Shakespeare: A Life (8 page)

It was never unwise to flatter the Queen, and even in the 1570s she
protected the players. She enjoyed theatre, and very nearly squashed
proposals to ban plays, games, and fairs on Sunday; she knew and spoke
Latin, but had sat through so many university plays in that language (
Plautus
Aulularia at Cambridge
; modern Latin works at Oxford)
that she was the keener to enjoy works in English. Her fondness for
spectacle was shared by many, but she was the one who did most to
ensure that her reign would be known for encouraging the drama.

Yet for months on end lawful touring groups were absent from
Stratford. Amateur mummers, or a Lord of Misrule who presided over
antics from Christmas to Twelfth Night, were the town's main dramatic
relief. With card-playing in fashion, paper kings and queens were in
anyone's power. Boys took up football, prison-base, wrestling, or
cudgel-playing with a sharp, smacking violence that shook off the
tedium of school hours; they also escaped into the countryside.

The town's common fields began near the Woolshop behind the Gild
Pits, and here, a few hundred yards from Henley Street, one entered an
arable Stratford field. William's sense of the country -- and its
terms -- has a relation to the borough fields, one of which lay within
sight of his father's barn, and the Bishopton and Welcombe fields
were not far off. Borough fields were laid out in furlongs, and the
furlongs were divided into yard-lands, separated by balks, or grassy
ridges. Each yard-land had ninety little strips, or 'lands', of a third
of an acre, which were 'eared'. Later, as a hopeful poet, he could
write with simple elegance to his patron that if
Venus and Adonis
proved deformed, he would 'neuer after
eare
so barren a
land,
for feare it yeeld me still so bad a haruest'.

Rural Warwickshire impressed him, and nature and his feelings for it
supplied a rich thematic basis for his imagery -- and its keynote. He
gorged on farming terms and would refer to
meers,
or banks and hedges (as in Enobarbus's 'the
meered
question'), or to
leas,
or tilled lands (as in Timon's command to mother earth, 'Dry up thy marrows, vines, and plough-torn
leas'
). Ploughed fields led up-river to Charlecote, where 'at the bake-syde of Mr Lucies huse', as Leland wrote,
¹¹
a brook met the Avon. Among several Thomas Lucys of the same title, the Sir Thomas Lucy who was born in 1532 was tutored by

-35-

John Foxe and wed at the age of 14 to Joyce Acton, aged 12. Tearing
down an old demesne structure, he built the great red-brick Chartecote
House, where the Earl of Leicester knighted him and the Queen
visited. With forty servants or retainers, a fine library and a
touring group of 'Sir Thomas Lucies players',
¹²
he was as well known at Stratford as the wealthy Sir Fulke Greville,
of Beauchamp's Court, who served as town recorder after 1591; both men
once arbitrated in a suit brought by William's friend Hamnet (or
Hamlet) Sadler. With reminiscent humour, but not necessarily to settle
a score as has been imagined, Lucy perhaps was recalled in Justice
Shallow's armorial coat of 'luces' in
The Merry Wives
. Anyone
could see, beyond his barbican at Charlecote, the fine glass in a hall's
bay window which showed a fishy coat of arms -- three white pikes or
'luces' on a crimson ground.

To the
south lay other elegant, ornamental domains such as the Rainsfords'
at Clifford Chambers, where from the turf one had a view of Holy
Trinity. The Warwickshire poet Michael Drayton was to summer with the
Rainsfords and at last write an elegy on Sir Henry Rains ford, who
married Drayton's beloved Anne Goodere. In youth or early manhood,
William knew the locale if not the owners of Clifford Chambers, and
both south and north of his town a line between affluence and poverty
met his eyes. Beggars were in the lanes and ditches, at fairs and in
streets. Wages sank and prices rose, and if farmers had pewter, glass,
and feather-beds as luxuries, a surplus of labourers added to the
homeless. Indeed, even market towns came into difficulties.

In the mid- 1570s inflation began to affect the leather crafts at
Stratford. In poorer times glovers became victims of their own workers,
and William's father -- whether or not he suffered from thievery --
had begun to speculate and break several laws himself. In fact, Tudor
laws affecting trade might have been kept in force for the purpose of
being broken, so that the state gained a revenue in fines.

Far from keeping all his eggs in one basket, John Shakespeare had
been dealing in wool and lending money. In 1570, when William was

-36-

barely of school age, John was twice accused of breaking a usury law
by charging interest -- high interest, £20 in both cases -- on loans of
£80 and £100 to one Walter Musshem, or Mussum, of Walton D'Eiville
near Stratford.
¹³
Musshem appears as a sheep farmer and one of John's business
partners; he may be the Musshem whose inventory is in the Worcester
County Record Office and who possessed 117 sheep in 1588: we know that
he and John failed to appear when Henry Higford, formerly town
steward, sued them for debts of £30 each in 1573.
¹⁴
John's usury cases came before the Royal Exchequer and in one
instance he paid a fine; but the wool trade relied on credit, and the
unworkable usury laws amounted to a random tax on trade. (The system
relied on informers who could receive for their services half the fine
levied against a violator.)

Such a
fine would not have disgraced a leading townsman; but John
Shakespeare's other troubles were more dangerous, as when he was twice
accused at the Exchequer in 1572 for illegal wool-dealing. The wool
statutes were unevenly enforced, but violations annoyed the Merchants
of the Staple, the main legal dealers. Glovers in particular were
tempted to transgress: with no use for fell wool removed from pelts, a
glover sold it as a matter of course to wool-dealers; yet it was only
a small step to take from selling cheap, superfluous fell wool to
breaking the law seriously to deal in fleece wool, and some Midlands
glovers made large profits in fleeces. A 'wool brogger' had to be
discreet, and it is more likely that John Shakespeare rode to Walton
D'Eiville and beyond with his eldest son, or Others he trusted, than
with casual helpers. William learned facts of the wool trade that apply
to his father's time, such as that eleven Midlands rams yield a tod of
28 pounds, or that a tod's worth at Stratford was 21 shillings.
¹⁵
He acquired a knowledge of shepherds and sheep farmers, sympathy for
them, and an accurate sense of sheep-shearing feasts and of the
farmers' talk, tones, and drollery. His sense of these men and their
womenfolk is unusually sure, and so in
The Winter's Tale
he could go beyond his romance source ( Greene
Pandosto
)
to write of more than pastoral puppets and give Warwickshire life to
Bohemia's shepherds. His knowledge of details a 'brogger' knew in the
1570s suggests that he was aware of his father's dealings and was
trusted. The Shakespeares of

-37-

Henley Street were close, defensive, and mutually dependent (so much
we may infer), but they were not isolated, and John in his graver
troubles was to depend on the leniency of the 'Brotherhode'.

Any brogger, by the mid- 1570s, would have found it harder to get
contracts for June shearings without risk of heavy fines. John had
farming as well as his shop to fall back on. With acreage at Asbyes, an
interest in 100 acres at Snitterfield, and a lease on 14 acres, in
1568, at Ingon Meadow, he was involved in corn-growing. He had sued
the tanner Henry Field for a debt owing on eighteen quarters of barley
(nearly 5 hundredweight), and he had at least 22 acres of meadow and
pasture suitable for grazing; not all of his land was arable. Also, he
was still buying land. In 1575 he paid to Edmund and Emma Hall, of
Hallow, the sum of £40 for two houses with gardens and orchards at
Stratford -- his last recorded property purchase. In that year or the
next, his application to the Heralds' College for a coat of arms and
hence for gentlehood came to nothing, though he got a 'pattern' or
sketch of his arms, before the matter was broken off.
¹⁶
In October 1576, the Privy Council ordered wool-buyers from London,
Northampton, and other locales in for questioning. Wool middlemen
were then being blamed for a sharp rise in wool prices (following a
resumption of normal trade with the Netherlands, after some four
years' interruption), and legal dealers of the Staple raged for the
heads of broggers. Intervention and questioning by the Privy Council,
just then, could be dangerous for Catholic families. Though he had
married one of the strongly Catholic Ardens, John, it is true, was
reticent about his own belief. Catholics had been accommodated in
Elizabeth's tolerant Church, but, increasingly, the nation's climate of
opinion had turned against the old faith.

How defiant in religion John truly was, we do not know; but he added
to his troubles by not attending Anglican services. Did a Jesuit
missionary in the 1580s persuade him to declare his faith? A paper
booklet of six leaves stitched together, found by a bricklayer in April
1757 between the rafters and tiling of what had been John's western
house at Henley Street, has turned out to be an authentic formulary; a
' John Shakspear' here makes a Catholic profession of faith, and
appears to sign, as the last paragraph indicates, in his own hand. The

-38-

formulary found in the rafters follows Borromeo's Last Will of the
Soul, which Jesuit missionaries in England were making use of by 1581.
But the booklet itself has vanished; and if John did mark or sign it,
he kept his religious feelings as well hidden as the testament in his
rafters. When cited in 1592 for recusancy, or failure to attend
church, he evidently declared he had stayed away from Anglican service
to avoid his creditors. 'It is sayd that', the wardens' not very
rigorously enquiring 'Seconde Certificat' states, 'Mr John
Shackespere' among eight others 'coom not to Churche for feare of
processe for Debtte.'
¹⁷
But by then almost any creditor could have caught him at the Court of
Record juries on which he served; he was not in fact in hiding, but
available to make probate inventories and press claims at law.

It is true that his practical, financial position was poor by 1576. In a
new effort to stamp out brogging, the Privy Council temporarily
suspended all licensed wool-dealing that November; thus six months
before the whole network of justices of the peace became involved in
collecting £100 bonds from the broggers as security against their
dealing in wool,
¹⁸
John Shakespeare -- if he had any large debts -- would have found his
hands tied. By then a marked man and known offender at the Exchequer,
he could not with impunity have made good to any of his creditors by
buying or selling wool after about December 1576.

This was a turning-point for the Shakespeare family. We have good
evidence that John failed to meet claims on his funds, and that his
downfall was known in the Gild hall. He avoided borough council
meetings. His affairs were so poor that when a levy to equip soldiers
was passed, John was 'excepted' and had to pay only 3
s.
4
d.
(just half the amount levied on other aldermen). He was excused from
paying a fine for being absent on election day, in 1578, and excused
again that November from paying 4
d.
weekly towards poor relief. 'm
^r
John shaxpeare', it was ordered, 'shall not be taxed to paye any thinge'.
¹⁹
It would be wrong for us to suppose that he avoided council meetings
only
because he feared trouble as a Catholic, at any rate. Incurring debts
and lacking cash, he was able to raise £40 in 1579 by mortgaging a
house and 56 acres at Wilmcote to his wife's brother-in-law Edmund
Lambert, to whom he owed money. When the borrowed £40 fell due, John
could not pay it -- and so Lambert held the property until he

-39-

died, after which John tried in vain to recover it from Lambert's heir,
whom he sued at the court of the Queen's Bench. Later he renewed his
effort in the court of Chancery, but John and Mary Shakespeare never
did get back their land, which was a part of the Arden inheritance.

John had dealt illegally in a wool trade that relied much on credit. It
is clear from borough records that he lacked ready cash to pay
creditors after the assault on broggers, and that his colleagues freed
him from fines, cut normal levies, and dropped him as an alderman
after his nine years' absence (during which he appeared once to vote
for his friend John Sadler as bailiff): 'm
^r
, Shaxpere dothe not Come to halles when they be warned nor hathe not done of Longe tyme', as a clerk wrote in 1586.
²⁰
John was concerned with self-preservation, and his long avoidance of
halls may not be wholly attributable to a fear of debt. He kept his
head down, it would seem, partly because he feared questions about his
beliefs and background; and he was disgraced by absences before the
town council expelled him. Yet he was not sent to ruin. He was in
business or speculating after being dropped by the council, and in his
last years was looking into toll-corn or pursuing Lambert's heir. As
late as 1599 he tried to recover a thirty-year-old debt for 21 tods
(588 lb.) of wool from John Walford, a clothier of Wiltshire and thrice
mayor of Marlborough; and he was slow to give up a glover's shop.

Shakespeare 'was a glovers son', Thomas Plume, Archdeacon of
Rochester, records around 1657 (and is thus more accurate than early
biographers in identifying the poet's father's trade), ' -- Sir John
Mennis saw once his old Father in his shop -- a merry Cheekd old man
-- that said -- Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crakt
a jeast [or jest] with him at any time'.
²¹
( Mennis was born in 1599 and could not have recalled a glover who died
in 1601, but may have quoted someone else who heard and recalled John
Shakespeare.)

That report of a
merry-cheeked old man who jests with his son is credible, and John was
not broken in 1576. In between William's twelfth and thirteenth
birthdays, the father's behaviour simply changed. After being an
honoured town servant, John became an absentee, plagued by threats of
creditors and informers, and needing help rather than giving it. He
was in shadow, and his household had less money but more mouths to
feed. William's parents had named a

-40-