by Shakespeare
A stray piece of research serves to deepen, if not necessarily to strengthen, the picture. Fifty years ago two Shakespearian scholars, Alan Keen and Roger Lubbock, discovered a copy of Hall’s Chronicles which had been heavily annotated in an unknown hand. Hall’s Chronicles was an indispensable source book for Shakespeare’s history plays, but this particular copy has an independent interest. The annotations have been made in a youthful hand, and display “sympathy with Hall’s patriotic enthusiasm and fury at his anti-Catholicism”;6 there are also notes and marginal comments on such matters as the resignation of Richard II. A graphologist, inspecting this handwriting, has concluded that the letterings “indicate the probability that Shakespeare and the annotator were the same man, but do not by any means prove it.”7 None of this would be of the slightest consequence were it not for the fact that Keen and Lubbock, pursuing their investigations, discovered that this particular volume was in the joint or communal possession both of Thomas Hoghton and of Thomas Hesketh.
A chronology of the salient events in the summer and autumn of 1581 will create a context for the young Shakespeare. Edmund Campion was arrested on 16 July, and was taken to the Tower for torture on 31 July. On 5 August, two days after Alexander Hoghton had made his will, the Privy Council issued an order for the search of “certain books and papers which Edmund Campion has confessed he left at the house of one Richard Hoghton in Lancashire.” Richard Hoghton was then arrested. Could it be that Alexander Hoghton had made his will because he knew by then that he might be arrested and that perhaps he did not expect to live for very long? On 21 August the Privy Council congratulated the loyal magistrates of Lancashire for seizing Campion’s hosts and for taking “certain papers, in Hoghton House.”
On 12 September Alexander Hoghton died in what appear to have been suspicious circumstances. Then, at the close of this year, Sir Thomas Hesketh – to whom Hoghton had recommended “Shakeshafte”-was consigned to prison on the grounds that he had failed to curb the practice of the Catholic faith amongst his servitors. All of his friends and retainers would naturally come under renewed suspicion from the queen’s emissaries. The net of suspicion was being drawn tightly over these Lancastrian households, and it was perhaps high time that the young Shakespeare made a convenient departure. By the summer of 1582, at the very latest, he is to be found once more in Stratford.
CHAPTER 16
Before I Know My Selfe, Seeke
Not to Know Me
He came back to a larger but not necessarily happier family. In the spring of 1580 John Shakespeare had been summoned to the Queen’s Bench in Westminster and, when he did not appear, was fined the large sum of £40. He was not alone in his transgression, since approximately two hundred men and women from different counties were caught up in the same punitive action and fined various amounts to a maximum of £200. The supposition must inevitably be that these “malcontents” were brought to the bar of justice for recusancy or refusal to attend church services. In the following year it was formally proclaimed that those who did not conform to the prescriptions of the Act of Uniformity would be fined the sum of £20 per month, rising to “all their goods and a third part of their land.” For Catholics there was now the clear danger of financial ruin. Half of John Shakespeare’s fine was levied because of his reluctance or inability to ensure that a Nottinghamshire hat-maker, John Audley, came to court. On the same day Audley himself was in turn fined £10 for not bringing John Shakespeare to the Queen’s Bench. Historians have inferred that this system of mutual bail, uniting people from various regions and different jurisdictions, was an attempt by Catholics to circumvent the collection of any fines. Yet Shakespeare’s father did pay his fine, as recorded in the Coram Regina Roll, suggesting that he lived still in relative affluence.
When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in 1582, it was in the face of an uncertain future. At the age of eighteen, what likely career might have been open to him? In recent years there has grown an abiding, if not universal, belief that he had some training as a lawyer’s clerk in Stratford. It was not an unnatural progress. For a quick and intelligent young man there were many possible “openings” in his home town. One of the old schoolmasters at the Free School, Walter Roche, had a lawyer’s practice in Chapel Street. John Shakespeare used the services of William Court in the same street. If he was not clerk to a solicitor, he might have been a copyist or even a scrivener’s apprentice. It is also possible that as a result of his father’s influence he worked in the office of Henry Rogers, the town clerk of Stratford, situated in Wood Street.
His drama is striated with legal terminology, particularly with that concerning property law. There is scarcely a play in which words or phrases from the courts are not employed. The sonnets are filled with similar references, to such an extent that it has even been supposed that they were addressed to a member of one of the Inns of Court. It could just as well be argued that the age of Shakespeare was excessively litigious, and that any Elizabethan would of necessity have acquired a great deal of knowledge about the law. As one contemporary put it, “now every Raskall will tak upon to knowe the laws as well as the best gentleman.”1 The law was an inevitable part of ordinary social life.
But the most important Shakespearian scholar of the eighteenth century, Edmond Malone, remarked that “his knowledge of legal terms is not merely such as might be acquired by the casual observation of even his all-comprehending mind; it has the appearance of technical skill.”2 More significantly, perhaps, it emerges in the very texture of his writing. He writes of warrants and conveyances, leases and inventories, presentments and suits, fines and recoveries. There is such a multitude of examples that it is almost absurd to single out any of them. Mistress Page says of Falstaff in The Merry Wives of Windsor (2132-4), “If the diuell haue him not in fee-simple, with fine and re-couery, he will neuer (I think) in the way of waste, attempt vs againe.” It would take an expert in Tudor law to explain the remark, which may not in any case have come naturally to a wife of Windsor. Lady Macbeth consoles her husband, on the ticklish matter of Banquo and Fleance, with the sentence (983) that “in them Natures coppie’s not eterne,” a reference to the law of copia or copyhold. In The Rape of Lucrece the unfortunate heroine “folds shee vp the tenure of her woe” (1310); “tenure” is the technical legal term for a correctly completed statement. In All’s Well That Ends Well Parolles says of his erstwhile master (2220-1), “for a Cardecue he will sell the fee-simple of his saluation, the inheritance of it, and cut th’intaile from all remainders.” But enough is enough. It need only be said that it is a mark of his “all-comprehending” imagination that the language of law comes to him as effortlessly and as instinctively as the language of nature. In the larger sense he places all his characters before the Court of Equity, where justice is tempered by mercy.
There is other evidence concerning Shakespeare’s early career. The first references allude to him somewhat slightingly as a former “noverint” or legal scrivener. Several palaeographers have agreed that the available remnants of his handwriting, particularly in his signatures, give clear indication of a legal training. One of those signatures appears in a volume entitled Archaionomia, found in 1939. It is a legal text, composed by William Lambarde, which contains a Latin translation of Anglo-Saxon edicts. The signature of “Wm Shakspere” within it is the object of considerable scholarly debate. But Lambarde was an officer of the court in Westminster Hall during the period when John Shakespeare was filing a bill of complaint at the Queen’s Bench. At a later date Lambarde was Master of Chancery when another of John Shakespeare’s fifty separate suits was entered there. He was also Master of the Revels at Lincoln’s Inn, one of whose duties was the staging of appropriate dramas. There was every reason why Shakespeare would have been acquainted with him.
John Shakespeare’s relatively late appearance as a plaintiff at Westminster suggests another explanation for Shakespeare’s knowledge of the law – he may have been assisting his father in the various legal manoeuvres
in which the Shakespeare family was engaged. That might explain the dramatist’s excellent knowledge of property law. He could have been working for his father. There is a strange note, in the copy of Archaionomia possibly signed by Shakespeare, to the effect that “Mr. Wm Shakspeare Lived at № 1 Little Crown St. Westminster”; it is in an eighteenth-century hand, and the location is genuine. The information may be spurious, or it may apply to quite another William Shakespeare. In a certain set of circumstances, however, it would make perfect sense. If he had lived close to the courts of justice, while pursuing a familial suit, he may have acquired Archaionomia in order to impress Lambarde with ancient precedents. Lambarde’s volume also acted as a source book for the play entitled Edmund Ironside, the surviving manuscript of which (to be found in the Manuscript Collections of the British Library) is written in an unmistakably legal hand and contains many legal abbreviations. The authorship of the play is contested, but some have ascribed it to Shakespeare himself. The connections and associations are there, for those who care to find them. The biographer can thus explore a number of possible Shakespearian identities without traducing the essential nature of the man.
One other quasi-legal digression is of some pertinence. If the young Shakespeare had indeed been working in the office of Stratford’s town clerk, he would have become fully acquainted with the case of a young woman who in 1580 drowned in the Avon. The inference was that she had committed suicide but her family, intent upon giving her a proper Christian burial, insisted that she had fallen accidentally into the river while going down to the bank with her milk-pail in order to draw water. The Avon at this juncture, by Tiddington, is known for its overhanging willows and coronet weeds. If she had been found guilty of “felo de se” or suicide, she would have been buried in a hole by a crossroads, at a spot where local folk were permitted to throw stones or broken pots. Henry Rogers conducted the inquest, and arrived at the conclusion that she had indeed met her death “per infortunium” or accidentally. If this suggests images of Ophelia, then it is interesting that the name of the girl was Katherine Hamlett.
All this is speculation, but – if he did begin his career in a lawyer’s office – he did not particularly care for the work. His emergence in London as an actor and dramatist suggests that, at an early stage, he willingly abandoned it. There was another change. A short while after his return to Stratford in 1582, he was courting Anne Hathaway.
CHAPTER 17
I Can See a Church by Day-Light
In As You Like It, the servant Adam suggests that “At seauenteene yeeres, many their fortunes seeke” (746). Shakespeare may have sought his fortune among the Lancastrian families of Hoghton Tower and Rufford Hall, but he had returned to his native town. If he then set to work in a lawyer’s office, he had at least one consolatory prospect. Anne Hathaway was already well known to him. Fourteen years previously John Shakespeare had paid off some of her father’s debts. The Hathaways were in any case long established in the region. They had been resident in the hamlet of Shottery, at Hewland Farm, since the end of the fifteenth century. Shottery was a mile outside Stratford itself, an area of scattered farms and homesteads on the edge of the Forest of Arden. Anne’s grandfather, John Hathaway, was classified as a yeoman and archer; he was esteemed highly enough to have become one of the “Twelve Men of Old Stratford” who presided at the Great Leet or criminal court. Anne’s father, Richard Hathaway, had inherited from him the farm and the property that in subsequent years became known as “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.”
Richard Hathaway was also a farmer and substantial householder. By his first wife, who came from Temple Grafton, he had three children one of whom was Anne herself. He married again, and had further children. He was eventually “honestly buried” in the manner of the reformed faith, but he named a prominent recusant as an executor of his will; so the religious affiliations of the family, like those of so many other households in the neighbourhood, may have been mixed and ambiguous.
Anne Hathaway was the eldest daughter of the house and as such incurred a fair number of household duties, chief among them the care of her younger siblings. As the daughter of a farming family, too, she learned how to bake bread, to salt meat, to churn butter and to brew ale. In the yard outside the house were poultry and cows, pigs and horses to be fed and reared. Far from being a mésalliance or forced marriage, as some have suggested, the partnership of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway could have been an eminently sensible arrangement. He may even have exercised a good deal of caution, or common sense, in his choice of lifelong partner. This was thoroughly in keeping with his practical and business-like approach to all the affairs of the world.
She was eight years his senior – in the year of their marriage he was eighteen and she was twenty-six – but, in a period of shorter life expectancy, the disparity in age would have seemed greater then than now. It was an unusual arrangement, since in the sixteenth century it was customary for the man to marry a younger woman. The difference in age has of course aroused much speculation, primarily concerned with the wiles of an older female in coaxing an inexperienced young man into bed and eventual marriage. Yet it might, on the contrary, suggest sexual self-confidence on Shakespeare’s part. In any case the suspicion does less than justice to Shakespeare’s judgement and intelligence which, even at the age of eighteen, might have been acute. It is also an insult to Anne Hathaway who, like many of the silent wives of famous men, has endured much obloquy. Those biographers who enjoy dramatic speculation, for example, have noted that Shakespeare’s history plays harbour many manipulative older women, whose beauty seems mysteriously to wither on the vine. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (138) Hermia cries out, “O spight! too olde to be ingag’d to young” and the Duke in Twelfth Night offers some advice-“Let still the woman take /An elder then her selfe”-and goes on to caution (1896-9):
Then let thy Loue be yonger then thy selfe,
Or thy affection cannot hold the bent;
For women are as Roses, whose faire flowre
Being once displaid, doth fall that verie howre.
But it is probably best to refrain from maladroit interpretation. In the Duke, Shakespeare has created a notorious sentimentalist. It could just as well be argued that, because the females in Shakespeare’s drama are literate, so must have been the women around him.
It is not known whether Anne Hathaway could read or write. There was no real opportunity which would have enabled her to learn how to do so and, in any case, 90 per cent of the female population of England were illiterate at that time. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare’s two daughters were also illiterate, and so we are faced with the irony of the greatest dramatist in the history of the world surrounded by women who could not read a word he wrote.
There is a sonnet placed as the 145th in Shakespeare’s sonnet sequence, which seems oddly situated and out of context. The last two lines suggest that it was in fact composed for Anne Hathaway and has some claim to being the first extant work of William Shakespeare-
“I hate” from “hate” away she threw,
And saued my life, saying “not you.”
Hate away is equal to Hathaway. The entire poem is a conventional and youthful paean to a kind and loving mistress, with “lips that Loues owne hand did make.” It is interesting as a token of Shakespeare’s early ambitions as a poet. He must have borrowed the sonnet form from a contemporary collection such as Tottel’s Miscellany, where the work of Wyatt and Surrey was to be found, or perhaps from the first published sonnet sequence in English, Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia, which was published in the summer of 1582. It may have proved the spur to Shakespeare’s invention. He reached for the form naturally and instinctively; this early poem is fluent and forceful, a harbinger of his triumphant mastery of that genre.
It is to be hoped that “Loues owne hand” had something to do with the match, since Anne Hathaway was four months pregnant by the time of their marriage day. It was not unusual in this period for couples
to cohabit before their wedding. Their Stratford neighbours, George Badger and Alice Court, Robert Young and Margery Field, had a similar arrangement. It was also customary for both parties to make a “troth-plight,” a verbal contract of marriage before witnesses which was also known as “hand-fasting” or “making sure.” So Alice Shaw of Warwickshire declared to William Holder, of the same county, that “I do confesse that I am your wief and have forsaken all my frendes for your sake and I hope you will use me well.”1 The man took the woman’s hand, and repeated the same pledge. Only after such a “troth-plight” could the woman give up her virginity. The marriage ceremony came later. It was a code of honour, marked out by both social and sexual discipline; there were of course different forms of “making sure,” varying from a private pledge to a ceremony with a prayer book. But its ubiquity can be measured in the fact that between 20 and 30 per cent of all brides bore children within the first eight months of marriage.
This informal contract remained firmly in Shakespeare’s consciousness. There are many allusions to it in his plays, ranging from Claudio’s plea in Measure for Measure that “she is fast my wife” to Olivia’s demand to Sebastian in Twelfth Night that he “Plight me the full assurance of your faith.” It would also have affected the Elizabethan understanding of dramatic action. When Troilus and Cressida plight themselves, Pandarus exclaims: “Go to a bargaine made, seale it, seale it ile bee the witnes here I hold your hand, here my Cozens” (1768-70). He is effectively sealing a “hand-fasting,” thus rendering Cressida’s subsequent unfaithfulness more execrable. When Orlando declares to Rosalind, in the guise of Ganymede, “I take thee Rosalind for wife” he is committing himself much further and more deeply than he supposes. It is a social custom, now long since discarded and forgotten, but it had profound implications for Shakespeare and for Shakespeare’s audience.