by Park Honan
So far as his identity with ' Shakeshafte' is concerned, Shakespeare's images of course prove nothing, but some are consistent with a Hoghton servant's likely experience. Did he join Hesketh's players at Rufford Hall? Apart from a folk tradition at Rufford that ' Shakespeare had been at the Hall as a young man', 17 we know, of course, that a contemporary from Lady Hesketh's small village of Rufford served as
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a Globe trustee. We know only a little more that might connect Shakespeare with Rufford. As an influential Catholic, Sir Thomas Hesketh in 1563 had been made High Sheriff of the county under Queen Elizabeth; he not only kept players, but remained friendly with ambitious player-patrons. His son and heir, Robert Hesketh, was to entertain 'Lord and Lady Strange' in the 1580s at Rufford. 18 Derbys and Heskeths had for years been on intimate terms. Thus if Shakespeare reached Rufford -- as a local tradition suggests he did -- Sir Thomas Hesketh was in a position to recommend him to Lord Strange, in a decade when Strange's men were on the way to becoming the premier playing troupe in London. Again, it may be a coincidence that Shakespeare's early plays, and knowledge of his unpublished sonnets, can be linked with people in the circle of Hoghton, Hesketh, and Strange; but the associations are factual enough. Certainly, too, Hoghton's sojourner was thought of as an actor in need of a patron. Sir Thomas was obliged by an item in Hoghton's will either to keep a ' Shakcshafte' or to send him to a good master who might 'manteyne players'.
At Rufford Hall, Hesketh's entertainers would have used an enormous, intricately carved screen for their rapid entrances and exits. The spectators watched in one of the loveliest halls that survive, nearly unchanged, from Tudor times. Carved angels peer out from heavy, hammerbeam trusses above rows of mullioned windows and a fivesided, tall bay window. However, the players could have disbanded temporarily in 1581, even before new servants reached them. Since Sir Thomas failed to suppress Catholic worship in his household, he was in prison late in the year. 19 Evidently he was released in 1582, then in custody briefly again in 1584, before he pledged reforms that kept him safe.
William returned to Stratford, presumably from some employment 'in the Countrey', either in 1581 when Sir Thomas was in custody, or soon after. He was at home within a few months of his eighteenth birthday, and not later than August 1582. In a changed political climate, not only unlicensed masters but other temporary servants in prominent Catholic families were then at risk. He may have been recommended to a patron such as Lord Strange, and, in any case, he
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could hope for interesting employment. Any experience of 'playe clothes' would have given him a measure of detachment, so that he would begin to see his town through a player's eyes.
To some extent, the ordinary, workaday life of any town is consoling. But in A Midsummer Night's Dream, the dignity and normalcy of the 'mechanicals', with their suppositions, seem to threaten the dream-world of the imaginative poet. Here there is a terror of the real, an absence of any complacency on the part of the playwright in the face of the normal and familiar. If William worked 'in the Countrey', it is likely that he came back with a troubled awakening to what as yet he had unsurety known. His instincts were theatrical, and with any opportunity to put on play clothes he cannot have been content to accept his position at home exactly as he had left it. He was ambitious, and an eager young poet in the making. He was no less charmed by books than Roger Lock or Richard Field -- who, by then, were stationer-apprentices. But back at Henley Street, with any travel dust on his shoes, he was almost unpredictably complex, if we accept Beeston's remark about his schoolmastering, which is one of the bestauthenticated reports we have of him. He was a smart, enthusiastic lad who had fled from pedantry, but prized what he had learned; and indeed with a remarkable, assimilating mind he found the world hardly too various for him; he might nourish any dissonances in his outlook, any number of mixed feelings or conflicting impressions while even hungering for books and learning, after being 'in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey'. But that experience would have whetted his taste for the full, sensuous enjoyment of the little world he found again. He was not likely to be guided by mere prudence and circumspection, and his life was to change very quickly at Stratford.
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6
LOVE AND EARLY MARRIAGE
I hope upon familiarity will grow more
contempt. But if you say 'marry her', I
will marry her. That I am freely
dissolved, and dissolutely.
( Slender, The Merry Wives of Windsor)
Anne Hathaway and the Shottery fields
In a Tudor parish one's life was under review by parents, friends, and neighbours so that almost no change in one's fate went unnoticed. One's private behaviour tended to be observable, too. A young man in the 'May of youth and bloom of lustihood' might, of course, sow his wild oats, but he was likely to hear from the vicar's apparitor and have to explain his fornication and apologize for it. Anyone's sexual affairs, outside marriage, concerned the community, and William's involvement with the Hathaways affected his career even as it touched on a web of social relationships.
The summer of 1582 had favoured lovers and crops. Great spreading green fields cultivated in strips, at Stratford and Shottery, lay in the sun, and the nation's harvest was the best since 1570, or about 20 per cent better than average. 1 Near the end of their new civic year Stratford's council in fact acted with largesse and, for the first time on record, sponsored local mummers. The aldermen were to pay the troupe's leader Davy Jones, whose wife Frances Hathaway was related to Richard Hathaway's people at Shottery. Davy's troupe were to perform at Whitsun a week before Shakespeare's first child was baptized -- and his familiar name would echo in Justice Shallow's
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insatiable liking for a servant in 2 Henry IV: 'What, Davy, I say! . . . Why, Davy! . . . Davy, Davy, Davy; let me see, Davy, let me see . . . With red wheat, Davy' (v. i. 2-13). 2 A good yield of crops often induced a general, rational euphoria in the 1570s and 1580s, since 'good' and 'bad' years arrived in cycles. Stratford's aldermen met at a happy seasonal time on election day, 5 September, with John Shakespeare, who had not been to 'halls' in months. The new bailiff to be elected was Adrian Quiney, who once had been asked with William's father to plead for the borough's corporate rights against the claims of its obstinate manorial lord, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick.
By November, the Shakespeares certainly knew of their son William's relations with Agnes or Anne Hathaway, the eldest daughter in a family of the earl's copyhold tenants. Born in 1555 or 1556, if the legend on her grave-slab is accurate, Anne at 26 or 27 was pregnant with William's child. It is a modern myth that she was 'on the shelf', or older than many women of the Tudor yeomanry at marriage, but William was legally a minor. He probably felt obliged to seek his father's consent to marry, and he may not have tried to do so before November.
It is unlikely that before this month he had any exact, careful wedding plans, and there are signs of his lack of reckoning, if not of lastminute haste and turmoil, in events that caught him up. One may have good reasons for loving, or none, but William, it seems, was partly moved by an urge to purchase experience. The strictness of schooling and almost any exigencies of work 'in the Countrey' would have limited his free behaviour. Every grammar-school boy had known a harsh discipline, and his eloquence had not been acquired cheaply, but as he became more self-confident so he enriched his sense of life. There can be no denying what he had done in August -- but, then, he could afford to be incautious: his father, despite financial irregularities, had kept up a trade and the Henley Street houses. William would have property to inherit, even a lucrative future if he found ways to use his eloquence.
He may have tested that eloquence during courtship, as has been supposed. The evidence is uncertain. But he was young for marriage, and had been a suitor among practical farmers. Anne, with the pride of her years, may have kept him in a 'woeful state', if the poem
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; later printed in Shake -- speares Sonnets as no. 145 has autobiographical references and he plays on her name ' Hathaway' as 'hate away'. The pun, of course, is not very exact. In the sonnet, a lady's acquiescence is merciful. Her poet, it seems, has been so suave that she has hardly had a chance to be cutting, petulant, or severe with him:
Those lips that Loves owne hand did make,
Breath'd forth the sound that said I hate,
To me that languisht for her sake:
But when she saw my wofull state,
Straight in her heart did mercie come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet,
Was used in giving gentle dome:
And taught it thus a new to greete:
I hate she alterd with an end,
That follow'd it as gentle day,
Doth follow night who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flowne away.
I hate, from hate away she threw,
And sav'd my life saying not you.
The poem's naïve diction and simple feeling suggest early work, and it may well date from about 1582.
However that may be, she would have a legacy. Her father Richard Hathaway, alias Gardner or Gardiner, a few days before he died in September 1581, had anticipated the wedding of his daughter 'Agnes' (pronounced 'Annes' and interchangeable with the name Anne). She was to have io marks, or £6.13s.4-d., 'at the daye of her maryage'. 3 His will was proved on 9 July 1582, and the lovers, in the summer, could have plighted their troth with the hope of a legacy to come. A trothplight was binding, and if spoken before witnesses it legitimized a child born out of wedlock -- but it was not recommended by clergymen of any persuasion. It would not necessarily save two young people from a summons by the vicar's court, and William may have been reluctant to force his people to accept his union with Anne as a fait accompli in this way before November.
At no time, in his school years or later, had he been a stranger at Anne's door. His father had twice helped her own father as a surety in
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1566, and had paid Hathaway's debts of £8 to John Page, the ironmonger, and £11 to Joan Biddle. 4 The sums suggest that Shakespeares had not been unwelcome at the Hathaways' farm. A mile to the west of town, but within the parish, Shottery was then a scattered hamlet with about 1,600 acres of common fields under tillage, an area as large as Stratford's three other main fields put together. Richard Hathaway's house, with extensions added after his time, survives as Anne Hathaway's Cottage. The Forest of Arden was then nearby, and visitors now are reminded of Oliver's 'sheepcote' and of the pretty woodland setting Celia describes in As You Like It:
West of this place, down in the neighbour bottom.
The rank of osiers by the murmuring stream
Left on your right hand brings you to the place. (IV. iii. 79-81)
Roses, herbs, and posy-peas still grow in the garden, though an orchard with fragrant apple trees and wild flowers must now be imagined. A brook flows below the house, which is built on a slope and has stone foundations with timber-frame walls filled in by wattle and daub, under a steep roof of thatch. The dwelling was ample for a family of eight or ten, with its 'hall' or downstairs sitting-room, a kitchen with a heavy bake-oven, and several upper rooms. Crucks, or curved oak timbers, rose from the ground to roof-ridge in the oldest part (dating from the fifteenth century), and lately builders had added two fireplaces with chamfered oak bressumers or sustaining beams, eight and eleven feet wide, and an upper floor for rooms over the hall. In his will Hathaway mentions two bedsteads, which would have been valuable if elaborately carved, and 'the Seelinges in my haule house' or his wainscots, which must have kept out winter drafts. Chairs, stools, cushions, brass pots, eight pieces of pewter -- all later owned by his son Bartholomew -- may originally have been in his own hall, where a high-backed bench or 'settle' is fixed near the hearth today.
For two generations, at least, Hathaways had been locally prominent, and their word had carried weight in Shottery and other parts of Stratford parish. Richard's father, John, had been one of the Twelve Men of Old Stratford's court, and had served as a beadle, a constable,
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and an affeeror while turning a profit in farming; his goods, in the subsidy of 1549-50, are valued at £10 (not, then, a low assessment). In turn Richard had carried on the farming, and, it seems, had married twice. Seven of his children were alive in 1579, when Shakespeare was near the end of his schooldays.
At that time, Shottery was fairly tranquil. Families here with recusants or with a Jesuit priest as a son, such as the Burmans or the Debdales, lived on good terms with church-goers. Though he apparently went to Anglican service, Richard Hathaway named in his will John Pace, a Catholic neighbour, and asked that his will's two supervisors be Fulke Sandells, a young farmer, and another of his 'Trustie ffryndes and neighboures' Stephen Burman, whose wife Margaret was a defiant Catholic twice cited by commissioners for avoiding church. 5 But by 1580 or 1581, Shottery had become the focus of an angry dispute over land at its western edge, Baldon Hill, claimed alike by the Protestant Earl of Warwick and the Catholic Mr Francis Smyth of Wootton Wawen. The dispute threatened to incite religious partisans.
Francis Smyth, with four peacocks in his coat of arms, was a son of the heiress of Wootton Wawen north of the parish; he openly professed to be a Catholic, but just avoided the usual penalties for his belief, and in his property claims if not in his religion he infuriated the earl. When the earl in court challenged his claim to Baldon Hill, the two main contenders at least were influenced by religious-party allegiance. Shakespeares and Hathaways were well apprised of the affair since one juror was Anne's father, another was Fulke Sandells (who also acted as a surety at Shakespeare's marriage), and a third was Anne's near neighbour Richard Burman.
Not long before he died, Anne's father had supported the earl's claim, but Smyth defied the jurors' findings around October 1582, when Anne was carrying William's child. By the time a new commission looked into the case, Baldon Hill was provoking sharp civic tension, and when the future playwright was 19 the Warwickshire equivalent of Capulets and Montagues, stirring for a fight, gathered one day at a vintner's at the corner of Bull Lane and Old Town where Sir Thomas Lucy was trying -- upstairs -- to examine witnesses. A real scene that Shakespeare and the parish would have heard about is
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apparent in court records. Stepping into the vintner's parlour, the Catholic Smyth was rudely met by the earl's man, John Goodman, then wearing a dagger:
GOODMAN. Mr Smyth, you do not like a gentleman.
SMYTH. Why?
GOODMAN. For you do my lord great injury.
SMYTH. Why, wherein?
GOODMAN. Marry, you go about to allure my lord's witnesses, and talk with them in corners.
SMYTH. I do not.
GOODMAN. You do.
SMYTH. I tell you truly I do not.
GOODMAN. But thou dost (advancing upon him). Thou shalt not.
SMYTH. I tell thee thou dost say untruly (thrusting him away with his hand).
GOODMAN. What, dost thou lay thy hands upon me? If thou clost lay thy hands on me I will lay my dagger on thy pate (putting his hand to his dagger and offering to draw it).
Smyth extricated himself, but his servant, Richard Dale, was set upon by two of the earl's men together -- Goodman and Mr Fenton:
FENTON (grasping Dale by the doublet). Ah sirrah! What dost thou here? Thou art a knave of all knaves! Away, knave! Out of this place!
GOODMAN. What, villain, wilt thou not go? Go, or I will lay my dagger on thy pate. (putting a hand to his dagger)
( Fenton gives Dale a blow on the side of the head, thrusts him partly through the door, and claps the door upon one of his legs.)
DALE. I pray you, let me take my other leg with me! (struggles with Fenton to open the door, and goes upstairs in fear and trembling) 6
Sir Thomas Lucy's commission made small headway with regard to that turmoil on 12 January 1584, and the case slowly dr
agged on until a final settlement for the Catholic landowner Smyth. Shakespeare -with the rest of the gossipy town -- must have heard what had passed between Smyth, Goodman, Dale, and Fenton and possibly remembered ' Fenton' when he wrote The Merry Wives, though the young gentleman who steals away Anne Page (as the host describes him) is less like the earl's rough man than like a nonchalant, sprightly lover of
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18 -- 'he capers, he dances, he has eyes of youth, he writes verses, he speaks holiday, he smells April and May' (III. ii. 61-2).
Most Shottery jurors in the Baldon Hill affair, it appears, had not spoken or decided upon religious party lines; people were wary of a case with a strong doctrinal factor. Events dictated caution. In the year of William's marriage Cottam, the brother of Stratford's schoolmaster, was hanged, and Robert Debdale of Shottery was to suffer the same fate as a missionary priest. William may already have learned to be discreet, but the mood of his parish would have affected him at least to the extent of making him a more seeking, fascinated observer. Even Baldon Hill exposed old religious fractures in a society, and local wits must have have enlivened the issues involved. William's own wit and imagination developed with enormous, buoyant force and humour as his head cleared itself of cobwebs left by the 'grammar gods', and civic contention appealed to him as he looked beyond the outward spectacle to the inward, private lives of individuals. If he was a neutral observer, he came closer to being a dramatic poet who would not 'take sides'. Perhaps the paradox of his courtship was that his imagination out ran it, as he took in tangled, intriguing, or comic events such as those involving the pride and pretensions of Smyth or the earl.