Shakespeare's Wife

by Germaine Greer

  For the horse, presumably. Duncan-Jones appears unaware that there were such things as litters, or that the Bard could have hitched a ride on the carrier’s wagon train. Coaches did exist, but they were too slow and cumbersome for a journey as long as from Stratford to London. Having created her Falstaffian Shakespeare, Duncan-Jones then turns him into a drunk.

  There are several reasons why, in the years 1615–16, he may indeed have been drinking more than was his wont…The first and most compelling reason is that he was already ill…If he ‘drank too hard’ towards the end, it was most probably in an attempt to palliate pain or distress.5

  Michael Wood too entertains the idea that Shakespeare was an alcoholic, principally on the grounds of the shakiness of the signature on the first draft of his will.6 Duncan-Jones prefers her own diagnosis ‘that heart and circulatory trouble were now added to latent syphilitic infection’.7 The syphilitic infection she takes to date from ‘visits to Turnmill Street’ in 1604–8. ‘Going to Turnmill Street to beat up whores was a traditional pastime for high-spirited young men throughout the Tudor period.’8 What the apprentices and students liked to do to the whores was, not to have intercourse with them without paying (anglice, to rape them), but to smash their glass windows and kick their doors in, as they do to the Bawd in Northward Ho (1607).9 It is possible but surely not probable that a successful businessman would turn juvenile hoodlum at the age of forty-five. Contemporary physician Philip Barrough was so used to finding the primary infection in very young men that he refers to his generic patient as a young man, even as ‘a lad or a stripling of tender years’.10 Duncan-Jones elaborates: ‘Though Shakespeare was to survive for nearly seven years more, his visits to Turnmill Street may have left him with an unwanted legacy of chronic and humiliating sickness.’11

  Turnmill Street, which was as often known as Turnbull or Turnball Street, was in Clerkenwell.12 Shakespeare had small need to travel so far when the Globe stood in the middle of the stews of Shoreditch and Southwark. So close was the relationship between the theatres and the stews that in 1593 the wife of the best-known tragedian Edward Alleyn, Joan Woodward, Henslowe’s stepdaughter, was carted through the streets of Southwark as a bawd, probably because it was thought she lived on the proceeds of prostitution, as perhaps she did.13 Both the Diocese of Winchester as landlord of parts of Southwark and Lord Hunsdon, who was granted the manor of Paris Garden by the queen, pocketed the rents of brothels in the theatre district without a qualm. George Wilkins, who is thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare in writing Particles, besides penning the odd pot-boiler, owned an inn in St Sepulchre’s which was also a house of ill repute.14

  One thing should be very clear: Shakespeare was vividly aware of venereal disease from the beginning of his career; his revulsion at the operation of lust was always expressed in terms of sickness, which no more goes to prove that he had experienced the horror for himself than that he hadn’t. He is far more likely to have risked casual sex earlier in his life than in middle age. If he did consort with prostitutes in his early years in London, and had seen the signs of venereal infection upon himself, or believed that he had been infected, we need seek no other reason for a cessation of intimacy between Ann and William. Succumbing to a momentary urge might have cost William the connubial comforts of his marriage with Ann. Certainly Ann lived far too long to have been infected by her husband with syphilis. However, the sixteenth century could not distinguish between syphilis (an imported disease) and gonorrhoea (which had been endemic for centuries). If William had contracted gonorrhoea and continued to cohabit with his wife after having been treated for it, she might well have contracted it and suffered sterilising disease as a consequence.

  Syphilis was a spectacular disease when it first manifested at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘This grief at the first was so extreme, cruel and so merciless, that it molested those who were infected therewith, even the head, eyes, nose, palate of the mouth, skin, flesh, bones, ligaments and all the inward parts of their bodies.’15 Duncan-Jones follows the view rather casually adopted by recent historians that by the second half of the sixteenth century the disease had settled down and was showing the same pattern, with two long periods of latency, that it did from the late seventeenth century. A careful reading of contemporary medical texts does not corroborate this view. Though observers agree that the disease was not as virulent as it had been but a few years before, latency is not yet established. Time and again all through the seventeenth century we find that a sufferer has been identified as such and ostracized. Gough’s report on a case brought as late as 1698 describes the dilemma of the Myddle parish authorities confronted with a supposed victim of venereal disease:

  The younger son of Charles Reve of Myddle Wood [who] had lived a year and more in Gloucestershire, came privately to his brother’s house in Myddle Wood, for he had got the French pox and was not able to do service. His brother was not able to maintain him and because no one else would receive him, our officers were forced to give his brother 2s 8d a week to harbour and maintain him.16

  In 1579 Ambrose Paré described the Lues Venerea thus:

  It partakes of an occult quality, commonly taking its original from ulcers of the privy parts and then further manifesting itself by pustules of the head and other external parts, and lastly infecting the entrails and inner parts with cruel and nocturnal tormenting pain of the head, shoulders, joints, and other parts. In process of time it causeth knots and hard tophi, and lastly corrupts and fouls the bones, dissolving them, the flesh about them being oft-times not hurt…

  Inner corruption became manifest in gross disfigurement:

  Some lose one of their eyes, others both, some lose a great portion of the eyelids, other some look very ghastly and not like themselves, and some become squint-eyed. Some lose their hearing, others have their noses fall flat, the palate of their mouths perforated with the loss of the bone Ethmoides…

  The effects of infection on the genitals could be catastrophic:

  There be some who have the Urethra or passage of the yard obstructed by budding caruncles or inflamed pustules, so that they cannot make water without the help of a catheter, ready to die within a short time unless you succor them by the amputation of their yards.

  Systemic effects were almost as spectacular:

  Others become lame of their arms, other some of their legs, and a third sort grow stiff by contraction of all their members, so they have nothing left them sound but their voice which serveth for no other purpose but to bewail their miseries, for which it is scantly sufficient.

  The terminal phases of the disease were often revolting.

  Wherefore should I trouble you with mention of those that can scantly draw their breath by reason of an asthma, or those whose whole bodies waste with a hectic fever and slow consumption? It fares far worse with these who have all their bodies deformed by a leprosy arising thence, and have all their throttles and throates eaten with putrid and cancrous ulcers, their hair falling off from their heads, their hands and feet cleft with tatters and scaly chinks, neither is their case much better, who, having their brains tainted with this disease, have their whole bodies shaken by fits of the falling sickness, who troubled with a filthy and cursed flux of the belly, do continually cast forth stinking and bloody filth.17

  Paré’s last observation, however, slightly undermines confidence in his diagnosis: ‘Lastly, there are no kinds of diseases, no sorts of symptoms, wherewith this disease is not complicate, never to be taken away, unless the virulency of this murrain be wholly taken away and impugned by its proper antidote, that is, argentum vivum.’18 Historians of medicine are still unable to disentangle the venereal disease process from the cumulative effects of treatment with argentum vivum, literally ‘quick silver’ or mercury, which was in routine use for treating syphilis/gonorrhoea well before 1579. Paracelsus, alias his translator John Hester, insists that the initial infection was always accompanied by intense pain, ‘great pricking and shooting between the
skin and the flesh’, which was so severe at night as to be unbearable; in our own time the initial chancre is held to be localised, painless and unaccompanied by systemic symptoms.

  Understanding how the disease manifested in the last decades of the sixteenth century is complicated by the effects of a growing awareness of its shameful nature; at first physicians believed that it could be caught from close stools (that is, toilet seats) and sleeping in infected sheets, but gradually, as they came to realise the disease’s entirely venereal character, the diagnosis went underground. Because it was rare to find an untreated case, it was impossible to disentangle the disease process from the dire consequences of the destructive therapies invented by the quack ‘pockmasters’. More conservative Galenists preferred to treat syphilis with the resin of the Jamaican tree Guaiacum officinale. ‘Of the kind of this hebenus is another strange and foreign wood, commonly called guaiacum, the powder whereof being filed off and boiled in water till three parts be consumed is most sovereign to cure the pox, and the loathsome infection gotten by lewd, filthy and lecherous life.’19 Philip Barrough, whose Method of Physic was republished nearly every year by Shakespeare’s first publisher Richard Field, observed that a disease of such long duration was bound to go through different phases, but the phases he describes are not the same as those described later. In his version too the signs of initial infection were neither localised nor trivial.

  Straightways after a young man is infected, he feeleth in himself a certain lassitude or weariness…a lumpish heaviness in the whole body, a dullness, faintness, litherness or slowness to move in all the members…Moreover, there is a certain pain or ache which wandreth throughout all the body or parts thereof.20

  Barrough also noticed a change in the complexion. Then within six months of the primary infection, or so Barrough thought, would appear ‘hard pustules in the whole body and in the head and beard’. ‘If the disease beginneth in the winter, it shall bring forth his crusts in the beginning of summer.’21 There is also a typical hoarseness, caused by the relaxation of the soft palate, and intense pain at night and unseen ‘corruption of the bones’. In Barrough’s description the different stages of the disease follow so hard upon each other that they seem almost continuous. He arrives at a tenth development in relatively short order, with no periods of latency worth mentioning:

  We may add here in the tenth and last place malign ulcers in all the parts of the body, which ulcerate the whole skin, head and all parts. To conclude there succeed this disease sometime their affects as asthma, which when it is come upon a patient, it declareth him to be past cure. Therefore never put such a one to pain by medicines or other means, for you shall never heal him.22

  The description given by William Clowes is of a piece with Barrough and Paré. One of his patients was a smith, fifty years old:

  for the space of twelve years he had been oftentimes in cure, both by the diet and by unction, and yet ever this disease did reverse, and return to the former state or worse. This infection was dispersed over all the parts of his body, namely, with hard swellings, prickings, with virulent and corrosive ulcers, and corruption of the bones and pains of the joints…23

  Clowes provides various prescriptions for the ointment, all of them containing argentum vivum. Barrough was well aware that he was more likely to encounter loosened teeth, collapse of the roof of the mouth and bone-deep ulceration in patients who had been treated with mercury, but even he occasionally used it when all else had failed.24 Eventually guaiacum was seen to be a symptomatic treatment and even the most hide-bound Galenists came to accept that the administration of mercury, though often destructive and dangerous, was the only effective way of treating venereal disease. Even an amateur gentlewoman practitioner like Lady Mildmay used mercury in her ‘ointment for the great disease’:

  Take an ounce of quicksilver and kill it with fasting spittle. Then put it into half a pound of boar’s grease. Mix them well together. Then take an ounce of mastic, an ounce of wine, an ounce of camphor. Beat these to powder, every one by themselves, and [sift] them. Then take one ounce of saltpetre and mingle them with the boar’s grease and quicksilver and anoint the party from the crown of the head to the soles of the feet, sparing no place but the eyes and ears.

  Then let the party keep his bed with moderate sweating 2 days and let him sit up for his ease the third day till night. Then anoint him as before and let him lie 2 days more and rise the third day. Take great heed for taking cold and use very good diet and warm drink. If the party take cold it is unto death. It will make the mouth to run very much.

  Lady Mildmay’s lotion ‘for the cure of the pox’, apparently used for affected members, is equally robust, being based on sublimate of arsenic, plus unsublimed arsenic. She also treated penile lesions ‘and the carnosities in the neck of the bladder, specially…such as proceed from the pox and all running of the back, be it of man or woman’. Lady Mildmay, in common with all her contemporaries, had no way of distinguishing gonococcal from syphilitic infection.

  Gervase Markham was addressing himself to humbler mortals, but even he includes specifics for ‘the French or Spanish pox’ in the opening section of The English Housewife and he too begins, ‘Take quicksilver and kill it with fasting spittle…’ A second ointment calls for ‘white lead and mercury sublimed’. A third ointment is described and then a drink ‘to put out the French or Spanish pox’, by which is meant to cause the skin lesions to appear so that they can be treated with one or other of the lotions.25

  If Shakespeare was infected for the first time in middle age when ‘the hey day in the blood is tame and waits upon the judgment’ he was a colossal fool. Still, if he had been in love with a professional courtesan, c.1600, as some think he was, he might have behaved recklessly. If the dark lady had made him a space on her crowded dance-card, he might have snatched at the opportunity and drunk disease and death with her kisses. If, on the other hand, the dark lady was Emilia Lanier, who lived to a hale old age, dying at the age of seventy-six in 1645, she seems far too healthy to have infected him. The casebooks of Simon Forman record that he examined her several times, without noting any symptom of the French disease. Indeed, his eagerness to ‘halek’ (his own jargon word for having sex) with her suggests indeed that he found her sound.26

  The whores of London were not irresistible. Both Henslowe and Alleyn, who were brothel-keepers as well as theatrical entrepreneurs, had daily dealings with prostitutes and yet lived to a healthy old age. But William Jaggard, the printer of the First Folio, lost his sight through the ravages of syphilis. Shakespeare’s old enemy Robert Greene may have met his premature end because of the effects of the pox, but his main symptom, massive oedema with virulent diarrhoea, suggests kidney and/or liver failure.

  At least one person was being treated for settled venereal infection in Stratford at about the time that Shakespeare is thought to have returned for good. In the Court of Record a surgeon called George Agge brought an action for ‘trespass on the case’ against the apothecary Philip Rogers, who was at the time suing him for a debt of 35s 7d. We first hear of Philip Rogers in the spring of 1604, when Ann Shakespeare sold him twenty bushels of malt and advanced him two shillings in June. Rogers only ever paid six shillings of the debt so Shakespeare sued him for 35s 10d, plus ten shillings damages.27 Rogers was probably a relation of William Rogers, sergeant-at-mace, who died in 1597. William Rogers was a victualler but, as his inventory contains distilling equipment, and a quantity of pharmaceuticals, we may conclude that he or someone else in his household worked as a druggist. Philip Rogers married Elinor Saunder in Wroxall on 9 October 1597, and he may have lived for some time in Wroxall. The first of his children to be christened at Holy Trinity was a daughter, Frances, on 6 January 1605. Another daughter, Rose, was christened on 20 September 1607, and another, Margaret, probably an older child, was buried on 19 March 1609. A son went to Oxford and obtained a licence to practise as a surgeon.29 Rogers’s wife Elinor was buried at Holy Trinity on 29 July 1613.
Although he was not buried in Stratford, Rogers seemed to have remained there for some years, and probably filled prescriptions for John Hall. In 1621 Hall treated Frances Rogers for vomiting, jaundice, amenorrhoea and nosebleeds with an emetic infusion and syrup of violets, purged her with a decoction of senna and sarsaparilla, and then gave her the white of hen’s dung in white wine with sugar, which must have done her the world of good.30

  George Agge seems not to have been a member of the well-known and extensive Ainge family of Stratford. According to the statement penned for him by the attorney William Tetherington he treated Philip Rogers twice, once in the summer of 1611 for ‘an ulcer in virga ipsius’ which he cured and again a year later for a great ulcer in his shin, which he also cured.31 Both the penile ulcer and the ulcer on the shin are typical of venereal disease as it manifested at this time.32 In such a case, the surgeon expected to be paid a substantial sum of twenty or thirty shillings per cure, but Rogers had given nothing in consideration. Agge had also provided Rogers with a cerecloth worth twenty pence, probably to be used as a plaster in his treatment or possibly for the burial of his daughter Margaret in 1609. For this too he had not been paid.

  In a list of residents called to answer the commission of the peace Agge is identified as a surgeon.33 The earliest mention of him in the Court of Record dates from 1605.34 His presentment in the Court of Record was part of a series of actions involving Philip Rogers of which we know only that Rogers had sued Agge for a debt of 35s 7d, most of which was owed for materials supplied for what was clearly a treatment for the pox, including not only the aniseed, senna, hermodactylis, sarsaparilla and liquorice used in the diet drink, but also the guaiacum, sassafras, bark, Venetian turpentine, burgundy pitch, mastic and sublimate of mercury used in electuaries and ointments. It seems that, in common with most of the litigation that found its way into the Court of Record, the action was partly to establish the correct state of the financial relationship between two colleagues who were obliged to deal almost entirely without cash. So intricate was the mutual indebtedness that both parties agreed to go to trial by jury. The outcome is lost to history.