by Park Honan
In his plays Shakespeare minimizes the Protestant -- Catholic conflict, and he did not advertise his beliefs. But Susanna's beliefs were likely to be unsettled, and about a year later, at 24, she was wed to John Hall, a church-going physician. It is wrongly supposed that in her mid-twenties a Stratford woman would have been thought a little 'old' for the altar. A modern account represents Anne Hathaway, at her marriage at 26, as 'long in the tooth', and supposes that Shakespeare may have wed to save 'his fading siren of Shottery'. Those are poor male guesses, nothing more. Parish registers are helpful, and a survey based on them shows that the 'mean' age for women at first marriage in twelve parishes (including Alcester near Stratford) during 150 years after Anne's wedding, was just 26. (For a quarter of a century, the age at first marriage for women was even higher in Stratford.) 2 At 24, the elder daughter of the owner of New Place might have had a fair choice among the town's bachelors.
But Susanna accepted Mr Hall -- a physician who lacked a doctoral
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degree. His sister, Sara, had wed a Cambridge scholar of 'physick' who had that degree, but one could practise medicine without a doctorate. Born in 1575 and raised in the rustic village of Carlton, Bedfordshire, in the family of a physician, John Hall had gone thirty miles away to Queen's College, Cambridge; he took his Bachelor's degree in 1593, his Master's in 1597, and then travelled in France. What had brought him to the Midlands? His parish of Carlton was not close to Stratford, but Sir Thomas Lucy had inherited a manor at Carlton. Abraham Sturley had worked for Lucy, and Mr Hall includes a Sturley among his patients. With a few local connections, he set up a practice before marrying Susanna on 5 June 1607. 3
To judge from his plays, Shakespeare viewed the role of a father at a wedding as of deep sacramental importance. In Lear, Othello, or Romeo and Juliet, it suggests tragic consequences to come if a father flouts his sacred role, either by 'giving away' his child without her consent, or by withholding it when she marries. And as at Holy Trinity, a country wedding's symbolism would have been important to him. Boys wore sprigs of rosemary tied to their sleeves as symbols of fidelity; bridesmaids carried cakes or garlands of gilded wheat to symbolize fertility. The father accompanied the bride to the altar.
'Who giveth this woman to be married unto this man?' the priest would call out. The father then relinquished the bride, and after that his role in his daughter's life had ended. He watched as the couple plighted troths, and as the groom placed the ring on the bride's finger with these words: 'With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.'
Yet even for a bride's father, weddings were as hopeful as they are today. John and Susanna might produce children, and at about this time in Act V in Pericles Shakespeare wrote one of his most moving testaments of a father's love for a daughter. He also saw the abased side of a father's supposedly blameless love, and symbolized an entwined, difficult, incestuous feeling in paternal love in Pericles. His love for Susanna was complex and intense, and one finds signs of it in his legal will and indirectly in his late plays. The recent evidence, coming to light in 1994, implies that John and Susanna knew that they would have the Old Stratford acres he had bought from the Combes,
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and this may have figured in the marital settlement. 4 The Halls, alert to his good will, probably settled before long not far from New Place, at the street of Old Town, in a timber-framed house known today as Hall's Croft, and Susanna gave birth to her only child, Elizabeth Hall, baptized on 21 February 1608. At 43, Shakespeare was a grandfather.
What did he think of his son-in-law? John Hall's social rank as a physician was not very high, and medical knowledge was more widely diffused then than today. The doctors in the plays so far had been nondescript, or burlesqued as Dr Caius is in Merry Wives, but Lord Cerimon in Pericles -- who restores the hero's wife after her 'burial' at sea -- is a selfless practitioner, not unlike Mr John Hall in bringing
to my aid the blest infusions
That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones.
(xii. 32-3)
Mr Hall in fact used 'infusions' which he prepared even with 'Coral' and 'Pearl', and carried his remedies up to forty miles from home. His first casebook is lost, but his second, which begins in 1617, tells us very interestingly of his medical habits. With herbs and 'Pearl', he once treated a Catholic priest, and noted that 'beyond all expectation the Catholick was cured'. ('Blessed be God', Hall noted in Latin, though his pious words for a Roman priest were omitted after Hall's death when his casebook was printed.) Shakespeare knew his son-in-law for nearly a decade, and one gathers that the two were fairly intimate. They appear together in London for example in Thomas Greene Diary (which Stratford's worried town clerk kept from 1614 to 1617 during a local civic crisis), and Hall's notions of curing with coral and pearl were likely to be remembered. 'Of his bones are coral made', wrote the poet for Ariel in The Tempest.
Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich an strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.
(I. ii. 401-5)
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Hall's cures may not have inspired the song, but to be acquainted with him was to know his strange, transforming liquids and Elizabethan pharmacopoeia. He disliked blood-letting. Some of his ways were superstitious, but he preferred what was mild. He used more than a hundred separate botanical herbs, and Hall's garden, like New Place's gardens, became known for its varieties of plants.
Once when Susanna was 'tormented with the Cholick', he gave her an enema of flowers, and then 'I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made hot. This brought forth a good deal of Wind, and freed her from all Pain' -- and so 'Mrs. Hall of Stratford, my Wife' was cured.
Neuralgia was not unknown to Shakespeare's descendants, and when Elizabeth, as a child, had what he diagnosed as 'Tortura Oris', with pain on her face's left side and then on her right, Hall produced his fullest case-history. The child became worse. But in late stages, when she was weak, he massaged spices into her back, poured almond oil over her head and squeezed it up her nose, until she was 'delivered from Death'. 5
Asked later to sit on Stratford's council, he twice declined (even as he was to refuse a knighthood). Then he accepted, only to be fined for being absent. When he flared up at that lack of reason, he was expelled from the council. One of Mr Hall's enemies became Daniel Baker, an ultra-Puritan linen-draper of High Street, who as bailiff in 1602 had helped to ensure the banning of plays. Narrow-minded and truculent, he was symptomatic of a new order in Shakespeare's late years: for the town's crafts had all but died out, and retail merchants were in power. There was insecurity among the burgesses partly because Stratford was at once a borough, a manor, and a parish, so boundaries of control overlapped. The haberdashers, mercers, and drapers could be rule-bound, ceremonial, aggressive. Mr Hall was to call them 'forsworne villaines'; they damned him for 'false imputations'. 6 They plotted to get rid of the local vicar (effectively as it turned out) before Shakespeare died, and Hall was to defend the next, well-educated, vicar against the council's wrath.
Even Puritan drapers usually went to Anglican service, and Hall was of Puritan inclination himself; but in these years, class or rank was a contentious factor in the town's life. Local politics had much to do with one's calling, friends, and education -- and what helped to divide
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Stratford was the contempt of well-educated, professional men such as John Hall for the airs of common tradesmen.
A few months after Elizabeth's birth, the poet's mother had died. Mary Shakespeare was buried on 9 September 1608. Summoned by the vicar's clerk that October, the poet's sister Joan and her husband William Hart appear to have administered her estate.
Mary Shakespeare had used a quill pen deftly, joined her husband in a law suit, and seen more than one of her sons through petty school. From such evidence as exists
and from genetic probability, she emerges as an intelligent, quick-minded, eager, and selfless person of use to generations of males, since it is likely that she had helped her father, husband, and eldest son in turn, in a managerial capacity at Arden's farm and Henley Street. Shakespeare had kept his Sonnets out of print while she lived. Eight months after she died they were registered for publication. Their bawdry might have troubled a countrywoman less than some of her son's odd, ironic assertions, which are a gateway to one of the most complex of psyches. The most tangled and contradictory of his relationships, one suspects, was always with his mother. His troubled attitudes to women are too deep to be of anything but early origin. There is no biographical evidence that he abhorred women, but in relation to female sexuality he had become fastidiously self-protective. The Sonnets cast an odd light in their obsession with sexual pollution or contamination, itself a theme in Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and Timon. The difference between his troubled views of sexuality, and the love he felt for his grown daughters, has a bearing on tensions in his late plays in which he sketches women in a new light and on occasion mocks himself; but it is not so certain, in view of his daughters' eventual problems, that he was confidential or at ease with the daughters he cared for.
We are to see more of Susanna's temperament, but he could not have been luckier in his son-in-law. In December 1607 the doctor's father, William Hall of Acton, made out a will in which the claims of an elder son were overlooked and John Hall as a younger son was named as his father's inheritor and 'sole executor'. 7 The poet too appears to have trusted Hall above other men he knew.
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A few of his Sonnets had been in circulation ever since 1598, when Meres noted that 'private friends' had access to them. Some, perhaps, had won admirers. John Weever as a young littérateur imitates the form of a Shakespeare sonnet in a lyric called 'Ad Gulielmum Shakespear' published in his Epigrammes ( 1599), but he could have seen the three sonnets in Romeo and Juliet. Weever dedicated Epigrammes to Sir Richard Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancashire -- and there is another vague link between the Sonnets and Lancashire. A manuscript of Sonnet 2 has been found in a collection made either by Sir Edmund Osborne, or by his second wife Anne, whose mother Mary was a sister of the same Sir Richard Hoghton ( 1570-1630), of Hoghton Tower. 8
Somewhat less significant is a long poem called Willobie his Avisa, licensed on 3 September 1594 and probably written by an undergraduate. Its likely author Henry Willobie had entered St John's College, Oxford, before transferring to Exeter College and taking a degree in 1595. Five years earlier Henry Willobie's elder brother William had married Eleanor Bampfield, whose sister in the same month married Thomas Russell. This is of interest since Shakespeare was to name Russell as an overseer of his will and leave him £5.
The poem, in a leisurely manner, concerns a frustrated lover, one 'Henrico Willobego. Italo-Hispalensis', or 'H.W.', whose 'familiar friend W.S.', recovering from a 'like' passion of his own, is bent on seeing if love will 'sort to a happier end for this new actor, than it did for the old player'. The allusions to 'W.S., new actor, old player' are few, vague, and also tantalizing, though there is nothing in Avisa that could not be imagined, perhaps, by a reader of Shakespeare's Ovidian poems who knew that he was also a stage actor. Still, it is silly to be too confident. Avisa refers to Shakespeare Lucrece, and, as we learned in recent times, a resident at one of the Inns of Court, a certain 'H. M. of the Middle Temple', links these two poems in a semi-erotic work of his own in 1605:
We reade ( Avisa) as reports the Writer
We reade that Lucrece was persude after:
The Strange Fortune of Alerane or My Ladies Toy. 9
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Every problem with Avisa, at any rate, shrinks when one comes to the mystery of the Sonnets' publication. Shakespeare, it is believed, had almost certainly revised his lyrics, and he may have arranged them for a sonnet sequence in the tradition of Samuel Daniel Delia ( 1592), which had its groups of sonnets, a lightweight interlude, and a 'Complaint of Rosamond'. Months of plague would have given him ample time to order his sonnets in small groups within two main sections, followed by an interlude in Sonnets 153 and 154, and A Lover's Complaint.
Certainly, too, Shakespeare's income was reduced by long closures of theatres in 1607 and 1608, and he would have had reason to sell poems of a slightly outmoded fashion while he could. At any rate, a volume of his lyrics was licensed in London on 20 May 1609 and printed by George Eld, for the quality publisher Thomas Thorpe, who since 1600 had brought out works by Jonson, Marston, and Chapman and had contacts with the universities. There is no sign that Shakespeares Sonnets was later withdrawn from publication, or that it appeared in irregular circumstances. Thirteen copies still exist, which could mean that a few readers very lovingly saved the volume, or that it was not liked well enough to be read literally to pieces (the highly popular Venus and Adonis of 1593 survives in only one copy).
Thorpe, who depended on writers for the theatre, had a fairly creditable record when he issued the Sonnets. His books were respected, and his printer Eld kept to fairly good, if not exceptionally high, standards. In 1611, perhaps as a Jonsonian joke, Thorpe was to issue Coryate's Odcombian Banquet without a main text but with its prefatory matter, and in fact he lacked authority for that, although he never printed the Banquet itself. 10
For Shake-speares Sonnets he used the impressive, famously obscure dedication which follows. It has become a Riddle of the Sphinx for Shakespeare scholars, who of course have not hesitated to tell us what Thorpe may mean. Supposing 'W.H.' to be a misprint for 'W.SH.', one critic observes that Thorpe elsewhere signs himself, 'T. Th.' or 'TH. TH'. If 'W. H.', then, is a slip for 'W. SH.' or W. Shakespeare, the odd dedication, which is meant to resemble a Latin lapidary inscription, might be nearly intelligible. 11 The phrase 'ever-living poet' might refer to Our Lord, and the metaphor about a 'well-
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wishing adventurer' could apply to the enterprising volume itself. Even so, the phrasing is remarkably contorted:
TO. THE. ONLIE. BEGETTER. OF.
THESE. INSVING. SONNETS.
Mr. W. H. ALL. HAPPINESSE.
AND. THAT. ETERNITIE.
PROMISED.
BY.
OVR. EVER - LIVING. POET.
WISHETH.
THE. WELL - WISHING.
ADVENTVRER. IN.
SETTI NG.
FORTH.
T. T.
And, one asks, is it likely that Eld, a competent printer, would let 'W.H.' stand as a glaring misprint? (There are not many misprints elsewhere in the work.) Worried over sales, Thorpe may have hoped to allure sonnet-readers by mystifying them, as publishers did in the 1590s, and changed 'W.SH.' to 'W.H.' himself. That explanation, at least, is not inconsistent with what little is known of Thorpe's character. The 'misprint' theory (first mooted by Brae in 1869) has no small merit in being sane, but attention has focused on a person with the initials 'W.H.' (entailing a little trouble if we favour Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton) who may have been the Sonnets' 'onlie begetter'. The latter word meant 'originator', but it has been taken to mean 'inspirer' or 'procurer', and, so far, the leading contenders for 'Mr. W.H.' are still Sir William Harvey ( Southampton's stepfather) and William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke. There was a precedent for addressing a nobleman as 'Mr', but it is unlikely that a publisher in touch with the theatre, or a public actor, in 1609, would refer in print
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to the great Earl of Pembroke, a patron of the King's men, merely as 'Mr. W. H.' Only frail circumstantial evidence supports the attribution to Sir William Harvey, and the dedication remains an alluring enigma -- as one suspects Thorpe hoped it would be.
Either the Shake-speares Sonnets sold too poorly to be quickly reissued, or they were withheld from republication during the author's lifetime. But there was a possible tactical advantage, for Shakespeare's actors, in having these elegant lyrics in print in London at a crucial time in 1609.
&nbs
p; Lands of 'painful adventure' from Pericles to The Tempest
At the time of Susanna's marriage to John Hall the city theatres had suffered from repeated closures. The plague hardly relented. Or if it relented for a few weeks, the death-toll, in either cold or warm weather, might subsequently rise unpredictably, forcing the Privy Council to give new orders to the justices of the peace, so that doors again would shut. Weeks passed for acting companies beset by high, inflationary costs, but taking in no money, and yet in this period the King's Servants were helped by their own patron, as when they were allowed to play at court nine days after Lent had begun in 1607. They had good reason to bless King James. In the next year, fifty deaths were recorded in London on 28 July, and more than forty a week thereafter, with up to 102, 124, or 147 dead in three autumn weeks. A long, enforced hiatus had begun -- and with the Globe's doors shut for sixteen months, even modest royal gifts were welcome. 12
The Globe's men, however, had taken a risky step to be in a good position when the sickness lifted. Success would hinge on their prestige, authority, and high quality, since they aimed to fulfil a dream by having a theatre inside the city in an élite neighbourhood which had previously rebuffed them. Those who had got up a petition against Burbage and signed their gentlemanly names, such as Harmon Buckholt, Ascanio de Renialmire, and the like, had complained of 'a common playhouse' in their midst. Twice again such residents were to protest, and, indeed, success for the King's men might depend on their own luck in avoiding early complaints while they established