himself off. Gilbert was never to marry.
The state of marriage was thought a desirable
one, both for mutual comfort and support, and for raising children to carry on the family name, and young men of Stratford were expected to marry once they had completed their apprenticeship. Bachelors aged more than thirty were rare; so much so that the compilers of the 1595 list of maltsters felt it necessary to explain that John Page, ‘a smith by trade’ was ‘a man never married’.95
Never married men were not rare in the Shakespeare household, which contained three of them. In Shakespeare’s plays brotherhood is not an easy relationship. We have only to think of Orlando’s fratricidal brother, and the usurping younger brother of the exiled duke in As You Like It, of Richard III, of Prospero’s treacherous younger brother and Sebastian plotting against his brother the King of Naples in The Tempest, not to mention the bastard brothers, Faulconbridge in King John, Don John in Much Ado and Edmund in King Lear. Brotherhood in Shakespeare is far more problematic than marriage.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
of how one Stratford boy became a leading printer, and another wrote a sexy poem that became a notorious best-seller, being literally read to pieces, and Ann buried her only son
All her life Ann Shakespeare could rely on the support and guidance of her brother Bartholomew Hathaway, and never did she need it more than in the difficult years when her children were small. He, it will be remembered, was married three weeks after their father’s death, on 25 November 1581, to Isabel Hancocks of Tredington. He was then farming in Tredington and Tysoe, as well as cultivating half of the Hewlands yardland and helping his stepmother and half-siblings to run their part of the Shottery farm. His first son, named for his father Richard, was christened at Tysoe. In April 1583, shortly before his sister bore her first child, Bartholomew took a lease on a house in Ely Street and moved his family to Stratford. It is possible, but not likely, that Ann and her family lived there with him—indeed it is possible that she was married from her brother’s house in Tysoe. One thing we can be sure of is that Bartholomew took his responsibilities as head of the Hathaway-Gardner family seriously. It is not inconceivable that he decided to base himself in Stratford because of concern for his sister, by then probably his closest surviving relative. When Bartholomew’s second child was born in January of the next year, she was christened Annys, and it seems likely that her aunt Ann was her godmother. (When Annys was married in 1610 it was as ‘Ann’ Hathaway.) Two years later another boy was born and christened John; two years later a new baby died before it could be baptised, and two years after that, in 1590, Edmund came along. The name is not a common one in Stratford, and it may be that he was named for his young uncle, Edmund Shakespeare.
As Bartholomew was a constant presence in Ann’s life, it is fitting to give some account of him, if only to correct the erroneous impression often given that he was some kind of dependant of Shakespeare’s. He was god-fearing, hard-working and astute and could both read and write. By 1605 he was of sufficient substance to be appointed one of the four churchwardens of Holy Trinity, a position that he held for four years.1 To be eligible for the post he had to have an income of at least £200 a year.
These officials upon whom the administration of the church and parish so much depended, were chosen from ‘the better sort’, the more substantial men of the parish and the borough. Their chief duties…were:
1. to ‘present’ or report all offenders to the [vicar’s] court;
2. to certify the performance of court orders;
3. to see that the church and church property were in good repair;
4. to see that the books and articles required were provided and kept in good condition;
5. to see that all attended church at the required times and behaved themselves there.2
Hathaway carried out the public services expected of a substantial citizen—as Shakespeare markedly did not. In 1586 he collaborated with Stephen, Richard and Thomas Burman in drawing up the inventory of their Shottery neighbour William Such;3 in 1608 he led the team that drew up the inventory of the widow Alice Burman.4 In 1616 he signed his full name to the inventory of Humphrey Allen of Old Stratford when the others involved signed by mark.5
In 1610 Hathaway managed to buy for £200 the freehold of the land in Shottery that his family had held in copyhold since 1543. This would not have been as easy as it seems, for at the time powerful consortia were buying up all available arable land. There is no reason whatsoever for supposing that Shakespeare gave Hathaway the money for the purchase. When Bartholomew’s son Richard died in 1636 he left important freehold properties in Stratford and five lands in the common fields of Old Stratford, which may have been acquired earlier by his father and transferred to him by deed before his father made his will.6 If Shakespeare had abandoned his wife and children, Bartholomew Hathaway would have been in the best position to bring the case to the attention of the authorities; if he did not—we do not have all the records for the Vicar’s Court—it must be because his brother-in-law’s absence from home was condoned, and his sister was managing without him.
We don’t know if, in August 1592 when the plague broke out in London with such ferocity that the theatres had to be closed, Shakespeare took refuge in Stratford or elsewhere. Stratford escaped the contagion; the parish registers show that mortality for 1592–3 remained within the normal parameters. Whether Shakespeare chose to wait it out in Stratford or not probably depends as much on where Ann and the children were living as on anything else, for he needed space and quiet to write what would turn out to be a huge best-seller, namely the housewives’ favourite poem, Venus and Adonis. This would be the first time a work by Shakespeare would appear in print. Whether Ann could read or not, she would not have been allowed to remain in ignorance of this turn of events. Some well-meaning person would have told her that there was a book selling like hot cakes in London with her husband’s name on it. Besides, the printer—publisher, Richard Field, was a Stratford man.
Field, three years older than Shakespeare, was the son of the tanner Henry Field, whose shop stood in Bridge Street. In 1579, when he was eighteen his father bound him apprentice to George Bishop, a London stationer, who agreed that he could serve the first six of his seven years of indentures with Thomas Vautrollier, a Huguenot printer in Blackfriars, who as a foreigner was not permitted to take apprentices of his own. Vautrollier may have been a Calvinist; he certainly published the first British editions of Calvin’s Institutes in French in 1576 and 1584. In 1574 Vautrollier was awarded the patent for printing Latin school texts for ten years; in 1582 he published the Metamorphoses in Latin, and in 1574 had published the Latin edition of Ovid’s Fasti that Shakespeare would later use for Lucrece. In 1586 Vautrollier printed Timothy Bright’s Treatise of Melancholy, which is generally accepted as one of the sources for Hamlet. Vautrollier was often away running his Edinburgh printing shop, at which times his wife Jacqueline managed his London business with Field’s help.
Field lived the apprentices’ dream; on 2 February 1587 he was made free of the Stationers’ Company. Five months later Vautrollier died and his widow, who inherited all of Vautrollier’s copyrights, his presses, type and devices, took over the business. In February 1588, she married twenty-six-year-old Field, who stepped into the shoes of one of the most prestigious printer—publishers in Britain. Field printed and published Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie in 1589. Like his master, as a printer Field was probably allowed to take only one apprentice, but there was nothing to stop him employing other people, of whom Shakespeare may for a time have been one.
The Shakespeares and the Fields certainly knew each other. After Henry Field died in 1592, John Shakespeare appraised his goods for probate.7 It may be that when Shakespeare went to London to try his fortune, he based himself at first at Vautrollier’s shop. He may have worked there as a proof-reader or assessor of manuscripts for publication, which would partly explain the curious scatter of sources that we find across the whole range of his works, which includes texts in Latin and French and texts which had never appeared in print. Vautrollier publi
shed North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives in 1579, the same year Field joined the shop as an apprentice. Field would go on to print the second edition in 1595, then the third in 1603 and the fourth in 1607. Holinshed’s Chronicles, another of Shakespeare’s most important sources, was sold by five booksellers, of whom one was George Bishop, the stationer to whom Richard Field was originally apprenticed and for whom he was working out the last year of his apprenticeship when the volume was published in January 1587. Field maintained a close working relationship with another of the booksellers, John Harrison. When Field printed and published Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis in 1593, it was sold in Harrison’s shop; of the twenty-seven books Harrison published between 1590 and 1596, seventeen were printed by Field.
Like all poets of his generation Shakespeare was immersed in Ovid; he certainly used Golding’s English translation of the Metamorphoses, but he apparently knew the original Latin as well. One of Field’s first independent publications was a second edition of the Metamorphoses in 1589. Many other major and minor sources for Shakespeare’s works can be traced in Richard Field’s publishing history. He published Sir John Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso in 1591, and this was used by Shakespeare as a primary source of Much Ado About Nothing. He printed the second edition of Robert Greene’s Pandosto, the main source for Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. He printed the first full edition of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which influenced Shakespeare in many ways, and in 1598 he printed an edition of Sidney’s Arcadia, which Shakespeare used as a source for numerous plays, most notably King Lear and Pericles. In 1599 he printed Richard Crompton’s Mansion of Magnanimity, which Shakespeare used as a source for Henry V, generally considered to have been written at about the same time.