Shakespeare, page 4
And then there is the vexed question of his religion. For centuries scholars have argued over the possibility that Shakespeare’s father was a secret adherent of the old faith. The question is confused by the perplexing circumstances of the time, when a person’s professed faith might not have been his or her real faith and when there were nice distinctions and gradations in any religious observance. There were conflicting loyalties. You might be a Catholic who attended the reformed services for the sake of propriety, or to escape a fine; you might be a member of the new communion, yet one who loved the rituals and festivals of the old Church. You might be undecided, leaning one way and then another in the quest for certainty. You might have no real faith at all.
The evidence for John Shakespeare is similarly equivocal. He had his son baptised within the rites of the Anglican communion, and the minister Bretchgirdle was a Protestant. But John Shakespeare might also have concealed within the rafters of the roof at Henley Street an explicit “spiritual testament.” There are many scholars who doubt the authenticity of this document, believing it to be a fabrication or a plant, but its provenance seems genuine enough. It has been shown to be a standard Roman Catholic production, distributed by Edmund Campion, who journeyed to Warwickshire in 1581 and stayed just a few miles from Stratford-upon-Avon. Campion himself was a Jesuit priest who had travelled from Rome on a secret and ultimately fatal mission to England, both to bolster the faith of native Catholics and to convert those who were wavering in their allegiance. Jesuit missionaries were not welcome in England, especially after the Pope’s excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570, and Campion was eventually apprehended, tried and sentenced to death.
The spiritual testament found in Henley Street included John Shakespeare’s obedience to “the Catholike, Romaine & Apostolicke Church” and invocations to the Virgin Mary and “my Angell guardian,” as well as to the succour of “the holy sacrifice of the masse.” It could not be a more orthodox or pious document. It was printed or transcribed, with blanks left for the specific details of the testator. Here John Shakespeare’s mark or signature appeared, as well as the information that his particular patron saint was “saint Winifrede.” This saint had her shrine in Holywell, Flintshire, which was a place of pilgrimage for the wealthier Catholic families of Warwickshire. If the testament is a forgery, only a well-informed forger would know the details of a local saint. More doubts are raised by the notation. If John Shakespeare could not write, then who added the reference to Winifred? Was there another member of the Shakespeare family who could read and write by 1581? There is one clue. In this Catholic testament there is reference to the danger that “I may be possibly cut off in the blossome of my sins.” In Hamlet the ghost laments that he was “Cut off euen in the blossomes of my sinne” (693) and invokes the Catholic doctrine of purgatory. This ghost is of course that of the father.
The identity of the amanuensis must, however, remain a matter for speculation. But if we believe that the testament was signed by John Shakespeare, and then concealed in the attic of his house, the suggestion is that he was or had become a secret and practising Catholic. There are other pieces of evidence. His family history included pious ancestors, among them Dame Isabella and Dame Jane of the nuns’ house in Wroxall. His wife, Mary Arden, also came from an old Catholic family. On several occasions he himself was included in lists of recusants “presented for not comminge monethlie to the Churche according to hir Majesties lawes.” In this context, he may also have conveyed his properties to members of his family to avoid the possibility of confiscation.
On the other side of the argument is the contention that he would have subscribed to the oath of supremacy in order to take up various official posts in Stratford; he was also instrumental in ordering and overseeing the lime-washing of the religious imagery in the guild chapel as well as the removal of the “rood loft” or crucifixion scene. But he was an ambitious man, one of many sixteenth-century officials who continually balanced their careers against their convictions. He could fulfil his administrative duties on these occasions without necessarily compromising or admitting any deeply held private faith.
By 1552 John Shakespeare is recorded as a tenant or householder in Henley Street; at the age of twenty-three he had passed through his apprenticeship, and had set up business on his own account. In 1556 he purchased the adjoining house in Henley Street that has since become known as the “Wool-shop.” The two houses were eventually knocked together to create the comfortable and commodious house that survives still. In the same year he bought the tenement and garden in neighbouring Greenhill Street. He was expanding.
In the spring or summer of the following year he married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father’s old landlord. In 1556, too, he began his slow rise in the Stratford hierarchy when he was appointed one of two “tasters.” These were the borough officials who ensured the quality of the bread and ale purveyed in the district. He was moving forward on all fronts with his family, his business, and his civic career, being organised simultaneously.
He was fined for missing three meetings of the Stratford court, but that did not prevent him from being appointed as one of four “constables” in 1558. He was obliged to supervise the night watch, quell disturbances in the street and disarm those bent on an affray. It was not a sinecure and suggests that, at the age of twenty-nine, John Shakespeare was a person of considerable respect among his neighbours. His judicial duties increased in the following year, when he was appointed to be “affeeror” or fixer of fines. Within a short space of time came a greater honour, when he was elected as a burgess of Stratford; he now attended the monthly council meeting and was permitted to educate any of his sons at the King’s New School free of charge. His first son, however, would not be born for another six years.
In 1561 he was elected as chamberlain, in charge of the property and revenues of the Stratford corporation; he filled that office for four years, in which period he supervised the building of a new schoolroom in the upper storey of the guildhall, where his son would one day be taught.
He was appointed as one of fourteen aldermen in 1565, the year after his son’s birth. From this time forward he was addressed as “Master Shakespeare.” On holy days and days of public festival he was obliged to wear a black cloth gown faced with fur; he also wore an aldermanic ring of agate that his young son knew very well. In Romeo and Juliet the playwright refers to “an Agot stone / on the forefinger of an Alderman” (515-16). And then in 1568 John Shakespeare reached the height of his civic ambition, when he was elected bailiff or mayor of Stratford. He exchanged his black robe for a scarlet gown. He was led to the guildhall by a Serjeant bearing the mace of office. He sat with his family, now including the four-year-old William Shakespeare, in the front pew of the Church of the Holy Trinity. He was also a Justice of the Peace, presiding over the Court of Record. When his term of office expired in 1571 he was appointed high alderman and deputy to his successor as mayor; he was clearly held in great respect. The extant and sporadic records of council business suggest a man of tact and moderation—referring to his colleagues, for example, as a “brotherhode”—as well as one of sound judgement. We will see some of those virtues in his son. Like many other “self-made” men, however, he may also have been excessively confident in his own abilities. This was also a familial trait.
His younger brother, Henry, continued the family tradition of farming; he rented land in Snitterfield and in a neighbouring parish. What little is known of him suggests pugnacity and a certain independence of mind. He was fined for assaulting one of his close relations—the husband of one of Mary Arden’s sisters—and in his eighties he was excommunicated from the church for failing to pay his tithes. He was also fined for breaching the Statute of Caps; he refused, in other words, to wear a cap on Sundays. He was fined on other occasions for various agricultural misdemeanours, and gaoled at different times for debt and for trespass. He was, perhaps, a “black sheep” in the Stratford farm landscape. But he exhibited a fierceness and hardiness that would inspire any young relative. Shakespeare might have inherited the vices of his uncle as well as the virtues of his father. Despite his reputation as a bad debtor Henry Shakespeare was good at acquiring and keeping his money. At his death a witness deposed that there was “plenty of money in his coffers”; his barns, too, were filled with corn and hay “of a great value.”9 Shakespeare came from a family of undoubted affluence, with all the ease and self-confidence that such affluence encourages.
CHAPTER 6
A Witty Mother,
Witlesse Else Her Sonne
It is an undoubted fact,” Charles Dickens once wrote, that “all remarkable men have remarkable mothers.” In the lineaments of the mature William Shakespeare, then, we might see the outline of Mary Arden. She is a formidable figure. She could plausibly claim to be part of a family that extended beyond the Norman Conquest. The Ardens had been “Lords of Warwick” and one of their number, Turchillus de Eardene, was credited in the Domesday Book with vast extents of land.1 The immediate beneficiaries of this wealth and gentility were the Ardens of Park Hall, in the north of the county of Warwickshire. They were a strongly Catholic family who were eventually harried and persecuted for their faith.
There is no proof that the Ardens of the village of Wilmcote were related to the wealthy landowners of Park Hall. In matters of lineage, however, what can be asserted or suggested is more important than that which can be proved. The shared surname was probably enough. It seems likely that the Ardens from whom Mary Arden was descended considered themselves to be connected, in however distant a fashion, with other branches of the Ardens and indeed with the grand families who were related to other Ardens— families such as the Sidneys and the Nevilles.
It has often been suggested that male actors are prone, in their earliest years, to identify with the mother; they internalise her behaviour and adopt her values. This at least is one explanation for the overriding concern for nobility and gentility in Shakespeare’s subsequent drama; he was known for playing kingly roles, and the aristocratic world is at the heart of his design. Could his mother have taught him his fastidiousness and his disdain? In the quest for an alternative Shakespeare, it has often been suggested that the dramatist was actually a well-known aristocrat; among these hypothetical aliases can be found the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and the sixth Earl of Derby. So it is a matter of the greatest irony that Shakespeare may have already considered himself to be of noble stock. He may even be alluding to his parents’ marriage at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (82-3):
Since once he plaide a Farmers eldest sonne,
“Twas where you woo’d the Gentlewoman so well.
Mary Arden’s father, Robert Arden, was an affluent yeoman farmer who owned two farmhouses and possessed more than 150 acres of land. Of such farmers William Harrison wrote that they “commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travel to get riches … and with grazing, frequenting of markets and keeping of servants do come to great welthe.”2 Robert Arden was in fact the most prosperous farmer, and the largest landowner, in Wilmcote. The village itself was three miles from Stratford, situated in cleared woodland; it was close to the very edge of the forest from which the family derived its name. The Ardens were nourished with a specific sense of belonging.
They lived here in a single-storey farmhouse, built at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with its barns and its cowsheds, its dovecote and its woodpiles, its pump and its apiary. Robert Arden possessed oxen and bullocks, horses and calves and colts and sheep, bees and poultry. There were plentiful quantities of barley and oats. Shakespeare’s mother, just like Shakespeare’s father, was brought up as an integral part of a working farm. This may be the best way of describing Robert Arden himself: he was of ancient farming stock, with pretensions to gentility.
An inventory of his possessions has survived. Among these were the farmhouse at Snitterfield, where Richard Shakespeare and his family had recently lived, as well as the house in Wilmcote. In that household there was a hall and a second chamber for sleeping, as well as a kitchen, but the accommodation was still somewhat cramped; Mary Arden had six sisters, and she grew up in an environment where there was much competition for attention and affection. In the inventory, too, there are references to table-boards and benches, cupboards and little tables in the hall or principal room; there were shelves, too, and three chairs. From these bare memoranda we can fill a sixteenth-century room in imagination. The second chamber contained a feather bed, two mattresses and seven pairs of sheets, as well as towels and tablecloths kept in two wooden coffers.
In the rooms were hung painted cloths for decoration and edification. These depicted classical or religious scenes, such as Daniel in the Lions’ Den or the Siege of Troy, and would have dominated the interiors of this relatively modest farmhouse. Mary Arden was bequeathed at least one of these painted tapestries in her father’s will, and it is most likely to have ended up on a wall in Henley Street. In Macbeth Shakespeare refers to the “Eye of Childhood that feares a painted Deuill” (595-6), and Falstaff mentions “Lazarus in the painted cloth” (1 Henry IV, 2287).
When Mary Arden brought the painted cloth with her from her family home, and became the mistress of Henley Street, she was probably in her seventeenth or eighteenth year. Her husband was a decade older and already, as we have seen, a rising man. She was the youngest of Robert Arden’s daughters, and may have some claim to being the most favoured. Alone among her kin she was left a specific piece of land. Her father bequeathed to her “all my lande in Willmecote cawlid Asbyes and the crop apone the grounde sowne and tyllide as hitt is.”3 From this we may deduce that she was dependable and practical. No farmer would leave land to an incompetent daughter. She was also healthy and vigorous, giving birth to many children and living to the age of sixty-eight. We may plausibly imagine her also to be energetic, intelligent and quick-witted; in a household of seven sisters she would also have learnt the virtues of tact and compliance. It is not known whether she was literate, but her mark upon a bond is well formed and even graceful. She could wield a pen in a single movement. Her private seal was of a galloping horse, an emblem of agility and industry. The fact that she had a seal at all is a sign of affluence and respectability. Shakespeare has left no record of her, but it has been surmised that her outlines can be glimpsed in a number of strong-minded mothers who appear in his dramas—Volumnia extolling Coriolanus’s achievements, the Countess reminding Bertram of his duty, the Duchess of York berating King Richard. It is also possible, and indeed plausible, that the high-spirited and intelligent young women of the comedies owe something to the memories of his mother.
The family house in Henley Street can even now be seen; it is much changed, but still recognisable. It was originally two (or perhaps three) houses, each with a garden and an orchard. It was on the northern side of Henley Street, at the edge of the town, with its narrow rooms looking directly on to the thoroughfare; there was very little privacy. At the back of the house, beyond the garden, was an area known as the “Guild Pits” that was essentially a stretch of waste ground with a ramshackle road threading within it.
The house itself was erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the usual mode of oak timber frame with wattle-and-daub, and with a roof of thatch. The ceilings of the interiors were lime-washed, and the walls decorated with painted cloths or patterned all over with the use of wood-blocks. Its timbers were much lighter in colour than the “mock-Tudor” beams now characteristically stained black or dark brown. The plaster work would have been of light beige. The whole effect was of brightness or, at least, of lightness. The stark black and white of restored Tudor interiors is wrong; Shakespeare’s contemporaries used much paler colours, and more subtly graded shades. The wooden furniture was of the standard household type, as already exemplified by Robert Arden’s inventory—chairs and plain tables and joint-stools (so called because the separate parts were joined together). The floors were of broken Wilmcote limestone, covered by rushes. If there were “carpets,” they were used as covers for the table. There may have been a wall-cupboard to display dishes or plate. In Romeo and Juliet a servant calls out, “Away with the ioyntstooles, remove the Courtcubbert [cupboard], looke to the plate” (579-80).
It was a commodious house with six separate chambers, the lower and upper storeys connected with a ladder rather than a stairway. The hall was the principal room of the house, next to the front door and the cross-passage; there was a large fireplace here, and the Shakespeare family sat for their meals in front of it. There was a kitchen at the back of the house with its usual complements of a hand-turned spit, brass skillets and leathern bottles. Beside the hall was the parlour, a combined sitting room and bedroom where the bed itself was displayed as a prize specimen of household furniture. The walls here were heavily patterned and decorated. Across from the hall, on the other side of the passage, was John Shakespeare’s workshop, where the labour of stitching and sewing was undertaken by him and his apprentices. It was also a shop trading with the outside world, with a casement opening on to the street, and as such had a different atmosphere from the rest of the house. From an early age Shakespeare knew all about the demands of the public. On the floor above there were three bedchambers. Shakespeare would have slept on a mattress of rush, stretched on cords between the wooden frame of the bed. In the attic rooms slept the servants and the apprentices. It was a large house for a tradesman and reinforces the note of affluence in all his father’s affairs.
