Shakespeare: A Life (37 page)

though Harry cheers up neither man nor devil in the night. What we
read in a text of Henry Vis not what we usually hear and see on stage,
or in the heroic films of Laurence Olivier ( 1944) or Kenneth Branagh
( 1989), though Branagh's Henry at least watches as Bardolph is
hanged. A modern editor notices that the King lies to his troops about
brotherhood, that he cannot be honest with anyone, and that after a
doubtfully just war he claims the French princess in a kind of
diplomatic rape.
²³

Written when the Chamberlain's men were short of funds and in other
difficulty, Henry V reveals patchwork composing or, at least,
uncertain revision. Shakespeare's trouble with Hal, in any case,
appears in no fewer than three plays. However, Henry V might testify
to the value of external and conceptual difficulties in his career, for
he depicts the politician and military hero at last in an exciting
drama of action, in which the ambiguities perhaps are not fully
realizable on a stage.
Harry
may be nobly perfect and likeable,
or a kind of sullen, political chunk of ice who is false with
everyone, but he is certainly heroic; and just as Richard II is hard
for actors to get right, so Henry V seems nearly impossible for them
to get wrong. The gusto, humour, and sureness in Falstaff's portrayal
are the more effective because ironically he is a test of truth in 1
and 2 Henry IV, but in Henry Vthere is no such standard, and the
pragmatic Harry suggests the author's deep uneasiness with political
heroism and with a nation's barbarity in war.

As it turned out, Falstaff caused some unexpected trouble. At first
in Henry IV Shakespeare had called him 'Sir John Oldcastle' after the
Protestant hero and Lollard martyr. Descendants of Oldcastle's widow
including Henry Brooke, the eighth Lord Cobham, must have protested,
and the clown's name was changed to Falstaff. In 2 Henry IV the
Epilogue cats humble pie to say that Falstaff might 'die of a sweat',
but 'Oldcastle died a martyr, and this is not the man'. With the
clown's new name in place, 1 Henry IV was published in quarto in 1598
and reprinted more often, in the next twenty-five years, than any other
Shakespeare play. Immensely popular, Falstaff thrived even in private
theatricals. At Surrenden in Kent, Sir Edward Dering went so far as to
abridge the two parts of Henry IV, link them with a few original
verses,

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and arrange for the revamped work's staging by his relatives, friends,
and 'Jacke of the buttery' a year before the first Folio.
²⁴

Long before that, Falstaff had featured in The Merry Wives of Windsor,
in which the great clown purges a provincial town of folly at the
price of losing his skill at evading blame. The comedy is a strong one
with its roots in old, suggestive folk-myths of social purgation. The
text was written in a mere two weeks at the Queen's command,
according to a legend fostered in 1702 by John Dennis, who had a
financial stake in The Comical Gallant, his revision of The Merry Wives.
Seven years later Dennis's legend was embellished when Rowe added
the detail that the Queen had asked Shakespeare to show Falstaff in
love. Falstaff is not in love, just broke, and hopes with identical
loveletters to seduce both Mistress Page and Mistress Ford and so live
off both. Unfortunately, he lacks a photocopier. 'I warrant', says
Mistress Page, 'he hath a thousand of these letters, writ with blank
space for different names -- sure, more, and these are of the second
edition. He will print them out of doubt -- for he cares not what he
puts into the press when he would put us two' (11. i. 71-6). Not many
Tudor country folk talked so readily of printing and the press. The
comedy was written for an urban audience, and, no doubt, too, for a
royal occasion. Posing as the Fairy Queen in Act V, Mistress Quickly
alludes to ' Windsor Castle'and to the Order of the Garter. It has
been argued that the play was staged at the royal Garter Feast at
Whitehall Palace, Westminster, on St George's Day, 23 April 1597. For
the first time in four years, knights were then elected to the Order
of the Garter, and invested in St George's Chapel, Windsor, a few
weeks later. Still, there is no proof that The Merry Wives was acted
then, and it could have had a court debut as late as the winter of
1597-8.
²⁵

Does the author take revenge on Henry Brooke, Lord Cobham by letting
jealous Ford assume the name ' Brooke' in negotiating with Falstaff?
The name
Brooke
in the play was altered to
Broome
, in
any case. Shakespeare glances at a real Frederick, Count Mömpelgard,
later duke of Württemberg, whom the Queen had pledged to elect as a
Garter Knight. From the German states Mömpelgard was sending letters
about a missing Garter. Thus Bardolph, out beyond Eton, spies 'three
German devils, three Doctor Faustuses', but it is left to the

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French physician Dr Caius to demolish foreign pretensions. 'It is tella
me', says Caius to the Garter Inn's host, 'dat you make grand
preparation for a duke de Jamany. By my trot, der is no duke that the
court is know to come' ( Merry Wives, IV. v. 65, 80-2).
²⁶

Shakespeare did not always mock 'Jamany', and would send Hamlet to one
of the German universities most favoured by the Danes. The heroine and
her brother are called 'Anne' and 'William', as if the author had in
mind two persons of the distant past. A sighing, wistful Slender,
missing his book of Songs and Sonnets, describes the pretty heroine as
well as he can. 'She has brown hair and speaks small like a woman',
he says of Anne Page; we don't know whether that is a clue to the
colour of Anne Shakespeare's hair. Slender manages to lose Anne for
good in this very funny comedy, the only one the author ever set in an
Elizabethan town.

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She has a housewife's hand -- but that's no matter. (Rosalind,
As You Like It
)

In these years, the poet who supplied repertory with works as effective as
Romeo and Juliet
, the
Dream
, and
Henry IV
did not hang up his hat after morning rehearsals. He appeared on the
stage himself, and with his writing, rehearsing, acting, planning with
his fellows, and vetting of scripts he was very unlikely to leave
London often. His income was substantial by 1596. As a matter of
record ' William Shackspere' was one of the seventy-three rateable
residents at St Helen's parish that October, but since he forgot or
neglected by the next February to pay his tax -- just 5s. on goods
valued at £5 -- the Petty Collectors of Bishopsgate ward sent his name
to the Exchequer. No doubt the low assessment of £5 was simply
nominal. Sharers in the Admiral's Servants were earning about £1 a
week (perhaps the equivalent of £500 or more in London at the end of the
twentieth century). This was four times the fixed wage of a skilled
city worker, and his income would have been between £100 and £160 a
year from all sources by the end of the reign. Few of his schoolmates
ever earned so much.

There is no
evidence that he spent money on London property until near the end of
his life, but there is every sign that he was concerned to establish
himself respectably at Stratford. His wife, his two daughters, and his
small son Hamnet awaited him there in 1596. John Aubrey twice records
that Shakespeare went into Warwickshire 'once

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a yeare', and there is a good tradition that he favoured summer visits
when the city's theatres might be shut. On 22 July, an outbreak of
plague had closed all of the suburban theatres. This was a hard,
miserable, testing time, since Lord Hunsdon died at Somerset House
next day; and later the old lord's cortège was followed (as one
manuscript account puts it) by large numbers of yeomen in 'black
coates'.
¹
So the Chamberlain's men lost their patron. His successor, in the
chamberlaincy, the seventh Lord Cobham, was less partial to the public
theatre, indeed he was descended from the Oldcastle who is mocked in
Henry IV
;
but for other reasons there was a danger now, if not a likelihood,
that he might collude with the Lord Mayor against the playhouses.
²

Sponsored by their former patron's son, the Chamberlain's men became
Lord Hunsdon's Servants. When they toured after 22 July in Kent,
Shakespeare apparently had a chance to return home, and he was to be
in Stratford well before he bought a house there. What would he have
found as he crossed Clopton's bridge, and went up beside Middle Row at
last into Henley Street?

Stratford
was feeling the effects of harvest failure -- and of two serious local
fires. One saw charred timbers and ruined barns. Though houses and
shops in the main streets were usually tiled, on 22 September 1594 and
again in the following September the flames had leapt to street
frontages. Leather fire-buckets, ladders, and fire-hooks to pull down
burning thatch had not saved many dwellings, and it was said that
damage and loss of property and goods amounted to £12,000. The second
fire had reached the Henley Street tenements of Cox and Cawdrey --
though John Shakespeare's double house was spared. Funds had poured in
from nearby shires, and the city of Oxford, for instance, had sent
'tenne shillings towards the relief of those that had their howses
burnt'.
³

William Shakespeare, in his will, left twenty times that amount to
Stratford's poor -- a generous bequest. In his expenditures he ran a
tight ship, but he was not simply tight-fisted, obsessed with land, or

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harsh with debtors. A man of his means recovered debts through
Stratford's Court of Record with its jurisdiction over sums up to £30,
and we know that he took local debtors to court just twice -- once to
get Philip Rogers the apothecary to pay for twenty bushels of malt plus
a borrowed sum in 1604, and again to recover a debt of £6, plus
damages, from John Addenbrooke in 1608. This may be the Addenbrooke who
speculated on land rights at Tanworth, near Henley, or the one who
sold starch licences at Warwick, but he lived within the borough.

Apart from rebuilding in the High, Stratford was much as it was in
the poet's youth. Time moved slowly here, and the townspeople were in
touch with their communal past. The council still met regularly at the
Gild hall's annexe, outside which the public sweeper ' Lame Margaret'
had at last given way to old 'Mother Ashfield'. Margaret Smith had
long since lost her full name, to be called Lame Margaret as if she
were an animal, but the burgesses had admitted her to an almshouse. In
succession she and Mother Ashfield swept the channel of a small,
often noxious, stream as it crossed the road from Tinkers Lane to
Chapel Lane at New Place, which the poet was to buy. It is likely that
he knew their old, coarsened or reddened faces.
⁴
From his viewpoint many women in the town might have been younger
versions of Lame Margaret, valued for childbearing or hard work.

At his parent's house on Henley Street, there was incessant work for
women to do. In any home there was wool to card, after it had been
treated with swine's grease, and spinning to do, with the spinner
leaning forward over her work. There would be netting for coverlets and
curtains, and sewing for most garments worn indoors or out, as well
as weaving hats and baskets, and candle-making with kettles of boiling
water and melted tallow for wicks.

Even a poet had to rely on quills from some source. A stocking was
pulled over a goose's head and down would fly everywhere as quills
were plucked. Shakespeare's wife Anne would have known comparable tasks,
even if she had servants. This summer she was nearly 40. Hard work
etches lines in a face and colours the hands. 'I saw her hand', says
Rosalind in
As You Like It
, as she mocks a love-letter from Phoebe the shepherd-girl,

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She has a leathern hand, A free-stone coloured hand. I verily did
think That her old gloves were on; but 'twas her hands. She has a
housewife's hand. ( IV.iii. 25-8)

But there is sympathy for the plight of rural women in several of
Rosalind's remarks: 'Maids are May when they are maids', Shakespeare
writes for that heroine, 'but the sky changes when they are wives'
(IV. i. 140-1). Along with his wife Anne, he of course found his ageing
parents at Henley Street. In this same year, he apparently ensured
that his father John had a grant of arms from the Heralds' College.
Two surviving drafts of the grant suggest it was Shakespeare who sat
with the heralds in London to supply data and pay fees. His father was
optimistically declared to be worth £500, and there was comic trouble
with the family motto (which the poet never used). A clerk jotted it
as 'non, sanz droict' and then as 'Non, Sanz Droict' and finally in
capitals without the comma as 'NON SANZ DROICT', meaning 'Not without
right'. Supposedly this later incited Ben Jonson in
Every Man Out of his Humour
to have the clown Sogliardo (who pays £30 for arms) mocked and
deflated by a motto suggested to him, 'Not without Mustard', a pnhrase
which Jonson lifts from Nashe.
⁵

At any rate, John Shakespeare and his offspring were granted for all time a shield or arms showing:

Gould. on A Bend Sables. a Speare of the first steeled argent. And for
his Creast or Cognizance a falcon his winges displayed Argent.
standing on a wrethe of his Collors. supp [MS torn] A Speare Gould
steeled as aforesaid sett vppo
n
a helmett with mantell & tassel

[Gould, on a bend sables, a spear of the first steeled argent, and for
his crest or cognizance a falcon, his wings displayed argent, standing
on a wreath of his colours, supporting a spear gold, steeled as
aforesaid, set upon a helmet with mantles and tassels
⁶

A sketch of this fairly simple trick of arms appears in the upper
lefthand corner of both drafts of the grant made at the Heralds' College
in 1596. Three years later, John gained the right to impale his arms
with those of Arden, his wife's family, as C. W. Scott-Giles points
out,

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