In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  ‘THE ARMS AND LEGS OF KING HENRY’

  So Topcliffe was a frightening figure who practised his trade of blackmail, deceit, rape and torture under the writ of the queen. A man to beware, his was an unstable mind in which sadism and dreams of power mingled with sexual fantasies about the queen. Those fantasies came out during the interrogation and torture of a young priest, Thomas Pormort, in Topcliffe’s house, as recorded in an amazing document from 1592:

  Item Topcliff told unto the said priest that he was so familiar with her majesty that he many times putteth [manuscript torn] between her breasts and pappes and in her neck.

  That he hath not only seen her legs and knees … with his hands above her knees.

  That he hath felt her belly, and said unto her majesty that she hath the softest belly of any womankind.

  That she said unto him: ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry [VIII]?’To which he answered ‘Yea’;

  That she gave him (for a favour) a white linen hose wrought with white silk, etc.

  That he is so familiar with her that when he pleaseth to speak with her he may take her away from any company, and that she is as pleasant with every one that she doth love.

  That he did not care for the Counsel, for that he had his authority from her Majesty.

  This is a dialogue that goes beyond even the most lurid scenes invented on the Elizabethan stage. Yet when we think of modern cases of the torture and abuse of prisoners in which sex, violence and sadism mingle, the modern psychologist would hesitate to dismiss it out of hand. Furious that his words had been reported to his employers, the queen’s council, Topcliffe kept Pormort shivering in his shirt on the scaffold ladder for almost two hours, trying to get him to withdraw this extraordinary story, ‘urging him to deny the words – but the priest would not’.

  The tale itself seemed incredible to earlier generations of scholars, even Catholic ones, who saw it simply as an indicator of the deranged mind of a psychopath. But Topcliffe’s reported words are so weird that it is hard to believe that something like this was not actually said. Given Elizabeth’s strange flirtations – exposing herself to young male courtiers and foreign ambassadors – it may just be that there is some grain of truth in Topcliffe’s account of her words. ‘Be not these the arms, legs and body of King Henry?’ might seem scarcely credible at first sight, but it has a disturbing ring of truth about it.

  To the author of King Lear, as we shall see, such a collusion of power and cruelty – even in the person of a woman – was all too believable.

  CHAPTER NINE

  ‘A HELL OF TIME’

  BY THE SUMMER of 1596 Shakespeare was already the greatest poet in the English language, and he would be still regarded as such today even if he had written nothing more after Romeo and Juliet. Well liked and discreet, he had the patronage of noblemen, and his language reveals an increasing familiarity with rich clothes, fine food and good taste. His shows had become regular post-Christmas entertainment for the queen. Apart, perhaps, from the long separations from Anne and the children, life was all it could be. But fate has a habit of striking when least expected.

  THE DEATH OF HAMNET SHAKESPEARE

  Throughout all the time Shakespeare had been living in London it is assumed that his family were living in the Henley Street house in Stratford with his parents, his brothers and his surviving sister. According to a seventeenth-century diarist, he went home only once a year, presumably during the thirty days of Lent when the theatres were closed. It might seem as if he had in some sense abandoned his family, if not financially, then emotionally. But people have to adapt to their circumstances. London was where his employment lay – and therefore his income, which supported them. No doubt he wrote home, and both sides would have had to accommodate themselves to the situation as best they could. That summer, however, brought a double blow. On 22 July Shakespeare’s patron, Lord Hunsdon, died. He was succeeded as chamberlain by Lord Cobham, who was not well disposed to the players. It was an ominous moment professionally, for now the threat of closure hung over them. Much worse was to follow. The Stratford register of burials contains this simple entry: ‘1596 11 August Hamnet son of William Shakespeare’. The boy was eleven. We know that there was famine and plague in the Warwickshire countryside at that time, exacerbated by a run of wet summers and bad harvests, but the cause of Hamnet’s death is unknown. Shakespeare’s company was on tour in Kent in early August. Hamnet was very likely buried before his father got the bad news.

  Shakespeare was thirty-two, no longer young by the standards of his time; and now his only son was gone. There can be no more shattering blow in life. Hamnet’s death may also have been a turning point in the poet’s art. Within the next year or two a change gradually came about not only in Shakespeare’s themes but also in his way of writing, in his language and imagery. The great tragedies followed, plumbing ‘the well of darkness’. This was not only a personal tragedy but a powerful intimation of mortality.

  Often, when this kind of event occurs in the lives of very busy people, they go straight back to work to bury their sorrow in activity. Shakespeare continued to live in London, working in the theatre and separated from Anne and his daughters. They had no more children – at forty, she was perhaps now too old. But grief for lost children does not end – it widens and deepens over the years. Shakespeare’s biographers have searched for possible clues in his work: a passage in King John about the boy and the empty room where his clothes still lie on the bed is often singled out, but it is impossible to say whether such writing is autobiographical. There is, however, as we shall see, compelling evidence to suggest his response to the death of his son in poems he wrote soon afterwards. These poems describe his love for a beautiful boy, and his passionate sexual affair with a married woman, both of which might be seen in some sense as responses to personal tragedy, especially perhaps in a middle-aged man.

  But before we turn to those poems, some of the practical things he did in the next few months are also interesting in the aftermath of such a trauma. For example, he bought a large house in Stratford for his family, which he renovated. But the first thing he did, just ten weeks after Hamnet’s death, is no less revealing. On the morning of 20 October 1596 Shakespeare went to the College of Arms in London to apply for a coat of arms and to make his father a gentleman.

  THE COAT OF ARMS: ‘NOT WITHOUT RIGHT’

  The College of Arms is still there between St Paul’s and the river, where it was rebuilt after the Great Fire of 1666. On the front window ledges stand painted wooden heraldic devices – griffons, unicorns and basilisks – the relics of bygone ceremonials. Portraits of former heralds stare down, including that of the irascible William Dethick who interviewed Shakespeare that day. Climbing the creaky wooden staircase, there is more than a faint whiff of Hogwarts, Griffendor and Ravenclaw. Up in the attic an artist paints devices on thick, crisp white sheets of vellum. This is the archive of the old English class system. Ask the Richmond Herald for the Shakespeare application and he will open a drawer to reveal, astonishingly, even the rough drafts with his predecessor’s scribbles noting the main points of his conversation with the playwright that autumn. It is one of the most intimate moments of the biography.

  Shakespeare’s story is about history and literature, but also about class and social advancement: a family that in fifty years went from farmers to gentlemen. To acquire the status of gentleman involved looking back on the family’s history and ahead to its future. For William, therefore, the meeting was particularly loaded with meaning because of the ups and downs of his father’s career, the recent death of his son and his own considerable success in the theatre. (One of Dethicks colleagues, who resented the award of arms to Elizabethan parvenus, would later pointedly mark the sketch of their heraldic shield ‘Shakespeare the player’, focusing on the very insecurities that, as he reveals in his sonnets, Shakespeare felt all too deeply.)

  Two different drafts survive of the application for ‘tokens of honor
and worthiness’. Dethick stated he had been ‘credibly informed’ that

  John Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the Countty of Warwick whose parents and late antecessors were for their valiant and faithful service advanced and rewarded by the most Prudent Prince king henry the seventh of famous memory sythence which time they have continued at those parts in good reputation and credit. And the said John having married Mary daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden of Wilmcote in the said county gentleman, whereof for the encouragement of his posterity I have therefore assigned … this shield or coat of arms.

  In the second draft Dethick inserted the word ‘grandfather’ above the line about parents and antecessors, and ‘for their valiant and faithful service’ was changed to ‘for his …’ Did an older Shakespeare, apparently John’s grandfather, fight at Bosworth in 1485?

  A scribbled note at the bottom of the sheet tells us that twenty years earlier John had made a first application, which had gone no further; it was evidently around that time in 1576 when he had run into trouble. Also surviving is a damaged list of details about John, which was supplied to Dethick by the family. He had been

  A justice of the Peace and was Bayliffe (officer and cheffe of the towne) of Stratford uppo’ Avon xv or xvi years past

  That he hath Landes and tenementes. Of good wealth and substance. 5001i.

  That he married ….

  So John was apparently now of ‘good wealth’ again (£500 no less); once more the connection with the Ardens was stressed, and the family were confirmed in the gentle status to which he had always aspired. The coat of arms, devised from the College’s pattern books, was a spear; the motto, presumably chosen by William himself, was adapted from a popular emblem book, a weighty assertion intended to sum up the family and its principles: ‘Not without right’.

  It is hard not to find this a touching moment, especially if John had come up to London to accompany his son to the meeting. William had been an absent husband, father and son for ten years or more. But how poignant, this document drawn up to commemorate the ‘name and good fame’ of John’s family, and to dignify his ‘children and issue … for the encouragement of their posterite’. For they had just buried William’s only son, John’s grandson, the last of the male children of the Snitterfield Shakespeares.

  CAREER CRISIS: ‘THE PLAYERS ARE PITEOUSLY PERSECUTED’

  Back at work there were other troubles on Shakespeare’s mind. Pressure had grown on the players since Hunsdon’s death: there were calls to ban plays and close the playhouses altogether. As Thomas Nashe remarked in a letter to a friend: ‘Now the players are piteously persecuted by the Lord mayor and the aldermen, and however in their old Lord [Hunsdon]’s time they thought their state settled, it is now so uncertain they cannot build upon it.’

  The Burbages’ twenty-one-year lease on the Theatre in Shoreditch was coming up for renewal and the landlord, Giles Allen, a Puritan in sympathies, was making threatening noises: a big hike in rent and a short five-year lease, after which he wished to pull the building down. At the same time the experience of playing city venues like the Cross Keys had convinced Shakespeare and the Burbages that they needed a winter home. So they took a lease on a building inside the old monastic precinct of Blackfriars, a hall in which to build an indoor theatre, warm and comfortable, where they could ask higher prices and attract a better clientele. But immediately they encountered strong resistance from well-to-do neighbours, who drew up a petition objecting to the building of ‘a common playhouse … which will grow to be a very great annoyance and trouble, not only to all the noblemen and gentlemen thereabout inhabiting, but also a general inconvenience to all the inhabitants of the same precinct, by reason of the gathering together of all manner of lewd and vagrant persons’. The Privy Council duly issued an order that ‘forbade the use of the said house for plays’.

  But the company were nothing if not resourceful. The clue to what they did next comes in a writ of attachment addressed to the sheriff of Surrey, returnable 29 November 1596: in it Shakespeare was summonsed to keep the peace – but in Surrey, south of the river. ‘Be it known that William Wayte seeks sureties of the peace against William Shakespeare, Francis Langley, Dorothy Soer the wife of John Soer and Anne Lee, for fear of death and mutilation of limbs ….’

  At first sight it may seem a shock to find ‘gentle Shakespeare’ threatened with arrest on charges of grievous bodily harm, but the wording was simply legal formula. The writ was in fact part of a bigger move against the theatre at that time by an important landowner in Southwark who was allied to the anti-players’ faction in the city. And, crucially, it suggests that the company had moved to the south bank.

  Shakespeare’s co-accused, Francis Langley, was the owner of the brand new Swan theatre in the manor of Paris Garden, 500 yards from Henslowe’s Rose on Bankside. Langley owned the manor house there: a member of the Drapers’ company and a typical Elizabethan entrepreneur, he had made his fortune as inspector for wool and cloth in London, extracting fees and fines from clothiers in a manner that had led to charges of violence and extortion. Now Langley was sitting pretty as a brothel keeper, rack landlord and fence for stolen goods, and had ploughed some of his ill-gotten gains into new investment possibilities in the theatre.

  The instigator of the writ, William Wayte, was the stepson and front man of Langley’s enemy William Gardiner, the sheriff of Surrey, a JP with jurisdiction over Paris Garden and Bankside. The wealthy, propertied Gardiner was a deeply unpleasant character, a crooked businessman who got his way by menaces and blackmail. The writ came at a time of growing pressure by the civic authorities on the playhouses. Gardiner was perhaps operating on behalf of even bigger fish, and this may have been the first salvo in a bigger war. The pressures of running a theatre company were not confined to the perennial rollercoaster of the box office.

  THE ELIZABETHAN UNDERWORLD: SOUTHWARK AND PARIS GARDEN

  So in his time of crisis, in the autumn of 1596, it seems that Shakespeare had moved to Southwark. Tax records confirm that he was in Paris Garden for the next couple of years or so. All his co-defendants lived there too: Dorothy Soer had property leases in Paris Garden Lane, and in the late 1590s ‘Soares rents’ were well-known lodgings for actors. (He was still living close by three years later and in Twelfth Night, written in 1601, the sailor Antonio gives this recommendation: ‘In the south suburbs at the Elephant is best to lodge.’ The Elephant, a former stew house that had survived the periodic closures of the sex industry, lay on the river on the corner of Horseshoe Alley less than 100 yards from the Globe. Perhaps this was where Shakespeare was lodging then, or at least where he took his meals and wrote – a case of Tudor product placement perhaps?)

  It was not a place you would recommend a friend to stay in London, especially if they were going through a mid-life crisis, as Shakespeare was. A visitor strolling around Southwark in the late 1590s would have seen new buildings going up everywhere as houses were subdivided, gardens disappeared and hundreds of tenements were thrown up by speculators. It was such a rough neighbourhood that it was customary for landlords to put good behaviour clauses in their leases. The area’s contempt for the civic authorities was notorious, as John Donne remarks in his first Elegy: ‘we will scorn his policies … as the inhabitants of Thames’ right side do London’s Mayor’. Beyond the city limits, sixteenth-century Southwark was a place of densely packed houses and teeming alleys. Wealthy residents, such as Langley or his enemy Gardiner, still had space and privacy and could enjoy their gardens, but the poor huddled in squalid alleys, in single rooms and even stables. There were industries such as tanneries and glassworks; the streets were choked with rubbish and building materials, and the wharves with ferrymen and merchandise. And, as might be expected, it was a centre of crime.

  The population boom in the late sixteenth century fuelled the entertainment industry in Southwark. A dense row of brick houses three or four storeys high ran along the river, and here the Rose had opened in 1587 and L
angleys Swan in 1596; the Globe would follow in 1599. There were also 300 inns, brothels and alehouses in the area, offering skittles, bowling and gambling. Their owners could make a killing on them: one bowling alley in Paris Garden had its rent upped five times in as many years. Then there was the frisson of blood sports. Built back in the 1540s, the bear-baiting ring had gained instant popularity – to the disgust of moralists who complained that the poor ‘every Sunday will spend one penny or two’ betting. In the 1550s a custom-built bullring had followed. These spectacles appealed just as much to the rich, such as the inns of court lawyers. Bears like Sackerson (as Shakespeare’s Falstaff mentions) were stars.

  Alongside these public spectacles more private entertainment was on offer. Out of sight and mind of the ecclesiastical and city authorities, the insalubrious and at times waterlogged reaches of Bankside had been a red-light district since the fourteenth century. The journalist Thomas Nashe wrote a salacious poem about a visit to a brothel in a rambling tenement, where ‘Venus’ bouncing vestals’ included the teenage Mistress Francis in her ‘rattling silks’. It may not be a coincidence that Shakespeare’s best tavern scenes, with Mistress Quickly and Doll Tearsheet, were written while he lived here.

  So Bankside was where rich folk parted with their money; where players, prostitutes and pickpockets rubbed shoulders. No wonder, when Langley proposed his new theatre, that the Lord Mayor protested about playhouses themselves being magnets for disorder: ‘ordinary places of meeting for all vagrant persons and masterless men that hang about the city, thieves, horsestealers, whoremongers, coseners, conycatching people, practisers of treason and other such like, where they consort and make their matches …’. And somewhere in this nefarious world of tenements and actors’ rentals at the Paris Garden end of Bankside was where Shakespeare had gone to ground at this time.