Shakespeare's Wife (25 page)

Ann would have nursed her boy in his final illness, and when it was over, closed his eyes and prepared him for burial. Her gossips would have come to help her wash the loved body, wind it in its clean white linen shroud with aromatic herbs tucked into it, and then watch by it until the time came to carry it to the churchyard. As a godparent,
Judith Sadler would certainly have been there to support the bereaved mother. Six of Judith's children had died; five of them lived less than forty days, and, as they were buried before she had been churched, she could not attend their funerals. She would have followed John, her second son to bear that name, when he was buried at the age of six months. Isabel Hathaway too had lost at least one newborn child. Losing even a newborn was painful, but to lose an eleven-year-old was immeasurably worse.

There would have been no need for a bier, and coffins were a luxury demanded by few. Hamnet was probably carried on a board or table-top by his uncles or his godfather Hamnet Sadler. As Shakespeare was almost certainly not there, it was probably Ann who followed behind as chief mourner, unless John and Mary Shakespeare took that role. If Susanna and Judith had been judged old enough to participate in the ceremony, they would have walked with their mother, but if the grief of either had been judged immoderate, she would have waited at home with one or other relative until the funeral party returned. Hysterical outbursts at the graveside were to be avoided. The funerals of ordinary Elizabethans did not require togging up in black crape or cypress; the mourners would have worn their everyday clothes. Ann's habitual wear, her gown of grey russet, her headcloth and hat were nun-like enough.

More important than the arrival of distant kin to attend the short ceremony was the respect of neighbours for Goodwife Shakespeare and her family. As the procession wound its way to Holy Trinity the citizens who cared would have downed their tools and removed their caps; some would have taken off their aprons, and joined the mourners. Even though the Shakespeare family was losing the son of a son and heir they did nothing to make Hamnet's funeral special: nothing was paid for the use of the pall, or for the tolling of the bell. Once he was buried, the mourners would have returned to Ann's house, where Susanna and Judith would have served them with the traditional funeral baked meats. If she could have afforded it, Ann would have given a dole of a penny or two to each of the other mourners.

A good deal has been written about the impact of child death on parents of previous generations. For years people thought that, because child death was so common, parents were inured to it. Then
came the revelation that child loss was the commonest cause of mental illness and emotional disturbance among the patients of the seventeenth-century physician Richard Napier.
²⁵
People who believe that Shakespeare cared nothing for his wife because they can find no trace of intimacy between them ought also to register that they can find no sign of grief at the extinction of his little boy. Ben Jonson has left us poems on the deaths of a son and of a daughter.
²⁶
Sir John Beaumont wrote beautifully on the death of his son.
²⁷
Shakespeare may have remained silent not because he cared less, but because he cared more. Ann would certainly have cared; indeed her grief may have been terrible to behold. It would not have been the first time Shakespeare witnessed the anguish of the bereaved mother. When his sister Ann was buried on 4 April 1579, six months short of her eighth birthday, Will was almost fifteen, of an age to be intensely aware of his mother's grief, however stoically she might have borne it.

Scholars cannot agree when Shakespeare wrote
King John
. Because it is audacious and experimental they tend to place it early in his writing career, about 1590. Others have tried to connect it to 1596, the year of Hamnet's death, and still others anywhere in between. The play is remarkable for many reasons, not least the portrayal of the relationship between eight-year-old Arthur, Prince of Britain, and his mother Constance. More telling than Constance's frantic raving is the extraordinary scene in which Arthur dies. He is alone on the upper stage, on the walls of the castle. The audience learns that it is his intention to jump down, and, if he survives the fall, to run away.

 

I am afraid and yet I'll venture it.

If I get down, and do not break my limbs,

I'll find a thousand shifts to get away.

As good to die and go, as die and stay.

 

Which no sooner said the boy leaps off the wall and lies still. He stirs only to utter his
consummatum est
:

O me. My uncle's spirit is in these stones.

Heaven take my soul, and England keep my bones. (IV. iii. 5–10)

 

The audience is the sole witness of what has happened. When the other characters come on they do not see Arthur's body at first; when they do they go off on their own tangents, uselessly swearing revenge on the non-existent person who threw the boy over the battlements. There is no other coup de théâtre like this in British drama. The helplessness of the audience watching a child act his dismal scene alone is a pale reflection of parents watching a child struggle with a life-threatening illness. At the end Constance's railing against fate is irrelevant; there is only the child's struggle with the inescapable and the helplessness of the onlooker. I would never argue that Shakespeare put his own child on the stage; what seems clear to me is that he knew what a bereaved mother's anguish was like, and he knew what it was like to live with a dying child who approached his fate more bravely and serenely than either of his parents could. Ann's grief may not have been unmixed with bitterness. Perhaps her little boy had missed his young father terribly and had been pining for him. If for years Ann had had to coax the boy to get him to eat, say, she might have raged inwardly that his listlessness was all the fault of his uncaring father. There is no play in the Shakespeare canon that is anything like
The Spanish Tragedy
in which a father is driven literally mad with grief for the death of a son. In
The Winter's Tale
Leontes causes the death of his son and heir Mamillius, who dies of grief at his father's ill-treatment of his mother. When Leontes gets his wife back in the last scene of the play, the rejoicing is unalloyed by any mention of the boy who will not be coming back.

 

CHAPTER TWELVE

treating of the curious circumstances of the grant of arms made to William Shakespeare, and the acquisition of a compromised title to a rambling and ruinous house in a town he spent little or no time in

While Ann was still grieving the death of her son, the old business of the grant of arms to John Shakespeare, begun before her marriage and subsequently abandoned, was revived. His son and heir being dead, William Shakespeare's line was now extinct, unless he outlived his wife, married again and had a son, which was possible, given his own youth. As Duncan-Jones has it: ‘Yet while there's death there's hope. Fairly naturally given the discrepancy in their ages, Shakespeare may have dreamed that he would eventually outlive Anne, and that he might one day be able, as a gentleman of substance, to make a better marriage, and beget another son.'
¹

Duncan-Jones believes that in securing his grant of arms Shakespeare was encouraged and aided by Southampton and even given money with which to suborn the heralds into countenancing a fraudulent claim. If Shakespeare had decided to leave playing and devote his time to writing verse best-sellers his quest for gentility might have made sense. To be called a gentleman could have protected him from the sneers of the university men, but it was as likely to have prompted them to further derision. A gentleman might write for the stage without losing caste, but not if he wrote for money.
²
Still, there was the troubling ‘Richard Hathaway, gentleman' who may be the same ‘Richard Hathway' who was writing for Henslowe. Class distinction is always volatile, and towards the end of Elizabeth's reign rich tradesmen are increasingly to be found acquiring gentle status, but Shakespeare knew that players who performed on public stages for money were ‘common' by definition.

There's much confusion in the explanations of what Shakespeare thought he was up to, when he approached the Garter King-at-Arms. If he genuinely wanted gentility he had gone the wrong way about it, for he had acquired a share in the Lord Chamberlain's Company, probably on the strength of giving them his playbooks,
³
and was now back writing full-time for the commercial theatre. Still, approach the heralds he did, perhaps carrying the old design that he had known since he was twelve years old. Usually we are told that he was doing this for his father; I suspect that he was doing it for his mother. His father knew that he was a husbandman's son; it was his mother who believed that she was an Arden of the Park Hall Ardens. The notes of the family history taken at the time are full of nonsense: John Shakespeare is said to have married ‘the daughter of a gentleman of worship', Robert Arden is referred to as ‘esquire' and ‘gentleman' when he was neither. John Shakespeare is said to have been a justice of the peace and Bailiff of Stratford ‘fifteen or sixteen years past', when in fact it was a good twenty-seven years, and to have ‘lands and tenements of good wealth and substance' worth £500 which he did not.

Scholars have assumed that John Shakespeare's affairs recovered in the years before his death. They point to the absence of claims against him as if it were evidence of a new-found solidity. In fact it is the opposite. Men of worth in Stratford were in and out of the Court of Record on a weekly basis. Cash being always in short supply, most transactions were conducted on the basis of consideration, which regularly resulted in confusion and misunderstanding. The Court of Record was resorted to in all cases of confusion; the bailiff, who was the presiding judge, was trusted to assess relative indebtedness and record the result. Indebtedness or ‘credit' was then, as now, the basis of all economic activity; difficulties arose only when indebtedness was denied or when the debtor proved unable to pay. Everybody who was anybody owed money to somebody and was owed money in return.

If John Shakespeare is absent from the record it is not because he was prospering, but because he was inactive. If he was on an even keel it was because he had flat-lined. If William Shakespeare had been as rich as some scholars like to think he was, he might have advanced his
father sums sufficient to get him going again, but, as far as we can tell, he didn't. Instead Shakespeare applied for a grant of arms. In his right mind he seems to have had special contempt for plebeians who tried to pass themselves off as gentle. Joan of Arc, La Pucelle, is a more or less sympathetic character in
Henry VI, Part 1
, until she denies her poor father, crazily asserting that she is not ‘begotten of a shepherd swain But issued from the progeny of kings'. When her father sees her on the way to the pyre he cries out: ‘Ah, Joan, sweet daughter Joan, I'll die with thee.' Joan's response could hardly be more shocking:

 

Decrepit miser, base ignoble wretch,

I am descended of a gentler blood.

Thou art no father nor no friend of mine.

 

The poor shepherd has had to confess her once before:

 

I did beget her, all the parish knows.

Her mother liveth yet, can testify

She was the first fruit of my bachelorship.

 

He pleads with her, only to be rejected again.

 

‘Tis true I gave a noble to the priest

The morn that I was wedded to her mother.

Kneel down and take my blessing, good

my girl. (V. vi. 6–26)

 

If we are to exonerate Shakespeare from the suspicion of fraud in his dealings with the Garter King-at-Arms, we have to assume that he believed in his mother's descent from a gentle family. His father had a claim on the strength of his public service, which would have been justified without the taradiddle about his father-in-law's status, which was intended to justify the eventual quartering of the new Shakespeare arms with the old coat of Arden. There is no indication that John was actually present during the interviews with the heralds, so Shakespeare, who had been more or less estranged from his family for the last ten years or so, would have been relating the family history as
he understood it from adolescence. It is a feature of reiterated family myth that it invariably works to elevate the status of forebears. When he sold a strip of land to George Badger in 1597 John Shakespeare is described in the deed of sale as a ‘yeoman' which is also incorrect. By birth he was a husbandman, a rung lower than yeoman. If the clerk making out the deed wrote ‘yeoman', it may have been because he could not described John Shakespeare as a tradesman, which strengthens the impression that in 1597 it was a long time since he had followed the trade of glover. He clearly did not know of the grant of arms acquired in his name by his son three months before, perhaps because Shakespeare had not yet attained his final objective. Three years on, John (or rather William) Shakespeare applied to the heralds again. This time what he was after was permission to combine the Shakespeare arms with those of the Ardens. The coat was to be divided vertically, with the Shakespeare arms on the right, and the Arden arms on the left. At first the heralds assumed that Mary Shakespeare was a descendant of the Park Hall Ardens, and sketched a version of their coat, only to cancel it for a version of an older coat. In the event the attempt was abandoned.
⁴

The fraud did not go unnoticed. Ralph Brooke or Brokesmouth, York herald from 1593, took it upon himself to review the recent grants of arms, in an attempt to establish just how many were based on fictitious genealogies. In a list of twenty-three dubious grants made by Sir William Dethick, Shakespeare's name was fourth. The Shakespeare grant incurred Brooke's censure both because the device was too close to the arms of the extinct Mauley family and because John Shakespeare was a ‘mean person' and his son a common player. Shakespeare's old enemy Robert Greene, who as a university graduate was entitled to call himself gentleman, was particularly contemptuous of those whose ‘own conceit was the Herald to blazon their descent from an old house, whose great grandfathers would have been glad of a new Cottage to hide their heads in'.
⁵

John Shakespeare, who was buried five years later as Master Joannes Shakespeare, seems never to have had the benefit of the grant of arms. The title ‘Master' was a reference to his service of the Corporation; the appellation ‘gentleman' would have been something else. More telling still is the fact that when Mary Shakespeare was buried in 1608,
it was as plain ‘Mary Shakespeare, widow'. A coat of arms, especially one that was mostly gold, was a difficult thing to make use of if you could not afford to have it ‘painted, embroidered, gilded or carved on…movables and immovables, such as trunks, furniture, bed canopies, book bindings, glass windows, seal rings',
⁶
as well as carved and painted above the windows and the entrance to your house. If John Shakespeare had had the golden shield with the bend sinister and the silver spear stuck up all round his fragment of a house, behind the sign of the Maiden Head, his creditors and his triumphant in-laws would have laughed him to scorn.

Scholars have been slow to abandon the notion of John Shakespeare as a rich man who left a substantial inheritance.

The death of [Shakespeare's] father in September would have enforced some reflection. For one thing, it made him rich, by contemporary standards. His inheritance would have included the double house in Henley Street as well as some of the substantial agricultural holdings that John Shakespeare maintained to the end.
⁷

William certainly inherited the freehold of the Henley Street property, but, as we have seen, most of it was leased out as the Maiden Head Inn and either the old lease still had ninety years or so to run when Shakespeare inherited in 1601 or he chose to levy a new fine and issue a new ninety-one-year lease.
⁸
There were no ‘substantial agricultural holdings' either. At present, though the records of Worcestershire, Warwickshire and Canterbury and Chancery Lane have been exhaustively searched, we have neither will nor inventory nor letters of administration nor notice of probate for a will of John Shakespeare. Perhaps John Shakespeare's will stipulated that Mary be allowed to live out her days in what remained to them of Henley Street, but we cannot be certain that she did live out her days in Henley Street. We don't know where her three sons were living. In 1596, when Shakespeare set out to acquire his coat of arms, thirty-year-old Gilbert had not found himself a wife and there is no evidence that one was ever sought for him. Richard was twenty-three, unmarried, apparently uneducated and good-for-little. Sixteen-year-old Edmund was so devoid of prospects that he was thinking
of running away to London to be a player. Instead of helping any of his brothers to a wife, Shakespeare threw his time and money away on a coat of arms that nobody believed in, and that there was no one to inherit. The Hathaways were frugal, no-nonsense people. When it came to posterity they took care for it, by matching their children with their own class, so that by the time she died Ann could see Hathaways filling the pews in Holy Trinity, while in the Shakespeare pews there were only the draggletail Hart children.

Joan Shakespeare turned up in Stratford the year before her father's death, married to a hatter (no one knows where or when) and pregnant. More nonsense is written about that too: ‘Joan had married a local hatter, William Hart, but remained in the family dwelling to look after her mother.'
⁹
No William Hart appears in the Stratford records before the entry in the Holy Trinity register for 28 August 1600 when he brought a son to Holy Trinity Church to be christened William. We don't know when or where Joan married Hart, or even if William was her first child. We don't know where she had been for most of her life, which was probably not in Stratford. Perhaps we can discern the hand of Shakespeare's brother Gilbert in this matter, for as a haberdasher he would have had a good deal to do with hatters. In the Accounts of Edmund Tilney, Master of the Revels, ‘haberdashers' parcels' were all hats and the makings of hats, while what we would think of as haberdashery was supplied by mercers.
¹⁰
Both Gilbert Shakespeare and William Hart could have supplied the Lord Chamberlain's Men with hats and other fripperies, if it comes to that.

Joan may have kept house for Gilbert in London, or she may have been in service elsewhere. Either way Gilbert could have been instrumental in making a match for her with one of his business contacts. Hart was not a Stratford man, and we cannot now know why he transferred to Stratford after he married Joan. In October 1598 Elizabeth Quiney asked her husband in London to buy ‘a suite of hats for five boys the youngest lined and trimmed with silk' which is an odd thing for her to have done if the same hats could have been made to her order in Stratford.
¹¹
In 1600 Hart was sued for debt in the Court of Record and 1601 he was sued again, which implied that he was economically active, though whether he was making hats is not clear. Hatters were less often sued than forced to sue for payment for
work done. In June 1603 Joan bore a daughter Mary, in July 1605 another son Thomas and in September 1608 a third son Michael. Eight years later her husband died. It was Joan's fate to outlive all her brothers, and all but one of her children.

On 4 May 1597, less than a year after the death of his son and heir, Shakespeare bought New Place, the second biggest house in Stratford. According to the ‘foot of fine' the property was handed over to him in return for ‘sexaginta libras sterlingorum', £60 in silver, which seems unbelievably little, especially if the house already consisted, as it did in 1663, often hearths. The recorded price is usually treated as a legal fiction, although the house had changed hands not long before for only £40. Even Schoenbaum, usually so careful to arrive at the single nugget of irreducible fact, assumes what should need to be proved. ‘In 1597 Shakespeare bought a fine house for himself and his family.'
¹²

Big New Place certainly was but there is no evidence that it was ‘fine'. The frontage of the property extended for sixty feet along Chapel Street and seventy feet down Chapel Lane. Such a extent could not well have been roofed; we must presume then that what ran along Chapel Street and round the corner was a range of buildings surrounding various open spaces or garths. The evidence also suggests that the property had never been properly maintained. The three storeys of brick and timber looming over Chapel Street right opposite the guild chapel might well have been ruinous. The title Shakespeare acquired had been in contention for more than twenty years. The rightful owners were the heirs of the Clopton family, but it was not to them that Shakespeare paid his pieces of silver. It was to be five years before he could secure even a dubious title, and yet the restoration of the building is thought to have begun immediately. If it had been Shakespeare's wife who took on the project of restoring and running this vast pile, the legal record would give no indication of the fact, because Ann was,
feme coverte
. What is obvious is that in 1597 and for some years thereafter Shakespeare had enough to do as shareholder, dramaturge, playwright and performer with the Lord Chamberlain's Men, without involving himself in the restoration of a big tumbledown house a hundred miles away.