A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Greenaway carried goods along with messages—he was a draper as well as a carrier and leased a couple of small shops in Middle Row in Stratford. His trade told a story of the complementary desires of country and city. He left home with his saddlebags laden with the traditional offerings of pastoral England: lambskins, rabbit skins, woolen shirts, and cheeses. And he carried back for Stratford’s wealthier consumers imported riches from London’s markets. So, for example, when Richard Quyney was in London for an extended stay in autumn 1598, his wife employed Greenaway to bring him tobacco, silver, and twenty pounds of cheeses, and Greenaway brought her back oranges as well. Taking advantage of her husband’s stay in London, she also asked that he send home “raisins, currants, pepper, sugar and some other grocery, if the prices be reasonable.” Anne Shakespeare may have requested much the same luxury items from her husband.

  Greenaway charged five shillings for a horse for the trip between London and Stratford. For some travelers, he also provided company. When Shakespeare’s neighbor John Sadler had to travel to London he hired a horse in Stratford and “joined himself to the carrier” who knew the best routes and inns. More than once, surely, Shakespeare and Greenaway’s trips home or back must have overlapped, and they would have ridden together and perhaps shared lodging and conversation. Greenaway probably had as good a sense of how Shakespeare juggled his roles as London playwright and well-to-do Stratford citizen as anyone, but what passed between the men perished with them.

  THE AGE OF CHAUCER’S PILGRIMS, A TIME WHEN CATHOLIC ENGLISH MEN and women of all ranks crisscrossed England to visit shrines at Canterbury, Norwich, and elsewhere, was long over. Royal statutes against vagabonds now outlawed unrestricted travel. Itinerants were likely to be whipped and sent packing. The problem was particularly acute in Arden. Vagrants, some of whom had lost their homes due to harvest failures and the pace of enclosure, had become so severe a problem in Stratford-upon-Avon that an act was passed in 1597 to prevent overcrowding, allowing no more than one family to a household. And in 1599 the authorities began to track down those who had entered town in the past three years.

  By the end of Elizabeth’s reign only a small number of people traveled far and wide across the English countryside, a list that included judges on circuit, carriers, soldiers, clandestine priests, those migrating to London to look for work, and of course, strolling players. As a Chamberlain’s Man, Shakespeare had toured in southeast England and had probably toured more extensively earlier in his acting career. What Shakespeare saw on the road during the stretch of terrible harvests in the mid-1590s must have been an especially sobering experience. Only someone who had seen the effects of crop failure could write so poignantly in A Midsummer Night’s Dream of how “the green corn”

  Hath rotted ere his youth attained a beard;

  The fold stands empty in the drowned field,

  And crows are fatted with the murrain flock.

  (2.1.94–97)

  Shakespeare had also seen firsthand, as few others could have, the widespread effects of enclosure and deforestation upon the English landscape.

  A trip home to Stratford in late summer 1599, with days spent bouncing on a small, hard, English saddle along rutted roads, and nights enduring strange and flea-infested beds, was no holiday. A 1555 statute put it bluntly: “Highways are now both very noisome and tedious to travel in, and dangerous to all passengers and carriages.” Even during the relatively dry months of late summer and early autumn the roads could be impassable. That October, for example, Thomas Platter failed to make it from Oxford to Cambridge by private coach. His coachman, who had leased his vehicle from a wealthy lord in London, begged off, explaining that the route was “uninhabited and rather deserted, [and] further that it had recently been raining, so that he did not wish to take the risk.” Newfangled four-wheel coaches might do in London’s immediate environs, but horse or foot was the only sure way of overland travel through rural England, and sometimes even that wasn’t good enough. When Will Kemp made his famous Morris dance from London to Norwich in the spring of 1600, he found himself having to detour around muddy roads “full of deep holes.”

  Shakespeare added his name to a list of seventy or so people who in 1611 contributed to supporting a parliamentary bill “for the better repair of the highways and amending diverse defects in the statutes already made.” He was acting out of self-interest, knew that travel on the poorly maintained roads was travail, labor—and said as much in Sonnet 27:

  Weary with toil, I haste me to my bed,

  The dear repose for limbs with travel tired;

  But then begins a journey in my head,

  To work my mind when body’s work’s expired.

  His obligations to his parents, his wife and her family, his daughters, and his business affairs drew Shakespeare to Stratford. But if Sonnet 50 can be said to offer any insight into his private life, the journey home must at times have produced mixed feelings, separating him as it did from other, more intimate relationships in London:

  How heavy do I journey on the way,

  When what I seek, my weary travel’s end,

  Doth teach that ease and that repose to say,

  “Thus far the miles are measured from thy friend!”

  The beast that bears me, tired with my woe,

  Plods dully on, to bear that weight in me,

  As if by some instinct the wretch did know

  His rider loved not speed being made from thee.

  The bloody spur cannot provoke him on

  That sometimes anger thrusts into his hide,

  Which heavily he answers with a groan

  More sharp to me than spurring to his side;

  For that same groan doth put this in my mind:

  My grief lies onward and my joy behind.

  Riding out of London, however ambivalent, Shakespeare passed through Holborn, St. Giles in the Field, past Tyburn’s gallows, over Han-well Common to Northcote. His path led him to Hillingdon Heath, through Uxbridge toward Buckinghamshire. And, after crossing the Colne, and riding through Beaconsfield, he arrived at High Wycombe, twenty-five miles from London, a good place to stop for the night. If he were traveling in late summer, he would have seen roads still clogged with mustered men hurrying back to their unharvested fields, now that the threat of the Invisible Armada had passed. There would also have been those back from Ireland—walking wounded or deserters. Shakespeare’s decision to disguise Rosalind as a soldier on her way to Arden must have struck some playgoers as an apt one.

  The dominant sight would have been of farmers harvesting their fields. Perhaps like the German traveler Paul Hentzner who toured England at this time of year in 1598, Shakespeare witnessed the popular and pagan celebration of “harvest-home,” when farmers crowned “their last load of corn… with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which perhaps, they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.” There would have been few idle hands in the rich agricultural country through which Shakespeare was riding.

  The next stage of his journey took him the twenty miles through Stokenchurch, Aston Rowant, Tetsworth, and Wheatley, into Oxford. Because of his father’s economic problems, Shakespeare, unlike schoolmates of his social standing in Stratford, had been denied a chance to study at the university; Oxford was the career path not taken. Tradition has it that Shakespeare lodged in Oxford at the Crown Inn. The proprietor was the father of William Davenant, who would later become a leading English playwright. Over time, the story was embellished, and it was alleged that Shakespeare lodged there to carry on an affair with Davenant’s beautiful mother—and Davenant himself wasn’t ashamed to declare that he “seemed contented enough to be thought” Shakespeare’s illegitimate son.

  The final leg of the journey—and the longest, at forty miles—would have taken Shakespeare from Oxford through Wolvercote and Begbroke to Woodstock
, where he could have stopped and visited the rooms in which Elizabeth, before she was queen, under close guard, awaited her doom, and scrawled in charcoal upon a window shutter a poem that was still legible when Paul Hentzner transcribed it in 1598:

  O Fortune! how thy restless wavering state

  Hath fraught with cares my troubled wit!

  Witness this present prison whither fate

  Hath borne me, and the joys I quit…

  ELIZABETH prisoner.

  Hers was a dramatic story and it was a pity that the life of the reigning queen remained off limits to a playwright who could have made so much of it.

  From Woodstock he followed the route over the Kiddington, through Neat Enstone into Chipping Norton. He was now twenty miles from home. This stage of the journey led through a rich strata of English history: on his way to Long Compton, he would pass by the Rollright Stones—a local Stonehenge rich in legend. The story went that in the days of the Danish King Rollo, an army of men had been turned to stone on the spot. After passing through this relatively isolated area, he neared Shipston-on-Stour. Shakespeare was approaching familiar ground, passing through Tredington and Newbold. He knew he was but eight miles out when he crested a hill, crossing the Roman road to Leicester, the great Fosse Way. Another five miles, through Ettington and Alderminster, would lead him to Atherstone. He was now squarely in the feldon, the rich and cleared agricultural expanse planted with wheat and other crops. In the distance, the Avon River marked the boundary separating feldon from woodland, chalk from cheese, not simply an agricultural boundary but a social, architectural, and economic one as well. His native town straddled it.

  Shakespeare rode into Stratford over Clopton Bridge, perhaps stopping long enough to notice where the stone he had recently sold the town (left over from renovations on his home) had been used in patching the bridge. His trip nearly over, he rode past Middle Row, turned left on High Street, past Sheep Street, and ended his journey on Chapel Street. Along this final stretch he saw how much the Stratford of his childhood and adolescence had changed. The terrible fires of 1594 and 1595 had claimed two hundred houses and caused as much as twelve thousand pounds in damage. The first fire had struck the town center, the one a year later its northern edge. The disasters were a national story: Thomas Beard bent the facts to suit his providential view of history when he wrote in The Theatre of God’s Judgment (1597) that the “whole town hath been twice burnt for the breach of the Sabbath by the inhabitants.” More likely, the conflagrations were caused and spread by small businesses in town, especially those turning barley to malt, which required stockpiles of fuel. The town went begging for relief—to neighboring counties for handouts and to London in order to be spared the steep taxes and subsidies demanded by the crown in 1598—and succeeded in both efforts.

  During the summer of 1599, the town was still rebuilding. In late April, Stratford’s leaders appointed a commission to see how reconstruction was progressing and their report provides a snapshot of how the town looked at this moment. Shakespeare would have seen Stratford in the slow process of recovery. There had been a flurry of activity in Wood Street Ward, where John Locke, Thomas Lempster, and Widow Cooper had finished rebuilding. Abraham Sturley still had some tiling to finish. Closer to his home, Shakespeare would have seen that, in defiance of new regulations, Hamnet Sadler had used flammable thatch in recovering his roof. The area around Sadler’s house and north, along Ely Street, had seen some of the worst destruction. Throughout Stratford, reconstruction remained spotty, with newly rebuilt houses standing alongside those still in ruins. Even more disconcerting were the number of strangers in town, most of them poor and living in overcrowded conditions. Stratford’s population had grown from just under fifteen hundred when Shakespeare was born to upward of twenty-five hundred in 1599. A quarter of the inhabitants, many of them displaced by the series of bad harvests or by the pace of enclosure, were impoverished. Stratford was struggling, country life a far cry from the pastoral fantasy served up by England’s poets and playwrights.

  HOME, FOR SHAKESPEARE, WAS NEW PLACE, AN IMPOSING HOUSE ON THE corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, across from the Guild Chapel. It was the second best house in town, which Shakespeare had bought two years earlier for the considerable sum of a hundred and twenty pounds. New Place was a fifteenth-century, three-story brick-and-timber building. It was very spacious, with ten rooms warmed by fireplaces, far more than the small family and any servants would have needed. The property also contained two gardens, two orchards, and two barns. Shakespeare’s recently acquired coat of arms would have been prominently displayed. In putting so much money into a huge home far from where he worked, Shakespeare may have been trying to assuage his guilt over living so far away from his wife and daughters. He may have been thinking ahead toward an early retirement. Or perhaps it was simply a good investment, one that few in hard-hit Stratford were in a position to make.

  It’s impossible to reconstruct what Shakespeare’s homecoming would have been like, what being reunited with his wife and daughters after a long absence might have meant to Shakespeare. He had not lived with Anne since he was in his early twenties. After he was established in London, Shakespeare could have easily purchased a home there and moved his family, but chose not to. Anne, now forty-three, had reached middle age sooner than her younger husband, while their teenage daughters Susanna and Judith, sixteen and fourteen, were almost grown up. Given that Shakespeare had only seen the girls at most a few times a year since they were children—and perhaps as few as a dozen or so times in all since he left for London in the late 1580s, it’s hard to imagine that his relationship with them was especially close, even by sixteenth-century standards. And yet the profound interest that Shakespeare shows in his plays about reunited families and his extraordinary insight into the relationship of fathers and daughters in plays from The Merchant of Venice and Lear to Pericles and The Tempest—would suggest the very opposite. Unless, of course, that writing was compensatory, a chance to create in stories what he had rejected in his life. There’s simply no way of knowing how he felt unsaddling at New Place on this or other visits—or how Anne, Susanna, and Judith may have felt about his return.

  Shakespeare’s visits home could not have been relaxing. He couldn’t count on getting much writing done. There was much to catch up on, many friends and relations to see, congratulate and condole, aging parents whom he might not see alive again, as well as some pressing legal matters to be looked into. Shakespeare would have found it much less noisy than London, the pace slower, and the food better, especially during the summer.

  One of the advantages of returning to Stratford was that he would not have to worry about having a meal prepared. And his gardens and orchards at New Place would have provided vegetables, herbs, and fruit and the local markets cheese and other dairy products. Shakespeare may have ridden back to London a bit heavier than when he left—or he may have been abstemious at home, too.

  THE SHAKESPEARE THAT HIS NEIGHBORS SAW RIDE INTO TOWN WAS NOT the “poet of the heart-robbing line” but a wealthy citizen with one of the most expensive homes in town. It’s this Shakespeare whose staid memorial bust still claims a prominent place in Stratford’s church. Shakespeare played vastly different roles in London and in Stratford. In his hometown he was sought out not for his plays or poems but for loans for business deals: just the previous October 1598, it was his “loving good friend and countryman” William Shakespeare that Richard Quiney, a leading citizen, tried to contact when he needed to borrow the considerable sum of thirty pounds. It’s unlikely that he ever had a chance to perform in Stratford for his parents, wife, children, and friends, for Puritan-leaning authorities strongly discouraged playing there. Shakespeare was fortunate to have grown up at a time when leading groups like Leicester’s Men, Worcester’s Men, Berkeley’s Men, and Derby’s Men had toured through Stratford. By 1602, the local bailiff had even imposed fines on anyone who permitted playing in town.

  Shakespeare was known loc
ally as an investor. Upon taking possession of New Place he had invested heavily in malt, eighty bushels of it, and stored it in his new barns. Malt was derived from barley, an expensive staple crop. It didn’t take much labor to turn barley to malt, and because of that the only ones to profit handsomely from malting were those wealthy enough to buy and store large amounts of grain. Shakespeare knew that by the time he began hoarding, the Privy Council—responding to terrible harvests and dearth—was trying to end to this practice, forbidding the export of grain and ordering that hoarded stock be sold on the open market. The councillors also instructed justices of the peace to look into local abuses. Since Stratford’s leading citizens were among the worst offenders—and also responsible for enforcing the new rules—little changed. Sick and hungry neighbors grew increasingly “malcontent,” and hoarders of malt were much hated (a Stratford weaver named John Grannams wished to see them “hanged on gibbets at their own doors”). Fortunately for Shakespeare, who was one of the leading offenders, the crisis passed. But he could not have stuffed his barns in 1597 ignorant of the consequences upon the poor of Warwickshire. He was clearly a man comfortable at playing many roles and capable of turning all of them into art. A decade later Shakespeare would begin Coriolanus by sympathetically portraying hungry citizens threatening to rise up against those hoarding grain.