Shakespeare: A Life (38 page)

so that the shield could be 'divided vertically into two halves, the
Shakespeare coat being placed in the dexter and the Arden coat in the
sinister half'.
⁷
John, evidently, chose not to impale with Arden.

Shakespeare seems to have been amused by these prodigious efforts.
The heralds -- it seems at the poet's own bidding -- had lifted up the
rank of his grandfather Robert Arden from 'gent'. or
generosus
to the higher rank of 'esquire',
armiger.
In
The Merry Wives
,
the insipid Slender proudly hails his uncle -- Justice Shallow -- as
one 'who writes himself "Armigero" in any bill, warrant, quittance, or
obligation: "Armigero." ' (1. i. 8-9). For their part, Shakespeare's
fellow actors were hardly amazed by his minor triumph of arms.
Augustine Phillips, his colleague and friend, simply bought one day
from a heraldic painter the arms of Lord Bardolph ( William Phillips),
and the actor Thomas Pope bought the arms of Sir Thomas Pope, the
Chancellor of the Augmentations. Richard Cowley and Shakespeare had
legitimate claims to arms, but, as actors, both were later cited in a
complaint of Ralph Brooke, the York Herald, to the effect that Sir
William Dethick as Garter King-of-Arms had made grants to 'base and
ignoble persons'.
⁸

Gentlehood had a serious bearing on the chances of younger
Shakespeares. Possibly the least helped was the poet's sister Joan, soon
to marry William Hart, a hatter down on his luck. Shakespeare's three
living brothers were more likely to benefit. Gilbert Shakespeare, who
never married, was in this year 29. His brother Richard was 22, and
Edmund 16. Gilbert tried to succeed in the nation's capital, since he
was a haberdasher at St Bride's in 1597 when he and a local shoemaker
put up £19 bail, in the court of Queen's Bench, for the clockmaker
William Sampson. Gilbert must have been back in the Midlands in 1602.
Then or a little later he became associated, probably in business,
with Peter Roswell (or Ruswell) and Richard Mytton, who are both
mentioned in the only existing letter addressed to Shakespeare.

In the twentieth century, Mark Eccles discovered a court case
involving Gilbert Shakespeare and his rather unsavoury acquaintances
living in, and also to the south-west of, the parish. We know that
Gilbert had to appear at the Court of Requests with Roswell, Mytton,
Mary Burnell, and others in November 1609 to answer certain

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charges. The charges are still unknown, but we know that Roswell and
Mytton had been in the employ of Stratford's Lord of the Manor, whose
men, as will emerge, were involved in the killing of the Shakespeares'
friend Richard Quiney when Quiney was bailiff. Roswell appears as a
brutal bully, among other bullies, even at the outset of the case
involving Shakespeare's brother Gilbert. Tempers flared when Elionor
Varney, a serving-girl of 21, first handed Roswell the subpoena to
appear in court: 'he did violently snatch from [Elionor] the said writ
and refused to re-deliver it unto her, and delivered his staff he
then had in his hand to a stander-by who therewith did assault and
beat this deponent out of the house'.
⁹
It is of interest to find Gilbert Shakespeare among violent
associates who in themselves worked for a vicious manorial lord, but a
dark curtain falls over this obscure court case; we may yet learn
more about it. The poet's brothers Gilbert and Richard, anyway, drew
little opprobrium down upon their own heads, and left almost no mark
in life. Gilbert was to die in his forty-sixth year; he was buried as a
bachelor (
adolescens)
at Holy Trinity, Stratford, on 3 February
1612. Richard admitted a fault at the church court in July 1608, for
which he was fined 12
d.,
but he was blameless in the local
court's eyes after that. Having nearly reached his fortieth year, he
was buried at Stratford on 4 February 1613.

The case with Shakespeare's youngest brother was otherwise, for
Edmund, unluckily, became a city actor. Among the dangers that
threatened an actor were indiscipline and sexual disease, and the
young man was rashly imprudent. In London he sired a son who was
baptized at St Leonard's parish in July 1607 and buried a month later,
at Cripplegate, as ' Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere Player base
borne'. The father barely survived the infant: Edmund died at 27 and
was buried on 31 December 1607 at St Saviour's church, Southwark,
where Shakespeare must have paid to have the great bell rung for him.

Would the 'Dark Lady' sonnets, in their fitful story of sensuality,
have been lost on Edmund? In our time, fanciful writers of course
suppose that Shakespeare himself fell into the clutches of a dark-haired
vamp, such as Lucy Negro, bawdy-house keeper of Clerkenwell's
stews, or Hunsdon's mistress Aemilia Lanyer, or else Pembroke's silly
paramour Mary Fitton (despite a lack of factual proof that he ever met

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any of them). It is not difficult to imagine that actors were terrified
of syphilis, and, in a 'homosocial' culture, very close male
friendships could help a few actors to avoid fornication. Homosexual
relationships must have been common, though boy apprentices were likely
to be well protected. No one knows if Shakespeare was especially
chaste, but when living with Huguenots later, he was respectable
enough to be trusted in a delicate family matter. The Sonnets suggest
he knew sexual liaisons, but that his horror of adultery is unusually
strong.

Nevertheless if he was a
penitent husband, it is odd that Anne Shakespeare bore him children in
only three years of married life. His own mother had offspring over a
span of twenty-two years, but Anne gave birth to no child after
Susanna and the twins Hamnet and Judith were born. It is perhaps less
likely that she was hopelessly estranged from her husband, than that
damage to her reproductive system, caused by the carrying and birth of
twins, had made it impossible for her to have more children. This of
course is no more than a possibility. Robert Bearman of the Shakespeare
Birthplace Trust notes that of 'thirty-two instances of twin births in
Stratford between 1560 and 1600, both children survived at least the
first three months of infancy in eighteen cases'. In eight cases of
twin births, however, the mother bore no more children -- at a time
when children were much desired in all of the social ranks.
¹⁰
Twin births could be particularly horrendous as a barber-surgeon
stood by, with his unsterilized instruments, to cut, crush, and
extract the unborn to save the mother, who might suffer irreparable harm
even if the births were successful. Shakespeare and his wife would
presumably have had more children if they could, and it is by no means
certain that they had a choice in the matter. A child was a fragile
treasure, and, among the gentry, it was normally felt that a family's
well-being and the likely survival of one's estate depended on one's
having a living male heir.

At the
time, belief in the sacredness of marriage reinforced unions, and
Shakespeare had much to benefit from harmony at home. 'In his dramas
from
Hamlet
to
Coriolanus
, he is, interestingly, less
concerned with opposition between husband and wife than with problems a
son faces in coming to terms with images of a parent. He was to take
Anne from the double house at Henley Street, and live with her among

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pleasant amenities at Chapel Street; the poet's house was convenient
and hospitable enough for Thomas Greene to stay there as a guest for
at least a year. Anne's looks, dress, or manners can hardly have
surprised Shakespeare, and, certainly, his family had known her own
family since his infancy. But to judge from the available facts, her
Hathaway relatives gave him cause for alarm. We recall that Anne was
close in age to her eldest brother Bartholomew, who was back at
Shottery. As an act of family piety Bartholomew had given the name of
his father, Richard, to his first-born. There was persistence in that,
since Bartholomew and Anne had earlier lost two brothers named after
their father. At Shottery Anne's father had thrived, but the rewards
for his energy, or good luck, were not bound to be equalled by fresh,
young Hathaway men in need of advancement in depressed times. Anne's
brothers were unlikely to offend her, and there is no sign that she
renounced any of them. It has been said that one reason why
Shakespeare's will appears to treat his wife shabbily, or negligently,
is that she became mentally ill -- but nothing supports that. If Anne
held money in trust for her father's shepherd in 1601, she was not
ineffectual then, nor do Whittington's phrases hint at any
incompetence on her part. What does clearly emerge, though, is the
fact of strong family loyalty among the Hathaways as Bartholomew's
children began to settle not only in Shottery but within the town
itself. Their warm interest in Anne Shakespeare was normal, but since
Bartholomew's branch produced churchwardens, aldermen, and a bailiff
there was a trace of social ambition in their friendly ways.
Bartholomew had very good credentials for his attentions to Anne. His
own father, a friend of John Shakespeare, in his will had urged
Bartholomew to look closely after his sisters, or to be a 'Comforte'
to them 'to his power'. Returning from Tysoe, he was not simply a
farmer; he took an interest in the town and had a lease in Ely Street
by 1583. Visiting Anne, he came to be on friendly terms with her
children; and through the poet's daughter, Susanna, Bartholomew later
developed a trusting relationship with her physician husband, John
Hall. Shakespeare's will firmly excludes Bartholomew and literally
every other Hathaway, while chiefly empowering Susanna and her spouse.
Ironically, Susanna's spouse was to be appointed as an overseer of
Bartholomew's own will.
¹¹

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What, then, in all likelihood irritated Shakespeare? The friendliness
of Bartholomew and his sons was hard to guard against, if Anne's
loyalty to them was keen. As they were by no means disreputable, he
could hardly have turned them from his door. Absent for long periods,
he cannot have returned home to find matters exactly as they were when
he left, and his brother-in-law's needs evidently confronted him. Just
how Bartholomew came to have £200 in 1610 to buy back Hewlands and
adjacent property at Shottery is unknown, but E. I. Fripp believes the
money came from Shakespeare. It was a large sum; the buyer was not
wealthy. Other Hathaways were very nearly the poet's neighbours.
Bartholomew's son Richard set up as a baker in Fore Bridge Street, and
became host of the Crown inn, before rising to the bailiwick.
¹²
Whether or not the poet welcomed early signs of such success, the
weak point of his own estate was soon to become its terrible lack of a
male heir. If he died before his wife, there was a possibility that her
relatives might try to get, through her, some access to his heritable
wealth, or to the entity of an estate intended for male Shakespeares.
He was vulnerable to his in-laws through Anne, and even if she at
last did nothing worse than to receive or encourage them, that could
have aroused his anger.

The unusual
arrangements he made for his Blackfriars property kept it safe from
Anne even three years before he made his will. His will is an
extraordinary document when compared with other actors' wills, and it
reflects further troubles in 1616. One oddity is not its lack of
endearing phrases for Anne (such as 'my loving' or 'my beloved' wife),
since other testators could omit those, but his failure to leave Anne
any jewel, keepsake, or other artefact that might show tenderness.
One might be reminded of the Sonnets' speaker who resents those to
whom he is emotionally close. The poet had a sudden, dark temper, it
has been implied, since two men he knew used the word 'offence' to
describe him. He was forgiving with Henry Chettle, but Chettle added
that
Groats-worth
was 'offensively taken' by the poet, and
Thomas Heywood reported that Shakespeare was 'much offended' by
Jaggard the printer who presumed 'to make so bold with his name' on
the title-page of
The Passionate Pilgrim.
Ben Jonson wrote with conventional hyperbole that his 'beloved' was capable of rage: 'Shine

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forth, thou star of poets', he urges in his elegy on Shakespeare, 'and
with rage | Or influence, chide or cheer the drooping stage'.
¹³

The trouble is that the poet had good cause to complain to Chettle of
Groats-worth,
and about a printer's unauthorized use of his name. It does not
follow that he was easily upset. He believed in loyalty and stability,
and his wife kept his house and raised his children. There are signs
of his satisfaction at New Place, an estate large enough perhaps to
emphasize his distinction in social rank from relatives who appeared
cap in hand. He mentioned a wish to invest in Anne's 'Shottery' -- and
civility prevailed in Shakespeare's household or he would not have
tolerated the prolonged stay of any visitor. How did Anne respond to
him? Stoical or dutiful compliance, at the time, is noticeable in wives
of the privileged. Even as a person from an old, respected Shottery
family, Anne may not have been so amenable as two other wives recently
widowed, but there is no outward sign, so far, that her attitudes
greatly differed from theirs: 'I carryed always that reverent respect
towards him in regard of my good conceipt which I had of the good
partes I knew to be in him', wrote Lady Mildmay in 1617; 'I could not
fynde it in my heart to challenge him for the worst word or deede
which ever he offered me'. Or again, Ann Clifford's attitude was not
altogether uncommon among the gentry: 'Sometimes I had fair words from
him and sometimes foul', she recalled of her husband, 'but I took all
patiently and did strive to give him as much content and assurance of
my love as I could possibly.'
¹⁴
Did Shakespeare believe in a marriage of equals? His dramas show a
wide range of marital attitudes, and his outlook on marriage may not
even begin to appear in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth, or Cornwall and
Regan, who might represent unions of equals in villainy. In the Merry
Wives, there are companionate marriages, despite Ford's air of
authority. The
Shrew
and
Comedy of Errors
debate the rights of a wife; Capulet in
Romeo
is shown to be a foolish autocrat in a disastrous marriage. In his
plays, Shakespeare at least entertained an idea, not attributable to
Puritan notions but to traditions as old as his town's Gild, that
marriage is a partnership based on mutual acquiescence. He feared at
times that Anne could not protect herself from her brothers; for the
likelihood of this, even if we put aside what is known of the
Hathaways, we have

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