by Shakespeare
Simon Hunt was succeeded by Thomas Jenkins, a Londoner and son of a “poor man” and “old servant” of Sir Thomas White; he had been a student of Latin and Greek at St. John’s College, Oxford, which had been established by the very same Sir Thomas White. White was a Roman Catholic, and St. John’s College was known to be sympathetic to Catholic undergraduates. Edmund Campion, Catholic saint and martyr, was attached to St. John’s College, and taught Thomas Jenkins there. Jenkins can therefore be considered to be indulgent, at the very least, to the Catholic cause. He can also be considered an expert classicist, and it was he who first introduced Shakespeare to the work of Ovid. He was in every sense a dedicated teacher; he had requested two years’ absence from his Oxford college “that he may give himself to teach children.”11
When Jenkins resigned in 1579 he found his own replacement in John Cottam, a fellow scholar from Merchant Taylors’ and Oxford University. Cottam’s younger brother, Thomas Cottam, was a Jesuit priest and missionary who resided at Douai with Simon Hunt. There they were joined by a fellow pupil of Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, the son of a Catholic farmer from Shottery. The associations with Shakespeare are close, therefore, and almost pressing. Thomas Cottam returned to England with a letter from Robert Debdale to his father. Both Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale were later arrested, for their proselytising activities in England, and executed. From allusions in his plays it is clear that Shakespeare followed the career of his erstwhile schoolfellow with some interest. He was, you might say, one of the fraternity.
John Cottam left the King’s New School in the year of his brother’s execution. The last connection with Shakespeare’s schooldays was another master, Alexander Aspinall, popularly supposed to be the model for the pedantic dunce Holofernes. And so the unfortunate man entered the creative imagination of the English. But since he did not enter the school until Shakespeare was eighteen, the connection may not be a close one. The young man no longer attended the New School; but he did know Aspinall, and may have observed his pedagoguery with an eye more objective than that of a school-boy. He is even believed to have written a set of verses, to accompany Aspinall’s present of gloves (bought from John Shakespeare) to an intended bride:
The gift is small
The will is all:
Asheyander Asbenall.
Funnily enough, the little poem sounds like Shakespeare, and may count as some amends for Holofernes.
CHAPTER 13
That’s Not So Good Now
In the early years of Shakespeare’s schooling his father persevered in illegal dealings in wool and in money-lending. They were in a sense conventional offences, and not likely to injure John Shakespeare’s reputation in any significant way. They were noted in the public records but he continued with his normal civic duties, and at the beginning of 1572 he and Adrian Quiney travelled to London in order to represent their town at the lawcourts in Westminster. There was a dispute with the lord of the manor, the Earl of Warwick. A few months later John Shakespeare was in Warwick to attend a post-mortem on a local miller. Throughout this period he attended the requisite “halls” when the council met for business.
There is a pretty story concerning another journey, during which he might have been accompanied by his son. Elizabeth I was engaged in one of her periodic progresses when, in the summer of 1575, she arrived at Kenilworth Castle; this castle was only twelve miles from Stratford, and the dignitaries of the locality were no doubt asked to attend in honour of Her Majesty. The Earl of Leicester’s Men were here to entertain her, but there were also various masques and pageants, dramatic spectacles and games, performed before her. One of these theatrical interludes included the presentation of a mermaid and various nymphs upon an artificial lake, followed by Arion riding upon a dolphin. It was part of the general extravagance of allegory and classical reference employed on such occasions, but many of Shakespeare’s biographers have insisted that it inspired a reference in Twelfth Night to “Arion on the Dolphines backe” (54) and a speech by Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (504-6):
… thou remembrest
Since once I sat vpon a promontory,
And heard a Mearmaide on a Dolphins backe …
It is at least suggestive. And a pretty story does no harm.
It cannot be said that John Shakespeare’s fortunes in this period were in any way declining. In 1575 he purchased two houses, with gardens and orchards, in Stratford for £40. It seems likely that these were contiguous to the dwelling in Henley Street, which he could now enlarge for his ever-growing family. He had also purchased land in Bishopton and Welcombe, which he later bequeathed to his son. He had already leased a house to William Burbage, and had also stood surety for two debts incurred by Richard Hath-away. His relative affluence makes his subsequent conduct all the more puzzling.
At the beginning of 1577, he left the borough council precipitately and abruptly. He had been present at its deliberations for the last thirteen years; after this date, he reappears in “hall” only once. This strange withdrawal does not seem to have been prompted by personal animosities. Indeed he was treated by his erstwhile colleagues with patience and forbearance. He was excused the fines generally levied for being absent, and he remained on the list of aldermen for a further ten years. His gown of office was not confiscated or “deprived.”
Many reasons have been adduced for his decision, ranging from ill-health and a possible stroke to drunkenness. It is unlikely that he was in any financial trouble; he seems to have remained prosperous throughout his son’s time in Stratford. There has been speculation that he avoided paying certain rates, or was deliberately under-assessed upon them, for reasons of penury. But this may simply be a misunderstanding of the difference between rates in the borough, and rates in the parish, of Stratford. A far more likely cause has been found in his espousal of the old religion. The year before his withdrawal a grand ecclesiastical commission was established by the Privy Council to investigate the religious affairs of the nation. Among its ordinances was one established to inquire into “all singular, heretical, erroneous and offensive opinions,” and “to order, correct, reform and punish any persons wilfully and obstinately absenting themselves from church and service.”1 The members of the borough council were no doubt asked to expedite these matters, perhaps even to draw up lists of recusants who “obstinately” refused to attend church service. To whom else could the commissioners turn? And so John Shakespeare, recusant, absented himself.
Later that year Whitgift was nominated to be the new Bishop of Worcester, in which see Stratford lay. Whitgift was known to be assiduous in the pursuit and prosecution of those who held “erroneous and offensive opinions.” In the year of John Shakespeare’s resignation, he arrived in Stratford on a religious visitation to hunt out heretics. At that time, he must have requested the help of the Stratford council. But John Shakespeare had gone nine months before.
John Shakespeare’s position was all the more precarious because through marriage he had become part of the Arden affinity; in this period the Catholic, Edward Arden, was engaged in full feud with the Protestant Earl of Leicester, who had charge of the county and who sent sectarian preachers to Stratford. Any member of the Arden family, however removed, could become an object of suspicion. So the world of religious politics conspired against Shakespeare’s father and obliged him to withdraw from public life. His colleagues were reluctant to see his departure, but they understood his reasons. This can be no more than a guess, but it does at least make sense of his subsequent behaviour.
Shakespeare was thirteen at the time of his father’s relinquishment of public duty and honour. Any effect upon his son can only be supposed, but the boy was of an age when rank and status are important among his fellows. In such a small and deeply hierarchical society, it seems likely that he felt his father’s departure most keenly. When we try to measure his response it is best to trust the tale rather than the teller. The plays of Shakespeare are filled with authoritative males who have failed
. That may of course be a definition of tragedy itself; in which case it will be one of the reasons for Shakespeare’s intense engagement with it. Many of the central male characters of his drama have been disappointed in the practical business of the world; we may adduce here Timon and Hamlet, Prospero and Coriolanus. This failure does not engender aggression or bitterness on the dramatist’s part; quite the contrary. It is invariably the case that Shakespeare sympathises with failure, with Antony or Brutus or Richard II. As his first biographer, Nicholas Rowe, put it of Wolsey in All Is True, “he makes his Fall and Ruin the Subject of general Compassion.”2 As soon as the male protagonists begin to lose their status, Shakespeare invests them with all the poetry of his being. It may be that John Shakespeare’s decline also became the context for his son’s preoccupation both with gentility and with the restoration of family honour. It will also help to elucidate, if not to explain, his unprecedented interest in the figure of the king. If the nominal head of the family has failed, it becomes quite natural to create an idealised patriarchy or an idealised relationship between father and son. In any case, Shakespeare himself made sure that he would never suffer his father’s failure.
In the course of the next four years John Shakespeare became enmeshed in further difficulties and negotiations. In 1578 he refused to pay a levy for six additional soldiers, equipped at Stratford’s expense. In the same year he did not attend the meetings on election day. He was not asked to pay the requisite fines for these offences. He was also involved in complicated land deals concerning some Arden property bequeathed to his wife. On 12 November he sold off 70 acres of Arden property in Wilmcote, the ancestral home of the Ardens, to Thomas Webbe and his heirs; the terms were that, after a period of twenty-one years, these lands would revert to the Shakespeare family. Thomas Webbe was a relative of some kind; Robert Webbe was Mary Arden’s nephew. Just two days later John Shakespeare mortgaged a house and 56 acres at Wilmcote to Edmund Lambert, Mary Arden’s brother-in-law. This was security on a loan by Lambert to Shakespeare of £40. The loan was to be repaid two years later, in 1580, when the property would be handed back to the Shakespeares. As it turned out Edmund Lambert never returned the house and land, citing various unpaid loans, and John Shakespeare sued him. It is a confusing history but the pattern is clear: the Shakespeares were selling land to relatives while arranging for its later reversion to them. In the following year they sold their portion of the property in Snitterfield, once belonging to Robert Arden, to their nephew.
The most plausible explanation for these complicated arrangements lies in John Shakespeare’s difficult position as a known recusant. Whitgift had made his visitation to Stratford, and the erstwhile alderman would soon be cited as one who refused to attend church services. One of the penalties of recusancy was the confiscation of land. An official report, published at a slightly later date, noted how recusants employed “preventions commonly … in use to deceive.” One subterfuge or “prevention” was detailed thus-“Recusants convey all their lands and goods to friends, and are relieved by those which have the same lands.” Others “demise their land to certain tenants.”3 The strategy is clear. A recusant such as John Shakespeare could convey his property to safe hands, to relatives rather than to “friends,” and thus avoid the prospect of confiscation. After an agreed interval the property was then returned. The conduct of Edmund Lambert, however, acts as a reminder that events did not always turn out as happily as they had been planned. His refusal to hand over the property at Wilmcote may lie behind some terse words from Horatio in Hamlet concerning “those foresaid lands / So by his father lost” (102-3). John Shakespeare was specifically “losing” lands once bequeathed to Mary Arden. It does not take an expert in marital relations to conclude that there was some unacknowledged tension between wife and husband, the inheritors of the Arden and Shakespeare names. As the example of D. H. Lawrence may suggest, these tensions may be bad for the child but good for the writer.
The whole imbroglio emphasises the increasing difficulty of John Shakespeare’s position, and no doubt the increasing anxiety of his family. The situation was compounded by the death in the spring of 1579 of Shakespeare’s sister. Anne Shakespeare was only eight years old. There is an item in the parish register concerning “the bell amp; paull for Mr. Shaxpers dawghter.” The sorrows of the Shakespeare family are not open to inspection.
CHAPTER 14
Of Such a Mery
Nimble Stiring Spirit
Shakespeare himself was fifteen in that year, 1579, and entering that period of life when, according to the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, there is nothing “but getting wenches with childe, wronging the Auncientry, stealing, fighting” (1313-14). He committed at least one of these offences, and is popularly supposed to have been guilty of two others. But we may prefer to see him as Goethe saw the young Hamlet, as “a good companion, pliant, courteous, discreet, and able to forget and forgive an injury.” If he was also “able to discern and value the good and the beautiful in the arts,”1 then he reached the borders of manhood at an appropriate time. In this year were published North’s translations of Plutarch, from which he would later borrow, as well as the Euphues of John Lyly and The Shepheardes Calender of Edmund Spenser. New forms of prose, and new kinds of poetry, were all around him.
It is possible that his father paid the £5 necessary for his son to continue his schooling after the age of fourteen; only after that age, according to the conventional school curriculum, could he have acquired even the “lesse Greeke” of which Ben Jonson accused him. The age of fourteen, however, was that hard year when boys became apprentices. The young Shakespeare may have started working for his father in some capacity; this was the standard practice of those who were not apprenticed elsewhere. Nicholas Rowe states that after school his father “could give him no better education than his own employment”;2 this surmise is confirmed by John Aubrey, who wrote that “when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade.”3 Rowe assumes that John Shakespeare was in poverty, however, and Aubrey assumes that he was a butcher. These assumptions are not correct.
It has also been suggested that the young Shakespeare worked as a lawyer’s clerk, or that he found employment as a schoolmaster in the country, or that he was called up for military service – a duty for which he would have been liable after the age of sixteen. It is perhaps significant that the only form of recruitment known to Shakespeare was that of impressments, and that there are many allusions in his plays to archery. But his extraordinary capacity for entry into imagined worlds has misled many scholars. His apparent knowledge of the technical terms of seamanship – even to the details of dry ship-biscuits – has, for example, convinced some that he served in the English navy. You can never overestimate his powers of assimilation and empathy.
In the absence of certainty, there have emerged many legends concerning Shakespeare’s early years. The most famous of these is his aptitude for poaching. The story concerns his encroachment upon the estate of a local dignitary, Sir Thomas Lucy, and is first mentioned in print by Rowe. Rowe himself gathered it from the actor, Thomas Betterton, who had travelled to Stratford in order to pick up any Shakespearian lore. “He had,” Rowe writes,
by a Misfortune common enough to young Fellows, fallen into ill Company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag’d him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong’d to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by the Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho’ this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Persecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.4
The ballad itself was, according to one elderly Warwickshire resident, “stuck upon the park gate, which exasperated the knight to apply to a lawyer at Warwi
ck to proceed against him.”5 And then, at a later date, two versions of the ballad itself were fortuitously discovered, one of them ringing the changes on the consonance of “Lucy” and “lowsie.” It might all be dismissed as minor literary speculation – or indeed fabrication, as many scholars believe- except that, quite apart from the testimony of Rowe, the same story was repeated by a clergyman in the late seventeenth century. Richard Davies told the antiquarian Anthony a Wood that Shakespeare “was much given to all unluckinesse in Stealing venison amp; Rabbits particularly from Sir – Lucy who had him oft whipt and Sometimes Imprisoned amp; at last made Him fly his Native Country …”6 Two independent accounts, employing approximately the same facts, deserve attention. But there are difficulties with the story as it stands. There was no park in the grounds of Sir Thomas Lucy’s house, Charlecote; it was then a “free warren,” and deer were not brought onto the estate until the eighteenth century. As a result of this discovery the site of Shakespeare’s alleged misdeed was moved, two miles away across the Avon, to another of Lucy’s parks called Fullbrooke. Yet it has been pointed out that the Lucys did not have proprietary rights in Fullbrooke until the last years of Shakespeare’s life. Even if Shakespeare had been able to poach the nonexistent deer in a non-existent park, he could not have been whipped for the offence; he would have been fined or imprisoned. Shakespeare does indeed make the allusive connection between “Lucy” and “lowsie,” through the happy medium of Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor. But the target of his humour is much more likely to have been a bailiff of Southwark, William Gardiner, a notorious hater of the theatre who had threatened Shakespeare with arrest. He had married Frances Lucy, and on his coat of arms were impaled three “lucies” or fish. In any event Shakespeare refers with great respect to one of Sir Thomas Lucy’s ancestors, William Lucy, in the first part of Henry VI.