I, Master Shakespeare

By David Lawrence-Young

Who could imagine that the son of a glove-maker and an illiterate mother would grow up to be the world’s greatest writer? Although he left school early and never went to university, William Shakespeare wrote many of the most famous plays ever. This delightful lively book brings Shakespeare to life. ‘I, Master Shakespeare’ shows the genius dramatist to have been a human being as well as master of his art.

Born in 1564 and educated in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare moved to London to start writing in about 1588. Would this young dramatist from a small country town succeed in the big city’s theatre? What would happen when his beloved Globe theatre burned down and would Queen Elizabeth I and King James I like his plays? And, finally, why did he will his ‘second best bed’ to his wife, Anne Hathaway?



David Lawrence-Young has written over twenty historical novels which have been published in the UK, USA and Israel. He loves researching and writing about Shakespeare and quirky aspects of English history. He has been fascinated by the Bard of Avon ever since he first read ‘Macbeth’ in school many years ago. When not writing, he enjoys travelling to the places which form the background to his novels.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Conrad Press
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781839781421

Book preview

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About the Author

David Lawrence-Young was an English teacher and lecturer in schools and universities for over forty years until he retired in 2013. He is happiest researching Shakespeare, English and military history or quirky aspects of British social history. In addition to rewriting Communicating in English, a best-selling textbook, he has written two crime and twenty historical novels which have been published in the UK, USA and Israel.

He has been a frequent contributor to Forum, a magazine for English language teachers and also to Skirmish, a military history journal. He is a member of the local historical club and from 2008-2014 was the Chairman of the Jerusalem Shakespeare Club. He is also a published (USA) and exhibited photographer (UK & Jerusalem). He loves travelling, plays the clarinet (badly) and is married and has two children.

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Website: www.dly.books.weebly.com

Other Novels by D. Lawrence-Young

Fawkes and the Gunpowder Plot

Tolpuddle: A Novel of Heroism

Marlowe: Soul’d to the Devil

Will Shakespeare: Where was He?*

The Man Who Would be Shakespeare

Will the Real William Shakespeare Please Step Forward**

Of Guns and Mules

Of Guns, Revenge and Hope

Arrows Over Agincourt

Sail Away from Botany Bay

Anne of Cleves: Unbeloved

Catherine Howard: Henry’s Fifth Failure

Six Million Accusers: Catching Adolf Eichmann

Mary Norton: Soldier Girl

Two Bullets in Sarajevo

King John: Two-Time Loser

Go Spy Out the Land

Entrenched

Villains of Yore

My Jerusalem Book (Editor)

Mistress of Land and Sea: The Story of Emma Hamilton***

*Reissued as: Welcome to London, Mr. Shakespeare

**Reissued as: Who Really Wrote Shakespeare?

***Also published by Conrad Press

As: David L. Young

Of Plots and Passions

Communicating in English (Textbook)

The Jewish Emigrant from Britain: 1700-2000 (contrib. chapter)

May I introduce myself?

My name’s William Shakespeare. I’m sure you’ve heard of me, if only because I became a famous playwright. I also wrote some poems but I think that it is the plays that really made me famous. I wrote them while I was living in London, but now I’m back at home in Stratford-upon-Avon (we’ll call it just Stratford from now on as to add ‘upon-Avon’ every time is a bit of a mouthful.)

I’m living in my house, New Place on the corner of Chapel Lane and Chapel Street. It’s an impressive building and I believe it’s the largest one in town. I live here with my wife, Anne Hathaway, while my two daughters, Susanna and Judith live nearby with their husbands. Susanna is married to Dr. John Hall and Judith is married to a winemaker called Thomas Quiney.

Judith had a twin brother called Hamnet but he died when he was only eleven years old, some twenty years ago. And by the way, Hamnet is not a misprint. His name was Hamnet, not Hamlet, the name of one of my plays. He was named after my friend, a baker called Hamnet Sadler.

But all that was in the past and, as they say, life has to go on. What I’d like to do now is tell you something about the story of my life.

I must admit that I’ve had a good life and a fairly long one, too. I’m fifty-two years old and considered to be quite an old man but now I am beginning to feel very frail.

I heard somewhere that people, like me, who have lived through the reigns of Queen Elizabeth, or Good Queen Bess – or Gloriana as she liked to be called – and also King James, usually live until they are about thirty-two, so if you see that some of my hair is turning grey, you’ll understand it’s because of my age.

Now Anne keeps reminding me that recently she’s been hearing all sorts of stories about me and my life, especially when she walks through town on her way to the market. As well as this, my daughters are urging me to set down once and for all what I have been doing over the past few decades. ‘It’s not everyone who’s left Stratford and gone to London and has spoken to Queen Elizabeth and King James,’ they say. My daughter Susanna added that after all the plays that I’ve written, I should now tell my own tale.

‘Otherwise,’ her younger sister, Judith, chimed in, ‘no-one will ever really know.’

I think she’s right. It is April 19th in the year of Our Lord, 1616, and as I know that I haven’t much longer to live, I feel that I should share my life story with you.

So here it is.

Chapter 1

Early days

At first the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

(As You Like It, II.vii.)

I was born in the spring of 1564 on St. George’s Day, 23 April, or perhaps a day or so afterwards. Birthdays were not strictly recorded then; the Church only listed when you were baptised and I was baptised on 26 April.

Later I wrote about St George in my play, Henry the Fifth. There is a scene in this when King Henry encouraged his soldiers to charge forward and beat the French at the battle of Harfleur. I had him call out, ‘Cry God for Harry! England! and Saint George!’

I was born in a four-poster bed in a large oak-timbered Tudor-style house. This house was larger than most of those in Stratford because my father had brought three smaller houses and joined them together.

This building was in Henley Street, a main street that linked Henley Lane and Back Bridge Street. Our house was two storeys high with a red-tiled gabled roof. It had several windows set into the attic facing the street and an imposing front door porch.

We had the usual furniture of the time: heavy dark brown oak cupboards, a long wooden dining-room table and some carved wooden chests and coffers to store our clothes and bedding. We also had a couple of other trunks which had heavy iron locks and were for the safekeeping of all sorts of valuables, jewellery and documents that my parents had.

Shakespeare’s birthplace, Henley Street, Stratford

My father, John Shakespeare, was an important man in the town. As well as being a very skilled leather-worker and glove-maker, he also traded in barley, timber and wool. Later he worked for the town council and became an alderman, borough constable and chamberlain, that is, a civic officer.

In 1568, when I was four years old, he was promoted and became the High Bailiff or Mayor of Stratford and I remember that we were all so proud of him. It was when we were walking to the mayor’s office in the centre of town for him to receive his chain of office that I asked him why it was such an important job to be the mayor.

‘What do you do?’ I asked.

‘Well, it’s like this, Will,’ he replied. ‘In a town like Stratford with all of its two thousand citizens, we have to have rules and taxes so that it will be a nice place to live.’

‘Rules and taxes? Like what?’

‘Rules such as telling people where they can build their houses and have their shops, for example. I mean we can’t allow them to build their houses just anywhere they want. And,’ he continued, ‘we need money to pay the constables of the peace to make sure that everyone behaves themselves…’

‘And catch any robbers,’ I added.

My father nodded. ‘And so we have a group of men called a council who see about these things and I, as the mayor, am in charge of this council. Do you understand?’

I said I did and felt even prouder of my father. He was the chief man in Stratford and the town’s people gave him a gold chain to wear to prove it. Then three years later, in 1571, when his term of office was over, dad was appointed Chief Alderman and Justice of the Peace.

But fourteen years before all this happened my father married my mother, Mary Arden, in 1557. She was the daughter of my father’s landlord and I believe that my parents were very happy living together.

My mother came from the well-known Arden family in Warwickshire. Her father, Robert, had seven other daughters as well as my mother. Just think of that! A family of eight girls, and all of them probably talking about boys, hair-styles and dresses.

My parents had two other children before I was born. Their names were Joan and Margaret, but I never knew them as they both died when they were very young. My parents were worried that I would die young too, because soon after I was born, the dreaded plague arrived in Stratford.

Yet somehow I survived and lived to see the births of my two other sisters, Joan and Anne, as well as my three brothers, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund. Unfortunately, little Anne died in 1579 when she was eight years old, but the rest of us grew up to become adults.

Gilbert became a cloak-maker and, like his younger brother, Richard, never married. He died when he was forty-six. My third brother, Edmund, was the youngest of us all. He was born in 1580, when I was sixteen, and later he followed me to London to become an actor. Unfortunately, he died young, aged twenty-seven, and is now buried in St. Saviour’s Church, Southwark. This impressive building is very near to the Globe Theatre where many of my plays were later performed. We were quite close and so I used his name, Edmund, for one of the main characters in my play, King Lear. My sister Joan married a hatter called William Hart, had four children and they live in Stratford. The only time I used the name Joan in one of my plays was when I wrote about Joan of Arc in the play Henry the Sixth.

This meant that out of my parents’ eight children, three of them died early. But that is just how the world is today. As The Book of Common Prayer says, ‘In the midst of life we are in death.’ This was a common situation in the days of Queen Elizabeth and no doubt it will continue in the future.

Another sad thing that happened to my family was that when I was about twelve years old my father got into serious financial difficulties. He was caught brogging.

‘What’s brogging?’ I asked one night when we were all sitting around the table eating our evening meal.

‘Where did you hear about that?’ my mother asked sharply.

I went a bit red, hesitated, then finally said, ‘I overheard you talking to father last night when you left your door open. You sounded quite cross.’

‘And so I should be, Will. Your father was caught illegally dealing in wool and sheep’s hides. That’s what brogging is.’

‘But why was it illegal?’ I asked, not looking at my father.

‘Enough questions, William. It just means that he didn’t pay any taxes to the council and they were very angry with him.’

‘But, mother, I…’

‘William, I said enough questions,’ she glowered at me. ‘Now get on with your supper and give a carrot to Gilbert. I can see he wants another one.’

As a result of father’s brogging, he had to pay a large fine and did not leave the house much for a while. He had to work even harder making more gloves to sell to make sure we were not short of money. This meant that I was kept busy in the shop helping him.

It was at about the same time that my father lost a lot of money that he had lent to a man called Walter Mussum. Master Mussum had died unexpectedly early and he hadn’t left enough money behind to repay his debts. Then my father fell foul of the law again when he was caught dealing illegally in land and mortgages. It was also during this period that he stopped attending council meetings, and so they took away his position as an alderman or deputy mayor and gave it to somebody else.

However, all’s well that ends well, and since I was later able to earn good money from my plays and my own dealings in wool and land, I was able to help my father financially. This meant that by the time he died in 1601 he had spent the last ten years of his life in a quiet and comfortable fashion. My mother, Mary, died seven years later and, like my father, was buried in Stratford.

Now while much of what I’ve just told you was happening I was a schoolboy at the local King’s New School. Let me rest a moment, and then I’ll tell you how it was.

Chapter 2

Petty school

Those that do teach young babes

Do it with gentle means and easy tasks…

(Othello, IV. ii.)

School - who likes it? You probably don’t or didn’t but, if the truth be told, I had quite a good time, even though in my play, As You Like It, I wrote about the whining schoolboy,

…with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like a snail

Unwillingly to school.

My first school, or Petty school, as it was sometimes called – the word, petty, coming from the French word petit or small – was officially called the King’s New School. I started going there when I was about five years old and I had to attend for six days every week. The only day I didn’t go to school was Sunday. And of course, we didn’t attend school on holy days such as Christmas and Easter.

Before I started my school day at six in the morning, my mother would make me a bowl of pottage. This was a type of unsweetened porridge made up of oats, barley and vegetables, and sometimes there were bits of meat in it as well. This was supposed to fill me up until the lunch time break when I came home for my midday meal. Every day we had this two-hour break in the middle of the day, when I went home and my mother would feed me and the rest of the family.

We would usually eat beef unless it was a Wednesday, Friday or Saturday when we ate fish or poultry. This we had together with vegetables and then my mother would give us some fruit such as an apple or a pear.

Sometimes if I were still hungry, she would give me a lump of cheese and some bread. I also used to take some nuts to school and these I shared with my friends. And of course we washed all this food down with weak ale or sometimes red wine. No-one drank water as it was thought to be unhealthy and it could make you very sick. In fact, I remember when I was a young lad that some of our neighbours did drink some water which they thought was clean, but it wasn’t and two of them died as a result.

After lunch I would take my satchel and go back to school. Most of the pupils in my class were boys, although there were a few girls too. Later when I attended grammar school, there were no girls in my class at all. In those days it was considered a waste of time to teach girls subjects such as, Logic, Latin and Greek. Most girls of my age were taught