Shakespeare's Wife (40 page)

It seems from the rewriting of Shakespeare's will in March that it was already apparent that Shakespeare's brother-in-law Willam Hart was drawing close to death. He was buried on 17 April, a week before his brother-in-law. Ann must have walked behind both coffins. Her nephew Richard Hathaway was now a churchwarden and met them both at the entrance to the churchyard. Hart was buried in the churchyard. Shakespeare is supposed to have been buried in the chancel, according to Fripp because it was his right as lessee of the tithes.
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The manner of it seems a little strange; the gravestone is too short, being little more than three feet long, and rather too obviously sited under the monument on the north wall.

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

of Shakespeare's lop-sided will and Ann's options—dower right, widow-bed or destitute dependency

Once her husband was decently interred, Ann had to endure the opening and reading of the will. The will first became known to posterity in 1747, the Vicar of Holy Trinity having come across a copy of it transcribed in the mid-seventeenth century. The vicar, Joseph Greene by name, expressed his disappointment in a letter to James West, secretary to the Treasury:

The legacies and bequests therein are doubtless as he intended; but the manner of introducing them, appears to me so dull and irregular, so absolutely void of the least particle of that spirit which animated our great poet, that it must lessen his character as a writer to imagine the least sentence of it his production.
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As Shakespeare is always thought of by bardolaters as standing alone, it has never occurred to any of them to ask whether it was Shakespeare himself who decided to call Francis Collins and instruct him to set about the tedious business of drawing up his will. It happens often enough in real life that carers have to take the initiative in this delicate business and it may have happened in Shakespeare's case. We might wonder why Thomas Greene did not take charge, seeing as he is supposed by historians to have been Shakespeare's kinsman and close friend. He was certainly a much better lawyer than old Francis Collins, a country attorney who was in poor health and would die within months.

There are some who want us to believe that Greene's grief at Shakespeare's untimely death was what prompted him to sell his pretty house and flee to Bristol. In fact Greene had loved living at
New Place as long as Shakespeare wasn't there, when Ann was in complete control. Shakespeare had disappointed Greene by currying favour with the Combes; he was now to disappoint Greene again by authorising a shabby, poorly drafted, mean-spirited statement of his last wishes. Nevertheless it may have been Ann who insisted on setting something down in writing; her family were all will-writers. In Shakespeare's family, as far as we can tell, there were none. John, Mary, Gilbert, Richard, Edmund—none left a will, as far as we know.

The most obvious, and for some people the most unusual, thing about Shakespeare's will is that he did not appoint his wife his executor. As Sir Thomas Smith remarks:

few [widows] there be that be not made at the death of their husband either sole or chief executrices of his last will and testament, and have for the most part the government of the children and their portions except it be in London where a peculiar order is taken by the city much after the fashion of the civil law.
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The job of an executor was onerous, both at the time of the administration of the will and, especially in the case of a will like Shakespeare's which reached into generations yet unborn, for years afterwards. At sixty Ann Shakespeare would have known herself to be too old to take on the responsibility. For all we know she begged her husband to excuse her and suggested Susanna and John Hall instead. Indeed, if she had had to listen to her husband's desperate attempts to identify male heirs generations down the line, she might have lost patience and told him she wanted nothing to do with it. Dreaming of a male child for thirty-three-year-old Susanna Hall who hadn't been pregnant in eight years was just soft-headed; projecting further into the reproductive career of an eight-year-old granddaughter was even less realistic. Who knows but Ann may have really objected to her husband's meanness to her younger daughter. Judith had thrown herself away on Thomas Quiney much as Ann Hathaway had on young Will Shakespeare. Ann may well have pleaded Judith's case with her obdurate father and retired defeated. More likely is it, however, that Collins's pernicketiness about the entail was necessitated by the terms of Susanna's marriage settlement.

When the first draft of Shakespeare's will was written by Francis Collins in January 1616, Shakespeare was already conscious of approaching death; a second draft was never written. All that Collins could manage was to rewrite the first page; the rest had to stand. The will was first published in Part I of the sixth volume of
Biographia Literaria
with an interesting error in the transcription; instead of ‘second-best bed' the transcriber read ‘brown best bed'.

The will begins unremarkably:

In the name of God Amen I William Shakespeare of Stratford upon Avon in the county of War[wickshire] gentleman in perfect health and memory God be praised do make & ordain this my last will and testament in manner and form following that is to say first I commend my soul into the hands of God my Creator hoping & assuredly believing through the only merits of Jesus Christ my Saviour to be made partaker of life everlasting and my body to the earth whereof it is made…
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The preamble as written by Francis Collins would make it clear that Shakespeare died a protestant, if it were not simply the formulaic preamble set out in law textbooks. To have departed from it, and made reference to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin and the saints, would have shown Shakespeare to have been a Catholic; simply failing to depart from it proves nothing. If there is anything odd about the will at this point it is that Shakespeare does not specify where he wishes to be buried.

Shakespeare then addresses the problem of Judith.

Item I give and bequeath unto my daughter Judith one hundred and fifty pounds of lawful English money to be paid to her in manner and form following that is to say one hundred pounds in discharge of her marriage portion within one year after my decease with consideration after the rate of two shillings in the pound for so long time as the same shall be unpaid to her after my decease & the fifty pounds residue thereof upon her surrendering of or giving of such security as the overseers of this my will shall like of to surrender or grant all her estate and right that shall descend or come unto her after my decease or that
she now hath of in or to one copyhold tenement with the appurtenances lying and being in Stratford aforesaid…being parcel or holden of the manor of Rowington unto my daughter Susanna Hall and her heirs forever

Shakespeare gives his executors the option of paying Judith £10 a year in lieu of her handsome lump sum. The £50 was compensation for surrendering any right to the ‘copyhold tenement', that is the cottage in Chapel Lane, that had been acquired in September 1602: ‘No doubt the cottage came in handy as quarters for a servant or gardener.'
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One is surprised to find a scholar as scrupulous as Schoenbaum writing ‘no doubt' when he means ‘perhaps'. With New Place slap in the middle of Stratford, and the unemployed poor all around, an employer in search of a ‘servant or gardener' hardly needed to offer the blandishment of a cottage. There is no hint in the records that Judith, who was neither servant nor gardener, had any claim on the Chapel Lane cottage, but she must have had. She certainly surrendered it after her father's death, for the Rowington Manor records show that Susanna took over the payments of the yearly fine or ground-rent and became the official tenant. At the time of the reading of the will Judith was living with her husband in his tavern in the house called Atwood's, next to his mother's house. On 21 December 1615, a new lease of the house called the Cage had been granted to Bess Quiney's son-in-law, Alderman William Chandler, who seems to have been running his mercery business in partnership with her. Chandler's wife, Bess's eldest daughter Elizabeth, had died the preceding May and Chandler had lost no time in remarrying. The new lease, granting him thirty-one years from 21 December 1615 for an annual rent of forty shillings, was sealed on 1 March 1616, but within weeks Thomas managed to agree with him a straight swap, of Atwood's for the Cage. The exchange was not formally sanctioned until 19 July, but the newly-weds probably moved in before that.

The next provision for Judith strikes a curiously callous note:

Item I give and bequeath unto my said daughter Judith one hundred and fifty pounds more if she or any issue of her body be living at the end of three years next ensuing the day of the date of this my will
during which time my executors to pay her consideration from my decease according to the rate aforesaid And if she die within the said term without issue of her body then my will is and I do give and bequeath one hundred pounds thereof to my niece [that is, granddaughter] Elizabeth Hall & the fifty pounds to be set forth by my executors during the life of my sister Joan Hart and the use and profit thereof coming shall be paid to my said sister Joan and after her decease the said £50 shall remain amongst the children of my said sister equally to be divided amongst them but if my said daughter Judith be still living at the end of the said three years or any issue of her body then my will is & so I devise & bequeath the said hundred and fifty pounds to be set
out by my executors and overseers for the best benefit of her and her issue and the stock not to be paid unto her so long as she shall be married & covert baron but my will is that she shall have the consideration yearly paid unto her during her life & after her decease the said stock and consideration to be paid to her children if she have any & if not to her executors or assigns she living the said term after my decease provided that if such husband as she shall at the end of the said three years be married unto or at any time after do sufficiently assure unto her & the issue of her body lands answerable to the portion by this my will given unto her.

If Judith ‘or any issue of her body' is still living three years after Shakespeare's death, a further £150 is to be made available in the form of a trust, meaning that she and/or her child or children could enjoy the interest on it at the usual rate of 10 per cent. Her husband could claim the principal only if he settled on her lands to the same value. This he was under no obligation to do. If Judith should die with no surviving child within the three years, the £100 would go to Susanna's daughter Elizabeth, and the £50 to Shakespeare's sister Joan Hart and her children. Shakespeare succeeded in guaranteeing Judith and her children sufficient inalienable income to live on. At the same time he contrived a situation where his widowed sister would get her windfall of £50 only if his daughter and any child she might have both perished, possibly because he was only entitled to take out of the estate as entailed by the marriage settlement personal bequests to a certain value. If Judith survived (and she did), Joan had to make do
with a mere £20 and her dead brother's old clothes. Her three sons were sixteen, eleven and eight. They would have looked very odd trailing round Stratford in their dead uncle's silks, but in any event they were not entitled to wear them. The Bard's wardrobe must have been turned over for sale by one or other of the Stratford mercers, who took his cut and gave Joan and her boys the rest, a shabby bequest if ever there was one. Again, we might infer that Shakespeare had very little room to manoeuvre. His clothes would be one asset that had not been considered in a marriage settlement. ‘I do will and devise unto her the house with the appurtenances in Stratford wherein she dwelleth for her natural life under the yearly rent of 12 pence'. Shakespeare did leave each of Joan's three boys £5, which reflects interestingly upon the £5 that he got from old John Combe.

Item I give will bequeath and devise unto my daughter Susanna Hall for better enabling of her to perform this my will & towards the performance thereof all that capital messuage or tenement with the appurtenances in Stratford aforesaid called the New Place wherein I now dwell and two messuages or tenements with the appurtenances situate lying and being in Henley Street…

To Susanna and her heirs male went all his other possessions in Old Stratford, Bishopton and Welcombe, plus the Blackfriars house, and to Susanna and her husband all the poet's ‘leases', ‘all goods, chattels, leases, plate, jewels and household stuff whatsoever', except his plate that went to Elizabeth and a silver-gilt bowl that went to Judith.

Shakespeare made no gift to the King's Men, but simply set aside £1 6s 8d for the purchase of mourning rings by three members of the company, John Hemmings, Richard Burbage and Henry Condell. To set Shakespeare's will beside that of the musician and actor Augustine Phillips, who died in May 1605, with its gifts of £5 to be shared among the hired men, twenty shillings each for five of his fellow shareholders, a thirty-shilling gold piece for Shakespeare and another for Condell, and silver bowls worth £5 for each of his three executors, is to be struck by the coolness and distance of Shakespeare's relations with the King's Men. He leaves the sword he had paid through the nose to have the right to wear to Thomas Combe. Six
months later Combe came across Valentine Tant in the town common close to the Dingles, and beat him up. On 14 November Tant, who was nearly seventy, was buried.

Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of Shakespeare's will is his indifference to the plight of Stratford's poor, to whose use he left £10. Sterner men had been anxious that their death provide the poor with an occasion for celebration. Even Bartholomew Hathaway wanted the poor to enjoy a square meal on the occasion of his funeral. Cantankerous Alderman Robert Perrott left money to buy fuel to be sold on to the poor at cost. When the elder William Combe died in April 1610, by the will written six months before his death he left £20 to the poor of Warwick, and £10 each to the poor of Alvechurch, Stratford and Broadway. When John Combe died in 1614 his will provided twenty shillings for a learned preacher to make a sermon twice a year at Holy Trinity, money for ten black gowns for the poor at 13s 4d each, £20 to the poor of Stratford, and £100 to be lent to fifteen ‘poor or young tradesmen' setting up in business, at the rate of twenty nobles a piece for three years, in return for a twice-yearly payment of 3s 4d.

Though Shakespeare may have been in perfect health and memory when he wrote his will, according to Greenblatt he was incapable of recognising the obvious—that he had failed to mention his wife—until someone pointed it out to him.