In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  The document is so strange, so wordy, so un-English in its baroque Catholic rhetoric that for a long time it seemed impossible to attribute such a creed to a good English burgher and former mayor of Stratford, let alone the father of the national bard. Malone died in 1812 and after his time the testament tended to be dismissed as a forgery, a verdict made easier by the fact that the first page had been lost, and restored ham-fistedly by a well-known Stratford antiquarian with an absurd pastiche quoting Hamlet’s ghost (which has nonetheless fooled several modern biographers). But the real point was that for most nineteenth-century scholars it was simply unthinkable that the bard’s family should have been ‘tainted’ by Catholicism.

  In the twentieth century, however, first a Spanish version and then a printed English translation of 1634 were discovered. They prove beyond doubt that what was found in the roof of the Henley Street house was an accurate sixteenth-century English translation of a spiritual testament composed in Latin in the 1570s by Cardinal Borromeo of Milan. Campion and Persons had stayed with Borromeo on their way to England – in one letter from England Persons asks to be remembered to the cardinal, whom he calls his patron. Unquestionably, what lay behind the discovery was a genuine sixteenth-century text.

  But how did this extraordinary document find its way into the roof of the Shakespeares’ house? And how did the poet’s father’s name come to be on it? Could John have received it from Campion or Persons? He could, of course, have come into contact with the testament at any time in the next twenty years through friends and neighbours hand-copying the text and disseminating it. But the impetus to sign such a formal document is much more likely to have come from the direct influence of the missionaries. There remains, of course, the faint possibility that it was an eighteenth-century forgery, but what possible motive could there have been at that time for falsely attributing it to John Shakespeare, when the question of his Catholicism was not remotely an issue?

  The available evidence makes it probable that the document was genuine. The missionaries used such things because they touched on crucial aspects of the battle of spirits in the sixteenth century: allegiance to the Catholic Church, prayers for the dead, resistance. Whilst complete certainty is impossible, it is likely that limited numbers of a printed version of the testament were among the ‘books brought in from overseas’ in June 1580. At the Jesuits’ secret masses copies were given out, and proved so popular that they needed to get more of them printed. Most likely, printed copies were handed out by Persons and supplemented by hand-written ones when they ran out.

  On balance, then, it is probable that John Shakespeare, the former bailiff of Stratford, really did receive the testament – perhaps through a local priest, or through friends, but most likely from the hands of Robert Persons himself, as a curious later tradition asserts. John was in dire financial straits, deprived of civic office, and his daughter Anne was only a year dead. Inspired by the mission’s charismatic preaching, at this moment the church papist and lapsed Catholic reaffirms his faith. Perhaps he attended mass at the Catesbys’ house at Bushwood, or at Park Hall with the Ardens, his wife’s family. This in turn might suggest that the document itself was no mere copy at third hand made by a friend or neighbour, but treasured because it had been written at the time of his profession of faith. Then subsequently, perhaps under some kind of threat, John was forced to get rid of it, significantly choosing to hide it in his roof rather than destroy it.

  Dramatic as its implications are, the testament does not materially alter our view of John’s religion. If genuine, it simply tends to support what is already suggested by other sources. Two Stratford recusancy returns for 1592 have survived, the first drawn up after Easter, the most important church festival for Catholics and therefore the one on which they would least wish to worship in a Protestant church. Among the names of those who had failed to take Protestant communion were well-known resisters, ‘obstinate papists, shelterers of seminaries’. Appearing in both lists, but among those who had excused themselves from church on the grounds of debt, was the poet’s father.

  Modern scholars have tried to cast doubt on this testimony. But John’s excuse, that he couldn’t be seen in a public place such as a church for fear of being arrested by his creditors, was a very common story among Catholics; and it certainly was an excuse – that summer he appeared in town conducting public business as an assessor on two deceased friends’ estates. John may still not have wished to come out as a recusant, but it appears he had crossed the line from being a church papist.

  What may be a clinching clue was only discovered in the episcopal records in Maidstone in 1964. In the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, in May 1606, in a list of avowed Catholics and church papists who ‘did not appear’ at Protestant Easter communion in Stratford is ‘Susanna Shakespeere’, the poet’s daughter and John’s granddaughter. The sureties case, the mysterious testament in the eaves, the recusancy list, and now the granddaughter. There is happenstance, and then there is coincidence. But this is surely one coincidence too many. This looks very much like family loyalty.

  When he reaffirmed his faith in these dangerous circumstances John Shakespeare solemnly beseeched his nearest and dearest – among whom his eldest son would have been the most important – to have masses said for him after his death, and to pray for his soul in purgatory. To consider that in the light of the ghost’s speech about purgatory in Hamlet is to experience a little shiver. By the time he wrote that play, around 1600, Shakespeare had long been a leading light of London’s theatre world and for all we know was no longer a Catholic. But he never sounds like a Protestant. And if William’s upbringing was set against these underground battles of conscience and power, it surely casts his later life and work in a very interesting light.

  TO THE SCAFFOLD: THE END OF CAMPION’S MISSION

  Campion remained at liberty for a year. A massive manhunt through the winter of 1580–1 tried to track him down. In the south, he used a secret printing press at Stonor House in the Chilterns to print his anti-government tract Decem Rationes. Then he moved up into Lancashire and stayed with the Hoghton family at Lea Hall and Hoghton Tower, where he was for Easter and Pentecost 1581. But in June Robert Debdale was captured, followed by Campion and Cottam. Taken under armed escort to London, Campion arrived beneath a banner reading ‘Campion the Seditious Jesuit’. His lengthy interrogation was reinforced by starvation, thumbscrews, needles under his fingernails, compression in the metal frame known as the Scavenger’s Daughter, and eight days in the Pit, a dank and dark wellshaft. On 30 July warrants were issued to use the rack. Eventually he gave in and began to provide his torturers with names.

  On 14 November the trial began in London of Campion and Thomas Cottam, the first of the great Jesuit dramas of conscience. Evidence against Campion came from a double agent called Anthony Munday, who had posed as a Catholic student in Rheims and published a lurid bestseller on doings in Jesuit seminaries. Campion, of course, was doomed. Despite the intellectual strength of his defence and the manner in which, despite his badly weakened physical state as a result of his torture, he discredited all the witnesses, he was found guilty and sentenced to death. He responded with prophetic words that resonate all the more powerfully given the obsession with history in Elizabeth’s England: ‘In condemning us, you condemn all your ancestors, all the ancient bishops and kings, all that was once the glory of England.’

  Campion’s contacts were investigated, including all those fingered by informers or by hearsay as having attended their masses. All the houses where he had stayed were searched. Some leading figures in the north bit the dust: Alexander Hoghton, mysteriously, died that autumn, and Sir Thomas Hesketh was jailed in Manchester, where he too died. The inquisitors also followed Campion’s trail in the Stratford area. At Bushwood Catesby was arrested and interrogated by Sir Thomas Lucy, and it may be no coincidence that that autumn John Cottam left his post at Stratford Grammar School and returned to Lancashire. His brother, after all, was one of
the two main defendants in the most sensational treason trial of the era. Back home, Cottam and his wife ran private tuition for Catholic children and were frequently fined as recusants. He was replaced by Alexander Aspinall, another Lancastrian, but, outwardly at least, a conforming Protestant. Amazingly, it had taken over twenty years of Elizabeth’s reign before the corporation had finally wished to appoint, or been forced to appoint, a more orthodox master.

  On 1 December Campion was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn – the place of punishment or crucifixion for Shakespeare’s generation, depending on their point of view. Relics of the butchery, including a bloodstained cloth, a knife and a finger, are still preserved by loyalists in shrines in Lancashire.

  THE END OF CHILDHOOD

  Sometimes childhood can be over in an instant, following one traumatic event. The gradual collapse of John’s fortunes had taken more than four years. But the sureties case and the contact with the 1580 mission, however it happened, were perhaps the final step into adulthood for young William. For here was the stark reality of power and conscience. And with it the golden childhood was gone.

  Not long afterwards, he disappears from our view in what have become known as the ‘lost years’ of his life. What happened? Back in the summer, the news of the Jesuit leader’s arrest had spread like wildfire among the many Catholics who had sheltered him and were now, of course, in danger themselves. On 13 August 1581 in Lancashire Alexander Hoghton hastily made his will. In it he rewarded many of his servants and staff, among whom he recommended two men called Fulk Gillom and William Shakeshafte to his brother Thomas at Lea Hall; and, failing that, to his neighbour and kinsman Sir Thomas Hesketh. Shakeshafte and Gillom are assumed to be players or musicians, as the will mentions musical instruments and ‘play clothes’ in connection with them. Hesketh was a renowned patron of players and Hoghton hoped he would either employ Shakeshafte and Gillom or ‘help them find a good master’.

  Alexander Hoghton’s will, it is now claimed, is the key to those missing years in Shakespeare’s life. Many scholars now believe that Shakeshafte was the seventeen-year-old Shakespeare. His last Stratford schoolmaster, John Cottam, was a Hoghton man, and, it is argued, might perhaps have recommended his former pupil to the Hoghtons as a private tutor. Some authorities have gone further and imagined young Shakespeare being recruited by the Campion mission from among the sons of Catholic gentlefolk, and going up north to be trained as one of the spearheads of the next generation.

  Far-fetched as this may seem, there are certainly some curious coincidences in this tale. Shakespeare’s trustee and backer at the Globe nearly twenty years later, Thomas Savage, was also from this part of Lancashire and his wife was a Hesketh; so the Shakespeare connection may not be pure fantasy. But was Shakeshafte Shakespeare? Shakeshafte was, and still is, a very common name in Lancashire – the Preston guild records are full of them in that year of 1580–1, one John Shakeshafte even being a glover. On the face of it, then, a man in a Hoghton will bearing a Preston name ought to be a local and with that, hard evidence for the young Shakespeare’s Lancashire connection evaporates. On this, as on numerous other details of Shakespeare’s early biography, the jury is still out; however, as things stand, no convincing evidence has yet been discovered to prove the Lancashire theory.

  But on the immediate events in Shakespeare’s life at this moment there is no doubt; at the end of August or early September 1582 he reached a turning point. Another young Stratford man, the Jesuit Robert Debdale, was still in prison in London, where his father had sent him food parcels – ‘two cheeses, a loaf of bread and five shillings in money’ – via William Greenaway, the Stratford carrier. But three weeks later he was discharged – maybe the terrified youth had offered to take Protestant communion – and he was able to come home to Shottery, in time for a wedding.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  MARRIAGE AND CHILDREN

  ABOUT A MILE outside Stratford lies the hamlet of Shottery, in Shakespeare’s day a pleasant walk from Henley Street through the marketplace and into Rother Street, from where a track led northwards to Shottery brook. Along the stream there are now allotments encroached on by a housing estate, but in the sixteenth century he would have passed through cornfields on either side before reaching a cluster of half-timbered thatched houses. The eighteen-year-old Shakespeare perhaps took that walk frequently during the summer of 1582. Back in Henley Street, William would have been sharing a room with his three younger brothers. As with all teenage boys, no doubt his thoughts were on love and sex – and in particular on a woman from Shottery eight years older than himself. As the popular song of the day went, youth is the time for love, and it goes fast away.

  One of the houses there, with a garden and an apple orchard, belonged to the family of Richard Hathaway, a husbandman and sheep farmer who had sold fleeces to Shakespeare’s father. Richard, a widower, had died the previous summer, leaving a daughter, Anne, and her brother, Bartholomew, who now shared the family home. It was a well-appointed place with good furniture, including two ‘joyned beds’ (four-posters); so, although premarital sex among the young usually took place in the open air in those days, the Hathaway home must have been especially attractive to William and the mistress of the house. Towards harvest time, in late August or early September, Anne became pregnant.

  ‘A DALLIANCE AND BUT A TOUCH OF YOUTH’

  It was a common story. It is estimated that a third of all Tudor women were pregnant when they married. The records of the church courts, the so-called bawdy courts, show that extramarital sex took place at every level of society: our permissive age has nothing on the Elizabethans. Official homilies against ‘whoredom and uncleanliness’ were read on Sundays in every parish church when there was no sermon. Puritans and stricter Protestants, of course, railed against it particularly vehemently: ‘Great swarms of vice,’ spluttered one homilist, ‘outrageous seas of adultery, whoredom, fornications and uncleanliness have overflowed the whole world, so much so that this vice among many is counted no sin at all, but rather a pastime, a dalliance and but a touch of youth; not rebuked but winked at; not punished but laughed at.’

  So although William and Anne may already have held hands in front of their relatives in his father’s parlour, and spoken the beautiful words of the troth plighting, ‘foresaking other friends’ for each other, it is just as likely that their affair was ‘a touch of youth’. Later diaries suggest that to avoid conception, ‘mutual pleasuring’ among the young did not always go as far as full intercourse. Younger girls often wouldn’t have sex unless the man had plighted his troth; and sex was thus more likely to be forthcoming from an older, more experienced woman. Anne was not exactly on the shelf at twenty-six, which was around the average marriage age for women in Tudor England; but perhaps her age was becoming a cause for concern in a rural community where they tended to marry a little younger. As for William, though, at eighteen he was still a minor and would need his parents’ permission to marry.

  THE RIDDLE OF THE MARRIAGE

  The couple didn’t make any move in that direction, however, until the very end of November. Church law forbade marriage between Advent Sunday (which was 2 December in 1582) and mid-January, by which time Anne would be heavily pregnant. At the very last minute, then, on 27 November, two of her father’s farmer friends, presumably taking William with them, rode to Worcester to apply for a special marriage licence from the consistory court. The episcopal archive in Worcester still has a note of the licence (but not the licence itself) and the marriage bond. These two documents are as intriguing as any in the poet’s story.

  The special licence gives Shakespeare’s name correctly, but names his bride as Anne Whately; and it also says she was resident not in Stratford but in Temple Grafton, four miles to the west. The second document, dated the 28th, is the bond entered by the two farmers from Shottery, John Richardson and Fulk Sandells. It states that William Shakespeare was marrying Anne Hathwey, and that the couple were both of Stratford. Now we know that S
hakespeare’s wife was called Anne Hathaway and came from Shottery, which was part of the parish of Stratford; but how to explain the other name for the bride? Over the years a huge industry has been generated by these admittedly confusing entries. Some authorities have even suggested that Anne Whately was the girl William had really wanted to marry, but, with the other Anne pregnant, his hand had been forced. Sadly, however, Anne Whately seems simply to have been the product of a scribal slip by an overworked clerk who had been dealing with a long-running case involving another Whately on the same day.

  Once that is accepted, a story emerges. Clearly there was a rush to obtain the licence and have the marriage banns read out in double-quick time. Usually three readings of the banns, on Sundays or holy days in succeeding weeks, were stipulated. But the only valid day for marriage left now was St Andrew’s Day, 30 November, the Friday before Advent Sunday when the marriage season closed. That was why they had gone to Worcester on the Tuesday with the paperwork, which would have included Shakespeare’s parents’ permission and an ‘allegation’ giving the bride and groom’s addresses and their reasons for seeking a special licence.

  But was the couple’s haste the only reason for the special licence? The law obliged them to marry in one or other of their home parishes. Both parties came from the parish of Stratford, but chose not to marry there, so the licence was needed for that reason too. Interestingly enough, a later memorandum by Bishop Whitgift, in whose name Shakespeare’s marriage licence was issued, justified the solemnization of marriages in a different parish on grounds that included ‘reasonable secrecy’ – for example, if the families wanted a quiet wedding because the bride was pregnant, because there was a difference in social status between bride and groom, or because they simply wanted to save money. What, then, of the bride’s place of residence as given in the licence – Temple Grafton? Marriage allegations that have survived in other parts of the country give the domicile of both bride and groom, which suggests that Temple Grafton was not a slip. Anne was either living there at the time (was it her mother’s village?) or had chosen to stay there for fifteen days to fulfil the necessary conditions of marrying in another parish (a rule that still applies today).