Shakespeare's Wife (37 page)

In cases where it could be established that the women had been put up to it by their menfolk, the menfolk were as likely to be arraigned for causing a riot. But if women and children could be shown to have acted spontaneously the law was powerless: ‘if a number of women (or children under the age of discretion) do flock together for their own cause, there is none assembly punishable by these statutes, unless a man of discretion moved them to assemble for the doing of some unlawful act…'
³²

Nevertheless the women of Stratford were taking a risk. In 1609,
when the lord of the Warwickshire manor of Dunchurch enclosed eight acres and blocked his tenants' access to their common pasture, and fifteen women came by night and destroyed his hedges, Star Chamber prosecuted not only the women but the men responsible for them, whether fathers, employers or husbands, and rejected the women's claim to have acted spontaneously.
³³

Clearly someone must have organized the action at Welcombe, but that someone was not necessarily a man, or even a woman under the tutelage of a man. She was probably a woman without father, employer or husband. She was probably a widow. When Alderman Chandler arrived home after his drubbing, his wife, Bess Quiney's eldest daughter Elizabeth, must have been among the first to hear of the outrage perpetrated by Combe. It looks very much as if, as the Corporation tried to come to some agreement with their powerful opposition, the Widow Quiney sent her maidservants to knock on doors in Stratford and Bishopton, and mobilize her troops. One thing is certain: the women who destroyed Combe's earthworks that night were never arraigned on any charge in the Star Chamber or anywhere else. As he put together the case to be presented to the lord chief justice, Greene listed the crimes of Edward Greville against the Corporation, including the murder of Bess's husband, Richard Quiney.
³⁴
Bess had gradually overcome the shock and grief of her husband's murder in 1602 and assumed the role of
de facto
leader of the Quiney gang. In 1612 when the bailiff and burgesses sued Sir Edward Conway and Francis Cawdry, the witnesses were examined at her house. Other occasions were celebrated by banquets at Mistress Quiney's.

There and then Greene feared that the women's intervention had made the situation worse, for he could see no way that the aldermen would not be held ultimately responsible for what was in effect a riot. On Thursday the Corporation met in emergency session at Bess Quiney's house; Masters Barker, Walford, Chandler, Henry Smith, Lewis Hiccox and Laurence Wheeler, plus Mistress Quiney, told Replingham ‘to his face' that they disagreed with the intended enclosure. Replingham's only reply was that ‘he would give names to Mr Bailiff for doing justice upon the women diggers' and he was promised in return that ‘justice would be done'.

Ann must have been among the first to hear of the events at Welcombe, if indeed she wasn't directly involved. Both her daughters may have been part of the hedge-breaker gang, and perhaps even Judith Hart and her boys. And perhaps none of them.

The Corporation's petition to the lord chief justice was successful; he ordered a stay of enclosure. Combe and Replingham then resorted to their second strategy; the yardlands were all laid down to pasture, and four to five hundred sheep let in to graze it with four shepherds. Combe was still buying up land; Mistress Reynolds resisted his offers and even went so far as to defy him and plough her yardland, but Mistress Mary Nash was happy to pocket his fifty pounds. Combe then began to court Sir Edward Greville, sending him a ‘fat wether' in order to get his favour in persuading Sir Arthur Ingram (who was buying up Greville's estates) to sell the manor of Old Stratford to the consortium. In August Master Barker died. He was another who had dared to infuriate Combe by ploughing his holding within the enclosure area. His executors were not so tough, and soon accepted a ten-shilling deposit against a full price of £40. In September Shakespeare told Greene's brother John Greene that Greene could not bar the enclosing of Welcombe.

Though the citizens of Stratford had the law on their side, they were helpless before the
force majeure
of the gentry. Workmen had appeared on the common again, this time claiming that they had instructions from Thomas Combe and Boughton, who would indemnify them against any action by the Corporation to prevent them from working. On 2 March 1616 Master Chandler sent his man ‘to the place where Stephen Sly, John Terry, Thomas Hiccox, William Whitehead and Michael Pigeon were working', and they ‘assaulted him so he could not proceed with throwing down the ditches and Sly said if the best in Stratford were there to throw it down he would bury his head in the bottom of the ditch'.
³⁵
At this point Mainwaring, who had been anxious all along to be seen to do no wrong, withdrew from the consortium, which left William Combe effectively on his own.
³⁶
Combe resorted to main force, using casual labourers to drive his tenants off the land by kicking and beating them. At the Lenten Assizes in Warwick in March the next year, the Corporation finally learnt that it had won.

Upon the humble petition of the Bailiff and Burgesses of Stratford-upon-Avon, it was ordered at these assizes that no enclosure shall be made within the parish of Stratford, for that it is against the laws of the realm, neither by Mr Combe nor any other, until they shall show cause at open assizes to the Justices of Assize; neither that any of the commons being ancient greensward shall be ploughed up either by the said Mr Combe nor any other, until good cause be likewise shown at open assizes before the Justices of Assize; this order is taken for preventing of tumults and breaches of his Majesty's peace; whereof in this very town of late there had like to have been an evil beginning of some great mischief.
³⁷

The victory was a real one; the Stratford town commons were never enclosed. Combe was not subdued, however; he continued to intimidate and beat his own tenants, impounded their livestock, and eventually succeeded in depopulating the village of Welcombe until only his own house remained standing.
³⁸
By that time William Shakespeare was dead and buried, and Thomas Combe was the proud possessor of his sword, which Shakespeare left to him in his will.

 

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

of Shakespeare's last illness and death and how Ann Shakespeare handled the situation

Perhaps Shakespeare headed for New Place because his health was failing.

 

Good broth and good keeping doth much now and then;

Good diet with wisdom best helpeth a man.

In health to be stirring shall profit thee best;

In sickness hate trouble, seek quiet and rest.
¹

 

That his terminal illness was of long standing is suggested by the fact that four months before he did die, Shakespeare knew that he was dying. Most people who died in Warwickshire in April 1616 were bowled over by a catastrophic infection. Very few of Shakespeare's contemporaries were as long as four months a-dying, though there were a few who made a will as far in advance as Shakespeare did and some further. As we have seen, Shakespeare's friend John Combe made his will eighteen months before he died.

The Rev. John Ward, who settled in Stratford forty-six years after the poet's death, recalled gossip that ‘Shakespeare, Drayton and Ben Jonson had a merry meeting and it seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted.'
²
Ward is using the late-seventeenth-century version of the theory of plethora to explain the poet's death as a sort of melancholy accident. This won't fit with what we know of the poet's gradual decline, or for that matter with what we know of his rather awkward relationship with Ben Jonson.
³

The existence of Shakespeare's will with its cancelled date of January 1616 gives the lie to the idea of a sudden eclipse. Fevers kill rapidly or
not at all. Other terminal diseases, congestive heart failure for example, would have taken longer than four months to enter a terminal phase, and we would expect some evidence of illness to have manifested much earlier—which of course it may have. A possibly fatal circulatory disorder would probably not have been diagnosed. At fifty-two Shakespeare was young to be in the final stages of a disease of old age. For reasons that she does not divulge Duncan-Jones decides that Shakespeare was ‘increasingly tired and unwell'. She believes too that Shakespeare was probably morbidly obese.

As a man of considerable wealth he is likely to have indulged in the heavy diet of fat meat and sweet, or sweetened, wines habitual in his class. And if he was now spending longer periods in Stratford, he enjoyed greater access to the excellent veal and beef produced in the Forest of Arden. His ‘mountain belly' may now have rivaled Ben Jonson's, making the three-day ride from Stratford to London increasingly uncomfortable.
⁴

For the horse, presumably. Duncan-Jones appears unaware that there were such things as litters, or that the Bard could have hitched a ride on the carrier's wagon train. Coaches did exist, but they were too slow and cumbersome for a journey as long as from Stratford to London. Having created her Falstaffian Shakespeare, Duncan-Jones then turns him into a drunk.

There are several reasons why, in the years 1615–16, he may indeed have been drinking more than was his wont…The first and most compelling reason is that he was already ill…If he ‘drank too hard' towards the end, it was most probably in an attempt to palliate pain or distress.
⁵

Michael Wood too entertains the idea that Shakespeare was an alcoholic, principally on the grounds of the shakiness of the signature on the first draft of his will.
⁶
Duncan-Jones prefers her own diagnosis ‘that heart and circulatory trouble were now added to latent syphilitic infection'.
⁷
The syphilitic infection she takes to date from ‘visits to Turnmill Street' in 1604–8. ‘Going to Turnmill Street to beat up whores was a traditional pastime for high-spirited young men through
out the Tudor period.'
⁸
What the apprentices and students liked to do to the whores was, not to have intercourse with them without paying (anglice, to rape them), but to smash their glass windows and kick their doors in, as they do to the Bawd in
Northward Ho
(1607).
⁹
It is possible but surely not probable that a successful businessman would turn juvenile hoodlum at the age of forty-five. Contemporary physician Philip Barrough was so used to finding the primary infection in very young men that he refers to his generic patient as a young man, even as ‘a lad or a stripling of tender years'.
¹⁰
Duncan-Jones elaborates: ‘Though Shakespeare was to survive for nearly seven years more, his visits to Turnmill Street may have left him with an unwanted legacy of chronic and humiliating sickness.'
¹¹

Turnmill Street, which was as often known as Turnbull or Turnball Street, was in Clerkenwell.
¹²
Shakespeare had small need to travel so far when the Globe stood in the middle of the stews of Shoreditch and Southwark. So close was the relationship between the theatres and the stews that in 1593 the wife of the best-known tragedian Edward Alleyn, Joan Woodward, Henslowe's stepdaughter, was carted through the streets of Southwark as a bawd, probably because it was thought she lived on the proceeds of prostitution, as perhaps she did.
¹³
Both the Diocese of Winchester as landlord of parts of Southwark and Lord Hunsdon, who was granted the manor of Paris Garden by the queen, pocketed the rents of brothels in the theatre district without a qualm. George Wilkins, who is thought to have collaborated with Shakespeare in writing
Particles
, besides penning the odd pot-boiler, owned an inn in St Sepulchre's which was also a house of ill repute.
¹⁴

One thing should be very clear: Shakespeare was vividly aware of venereal disease from the beginning of his career; his revulsion at the operation of lust was always expressed in terms of sickness, which no more goes to prove that he had experienced the horror for himself than that he hadn't. He is far more likely to have risked casual sex earlier in his life than in middle age. If he did consort with prostitutes in his early years in London, and had seen the signs of venereal infection upon himself, or believed that he had been infected, we need seek no other reason for a cessation of intimacy between Ann and William. Succumbing to a momentary urge might have cost William the connubial comforts of his marriage with Ann. Certainly Ann lived far too long to have been
infected by her husband with syphilis. However, the sixteenth century could not distinguish between syphilis (an imported disease) and gonorrhoea (which had been endemic for centuries). If William had contracted gonorrhoea and continued to cohabit with his wife after having been treated for it, she might well have contracted it and suffered sterilising disease as a consequence.

Syphilis was a spectacular disease when it first manifested at the end of the fifteenth century: ‘This grief at the first was so extreme, cruel and so merciless, that it molested those who were infected therewith, even the head, eyes, nose, palate of the mouth, skin, flesh, bones, ligaments and all the inward parts of their bodies.'
¹⁵
Duncan-Jones follows the view rather casually adopted by recent historians that by the second half of the sixteenth century the disease had settled down and was showing the same pattern, with two long periods of latency, that it did from the late seventeenth century. A careful reading of contemporary medical texts does not corroborate this view. Though observers agree that the disease was not as virulent as it had been but a few years before, latency is not yet established. Time and again all through the seventeenth century we find that a sufferer has been identified as such and ostracized. Gough's report on a case brought as late as 1698 describes the dilemma of the Myddle parish authorities confronted with a supposed victim of venereal disease:

The younger son of Charles Reve of Myddle Wood [who] had lived a year and more in Gloucestershire, came privately to his brother's house in Myddle Wood, for he had got the French pox and was not able to do service. His brother was not able to maintain him and because no one else would receive him, our officers were forced to give his brother 2s 8d a week to harbour and maintain him.
¹⁶

In 1579 Ambrose Paré described the Lues Venerea thus:

It partakes of an occult quality, commonly taking its original from ulcers of the privy parts and then further manifesting itself by pustules of the head and other external parts, and lastly infecting the entrails and inner parts with cruel and nocturnal tormenting pain of the head, shoulders, joints, and other parts. In process of time it causeth knots
and hard tophi, and lastly corrupts and fouls the bones, dissolving them, the flesh about them being oft-times not hurt…

Inner corruption became manifest in gross disfigurement:

Some lose one of their eyes, others both, some lose a great portion of the eyelids, other some look very ghastly and not like themselves, and some become squint-eyed. Some lose their hearing, others have their noses fall flat, the palate of their mouths perforated with the loss of the bone Ethmoides…

The effects of infection on the genitals could be catastrophic:

There be some who have the Urethra or passage of the yard obstructed by budding caruncles or inflamed pustules, so that they cannot make water without the help of a catheter, ready to die within a short time unless you succor them by the amputation of their yards.

Systemic effects were almost as spectacular:

Others become lame of their arms, other some of their legs, and a third sort grow stiff by contraction of all their members, so they have nothing left them sound but their voice which serveth for no other purpose but to bewail their miseries, for which it is scantly sufficient.

The terminal phases of the disease were often revolting.

Wherefore should I trouble you with mention of those that can scantly draw their breath by reason of an asthma, or those whose whole bodies waste with a hectic fever and slow consumption? It fares far worse with these who have all their bodies deformed by a leprosy arising thence, and have all their throttles and throates eaten with putrid and cancrous ulcers, their hair falling off from their heads, their hands and feet cleft with tatters and scaly chinks, neither is their case much better, who, having their brains tainted with this disease, have their whole bodies shaken by fits of the falling sickness, who troubled with a filthy and cursed flux of the belly, do continually cast forth stinking and bloody filth.
¹⁷

Paré's last observation, however, slightly undermines confidence in his diagnosis: ‘Lastly, there are no kinds of diseases, no sorts of symptoms, wherewith this disease is not complicate, never to be taken away, unless the virulency of this murrain be wholly taken away and impugned by its proper antidote, that is,
argentum vivum
.'
¹⁸
Historians of medicine are still unable to disentangle the venereal disease process from the cumulative effects of treatment with
argentum vivum
, literally ‘quick silver' or mercury, which was in routine use for treating syphilis/gonorrhoea well before 1579. Paracelsus, alias his translator John Hester, insists that the initial infection was always accompanied by intense pain, ‘great pricking and shooting between the skin and the flesh', which was so severe at night as to be unbearable; in our own time the initial chancre is held to be localised, painless and unaccompanied by systemic symptoms.

Understanding how the disease manifested in the last decades of the sixteenth century is complicated by the effects of a growing awareness of its shameful nature; at first physicians believed that it could be caught from close stools (that is, toilet seats) and sleeping in infected sheets, but gradually, as they came to realise the disease's entirely venereal character, the diagnosis went underground. Because it was rare to find an untreated case, it was impossible to disentangle the disease process from the dire consequences of the destructive therapies invented by the quack ‘pockmasters'. More conservative Galenists preferred to treat syphilis with the resin of the Jamaican tree
Guaiacum officinale
. ‘Of the kind of this hebenus is another strange and foreign wood, commonly called guaiacum, the powder whereof being filed off and boiled in water till three parts be consumed is most sovereign to cure the pox, and the loathsome infection gotten by lewd, filthy and lecherous life.'
¹⁹
Philip Barrough, whose
Method of Physic
was republished nearly every year by Shakespeare's first publisher Richard Field, observed that a disease of such long duration was bound to go through different phases, but the phases he describes are not the same as those described later. In his version too the signs of initial infection were neither localised nor trivial.

Straightways after a young man is infected, he feeleth in himself a certain lassitude or weariness…a lumpish heaviness in the whole
body, a dullness, faintness, litherness or slowness to move in all the members…Moreover, there is a certain pain or ache which wandreth throughout all the body or parts thereof.
²⁰

Barrough also noticed a change in the complexion. Then within six months of the primary infection, or so Barrough thought, would appear ‘hard pustules in the whole body and in the head and beard'. ‘If the disease beginneth in the winter, it shall bring forth his crusts in the beginning of summer.'
²¹
There is also a typical hoarseness, caused by the relaxation of the soft palate, and intense pain at night and unseen ‘corruption of the bones'. In Barrough's description the different stages of the disease follow so hard upon each other that they seem almost continuous. He arrives at a tenth development in relatively short order, with no periods of latency worth mentioning:

We may add here in the tenth and last place malign ulcers in all the parts of the body, which ulcerate the whole skin, head and all parts. To conclude there succeed this disease sometime their affects as asthma, which when it is come upon a patient, it declareth him to be past cure. Therefore never put such a one to pain by medicines or other means, for you shall never heal him.
²²