Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
John Shakespeare needed money. He needed it urgently enough by November 1578 to do what Elizabethan families dreaded and resisted doing: he sold and mortgaged property. And not just any property: in a few years’ time he disposed of virtually all of his wife’s inheritance. Piece by piece, in exchange for ready cash, the properties she brought to the marriage slipped through the fingers of her improvident husband. An interest in land in Snitterfield, where his father had farmed, was sold for four pounds; Asbies was let for a nominal rent, presumably in exchange for a payment up front; and in 1579 another house and fifty-six acres at Wilmcote were mortgaged for forty pounds to his wife’s brother-in-law, Edmund Lambert, of Barton-on-the-Heath. This cash evidently vanished quite quickly. When the borrowed money came due the next year, John was unable to repay it, and the property was lost. Years later, he twice sued to try to get the land back, claiming that he had in fact proffered payment, but the courts found for Lambert. All Will’s mother, Mary, had left of what she brought to the marriage was the Arden name.
The most striking glimpse of John Shakespeare’s financial situation is provided by evidence of the inquisitive eyes of the queen’s officers. The government was anxious to enforce religious uniformity. Though the queen had declared that she did not want to rip open each individual’s soul and inquire into private beliefs, she wanted to pressure as many of her subjects as she could to observe at least the outward forms of official Protestant belief. Once a month at a minimum, everyone was expected to attend Sunday services of the Church of England, services in which the Protestant Book of Common Prayer would be used and in which the ministers would deliver one of the homilies, or state-sponsored sermons, written by the central religious authorities. People who broke the law requiring regular church attendance were subject to fines and other punishments. The fines were relatively small and manageable until 1581; thereafter, in the wake of a systematic crackdown on religious dissidents, they became astronomical.
In the autumn of 1591 the government ordered the commissioners of every shire in the land to draw up a list of those who did not come monthly to church. John Shakespeare’s name turns up on the list prepared by the local officials, but in a category set apart by a note: “We suspect these nine persons next ensuing absent themselves for fear of processes.” Some months later the commissioners filed their report and reiterated the explanation: “It is said that these last nine come not to church for fear of process for debt.” If the explanation is accurate and not a cover for religious dissent, then the onetime bailiff of Stratford and justice of the peace was staying in his house on Sundays—and, presumably, many other days as well—to avoid arrest. The public man had become a very private man.
By 1591, when John Shakespeare was making himself scarce, his eldest son had almost certainly flown the coop: the next year he is first mentioned as a London playwright. But his father’s humiliating position was only the latest scene in a drama that had been long unfolding and that must have shaped Will’s entire adolescence. As he came of age, Will would have been keenly aware that something had gone seriously wrong. He could not have been indifferent to what he saw; his father’s standing in the world was sinking exactly at the time when he, the oldest son and heir, was about to emerge as an adult.
What was the cause of the decline? Then, as now, there were business cycles—the last decades of the sixteenth century were particularly difficult in the Midlands—and in hard times people are obviously less likely to purchase luxury goods like elegant gloves. But many prominent merchants in comparable situations weathered hard times and personal disasters. Another Stratford chamberlain, Abraham Sturley, lost his house in a fire that swept through several streets of the town on September 22, 1594, and never fully recovered financially, but he managed to keep his eldest son, Henry, at Oxford and to send his second son, Richard, to Oxford the next year. Another prominent Stratford citizen, William Parsons, lost his house in the same fire, but he too managed to send his son to Oxford and to serve as alderman and magistrate. John Shakespeare’s debts, mortgages, fines, and losses and his sudden and precipitous disappearance from public life suggest something more than the consequences of a cyclical downturn in the glove trade.
A far likelier cause was a sharp government crackdown on one of the key sources of his income. In the wake of wool shortages in the mid-1570s, the authorities decided that the fault lay with the “broggers,” men like John Shakespeare, who had already been twice denounced for illegal transactions. In October of 1576 the queen’s principal advisers, the Privy Council, ordered wool traders in for questioning; in November they temporarily suspended all wool trading; and in the following year they required all known wool broggers to post bonds of one hundred pounds—a very large sum—as a surety against any further illegal dealings. This was all terrible news for John Shakespeare.
Matters were made worse by another financial blow. In 1580 the Crown issued a long list of names—over two hundred—and demanded that everyone listed appear on a specified day in June at the Queen’s Bench in Westminster to be bound over to “keep the peace towards the queen and her subjects.” John Shakespeare’s name was on the list. “Binding over”—roughly equivalent to a restraining order—was a key low-level policing and crime-prevention method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Upon someone’s swearing an oath that he feared for his life or well-being or the well-being of the entire community, the court could issue an order requiring the suspected malefactor to appear in order to guarantee his good behavior and to post a bond—a surety—to this end. The surviving records do not reveal who swore an oath against John Shakespeare or why. Was it because of his wool brogging, or some drunken quarrel for which he had been denounced, or a suspicion that he held the wrong religious beliefs? He somehow managed to find four guarantors for his appearance, and he agreed reciprocally to serve as guarantor for one of them. But on the June date neither John nor his guarantors appeared—again their absence has never been explained—and they forfeited their money. John was fined twenty pounds for himself and twenty pounds for John Audley, the Nottingham hatmaker for whom he had agreed to pledge. In the wake of his other difficulties, this was money he could not spare.
The impact upon his family appears to have been severe. Unlike the sons of Sturley and Parsons, Will conspicuously did not go to Oxford, nor did John Shakespeare’s other sons. In the early eighteenth century the Shakespeare biographer and editor Nicholas Rowe wrote that John Shakespeare sent his eldest son to the Stratford grammar school, where he learned some Latin, “but the narrowness of his Circumstances, and the want of his assistance at Home, forc’d his Father to withdraw him from thence, and unhappily prevented his further Proficiency in that Language.” Rowe believed, incorrectly, that John Shakespeare had had ten children, and the rest of the account may be equally incorrect. But the story of the son’s being taken out of school in order to help at home would certainly be consistent with the documented financial straits of the late 1570s. At a certain point it may have seemed an absurd luxury to have his eldest son parsing Latin sentences.
“My father charged you in his will to give me good education,” Orlando complains to his wicked brother in the pastoral comedy As You Like It. “You have trained me like a peasant, obscuring and hiding from me all gentleman-like qualities” (1.1.56–59). A good education marked the difference between a gentleman and a peasant. And yet Shakespeare did not, from all appearances, harbor any regrets about failing to attend Oxford or Cambridge; he did not show signs of a frustrated vocation as a scholar. For that matter, nothing in his works suggests any very sentimental feeling about school: Jaques’ vision in the same comedy of “the whining schoolboy with his satchel / And shining morning face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school” does not convey nostalgia for a lost happiness (2.7.144–46). Nor does the scene of Latin instruction in The Merry Wives of Windsor, a scene that must have come quite close to Shakespeare’s own direct memories of the King’s New School. “My husband says my son profi
EVANS: What is “lapis,” William?
WILLIAM: A stone.
EVANS: And what is “a stone,” William?
WILLIAM: A pebble.
EVANS: No, it is “lapis.” I pray you remember in your prain.
WILLIAM: “Lapis.”
EVANS: That is a good William.
(4.1.11–12, 26–32)
The tedium of rote learning is deftly recalled, as is the punning—preferably, obscene punning—that must have been the schoolboy Shakespeare’s principal psychic relief from this tedium. This language lesson manages to turn the genitive into the genitals and to make us hear the word “whore” in the Latin for “this”:
EVANS: What is your genitive case plural, William?
WILLIAM: Genitive case?
EVANS: Ay.
WILLIAM: Genitivo: “horum, harum, horum.”
MISTRESS QUICKLY: Vengeance of Jenny’s case! Fie on her! Never name her, child, if she be a whore.
(4.1.49–54)
These dirty jokes surfaced in abundance whenever Shakespeare gave a thought to Latin lessons or indeed to any language lessons at all. “Comment appelez-vous les pieds et la robe?” asks the French princess in Henry V, trying to learn the English words “feet” and “gown.” Her tutor’s reply discombobulates her: “De foot, madame, et de cown.” In “foot” she and the audience (or at least the members of the audience in on the joke) hear the French word foutre, “fuck,” and in the slightly mangled pronunciation of “gown” she hears con, “cunt.”
CATHERINE: De foot et de cown? O Seigneur Dieu! Ils sont les mots de son mauvais, corruptible, gros, et impudique, et non pour les dames d’honneur d’user. [O Lord God! Those are evil-sounding words, easily misconstrued, vulgar, and immodest, and not for respectable ladies to use.]
(3.4.44–49)
If this stuff is not, in truth, infinitely amusing, it still can generate chuckles after four hundred years, and it would have served to lighten the burden of an exceedingly long school day. But it is certainly not the glimpse of a lost vocation. Ben Jonson wrote scholarly footnotes to his Roman plays and his classicizing masques; Shakespeare laughed and scribbled obscenities.
The end of his formal schooling must have meant more time for Will in the glove trade, getting to know the qualities of cheverel and deerskin. All the Shakespeare children probably helped in the family business. But after the late 1570s, there may not have been much of a business left to help in. Will’s younger brother Gilbert, born in 1566, is described in town records as a “haberdasher,” and Edmund, born in 1580, followed Will to London and became an actor. No records survive of how a third brother, Richard, born in 1574, spent his almost forty years of life. He too probably did not become a glover; if he had something to do with the father’s business, and certainly if he had been a success at it, he is likely to have left a trace.
It often happens, Hamlet tells Horatio, that there is “some vicious mole of nature” in men (1.4.18.8), some inborn propensity or weakness, that ruins what would otherwise be an altogether admirable life. The particular fault on which Hamlet focuses his brooding attention is heavy drinking, a Danish national custom, he says, “More honoured in the breach than the observance” (1.4.18). Other nations call us drunkards, Hamlet complains, and with this charge sully our reputation:
and indeed it takes
From our achievements, though performed at height,
The pith and marrow of our attribute.
(1.4.18.4–6)
Hamlet’s extended meditation on this fault makes for a rather strange passage—extraordinarily intense, as if the thoughts were forcing themselves into speech, but at the same time oddly irrelevant, since his crafty, calculating uncle and his confederates are not elsewhere in the tragedy notably depicted as drunkards. One of the texts of Hamlet simply cuts the lines, as if they represented a false start, an idea Shakespeare decided not to pursue.
Is this a further clue to the cause of the father’s decline? Did the man who served in 1556 as the borough ale-taster drink himself into deep personal trouble? In the mid-seventeenth century, when the public began to be curious about the life of their greatest playwright, Thomas Plume, archdeacon of Rochester, jotted down something he had been told about the Stratford glover, “a merry-cheeked old man” whom someone had seen once in his shop and questioned about his celebrated son. “Will was a good Honest Fellow,” the father is said to have replied and then added, as if he had been challenged, “but [I] durst have cracked a jest with him at any time.” The anecdote comes too late to be reliable as an eyewitness account, but does it contain a trace of the actual person, genial, good-natured, at once proud of his son and a touch competitive with him, and, possibly, “merry-cheeked” from something more than good humor or advancing age?
Throughout his career, Shakespeare kept thinking about drunkenness. He registered the disgust eloquently voiced by Hamlet. But he was also fascinated by the delicious foolishness, the exuberant cracking of jests, the amiable nonsense, the indifference to decorum, the flashes of insight, the magical erasure of the cares of the world. Even when he depicts the potentially disastrous consequences of alcohol, Shakespeare never adopts the tone of a temperance tract, and in Twelfth Night the drunk and disorderly Sir Toby Belch delivers the decisive put-down of the puritanical Malvolio: “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2.3.103–4). In a luminous scene in one of the greatest of the tragedies, Antony and Cleopatra, the rulers of the world become soused, join hands, and dance “the Egyptian bacchanals” (2.7.98). Even grave, calculating Caesar is caught up, against his will, in the muddle-headed revelry: “It’s monstrous labour when I wash my brain, / An it grow fouler.” “Gentle lords, let’s part,” he says, looking at the faces of those about him and feeling his own flushed face. “You see we have burnt our cheeks” (2.7.92–93, 116–17).
If Caesar’s cold sobriety marks him as likely to prevail in the struggle for power, it also marks him as far less appealing than the riotous, great-spirited Antony. True nobility in Antony and Cleopatra—nobility not of blood alone but of character—has an affinity with excess, a perception that extends to many of Shakespeare’s plays and carries the force of a conclusion drawn from life. John Shakespeare may have never seemed more like a nobleman to his observant, imaginative child than when he was in his cups, his cheeks burning.
But heavy drinking is associated in the plays with clowns, buffoons, and losers as well as kings. And an early play, The Taming of the Shrew, brings drunkenness literally close to home in the figure of Christopher Sly, who is noisy, impotently belligerent, and entirely unwilling to pay for the glasses he has broken. When the tavern hostess calls him a rogue and threatens to call the constable, the drunken beggar grandly stands on his family honor—“The Slys are no rogues. Look in the Chronicles—we came in with Richard Conqueror” (Induction 1, lines 3–4)—and then promptly falls asleep. A few moments later, a nobleman decides to trick the beggar into thinking he is a lord, and the baffled Sly clutches at a more homely sense of his identity: “What, would you make me mad? Am not I Christopher Sly—old Sly’s son of Burton Heath, by birth a pedlar, by education a cardmaker, by transmutation a bearherd, and now by present profession a tinker? Ask Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, if she know me not.” (Induction 2, lines 16–20).
Shakespeare wrote this comedy shortly after he moved to London, and it bears vivid traces of the district around Stratford: Barton-on-the-Heath, where his cousins the Lamberts lived; Wincot, where dwelled a Hacket family he probably knew; perhaps Sly himself, since there was a Stephen Sly living in Stratford. It must have amused Shakespeare, in a quiet, private way, to introduce these familiar details onto the urban stage in order to give a realistic air to his depiction of rustic folly. Perhaps,
Shakespeare’s greatest representation of drunkenness is Sir John Falstaff, the grotesquely fat knight whose reiterated call for a white wine imported from Spain and the Canaries serves virtually as his motto: “Give me a cup of sack.” In the second part of Henry IV, Falstaff delivers an ecstatic rhapsody to the virtues of “sherry-sack”—that is, sack from Jerez, in Andalusia—a mock-scientific analysis of its power to inflame both wit and courage:
A good sherry-sack hath a two-fold operation in it. It ascends me into the brain, dries me there all the foolish and dull and crudy vapours which environ it, makes it apprehensive, quick, forgetive, full of nimble, fiery, and delectable shapes, which, delivered o’er to the voice, the tongue, which is the birth, becomes excellent wit. The second property of your excellent sherry is the warming of the blood, which, before cold and settled, left the liver white and pale, which is the badge of pusillanimity and cowardice. But the sherry warms it, and makes it course from the inwards to the parts’ extremes; it illuminateth the face, which, as a beacon, gives warning to all the rest of this little kingdom, man, to arm; and then the vital commoners and inland petty spirits muster me all to their captain, the heart; who, great and puffed up with his retinue, doth any deed of courage. And this valour comes of sherry. (4.2.86–101)