Shakespeare's Wife
Page 41
The cost of production having been assessed at about 6s 8d a copy, the retail price can hardly have been less than about fifteen shillings. As Stanley Wells points out: ‘The publishers’ investment in a massive collection of play scripts was a declaration of faith in Shakespeare’s selling power as a dramatist for reading as well as for performing.’ 17 The declaration of faith and the investment may not after all have been the publishers’. If the publication was subsidised, the print-run could well have been small. In 1633, William Prynne was scandalised to notice that ‘Shakespeare’s Plays are printed on the best crown paper, far better than most Bibles,’ which suggests that for someone cost was no object. 18 Wells credits Hemmings and Condell with the actual editorial work; they commissioned a scribe called Ralph Crane to copy ‘a number of plays specially for the volume’ and chose ‘which printed editions and manuscripts to send to the printer…copy which must have been a printer’s nightmare’. What is obvious from the appearance of the First Folio is that a house style has been imposed on all this disparate material, which suggests to me at least that the editors did not take the risk of giving the printers jumbled papers or leaving them to impose a house style of their own. So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare’s widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband’s plays that no one has ever considered it.
As a widow Ann Shakespeare was entitled to make a will. If we could find it, and her inventory, we would know once for all whether she died a penniless dependant or whether she left money in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband’s work. If she did she would have left her executor no choice but to make available any funds remaining for a de-luxe second edition before he himself was gathered to his eternal reward.
All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband’s life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a ‘world-without-end bargain’. The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff:
I have done no harm. But I remember now
I am in this earthly world, where to do harm
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,
Do I put up that womanly defence
To say I have done no harm? (IV. ii. 75–80)
NOTES
ABBREVIATIONS
BL
British Library
CSPD
Calendar of State Papers Domestic
CSPF
Calendar of State Papers Foreign
DNB
Dictionary of National Biography
M&A
Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon 1553–1620, vols i-iv ed. R. Savage and E. I. Fripp, vol. v ed. Levi Fox (Hertford, Dugdale Society, 1921–90)
MS
manuscript
NA
National Archives
OED
Oxford English Dictionary
SBTRO
Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Record Office
SPD
State Papers Domestic
VCH
Victoria County History
INTRODUCTION
1. Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 103.
2. Chambers Bunten, Life of Alice Barnham, passim.
3. Bacon, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life’, Essays, viii.
4. Tasso, Of Marriage and Wiving, Sig. Blv.
5. DNB. His wife was Philippa de Roet, daughter of the Rienne king-at-arms and she bore him at least three children—two sons, Thomas who survived to adulthood and Lewis who didn’t, and a daughter Elizabeth who became a nun. The marriage is presumed to date from c.1364 and Philippa is thought to have died in about 1387.
6. Moore, ‘Notices of the Life of Lord Byron’, 136n.
7. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 173.
8. ibid.
9. Malone, Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare’s Plays, i, 653.
10. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 247.
11. Thomas De Quincey, quoted in Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 322.
12. ibid., 312. The allegation was repeated in Rees’s Cyclopaedia (1819).
13. Moore, ‘Notices of the Life of Lord Byron’, 136n.
14. Hunter, New Illustrations, i, 51.
15. Joyce, Ulysses, 247.
16. Schoenbaum, Shakespeare’s Lives, 765.
17. Holden, William Shakespeare, 63–4.
18. Guizot, Shakespeare et son temps, 22–3.
19. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 147.
20. Price, Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, 14.
21. Armstrong, Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis, 2–3.
22. ibid., 3.
23. [Cooke], How to chuse a good wife from a bad, Sig. [A2v].
CHAPTER ONE
1. Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life &c of Mr. William Shakespeare’, in Rowe, Works of Shakespeare, i, ii–iii.
2. Holy Trinity Parish Register, SBTRO, DR 243/1.
3. Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 63.
4. The thirteenth-century Legenda Sanctorum of Jacopus de Voragine, printed by Caxton in 1483 as The Golden Legend.
5. Worcestershire Record Office, 008.7, 16/1601; Schoenbaum, Documentary Life, illustration facing p. 69.
6. Hoskins, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640’, 44–59.
7. NA, Prob. 11/64/31; Schoenbaum, Documentary Life, 60; complete transcript, Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage, 221–3.
8. Fripp, Shakespeare, 184.
9. According to the International Genealogical Index a Catherine Hathaway married a Henry Widdowes at Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, in 1590.
10. M&A, iii, 137.
11. e.g. Wood, In Search of Shakespeare, 81.
12. Warwickshire Corn Enquiry, M&A, v, 58.
13. Henslowe’s Diary, 90.
14. ibid., 89.
15. ibid., 126.
16. Belvedere or the Garden of the Muses, Sig. [b2v].
17. Henslowe’s Diary, 138.
18. ibid., 65.
19. ibid., 166.
20. Dulwich College MSS, vol. 1, Article 33 (Henslowe’s Diary, 295).
21. Henslowe’s Diary, 183.
22. ibid., 193.
23. ibid., 186–7.
24. ibid., 206.
25. ibid., 221.
26. ibid., 208.
27. ibid., 221, 222.
28. Vicar General’s Book No. 4, f. 301v, Principal Probate Registry, Somerset House, in Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage, 233–4.
CHAPTER TWO
1. That is, if the first Joan Shakespeare in the baptismal register of Holy Trinity is his daughter, and perhaps even later if—as I suspect—Joan is the child of another John Shakespeare.
2. SBTRO, ER3/1923; Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines (7th edn 1887), ii, 173; Hone, The Manor, 125, 310; Chambers, William Shakespeare, 30–1; VCH: Warwickshire, iii, 44.
3. SBTRO, Miscellaneous Documents, ii, 21; Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines (7th edn 1887), ii, 173–6.
4. Wood, In Search of Shakespeare, 27.
5. M&A, ii, xlvi, xlviii, 110; iii, 14.
6. M&A, v, 149, 161.
7. Emanuel van Meteren, Album, quoted by Plowden in Tudor Women, 1–2.
8. M&A, i
v, 12, 24, 28, 29, 34.
9. M&A, iii, 142, 154, iv, 89.
10. M&A, iv, 67, 128; Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 100.
11. Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, i, 195–6.
12. Dekker, The Shoemakers’ Holiday, III. ii. 131–9, in Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, 54.
13. Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800’, 95.
14. Deloney, Jack of Newbery, 68.
15. SBTRO, BRU 15/1/130, 178; Bess Quiney’s mother-in-law also participated in her husband’s business: M&A, iii, 14.
16. SBTRO, BRU 15/1/129, 177.
17. M&A, iii, 31 (Council Book A, 87).
18. M&A, iii, 19 (Council Book A, 186).
19. M&A, iii, 24 (Council Book A, 190).
20. Schoenbaum, Documentary Life, 60.
21. Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie, 58–60.
22. M&A, iii, 68–9; NA, Court of King’s Bench, Anglia 20b 21a Trinity Term, 22 Eliz.
CHAPTER THREE
1. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 17.
2. Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, Book I, Song iv.
3. Corydon’s Commendation, The Second Part, in Pepys Ballads, i, 81.
4. A New Ballad intituled, I have fresh Cheese and Creame, in Pepys Ballads, i, 48.
5. Greenes Vision, Sig. D2—[D2V].
6. ‘he weeps like a wench that had shed her milk’, All’s Well That Ends Well, IV. iii. 110–11.
7. Turner’s Dish of Lenten Stuff, in Pepysian Garland, 34.
8. Holden, William Shakespeare, 63–4.
9. The Winter’s Tale, IV. iii. 9–12.
10. Fripp, Master Richard Quyny, 85.
11. A Maydens Lamentation for a Bedfellow. Or, I can, nor will no longer lie alone, in Pepys Ballads, i, 67.
12. ‘Coridon’s Song’, in Englands Helicon, 114.
13. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 81.
14. Stone, Family, Sex and Marriage, 43–4; Wrigley and Schofield, Population History of England, 255.
15. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 82.
16. Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations’, 127–8.
17. Deloney, The Gentle Craft, 12.
18. Deloney, Jack of Newbery, 9.
19. ibid.
20. ibid., 19.
21. DNB.
22. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 125–6.
23. e.g. letter of 28 October 1598, Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney, SBTRO, BRU 15/1/145.
24. The evidence for this is her signature in full on an indenture of 1647, reproduced in Fripp, Shakespeare, facing p. 905, as Birthplace Catalogue, No. 69.
25. Eason, The Genevan Bible, 1–12.
26. Weston, Autobiography of an Elizabethan, 164–5.
27. Quoted from the thesis of N. Evans by Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 34.
28. Cressy, ‘Education and Literacy in London and East Anglia, 1580–1700’, 99–100, 111–13, 129–35.
29. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 21.
30. Cross, ‘Great Reasoners in Scripture: Women Lollards 1380–1530’ Schofield, ‘Illiteracy in Pre-Industrial England: The Work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure’.
31. Rhodes, The Countrie Mans Comfort, quoted in Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 10.
32. SpufFord, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, 407–35.
33. Bownde, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, 242. See also Baskervill, The Elizabethan Jig, and Brody, The English Mummers and their Plays.
34. Maden, ed., ‘The Daily Ledger of John Dome, 1520’, quoted in Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories, 14.
35. ibid.
36. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 55.
37. The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, 211.
38. Dekker and Webster, Westward Ho, I. ii. 120–1, in Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ii, 329.
39. Westward Ho, II. i. 75–105 (the whole exchange is rather longer than as quoted here).
CHAPTER FOUR
1. Gurr, ‘Shakespeare’s First Poem: Sonnet 145’, 221–6.
2. Joan is as good as my Lady. To the Tune of What care I how faire she be, in Pepys Ballads, i, 159–60.
3. Kyd, Soliman and Perseda, I. ii. 6–9, 15–16, in Works of Thomas Kyd, 655.
4. As You Like It, V. iii. 21–6.
5. Gataker, A Good Wife Gods Gift, 11.
6. E.g. 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, c. 5, and 39 Eliz., c. 9.
7. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare, 217–18.
8. Love’s Labour’s Lost, IV. iii. 322–3.
9. Ascham, The Scholemaster (1570), in English Works, 205.
10. [Becon], The golden boke of christen matrimonye.
11. Googe, Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes, ‘Notes of his Life and Writings’, 10.
12. ibid.
CHAPTER FIVE
1. As You Like It, V. i. 13–58.
2. Holden, William Shakespeare, 65.
3. Worcester Diocesan Registry, 28 November 1582; Gray, Shakespeare’s Marriage, 204.
4. Steel, 323.
5. Holden, William Shakespeare, 65.
6. ibid.
7. Lee, A Life of William Shakespeare. Schoenbaum remarks: ‘Lee allowed this passage to remain intact throughout his lifetime, despite the fact that twenty years earlier Gray had refuted Lee’s inferences in Shakespeare’s Marriage (1905) pp. 48–57’ (Schoenbaum, Documentary Life, 65).
8. Collins, Sidney Papers, ii, 81.
9. ibid., 90.
10. CSPD, Eliz. cclxviii.
11. Henry VI, Part 1, V. v. 11–13.
12. Brinkworth, Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court, 122–3; M&A, v, 97.
13. ibid., 131.
14. ibid., 132.
15. ibid., 135.
16. ibid., 142.
17. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 123.
18. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 286.
19. Brinkworth, Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court, 127.
20. ibid., 138.
21. Boswell, The Kindness of Strangers, 100–2, 186, 258–9, 261–4; Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in the Early Seventeenth Century’, 10–22.
22. Episcopal Register, Worcester Cathedral, f. 43v, 27 November 1582.
23. Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 41.
24. Honan, Shakespeare, 81–2.
25. Fripp, Shakespeare, 191.
26. Burgess, Shakespeare, 57.
27. Love’s Labours Lost, V. ii. 886–9, 895–8.
CHAPTER SIX
1. Perkins, Of Christian Oeconomie; Swinbume, A Treatise of Spousals, 219–20.
2. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 141–2.
3. [Bullinger], The Christian State of Matrimony, Sig. [H8]v.
4. [Watson], Holsome and Catholyke doctryne concernynge the seuen sacramentes, f. clxxii.
5. View of Popishe Abuses, Puritan Manifestoes, 34.
6. ibid., 127.
7. Breton, The Court and the Country, 183.
8. Pepys Ballads, i, 77.
9. Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage, Chapter 7, passim.
10. The Bride’s Goodmorrow, BL Roxburghe i, 15.
11. Spenser, Amoretti and Epithalamion written not long since by Edmunde Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’, 11. 19–30.
12. ibid., 11. 151–8.
13. Deloney, Jack of Newbery, 26.
14. Browne, Britannia’s Pastorals, Book I, Song ii.
15. Greene’s Vision, Sig. D3.
16. Spenser, ‘Epithalamion’, 11. 137–8.
17. ibid., 11. 43–4.
18. Brooke, ‘An Epithalamium, or a Nuptiall Song, applied to the Ceremonies of Marriage’, 220.
19. The Bride’s Goodmorrow.
20. Fripp, Master Richard Quyny, 36.
CHAPTER SEVEN
1. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man, 272.
2. Fripp, Shakespeare�
��s Stratford, 23.
3. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 90.
4. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 149.
5. Coram Rege roll, Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, (7th edn 1887), ii, 298.
6. Wood, In Search of Shakespeare, 72.
7. Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 31.
8. Rowse, Shakespeare the Man, 36.
9. Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire, 33–4; NA, Court of Common Pleas, Docket Roll 78, f. 8v.
10. NA, CP 40/1697 mem. 327, Hilary 31 Eliz.
11. Fripp, Shakespeare, 192.
12. Bearman, ‘John Shakespeare: A Papist or Just Pennniless?’, 418.
13. Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories, ii, 16: Worcestershire Record Office, 008.7 1627/04.
14. In 1642 the Corporation leased to Francis Ainge a messuage in Bridge Street supposed to be ‘Henry Turbitt’s [house], being the Maidenhead’ (SBTRO, BRU 15/11/10).
15. Stubbes, The Anatomic of Abuses, Sig. [H5].
16. The Countryman’s Chat, in Pepys Ballads, ii, 235.
17. Whateley, A Bride-Bush, Sig. [A6r-v].
18. The Witch of Edmonton, I. i. 5–9, 44–5, in Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, iii, 490–1.
19. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 90–1.
20. Statutes of the Realm, iv, 804–5; NA, DL 44, 398.
21. The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady, 8.
22. Fripp, Shakespeare, 792.
23. [Dekker], The Pleasant Comodie of Patient Grissill, I. ii. 151–6, in Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, i, 220.
24. As You Like It, IV. iii. 80.
25. Sir John Davies, ‘The Wife’, in The Poems of Sir John Davies, 227.
26. Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), 113.
27. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 126–7.
28. ibid., 130.
29. Overbury, A Wife now The Widow.
30. Greenblatt, Will in the World, 130.
CHAPTER EIGHT
1. Holden, William Shakespeare, 65.
2. Laslett, World We Have Lost, 141.
3. Deloney, Jack of Newbery, 76.
4. ibid., 80.
5. Burgess, Shakespeare, 60.
6. Sharp, Midwives Book, 50–1.