A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  HEADING HOME, THE IRONY COULD NOT HAVE ESCAPED SHAKESPEARE HOW closely his journey resembled the experience of his characters. Like Orlando, Celia, Rosalind, Touchstone, and the rest, he had left the world of court and city behind and entered Arden. Unlike Touchstone, who complains that “now am I in Arden; the more fool I,” Shakespeare knew that the journey to the country was only temporary; in the end, in his comedies as in his life, the lure of the city and court—what Touchstone calls the “better place”—was too powerful.

  Jonson and Dekker and other dramatists who were London born and bred gravitated at this time to plays set in contemporary London. Shakespeare preferred distant lands and times. In As You Like It he would offer a more realistic and contemporary setting, but it would be rural, not urban—the Forest of Arden. When Shakespeare saw that Lodge had set his Rosalind in Arden (that is, the French Ardennes, though spelled Arden), the temptation must have been overwhelming to domesticate it to a familiar English landscape, at the same time making it accommodating enough to embrace all kinds of associations with Ardens domestic and foreign, past and present.

  The Shakespeares had come from the heart of the old forest of Arden, villages like Balsall and Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall and Rowington. His mother even bore the name of Arden, and through her he could trace his English roots to a time before the Norman Conquest. Shakespeare’s Arden in As You Like It is close to home, though not home itself—and he took care to retain some of the more fantastic bits from Lodge, the lions and snakes and palm trees that made clear that this was an imaginary world. As usual, Shakespeare managed to have it both ways. But it’s also the closest he would come to exploring the depth of his investment in his native Arden.

  ONCE AGAIN, SHAKESPEARE HAD BEEN BORN TOO LATE. LIKE THE OLD faith, Arden had been central to the world of his ancestors, the stuff of family legends; yet all that now remained were traces of what had been. Just as the Catholic paintings in Stratford’s church and chapel had been whitewashed, the great Forest of Arden had been cut down, pasture and mixed woodland having replaced the endless woods rich in mystery and folklore. Writing about it in As You Like It must have stirred conflicting feelings in Shakespeare, for the play, in its disorienting shifts between woodland and pastoral landscapes, juxtaposes the romanticized Arden that stirred his imagination as a child with the realistic Arden that Shakespeare, sharp observer of land and people, witnessed as an adult. This helps explain the radically different Arden settings in the play. Four scenes in the play are set in the woods, the forbidding terrain where Orlando and Adam stumble upon the Duke and his men—the forest of ancient oak, streams, caves, and herds of deer, of men dressed as outlaws and “the old Robin Hood of England” (1.1.112). Twelve other scenes set in the Forest of Arden offer an alternative landscape, a world of enclosure, of sheep and shepherds, landlords and farmers, landed peasants and the less fortunate wage earners, where “green cornfield” and “acres of the rye” are now established (5.3.17, 21). When Oliver seeks Rosalind he does so “in the purlieus”—Shakespeare here using the technical term for parts of royal forests that were no longer wooded.

  His fellow poet and playwright Michael Drayton, another Warwickshire native, gave voice to what it felt like to be born too late to have experienced the forest of old in his topographical poem Poly-Olbion. Drayton explains that “the woodland in Warwickshire” was once “part of a larger weald or forest called Arden” whose bounds extended from the Severn to the Trent. Drayton is quick to assign blame for the end of Arden, first to overpopulation:

  When Britain first her fields with villages had filled,

  Her people waxing still, and wanting where to build,

  They oft dislodged the hart, and set their houses, where

  He in the broom and brakes had long time made his lair.

  Then to greed:

  For, when the world found but the fitness of my soil,

  The gripple wretch began immediately to spoil

  My tall and goodly woods, and did my ground enclose,

  By which, in little time my bounds I came to lose.

  Drayton may not have known it but even by medieval times, enclosure had already cleared most of the woods. One reason for these depredations was that Arden had never technically been a forest—and therefore protected under forest law. When the antiquarian John Leland rode through Warwickshire in the 1530s, deforestation was well advanced. He writes that the area north of the Avon is “much enclosed, plentiful of grass, but no great plenty of corn,” a view confirmed in 1586 by William Camden, who observed that the area is woodland, but “not without pastures, corn fields, and iron mines.” Those iron mines, a sign of early industry, were hungry for fuel. Shakespeare wasn’t as sentimental as Drayton, but he shared some of his nostalgia. His portrayal of Arden in As You Like It also acknowledges the economic and environmental changes Drayton describes in Poly-Olbion. They don’t swamp Shakespeare’s play, but they can’t be ignored either. Perhaps because he saw it every time he passed the dispossessed on his ride home, Shakespeare’s work is sensitive to the personal and social cost of enclosure.

  When Shakespeare worked through his main source for As You Like It, he could easily have represented the shepherd Coridon as Lodge had: a successful tenant farmer who made a living tending to his landlord’s sheep and tilling the land adjoining his rented cottage. What we get instead is the grim fate of Corin, unexpected in a comedy, who is so impoverished that he can’t even feed or lodge his guests. He apologetically explains that he is “shepherd to another man / And do not sheer the fleeces that I graze.” It gets worse, for his master’s cottage, “flocks, and bounds of feed / Are now on sale” (2.4.74–80). Shakespeare reduces Lodge’s tenant farmer to a wage earner who will be homeless and unemployed as soon as his master can sell off the cottage and the enclosed “bounds” for a quick profit (3.5.106). This is no throwaway scene. Shakespeare even names the owner, “old Carlot,” later in the play. Shakespeare also romanticizes Corin as the epitome of country virtues. As Corin tells Touchstone, when asked whether he likes “this shepherd’s life” (3.2.12): “Sir, I am a true laborer: I earn that I eat, get that I wear, owe no man hate, envy no man’s happiness, glad of other men’s good, content with my harm, and the greatest of my pride is to see my ewes graze and my lambs suck” (3.2.71–75).

  But of course the sheep are not his. Celia’s offer to buy the farm and mend Corin’s wages is all that stands between him and the highway. As You Like It quietly but firmly reminded contemporary audiences that the new economy could be ruthless. Shakespeare knew that there were more Corins around than ever, left, as the historian Victor Skipp puts it, “with no alternative but to take to the road, and ultimately to die on it.” Elizabethans knew what it meant when old Adam staggers onstage at the beginning of act 2, scene 6, exhausted and starving in the Forest of Arden, and tells Orlando, “I can go no further. Oh, I die for food! Here lie I down and measure out my grave” (2.6.1–2). The early acts of the play circle back time and again to the problems caused by vagrancy and hunger, including Orlando’s angry words when Adam first suggests that they turn itinerant:

  What, wouldst thou have me go and beg my food?

  Or with a base and boist’rous sword enforce

  A thievish living on the common road?

  This I must do or know not what to do.

  (2.3.31–34)

  Even as some starved, others profited. There’s a brief exchange late in the play in which Touchstone addresses William, a young man in his twenties who was born in the forest, and asks him, point-blank, “Art rich?” William, who for a landed Warwickshire peasant has done quite well, admits as much, though in a cautious country way, “Faith, sir, so-so” (5.1.24–25). We don’t need to see a sly bit of self-parody here in this Arden-bred William to know that another Warwickshireman with this name was also doing “so-so”—thanks in part to activities like his recent hording of malt. Shakespeare understood all too well that there was a profit to be made from economic hardships endur
ed by others. What we are presented with in this play, then, is a much grittier comic landscape than Shakespeare had ever offered, one that provides an almost subliminal source of conflict in a play largely devoid of it, and at times casts a shadow over an otherwise relatively sunny comedy. Its quiet recognition of the threat of social dislocation helps explain why at so many points As You Like It seems to anticipate the next play Shakespeare set in England, King Lear.

  SHAKESPEARE’S INVESTMENT IN ARDEN AT THIS TIME EXTENDED BEYOND the play he was completing this summer. He would have taken advantage of a trip home in late summer to discuss with his father two issues concerning the family’s Arden legacy that demanded their immediate attention. The first was the family coat of arms; the other, his mother’s Arden inheritance, which his father had mortgaged and lost, and which they were in the final stages of a drawn-out and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to recover. Shakespeare stake in Arden was real, and personal.

  It seems that the Shakespeares were not satisfied with the coat of arms that they had secured in 1596. Shakespeare and his father now sought more than simply the status of gentlemen; they wanted to incorporate their Arden connection. Whatever strategy he and his father decided upon, Shakespeare was the one who would have to deal directly with the heralds back in London. In November, or a few months after, Shakespeare returned to the College of Arms to plead the case (and to pay, once again, the steep price of twenty or so pounds for the privilege of doing so). In 1596, he and his father had claimed their right to a coat of arms on the grounds that John Shakespeare’s own father and grandfather had faithfully and valiantly served King Henry VII and had been rewarded by him. They also noted that John, in taking Mary Arden as his wife, had married the daughter of an esquire.

  The 1599 draft rewrites and expands this story. This time, their family service to the Crown, which is “approved” rather than “valiant,” is pushed further back in time, involving John Shakespeare’s “great grandfather and late antecessor.” And the royal largesse to the Shakespeares, previously left unspecified, is described in a way that emphasizes the family’s deep Warwickshire roots: “lands and tenements… in those parts of Warwickshire, where they have continued by some descents in good reputation and credit.” This was stretching things, for no grant appears on the Patent Rolls has ever been traced to a Shakespeare; Shakespeare’s ancestors had at best been freeholders or leaseholders.

  But these changes were incidental to the main reason for the return visit to the heralds in 1599, which was to justify impaling the Arden arms alongside those of Shakespeare. Curiously, Mary Arden, mentioned by name in 1596, becomes nameless in the 1599 draft, where what matters is John Shakespeare’s relation to Robert Arden, whose daughter he married. It wasn’t just plays and sonnets that Shakespeare put his mind to revising. In 1596, Shakespeare had first described his maternal grandfather as a “gentleman” before asking the heralds to upgrade that to “esquire,” the rank repeated in 1599. This overlooked the fact that Robert Arden, though financially comfortable, never in his lifetime even claimed the middling status of a yeoman.

  The main challenge facing the Shakespeares, and by implication, the heralds, was to which gentle line of Ardens to assign a Shakespeare connection. The absence of documentation was both an advantage and a problem. Had there been no doubt about Robert Arden’s relation to those Ardens who bore coats of arms, the Shakespeares would not have had to return to the heralds for an empowering grant. The surviving 1599 draft shows that the heralds initially decided on (or were persuaded by Shakespeare to assert) an alliance with the ancient line of the Ardens of Park Hall. So they began to draw in the margin of the document a sketch of the Shakespeare arms impaled alongside those of the Park Hall Ardens: “Ermine, a fess checky or and azure,” a coat ultimately derived from the Beauchamps, Earls of Warwick. But at this point, the heralds had a change of heart. The side of their sketch of the shield showing the arms of the Park Hall Ardens was scratched out, and next to it was sketched in another and less illustrious Arden coat, the so-called old coat, with “Gules, three cross-crosslets fitchées gold, and on a gold chief a martlet gules.”

  Alternatively, if the decision to alter the coat of arms at the last moment had been Shakespeare’s, it might have been motivated by his desire to put some distance from the Arden line that had been implicated in the failed Catholic assassination attempt on Elizabeth. It’s more likely, though, to have been the heralds’ decision. They must have been unconvinced that the Shakespeares were connected with even a cadet branch of so ancient a family as the Park Hall Ardens. Still, the draft ultimately allowed that the Shakespeares could join their arms with the “ancient arms” of Arden. But it remains unclear whether the confirmation was complete. If William Shakespeare’s Arden-less coat of arms on his monument in Stratford’s church and the family coat of arms subsequently used by his daughter Susanna and her husband, John Hall, are any indication, heraldic authorization was in the end withheld. Regardless of the outcome, the episode points to the depth of Shakespeare’s investment—financial as well as emotional—in the Arden legacy. He and his father either knew that what they were telling the heralds was a fiction, or they themselves had come to believe the stories they had been telling of their connection to Warwickshire and to Arden.

  The same obsession with an Arden legacy informs their persistence in trying to recover property that Shakespeare’s father had lost twenty years earlier. In 1556, Robert Arden had bequeathed property to his youngest daughter, Mary, in the Arden village of Wilmcote. In 1578, struggling financially, John Shakespeare, who had married Mary Arden, borrowed forty pounds from Edmund Lambert and mortgaged Mary’s house and land as security. This must have seemed a safe bet, for Lambert was his brother-in-law: his wife, Joan, was Mary’s sister, and it’s likely that Edmund and Joan had stood godfather and godmother to John and Mary’s children, who bore their names. But things didn’t work out as planned. William Shakespeare was fourteen years old when his father, unable to repay all of the money on time on September 29, 1580, saw his wife’s property pass into Lambert’s hands. However unjust, that was the law. After Lambert’s death in 1587, the property went to his son John. At this point the Shakespeares seemed ready to cut their losses, and, according to their version of what happened, in 1588, they agreed to give up any rights to the property and hand over any title deeds in their possession if John Lambert would compensate them with a cash payment of twenty pounds. It seems that some kind of conversation about this took place, but Lambert later denied that an agreement had been reached.

  And so the matter stood until November 1597, when Shakespeare and his father, having recently received their coat of arms, reversed course. They now wanted back their piece of Arden and sued for its return in Chancery, the court responsible for granting relief for unfair agreements. Once again, Shakespeare had to scramble to revise earlier narratives of what had transpired. His literary skills would have proved useful. The wheels of justice ground slowly, and it wasn’t until the summer of 1598 that the court appointed commissioners to look into the facts of the case. Because John Shakespeare had mistakenly filed proceedings with the court twice in the same cause, there were further delays, and it wasn’t until late June 1599 that the confusion was straightened out. Between June and October of 1599 witnesses for both sides were deposed and depositions prepared and submitted to the court, and evidence shared by the two parties. It would have been critical for William Shakespeare to be on the scene in Stratford at some point during these months to sift through documents, contact potential witnesses, and steer the case (we don’t know whether his father was literate or whether, given his advanced age, he was physically up to the task). Unfortunately, the depositions each side put together are lost; if they had survived, they could have told us a great deal more about the Shakespeares. It appears that their claim wasn’t strong enough, or, alternatively, that they grudgingly came to terms with Lambert, for the case was never heard by the court. Shakespeare and his father had spent an en
ormous amount of time, money, and energy in their attempt to regain this Arden legacy. There’s something quite brutal about having lost it on a legal technicality. But the episode, like that of the coat of arms, underscores how much the Arden connection had come to matter.

  The Arden of Shakespeare’s As You Like It and the Arden of his legal and heraldic pursuits have much in common. There’s a tension in the work as in the life between the real and the romantic, between the way things once were and the way things now stood. Even as we see two versions of Forests of Arden in the play—the wooded forest of days of yore and the deforested, enclosed, and economically fraught one of the present—so, too, we get two vastly different versions of Shakespeare’s Arden legacy. The fantasy of a heroic Shakespearean past and of a connection to Arden that stretched back to the days when it was indeed a magnificent forest, competed in Shakespeare’s mind with the reality that his ancestors on both sides had never been more than husbandmen. One of the most teasingly mysterious things about Shakespeare is his ability to sustain such contradictions; the same writer whose work exposed how embellished historical narratives often were, found himself, when it came to his own past, making it up as he went along.