Shakespeare: A Life (3 page)

ful for a note from the late A. L. Rowse. None of these persons can be
held responsible for any of my blunders. The largest debt is to my
family, all of them, including my elder daughter Corinna Honan and my
brother W. H. Honan who enhanced my clarity, and my wife Jeannette, who
made the task possible over ten years and who encouraged my researches
long before.

P. H.

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In Shakespeare's time, the year began on 25 March (or Lady Day), but in
this book it is assumed that the year starts on I January.

My citations from Shakespeare are normally to the texts and line numbers in
The Complete Works
,
ed. Stanley Wells, Gary Taylor, et al. ( Oxford, 1986). In a few
cases, I have quoted from the companion volume of Shakespeare,
The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition
( Oxford, 1986) (
O-S
).

It has seemed wise to respect the original spelling of historical
documents when the sense of the quoted words is clear; but the older
form of a letter (such as 'v' for 'u', or 'i' for 'j') is changed in
some instances. Italicized letters within a quoted word ('her
majestie') and [bracketed] words signify modern additions, such as a
spelling out in full. For clarity, with longer extracts dating from
after Shakespeare's early years, I have sometimes used modern spelling.

I have used Mr and Mrs to signify 'Master' and 'Mistress' as distinct
from the modern 'Mr' and 'Mrs'. In Shakespeare's day the rank (or
title) of Master usually conveyed a special degree of social
distinction or gentlehood.

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the cruel times before ( John Foxe)

Shakespeare's life began near the reflecting, gleaming river Avon,
which today flows past Stratford's Church of the Holy Trinity where he
lies buried, and past a theatre where his dramas are seen and heard
by visitors from all nations. In rare flood times, the river was wild
and destructive, sweeping away bridges and much in its path, but
normally it was hospitable to truant boys or patient fishermen, and no
guttered rocks or congregated sands imperilled any large keel here.
The river arises in grassy highland in the east of England near
Naseby, and for miles hardly deserves the name Avon, or 'river', which
has echoes all over Celtic Europe: the Avon or Aven in Brittany, the
Avenza in Italy, and the Avona in Spain. This Avon is at first only a
runnel and then a willow-bordered stream, but below the old city of
Warwick it is slow and stately as it divides Warwickshire and cuts the
middle of England.

To the north is
the Arden region, where the Forest of Arden was more thinly wooded in
Shakespeare's day than in medieval times. Here were irregular fields,
meadows, moated farmsteads, and groups of cottages, but few villages.
South and west lay the Feldon, with new ornamental parks at Clopton and
Goldicote, Ettington and Charlecote. Round about were fields
cultivated in narrow strips, as well as tithe barns, villages, and
black and white half-timbered cottages.

Stratford-upon-Avon, between Arden and Feldon, was a market town
where goods from the two regions could be exchanged. Protected because
it lay in the rain-shadow of Welsh hills to the west, it had a mild
climate, Farmers found the Avon valley fertile and took

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advantage of a bridge built by the town's benefactor Sir Hugh Clopton
in the reign of Henry VII to take goods to market. John Leland, the
antiquary, saw Stratford's bridge with its fourteen stone arches
around 1540, and noted the well-laid-out town. A parish church rose to
the south at Old Stratford, and from here one walked north into good
streets, partly paved, to see the Pedagogue's House accommodating a
grammar school, a range of almshouses, and the Gild hall and Gild
chapel. Besides back lanes the town 'hath 2. or 3. very lardge
stretes', Leland wrote. 'One of the principall stretes ledithe from est
to west, anothar from southe to northe.' Houses of two and three
storeys were of timber, and he was struck by the 'right goodly
chappcll' in Church Street.
¹

The land on which Stratford was built had belonged to bishops of
Worcester after Ethelhard, a Saxon king, granted it to the third bishop
( AD 693-714). From then until fifteen years before Shakespeare's
birth Stratford had been a
manerium
of Worcester bishops.
²
Once the town had been a small group of farms called Straetford,
meaning a Roman approach to a ford, and it stood on a Roman road. But
in 1196 there had been a change: a bishop purchased the right to hold a
weekly market at the Avon, and his plan avoided the existing village.
Land north of Straetford, some 109 acres, was laid out into six
streets, forming a grid which is still visible in the town's pattern
today. Three streets ran roughly parallel to the river, intersected by
three more, and the land within this grid was marked into 'burgage'
plots, each of which was 12 perches in length and 3½ perches in
breadth (198 feet by 57 feet 9 inches). The plots would be subdivided
in various ways in the years ahead, but they allowed for ample
buildings and convenient neighbourhoods. The Roman road was worked into
the grid to form an open area, and hence Bridge Street is wide today.
Craftsmen and merchants were attracted to settle in this well-planned
town, and the
'Manerium de novo Stratford'
began to thrive. It
had tall inns and some 240 built-up plots (besides other tenements,
shops, and stalls) in the thirteenth century, and would have been no
larger in Shakespeare's day.

The
medieval town of Stratford was known for one of its social features,
its lay religious Gild. Membership in the Gild of the Holy

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Cross was open to all men and women -- and the fame of this
organization spread beyond the county. Members elected their own
aldermen, and a woman's vote counted as equal to a man's; the Gild
provided jurors for the manorial courts, looked after the sick and the
poor, prayed for the dead (even admitting departed souls to the
membership), and founded a school. The Gild nearly absorbed the local
government and gave continuity to local life.

Indeed, the Gild not only linked the generations, and gave common
religious and social purposes to the people of Stratford, but it had
too the effect of stimulating at least a few men of exceptional talent.
Robert de Stratford (taking his surname from the town) probably
founded the chapel of the Gild in 1296. John de Stratford, his son,
rose to be Bishop of Winchester and three times Chancellor of England,
before returning to found, in 1331, a chantry in honour of Thomas a
Becket and a college of five priests who were bidden to pray for his
family, himself, the bishops of Worcester, and kings of England. When pe
( Shakespeare's most heroic king) confirmed the college, Stratford's
church came to be called the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity.
³

Civic pride -- and the long traditions of the Gild -- were nevertheless
affected by a convulsion. Until the sixteenth century, little had
unsettled the town's religious life. But new Protestant reforms struck
hard at Stratford -- when the College was forced to close. Then after
the Gild was dissolved and its properties were confiscated, in 1547,
the town government collapsed.

Worried merchants petitioned the Crown. They received a charter of 28
June 1553, which incorporated the town as a royal borough. Yet no
sooner was the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon in being than Mary
Tudor returned the nation to Roman Catholicism. Under Henry VIII, her
father, few people had known from day to day which opinions were
orthodox and which heretical; but Queen Mary was clearer. A woman of
inflexible honesty with a dim, obstinate mind, she pressed ahead with
heresy trials, supported by her bureaucracy. Stratford became the eye of
a circle of martyr fires at Coventry, Lichfield, Gloucester,
Wotton-under-Edge, Banbury, Oxford, Northampton, and Leicester. Women
and tradesmen were burned -- and a baby born

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in Coventry's fire was thrown back onto the hard, burning faggots. Lest anyone forget these events John Foxe, in his '
Book of Martyrs
' or
Actes and Monuments
,
published a year before Shakespeare's birth, was to describe them in
lurid detail. One effect was that people living under the reign of
Mary's successor were often reticent on points of faith. Shocking and
violent as it was, doctrinal controversy had torn at the normal fabric
of social connections in the Midlands, and proved bad for trade. As
late as the 1590s Stratford's wardens were to be lax or restrained in
reporting on non-attendance at church; Shakespeare's father and
Shakespeare himself, at different times, were to camouflage their
religious commitments and feelings with a caution that seems typical
of all but an outspoken few at Stratford. Foxe had meant his martyrs
to be remembered -- and had excelled himself in an account of Bishop
Hooper, who when burning had cried out to 'Lord Jesus'. When 'blackc
in the mouth, and his tonge swollen, that he could not speak' he
struck off an arm into the fire and 'knocked still with the other,
what time the fat, water, and bloud dropped out at his fingers endes,
until by renewing the fire, his strength was gone, and his hand did
cleave fast in knocking to the yron on his brest'.
⁴

Mary's martyrs, of course, gave immense authority to the Protestant
cause, and her marriage with her cousin Philip 11 of Spain led to a
ruinous war. When her half-sister, the Lady Elizabeth, came to the
throne in 1558, French troops were in Scotland with nothing between
them and England but an ill-manned fortess at Berwick. Coinage was
debased, and the religious problem festered at Stratford, where a town
constable had been assaulted by Alderman Perrott. If blood flew even
among the council, merchants might well worry. After the Catholic
vicar left in 1558, Stratford's people lived in an odd limbo with no
regular vicar at all.

When a sound Protestant, John Bretchgirdle, became Stratford's new
vicar in 1561, Catholics were then still in the town council and
Catholic frescos in the Gild chapel -- but the new vicar waited. A
native of Baguley near Manchester with his MA degree from Christ Church,
Oxford,

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Master Bretchgirdle wrote in Latin in the town's registers (whereas the
Catholic vicar had used English) and settled down as a bachelor on
Church Street, where as 'vicar perpetuall' he unpacked a library.

Few clergymen -- outside London and the universities -- could have
matched it. He had a Horace, a Sallust and a Virgil, Aesop's fables,
two or three books by Erasmus, with
Acts of the Apostles translated into English Metrel
⁵
-- and his books took a long view of those forces that helped to form
Shakespeare's mind. Once the Roman empire had held sway over Europe,
to be replaced by the order of an imperial papacy; now the collapse of
the Catholic Church in England was releasing the full effect of the
European Renaissance and Reformation, so that gusto, freedom, and energy
were in the English air. At the vicar's Oxford, medieval logic had
given way to the humanist study of rhetoric, but everywhere an older,
calmer temper of life was also passing -- or was locked up in London
with the caged wolves', the Marian bishops, six of whom Queen
Elizabeth kept imprisoned. People were to know incipient doubt, a loss
of calm certainty about human destiny, and sharp changes in the
nation's mood. Shakespeare was born when things began to seem badly
out of date. Lost with the 'old faith' were Catholic dirges and
trentals, or the sets of thirty requiem services, and the
De Profundis,
shrines, pilgrimages and incense, as well as candles and torches and
old ceremonies, extreme unction and purgatory and satisfactory masses.
Holy days had been cut in number from over a hundred to twenty-seven,
and a vicar was now exalted. The Catholic priestly function had never
depended on the moral worth of the priest. Now, a vicar had to be
exemplary as a teacher of God's will, and so a deep change, in each
community, was helping to foster a new interest in the person -- in
behaviour and character.

Yet -- at
Stratford -- one thing was unchanged. Into the fourth year of a
Protestant reign the council had not removed Catholic traces in the
Gild chapel; their caution wastin keeping with Elizabeth's wish not to
have any 'image in glass windows' broken nor to leave 'the place of
prayers desolate' in chapels and churches.
⁶
Indeed, the Queen wisely avoided enquiry into Catholic consciences --
and Bretchgirdle, in his correct Anglican 'square cap', did not purge
the town of papists. He had to placate the council -- and he was more
articulate than many

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clergymen. An outcry was loud in the land against non-residency,
pluralism (the holding of two or more benefices at the same time), and
the horrors of 'lay patronage' which sent men to pulpits from which
they never preached.
⁷
The power of appointment to five-sixths of the church livings in
south Warwickshire was in lay hands -- but Stratford's council were
confident of the new vicar. In 1563 they decided at last to expunge
the Catholic decor of the old Gild chapel, and in that sense the
town's past was to be removed.

Sitting on Stratford's governing council were trusted local men,
including a bailiff or mayor (elected by themselves for a year),
thirteen other aldermen, and fourteen capital burgesses. They had many
rules to enforce. Bretchgirdle was responsible to the council, but he
did not have to desecrate the chapel
himself
-- or record the deed. The aldermen had other help, and no one helped them more in seven years than John Shakespeare.

Stratford's records tell us more about this man than appears in any
biography of his son, and we see him at first as a yeoman farmer from
nearby Snitterfield, who had set up as a craftsman and merchant. He
had become a glover and whittawer (a dresser of soft, white-coloured
leather) on Henley Street, and he would have had other interests. In
the hand of a clerk, his name appears typically as 'Jhon shacksper' or
' John Shaxpere', once in a London record as John 'Shakespeare',
⁸
and we find it beneath terse, efficient reports.

In September 1556 John was chosen as one of the council's two tasters
of ale and bread, a job for an able and 'discreet' man. He was burly
enough to be a constable who had to deprive 'single-men' of weapons,
and astute enough to be an affeeror, or assessor of fines. On 3
October 1561, he was sworn in as one of the two chamberlains in charge
of the borough's property and finances.
⁹

We have no example of his writing -- though he drew his mark as a
cross or as a pair of glover's compasses (an instrument used for
making designs on the back of gloves); one of his marks resembles a
glover's stitching clamp, or 'donkey'. Men such as John Shakespeare

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