Shakespeare: A Life (42 page)

had held too much malt, but he may not have been so rash again (it
was only after good harvests that he sold twenty bushels to his
neighbour Rogers). The Queen's Council called grain speculators
'wolves', and by coincidence Sturley echoed that in a newsy, worried
letter: 'Man is a god to man, man is a wolf to man', he told Quincy in
Latin.
²⁸
It is only a myth of modern biography that Shakespeare closely
befriended either alderman (who can refer to him with distant respect,
even as they try to use him), but, then, he may have been amused
enough to draw hints from both in his work.

Late in 1598 Quincy was back in London. He and Sturley, over the past
few years, had consoled each other, rather as Antonio is consoled in
The Merchant of Venice
,
and as profiteering aldermen they had reason to be wary (since their
exposure as grain speculators back in 1595). 'Farewell, my dear
heart', Sturley salutes his friend this autumn, 'and the Lord increase
our loves and comforts one to another.'
²⁹
In fact, both aldermen were then in debt, and Sturley's standing with
a moneylender was in peril. In January he had told Quincy that he was
'left I assure you in the greatest need of £30 that possibly may be',
for he had borrowed £80 from the moneylender and relied on Quincy to
get £40 of the repayment deferred for six months. Now on 16 October,
things were worse: a bond for £100 was due for repayment in six weeks,
and to meet other creditors Sturley urgently needed £25, which he
hoped Quincy's 'good labour' could procure.
³⁰
But Quincy needed money as well, and a few days later at the Bell inn
on Carter Lane, he penned a famous letter to Shakespeare.

It is a hurried letter, but Quincy mentions Thomas Bushell, Richard
Mytton, and Peter Roswell, who were all in the service of Stratford's
lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville. The poet's brother Gilbert had
dealings with two of them, as we recall, and Quincy now proposes
Bushell and Mytton as sureties for a loan. 'Loving Countryman', he
writes to Shakespeare on 25 October, 'I am bold of you as of a friend,
craving your help with £30 upon Mr Bushell's and my security, or Mr
Mytton's with me. Mr Roswell is not come to London as yet, and I have
especial cause.' Since Quincy was ostensibly in the city on town
business, he hoped to get expense money from Sir Edward's agent
Roswell, but the agent has not appeared. 'You shall friend me

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much in helping me out of all the debts I owe in London', Quiney assures Shakespeare.

I thank God & much quiet my mind which would not be indebted. I am
now towards the Court in hope of answer for the despatch of my
business. You shall neither lose credit nor money by me the Lord
willing, & now but persuade yourself so as I hope, and you shall not
need to fear. But with all hearty thankfulness I will hold my time
& content your friend, & if we bargain further you shall be
the paymaster yourself.

Probably the poet was not being asked for his own funds, but for help
with a money-dealer who would tend £30, and indeed this is suggested in
a note Quiney received a few days later from Sturley, who, then, was
glad to hear that 'our countryman Mr Wm Shak[speare] would procure us
money, which I will like of as I shall hear when, where, and how'.
Moneylending at up to 10 per cent interest was then permissible, but
less than respectable, and risky if not professionally managed. Still,
what is a little odd about Quincy's letter is a dark undercurrent of
inexplicit, half-suppressed worry or anxiety, and he concludes in a
rush:

My time bids me
hasten to an end, and so I commit this [to] your care & hope of
your help. I fear I shall not be back this night from the Court. Haste.
The Lord be with you & with us all, Amen. From the Bell in Carter
Lane the 25 October 1598.

Yours in all kindness Ryc. Quyney

Quiney folded, sealed, and addressed this 'To my Loving good friend & countryman M
^r
W
^m
Shackespere deliver these'. The letter perhaps was not sent, unless
the poet returned it with a reply, but Quiney made some contact with
him that day. Back at Stratford, his father had got wind that an
approach to the poet was being made, and sent a note to advise his son
to buy knit stockings for resale at home, if 'you bargain with W
^m
Sha[kespeare] or receive money there'.
³¹
The son may have bought the stockings, but he was disturbed not to
see his lord's agent, Roswell, and he was soon to know the open
hostility of the lord of the manor, Sir Edward Greville -- whose men
were to crack Quiney's skull.

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Lately, Shakespeare's own relations with Stratford had changed. He
was a householder, at last, in his mid-thirties, among citizens almost
driven to barn-burning or worse. Did his eighty bushels trouble him
after February? He was likely to sympathize at first with local
maltsters, but a prospect of civic rebellion worried townsmen he knew.
One intuits that Shakespeare feared a threat of social dissolution with
an increase in violence and a fading of the notion of responsible
community. His last series of happy comedies, from
As You Like It
to
Twelfth Night
,
might be a good bulwark against his disenchantment; but in view of his
own hoarding, in a time of famine and miserable deaths, he perhaps had,
on reflection, some very prime, ugly evidence of man's callous, cold
social indifference in modern times.

As You Like It
-- Shakespeare's happiest play -- was composed not long after Richard
Quiney had asked for the poet's help in London. Most likely the
comedy was written after its author's thirty-fifth birthday, in 1599;
it was registered on 4 August 1600. Though it has a relation to
problems that involve Quiney, the Grevilles, Stratford, and the Arden
forest, the play was not meant to advertise injustice in the English
Midlands. As an exuberant comedy it suggests its author's sanguine
temperament. Its manner reveals his delight in pastoral romance and in
Sidney's nuances of tone in the
Arcadia
, even as its romantic
setting flatters the rural nostalgia of Londoners. On a May Day
milkmaids paraded in London's streets with pails, and maypoles and
morris dancers suggested a yearning for a 'golden' rural world.
³²
Aching with love for Orlando, Rosalind dominates her milieu in
disguise as the boy Ganymede. She avoids the worst complications of
passion, wittily educates a Petrarchan lover (who carves her name on
trees), and orchestrates a plot which ends in four marriages and her
own Epilogue. The plot nevertheless relates to a malaise of brutality,
alienation, and injustice, so that one's enquiries turn after all to the
Midlands. To what extent might Quincy's difficulties bear on the
poet's attitudes in this play and later?

On the very day he negotiated with Shakespeare, Quiney, in

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October 1598, as it appears, was trying to gain benefits for his town.
Keeping up that pursuit in the city, he was fretful, but he had word
from a loving fellow alderman. Sturley told him in November to give
half
of anything he could get from the Queen's authorities for the
Stratford Corporation to Sir Edward Greville, lest 'he shall think it
too good for us and procure it himself'.
³³
Sir Edward had a sense of his legal, well-protected power, which John
Shakespeare, the Quineys, Sturley, and others who served at 'halls'
well understood.

For the town, after
all, had an odd status. Despite its corporate charter, Elizabethan
Stratford had kept a few features of an old manorial borough, subject to
a manorial lord; yet no prior lord had had the greed of Sir Edward,
who lived south-west of the town at Milcotewhich he had inherited after
his father, Lodowick, was executed for killing a tenant. Sir Edward's
aggression became more overt a few years after
As You Like It
was written, as when he claimed Stratford's toll corn or corn tax, and
enclosed the meadowy Bancroft at the River Avon with hedges. (The
Bancroft was a common where townsmen grazed cows, sheep, or a few pigs
if they were ringed.) Quiney, with others, tore up the lord's hedges
in disgust. Sir Edward responded with a lawsuit, and then vowed to win
'by the sword'.

A prophetic claim.
Having opposed Quiney's elevation to the bailiwick, Sir Edward relied on
bullying tactics with the help of a steward. But it was on a May
night, some months after his second election as Stratford's High
Bailiff, that Quiney was struck down. Having entered a house full of
Sir Edward's men who were taunting its owner in a 'hurly burly' of
shouts, the bailiff, as it was noted, 'in his endeavour to still the
brawl had his head grievously broken'.
³⁴
Perhaps his skull was fractured. Richard Quiney certainly made no
legal will; the only Stratford bailiff to be killed in office, he died
a few weeks later and was buried at Holy Trinity on 31 May 1602. He
left behind his widow, and nine children all under the age of 20:
Elizabeth, Adrian, Richard, Thomas, Anne, William, Mary, John, and
George. (It was his third son, Thomas, who later became a vintner and
married Shakespeare's daughter Judith.)

The brutal death of a Stratford bailiff was not lost on Shakespeare,
and helps to account for a deepening social pessimism in his writing.

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Plays such as
Troilus and Cressida
and
Timon of Athens
are not uninfluenced by the violence and anarchy he knew in the town
where Anne, Susanna, and Judith had to live. It is also significant
that (as the Sonnets suggest) he could take his own deficiencies as
subject-matter, and find elements of a community's failures in his own
egoism, obtuseness, or inconsistencies as these appeared to him. It
would be foolish to impose any fancied limit on Shakespeare's
reactions to experience, or to say that as a mature artist he learned
only or mainly from books, or to suppose that the two deaths linked
with New Place, or the killing of Quiney, had nothing to do with his
attitude to tragedy. It is not clear that his reactions to individuals
were ever simple; he may not have been horrified even by Sir Edward
Greville, as rapacious as that figure was, and Gilbert Shakespeare's
connection with two of Sir Edward's men is on record. But the
disintegration of order at Stratford would have seemed to Shakespeare,
at times, bitter and irreversible. In the late 1590s, Quiney's
problems with a manorial lord had precedents; the poet's father and
old Adrian together once had tried to wrestle privileges for the town
from its former lord, the Earl of Warwick, and Adrian was aware of his
son's efforts and worries around 1598.

By that year, too, rapaciousness was not limited to Greville's
domain. North of the town was the scrubby, wooded Arden where Sir
Edward's cousin -- Sir Fulke Greville -- without warrant denuded large
tracts of their trees. This struck at the landless poor, or at
squatters depending on wood for fuel, even as landowners enclosed Arden
fields once cultivated by their tenants. Enclosure drove some to
vagrancy, and those left behind faced hunger and destitution. In the
real 'Forest of Arden' there was a high incidence of infant mortality;
and many of its thin, flat-breasted women later stopped ovulating.
Protesters troubled the authorities, of course, but a rebellion against
land enclosures -- led by Bartholomew Steer in 1596 -- had sputtered
out even before its leader was executed.
³⁵

In a folk-tale context,
As You Like It
does include the bleakest evil. The usurper Duke Frederick, it seems,
after seizing his brother's lands has driven a good 'Duke Senior' and
retinue into exile. Oppressed by his elder brother Oliver who makes
him eat with the hogs, Orlando

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asserts his rights, whereupon Oliver arranges with the tyrant's
wrestler to have his brother's neck broken. To be sure, Orlando
defeats the killer-wrestler and at once falls idealizingly in love
with Rosalind, as she does with him.

In her self-confidence and nerve, the heroine steps out of Thomas Lodge's rather gory romance
Rosalynde
or
Euphues Golden Legacy
( 1590), the play's main source. Shakespeare softens Lodge's violence, but he develops
Rosalynde
's
theme of the difference between gifts of fortune which do not matter,
and gifts of human nature which do. Disguised in the greenwood,
Rosalind speaks and acts as a man, while keeping the privilege of
feeling as a woman, and the playwright sets psychological realism in
tension with a delightful mock-pastoralism which includes sudden love,
comic episodes, exuberant rhetoric, and five songs -- more songs than
in any of his earlier plays. Myths of a 'golden age' are offset not
only by Touchstone, but by Jaques, who in his Seven Ages of Man speech
saves his very worst for old age. 'Last scene of all', Jaques offers
with sombre smartness,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

(II. vii. 163-6)

That might be a parody of the satiric mode of Jonson and Marston in
the late 1590s: and Jaques's cynicism is punctured by the entry of the
servant Adam, who, at 80, is defeated only by hunger and knows of
'unregarded age in corners thrown'.

Yet here Shakespeare does not emphasize social issues. Lodge had
imagined a 'Forest of Arden', and in the play the dramatist's Forest of
Arden is a timeless place of random encounters, mainly happy debates
and recollection. The word 'Arden' itself has a relation to the French
Ardennes, to the Warwickshire Arden, and perhaps to the author's
youth if he once heard folk-tales from the lips of Robert Arden's
daughter. In the play's Arden the reality of death is not quite absent,
and Touchstone is the first of the playwright's fools to have learned
from death. 'But as all is mortal in nature', he tells Rosalind, 'so
is all nature in love mortal in folly.' Shakespeare, nevertheless,
evokes the dead poet Marlowe diffidently, or, perhaps, as a 'private
rite of

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