WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Art Neuendorffer
http://91.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SH/SHAKESPEARE.htm
SHAKESPEARE, WILLIAM (1564-1616), English poet, player and playwright, was
baptized in the parish church of Stratford- upon-Avon in Warwickshire on the
26th of April Birth 1564. The exact date of his birth is not known. Two
par~entage. 18th-century antiquaries, William Oldys and Joseph Greene, gave
it as April 23, but without quoting authority for their statements, and the
fact that April 23 was the day of Shakespeares death in 1616 suggests a
possible source of error. In any case his birthday cannot have been later
than April 23, since the inscription upon his monument is evidence that on
April 23, 1616, he had already begun his fifty-third year. His father, John
Shakespeare, was a burgess of the recently constituted corporation of
Stratford, and had already filled certain minor municipal offices. From 1561
to 1563 he had been one of the two chamberlains to whom the finance of the
town was entrusted. By occupation he was a glover, but he also appears to
have dealt from time to time in various kinds of agricultural produce, such
as barley, timber and wool. Aubrey (Lives, 1680) spoke of him as a butcher,
and it is quite possible that he bred and even killed the calves whose skins
he manipulated. He is sometimes described in formal documents as a yeoman,
and it is highly probable that he combined a certain amount of farming with
the practice of his trade. He was living in Stratford as early as 1552, in
which year he was fined for having a dunghill in Henley Street, but he does
not appear to have been a native of the town, in whose records the name is
not found before his time; and be may reasonably be identified with the John
Shakespeare of Snitterfield, who administered the goods of his father,
Richard Shakespeare, in 1561. Snitterfield is a village in the immediate
neighborhood of Stratford, and here Richard Shakespeare had been settled as
a farmer since 1529. It is possible that John Shakespeare carried on the
farm for some time after his fathers death, and that by 1570 he had also
acquired a small holding called Ingon in Hampton Lucy, the next village to
Snitterfield. But both of these seem to have passed subsequently to his
brother Henry, who was buried at Snitterfield in. 1596. There was also at
Snitterfield a Thomas Shakespeare and an Anthony Shakespeare, who afterwards
moved to Hampton Corley; and these may have been of the same family. A John
Shakespeare, -who dwelt at Clifford Chambers, another village close to
Stratford, is clearly distinct. Strenuous efforts have been made to trace
Shakespeares genealogy beyond Richard of Snitterfield, but so far without
success. Certain drafts of heraldic exemplifications of the Shakespeare arms
speak, in one case of John Shakespeares grandfather, in another of his
great-grandfather, as having been rewarded with lands and tenements in
Warwickshire for service to Henry VII. No such grants, however, have been
traced, and even in the 16th-century statements as to antiquity and service
in heraldic preambles were looked upon with suspicion.
The name Shakespeare is extremely widespread, and is spelt in an astonishing
variety of ways. That of John Shakespeare occurs 166 times in the Council
Book of the Stratford corporation, and appears to take 16 different forms.
The verdict, not altogether unanimous, of competent palaeographers is to the
effect that Shakespeare himself, in the extant examples of his signature,
always wrote Shakspere. In the printed signatures to the dedications of his
poems, on the title-pages of nearly all the contemporary editions of his
plays that bear his name, and in many formal documents it appears as
Shakespeare.
This may be in part due to the martial derivation which the poets literary
contemporaries were fond of assigning to his name, and which is acknowledged
in the arms that he bore. The forms in use at Stratford, however, such as
Shaxpeare, by far the commonest, suggest a short pronunciation of the first
syllable, and thus tend to support Dr Henry Bradleys derivation from the
Anglo-Saxon personal name, Seaxberht. It is interesting, and even amusing,
to record that in 1487 Hugh Shakspere of Merton College, Oxford, changed his
name to Sawndare, because his former name vile reputatum est. The earliest
record of a Shakespeare that has yet been traced is in 1248 at Clapton in
G]oucester~ shire, about seven miles from Stratford. The name also occurs
during the ,3th century in Kent, Essex and Surrey, and durin~ the I4th in
Cumberland, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire, Essex, Warwickshire and as far away
as Yougbal in Ireland. Thereafter it is found in London and most of the
English counties, particularly those of the midlands; and nowhere more
freely than in Warwickshire. There were Shakespeares in Warwick and in
Coventry, as well as around Stratford; and the clan appears to have been
very numerous in a group of villages about twelve miles north of Stratford,
which includes Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, Rowington, I{aseley, Hatton,
Lapworth, Packwood, Balsall and Knowle. William was in common use as a
personal name, and Williams from more than one other family have from time
to time been confounded with the dramatist. Many Shakespeares are upon the
register of the gild of St Anne at Knowle from about 1457 to about 1526.
Amongst these were Isabella Shakespeare, prioress of the Benedictine convent
of Wroxall, and Jane Shakespeare, a nun of the same convent. Shakespeares
are also found as tenants on the manors belonging to the convent, and at the
time of the Dissolution in 1534 one Richard Shakespeare was its bailiff and
collector of rents. Conjectural attempts have been made on the one hand to
connect the ancestors of this Richard Shakespeare with a family of the same
name who held land by military tenure at Baddesley Clinton in the 14th and
15th centuries, and on usc other to ideniify him with the poets grandfather,
Richard Shakespeare of Snitterfield. But Shakespeares are to be traced at
Wroxall nearly as far back as at Baddesley Clinton, and there is no reason
to suppose that Richard the bailiff, who was certainly still a tenant of
Wroxall in 1556, had also since 1529 been farming land ten miles off at
Snitterfield.
With the breaking of this link, the hope of giving Shakespeare anything more
than a grandfather on the fathers side must be laid aside for the present.
On the mothers side he was connected with a family of some distinction. Part
at least of Richard Shakespeares land at Snitterfield was held from Robert
Arden of Wilmcote in the adjoining parish of Aston Cantlow, a cadet of the
Ardens of Parkhall, who counted amongst the leading gentry of Warwickshire.
Robert Arden married his second wife, Agnes Hill, formerly Webbe, in 1548,
and had then no less than. eight daughters by his first wife. To the
youngest of these, Mary Arden, he left in 1556 a freehold in Aston Cantlow
consisting of a farm of about fifty or sixty acres in extent, known as
Asbies. At some date later than November 1556, and probably before the end
of 1557, Mary Arden became the wife of John Shakespeare. In October 1556
John Shakespeare had bought two freehold houses, one in Greenhill Street,
the other in Henley Street. The latter, known as the wool shop, was the
easternmost of the two tenements now combined in the so-called Shakespeares
birthplace. The western tenement, the birthplace proper, was probably
already in John Shakespeares hands, as he seems to have been living in
Henley Street in 1552. It has sometimes been thought to have been one of two
houses which formed a later purchase in 1575, but there is no evidence that
these were in Henley Street at all.
William Shakespeare was not the first child. A Joan was baptized in 1558 and
a Margaret in 1562. The latter was buried in 1563 and the former must also
have died young, although her burial is not recorded, as a second Joan was
baptized in 1569.
A Gilbert was baptized in 1566, an Anne in 1571, a Richard in ~ and a~
Edmunc~l 01 1580. e~nne died in ~7o; Edmund, who like his brother became an
actor, in 1607; Richard in 1613. Tradition has it that one of Shakespeares
brothers used to visit London in the 17th century as quite an old man. If
so, this can only have been Gilbert.
During the years that followed his marriage, John Shakespeare became
prominent in Stratford life. In 1565 he was chosen as an alderman, and in
1568 he held the chief municipal office, that of high bailiff. This carried
with it the dignity of justice of the peace. John Shakespeare seems to have
assumed arms, and thenceforward was always entered in corporation documents
as Mr Shakespeare, whereby he may be distinguished from another John
Shakespeare, a corviser or shoemaker, who dwelt in Stratford about
1584-1592. In 1571 as an ex-bailiff be began another year of office as chief
alderman.
One may think, therefore, of Shakespeare in his boyhood as the son of one of
the leading citizens of a not unimportant Youth provincial market-town, with
a vigorous life of its own, which in spite of the dunghills was probably not
much unlike the life of a similar town to-day, and with constant reminders
of its past in the shape of the stately buildings formerly belonging to its
college and its gild, both of which had been suppressed at the Reformation.
Stratford stands on the Avon, in the midst of an agricultural country,
throughout which in those days enclosed orchards and meadows alternated with
open fields for tillage, and not far from the wilder and wooded district
known as the Forest of Arden. The middle ages had left it an heritage in the
shape of a free grammar-school, and here it is natural to suppose that
William Shakespeare obtained a sound enough education,i with a working
knowledge of Mantuan2 and Ovid in the original, even though to such a
thorough scholar as Ben Jonson it might seem no more than small Latin and
less Greek. In 1577, when Shakespeare was about thirteen, his fathers
fortunes began to take a turn for the worse. He became irregular in his
contributions to town levies, and had to give a mortgage on his wifes
property of Asbies as security for a loan from her brother-in-law, Edmund
Lambert. Money was raised to pay this off, partly by the sale of a small
interest in land at Snitterfield which had come to Mary Shakespeare from her
sisters, partly perhaps by that of the Greenhill Street house and other
property in Stratford outside Henley Street, none of which seems to have
ever come into William Shakespeares hands. Lambert, however, refused to
surrender the mortgage on the plea of older debts, and an attempt to recover
Asbies by litigation proved ineffectual. John Shakespeares difficulties
increased. An action for debt was sustained against him in the local court,
but no personal property could be found on which to distrain. He had long
ceased to attend the meetings of the corporation, and as a consequence he
was removed in 2586 from the list of aldermen. In this state of domestic
affairs it is not likely that Shakespeares school life was unduly prolonged.
The chances are that he was apprenticed to some local trade. Aubrey says
that he killed calves for his father, and would do it in a high style, and
make a speech.
Whatever his circumstances, they did not deter him at the early age of
eighteen from the adventure of marriage. Rowe Marriage recorded the name of
Shakespeares wife as Hathaway, and Joseph Greene succeeded in tracing her to
a family of that name dwelling in Shottery, one of the hamlets of Stratford.
Her monument gives her first name as Anne, and her age as sixty-seven in
1623. She must, therefore, have been about eight years older than
Shakespeare. Various small trains of evidence point to her identification
with the daughter Agnes mentioned in the will of a Richard Hathaway of
Shottery, who died in 1581, being then in possession of the farm-house now
known as Anne Hathaways Cottage. Agnes was legally a distinct name from
Anne, but there can be no doubt that ordinary custom treated them as
identical. The principal record of the 2 Baptista Mantuanus (1448-1516),
whose Latin Eclogues were translated by Turberville in 1567.
marriage is a bond dated on November 28, 2582, and executed by Fulk Sandells
and John Richardson, two yeomen of Stratford who also figure in Richard
Hathaways will, as a security to the bishop for the issue of a licence for
the marriage of William Shakespeare and Anne Hathwey of Stratford, upon the
consent of her friends, with one asking of the banns. There is no reason to
suppose, as has been suggested, that the procedure adopted was due to
dislike of the marriage dn the part of John Shakespeare, since, the
bridegroom being a minor, it would not have been in accordance with the
practice of the bishops officials to issue the licence without evidence of
the fathers consent. The explanation probably lies in the fact that Anne was
already with child, and in the near neighborhood of Advent within which
marriages were prohibited, so that the ordinary procedure by banns would
have entailed a delay until after Christmas. A kindly sentiment has
suggested that some form of civil marriage, or at least contract of
espousals, had already taken place, so that a canonical marriage was really
only required in order to enable Anne to secure the legacy left her by her
father at the day of her marriage. But such a theory is not rigidly required
by the facts. It is singular that, upon the day before that on which the
bond was executed, an entry was made in the bishops register of the issue of
a licence for a marriage between William Shakespeare and Annam Whateley de
Temple Grafton. Of this it can only be said that the bond, as an original
document, is infinitely the better authority, and that a scribal error of
Whateley for Hathaway -is quite a possible solution. Temple Grafton may have
been the nominal place of marriage indicated in the licence, which was not
always the actual place of residence of either bride or bridegroom. There
are no contemporary registers for Temple Grafton, and there is no entry of
the marriage in those for Stratford-uponAvon. There is a tradition that such
a record was seen during the I9th century in the registers for Luddirigton,
a chapelry within the parish, which are now destroyed. Shakespeares first
child, Susanna, was baptized on the 26th of May 1583, and was followed on
the 2nd of February 1585 by twins, Hamnet and Judith.
In or after 1584 Shakespeares career in Stratford seems to have come to a
tempestuous close. An 18th-century story of a drinking-bout in a neighboring
village is of no Obsce,~~ importance, except as indicating a local
impression years, that a distinguished citizen had had a wildish youth. 1584
But there is a tradition which comes from a double 1592, source and which
there is no reason to reject in substance, to the effect that Shakespeare
got into trouble through poaching on the estates of a considerable
Warwickshire magnate, Sir Thomas Lucy, and found it necessary to leave
Stratford in order to escape the results of his misdemeanour. It is added
that he afterwards took his revenge on Lucy by satirizing him as the Justice
Shallow, with the dozen white louses in his old coat, of The Merry Wives of
Windsor. From this event until he emerges as an actor and rising playwright
in 1592 his history is a blank, and it is impossible to say what experience
may not have helped to fill it. Much might indeed be done in eight years of
crowded Elizabethan life. Conjecture has not been idle, and has assigned him
in turns during this or some other period to the occupations of a scrivener,
an apothecary, a dyer, a printer, a soldier, and the like. The suggestion
that he saw military service rests largely on a confusion with another
William Shakespeare of Rowington. Aubrey had heard that he had been in his
younger years a sthoolmaster in the country. The mention in Henry IV. of
certain obscure yeomen families, Visor of Woncote and Perkes of Stinchcombe
Hill, near Dursley in Gloucestershire, has been thought to suggest a sojourn
in that district, where indeed Shakespeares were to be found from an early
date. Ultimately, of course, he drifted to London and the theatre, where,
according to the stage tradition, he found employment in a menial capacity,
perhaps even as a holder of horses at the doors, before he was admitted into
a company as an actor and so found his way to his true vocation as a writer
of plays. Malone thought that he might have left Stratford with one of the
travelling companies of players which from time to time visited the town.
Later biographers have fixed upon Leicesters men, who were at Stratford in
1587, and have held that Shakespeare remained to the end in the same
company, passing with it on Leicesters death in 1588 under the patronage of
Ferdinando, Lord Strange and afterwards earl of Derby, and on Derbys death
in 1594 under that of the lord chamberlain, Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon. This
theory perhaps hardly takes sufficient account of the shifting combinations
and recombinations of actors, especially during the disastrous plague years
of 1592 to 1594. The continuity of Stranges company with Leicesters is very
disputable, and while the names of many members of Stranges company in and
about 1593 are on record, Shakespeares is not amongst them. It is at least
possible, as will be seen later, that he had about this time relations with
the earl of Pembrokes men, or with the earl of Sussexs men, or with both of
these organizations.
What is clear is that by the summer of 1592, when. he was twenty-eight, he
had begun to emerge as a playwright, and had evoked the jealousy of one at
least of the group of 1Y scholar poets who in recent years had claimed a f1,
monopoly of the stage. This was Robert Greene, who, in an invective on
behalf of the play-makers against the play-actors which forms part of his
Groats-worth of Wit, speaks of an upstart Crow, beautified with our
feathers, that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a Players hide, supposes he is
as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you:
and being an absolute Johannes fac jotum, is in his owne conceit the onely
Shake-scene in a countrie. The play upon Shakespeares name and the parody of
a line from Henry VI. make the reference unmistakable.i The London theatres
were closed, first through riots and then through plague, from June 1592 to
April 1594, with the exception of about a month at each Christmas during
that period; and the companies were dissolved or driven to the provinces.
Even if Shakespeare had been connected with Stranges men during their London
seasons of 1592 and 1593, it does not seem that he travelled with them.
Other activities may have been sufficient to occupy the interval. The most
important of these was probably an attempt to win a reputation in the world
of non-dramatic poetry. Venus and Adonis was published about April 1593, and
Lucrece about May 1594. The poems were printed by Richard Field, in whom
Shakespeare would have found an old Stratford acquaintance; and each has a
dedication to Henry Wriothesley, earl of Southampton, a brilliant and
accomplished favorite of the court, still in his nonage. A possibly
super-subtle criticism discerns an increased warmth in the tone of the later
dedication, which is supposed to argue a marked growth of intimacy. The fact
of this intimacy is vouched for by the story handed down from Sir William
Davenant to Rowe (who published in 1709 the first regular biography of
Shakespeare) that Southampton gave Shakespeare a thousand pounds to enable
him to go through with a purchase which heheard he had a mind to. The date
of this generosity is not specified, and there is no known purchase by
Shakespeare which can have cost anything like the sum named. The mention of
Southampton leads naturally to the most difficult problem which a biographer
has to handle, that of the Sonnets. But this will be more conveniently taken
up at a later point, and it is only necessary here to put on record the
probability that the earliest of the sonnets belong to the period now under
discussion. There is a surmise, which is not in itself other than plausible,
and which has certainly been supported with a good deal of ingenious
argument, that Shakespeares enforced leisure enabled him to make of 1593 a
Wanderjahr, and in particular that the traces of a visit to northern Italy
may clearly be seen in the local coloring of Lucrece as compared with Venus
and Adonis, and in that of the group of plays which may be dated in or about
1594 and 1595 as compared with those that preceded. It must, however, be
borne in mind that, while Shakespeare may perfectly well, at this or at some
earlier time, have voyaged to Italy, and possibly Denmark and even Germany
as well, there is no direct evidence to rely upon, and that inference from
internal evidence is a dangerous guide when a writer of so assimilative a
temperament as that of Shakespeare is concerned.
From the reopening of the theatres in the summer of 1594 onwards
Shakespeares status is in many ways clearer. He had certainly become a
leading member of the Chamberlains company by the following winter, when his
name appears for the first and only time in the treasurer Chamberof the
chambers accounts as one of the recipients of lains payment for their
performances at court; and there is every reason to suppose that he
continued to act with and write for the same associates to the close of his
career. The history of the company may be briefly told. At the death of the
lord chamberlain on the 22nd of July 1596, it passed under the protection of
his successor, George, 2nd Lord Hunsdon, and once more became the Lord
Chamberlains men when he was appointed to that office on. the 17th of March
1597. James I. on his accession took this company under his patronage as
grooms of the chamber, and during the remainder of Shakespeares connection
with the stage they were the Kings men. The records of performances at court
show that they were by far the most favored of the companies, their nearest
rivals being the company known during the reign of Elizabeth as the
Admirals, and afterwards as Prince Henrys men. From the summer of 1594 to
March 1603 they appear to have played almost continuously in London, as the
only provincial performances by them which are upon record were during the
autumn of 1597, when the London theatres were for a short time closed owing
to the interference of some of the players in politics. They travelled again
during 1603 when the plague was in London, and during at any rate portions
of the summers or autumns of most years thereafter. In 1594 they were
playing at Newington Butts, and probably also at the Rose on Bankside, and
at the Cross Keys in the city. It is natural to suppose that in. later years
they used the Theatre in Shoreditch, since this was the property of James
Burbage, the father of their principal actor, Richard Burbage. The Theatre
was pulled down in 1598, and, after a short interval during which the
company may have played at the Curtain, also in Shoreditch, Richard Burbage
and his brother Cuthbert rehoused them in the Globe on Bankside, built in
part out of the materials of the Theatre. Here the profits of the enterprise
were divided between the members of the company as such and the owners of
the building as housekeepers, and shares in the house were held in joint
tenancy by Shakespeare and some of his leading fellows. About I6o8 another
playhouse became available for the company in. the private or winter house
of the Black Friars. This was also the property of the Burbages, but had
previously been leased to a company of boy players. A somewhat similar
arrangement as to profits was made.
Shakespeare is reported by Aubrey to have been a good actor, but Adam in As
You Like It, and the Ghost in Hamlet indicate the type of part which he
played. As a dramatist, however, he was the mainstay of the company for at
least some fifteen years, during which Ben Jonson, Dekker, Beaumont and
Fletcher, and Tourneur also contributed to their repertory. On an average he
must have written for them about two plays a year, although his rapidity of
production seems to have been greatest during the opening years of the
period. There was also no doubt a good deal of rewriting of his own earlier
work, and also perhaps, at the beginning, of that of others. Occasionally he
may have entered into collaboration, as, for example, at the end of his
career, with Fletcher.
In a worldly sense he clearly flourished, and about 1596, if not earlier, he
was able to resume relations as a moneyed man with Stratford-on-Avon. There
is no evidence to show whether he had visited the town in the interval, or
whether he had brought his wife and family to London. His son Hamnet died
and was buried at Stratford in 1596. During the last ten years John
Shakespeares affairs had remained unprosperous. He incurred fresh debt,
partly through becoming surety for his brother Henry; and in 1592 his name
was included in a list of recusants dwelling at or near
Stratford-on-Avon,with a note by the commissioners that in his case the
cause was believed to be the fear of process for debt. There is no reason to
doubt this explanation, or to seek a religious motive in ~ John Shakespeares
abstinence from church. William Shakespeares purse must have made a
considerable difference. The prosecutions for debt ceased, and in 1597 a
fresh action was brought in Chancery for the recovery of Asbies from the
Lamberts. Like the last, it seems to have been without result. Another step
was taken to secure the dignity of the family by an application in the
course of 1596 to the heralds for the confirmation of a coat of arms said to
have been granted to John Shakespeare while he was bailiff of Stratford. The
bearings were or on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, the crest a
falcon his wings displayed argent supporting a spear or steeled argent, and
the motto Non sanz droict. The grant was duly made, and in 1599 there was a
further application for leave to impale the arms of Arden, in right of
Shakespeares mother. No use, however, of the Arden arms by the Shakespeares
can be traced. In 1597 Shakespeare made an important purchase for 60 of the
house and gardens of New Place in Chapel Street. This was one of the largest
houses in Stratford, and its acquisition an obvious triumph for the
ex-poacher. Presumably John Shakespeare ended his days in peace. A visitor
to his shop remembered him as a merry-cheekt old man always ready to crack a
jest with his son. He died in 1601, and his wife in 1608, and the Henley
Street houses passed to Shakespeare. Aubrey records that he paid annual
visits to Stratford, and there is evidence that he kept in touch with the
life of the place. The correspondence of his neighbors, the Quineys, in 1598
contains an application to him for a loan to Richard Quiney upon a visit to
London, and a discussion of possible investments for him in the neighborhood
of Stratford. In 1602 he took, at a rent of 2S. 6d. a year, a copyhold
cottage in Chapel Lane, perhaps for the use of his gardener. In the same
year he invested 320 In the purchase of an estate consisting of 107 acres in
the open fields of Old Stratford, together with a farm-house, garden and
orchard, 20 acres of pasture and common rights; and in 1605 he spent another
440 in the outstanding term of a lease of certain great tithes in Stratford
parish, which brought in an income of about 60 a year.
Meanwhile London remained his headquarters. Here Malone thought that he had
evidence, now lost, of his residence in Southwark as early as 1596, and as
late as 1608. It is known that payments of subsidy were due from him tions.
for 1597 and 1598 in the parish of St Helens, Bishopsgate, and that an
arrear was ultimately collected in the liberty of the Clink. He had no doubt
migrated from Bishopsgate when the Globe upon Bankside was opened by the
Chamberlains men. There is evidence that in 1604 he lay, temporarily or
permanently, in the house of Christopher Mountjoy, a tire-maker of French
extraction, at the corner of Silver Street and Monkwell Street in
Cripplegate. A recently recovered note by Aubrey, if it really refers to
Shakespeare (which is not quite certain), is of value as throwing light not
only upon his abode, but upon his personality. Aubrey seems to have derived
it from William Beeston the actor, and through him from John Lacy, an actor
of the kings company. It is as follows: The more to be admired q~uod} he was
not a company-keeper, lived in Shoreditch, would not be debauched, & if
invited to court, he was in paine. Against this testimony to the correctness
of Shakespeares morals are to be placed an anecdote of a green-room amour
picked up by a Middle Temple student in 1602 and a Restoration scandal which
made him the father by the hostess of the Crown Inn at Oxford, where he
baited on his visits to Stratford, of Sir William D~venant, who was born in
February 1606. His credit at court is implied by Ben Jonsons references to
his flights that so did take Eliza and our James, and by stories of the
courtesies which passed between him and Elizabeth while he was playing a
kingly part in her presence, of the origin of The Merry Wives of Windsor in
her desire to see Falstaff in love, and of an autograph letter written to
honor him by King James. It was noticed with some surprise by Henry Chettle
that his honied muse dropped no sable tear to celebrate the death of the
queen. Southamptons patronage may have introduced him to the brilliant
circle that gathered round the earl of Essex, but there is no reason to
suppose that he or his company were held personally responsible for the
performance of Richard II. at the command of some of the followers of Essex
as a prelude to the disastrous rising 0 February 1601. The editors of the
First Folio speak also of favors received by the author in his lifetime from
William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, and his brother Philip Herbert, earl of
Montgomery.
He appears to have been on cordial terms with his fellows of the stage. One
of them, Augustine Phillips, left him a small legacy in 1605, and in his own
will he paid a F~tends. similar compliment to Richard Burbage, and to John
Heminge and Henry Condeli, who afterwards edited his plays. His relations
with Ben Jonson, whom he is said by Rowe to have introduced to the world as
a playwright, have been much canvassed. Jests are preserved which, even if
apocryphal, indicate considerable intimacy between the two. This is not
inconsistent with occasional passages of arms. The anonymous author of The
Return from Parnassus (2nd part; 1602), for example, makes Kempe, the actor,
allude to a purge which Shakespeare gave Jonson, in return for his attack on
some of his rivals in The Poetaster.i It has been conjectured that this
purge was the description of Ajax and his humours in Troilus and Cressida.
Jonson, on the other hand, who was criticism incarnate, did not spare
Shakespeare either in his prologues or in his private conversation. He told
Drummond of Hawthornden that Shakspeer wanted arte. But the verses which he
contributed to the First Folio are generous enough to make all amends, and
in his Discoveries (pub. 164,; written c. 1624 and later), while regretting
Shakespeares excessive facility and the fact that he often fell into those
things, could not escape laughter, he declares him to have been honest and
of an open and free nature, and says that, for his own part, I lovd the man
and do honor his memory (on this side idolatry) as much as any. According to
the memoranda-book (1661-1663) of the Rev. John Ward (who became vicar of
Stratford in 1662), Jonson and Michael Drayton, himself a Warwickshire poet,
had been drinking with Shakespeare when he caught the~ fever of which he
died; and Thomas Fuller (1608-1661), whose Worthies was published in 1662,
gives an imaginative description of the wit combats, of which many took
place between the two mighty contemporaries.
Of Shakespeares literary reputation during his lifetime there is ample
evidence. He is probably neither the Willy of Spensers Tears of the Muses,
nor the Aetion of Coatemhis Cohn Clouts Come Home Again. But from the porarj
time of the publication of Venus and Adonis and i~~put~~ Lucrece honorific
allusions to his work both as poet lou.
anddramatist, and often to himself by name, come thick and fast from writers
of every kind and degree. Perhaps the most interesting of these from the
biographical point of view are those contained in the Palladis Tamia, a kind
of literary handbook published by Francis Meres in 1598; for Meres not only
extols him as the most excellent in both kinds comedy and tragedyl for the
stage, and one of the most passionate among us to bewaile and bemoane the
perplexities of Love, but also takes the trouble to give a list of twelve
plays already written, which serves as a starting-point for all modern,
attempts at a chronological arrangement of his work. It is moreover from
Meres that we first hear of his sugred Sonnets among his private friends.
Two of these sonnets were printed in 1599
I Kempe (speaking to Burbage), Few of the university pen plays well. They
smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer (sic) Metamorphosis, and
talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter. Why heres our fellow Shakespeare
puts them all down; aye, and Ben Jonson too. 0 that Ben Jonson is a
pestilent fellow. He brought up Horace giving the Poets a pill, but our
fellow Shakespeare bath given him a purge that made him beray his credit.
in a volume of miscellaneous verse called The Passionate Pilgrim. This was
ascribed upon the title-page to Shakespeare, but probably, so far as most of
its contents were concerned, without justification. The bulk of Shakespeares
sonnets remained unpublished until 1609.
About 1610 Shakespeare seems to have left London, and entered upon the
definite occupation of his house at New Place, Stratford. Here he lived the
life of a retired ~ gentleman, on friendly if satiricaJ terms with the
richest of his neighbors, the Combes, and interested in local affairs, such
as a bill for the improvement of the highways in 1611, or a proposed
enclosure of the open fields at Welcombe in 1614, which might affect his
income or his comfort. He had his garden with its mulberry-tree, and his
farm in the immediate neighborhood. His brothers Gilbert and Richard were
still alive; the latter died in 1613. His sister Joan had married William
Hart, a hatter, and in 1616 was dwelling in one of his houses in Henley
Street. Of his daughters, the eldest, Susanna, had married in 1607 John Hall
(d. 1635), a physician of some reputation. They dwelt in Stratford, and had
one child, Elizabeth, afterwards Lady Barnard (1608-1670). The younger,
Judith, married Thomas Quiney, a vintner, also of Stratford, two months
before her fathers death. At Stratford the last few of the plays may have
been written, but it is reasonable to suppose that Shakespeares connection
with the Kings company ended when the Globe was burnt down during a
performance of Henry VIII. on the 29th of June I6 13. Certainly his
retirement did not imply an absolute break with London life. in 1613 he
devised an impresa, or emblem, to be painted by Richard Burbage, and worn in
the tilt on Accession day by the earl of Rutland, who had been one of the
old circle of Southampton and Essex. In the same year he purchased for 140 a
freehold house in the Blackfriars, near the Wardrobe. This was conveyed to
trustees, apparently in order to bar the right which his widow would
otherwise have had to dower. In 1615 this purchase involved Shakespeare in a
lawsuit for the surrender of the title-deeds. Richard Davies, a
Gloucestershire clergyman of the end of the i7th century, reports that the
poet died a papist, and the statement deserves more attention than it has
received from biographers. There is indeed little to corroborate it; for an
alleged spiritual testament of John Shakespeare is of suspected origin, and
Daviess own words suggest a late conversion rather than an hereditary faith.
On the other hand, there is little to refute it beyond an entry in the
accounts of Stratford corporation for drink given in 1614 to a preacher at
the Newe Place.
Shakespeare made his will on the 25th of March 1616, apparently in some
haste, as the executed deed is a draft with many erasures and
interlineations. There were legacies to his daughter Judith Quiney and his
sister Joan Hart, and remembrances to friends both in Warwickshire and in
London; but the real estate was left to his sister Susanna Hall under a
strict entail which points to a desire on the part of the testator to found
a family. Shakespeares wife, for whom other provision must have been made,
is only mentioned in an interlineation, by which the second best bed with
the furniture was bequeathed to her. Much nonsense has been written about
this, but it seems quite natural. The best bed was an important chattel,
which would go with the house. The estate was after all not a large one.
Aubreys estimate of its annual value as 200 or 300 a year sounds reasonable
enough, and John Wards statement that Shakespeare spent 1000 a year must
surely be an exaggeration. The sum-total of his known investments amounts to
960. Mr Sidney Lee calculates that his theatrical income must have reached
600 a year; but it may be doubted whether this also is not a considerable
overestimate. It must be remembered that the purchasing value of money in
the 17th century is generally regarded as having been about eight times its
present value. Shakespeares interest in the houses of the Globe and
Blackfriars probably determined on his death.
A month after his will was signed, on the 23rd of April 1616, Shakespeare
died, and as a tithe-owner was buried in the chancel of the parish church.
Some doggerel upon the stone that covers the grave has been assigned by
local tradition to his own pen. A more elaborate monument, with a bust by
the sculptor Gerard Johnson, was in due course set up on the chancel wall. D
th Anne Shakespeare followed her husband on the 6th ~
of August 1623. The family was never founded. Shakespeares grand-daughter,
Elizabeth Hall, made two childless marriages, the first with Thomas Nash of
Stratford, the second with John, afterwards Sir John, Barnard of Abington.
Manor, Northants. His daughter Judith Quiney had three sons, all of whom had
died unmarried by 1639. There were, therefore, no direct descendants of
Shakespeare in existence after Lady Barnards death in 1670. Those of his
sister, Joan Hart, could however still be traced in 1864. On Lady Barnards
death the Henley Street houses passed to the Harts, in whose family they
remained until 1806. They were then sold, and in 1846 were bought for the
public. They are now held with Anne Hathaways Cottage at Shottery as the
Birthplace Trust. Lady Barnard had disposed of the Blackfriars house. The
rest of the property was sold under the terms of her will, and New Place
passed, first to the Cloptons who rebuilt it, and then to the Rev. Francis
Gastrell, who pulled it down in 1759. The site now forms a public
recreation-ground, and hard by is a memorial building with a theatre in
which performances of Shakespeares plays are given annually in April. Both
the Memorial and the Birthplace contain museums, in which books, documents
and portraits of Shakespearian interest, together with relics of greater or
less authenticity, are stored.
No letter or other writing in Shakespeares hand can be proved to exist, with
the exception of three signatures upon his will, one upon a deposition (May
II, 1612) in a lawsuit with which he was remotely concerned, and two upon
deeds (March io and II, 1613) ~fl connection with the purchase of his
Blackfriars house. A copy of Florios translation of Montaigne (1603) in the
British Museum, a copy of the Aldine edition of Ovids Metamorphoses (1502)
in the Bodleian, and a copy of the 1612 edition of Sir Thomas Norths
translation of Plutarchs Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romaines in. the
Greenock Library, have all been put forward with some plausibility as
bearing his autograph name or initials, and, in the third case, a marginal
note by him. A passage in the manuscript of the play of Sir Thomas More has
been ascribed to him (vide infra), and, if the play is his, might be in his
handwriting. Aubrey records that he was a handsome, well-shapt man, and the
lameness attributed to him by some writers has its origin only in a too
literal interpretation of certain references to spiritual disabilities in
the Sonnets.