Shakespeare: A Life (16 page)

dwelling, with separate kitchen, staircase, and "solar", extending into
the garden', but it is hard to imagine much independence for anyone
in a glover's domestic arrangements.
¹⁸
The couple probably dined with William's parents, and Anne would have been obliged to cooperate in the common family work.

We cannot peer into the ménage, but it would have had drawbacks as
well as a few advantages. That Anne seems to have stayed with
William's parents until the purchase of New Place in 1597 -- some
fourteen or fifteen years after she began to live with them -- argues
that she was welcome to Mary Shakespeare. Both countrywomen were pious
daughters of affluent, conservative farmers. John Shakespeare had
more in common with the two women than did William -- a grammarschool
scholar and poet too old for an apprenticeship and surely aching for
better challenges than Stratford could offer. In this ménage he was in
the position of a child twice over, first to his mother and then to
his wife. He was in effect doubly fixed in his former home; he was his
mother's flesh and blood, and of one flesh and blood with his wife:
'Farewell, dear mother', Hamlet mocks King Claudius, 'Father and
mother is man and wife, man and wife is one flesh' (IV. iii. 51, 53-4.).
To an extent he was locked into a little, ever-present situation of
halfunderstandings, or of much less than full communication, in which
his elders could not have responded to much in his being. So it is
often, with one generation and the next, but the gap between young and
old in provincial towns in the 1580s was particularly great.
William's Latin training had abetted his concern with books when more
were being published than ever before and the nation's culture was
becoming more complex, refined, challenging to the mind; the pace of
sophistication was swifter than at any time in the past. There are
signs of Mary's unusual capability, but we do not know that she read
for pleasure; his father and wife were, at best, semi-literate.

As a person of intellectual acuity, he adapted outwardly to those who
could not share his interests, as his later relations with the town
suggest. In a sense, the security and routines of the day must have
been welcome enough, and his imagination and intellect were free to
conceive remote, ancient, or courtly pictures of an ampler existence.
To judge from his plays and poems, he needed to lose himself in the

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distanced imaginary situation to explore his insights, and perhaps to
make use of his experience. What is really new in his view of love is
his understanding of its connection with loneliness, and one force
that drives many of his stage lovers is misery in the isolatedness of
being; some of his young men are convinced that love is a means
chiefly of overcoming errors of pride, self-delusion, and presumption
that victimize the estranged, misled psyche. In
The Comedy of Errors
, his Antipholus of Syracuse speaks to Luciana as if she had alighted as a force of sanity from a distant planet:

Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak.
Lay open to my earthy gross conceit,
Smothered in errors, feeble, shallow, weak,
The folded meaning of your words' deceit.
Against my soul's pure truth why labour you
To make it wander in an unknown field?
Are you a god? Would you create me new?
Transform me, then, and to your power I'll yield. (III. ii. 33-40)

Romeo easily and naturally regards Juliet as an exception to the human
species, as one who lifts him as in a dream to a new state of being.
Such love may accuse domesticity of its failure to satisfy, to
enlighten, to make whole. Yet a belief in the gorgeous, ample,
transforming possibilities of love does not suggest utter despair over
the commonplaces of marriage, and William must have drawn upon sources
of strength at home. Ambitious, dissatisfied, and restless as he
undoubtedly was with no outlet for the energy of his talents at Henley
Street, he was not to behave as a man ensnared by an unsuitable
woman; his apparently regular visits to Stratford, his investments and
care to establish himself there, do not suggest he found Anne
immaterial to his welfare. And it is not irrelevant that his early
biographers imply he chose marriage, not that he was trapped: 'in
order to settle in the World after a Family manner, he thought fit to
marry while he was yet very Young', wrote Rowe in 1709, and Theobald
alludes to the poet's 'Force of Inclination' towards matrimony.
¹⁹
Certainly his wife and mother were from old county families traditional in their ways; Ardens and Hathaways

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would have connected him more closely with the civic past of Stratford,
the Holy Cross Gild, the impassioned intelligence and relative
simplicity of the community in its medieval, well-regulated order. The
piety of Anne and Mary would have been unlocking and important, but
it is useless to suppose that he was deeply contented at Henley Street
or that he welcomed Anne's family as intimate friends; he was not to
mention any Hathaway in his will, and it is not easy to find more than
a handful of local people who can be called his lifelong friends. He
was to be wary of certain aldermen; but just after his marriage it is
unlikely that he shunned all of his former mates. A week before Anne
gave birth the husband of another Hathaway in fact put on the Whitsun
show, and later the chamberlains noted,

Payd to Davi Jones and his companye for his pastyme at whitsontyde xiij
⁵
iiij
^d
[13
s.
4-
d.
]
²⁰

Frances Hathaway -- whose father Thomas figures in Anne's father's
will -- was evidently a first cousin of Anne's. Richard Hathaway had
left to her two youngest sisters the bequest of a sheep apiece, and
the two families must have been on fairly intimate terms. In 1579
Frances had wed the young widower David Jones, formerly married to a
daughter of Adrian Quiney, and, among entertainers, Davy or 'Davi'
Jones rose to local leadership. Shakespeare would have known something
of Davy's performers, whose costumes and paraphernalia, on 19 May
1583, surely were as fine as the sum of 13
s.
could buy. Municipal
eloquence and pageantry, strong ale and sports, dancing and rowdiness
had taken over Whitsun holidays -- but Whitsun was a time of flowers
and gentler celebrations, too, and not every performer was
'o'erparted' as he spoke his lines. 'Come,' says Perdita in
The Winter's Tale
,

take your flowers.
Methinks I play as I have seen them do
In Whitsun pastorals.

(IV. iv. 132-4)

It is just possible that Shakespeare acted with or otherwise aided the
'companye', and he would have been well acquainted with crafts-

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men's or tradesmen's sons in the performance. He may have found
Davy's troupe more laughable than they meant to be. Probably he felt
himself drawn in other directions, or towards the possibility of writing
acceptably elegant poetry. His literary taste at this time -- in
common with England's -- was certainly becoming alert to refinements
in the vernacular; he was well attuned, for example, to the music of
the Earl of Surrey in the
Songes and Sonetts
, 'For my swete
thoughtes sometyme doe pleasure bring . . .', and, no doubt, even more
sensitively responsive to Spenser's delicate effects in
The Shepheardes Calendar
of 1579, which a generation of new writers accepted as a landmark:

How I could reare the Muse on stately stage,
And teach her tread aloft in bus-kin fine,
With queint
Bellona
in her equipage.

But ah my corage cooles ere it be warme,
For thy, content vs in thys humble shade:
Where no such troublous tydes han vs assayde,
Here we our slender pipes may safely charme.
²¹

A week after Davy's troupe performed, William and Anne's child was
baptized Susanna Shakespeare on 26 May 1583. Her name had come
acceptably into local fashion, and her parents may have named her
after a family friend: Sir Thomas Lucy had a sister named Susanna, and
Richard Tyler would soon marry his Susanna Woodward -- but the name
is interestingly significant for its story. In the Apocrypha, Susanna
as the virtuous wife of Joachim lives in accordance with Moses' law.
Two lustful judges trap her; her screams of despair bring servants to
her rescue, but, at an assembly the next day, the judges cause her to
be condemned as an adultress. God, however, sends to her aid the young
Daniel, who makes the judges contradict each other so that they are
put to death, and Susanna and her family praise the Deity for her
deliverance.

There may be a defiant,
proud virtue in the name 'Susanna' when parents choose it for a child
conceived out of wedlock, and gossip over a sudden wedding might
linger. The name asserts its purity and spiritual strength; it had been
used by the Catholic Bishop of Ross in a defence of Mary Queen of
Scots (he summoned up the biblical Judith,

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t0oo, in describing Mary's virtues); Puritans favoured 'Susanna', and
playwrights had not neglected her story. When the Shakespeares'
daughter was born the name was a prime one for biblical drama, and
more than a dozen Susanna-plays had appeared in Europe before Thomas
Garter's grave 'comedy'
Susanna
was printed in Fleet Street by Hugh Garter, at the sign of St John the Evangelist, in 1578.

Much of the training of a daughter was left to her mother, but, in an
age of new literacy, a substantial number of girls benefited from petty
school. Brightly alert, mentioned later for her wit and apparently
favoured as an eldest child, Susanna was taught household chores. It
is likely that she learned to read and write, but it does not
necessarily follow that she was prompted to make much use of these
skills, or to read for her delight. Had Shakespeare been a
conventional father he would not have desired that she should read
many books, or wished her to be unlike most other women of the
Stratford gentry. He hardly wrote
Venus and Adonis
or the
so-called Dark Lady sonnets for Susanna's pleasure, and it is
difficult to believe he would have offered a printed quarto of a
comedy to her. Uppermost in Anne Shakespeare's mind would have been her
daughter's piety, dutifulness, simple and cheerful amenity, and
usefulness.

We shall look further
into such evidence about Susanna's life as we have. She was brought up
in a busy, and eventually prosperous, household where she saw her
grandparents regularly and her father seldom. Soon enough, she had
siblings. On the Festival of the Purification, Tuesday, 2 February
1585, the Shakespeares had their newborn twins christened Hamnet and
Judith, no doubt in deference to their friends Hamnet and Judith
Sadler. The boy's name was interchangeable with 'Hamlet' -- in
Shakespeare's will in a legal hand his friend would appear as ' Hamlet
Sadler' -- and among abundant local variants of the same name were
(for example) Amblet, Hamolet, and even Hamletti.

The family home became more crowded, ample as it was. New evidence in
the inventory of Lewis Hiccox, who after the playwright's death had a
'lease of the houses in henlye street' once owned by ' Will
ia
m Shakespeare gent', shows that at least six of the rooms where Shakespeare once lived were thought suitable as bed-chambers.
²²
In the 'starchead chamber' with its 'green rugg', or even in the best room

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with its feather-bed, red rug, curtains, benches, and solitary table in
Hiccox's time in the 1620s, the furnishings seem sparse, and they
could hardly have been much more ample in the glover's household.
John's business affairs were poor and deteriorating, and as his
prospects became worse so the outlook for his son and for Anne's
children must have seemed bleaker.

The birth of twins virtually assured that Shakespeare's future would
be more problematic, that he would be concerned to make up for lost
time in a calling, and would undertake nearly anything required of him
to get money. He would also know, surely, the pain of separation for
long periods from a substantial and consoling family. At 20 he had
known more domestic complexities and responsibilities and probably a
more intense emotional life than some people have known at 40,
although he had done little to justify his fine grammar-school training
and cannot have felt he had much of a chance to earn a fortune. If he
lingered in the town as a resigned, respectable Prince Hal, he waited
for a crown he did not want -- it is impossible that he would have
yearned to take over a glover's shop and debts. Exactly who drew him
from Stratford, or when at last he left, we do not know. Since
Londonbased troupes did not recruit on the road, it is unlikely that one
of them picked him up in Warwickshire, even if he had served in a
provincial troupe. What is quite certain is that an expansion of playing
companies in the 1580s would have worked in his favour. New hands were
needed for all varieties of work in connection with the popular public
entertainments; and, again, the capricious Ferdinando, Lord Strange
was patron of a troupe of acrobats and players in a position to
expand.
²³

In responding to any encouragement or offer, Shakespeare hoped to
better himself; he could serve his family best by removing himself
from Stratford, though theatre work was hard, always uncertain. The
profession had little status. He would be far from normal consolations.
After his school years, he had married quickly and sired children as
if to absorb such emotional nourishment and experience as he could. He
must have overcome the results of the scholarly aridity of his
grammar-school training to a large extent; regular employment and
marriage would have been antidotes to his vanity, and he was

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