by Shakespeare
There was also a custom of exchanging rings during this informal ceremony (other pre-contract gifts included a bent sixpence and a pair of gloves), a charming ritual which anticipates a no less charming “find” in the early nineteenth century. In 1810 the wife of a Stratford labourer was working in a field, next to the churchyard, when she found a heavily encrusted ring. It was of gold and, when it was cleaned, it was discovered to bear the initials “W S” separated by a lover’s knot. The dating is that of the sixteenth century, and a local antiquarian believed that “no other Stratfordian of that period [was] so likely to own such a ring as Shakespeare.”2 There is one other intriguing connection. Shakespeare may have owned a seal-ring, but his will has no seal. The phrase “in witness whereof I have hereunto set my hand and seal” has been altered; the word “seal” has been struck out, as if Shakespeare had lost his ring before signing the document.
The “cottage” in which William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway are popularly supposed to have courted was in fact a relatively large farmhouse constructed of timber and of wattle-and-daub (hazel twigs and dried mud can still be seen embedded within the walls) with rooms at different levels, low ceilings and uneven floors. Its timber construction means that it is a box of noise, so courtship would have been untenable as well as uncomfortable. From the upstairs bedchambers you can hear everything in the rooms below and, through the cracks in the floorboards, see everything as well. It was fortunate that there were meadows, and a forest, nearby. He may not have visited her there in the crucial period, in any case, since after the death of her father in 1581 she went to live with her mother’s family in the nearby village of Temple Grafton. She may have wished to remove herself from the company of her stepmother and four surviving children. The absence of paternal watchfulness, however, may have hastened the fruition of the match.
There is one odd incident concerning the wider family in this year of betrothal and marriage. In September 1582, John Shakespeare attended a council meeting in the guildhall in order to vote for his friend, John Sadler, as mayor of Stratford. Sadler declined to serve, on the grounds of ill-health (he died six months later), but John Shakespeare’s reappearance after an absence of almost six years is somewhat puzzling. It may have been a sudden decision, or a desire to be seen to support an old friend, but it may conceivably be connected with his other appearance in the public records at this time. Three months previously he had entered a petition against four men – Ralph Cawdrey the butcher among them-“for fear of death and mutilation of his limbs.” This was a ritual formula and need not be taken as token of a literal threat to John Shakespeare’s life, but the circumstances are obscure. It could not have been a partisan religious quarrel, since Cawdrey himself was a staunch Catholic. It is more likely to have been some kind of trade or financial dispute. One of the other men, against whom John Shakespeare complained, was a local dyer. By attending the council meeting John Shakespeare may have hoped to revive something of his old authority.
The first child of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway was probably conceived in the last two weeks of September, for at the end of November the young man or Anne Hathaway’s guardians hastened to Worcester in order to obtain a special marriage licence. Anne Hathaway had been left £6 13s 4d by her father, equivalent to a blacksmith’s or a butcher’s annual wage and enough for her dowry. The licence permitted marriage after a single publication of the banns, and did not specify any particular parish in which the ceremony must take place. The haste was necessary since the period of Advent was at hand, in which marriages were very largely restricted. Another period of prohibition began on 27 January and lasted until 7 April. It was possible, then, that their child might be born when its parents were not formally wedded. Anne’s interesting condition may have become evident, and neither she nor her guardians may have wished her child to be illegitimate.
So on 27 November 1582, William Shakespeare or Anne’s representatives rode to Worcester, and visited the consistory court at the western end of the south aisle of the cathedral there. The fee for this special licence, allowing for a marriage in haste or in privacy, varied from 5 to 7 shillings. Anne Hathaway’s home was given as Temple Grafton, but by some strange slip of the pen she was given the surname of Whateley. So the licence reads as “inter Willelmum Shaxpere et Annam whateley de Temple Grafton.” There has been some unnecessary speculation about an unknown young woman named Anne Whateley, but it is likely that the clerk had simply misheard or misread the name; there was a Whateley appearing at the court on the same day, so the official’s confusion is understandable. Since Shakespeare himself was under the age of twenty-one, he was obliged to swear that his father had given consent to the match. On the following day two of Anne Hathaway’s neighbours in Shottery, both farmers, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, stood surety of £40 in the event of some “lawful impediment” being later discovered. It is not surprising that John Shakespeare did not sign this surety, since he was a known recusant intent upon concealing his wealth and property.
The banns were published on Friday 30 November, and the marriage took place on that or the following day. The most likely venue for the ceremony was Anne Hathaway’s parish church at Temple Grafton, some five miles west from Stratford. The absence of parish records makes it clear that it was not performed in Stratford, where the vicar was strongly attached to the reformed faith. Some scholars place it at Luddington, a village three miles from Temple Grafton where other relatives of Anne Hathaway lived. One old resident claimed to have seen the parish record of the marriage, but the curate’s housekeeper is supposed to have burnt that register subsequently on a cold day in order “to boil her kettle.”3 This does not, on the face of it, seem very likely. Others claim the site of the wedding to be St. Martin’s Church, in Worcester, where the pages of the parish register for the marriages of 1582 have been carefully cut out.
The church of Temple Grafton, however, was convenient in more ways than one. The priest here was a remnant of Mary’s Catholic reign, an old man who according to an official report was “unsound in religion” and who could “neither preach nor read well.” But he was well versed in the practice of hawking and could cure those birds “who were hurt or diseased: for which purpose many do usual repair to him.”4
It is not known whether an approximation to the Catholic marriage service took place in the ancient church of Temple Grafton. Given the affinities of the priest, however, this seems likely. If so, the ceremony was conducted in Latin and took place between the canonical hours of eight and twelve in the morning. The favoured day was Sunday. It began at the church porch, where the banns were recited three times. Anne Hathaway’s dower, of £6 13s 4d, was then displayed and exchanged. She was no doubt “given” by Fulke Sandells or John Richardson who had stood surety in Worcester. The woman stood on the left side of the groom, in token of Eve’s miraculous delivery from Adam’s left rib; they held hands as a symbol of their betrothal. In the church porch the priest blessed the ring with holy water; the bridegroom then took the ring and placed it in turn on the thumb and first three fingers of the bride’s left hand with the words “In nomine Patris, in nomine Filii, in nomine Spiritus Sancti, Amen.” He left it on this fourth finger, since the vein in that finger was supposed to run directly to the heart. The couple were then invited into the church, where they knelt together in order to partake in the nuptial Mass and blessing; they wore linen cloths or “care cloths” upon their heads to protect them from demons. It was also customary for the bride to carry a knife or dagger suspended from her girdle, the reasons for which are uncertain. (Juliet possesses a dagger, with which she stabs herself.) The bride’s hair was unbraided, hanging loose about her shoulders. After the Mass it was customary for a festive procession to return from the church to the house where a wedding feast, or “bride-ale,” was prepared. The newly joined couple might then receive gifts of silver, or money, or food. The guests were in turn often given presents of gloves – since Shakespeare’s father was a glove-make
r, there was no great difficulty in procurement. So we leave them on this apparently auspicious day.
Part II. The Queen’s Men
Richard Tarlton, the most popular comedian of the Elizabethan age.
CHAPTER 18
To Tell Thee Plaine,
I Ayme to Lye with Thee
At some point after the wedding Shakespeare made his way to London. We do not know the year of this very significant transition, but he must have left Stratford by 1586 or 1587.
There are references in several of his plays to an unhappy separation immediately after a wedding, but these may all be wholly dramatic devices. John Aubrey has a note on the subject. “This Wm being inclined naturally to Poetry and acting, came to London I guesse about 18, and was an Actor at one of the Play-houses and did act exceedingly well.”1 Aubrey would then “guesse” his removal to London just after his marriage, as others have also supposed, but this seems to defy common sense and practical decency. We may give him the benefit of a little time with his bride. The probability must be that William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, with their expected child, returned to the bridegroom’s home in Henley Street. It was customary for a newly married couple to set up house with their own resources but, if that were not possible, the groom’s father would offer lodging. With such a young bridegroom as Shakespeare, this must have been a necessity.
It has been supposed that the newly married couple moved into the back extension of the house, with its own solar (or upstairs room) and staircase. But this was probably not constructed until 1601, so the available space in Henley Street was even by Elizabethan standards nicely filled. There was not much privacy, but privacy was not itself considered essential or even particularly important. It was already a large family, with Shakespeare’s four younger siblings – Gilbert, Joan, Richard and Edmund, whom we may safely call the forgotten family of the dramatist – as well as four adults, but this was the kind of household to which Mary Arden and Anne Hathaway were accustomed. The ménage was soon enlarged by three children of Shakespeare’s own, so it would have been crowded and noisy. And what of Shakespeare himself? In the sixteenth century a married man could not enter a university or be formally apprenticed to a trade. Before his removal to London we may imagine that he led an ordinarily conventional outward life as a lawyer’s clerk.
His first daughter, Susannah, was born in May 1583; the name itself, suggesting purity and spotlessness, derives from the Apocrypha. It may have been an assertion of virtue after a birth perilously close to the wrong side of marriage. Although the name later became popular in the circles of the religious reformers, at least if Puritan literature is anything to go by, it was already familiar enough in Stratford itself. Three female children were baptised with that name in the spring of 1583.
The cause of religion manifested itself in a more public, and more dangerous, context in the autumn of that year. Margaret Arden, the daughter of Edward and Mary Arden of Park Hall, with whom Shakespeare’s mother claimed some affinity, had married a Catholic gentleman from Warwickshire. This young man, John Somerville of Edstone, was of extreme views. On 25 October 1583, he set out with the express intention of killing Elizabeth I. He announced this ambition to anyone who cared to listen and, as a result of his indiscretion, was arrested on the following day and taken to the Tower of London. He may have been mentally deranged, but the plea of insanity was not enough to excuse an aspiring royal assassin. Somerville’s expedition was seen as the prelude to a foreign invasion and the resurgence of a Catholic regime in England.
The consequences were felt by his unfortunate family. A few days later a warrant was issued for the search of all suspected houses in Warwickshire and the arrest of suspicious persons. This investigation was considered urgent because, in the words of the officer in charge, “the papists in this county greatly do work upon the advantage of clearing their houses of all shows of suspicion.”2 Edward Arden was taken at the London house of the Earl of Southampton; Mary Arden and others of her family were arrested by Sir Thomas Lucy. The Ardens were tried at the Guildhall in London, and were found guilty of treason. Mary Arden was pardoned, but her husband was hanged, drawn and quartered in Smithfield and his head placed on a pole at the southern end of London Bridge. John Somerville hanged himself in Newgate, but his head joined that of his kinsman in its prominent position. And with them was decapitated the Arden family of Warwickshire.
Did John Shakespeare, husband of another Mary Arden and putative kindred of the martyred Ardens, come under suspicion? Did his son? It was a time of terror for anyone even peripherally concerned or related. The key-cold stone of the Tower, torture and a horrible death, were genuine possibilities. It may well have been at this juncture that John Shakespeare concealed his Catholic testament in the rafters of Henley Street. We know only that when the Shakespeares submitted their coat of arms to the College of Heralds, some sixteen years after the events here related, the device of “ermine fess cheeky”3 used by the Ardens of Park Hall had been removed. There is one other stray fact. In Henry VI, Part Three, Shakespeare invents a native of Warwickshire and gives him the name of John Somerville.
If ever there was a time when William Shakespeare might have appreciated the relative anonymity of the capital, then this was it. But he chose to remain with his family in Stratford for the duration. In February 1585 his twins, Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare, were baptised in the parish church. They were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, friends and neighbours who owned a baker’s business at the corner of High Street and Sheep Street. When the Sadlers had a son, they named him William. The young Shakespeare, despite his immortal longings, was still very much part of the local community. The name of the boy, so fraught with association, could have been pronounced and spelled Hamblet (chimney was pronounced as chimbley) or of course Hamlet. The mystery of twinship, unique and indissoluble, also provokes Shakespeare to dramatic speculation; in two of his plays, The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, a twin is confronted by his or her lost counterpart in some dream-like landscape.
The birth of the twins in the early spring of 1585 suggests that, despite Aubrey’s “guesse,” Shakespeare was still with his wife in the spring of 1584. But no children were conceived by the Shakespeares after that date. In this he did not follow the pattern of his parents, who produced eight children over twenty-two years. He did not even follow the pattern of the time, in which large families were common. At the birth of her twins Anne Shakespeare was only thirty years old, and well within the age of child-bearing. It may have been that the birth of Hamnet and Judith was in some way injurious.
In the conditions of Henley Street, however, it would have been inevitable that Anne and her husband slept in the same bed; in this period, too, there were no properly effective means of birth control. They may have abstained by mutual consent from sexual intercourse. All the evidence suggests, however, that Shakespeare was of a highly sexual nature; it is unlikely that, in his early twenties, he could have abstained without very good reason. The better explanation is also the more obvious one. He was not there. So where was he?
CHAPTER 19
This Way for Me
It has become a commonplace of Shakespearian biography that, from roughly his age of twenty to his age of twenty-eight, we encounter the “lost years.” But no years are ever wholly lost. There may be a gap in the chronology, but the pattern of a life may be discerned obliquely and indirectly. It is known that he became a player. It has been surmised that he joined a company of travelling players, perhaps when they were passing through Stratford. It has been suggested that he journeyed to London in the hope or expectation of joining one of the companies already performing there. His previous association with Sir Thomas Hesketh’s players, and with Lord Strange’s Men, may have facilitated some form of introduction. A clever young actor, and an aspiring dramatist, might have been welcome.
Did he join a company of travelling players when such a group was performing in Stratford? There is no record of this, and
it is in any case an unlikely form of recruitment. But, in the seasons from 1583 to 1586, at least eight sets of players performed in the guildhall at Stratford – among them the Earl of Oxford’s Men, Lord Berkeley’s Men, Lord Chandos’s Men, the Earl of Worcester’s Men, and the Earl of Essex’s Men. Among Worcester’s players was Edward Alleyn, sixteen months younger than Shakespeare, who became a formidable presence on the London stage and a direct rival of Shakespeare’s own company. But it has also been argued that Shakespeare joined the Earl of Leicester’s Men, in part because of a remark in a letter from Sir Philip Sidney referring to “William my Lord of Leicester’s jesting player.” Sidney, however, may have been alluding to the celebrated William Kempe.
One other company of players, who came to Stratford in 1587, deserves further notice. The Queen’s Men had been re-established four years before by the Lord Chamberlain and the Master of Revels, partly in order to provide what might now be called dramatic propaganda on behalf of Elizabethan polity. They were a privileged group of players who were formally chosen to play before the monarch at court. They were paid wages as the queen’s servants and granted liveries as “grooms of the chamber”; Shakespeare was to receive a similar honour in later years. The twelve actors had been selected from other companies, and were considered to be at the height of their profession – among them two comic wits, Robert Wilson “quick, delicate, refined” and Richard Tarlton “wondrous plentiful and pleasant.”1