Shakespeare: A Life (13 page)

will proceide to frame some better reformation in this so unbridled
& bade an handful of England', and signed himself, 'Youre lordships
assured, yow know even verie assured, Fer. Strange.' To add to that,
he told the Lord Bishop a little afterwards about the earl's
backwardness in reducing Catholic recusancy, and referring to two
actions that might avail, he added of his father:

I find him rather an enemye in substance to both actions, than anie
frende to ether. . . . To be constant is noe common vertew, althoughe
it be most commendable, most fitt, & least founde in noblemen. . . .
But we must be patient
per
force, & make a vertew of
necessitie, & folowe his humor. . . . This secreat letter I sent
your lordship. The other his lordship [Earl of Derby] is privie to.
¹¹

By 1582 Ferdinando may well have over-dramatized his feelings about
his father -- but it is clear that the Hoghtons knew a troubled
county: spies were common and families were divided. Yet, to an
extent, recusancy thrived; even late in the century Hoghton's friend
Lady Hesketh, of Rufford in Lancashire, was reported as a 'reliever of
papists'.
¹²
A connection, faint enough, but interesting, has been traced between
Shakespeare and this same Lady Hesketh: ' Shakeshafte' was recommended
to the Heskeths of Rufford, in Hoghton's will of 1581, and eighteen
years later Shakespeare with four colleagues chose as a Globe trustee
(when its ground-lease was arranged) the Rufford-born London
goldsmith, Thomas Savage, who left a bequest of 2Os. to a close friend
of Lady Hesketh.

How much would a
visitor have heard of the county's past? Among the Hoghtons one was
likely to hear at least of the Pilgrimage of Grace (the rebellion of
1536 against which the Crown had enlisted the third Earl of Derby's
help, at a price), when two Cistercian abbots of Lancashire were hanged
on the same day and when banners painted with emblems of Christ
crucified, or showing the chalice and host, were hacked down. Many
died. The quarters of one abbot's body were displayed, and the body of
one of his monks was secretly cut from the gibbet and taken to Cottam
Hall.
¹³
People prayed on All Hallow's Eve for such faithful; the northern
Catholic sentiment was elegiac, intense, and yearningly nostalgic over
the spiritual past and a thousand years of the Roman faith in
England.

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Shakespeare, it is true, may have acquired his own intense feelings
for the past in another family, or at home. Eight or ten years after he
left school, he knew more than most contemporary playwrights. He
would devote nine of his first eighteen or nineteen plays to the history
of his country; he knew a good library before he wrote his Henry VI
plays, and he could hardly have made deft use of historical sources
without developing his reading habits after grammar school. Any time
as a 'Schoolmaster in the Countrey' perhaps helped him to seek in
books for what might appeal to his hearers. One warm, favourable
catalyst for an emergence of his talent, at any rate, was a milieu not
indifferent to learning and to history.

Alexander de Hoghton, as we know, was anxious to attach ' Shakeshafte'
and ' Gillom' either to his half-brother, or else to send them on with
his stock of play clothes to Sir Thomas Hesketh. New measures,
receiving the royal assent on 18 March 1581, were partly directed
against the keeping of unlicensed schoolmasters. If hired as teachers,
' Shakeshafte' and ' Gillom' would have been in less danger as players,
and after Alexander died in August 1581 they may indeed have gone, in
accordance with his will, either to his half-brother, or to Sir
Thomas Hesketh's players at Rufford Hall south of Lea.

We have only incomplete, uncertain evidence as to what may have
happened to both servants. It seems that Fulke Gillom did cross the
Ribble to serve at Hesketh's Rufford, ten miles to the south. His name
is unusual, and 'ffoulke gillame' and 'ffoulke Gillam' occur in two
papers in the Hesketh archives.
¹⁴
Since their names are linked three times in the will of 3 August, it
would seem that ' William Shakeshafte' went with Gillom, some time
late in 1581, to join Hesketh's players.

Our William was then past his seventeenth birthday. If he had
something like the experience of a Hesketh servant by then, he already
had taught children to sing and play the virginals. And both Hoghton
and Hesketh had players skilled in 'mewsicks'. A later inventory of
Robert Hesketh names a small orchestra of instruments -- some or all
could be those bequeathed by Hoghton -- which includes 'vyolls,

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vyolentes, virginalls, sagbutts, howboies and cornetts, cithon, flute and taber pypes'.
¹⁵
A lad in Hoghton's ménage may have had a good chance to perform. At
Hoghton Tower east of Lea, there was a grand banqueting hall with a
minstrels' gallery; the hall could have accommodated an audience of 150
people and the gallery, if needed for a theatrical, could have served as
an upper stage. Hoghton had lived chiefly at Lea, near the north
shore of the Ribble estuary. Here, too, was an oak-framed hall where
players could entertain. The locale -- with its long vistas changing
with swift regularity -- was unusual. Nearby the tide brought in a
sudden rush of ocean to part the shore, with a visual effect not
unlike that of a striking image in Shakespeare's Sonnet 56:

Let this sad int'rim like the ocean be Which parts the shore where
two contracted new Come daily to the banks, that when they see
Return of love, more blessed may be the view.

Shakespeare as a young playwright is almost too attentive to England's
west; he has the west in mind when he means the Kentish coast and so
has the 'day' sink in an easterly direction (
2 Henry VI
, iv. 1-2). In three scenes in
3 Henry VI
,
the effort of crossing tidal waters against wind and tide is evoked,
as if the playwright had known the crossing from Lea to Rufford, and,
indeed, apparent images of an estuary have been noted in the same
early play.
¹⁶
The young playwright is familiar with a sight that is common on a
flat northern seashore when rough waves, in a strong offshore gust,
after breaking appear to hesitate and retreat before the wind. Perhaps
he would have needed to see this, as well as a play of light on low
mountains such as those at the end of the Pennine chain, to depict
such details as freshly as he does. Other images in
2 Henry VI
and
Titus Andronicus
suggest a sight of northern hills and seascapes.

So far as his identity with ' Shakeshafte' is concerned, Shakespeare's
images of course prove nothing, but some are consistent with a
Hoghton servant's likely experience. Did he join Hesketh's players at
Rufford Hall? Apart from a folk tradition at Rufford that ' Shakespeare
had been at the Hall as a young man',
¹⁷
we know, of course, that a contemporary from Lady Hesketh's small village of Rufford served as

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a Globe trustee. We know only a little more that might connect
Shakespeare with Rufford. As an influential Catholic, Sir Thomas
Hesketh in 1563 had been made High Sheriff of the county under Queen
Elizabeth; he not only kept players, but remained friendly with
ambitious player-patrons. His son and heir, Robert Hesketh, was to
entertain 'Lord and Lady Strange' in the 1580s at Rufford.
¹⁸
Derbys and Heskeths had for years been on intimate terms. Thus if
Shakespeare reached Rufford -- as a local tradition suggests he did --
Sir Thomas Hesketh was in a position to recommend him to Lord
Strange, in a decade when Strange's men were on the way to becoming the
premier playing troupe in London. Again, it may be a coincidence that
Shakespeare's early plays, and knowledge of his unpublished sonnets,
can be linked with people in the circle of Hoghton, Hesketh, and
Strange; but the associations are factual enough. Certainly, too,
Hoghton's sojourner was thought of as an actor in need of a patron.
Sir Thomas was obliged by an item in Hoghton's will either to keep a '
Shakcshafte' or to send him to a good master who might 'manteyne
players'.

At Rufford Hall, Hesketh's
entertainers would have used an enormous, intricately carved screen for
their rapid entrances and exits. The spectators watched in one of the
loveliest halls that survive, nearly unchanged, from Tudor times.
Carved angels peer out from heavy, hammerbeam trusses above rows of
mullioned windows and a fivesided, tall bay window. However, the players
could have disbanded temporarily in 1581, even before new servants
reached them. Since Sir Thomas failed to suppress Catholic worship in
his household, he was in prison late in the year.
¹⁹
Evidently he was released in 1582, then in custody briefly again in 1584, before he pledged reforms that kept him safe.

William returned to Stratford, presumably from some employment 'in
the Countrey', either in 1581 when Sir Thomas was in custody, or soon
after. He was at home within a few months of his eighteenth birthday,
and not later than August 1582. In a changed political climate, not only
unlicensed masters but other temporary servants in prominent Catholic
families were then at risk. He may have been recommended to a patron
such as Lord Strange, and, in any case, he

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could hope for interesting employment. Any experience of 'playe
clothes' would have given him a measure of detachment, so that he
would begin to see his town through a player's eyes.

To some extent, the ordinary, workaday life of any town is consoling. But in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
,
the dignity and normalcy of the 'mechanicals', with their
suppositions, seem to threaten the dream-world of the imaginative
poet. Here there is a terror of the real, an absence of any
complacency on the part of the playwright in the face of the normal
and familiar. If William worked 'in the Countrey', it is likely that
he came back with a troubled awakening to what as yet he had unsurety
known. His instincts were theatrical, and with any opportunity to put
on play clothes he cannot have been content to accept his position at
home exactly as he had left it. He was ambitious, and an eager young
poet in the making. He was no less charmed by books than Roger Lock or
Richard Field -- who, by then, were stationer-apprentices. But back
at Henley Street, with any travel dust on his shoes, he was almost
unpredictably complex, if we accept Beeston's remark about his
schoolmastering, which is one of the bestauthenticated reports we have
of him. He was a smart, enthusiastic lad who had fled from pedantry,
but prized what he had learned; and indeed with a remarkable,
assimilating mind he found the world hardly too various for him; he
might nourish any dissonances in his outlook, any number of mixed
feelings or conflicting impressions while even hungering for books and
learning, after being 'in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the
Countrey'. But that experience would have whetted his taste for the
full, sensuous enjoyment of the little world he found again. He was
not likely to be guided by mere prudence and circumspection, and his
life was to change very quickly at Stratford.

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I hope upon familiarity will grow more
contempt. But if you say 'marry her', I
will marry her. That I am freely
dissolved, and dissolutely.

( Slender,
The Merry Wives of Windsor
)

I
n
a Tudor parish one's life was under review by parents, friends, and
neighbours so that almost no change in one's fate went unnoticed. One's
private behaviour tended to be observable, too. A young man in the
'May of youth and bloom of lustihood' might, of course, sow his wild
oats, but he was likely to hear from the vicar's apparitor and have to
explain his fornication and apologize for it. Anyone's sexual affairs,
outside marriage, concerned the community, and William's involvement
with the Hathaways affected his career even as it touched on a web of
social relationships.

The summer of
1582 had favoured lovers and crops. Great spreading green fields
cultivated in strips, at Stratford and Shottery, lay in the sun, and
the nation's harvest was the best since 1570, or about 20 per cent
better than average.
¹
Near the end of their new civic year Stratford's council in fact acted
with largesse and, for the first time on record, sponsored local
mummers. The aldermen were to pay the troupe's leader Davy Jones,
whose wife Frances Hathaway was related to Richard Hathaway's people
at Shottery. Davy's troupe were to perform at Whitsun a week before
Shakespeare's first child was baptized -- and his familiar name would
echo in Justice Shallow's

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insatiable liking for a servant in 2 Henry IV: 'What, Davy, I say! . . .
Why, Davy! . . . Davy, Davy, Davy; let me see, Davy, let me see . . .
With red wheat, Davy' (v. i. 2-13).
²
A good yield of crops often induced a general, rational euphoria in
the 1570s and 1580s, since 'good' and 'bad' years arrived in cycles.
Stratford's aldermen met at a happy seasonal time on election day, 5
September, with John Shakespeare, who had not been to 'halls' in months.
The new bailiff to be elected was Adrian Quiney, who once had been
asked with William's father to plead for the borough's corporate
rights against the claims of its obstinate manorial lord, Ambrose,
Earl of Warwick.

By November, the
Shakespeares certainly knew of their son William's relations with
Agnes or Anne Hathaway, the eldest daughter in a family of the earl's
copyhold tenants. Born in 1555 or 1556, if the legend on her
grave-slab is accurate, Anne at 26 or 27 was pregnant with William's
child. It is a modern myth that she was 'on the shelf', or older than
many women of the Tudor yeomanry at marriage, but William was legally a
minor. He probably felt obliged to seek his father's consent to
marry, and he may not have tried to do so before November.

It is unlikely that before this month he had any exact, careful wedding
plans, and there are signs of his lack of reckoning, if not of
lastminute haste and turmoil, in events that caught him up. One may have
good reasons for loving, or none, but William, it seems, was partly
moved by an urge to purchase experience. The strictness of schooling
and almost any exigencies of work 'in the Countrey' would have limited
his free behaviour.
Every
grammar-school boy had known a harsh
discipline, and his eloquence had not been acquired cheaply, but as
he became more self-confident so he enriched his sense of life. There
can be no denying what he had done in August -- but, then, he could
afford to be incautious: his father, despite financial irregularities,
had kept up a trade and the Henley Street houses. William would have
property to inherit, even a lucrative future if he found ways to use his
eloquence.

He may have tested that
eloquence during courtship, as has been supposed. The evidence is
uncertain. But he was young for marriage, and had been a suitor among
practical farmers. Anne, with the pride of her years, may have kept
him in a 'woeful state', if the poem

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