In Search of Shakespeare Page 4

  Of course, all this came at a cost: inflation, the growth of usury and the oppression of tenants by landlords were the common grouses of Shakespeare’s childhood, and there was a huge increase in poverty as peasants were driven off the land in the break-up of the last vestiges of the medieval feudal order. These things were on people’s minds right across the Midlands, and no doubt they were remarked on in Burbage’s tavern in Bridge Street, too. Young Shakespeare’s parents, then, were part of a new rising middle class, in every respect poised between old ways and new.

  ‘IN FEASTING OF THIS SORT THEY DO EXCEED’

  Tudor birthing manuals prescribed a month’s lying-in for the new mother before a purification or ‘churching’, an old Catholic ceremony that continued for some time in Protestant churches of Elizabeth’s day (and still hung on in some places until the twentieth century). The idea was that a woman who had given birth should be kept in isolation during this time so that she and the infant could gain strength and avoid infection. In Stratford in 1564 nearly two-thirds of all babies died in their first year: easy to see why, then, those first few weeks were viewed as the most dangerous in a child’s life.

  Mary’s churching on Sunday 28 May would have been conducted by the vicar, John Bretchgirdle, in Holy Trinity Church. Then, as was customary in the countryside, the family would have held a feast in Henley Street for friends and neighbours, with a table full of ‘fruit pies, game birds, cheese and butter’. Country people were said to be much better at this sort of thing than the townsfolk: ‘in feasting of this sort they do exceed after their manner especially at bridals and purifications of women, where it is incredible to tell what meat is consumed and spent, each one bringing such a dish, or so may, as his wife and he do consult upon’.

  Such country feasts were thought not only to be more generous, but also more fun than those given in towns; full of ‘scurrility and ribaldry’, as opposed to the ‘great silence’ at the tables of the ‘wiser sort’ who would not get drunk. ‘Sir Sullen and Sir Solemne are seldom welcome to any place,’ said a Worcestershire contemporary of Shakespeare’s father. The Henley Street house is unlikely to have been a silent one, and the baby was no doubt welcomed with an overflowing table. Six weeks later, however, when William was not yet three months old, the town was rocked by a tremendous blow.

  PLAGUE STRIKES STRATFORD

  The almanac for 1564 had correctly predicted a hot summer and a late harvest, accompanied by ‘fevers and tertians [which] shall grieve many people’. Over the previous twelve months London had lost a tenth of its population to the plague, and that summer the disease was carried from the teeming streets of the capital by soldiers of the Earl of Warwick, returning to Coventry and Stratford from the siege of Le Havre. On 11 July the Stratford burial register tersely marks the moment when the apprentice Oliver Gunne died: ‘Hic incepit pestis’ (here the plague began). Before it was over more than 200 people would have died in Stratford, up to one-sixth of the population. In late August the council, reeling at the town’s losses, held an emergency meeting in the fresh air of the garden behind the guildhall (plague was believed to circulate in indoor ‘infected air’, as Shakespeare later wrote in Timon of Athens). The corporation minute book records their deliberations over the money to be given out to the plague-stricken townspeople: ‘At the Hall holden in oure garden the 30 daye of auguste anno 1564. Moneye pd towardes the releffe of the poore.’ As the richest men in the borough, the aldermen were expected to fork out for the poor and alleviate the mounting distress among their neighbours. John Shakespeare was among those who dug into their own pockets; as acting chamberlain he was also responsible for the distribution of the money.

  Like most epidemics, the plague hit in particular the old, the infirm and the very young. For a small, tight-knit community where everyone knew each other, it must have been horrendous. Richard Symons, the town clerk, lost two sons and a daughter. The victims also included four children of the Shakespeares’ neighbours the Greens, three doors down in Henley Street – but not their own son William. Having already lost two babies, maybe Mary took him back across the fields to Wilmcote, where she and John had recently built a small house. By the end of the summer Stratford had been devastated, but Wilmcote escaped without a single death.

  OLD WAYS, NEW DEMANDS

  What were the prospects for a child in a small town early in Elizabeth’s reign? Then, much more than now, everything depended on money and class. Had William’s parents stayed in the countryside, he would have been a farmer – perhaps on the 80 acres at Wilmcote that he would have expected to inherit from his mother. But because his father had moved into the town and risen to be an alderman he would have the right to a decent education, and with it the chance to better himself. With good Latin he might become a clerk, working in a law office; or he might decide to enter his father’s business as a glover. Alternatively, he could become an apprentice in a bigger town or city – Coventry, say, or even London, as quite a few Warwickshire boys did. Among his Stratford contemporaries, one, Richard Field, became a London printer, and another, Alderman Smith’s son William, went to university. We know Shakespeare became an actor and a playwright, but exactly how he made the leap is, as we shall see, still mysterious.

  Like anyone, though, the young Shakespeare was shaped by family, work, church and environment. And although we have few details of the poet’s early life we can access these influences through other sources. Like so many places in provincial England, Stratford was wary of the new and sympathetic to the old. In Shakespeare’s childhood and youth, this part of Warwickshire was viewed by the government, and by the ecclesiastical authorities in Worcester, as an ungodly region, a stronghold of Catholicism and notoriously reluctant to implement the wishes of Elizabeth’s ministers. A report made to the Privy Council in the year of the poet’s birth says that half of the shire’s forty-two JPs were ‘adversaries of true religion’ and only eight were ‘favourers’ of Protestantism. One Warwickshire Protestant writer had Stratford and the big neighbouring parishes of Arden in mind when he spoke of ‘great parishes and market towns … utterly destitute of God’s word’.

  This was still true twenty years later, as is revealed in a fascinating document compiled by Elizabeth’s religious spies. In 1585 a government inquisition concluded of Warwickshire, ‘How miserable the state of the Church is for want of a godly learned ministerie.’ Astonishingly, even at that late date, fewer than half the parishes possessed the authorized Bishops’ Bible of 1568; of 186 priests, 120 were said to be ‘dumbe’ and 48 certain or suspected Catholics. Humfrey Style, vicar at Spernall until 1607, gave the commissioners a typically curt response: ‘our bible is not Authorished by the sinod of Byshopps … I have no degree in the universities and doe not preache … to the Rest of the Articles I can say nothinge.’ But nearly one-third of the shire’s sixty-five parishes ignored the inquisition and sent no replies at all. Among these were twelve parish priests directly accused of still being papists, who officiated in the big old parishes west and north of Stratford in the Forest of Arden. Geoffrey Heath, vicar of Oldbarrow, was reported to be ‘popish and useth incantation’; Hugh Bate at Packwood was ‘an old priest and a massemonger, a drunkard and dumbe and it is thought a sorcerer’. These were the kind of priests and friars whom Shakespeare would write about in his plays with persistent affection and nostalgia. And it is interesting that the list included John Frith of Temple Grafton, who may have conducted the poet’s marriage ceremony. He was described as ‘an old priest, unsound of religion’, much resorted to by locals for his skill in cures, recalling the old friar in Romeo and Juliet with his medicines and potions.

  This picture of the survival of Catholic beliefs alongside the rituals of the Protestant Church, and of the continued use of masses for the dead, exorcism and incantation, we now know was paralleled up and down the country. Even in Shakespeare’s late twenties, it was said by government informers of England in general that ‘most of the common people are still papist at hear
t, given to saying it was a good world when the old religion was, because everything was cheap then, and a man eats his maker in the Sacrament, and we might swear by our Lady Men like Frith were not superstitious throwbacks; loyal to their parishioners and their locality, they were the link between old and new.

  Such stories help us to understand the first twenty years of Shakespeare’s life. This complex, gradual shift and interaction between the old world and the new is what shaped him. The Reformation is no longer seen as a broadly consensual matter, contested only by extremists. That long-entrenched idea is merely another example of history told by the winners. Here, in the persons of John Frith and his fellow clergy, was the reality on the ground. In the end, from the 1550s to the 1580s the old generation helped make possible the marriage of the old ways and the new. This was the reality of historical change in many parts of England, and especially in Warwickshire. And it is a picture to bear in mind when looking not only at the broad changes that occurred during Shakespeare’s lifetime, but at his personal life too. For he too would have a foot in both worlds; and as a writer he too would be a bridge between old and new, carrying down something of the pre-Reformation past into his children’s and grand-children’s generations – and into our own.

  ‘A FART OF ONE’S ARS FOR YOU’

  So how did the citizens of Stratford feel about these changes? The corporation records from the time of Shakespeare’s childhood reveal most by what they don’t say. They offer none of the tell-tale signs of precocious Protestant enthusiasm found in East Anglian towns, or even in neighbouring Coventry. There are no accounts of official hospitality towards visiting Protestant preachers, of anxious debates about church attendance or Sabbath-breaking, or of wheedling investigations of newcomers and strangers. This makes sense in a community in which many aldermen and their wives were avowed Catholics. The Wheelers were firm adherents, who, in 1592, would be accused of being recusants (‘refusers of Protestant communion’) along with John Shakespeare; as late as 1606 Hamnet and Judith Sadler, godparents of Shakespeare’s twins, were arraigned in the church courts for their Catholicism; the Debdales of Shottery, who also appeared in the 1592 list of recusants, had a son who died on the scaffold as a Jesuit martyr.

  In such a community the women were perhaps especially important in terms of holding on to the old beliefs and customs. In 1580 Elizabeth’s Privy Council were alarmed by reports that ‘women in their ordinary meetings among themselves very irreverently speak of the religion now established in this realm’. As the Shakespeares’ old friend and neighbour Elizabeth Wheeler memorably told the Puritans on the benches of the church court in 1592: ‘Godes woondes, a plague of God on you all, a fart of ons ars for you!’ (God’s wounds … a fart of one’s arse for you!)

  A WELL-TO-DO FAMILY OF CHURCH PAPISTS

  Like many English people in those uncertain early years of Elizabeth’s reign, Shakespeare’s parents were most likely what were called church papists. John, as a leading townsman, would have gone to church when he had to, on Sundays and holy days, but would have drawn the line at taking communion. At home Mary would have privately brought up their children with the old prayers, rituals, beliefs and stories, as is borne out by the numerous references to such things in William’s plays and by his palpable affection for the medieval English Christian past. This suggests that from the start young Shakespeare was brought up in a world of conflicting viewpoints and that by the time he left school he knew what it felt like to be an outsider.

  In the Stratford house of Susanna Hall, William’s daughter, there hangs a haunting Flemish picture of a middle-class family of the period. Painted perhaps in the last years of the sixteenth century, it gives a vivid impression of what the Henley Street house might have looked like. The family – the father and mother, their hands together in prayer, along with their young sons and daughters, perhaps a grown-up son and daughter-in-law – are saying grace before a meal. All are soberly dressed, the adults in black, the women with ruffs, pearls and lace headdresses. Their clothing, stiff bearing and religious poses suggest a mercantile family influenced by Calvinism, a more silent household than those of the English country middle classes; John and Mary’s home, one imagines, would have been more relaxed, their table more jolly.

  Nevertheless, the painting gives an idea of what the Shakespeares’ domestic environment would have been like. The family are sitting on wooden stools around a table, in front of which stands a big glazed earthenware water jug. On the table is fine linen, a pewter dish, plates and cups, salt cellars, a big joint of meat and a loaf of bread. A woman servant enters from the right. Beyond the wooden screen is a view out to a mulberry tree in the garden. In the foreground are two boys aged about eight, in brown jerkins, striped red breeches and short leather boots. One of them turns to look directly at the viewer: with his cropped hair, big almond eyes and intent look he is perhaps something like the young William.

  John and Mary had more children in the late 1560s: first Gilbert, then Joan, followed by Richard and Edmund. Another sister, Anne, was born when William was seven. The house was filling up. Throughout this time John Shakespeare was doing very well for himself. In 1569, when William was five, his father was elected bailiff of Stratford, the equivalent of mayor, ‘the Queen’s Officer and cheffe of the town’. No longer a peasant farmer like his father, John could now call himself ‘Master Shakespeare’. How proud the family must have been to watch him walk in procession down Chapel Street to the guildhall, in his ermine and red wool robes topped off by his alderman’s cap, escorted by the buff-coated serjeants bearing their maces before them.

  JOHN THE BROGGER AND MONEYLENDER

  In recent years several documentary discoveries about Shakespeare’s father have cast fascinating new light on his son’s early days. John had a barn and outbuildings behind the house in Henley Street, and his glover’s workshop would have been inside the house, just over the passage from the parlour. Gloving is a highly skilled trade which demands great attention to detail; then, as now, the fine stitching was usually done by women, and it may well be that Mary worked with her husband alongside hired workers and apprentices.

  As a child in Henley Street, William no doubt saw these things. In his plays he uses unusual gloving metaphors: when he talks about a wit, or a conscience, which can ‘stretch like a piece of chevril’ (goatskin), it is clear that he must have watched chevril being stretched by hand. No mere wearer of gloves would have known about this process. He uses the big round glover’s paring knife as a rather unlikely simile for a beard (how many of his audience would have got that?). It is unlikely that John had animals killed on the premises; presumably he got his skins from the Taylors’ slaughterhouse near by. But young William no doubt saw that part of the trade too: not only the act of killing, a running metaphor in his plays, but also the way that blood flows is very closely and disturbingly observed.

  In William’s first few years his father bought more property and seems to have been making more money than might be expected of a small-town glover. How did he do it? There is a seventeenth-century story that John was a ‘considerable’ dealer in wool on the side. This tale was often dismissed by early modern authorities as an unreliable oral tradition, even though in the nineteenth century wool waste was found under the floor of the birthplace house in the room long known as ‘the Woolshop’. Subsequently the record was discovered of a court case involving an alderman in Marlborough, Wiltshire, who had bought wool from John in Stratford in 1569 but had never paid him; but the full significance of this find was not realized until a fascinating recent discovery in the Public Record Office that may cause the experts to look again at other aspects of the Shakespeare ‘myth’.

  The Elizabethan government employed a network of informers, spies and bounty hunters, who pried into every aspect of people’s business affairs, their religion and even their sex life. When Shakespeare was six, his father was twice shopped for breaking the stringent laws on usury; and then, when the boy was eight, John ca
me before the courts on two charges of illegal wool dealing. The latter cases confirm the old tradition: the two purchases were of a couple of tons of wool, purchased for £210 in cash at a time when a good house cost £60. One lot had been bought from a Warwickshire sheep farmer at the Wool Staple in Westminster, where John had evidently pretended to have a licence. The moneylending case involved a shepherd called John Mussem, from Walton, a village near Stratford, to whom John had lent two sums of £80 and £100, on each of which he had charged £20 interest – much higher than the 10 per cent permitted by law.

  So we now know that the poet’s father was a brogger, a freelance wool dealer working illegally without the necessary licence from the London Wool Staple. This was a very competitive business of high risk and fast profit in an uncertain economic climate. The discovery of these court appearances gives a key to the many legal cases involving John Shakespeare during William’s childhood. Put them together and John’s contacts, loans, debts, sales and purchases make a picture. He clinches deals with sheep farmers in Worcestershire and Warwickshire – at first, probably, for skins for leather; later, as he diversifies, for wool. He works with friends and kinsmen in several places close to Stratford – his distant relatives, the Shakespeares of Packwood, the Mussems in Walton, Walter Newsham in Chadsunt, Thomas Such over the border in Worcestershire, and, most interestingly, the Grants at Northbrook and Snitterfield, an old Catholic family who would be key figures in the Gunpowder Plot. Some of these men are evidently financial partners: John Mussem at Walton looks like one, as does the Stratford glover John Loxley. But other contacts spread further afield. The clothier from Marlborough, a glover in Banbury and a hatter in Nottingham may also have been partners. John’s web of dealings might even explain a cluster of Cotswold references that crops up in Shakespeare’s play Henry IV Part 2, in which he mentions one George Vizor, an ‘arrant knave’ from Woncot (Woodmancote) in Gloucestershire, in a court case with Clement Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill. Tax documents and parish records show that the Vizors and the Perkeses were real people; the Vizor family, of Flemish descent, owned wool mills in Dursley and Woodmancote, where there were thirty Tudor wool mills along the Cotswold escarpment looking out over Berkeley (a view that Shakespeare mentions in Richard II).