Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life

By René Weis

At last—a key that unlocks the secrets of Shakespeare's life

Intimacies with Southampton and Marlowe, entanglements in London with the elusive dark lady, the probable fathering of an illegitimate son—these are among the mysteries of Shakespeare's rich and turbulent life that have proven tantalizingly obscure.

Despite an avalanche of recent scholarship, René Weis, an acknowledged authority on the Elizabethan period, believes the links between the bard's life and the poems and plays have been largely ignored. Armed with a wealth of new archival research and his own highly regarded interpretations of the literature, the author finds provocative parallels between Shakespeare's early experiences in the bustling market town of Stratford—including a dangerous poaching incident and contacts with underground Catholics—and the plays.

Breaking with tradition, Weis reveals that it is the plays and poems themselves that contain the richest seam of clues about the details of Shakespeare's personal life, at home in Stratford and in the shadowy precincts of theatrical London—details of a code unbroken for four hundred years.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 22, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466855090

René Weis

René Weis is a freelance writer and academic from University College London. He has published books on history, biography, and a notorious miscarriage of justice. His books include The Yellow Cross (‘utterly absorbing’ – Daily Telegraph; ‘succeeds enthrallingly’ – The Times) and The Real Traviata (‘superbly readable and meticulously researched’ – Sunday Times).

Book preview

Prologue

If there is one character in the later plays with whom Shakespeare is commonly identified, it is Prospero in The Tempest, his last solo play. Prospero sees himself as a magician whose art allows him to conjure up entire worlds of men and women, lord it over their lives, even resurrect them from death. Whatever else he may or may not have thought, Shakespeare did not take a modest view of his gifts and achievements, though Prospero is not Shakespeare and the Milan to which Prospero wishes to retire is not Stratford-upon-Avon.

The links between Shakespeare’s life and his work are closer than is generally assumed. This book aims to show how deep these connections are. The plays and poems contain important clues to Shakespeare’s inner life and to real, tangible, external events he experienced four hundred years ago.

There is a cumulative amount of circumstantial evidence that demonstrates beyond doubt that Shakespeare responded in his work to key events of his life. King Lear’s rage reflects the bard’s anger and frustrations and his need to vent them against the world at large. That does not mean that he tore off his clothes on a heath in Warwickshire, or that he had two daughters who were conspiring against him while a third, his youngest, was trying to save his life and sanity. Of course Shakespeare was neither king of England nor Prince of Denmark, not a middle-aged black man consumed by love and jealousy and rendered vulnerable to treachery because of his race, nor a Jewish financier seeking revenge on Christians for putting him out of business or spitting on him. The resonances in the work are much subtler, but the echoes across the boundary of life and art can clearly be heard if we only wish to listen for them. Shakespeare did not have three daughters, but we know he had two. If we were to discover that at the time of King Lear there were major tensions in the Shakespeare household and in his sexual life that might have helped influence the play’s plot, why would we ignore them?

The most thought-provoking remark on the convergence of Shakespeare’s life and works belongs to the English poet John Keats, one of Shakespeare’s most assiduous and intelligent readers. In an 1819 letter, Keats wrote that A man’s life of any worth is a continual allegory—and very few eyes can see the mystery … Shakespeare led a life of Allegory; his works are the comments on it. For Keats Shakespeare’s life and his plays and poems are inextricably linked in ways that are mutually reflective and illuminating. They merge to form a secret history, which this book sets out to decode. Keats’s near contemporary William Wordsworth, the author of an important epic autobiographical poem, suggested that the Sonnets were the key with which Shakespeare had unlocked his heart. Far from distilling the essence of impersonality, Shakespeare’s works tackle the human condition straight out of his own experiences. He poured his soul into his works, hence their intensity and imaginative power. He lived and breathed theater, composing countless iambic pentameters, memorizing lines, acting in his own plays and in those written by fellow dramatists, while at the same time reading widely in the classics and in English and Roman history. He wrote as the mood took him. The energy and intensity of his plays derive from Shakespeare’s struggle to come to terms with the eternal issues of love, life, and death. Shakespeare went so far as to call one of his greatest works, perhaps the most famous tragedy in the world, Hamlet after his own dead son. To try to disembody the plays and poems from the life of their author is as counterintuitive as seeking to separate him from the national history of his era.

He lived emphatically in history, and few critics have doubted that this fascination left a deep imprint on his work. When he was born, the Protestant revolution had recently put the new English Bible at the core of the national culture. If it had not been for the Reformation Shakespeare would not have read the scriptures, probably not have gone to school. He might never have lived beyond the limits of a glover’s life. On the other hand, neither would he have lived in a country in which he watched the slaughter of innocent people who served as bloody public spectacles because of their beliefs. Without the Reformation, he would have attended the same mass as every other good Catholic of Stratford-upon-Avon; the England of his forebears would also have been his to inherit spiritually. Their history and his would have been identical: Catholic, and European.

The Shakespeare story begins and ends in a Midlands market town. He always thought of this place as home and returned to it finally at the age of thirty-three. It marked him more than any other place, including the glitzy big city where he made his fortune. Knowing Shakespeare’s Stratford intimately is a prerequisite for forming a clear picture of the child who became the mature writer. If Shakespeare had never written anything at all, he would have remained a witty and resourceful glover in Henley Street, probably would have been featured in the annals of Stratford as a hardworking businessman who might have joined the council and become mayor, as his father had—something that he conspicuously avoided in his real life in Stratford. Though he would have attended the same local grammar school, his horizons would have been much more circumscribed. He would not have hobnobbed with the top people in London; there would probably have been no extramarital affairs, and above all there would have been no outlet for the pressure cooker that was his imagination. Wordsworth called this fissile inner core the hiding places of man’s power. Few passages in Shakespeare’s plays and poems better render his sense of the creative inner self than Richard II’s soliloquy in the dungeon of Pomfret Castle. The King is alone and abandoned, without a realm, or a crown, or human company. His boon companions, those parasites who poisoned his mind, the infamous caterpillars of the Commonwealth, are all gone. His world has contracted to his prison cell and in despair he decides to people it from within his own head: My brain I’ll prove the female to my soul,/My soul the father; between them, these two will engender a virtual parallel universe, a little world just like the larger world itself. Inside his head, Richard is king of all he surveys and he freely weaves in and out of whichever role takes his fancy, whether king or beggar. So did Shakespeare. It may not be a coincidence that out of all his characters it should be a gay king to put in words the inner mechanisms of the imagination. Like Richard II, Shakespeare imagined worlds within worlds, and as with Richard so there are question marks hanging over Shakespeare’s sexuality. Before his brain and soul could merge and multiply, Shakespeare needed to give them sustenance. This he did with an impressive amount of reading. He could never have done that if he had stayed in Stratford, even though his Stratford education provided him with the first key to the portals that led to Ovid, Virgil, Horace, Cicero, Plautus, and Terence. His years at the grammar school had equipped him with a superb command of rhetoric and an introduction to the classics.

Stories about Shakespeare started to circulate in his lifetime, and they continued in Stratford after his death and during the lives of his daughters and granddaughter. The material reality of sixteenth-century Stratford was Shakespeare’s habitat. This was the physical space that the greatest writer of all time inhabited, and eventually he himself became his hometown’s favorite subject of folklore. As it happens the lasting Stratford stories about Shakespeare have an uncanny habit of turning out to be true, or very nearly so.

1.

Stratford 1564: Birth of a Genius

After William Shakespeare died, nearly four hundred years ago, a younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, wrote that he

loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave motions, and gentle expressions wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.… His wit was in his own power, would the rule of it had been so too.

Jonson is a great witness, trenchant, steeped in theater, and never fawning. This tribute provides a convenient starting point. He is talking about the man, but almost at once conflates the man with the poet and playwright. Jonson did not distinguish categorically between the man and the work, and neither should we. The main reason for writing a biography of Shakespeare at all is those plays and poems, which have given untold pleasure to people the world over. If there is such a thing as a window into the soul of the subject, as in one of his sonnets Shakespeare suggested there was, his plays and poems are it.

Jonson has the immense advantage over us that he knew Shakespeare well. He anticipated that his friend would in the judgment of posterity outshine him and all his contemporaries, that he would be ranked above even Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Homer. It was Jonson who best captured Shakespeare’s legacy, in his elegy in the 1623 First Folio. He apostrophized his friend as the soul of the age and the wonder of our stage before, finally, claiming that Shakespeare was not of an age, but for all time. In the course of this book, we will see how deep a trace his age and his own life left in these plays, which have proven every bit as timeless as Jonson predicted. We owe Jonson for authenticating the portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio. His address To the Reader faces the famous egg-headed depiction of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout. The Droeshout engraving has not pleased the many, but it is a true likeness and, in Jonson’s judgment, not a bad one at that:

TO THE READER

This figure that thou here seest put,

It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,

Wherein the graver had a strife

With nature to outdo the life.

O could he have but drawn his wit

As well in brass, as he has hit

His face, the print would then surpass

All that was ever writ in brass.

But since he cannot, reader, look

Not on his picture but his book.

B[en] J[onson]

It is comforting to be told by someone in a position to know that the artist hit Shakespeare’s face to the life. Very few past lives of people from backgrounds like Shakespeare’s afford this luxury. In Shakespeare’s case we are lucky enough to have one other authenticated representation: the famous bust in the chancel of Holy Trinity in his hometown. It was erected in the church during the lifetime of Shakespeare’s sister, Joan, his widow, and his daughters. It was in place by the time the First Folio was published.

Shakespeare spent much of his life in the Warwickshire town where he was born. Compared with London, Stratford-upon-Avon was a backwater, but it was not therefore backward, nor was it small. Since the 1490s, it had been linked to the south of the country by an imposing stone bridge across the Avon. We know it as Clopton Bridge, after its builder the Stratford benefactor Sir Hugh Clopton, but in Shakespeare’s day it was the great bridge, Stratford Bridge, or the stone bridge. It was renowned throughout the region and it was well looked after by the borough. Shakespeare’s imagination was steeped in the Warwickshire countryside as surely as William Wordsworth’s was in the lakes and mountains of Cumbria, and in his imagery he frequently returns to it. This is as true of the painful, figurative English landscape of King Lear as it is of that so very Warwickshire-like magic wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shakespeare never bought a property in London, choosing instead to base himself in a huge and comfortable new house in Stratford-upon-Avon after 1597. In London he was only ever a lodger, even though the capital was the scene of his great triumphs and where he kept company with the good, the true, and the reckless.

The outline of the Stratford that Shakespeare knew remains largely intact, a parallelogram with two main arteries on a north–south axis intersecting with a set of streets running from east to west. At the southern edge of the town and in splendid isolation on the Avon sits Holy Trinity, one of the most cherished silhouettes in all of rural England, as evocative as the paintings of Constable. Long ago, a medieval priory and township surrounded it: hence the name Old Town by which the area was already known in Shakespeare’s time. A lane by that name still links Holy Trinity with the Bancroft, the old common on the Avon.

The other place of worship in town was the Gild Chapel of the Holy Cross. It sits right opposite the spot where the largest house in town once stood. Shakespeare bought that house in the 1590s; he and his family would have heard the din of the chapel bells every day and every night. And when the clock struck, that was the sound that Shakespeare heard, wrote Virginia Woolf. The large bell in the tower of the Gild Chapel dates from 1633. Since 1992, it has again been sounding the curfew at eight o’clock each night. Shakespeare never heard it, but his daughters did. On the outside, the chapel looked the same in his lifetime as it does now. William was born just too late to see the interior in its former Catholic glory. His father was the borough chamberlain who in January 1564 paid for the mandatory Protestant vandalism of its mural paintings: Item paid for defacing images in the chapel 2 shillings, 10 January 1564. Another 240 years passed before the wonderful frescoes bled through the whitewash in the Gild Chapel. Then they started to fade for good and now, some two hundred years on, they have almost entirely disappeared. Mercifully, they were copied in good time, so we know what they looked like.

South of the Gild Chapel sits the King’s New School, named after King Edward VI. Although the bulk of the modern school has mostly retreated east inside the old grounds, the core of Shakespeare’s late medieval grammar school is extant. Its long classrooms on the first two floors were spaces that he must have known well, and one of its inside chambers to the left of the staircase, at the southeastern end of the building, served as the town council’s meeting room. The town was led from this chamber. Adjacent to the school, another set of timbered fifteenth-century buildings have somehow survived and bulge out onto the pavement. These are the Stratford almshouses.

Shakespeare was baptised in Holy Trinity on Wednesday, April 26, 1564. (The date corresponds to modern May 6, because the Elizabethans computed the year by the antiquated Julian calendar and England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.) The spring of 1564 was a bad time to be born, because the plague was about to hit the town. Less than three months after Shakespeare’s birth, the register of Holy Trinity ominously records Hic incepit pestis, Here the plague began.¹ The statistics for Stratford baptisms tell their own story. In the year of Shakespeare’s birth, the number of newborns dropped by half: whereas in each of 1562 and 1563 just over eighty children were born, in 1564 the total fell to thirty-nine. Among these twenty-five boys and fourteen girls was William Shakespeare. For 1565, the records show a rise again, to fifty-eight. The provinces were no more immune from visitations by the plague than London was, although there were no congested public places here for the infection to spread like wildfire, as it did in the big city.

This must have been an anxious time for Shakespeare’s parents, John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. William was their third child and the first boy. Two sisters, Joan and Margaret, had preceded him, but neither had lived for more than a few months. Joan was baptised on September 15, 1558, and died, it seems, not long afterward. It took her parents four years to produce another daughter, Margaret, who died four short months later. The two girls were named after Mary Arden’s sisters; as for William, it was one of the most common first names in Elizabethan Stratford, although there were no Williams in the Shakespeare or Arden families. So the boy must have been named after a neighbor or friend or someone who was both. It is usually taken for granted that the haberdasher William Smith of Henley Street stood as Shakespeare’s godfather. Smith and John Shakespeare had acted as the Corporation’s chamberlains at the time of William’s birth in April 1564. In this office they were charged with keeping the accounts of the borough that year, itemizing all its revenues and expenses. The two men seem to have got on well together, for William Smith called his son John, perhaps a reciprocal compliment. William Smith and John Shakespeare not only sat on the town council at the same time, they also lasted for fifty years in the same street in the same town.² But it is just as likely that William Tyler rather than William Smith was Shakespeare’s godfather. Tyler was a butcher with premises on the southeast side of Sheep Street near the Bancroft, roughly opposite the present Cordelia cottage. He was a few years older than John Shakespeare and he had a son called Richard who was born in the autumn of 1566. This Richard Tyler is famously remembered in the first draft of Shakespeare’s will before being crossed out in the final version. He may also be linked to the naming of one of Shakespeare’s daughters.

The fourth Shakespeare child to be born was another boy, Gilbert. He arrived in 1566 and was probably named after the glover Gilbert Bradley, who lived three doors east of John Shakespeare in Henley Street. For the next three years, Will and Gilbert were the only children in the family; they seem to have stayed friends and business partners throughout their lives. Gilbert was followed by a second Joan in 1569, and two years later another little girl arrived. She was called Anne after her mother’s sister Agnes, the names Agnes and Anne being then interchangeable. Three years later, a further son arrived on the scene. He was baptised on March 11, 1574, and named Richard, after his grandfather Richard Shakespeare from the nearby village of Snitterfield. The next and last child was another boy, Edmund. He was baptised on May 3, 1580, when Will was sixteen, Gilbert fourteen, Joan eleven, and Richard six.

The name Edmund was rare in sixteenth-century Stratford and there were no Edmunds in the immediate Arden and Shakespeare families. The odds are that this child was named after Edmund Lambert from Barton-on-the-Heath, the husband of Mary Arden’s sister Joan. There might be another reason for the choice of name: the connection to Edmund Campion. Campion became a saint of the Roman Catholic church in 1970; in 1580 his name was already revered in recusant circles, and the following year saw his martyrdom. Undoubtedly, some Edmunds were named for him. The Jesuit William Weston called himself William Edmunds to honor his friend Campion, with whom he had been at Oxford. His many years of incarceration at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire and in the Tower of London, followed by his eventual release into exile when he was on the verge of blindness, led to his saintly presence in Shakespeare’s own lifetime. Shakespeare, Edmund Campion, William Edmunds Weston, Edmund Shakespeare, and Edmund (the bastard) Gloucester in King Lear all interleave in this story. The civil war between Catholics and Protestants was the deepest spiritual and political reality of the time.

Because of this, we may want to be aware of another man who was born in the same year as Shakespeare. The tall young aristocrat John Gerard joined the Society of Jesus at a time when to do so and return to England was virtual suicide. He did just that, and suffered dreadfully for his calling. There was a dash about this Jesuit Hotspur, who converted Penelope Rich (née Devereux) to the Catholic faith. She was the sister of the mercurial Earl of Essex and the object of the most famous sonnet cycle of the age, Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. Gerard, a master of disguises, a wonderful writer and autobiographer, was also the close friend of a priest who found his way into Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Father Henry Garnett. Shakespeare’s and Gerard’s lives ran on parallel tracks in the England of the period: the one, Shakespeare, inside the tent even if perhaps only just, the other, Gerard, militantly outside and thus exposed fully to the vengeful savagery of the Elizabethan state. Gerard’s autobiography offers the most intimate, immediate, and intensely lived account of the years and of the country that Shakespeare inhabited.

*   *   *

With the birth in 1580 of Edmund Shakespeare, the family was complete. Mary Arden was probably about forty then. On November 24, 1556, when her father, Robert Arden of Wilmcote, made his will, she was still a spinster. Little Joan was born in September 1558, so Mary and John probably wed in the summer or autumn of 1557. Assuming that she was around eighteen during that first pregnancy, this would place her birth in 1540. John may have been Mary’s senior by some ten years, because he was renting property in Henley Street by 1552. After a full seven-year apprenticeship as a glover, and having clearly worked hard already to set up on his own in Henley Street, he must have been in his early twenties then; he was born probably in or near 1530. John had spent his youth in the village of Snitterfield some three miles northeast of Stratford; his father, Richard, was a yeoman there. The name Snitterfield signifies open land inhabited by snipe; and the landscape is a bowl of rolling fields perfect for farming. When the Shakespeares pitched their tent here in the early sixteenth century, almost all the acreage around the village would have been held in common and cultivated. As a young man, John must have helped out his father in the family’s fields down from their house and also in those that lay beyond the church on the right-hand side of the road to Luscombe and Norton Lindsey. These fields were known as Burman and Redhill; in the 1590s, Shakespeare’s uncle Henry was fined for not maintaining a drainage ditch between them. Today a housing estate sits on fields that were once tilled by Shakespeares.

Thanks to sixteenth-century local records, we can identify Richard Shakespeare’s farm, his messuage, with certainty. In 1504 the following property, which would become it, was sold to Mary Arden’s grandfather Thomas Arden of Wilmcote: one messuage and eighty acres of land at Snitterfield, the messuage being situated between the tenement of William Palmer and a lane called Maryes Lane, and extending in length from the King’s highway to a small rivulet.³ The rivulet is the Bell Brook, which meanders along today’s School Road through the lower village toward the Green; Maryes Lane corresponds to Bell Lane, while the King’s highway is Church Road. The property that now straddles the south corner of Bell Lane and Church Road occupies the site of Shakespeare’s grandfather’s house. Whenever William Shakespeare visited Snitterfield to see his aunt and uncle, he would have passed this very spot. His roots were right here. In due course, the Shakespeare farm and its substantial lands, which rolled down all the way to Bell Brook, reverted to the Ardens, who had owned the freehold all along and now bequeathed it to Mary Arden’s brother-in-law Edmund Lambert, whose home village, Barton-on-the-Heath, Shakespeare would put in one of his plays.

How John Shakespeare of Snitterfield turned up in Stratford as a glover we do not know, but he was a restless spirit on the make, and make it big he did at first, doing more than gloving. Rather, he started to trade in wool on a lucrative scale, and not always legally. He may not have had a racket going, but he got close enough to attract his own personal surveillance agent, whose reports on him survive in the National Archives in Kew. In October 1556, John Shakespeare acquired the eastern wing of the Birthplace from Edward West, as well as a house of a similar size in Greenhill Street from George Turnor. It is likely that this Turnor was related to the John Turnor who lived across from the Shakespeares in Henley Street. John Shakespeare was becoming a man of substance and a serious property owner. He had proven himself to be an astute businessman and artisan. He was a rising man, he was ready to marry, and marry he did. Mary Arden was not quite the boss’s daughter, but she was as good as, given the relationship between his father and hers, and she stood to inherit considerable property in Wilmcote. In 1557 John and Mary Shakespeare embarked on their married lives in the Henley Street house.

Twenty-two years separate the Shakespeares’ firstborn daughter, Joan, and baby Edmund. What Will Shakespeare made of Edmund’s arrival, we cannot know. As the eldest of the surviving children, he was the man of the house after his father, who was by now struggling badly with debts and potential insolvency. If young William helped out with baby Edmund, it would have been timely training, because before long he would himself be lumbered with children: his daughter Susanna was only three years younger than her uncle Edmund. One wonders how sixteen-year-old Will responded to the sight of his pregnant and aging mother. The rituals and the physicality of childbirth in the period were raw and unavoidable. Usually a group of women would gather in the home of the woman who was giving birth. There would be no escaping the pain and the screaming; everyone, men, women, and children, knew what was going on, outside in the street as well as within the house. These elemental facts of life would have helped shape Shakespeare’s imagination as much as anything. Shakespeare knows a great deal about motherhood. A mother’s pains, as he puts it, are never far from his mind, although mothers are much less prominent in his plays than fathers are. This is partly because the statute that forbade women to act onstage made it harder to portray mothers than fathers, daughters than sons. The impressive number of daughters in Shakespeare’s plays, in the teeth of this practical difficulty, underlines the emotional hold on him of this particular bond.

Mothers are nevertheless given a powerful voice. There is a tense moment toward the end of Richard II when young Aumerle is forced by his father, York, to reveal his disloyalty to the usurper king, Bolingbroke, Henry IV. Without a moment’s hesitation, the aged father decides to report his son’s treason to the king, in the full knowledge that this will mean certain death to the boy. Aumerle’s mother protests vehemently:

Why, York, what wilt thou do?

Wilt thou not hide the trespass of thine own?

Have we more sons? Or are we like to have?

Is not my teeming date drunk up with time?

And wilt thou pluck my fair son from mine age,

And rob me of a happy mother’s name?

Is he not like thee? Is he not thine own?

When he refuses to heed her pleas, she retorts, Hadst thou groaned for him/As I have done, thou wouldst be more pitiful. Here a mother’s sufferings in childbirth are granted considerable moral authority. Knowing how hard it is to create life, the Duchess values it that much more intensely. Earlier in the same play, King Richard’s Queen had called Green, the bearer of bad news, midwife to my woe. Her soul, she claimed, had brought forth her prodigy,/And I, a gasping new-delivered mother,/Have woe to woe, sorrow to sorrow joined. Shakespeare knew exactly what a gasping new-delivered mother was like.

The customs of childbirth in this period made it almost impossible to hide, and yet concealment is precisely what was happening in Stratford at the time. The only safe way to shield a birth from family, friends, or foes was to remove the pregnant woman to a neighboring village where she was not known. A woman generally had one of two reasons for not wanting a birth to be public knowledge: illegitimacy or a fervent desire to baptise her baby in a faith other than the prevailing one. In the 1550s, Stratford town council time and again fined local burghers for sheltering expectant mothers from outside the parish. On first perusing the borough records, the unsuspecting student may be moved by these repeated acts of kindness to strangers, by the readiness of Stratford’s people to take into their homes big-bellied waifs and vagrants. Perhaps even the most hard-hearted of citizens melted at the thought of a heavily pregnant and vulnerable woman. In fact, the taking in of such women was mostly recusant in nature.

Eleven years before Shakespeare was born, the heads of four families were convicted in Stratford and fined by the manorial court, or court leet, for receiving into their homes women strangers who were brought to bed of children contrary to the order of the last leet court. The threatened fines ranged from twenty shillings to four pounds, although the actual levies were much lower. The term used by the borough’s officers when they suspected their fellow citizens of harboring people illegally was inmake or inmate. There was in place a raft of legislation about getting rid of inmates. Such illegal lodgers or transients, whether Catholic or not, were deemed undesirable because they might become a burden on the local public purse. Also, their presence meant that the Corporation was not entirely in control of its residents. In the autocratic state that was Elizabethan England, the free movement of people was restricted through stringent laws against so-called vagabonds. The immense hardships that this caused to some of the most unfortunate men and women in society are powerfully evoked by Shakespeare’s poor Tom in King Lear.

In 1556 the shepherd John Cox was fined four pence for receiving a woman great with child. Cox was a Henley Street fixture for forty-one years; Shakespeare knew him all his life because he lived opposite the Birthplace until 1594, when his house was destroyed by fire. His neighbor on the same south side of Henley Street was William Cawdrey, who headed a clan of diehard Catholics. That Cox sheltered a woman might suggest that he shared his neighbor Cawdrey’s faith. Someone else from Henley Street was punished for shielding an inmate in 1557. This was Richard Reeve. He lived in what would eventually be the Ainges’ house; that family also took in recusant mothers. Perhaps the Whateleys next door did so, too, since their Catholic credentials were impeccable. One wonders whether there was a Catholic caucus at the top of Henley Street, just as there seems to have been toward its middle, where the Catholic Cawdreys and Badgers lived near John Shakespeare. Reeve was a Clopton tenant, and the Cloptons were the godfathers of all things popish in Stratford. On these very premises in Henley Street, the Reeves preceded Roger Sadler, another suspected recusant, who in turn moved out to make room for the Ainges in the same house.

Given the spiritual ferment of the Midlands and the borough council’s obsession with this issue, one can see how big this was. From the Catholic point of view, the need for Catholic women to fend for themselves in this way showed up the inhumanity of the Protestants. In a letter to his superiors in Rome, written at the height of the anti-Catholic hysteria in the Armada year of 1588, the Jesuit Henry Garnett complained:

A certain woman with child, when her time of delivery drew near, travelled to another county where she might have her child. Catholics have to do this, for if they give birth in their own house the question always arises as to where the child is to be baptised.… It is a crime punishable at law for a mother to give birth to a child and not to have it baptised [by the minister], or for her to move about in public before she has been childed by him. So by chance it happened that this woman, after a short labour, gave birth in an open field by the road, without any other woman present; and then she carried her infant son at the breast to the house of a neighbouring [Catholic] lady.⁴

Garnett’s note makes perfect sense in 1588, but in the period from 1554 to 1557, when the Stratford manorial courts were particularly exercised by the clandestine births in the town, the Queen of England was the militantly Catholic Mary. It seems that even then the borough had no intention of reinventing itself as a Catholic enclave.

On Sundays Mayor Shakespeare, wearing red robes, and his family were escorted to Holy Trinity from their home in Henley Street. At church, the Shakespeares would have been led to their pew, one at the very front. John Shakespeare would have worn his alderman’s ring. These rituals must have left a strong impression on little William; he later recalled the alderman’s ring on his father’s finger. Henley Street was full of children and several of the best families of the town lived here. William would have played with them in a child’s world, an idyll of gardens and orchards. A strong sense of family runs through Shakespeare’s plays. It would hardly be so potent if his own family had not felt solid, sound, and secure. Mary and John Shakespeare must have run a mostly happy home.

Unlike others among his contemporaries, Shakespeare never left Stratford permanently; a yearning to be close to his family—his mother and father as much as his wife and children—must have played a clinching role in this. Stratford fostered his affinity for nature, and in Stratford were sown the seeds of his immense linguistic range. In this agrarian society, it would have been from his parents and grandparents that he learned the names of flowers, birds, and animals, as he helped his parents with chores around the house, lent a hand in the stables and out in the fields, and helped prune and harvest the fruit trees in the family’s orchards in Stratford, Snitterfield, and Hampton Lucy. He listened and remembered, as a future actor and writer who would commit lines to memory at short notice while all the time writing them for others and himself too. The flora and fauna of Warwickshire as well as its folk memory find their way into the works at every juncture. It is one thing to read about the dive-dapper peering through a wave and ducking in when being looked on—and what an extraordinary image that is for the callow Adonis to use in Venus and Adonis—but to see a little grebe or dive-dapper on a pond or in a still corner of the Avon endows the image, and indeed the creature, with a particular kind of imaginative life. The only way Shakespeare could have learned to distinguish ducks from grebes, to know that one of the dive-dapper’s characteristics is its extreme shyness, was through patient bird-watching on the river, through living close to nature in a way few do today.

2.

William Shakespeare’s Schooldays: c.1570–c.1578

As mayor, John Shakespeare could send his eldest son to the local school for free. The shrewd businessman and his wife can have been in little doubt about William’s talents. His gift for language must have been present from the start, even if it had, as yet, no artistic outlet. The Stratford grammar school had existed since the fifteenth century. Its records have disappeared, but it is inconceivable that he went to a school farther afield. His plays demonstrate that he was familiar with the classic grammar school syllabus. Nicholas Rowe, who was born fifty-eight years after Shakespeare’s death, wrote in 1709 that Shakespeare’s father

had bred him, ’tis true, for some time at a free-school where ’tis probable he acquired that little Latin he was master of; but the narrowness of his circumstances and the want of his assistance at home forced his father to withdraw him from thence and unhappily prevented his further proficiency in that language—upon his leaving school, he seems to have given entirely into that way of living which his father proposed to him.

According to Rowe, Shakespeare was forced to leave the King’s New School before he reached fifteen, the normal school-leaving age for someone going full term. Quite when he left, we cannot know, but such is his knowledge of the classics and of rhetoric that it could not have been much before 1579, when, it seems, his father first hit rough waters. Free school education from the age of five or six was a privilege; John Shakespeare would have appreciated that knowledge meant power, that being able to read and write would be a huge asset to a glover. He himself signed with a cross sometimes, or else by drawing a pair of compasses. Given that he had kept the Corporation accounts for 1563 and 1564, it is nevertheless highly likely that he could read and that other members of his family could do so too. Whatever the wider national spread of literacy was, Shakespeare clearly assumed that craftsmen like weavers, carpenters, joiners, tinkers, tailors, and bellows menders, to mention only the so-called rude mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, could read and, in the case of at least one of them, Peter Quince the carpenter, write as well. As Bottom the weaver puts it on waking up from his wonderful dream about the Faerie Queene, I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. These are, in the words of the master of ceremonies of the Athenian court, Hard-handed men that work in Athens here,/Which never laboured in their minds till now.

They may not stand on punctuation, and their misplacing of stops and commas is the reason why Quince’s prologue turns into an egregious, supremely artful farce. It is, of course, Shakespeare’s punctuation that delivers the brilliant double entendres of the speech, but then he was clearly never bottom of the class. There are true illiterates in the plays—for example, the Capulet servant in Romeo and Juliet who is dispatched to deliver invitations to a ball but cannot do so because he is unable to read the addresses on his piece of paper. He protests, comically, that It is written that the shoemaker should meddle with his yard and the tailor with his last, the fisher with his pencil and the painter with his nets; but I am sent to find those persons whose names are here writ, and can never find what names the writing person hath here writ. I must to the learned. Enter to him Benvolio and Romeo. When the servant asks Romeo whether he can read anything you see, Romeo replies, Ay, if I know the letters and the language. The man who wrote these lines at the age of thirty-one not only knew more letters than anyone ever in the English language but would also master French and had some Italian too.

Like other such schools in the country, the Stratford grammar school subjected its charges to a tough regime. School started with prayers at six A.M. and continued until a lunch break from eleven to one. Little William undoubtedly went home for the meal. School resumed at one and went on for another five hours. In the winter these times contracted and school ran from seven A.M. to eleven A.M., then from one P.M. to four P.M. Elizabethan masters were quick to flog their charges, but the glover’s son had, it seems, mostly fond memories of school, even if he was also intimidated by it. Shakespeare returned to those days repeatedly in his writings. The most famous reference of all occurs in Jaques’s speech All the world’s a stage in As You Like It:

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining school-boy with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school.

The vignette shows that Shakespeare experienced school just like the rest of us. This is borne out further by Romeo’s claiming outside Juliet’s window that Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books,/But love from love toward school with heavy looks. That as a little boy William Shakespeare loved returning home from school implies that he was happy in Henley Street. Shakespeare wrote As You Like It when he was thirty-five years old, and the lines need not necessarily describe his own experience as a reluctant little boy at school in the early 1570s. By the time he embarked on the comedy, he would have seen his own brothers go to school. Like him, they were entitled to a free education there. Later, during his returns to Stratford, he would have watched Hamnet do the same. But of course one wants to think that Shakespeare is writing about himself here, wants to picture little Will with his satchel making his way to school while wishing himself home again with his parents. Childhood anxiety about school is all too recognizable in the cameo, as is the little boy’s shining morning face, spruced up by an affectionate mother sending him off perhaps just as unwillingly as he departs.

To walk from Henley Street to the school in Church Street takes barely ten minutes. For half the year, the streets would have been dark at six or seven A.M., although they would also have been far less deserted at that hour than they are in the twenty-first century. People rose with the sun, and often rather earlier, like the carriers in Henry IV Part 1. The lanes of an Elizabethan town would have been busy well before dawn. Other children would have joined Will Shakespeare on his daily calvary, including the son of his putative godfather, William Smith, Jr., whom he might have picked up just before turning into High Street. The Ainges, the bakers who were neighbors of the Smiths near the top end of Henley Street, probably had children at school too, provided they could afford it. And there were Whateley children, from that distinguished family of glovers, whittawers, and town councilors, who lived one door down from the Ainges toward the Shakespeares. These Elizabethan boys were the first generation to go to school the way children still do today.

Among the young scholars was probably one Robert Debdale, from a recusant family in Shottery. Many years later, Shakespeare would read a vicious diatribe against Debdale and his fellow Jesuits in a text that became an important source for King Lear. George Cawdrey, another Catholic boy at the school, was about a year and a half younger than Shakespeare. He was the son of Alderman Rafe Cawdrey, a major player in the town, who had family connections in Henley Street through his father, old William Cawdrey. Eventually George joined the English seminary in Rheims and became a priest. Finally there was Richard Field, the son of a tanner. Field was two and a half years older than Shakespeare and would one day print his two long poems. Strong bonds were forged at school then as now, and in the case of Shakespeare and Field the friendship seems to have lasted throughout their lives. Both men fetched up in the metropolis, but Field, unlike Shakespeare, never returned permanently to Stratford. It is likely, though, that the two men teamed up occasionally for the journey back to Warwickshire. In these preindustrial times, men and women from the same areas or towns remained closely loyal to one another. There is, as we shall see in the course of this story, plenty of evidence to this effect as far as Stratfordians in London are concerned.

The Fields lived in Bridge Street; if Richard did join the boys coming from Henley Street on the school walk, it would have been at Market Cross, which they all passed on their way to Church Street. Its clock tower rang out the hour. On Thursdays the stall holders, and particularly those who, like Shakespeare’s father, were among the privileged caste licensed to use Market Cross for their stalls, would have been setting out well before six when the schoolboys passed them on their way to learn Latin. Quite how precious those early ties were to Shakespeare can be gleaned from Julius Caesar, when the noblest of all his heroes, Brutus, evokes the memory of shared schooldays to prompt his friend to help him die:

Good Volumnius,

Thou know’st that we two went to school together.

Even for that, our love of old, I prithee,

Hold thou my sword hilts whilst I run on it.

Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were similarly Hamlet’s schoolfellows, and in a play full of huggermugger and duplicity this is seen as a natural source of strength and camaraderie. It should provide a bulwark against treachery, but it does not; this failure is yet another symptom of everything that is rotten in Denmark.

But it was not only the boys who were allowed to bond at school. Girls did too. The fact that girls were educated at all may come as a surprise, but that certainly was the case, although they did not as a rule proceed to grammar school. When, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Hermia feels set upon from all sides, she appeals to her tall friend Helena for female solidarity in the name of all the counsel that they shared, their sisters’ vows, the happy hours they spent together when they chid the hasty-footed time for parting them, their school-days’ friendship, childhood innocence, when they sat together at needlework on a single cushion creating flowers between them on their samplers. At petty school (also known at the time as ABC school after the ABC or absey primer), girls acquired domestic skills and learned the alphabet from a hornbook, just like the boys, with whom they shared benches during class. That Helena and Hermia thought of themselves as having been at school together is clear from Helena’s exclaiming O, when she is angry, she is keen and shrewd./She was a vixen when she went to school,/And though she be but little, she is fierce. There is a shared past here, just as there is for boys.

As the father of two daughters, who were twelve and ten years old respectively when he was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare would have had parental experience of the schooling of girls in Stratford. We think we know that Anne Hathaway, his future wife, was several years older than the poet; otherwise, we might even wonder whether she attended a Stratford school, given that she came from a prosperous Shottery farm. Had that been so, he and she might have met at school.

As it happens, we have hard documentary evidence that there was a girls’ school in Stratford, and it comes from the records of the dreaded Bridewell prison in London. It concerns two Stratford women, Elizabeth Evans and Joyce Cowden, who eked out a living in London as prostitutes in the early seventeenth century. Elizabeth Evans was the daughter of a Stratford cutler called William Evans. She, it is alleged, went to a house of ill report in Moore lane and to another such house in Islington. Joyce Cowden testified that she had been to school together at Stratford-upon-Avon with Elizabeth, and one George Pinder from Stratford correctly identified Elizabeth’s father by hometown and profession.¹ The girls seemed to have plied their trade together in London for at least three or four years before their arrest. According to Pinder, Elizabeth and her friends were very poor and unable to maintain themselves. What he means is that they could not make an honest living and therefore resorted to soliciting. It is interesting that in the big city, Stratfordians could be found to identify the women, unless Pinder was their pimp, which is not impossible. Stratfordians stuck together in London, it seems, even those at the margins of society. When his friend Richard Quiney wrote to Shakespeare from a London inn he addressed him as loving countryman, a phrase that probably carried more weight than we customarily assume.

The story of the two women is intriguing and pitiable, but its primary relevance for us here is that it proves there was an ABC school for girls in Stratford even though the Corporation records do not specifically refer to one. Boys and girls probably attended the same petty school in Church Street and were segregated only later, around the age of seven. If the premises of the girls’ school were the same as the boys’ it may have made both sexes’ lives much more bearable, turning the school into a place that at least held out the prospect of childhood romances rather than just being a place of austere learning and all-male bonding. Brutus and Cassius are fine; Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher are better, at least when at the ages of seven or ten.

The size of the school is a matter of guesswork, for the written parchment register has vanished. It has been estimated that some forty pupils were taught at any one time by the master.² We can speculate about the school’s likely population from the average number of children per family in the town and then multiply that figure by the number of all those who could have their children educated for free. At any given time there were twenty-eight aldermen and chief burgesses in the town. If these each had three children at the school, with perhaps four years between the eldest and youngest, they alone would add up to eighty-four children. The school may have had as many as eighty or ninety children enrolled in any one

Reviews for Shakespeare Unbound

[tarheel96-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A thoroughly fascinating journey for anyone interested in the man behind the famous plays and sonnets. The author uses historical documents and what is known about events, locations and even other people who crossed paths with Shakespeare to fill in the gaps of what we don't know about this enigma of a man. Granted, much of it is conjecture: nothing more than a very educated guess. Yet Weis makes his arguments very convincing and even acknowledges the opposing views and competing theories along the way, often proving in the end (at least to my mind) why his view is the most logical. Although there is so much we may never know for certain about the life, both public and private, of William Shakespeare, there are new discoveries being made and more information may yet come to light. Until such time, I highly recommend Shakespeare Unbound as food for thought.

[alexezell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A stunning and profound biography of the world's greatest writer. It makes a firm case that Shakespeare was no more able to segregate himself from his humanity than any of us. His plays and poetry become even more beautiful and powerful given Weis's striking and adept scholarship. A joy to read for lovers of Shakespeare and accessible to anyone interested in how a great artist might create great art.

[psy_19 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Weis makes a credible case that Shakespeare's works were closely influenced by people and events in his life. While it's futile to speculate too closely about this, if Weis' misunderstanding of the history of the "Hamlet " character and legend is anything to go by, much of this book is wishful thinking.