Shakespeare, p.3
Shakespeare, page 3
The presence of the landless and unemployed exacerbated a problem that at the time seemed insoluble. How to prevent the poor from becoming ever more destitute? It was a period of rising prices. Sugar was 1s 4d a pound in 1586, 2s 2d in 1612. Barley was sold at 13s 13d a quarter in 1574, but by the mid-1590s this price had risen to £1 6s 8d. The increase of population also depressed the earnings of wage labourers. A mason was paid 1s 1d a day in 1570 but thirty years later, after a time of steeply rising prices, he was earning only 1s. These conditions were rendered ever more severe with a succession of four bad harvests after 1594; in the latter half of 1596, and the first months of 1597, there were many Stratford deaths that seem directly related to malnutrition. It was a time of famine. The mutinous citizens of Coriolanus, “in hunger for Bread” (21), were not some historical fantasy.
Yet as the poor were reduced to the level of subsistence, or worse, yeomen and landowners became steadily richer. The growing population, and the demand for wool in particular, favoured land speculation on a large scale. It was a means of making easy profit that Shakespeare himself enjoyed, and he can in fact be cited as a major beneficiary of the economic change that proved so disadvantageous to the labouring poor. He was not in the least sentimental about such matters, and arranged his finances with the same business-like acumen that he applied to his dramatic career. But he saw what was happening.
The nature of the new secular economy was becoming increasingly clear, in any case, and many studies have been devoted to Shakespeare’s expression of the change from medieval to early modern England. What happens when old concepts of faith and authority are usurped, when old ties of patronage and obligation are sundered? It is the transition from Lear to Goneril and Regan, from Duncan to Macbeth. There also emerged a disparity between polite and popular traditions that grew ever more pronounced; Shakespeare was perhaps the last English dramatist to reconcile the two cultures.
CHAPTER 5
Tell Me This: Who Begot Thee?
There were two cultures in a more particular sense: old and reformed. The English Reformation of religion was begun in fury and in greed; such violent origins beget violent deeds. It was only during the cautious and pragmatic reign of Elizabeth that a form of compromise or settlement was reached.
As a result of his anger and impatience with the Pope, Henry VIII had proclaimed himself to be the head of the Church in England, despatching several churchmen to their deaths for daring to deny his supremacy. His more ardent advisers, moved by the prospect of enrichment as much as by religious fervour, suppressed the monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands. It was the single largest blow to the medieval inheritance of England. The king was also responsible for the introduction of the English Bible into parish churches, an innovation which had more beneficent effects.
Edward VI, after the death of his father, was more eagerly devoted to the destruction of Catholicism. He was the young Josiah, ready to tear down the idols. In particular he was emboldened to reform the prayer book and the liturgy, but his early death interrupted his programme of renewal. His measures were then reversed during the equally brief reign of Mary I, leaving the English people in some doubt as to the nature and direction of the nation’s faith. It was Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, who successfully found a middle path. She seemed intent upon placating as many factions as possible.
It was part of her church “settlement” in which the vagaries of Catholicism and Protestantism were chastened. She ordained that church services should be held in English, but permitted the use of such papist tokens as the crucifix and the candlestick. By the Act of Supremacy she affirmed her position as the head of the Church of England, and by the Act of Uniformity she installed the Book of Common Prayer in every church. It was a somewhat rickety structure, stitched together by compromise and special pleading, but it held. She may have underestimated the power of the Puritan factions, as well as the residual Catholicism of the people themselves, but her control of religious affairs was never seriously in doubt.
The Virgin Queen, however, was not necessarily mild with her more recalcitrant subjects. Recusants as they were known—those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England—were fined, arrested or imprisoned. They were considered to be traitors to their sovereign and their realm. Catholic priests and missionaries were tortured and killed. Commissioners made periodic and much advertised “visits” to towns where the old faith was said to persist, while the bishops made regular inspections of their dioceses in pursuit of renegade piety. It was perilous to be a Catholic, or a suspected Catholic.
All these conflicts and changes found a vivid reflection in the life of John Shakespeare. The father of the dramatist was described in later life as “a merry Cheekd old man—that said—Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crackt a jeast with him at any time.”1 Since this sketch was first published in the mid-seventeenth century, from an ambiguous source, it need not be taken with any high degree of literalness. It is perhaps too close to the image of Falstaff, although we may surmise that the merry-cheeked roisterer of the history plays may bear some passing resemblance to a domestic original. What we know about Shakespeare’s father, and forefathers, can be more carefully measured by documentary reports.
The ancestry of the Shakespeares stretches far back. Shakespeare’s own name had more than eighty different spellings—including Sakspere, Schakosper, Schackspere, Saxper, Schaftspere, Shakstaf, Chacsper, Shasspeere—perhaps testifying to the multifarious and polyphonic nature of his given identity. The variations suggest prolificity and universality. In Stratford documents alone there are some twenty different and separate spellings.
The original family may have been of Norman derivation. In the Great Rolls of Normandy, dated 1195, there is found “William Sakeespee”; a late thirteenth-century Norman romance, Le Chatelain de Couci, was composed by “Jakemes Sakesep.” It is also true that the Shakespeare families of England preferred Christian names that were characteristically Norman. The surname itself seems to have had some militaristic association, and in Shakespeare’s lifetime there were some who were impressed by its martial ring. An early sixteenth-century text suggests that it was “imposed upon the first bearers … for valour and feats of arms.”2 It is suggestive, then, that when Shakespeare’s father applied for a coat of arms, he claimed that his grandfather had been rewarded by Henry VII for “faithfull & valeant service.”3 Shakespeare was also used as a nickname “for a belligerent person, or perhaps a bawdy name for an exhibitionist.”4 For this reason it was sometimes regarded as a “base” name. In 1487 Hugo Shakespeare wished to change his surname because “vile reputatum est”5 (it was considered “low”). Similar obloquy was later heaped upon the name of Dickens.
The first mention of the name in English records is of “William Sakspeer” in 1248; he came from the village of Clopton, just a few miles outside Stratford. From the thirteenth century the name often occurs in Warwickshire records; it was a family name of long local settlement, in a literal sense part of the landscape. This may help to explain the rootedness of Shakespeare himself within English culture. Thomas Shakespere was living in Coventry in 1359. William Shakespere dwelled in the southern part of Balsall in 1385. Adam Shakespere was part of the manor of Baddesley Clinton in 1389. The religious guild of Knowle had as its members Richard and Alice Shakspere, in 1457, subsequently joined by Ralph Schakespeire in 1464. Thomas and Alice Shakespere, of Balsall, entered the same guild in 1486.
There are many other Shakespeares of later date in Balsall, Baddesley, Knowle, Wroxall and neighbouring villages; the names and dates provide clear evidence of an extended family of siblings and cousins living within a geographical area a few miles in extent. Many of them were part of the guild of Knowle, fulfilling certain secular and religious obligations, and can therefore be considered good and observant Catholics. The prioress of the nuns’ house in Wroxall in the first years of the sixteenth century was Isabella Shakespeare; in 1526 that position, in characteristically medieval fashion, was in turn granted to Jane Shakspere. It was from this cluster of Shakespeares that William Shakespeare’s immediate ancestors came.
His grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a farmer of Snitterfield, a village four miles north of Stratford. He was the son either of John Shakeschaffte of Balsall, or of Adam Shakespere of Baddesley Clinton; whatever his exact paternity, his origin is clear. He was an affluent farmer, commonly known as a husbandman, with two sets of land in the vicinity. Snitterfield itself was a scattered parish with a church and manor-house, ancient farmhouses and cottages, presiding over a mixed landscape of woodland and pasture, heath and meadow. This was the landscape for part of the dramatist’s childhood.
There was a further familial bond. Richard Shakespeare’s house and grounds were leased from Robert Arden, the father of Mary Arden, whom John Shakespeare later married. The dramatist’s mother and father knew each other from an early age, therefore, and doubtless met in Richard Shakespeare’s old house on the High Street whose land stretched down to a little brook. It had a hall and several bedchambers; by the standard of the time it was an imposing dwelling. John Shakespeare himself grew up in the life and atmosphere of the farm. He was born in 1529, the year that his father is first known in Snitterfield, and it seems likely that Richard Shakespeare moved to this area with his new wife and anticipated family.
Richard Shakespeare left in his will the sum of £38 14s 0d, which demonstrates that he was by the standard of his age and position living in modest affluence. He was fined on occasions, for not attending the manorial court and for not controlling his livestock or yoking his swine, but he was a man of some substance in the little community of Snitterfield. A friend of his living in Stratford, Thomas Atwood, bequeathed him a team of oxen. He sat on juries in order to appraise his neighbours’ goods, and seems to have also been enrolled in the religious guild of Knowle. He was in that sense the image of the Shakespeare family itself, in its affluence, in its solidity, and also in its occasional recklessness. It is sometimes conjectured that Shakespeare sprang from a race of illiterate peasants, but that is emphatically not the case.
Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, embarked at an early age on a prosperous career. Although there were already Shakespeares settled in Stratford, he was a native of Snitterfield. His younger brother, Henry, remained a Snitterfield farmer, but John did not choose to work only in the family business. He wished to pursue other trades as well. He was, in the tradition of striving first sons, moving upwards through the world. His own son would follow him. John Shakespeare left the farm in order to be enrolled as an apprentice to a glover in Stratford. The most plausible candidate for his master is Thomas Dixon, who was the innkeeper of the Swan, at the bottom of Bridge Street, as well as a master glover. His wife came from Snitterfield.
John Shakespeare’s apprenticeship lasted for seven years, and in the Stratford records of 1556 he was listed as a “glover.” He was then twenty-seven, and he would already have pursued the trade for a few years. In later documents he is described as a “whittawer” or dresser of “tawed” or un-tanned white leather. He soaked and scraped the skins of horses and deer, sheep and hounds, before softening them with salt and alum; they were placed in pots of urine or excrement before being laid out in the garden to dry. It was a messy and smelly business. From the evidence of his drama Shakespeare had a pronounced aversion to unpleasant smells. When the skins had been rendered tender and pliant they were cut to pattern with knife and scissors as they assumed the shape of gloves, purses, belts and bags. They were then hung on a rod by the window in order to attract custom. Shakespeare often mentions the trade, and its products, in his plays. He knows the varieties of leather, from dog-skin to deer-skin, and lists the assortment of items that his father sold, from shoes of neat’s leather to bridles of sheep’s leather and the bags of sow-skin carried by tinkers. “Is not Parchment made of sheepe-skinnes?” Hamlet’s question is answered by Horatio with a further refinement: “I, my Lord, and of Calues-skinnes to” (3082-3). Gloves, particularly those made of cheveril or kid-skin, are praised by Shakespeare for their softness; there are references to a “soft chiuerell Conscience” (All Is True, 996) and “a wit of cheuerell, that stretches from an ynch narrow, to an ell broad” (Romeo and Juliet, 1139-40). Shakespeare describes gloves continually, whether worn in the hat or thrown down as a pledge. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Mistress Quickly remarks upon “a great round Beard, like a Glouer’s pairing-knife.” This is the language of close observation.
John Shakespeare had a ground-floor shop at the front of his house, looking out upon Henley Street, with outbuildings at the back for stretching and drying. He found employment here for one or two apprentices or “stitchers.” His “sign” was a pair of glover’s compasses. He also set up a stall on market-days by the High Cross, where the cheapest gloves sold at 4 pence a pair; lined and embroidered items were of course far more expensive. It would be interesting to see his eldest son helping to attract custom at this Thursday morning market; but on most weekday mornings he was at school. Nevertheless every business was in some sense a family business.
John Shakespeare was a member of the glovers’ guild. The making and selling of gloves was a well-developed and thriving Stratford trade. Between 1570 and 1630, there were some twenty-three glovers in the town. But he had other occupations as well. He was still a yeoman farmer, and farmed land with his father in Snitterfield and with his younger brother in the neighbouring village of Ingon. Here he reared and slaughtered the animals whose skins were later converted into leather; hence derive later Stratford reports that Shakespeare’s father was a butcher and that the young Shakespeare had become a butcher’s apprentice. Behind all local legends, there lies a modicum of ascertainable fact. There are indeed a number of references to butchers and to butchery in Shakespeare’s dramas, most notably connected with the relationship between sons and fathers; Shakespeare knows the various shades and textures of blood, as well as the “uncleanly sauours of a Slaughterhouse” (King John, 2002). There is a suggestive connection.
John Shakespeare, recorded in an official document as “agricola” or farmer, dealt in barley and in wool. He also traded in timber. It was perfectly natural, and proper, that a man should be possessed of many skills and trades. Of his business in wool-dealing, there is ample evidence. Like many other glovers he needed the skins and wished to pass on the fleece. Part of the house in Henley Street was known as “the Woolshop,” and when a later tenant “re-laid the floors of the parlour, the remnants of wool, and the refuse of wool-combing, were found under the old flooring, imbedded with the earth of the foundation.”6 John Shakespeare sold 28-pound parcels of wool, or “tods,” to mercers and clothiers in surrounding towns. The clown in The Winter’s Tale does his arithmetic—“Let me see, euery Leauen-weather toddes, euery tod yeeldes pound and odde shilling: fifteene hundred shorne, what comes the wooll too?” (1508-9).
But, like other glovers, John Shakespeare also acted as an unlicensed wool-broker or “brogger”; information was laid against him in court that on two occasions he had illegally purchased wool at 14 shillings per “tod.” His actions were illegal because he was not a member of the wool “Staple,” a kind of guild, but more importantly he laid down the sums of £140 for one transaction and £70 for the other. These were very large amounts indeed. They suggest that John Shakespeare was a wealthy man.
That is why he could afford to speculate in property. He bought a house in Greenhill Street, just down the road from Henley Street, and rented it out. He bought two further houses, with gardens and orchards, for £40. He rented another house to one William Burbage, who may or may not have been related to the London acting family. Ordinary life is filled with coincidence.
He also lent money at an illegal rate of interest to his neighbours, a trade which passed under the unhappy name of “usury.” The legal rate was 10 per cent, but John Shakespeare lent £100 to a business colleague at interest of 20 per cent, and a further £80 to another contemporary at the same rate. He charged the excess because it had become standard practice. He could get away with it, in other words. Money-lending was itself widely accepted, in a period where there were no banks or credit facilities, and it was even one in which his son engaged from time to time. According to one social historian such financial dealings were “extremely widespread,”7 and in fact necessary for the smooth running of the community. Of usury William Harrison wrote that it is “practiced so commonly that he is accounted a fool that doth lend his money for nothing.”8 The sums in which John Shakespeare dealt were nevertheless very large. When observing his payment of £210 for wool, and his loans of £180, a contrast might be made with his father’s entire estate amounting to less than £40. The son had far outstripped the affluence of his father. It was a tradition of striving that his own son would inherit.
So John Shakespeare was a canny and prosperous businessman. There has been much speculation, however, about his literacy. He signed with a mark rather than a signature, which suggests that he could not write. There is something deeply satisfying, to some commentators, in the prospect of the greatest writer in the history of the world springing from an illiterate family. It adds to the supposed drama. The fact that John Shakespeare could not write, however, does not necessarily imply that he could not read. Reading and writing were taught separately, and were considered to be different skills. It would in any case have been difficult for him to engage in his multifarious trades and businesses without being able to read. He was also left some books, in a bequest, which points towards the same conclusion.
