by Shakespeare
At the very beginning of 1598 the bailiff of Stratford, Abraham Sturley, was ready to approach Shakespeare with news of a likely investment. He had informed a close relative, Richard Quiney, alderman, “that our countriman mr Shaksper is willinge to disburse some monei vpon some od yardeland or other att Shottri or neare about vs; he thinketh it a veri fitt patterne to move him to deale in the matter of our tithes.” Sturley went on to say that “Bi the instruccions you can geve him theareof, we thinke it a faire mark for him to shoote att, and not unpossible to hitt. It obtained would advance him in deede, and would do vs muche good.”4
So the new owner of New Place was already a gentleman of financial consequence in Stratford. It seems likely that he was being asked to consider the purchase of the house and land of his wife’s stepmother, Joan Hathaway, in Shottery; the old woman died in the following year, leaving 21/2 yardlands (a yardland being approximately 30 acres) as well as the farmhouse now known as “Anne Hathaway’s Cottage.” He was also considered to be in the market for the purchase of “tithes,” money in lieu of a percentage of crops or farm-stock on land possessed by tithe-holders; it had once been a religious obligation which had become a matter of lay ownership.
It is not clear which particular tithes Quiney and Sturley had in mind- although they were the “farmers” of the “Clopton tithe-hay”-but the essential point is that Shakespeare did not take up their offer. He did not in fact purchase tithes until 1605, which suggests a measure of prudence on his part. In the 1590s, Stratford was in a condition of economic and social depression. In the same letter Abraham Sturley notes that “our neighbours are grown, with the wants they feel through the dearness of corn, malcontent.” The succession of bad harvests had weakened the financial strength of the town, and there had been two recent widespread and devastating fires that had further depressed the price of property. It was one of the reasons why Shakespeare had been able to purchase New Place so cheaply. Richard Quiney was in fact in London on pressing local business when he received the letter from Abraham Sturley. As alderman he had been charged with the responsibility of pleading Stratford’s case with the national administration. The town asked to be made exempt from certain taxes, and wished to be given more ample provision from a fire-relief fund.
And then later in the year Richard Quiney decided to approach Shakespeare on another matter. He needed a loan on behalf of the Stratford Corporation. Who else to ask but the man who was arguably now the wealthiest householder in Stratford? So in October 1598, from his London lodgings at the Bell Inn in Carter Lane, he wrote a letter to his “Loveinge Countreyman” declaring that “I am bolde of yowe as of a ffrende, craveing yowre helpe with xxx li [£30] … Yowe shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, amp; muche quiet my mynde.” He then noted that he had gone to “Cowrte” at Richmond over Stratford affairs and pledged that Shakespeare “shall neither loase creddytt nor monney by me, the Lord wyllinge … amp; yf we Bargaine farther yowe shalbe the paiemaster yowre self.” It seems likely that Richard Quiney needed the money to sustain his advocacy of Stratford’s business in the capital. News of his attempts to borrow money from Shakespeare reached Stratford itself, and eleven days later (the speed of the post was not great) Abraham Sturley wrote to him saying that he had heard “our countriman Mr. Wm Shak, would procure vs monei, which I will like of as I shall heare when, and wheare, and howe.”5 It does not take an over-sensitive ear to detect a note of scepticism or caution on Sturley’s part. Did Shakespeare have a reputation for meanness or avariciousness? It is not an impossible assumption. He took small debtors to court. Yet it is more likely that his financial reputation, if such it was, was that of canniness rather than avarice. The idea that Shakespeare would “procure” the requisite sum suggests that Shakespeare may have been ready to deal with a money-lender on Quiney’s behalf. There have even been suggestions that, like his father, Shakespeare himself acted as a part-time moneylender. In the conditions of the time, and in the absence of banks, this was not an unusual activity for a wealthy man. It will seem inappropriate only to those who hold an excessively romantic opinion of eminent writers.
The letter to Shakespeare was in fact never sent, and was later found among Quiney’s papers. Perhaps the alderman had decided to pay a call on his countryman. But where was he to find him? In November 1597 the dramatist had failed to pay 5 shillings in property tax to the collectors of St. Helen’s Bishopsgate. He was one of those who were “dead, departed, and gone out of the said ward.” It may be that he had already removed to Southwark, out of the reach of the Bishopsgate collectors. In the following year, 1598, he was listed again by the parish authorities for non-payment of 13s 4d. He had certainly moved to Southwark by 1600, for in that year he is reported to the officers of the Bishop of Winchester for having still failed to pay his property tax. The Bishop of Winchester had jurisdiction over that area of Southwark known as the Clink. It was a common enough offence but it is still difficult to understand why the wealthy Shakespeare seems deliberately to have withheld payment of a standard tax. Was it laziness or meanness? Or did he feel that he had discharged his obligations by paying taxes in Stratford? Did he not consider himself to be thoroughly “settled” in London? Did he feel that he owed London nothing or, perhaps more likely, that he owed the world nothing?
Part VII. The Globe
The Globe Theatre on Bankside.
CHAPTER 59. A Pretty Plot. Well Chosen to Build Vpon
In the summer of 1598 there were still demands from the civic authorities and indeed from the members of the Privy Council that the theatres should be “plucked down” as a result of the “lewd matters that are handled on the stages.” 1 This had become something of an occupational hazard, and the playhouses simply ignored the injunctions. Given the undoubted popularity of plays and playhouses there was also going to be competition, official or unofficial, springing up to challenge the two established companies. The Earl of Pembroke’s Men had put on The Isle of Dogs at the Swan, as we have seen, before being disbanded.
New theatres were about to be erected in the city and northern suburbs, also, among them the Fortune and the newly refurbished Boar’s Head. In addition, the boys’ companies were soon to be in operation again. In the following year an indoor playhouse was opened in the precincts of St. Paul’s grammar school, where the children of St. Paul’s performed two plays by a new writer, who referred to himself as the “barking satirist,” John Marston. The competition demonstrated the vitality of theatrical life in London, but it was an annoyance to the already established players. Nevertheless the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were still at the Curtain, and the Admiral’s Men across the river at the Rose. There is no record of the players touring in this year, so it can be supposed that Shakespeare and the rest of the company were playing in the capital. We know that they were performing Ben Jonson’s new play, Every Man in His Humour, in the autumn of 1598. So Shakespeare acted in a drama written by one whom posterity has declared to be his “rival.” Reports of such rivalry are always greatly exaggerated by various partisans. We may place them against the testimony that Shakespeare became godfather to one of Jonson’s children.
The wayward, obstinate and bad-tempered character of Ben Jonson is well enough known. But it is often forgotten that he was a supreme literary artist who wrote for the play-going public only on his own terms. Unlike Shakespeare he was not born to please. He had genuine faith and pride in his achievement, however, and ensured that his dramas were properly collected and published. His opinion about Shakespeare’s work seems to have been one of admiration only slightly modified by misgivings about what he considered to be his excessive fluency and his dramatic “absurdities.” Jonson was a classicist by inclination and by training. He recognised Shakespeare’s genius but considered it prone to extravagance and unrealism. “In reading some bombast speeches of Macbeth,” according to John Dryden, “which are not to be understood, he [Ben Jonson] used to say that it was horrour.�
�2 There are also reports of conversations between the two men at the Mermaid Tavern. The tavern itself lay back from Bread Street, with passage entries from Cheapside and Friday Street. Since Jonson had a reputation for a loose tongue, flowing with sexual innuendoes and sexual gossip, these dialogues were perhaps not always very edifying; we have seen that Shakespeare himself was not averse to bawdry. Modern auditors would no doubt be shocked. “Many were the wit-combates betwixt him and Ben Johnson,” wrote Thomas Fuller in his Worthies of England:
which two I behold like a Spanish great Gallion and an English man of War; Master Johnson (like the former) was built far higher in Learning; Solid but Slow in his performances. Shake-spear, with the English-man of War, lesser in bulk but lighter in sailing, could turn with all tides, tack about and take advantage of all winds, by the quickness of his Wit and Invention.3
This itself is a pleasing invention. Fuller has captured something of the spirit of both men but, having been born as late as 1608, can hardly be cited as a witness.
In this period Sir Walter Raleigh established a “Mermaid Club” that met on the first Friday of every month; among its members, according to one of Ben Jonson’s early editors, were Shakespeare, Beaumont, Fletcher, Donne and Jonson himself. Beaumont wrote some verses to Jonson in which he remarks:
What things have we seen
Done at the “Mermaid”? Heard words that have been
So nimble, and so full of subtle flame …4
Whether any of those “words” came from Shakespeare is open to doubt. Among the members of the Mermaid Club, however, was Edward Blount; Blount was one of the publishers of Shakespeare’s First Folio. So there are connections. Jonson at this time was an avowed Catholic who used to meet his co-religionists at the Mermaid. The previous owner of the Mermaid had been the Catholic printer John Rastell, who was also brother-in-law of Sir Thomas More. Certain associations cling to specific sites. At a later date Shakespeare purchased a house harbouring Catholic associations; one of his co-purchasers was the landlord of the Mermaid, William Johnson.
Very shortly after the production of Every Man in His Humour Jonson became involved in an argument with an actor and erstwhile colleague from the Admiral’s Men, Gabriel Spencer. The quarrel may have arisen from Jonson’s recent defection to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, or it may have been entirely personal. Whatever the cause a duel was fought in the fields of Shoreditch, close to the Theatre, and Spencer was killed by Jonson’s sword. The playwright only saved himself from the gallows by pleading benefit of clergy – that is, by proving he was literate and could read. His thumb was branded with the letter “T,” for Tyburn, so that he would not escape a second conviction.
In this same period Burbage and Shakespeare, together with their colleagues, had arrived at an important decision which would also have consequences for the young Ben Jonson. Their negotiations concerning the lease with the landlord of the Theatre had got precisely nowhere. They had read the existing contract very carefully, over the period of these strained discussions, and its wording seemed to offer a solution. The landlord owned the land upon which the Theatre stood, but he did not own the theatre itself. So he could keep the land, and they would take away the theatre. They literally moved it. Three days after Christmas 1598, on a day of heavy snow, the Burbage brothers, Cuthbert and Richard, and their mother, together with twelve workmen and their surveyor and carpenter, Peter Streete, arrived in front of the Theatre in Shoreditch. The aggrieved landlord, Giles Allen, has left a picturesque description of the extraordinary scene.
The Burbages and their cohorts did “ryotouslye assemble themselves” armed with “swords daggers billes axes and such like,” whereupon they “attempted to pull downe the sayd Theater.” Allen alleges that diverse people asked them “to desist from their unlawfull enterpryse,” but the Burbages violently resisted their objections and then began “pulling breaking and throwing downe the sayd Theater in verye outragious violent and riotous sort.” In the course of this operation they were responsible for “the great desturbance and terrefyeing” of the local inhabitants of Shoreditch.5 It is interesting how Tudor legalese encourages melodrama; it was a dramatic society on every level.
The great and terrifying disturbance, if such it was, lasted for some four days. Within that period the Burbages and their employees took down the playhouse’s old timbers and loaded them onto wagons; the tiring-house, the beams, the galleries, were all taken up and transported across the river by ferry or by means of London Bridge. There is no reference to the ironwork that was also employed in its construction, although they are unlikely to have left such a valuable asset on site. Much had to be discarded, however, as a result of the speed of the operation. The appurtenances of the Theatre were then deposited south of the river on some land that the Burbages had recently leased for thirty-one years. The plot of ground was a little to the east of the Rose, in the pleasure grounds of Southwark, but further back from the Thames. Ben Jonson described the area as “flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh.”6 It would have been filled with tidal waters, ooze and garbage. At the time of its redevelopment by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men it comprised seven gardens, a house, and a row of tenements that held fifteen people.
In these watery and insalubrious surroundings the Globe would rise. It was a bold and enterprising decision. The landlord of the plot where the Globe was erected, Nicholas Brend, was in fact brother-in-law of the queen’s Treasurer of the Chamber. So he had impeccable references. But the trustees engaged in the negotiation also throw a little light on the intricate social networks of Elizabethan society. One of them, a goldsmith called Thomas Savage, came from the town of Rufford in Lancashire – where it has been deemed that the juvenile Shakespeare was once in the employment of Sir Thomas Hesketh as schoolmaster and actor. Savage’s wife was a member of the extended Hesketh family. It may simply be coincidence, in a relatively small society, but it is suggestive. The other trustee was a merchant named William Leveson, who became a part of the colonial enterprise to Virginia that also involved the Earl of Southampton. Two of Shakespeare’s early patrons, therefore, can be glimpsed in the dramatist’s later career.
Giles Allen was obviously surprised and angered by the sudden disappearance of the playhouse. He sued the Burbages for £800 in damages, and the litigation lasted for two years through various courts and tribunals. But the Burbages had in fact behaved within the strict interpretation of the law, and Allen received no compensation.
The building work on the new theatre, however, did not proceed as quickly as had been anticipated. So the Burbages spread the financial responsibility. They created five “sharers” who between them would put up half the costs, and who would in return become “house-keepers” or part owners of the new theatre. One of those sharers was William Shakespeare, who now had the advantage of owning one-tenth of the theatre in which he acted and for which he wrote. It was the most complete association possible between playwright and playhouse. His other sharers were the principal actors of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Will Kempe and Thomas Pope, John Heminges and Augustine Phillips. They had all grown moderately wealthy out of their new-found profession.
Peter Streete contracted to finish the construction of the Globe within twenty-eight weeks, although that may be an example of perennial builders’ optimism. Strong foundations had to be laid, since the Globe was erected on watery soil; wooden piles were driven into the Southwark earth, and a ditch had to be bridged to allow public access. This operation would have taken some sixteen weeks. By May 1599 a legal document refers to a “domus” with an attached garden in the parish of St. Saviour’s, Southwark, “in occupatione Willielmi Shakespeare et aliorum” – in the occupation of Shakespeare and others, the prominence given to the dramatist’s name suggesting that he was considered to be the first mover in this enterprise. Intriguingly enough “domus” may be interpreted to mean either the theatre itself or a house adjoining that structure. A picture of Shakespeare living in a house beside the
playhouse proper is not inconceivable.
CHAPTER 60
Thou Knowest My Lodging,
Get Me Inke and Paper
There is no doubt that Shakespeare lived south of the river, but his exact location is not known. The immediate vicinity of the Globe Playhouse was described by John Stow’s editors in the eighteenth century as a “long straggling Place, with Ditches on each side, the Passage to the Houses being over little Bridges, with little Garden Plotts before them.”1 It was no more salubrious in the period when Shakespeare himself moved to Southwark. Nevertheless it was important for him to be close to the centre of all his activities. Here he joined his colleagues from the Globe, Thomas Pope and Augustine Phillips; Phillips lived with his large family close to the river. Southwark was in fact something of an actors’ district. Shakespeare also had, as neighbours, Edward Alleyn and Philip Henslowe, who already possessed extensive interests in the vicinity. Henslowe’s address was “on the bank sid right over against the clink,”2 the “clink” itself being the small underground bishop’s prison by the river.