Shakespeare's Wife (27 page)

In 1597 the affairs of the Lord Chamberlain's Men required Shakespeare's attention. In January James Burbage died, and in April his lease on the Theatre, the company's headquarter, ran out. Burbage and the landlord, Giles Allen, had been unable to agree terms for a new lease, so Burbage had decided upon a new site, the old refectory of the dissolved Blackfriars monastery, and had invested £600 in a lease, and hundreds more in refurbishing the building for use as a theatre. This money he had borrowed. According to evidence later given by the younger James Burbage his father had built the Theatre:

with many hundred pounds taken up at interest…he built this house upon leased grounds by which means the landlord and he had a great suit in law, and by his death, the like troubles fell on us, his sons: we then bethought us of altering from thence, and at like expence built The Globe with more sums of money taken up at interest.
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The interest would have been 10 per cent per annum. Once Shakespeare became a shareholder in the theatre he would have been liable for his share of the costs of servicing the loans and fighting the various legal actions. When the residents protested to the Privy Council and the Blackfriars project was abandoned, interest was still payable on the money borrowed by Burbage. Burbage's son Cuthbert entered into new negotiations with Giles Allen and agreed to pay a much higher rent for the Theatre site, but the deal fell through when Allen refused to accept Burbage as the guarantor. For years Giles Allen pursued the Lord Chamberlain's Servants through the courts, demanding the crushing amount of £800 in damages.

At this critical juncture in the company's fortunes Shakespeare is believed to have squandered money on a huge house three days' ride
from London. The acquisition of residential real estate was not at all the kind of thing that theatre people went in for. What with playing in London during the terms and touring the countryside in the vacation, few of them had any use for a permanent residence of any kind. Most of Shakespeare's colleagues in the theatre, even those who called themselves gentlemen and had a university education, lived a hand-to-mouth existence in lodgings, and spent the little money they made on good cheer. Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, John Day and Henry Chettle never became heads of households. According to Aubrey, Beaumont and Fletcher ‘lived together on the Bankside, not far from the playhouse, both bachelors, lay together, had one wench in the house between them, which they did so admire, the same clothes and cloak etc. between them'.
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Fletcher never married. Beaumont eventually gave up the theatre and married a gentlewoman who bore him one child and was pregnant at the time of his death in March 1616.

Those who did marry do not seem to have invested much time or energy in the role of paterfamilias. Robert Greene, a few years older than Shakespeare, married ‘a gentleman's daughter of good account' in about 1585 and settled briefly in Norwich. When she had borne a child and he had spent her portion he abandoned her and returned to his haunts in London, where he died destitute in 1592, having signed a bond to the poor shoe-maker whose family cared for him which he begged his estranged wife to honour. Thomas Dekker, gentleman, may have been the father of a daughter christened at St Giles Cripplegate in 1594, and another buried there in 1598, and a son buried at St Botolph's in 1598, and he may not. Philip Massinger was married and had children, apparently, but nothing is known of his family. Even the most successful of Shakespeare's rivals, Benjonson, though like Shakespeare married in his youth and father of at least three children, lived mainly in other people's houses, at Polesworth with Goodere, and at Loughton with Sir Robert Wroth, for example, evidently at their expense, though he must have earned at least as handsomely as Shakespeare both at court and in the public theatres. Jonson lamented that he followed the muse of poetry even though she had beggared him, when he might have been a rich lawyer, physician or merchant.
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Yet Shakespeare, who did the same, is
presumed to have earned and kept a fortune. Those of Shakespeare's colleagues who acquired houses of their own looked for them rather closer to London. Thomas Middleton and his wife, the well-connected Mary Marbeck, and their single child lived at Newington Butts. The player Augustine Phillips bought himself a house in Mortlake. Condell owned a house in Fulham.

We have no clear idea of what the house that the Shakespeares bought in 1597 was like. The fine of 1597 mentions a messuage with two barns and two gardens; the version of 1602 adds two apple orchards. The restored house was pulled down in 1702, and so we have to rely on the long-distance reminiscences of people who were alive in the later seventeenth century to get any idea of what the Shakespeares ended up with. In 1737 George Vertue interviewed Shakespeare Hart, a descendant of the Bard's sister Joan Hart, and sketched what he told him. Vertue's drawing shows a house with three storeys and five gables. His caption reads, ‘This the outward appearance towards the street, the gate and entrance (at the corner of Chapel Lane)…' He then drew a plan showing the gate and a building on either side in front of the house: ‘besides this front or outward gate there was before the house itself (that Shakespeare lived in) within a little court-yard, grass growing there—before the real dwelling house, this outside being a long gallery etc. and for servants.' The long gallery would have been used for exercise in the winter months and for children to play in during inclement weather. Richard Grimmitt, born in 1683, said that to the best of his remembrance ‘there was a brick wall next the street, with a kind of porch at the end of it next the chapel; then they crossed a small kind of green court before they entered the house which was bearing to the left and fronted with brick, with plain windows consisting of common panes of glass set in lead, as at this time'. Besides the little green forecourt, New Court had a big enclosed garden of at least three-quarters of an acre. This, the ‘great garden', was sold off at about the time that the house was pulled down. It is there that Shakespeare is supposed to have planted the famous mulberry tree.

Mulberry trees can be in the ground for many years before they fruit, but, if the point of the planting is to rear silkworms, it doesn't matter if the trees don't fruit, as you only need fresh green leaves.
Shakespeare's mulberry tree, the bole of which when it was cut down in 1758 was a mere six inches in diameter, was probably the last surviving of a row whose leaves were originally harvested for silkworms. Everybody who could remember agreed that the tree was in the garden in Shakespeare's time, and this, later generations supposed, meant that he had planted it with his own fair hands. Malone surmises that the mulberry tree was planted in 1609 when thousands of mulberry trees were imported from France at the order of James I in a bid to establish silk manufacture in Britain.
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James's attempt failed, as did that of his grandson Charles II who sixty years later planted a mulberry garden at Whitehall with the same intention. Before the industrial revolution silk production, whether in China or in Europe, was a cottage industry. If, as has been suggested, Ann was involved in the haberdashery business with her brother-in-law, in the manufacture of lace and ribbons or as a knitter, teacher of knitting or organiser of outworkers, she might well have wanted to branch out into the really big money, which was in silk. The suggestion that she was involved in sericulture at New Place is given some support from the Holy Trinity register for 1611 which for the first time describes the occupation of a parishioner, one Thomas Knight, as ‘silk weaver'.
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All things considered it is unlikely that the Bard planted a single mulberry tree at New Place and rather more likely that his wife planted several.

There were grapevines at New Place too, but no one has suggested that the Bard trod his own grapes or bottled his own vintage. All the work associated with New Place, whether it was brewing or wine-making or sericulture, would have been overseen by Ann Shakespeare. If she had been unwilling or unable to extend the field of her operations, Shakespeare could never have bought the house, unless he was prepared to employ a housekeeper or a steward. As no such person appears in the record, the best guess is that Ann was both housekeeper and steward. Within months of acquiring New Place Shakespeare is listed as a holder of malt; the malt was almost certainly made by Ann or under her supervision. If she was making malt, she was probably also brewing ale, and raising pigs on the spent malt, curing her own bacon, and baking bread, for all these activities were interdependent.

 

Brew somewhat for thine

Where brewer is needful, be brewer thyself

What filleth thy roof will help furnish thy shelf,

Else bring up no swine

In buying thy drink by the firkin or pot,

The tally ariseth, but hog amends not.
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To make malt in this period barley, or mixed oats and barley called maslen, was soaked in water in a ‘yealing vat' and spread on the floor of a ‘couch house' to begin the germination process that converts the starches in the grain to sugar or maltose. For this process space was needed.

 

The place may be so and the kiln may be such

To make thine own malt shall profit thee much.

 

As soon as rootlets began to emerge from the grain, the malt was swept up and put to dry on a ‘kill' or ‘keele', a wooden frame supporting a ‘hair cloth' made of woven horse hair, which was set over a fire of straw. Straw was chosen because it does not create the kind of thick smoke that would taint the malt, which was meant to assume a golden colour. The process was dangerous, especially when carried out in a confined, poorly ventilated space. All of the fires that devastated Stratford probably involved the mismanagement of some stage of the malting or brewing process. It was essential to dry the malt thoroughly, if it was not to spoil.

 

Some drieth with straw and some drieth with wood,

Wood asketh more charge and yet nothing so good…

Malt being well spared the more it will cast,

Malt being well-dried the longer will last…
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This activity, especially if carried out on a considerable scale, required the services of maids; others were employed by the good housewife elsewhere in her establishment:

 

Set some about churning, some seething of souse,

Some carding, some spinning, some trimming up house…

Set some to grind malt, or thy rushes to twine,

Set some to peel hemp, or to seething of brine…
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The most skilled workers were to be found in the dairy:

 

Good servant in dairy that needs not be told

Deserveth her fee to be paid her in gold…

Keep dairy house cleanly, keep pan sweet and cold,

Keep butter and cheese to look yellow as gold.
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Ann could have undertaken the same enormous range of activities as her younger contemporary, Margaret, Lady Hoby.
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As well as observing her daily routine of private and public devotions, reading and conference with her household, Lady Hoby attended women in labour, dressed wounds, prepared medicines, gardened, propagated plants, gathered and preserved fruit, made cakes and confectionery, kept bees, made candles, distilled essential oils, dyed wool, and lent money and held money.

Malt-making and money-lending were connected activities; the women who prospered as the one entered in business as the other, both holding and laying out funds for clients. We have one piece of evidence of Ann's participation in this kind of related activity. On 25 March 1601, the Hathaways' shepherd made his will. Shepherds, responsible for keeping the scattered small flocks healthy, for crutching, docking, castrating, shearing and mating them, paring their feet and delivering lambs, as necessary, made good money. According to Edgar Fripp there were no fewer than eight shepherds living in Stratford in 1600. In his will Whittington admitted a debt for ‘a quarter's of an year's board' to Ann's brothers John and William Hathaway who were still living at Hewlands Farm, so he was probably one of the six people in Joan Hathaway's household in 1596. His will was witnessed by two of the creditors listed in Richard Hathaway's will of 1581, John Pace and John Barber; another witness was William Gilbert the curate who wrote the elder Hathaway's will. When he died at Shottery in April 1601 Whittington's possessions, assessed at the handsome sum of £50, included ‘four score and one sheep' and eleven quarters of malt.
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One clause in his will is of particular interest:

Item I give and bequeath unto the poor people of Stratford forty shillings that is in the hand of Ann Shakespeare wife unto Mr William Shakespeare and is due debt unto me being paid to mine executor by the said William Shakespeare or his assigns according to the true meaning of this my will.

As Whittington also listed further debts owed to him by Ann's brothers, John and William Hathaway, executors of their mother's will in which he had been left money which he had not yet received, the will might be thought to give us a picture of the Hathaway clan in 1601 as so strapped for cash that their faithful shepherd was obliged to lend them small sums that they were not able to repay in his lifetime. In fact the last person to whom a shepherd like Whittington would confide his money would be someone who was in financial difficulties. Having no households of their own to maintain, because they lived mostly with the owners of the flocks they managed, shepherds tended to accumulate quantities of cash which they had no way of keeping safe. As soon as a sizable sum had accumulated they tended to place it in the hands of a solid citizen who would be certain to repay it on demand. When Richard Cowper, also a shepherd, died in 1588, and left an estate valued at more than £37, all but £7 of it was in the hands of other people, his principal debtor being Alderman Abraham Sturley, who owed him £22.