Shakespeare's Wife (44 page)

The John ‘Heminge' who collaborated with Condell in the compilation of the Folio is supposed to be the same John Hemmings who was a member of the Queen's Men when they visited Stratford in 1586. By 1587 he was living in London. After the actor William Knell was killed in a brawl with another player, ‘John Hemminge, gent, of Cornhil'' was granted a licence on 5 March 1588 at St Mary the Virgin Aldermanbury to marry Rebecca, widow of ‘William Knell, gent.' From then on he was associated with Aldermanbury where Condell was a churchwarden and where he too eventually served as a sidesman.
¹¹
The first of John and Rebecca Hemmings's fourteen children was christened John at Aldermanbury on 2 April 1588. A daughter Thomasine, born in 1595, was married to William Ostler, a player with the King's Men, in 1611; their son was christened Beaumont at Aldermanbury on 18 May 1612. As part of the marriage settlement, Ostler had been given shares in both
Blackfriars and the Globe. When Ostler died at the end of 1614, his widow tried to cash in the shares, and ended up in litigation with her father who denied her valuation of £600. Hemmings's ninth child, William, was educated at Westminster and went up to Oxford as a king's scholar. Hemmings died in 1630. The possibility that Hemmings had been a childhood playmate of Ann Shakespeare raises the further possibility that when her young husband set off for London to ply his poetry he knew where to go and whom to see about a career in the theatre. The very suggestion will raise guffaws in university common-rooms, but the possibility remains, nonetheless.

Not much is known about Henry Condell, who married an heiress in 1596, when he is thought to have been about twenty. One of the trustees of the Globe was another churchwarden at Aldermanbury, William Leveson. Aldermanbury, not far from the Moorgate, was as distant from the Bankside as it was possible to get and still be in London, and it was not much nearer Blackfriars; the Aldermanbury connection has yet to be fully investigated.

We know from a warrant of 2 October 1599 for payment of £30 ‘for three interludes or plays played before her majesty on St Stephens Day at night, New Year's Day at night, and Shrove Tuesday at night last past' to Hemmings and Thomas Pope that Hemmings was by then a shareholder in the Chamberlain's Company. At some point, between 1605 and 1608, Henry Condell joined as a shareholder in the Globe. Both bought a share of the Blackfriars in 1608. When Shakespeare bought the house in Blackfriars, and mortgaged it for part of the purchase price, Hemmings and Condell were trustees and co-tenants.

If Shakespeare had discussed with Hemmings and Condell the possibility of printing an edition of his plays, we might wonder what took them so long. They were representatives of the King's Men: the company owned the plays and had the sole right to sell the playtexts to a publisher. When we consider that for the company there was no advantage to be gained by printing their playtexts which then became available to every cry of players, we must ask ourselves why Hemmings and Condell undertook such a project when they did. What they said in their dedicatory letter was that they did it ‘only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive, as was our Shakespeare'. The best way to keep his memory alive, one would
have thought, would have been to stage his plays but, in the winter of 1620–1, of eleven performances at court by the King's Men, the only play by Shakespeare to be performed was an adaptation of
Twelfth Night
, called ‘Malvolio', and apparently an anti-puritan satire.

Shakespeare's reputation was fading fast. Michael Drayton, writing ‘Of Poets and Poesy' to Henry Reynolds c.1625, had more to say about Spenser, Sidney, Warner, Marlowe, Nashe, Daniel, Chapman, Jonson, Sylvester and Sandys than he did of Shakespeare.
¹²
Fifteen years or so later William Cartwright could assure John Fletcher:

 

Shakespeare to thee was dull, whose best jest lies

I'the Lady's questions and the Fool's replies,

Old-fashioned wit which-walked from town to town

In turnèd hose, which our fathers called the Clown,

Whose wit our nice times would obsceneness call,

And which made bawdry pass for comical.

Nature was all his art. Thy vein was free

As his, but without his scurrility.
¹³

 

In 1622 the King's Men visited Stratford and were paid six shillings not to perform. ‘What brought them for once and now to Shakespeare's native town and home and burial-place?…but to pay homage to the man and his monument and to receive “papers” without a blot on them, from his Widow and Daughter and Son-in-law at New Place?'
¹⁴

It would not have taken a company of twelve persons or more to collect Shakespeare's papers, or three people to give them away for that matter. What it would have taken to print the Folio was money. The printing of large-paper folios was expensive. Somehow money had to be made available up front for the acquisition of paper, still an extremely expensive commodity, and the setting of the print. The sales of such bulky and expensive volumes were bound to be slow. Later generations would deal with this problem by raising subscriptions, but Hemmings and Condell did not have that option. The mildly facetious letter ‘To the great variety of readers' signed in full ‘John Heminge and Henrie Condell' makes quite clear that the publishers were anxious to recoup what they had outlaid.

 

From the most able to him that can but spell, there you are numbered. We had rather you were weighed, especially when the fate of books depends upon your capabilities, and not of your heads alone, but of your purses. Well! It is now public and you will stand for your privileges we know, to read and censure. Do so, but buy it first. That doth best commend a book, the stationer says. Then, how odd soever your brains be or your wisdoms, make your licence the same and spare not. Judge your sixpenn'orth, your shillingsworth, your five shillings worth at a time, or higher, so you rise to the just rates, and welcome. But, whatever you do, buy.

 

This is so strangely apologetic that the reader might be pardoned for doubting the seriousness of the editors' commitment to the project. Modern scholarship, assuming that the printers had to cover their costs, has arrived at a retail price for the First Folio of £1, which for most people would have been prohibitive. The poet's ‘friends' are credited with compiling and collating the works with ‘care and pain',

 

and so to have published them, as where, before, you were abused with diverse stolen and surreptitious copies, maimed and deformed by the frauds and stealths of injurious imposters that exposed them, even those are now offered to your view cured and perfect of their limbs and all the rest, absolute in their numbers, as he conceived them.

 

Though the editors do not claim to have had autograph manuscripts for their copytexts, they imply as much: ‘And what he thought, he uttered with such easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' Scribal copies are necessarily blot-free; a professional copyist who makes a mistake has to throw away his page and start again. If the absence of blots is worthy of remark it is because what the editors had was written in the poet's own hand, described on the title-page of the Folio as ‘the true, original copies'. They claim elsewhere that their texts are ‘truly set forth, according to their first original. In the theatre the whole play was the copytext for scribal copies of parts, and the platts listing entrances and exits that were used by the stage managers. These multiple copies were costly to generate and would not have been thrown away. Whether companies were as
careful with their copies of whole plays is not clear. Certainly, printers threw away their copytexts, whether they were autograph or not. The puzzle remains, if Shakespeare's texts were not all in one place, under the control of the King's Men, where could they have been? Some may have been in the Blackfriars house, though it seems that Shakespeare never lived there, but surely some must have been at New Place. If any papers had been at New Place or in Ann's keeping, it is most unlikely that they would have found their way back there after they had been used by the printer, so whatever papers remained in Stratford after the Folio appeared were not the Folio copytexts.

The Frankfurt book fair was already up and running in 1622, when it was held twice yearly, in spring and autumn. The English version of the catalogue for October 1622 lists ‘Plays written by M. William Shakespeare, all in one volume, printed by Isaac Jaggard in folio'. Printing had in fact begun in the summer of 1621, and it is thought that the assembling of the texts must date from at least a year earlier. However, the Folio was not entered in the Stationers' Register until 8 November 1623. The point of entering copyright in the Stationers' Register was to prevent anyone else from uttering the same text; leaving the entry so late in the lengthy production process implies an absence of competition and no risk whatever of piracy.

In the First Folio of 1623 there are thirty-six plays, eighteen of them never before published. Of the others six had been published in bad quartos and the Folio text is superior; three had been published in doubtful quartos and the Folio text is no better; and in eleven cases the Folio text is based on the published quarto. It seems clear from this that there was no single source of the Folio copytexts. Textually the Folio had more than one begetter, but there may have been only one angel who provided the money to set it up and that could have been Ann Shakespeare, anonymous as usual.

The fact that the Folio was reprinted nine years later is usually taken to mean that the first print-run sold out, yet no mention of the Folio can be found in any documented contemporary collection. Indeed, the copy sent for deposit in the Bodleian was so little regarded that it was sold when the second edition appeared in 1632.
¹⁵
We have no idea what the original print-run can have been; 500 copies is considered too few because it would result in too high a unit cost,
while 1,500 was the legal maximum.
¹⁶
Two hundred and thirty copies are known to survive. This fact itself suggests that the First Folio was not much read, certainly not as
Venus and Adonis
was, for example; as we have seen, virtually all of the copies of the more than eleven editions of
Venus and Adonis
were read to pieces. The First Folio is the kind of volume that is presented to all kinds of luminaries, who accept it with thanks but don't read it. One is reminded of the folios vanity-published by Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle and sent to every educational institution in the country, where they are still, in pristine condition.

The cost of production having been assessed at about 6s 8d a copy, the retail price can hardly have been less than about fifteen shillings. As Stanley Wells points out: ‘The publishers' investment in a massive collection of play scripts was a declaration of faith in Shakespeare's selling power as a dramatist for reading as well as for performing.'
¹⁷
The declaration of faith and the investment may not after all have been the publishers'. If the publication was subsidised, the print-run could well have been small. In 1633, William Prynne was scandalised to notice that ‘Shakespeare's Plays are printed on the best crown paper, far better than most Bibles,' which suggests that for someone cost was no object.
¹⁸
Wells credits Hemmings and Condell with the actual editorial work; they commissioned a scribe called Ralph Crane to copy ‘a number of plays specially for the volume' and chose ‘which printed editions and manuscripts to send to the printer…copy which must have been a printer's nightmare'. What is obvious from the appearance of the First Folio is that a house style has been imposed on all this disparate material, which suggests to me at least that the editors did not take the risk of giving the printers jumbled papers or leaving them to impose a house style of their own. So far-fetched is the idea that Shakespeare's widow might have hired an amanuensis to prepare an edition of her husband's plays that no one has ever considered it.

As a widow Ann Shakespeare was entitled to make a will. If we could find it, and her inventory, we would know once for all whether she died a penniless dependant or whether she left money in trust to be spent on further publishing of her husband's work. If she did she would have left her executor no choice but to make available any
funds remaining for a de-luxe second edition before he himself was gathered to his eternal reward.

All this, in common with most of this book, is heresy, and probably neither truer nor less true than the accepted prejudice. Ann Shakespeare cannot sensibly be written out of her husband's life if only because he himself was so aware of marriage as a challenging way of life, a ‘world-without-end bargain'. The Shakespeare wallahs have succeeded in creating a Bard in their own likeness, that is to say, incapable of relating to women, and have then vilified the one woman who remained true to him all his life, in order to exonerate him. There can be no doubt that Shakespeare neglected his wife, embarrassed her and even humiliated her, but attempting to justify his behaviour by vilifying her is puerile. The defenders of Ann Hathaway are usually derided as sentimental when they are trying simply to be fair. It is a more insidious variety of sentimentality that wants to believe that women who are ill treated must have brought it upon themselves. The creator of Hero, Desdemona, Imogen and Hermione knew better. Ann might say like Lady Macduff:

 

I have done no harm. But I remember now

I am in this earthly world, where to do harm

Is often laudable, to do good sometime

Accounted dangerous folly. Why then, alas,

Do I put up that womanly defence

To say I have done no harm? (IV. ii. 75–80)

 

 

NOTES

ABBREVIATIONS

INTRODUCTION

1. Jardine,
Still Harping on Daughters
, 103.

2. Chambers Bunten,
Life of Alice Barnham, passim
.

3. Bacon, ‘Of Marriage and Single Life',
Essays
, viii.

4. Tasso,
Of Marriage and Wiving
, Sig. Blv.

5.
DNB
. His wife was Philippa de Roet, daughter of the Rienne king-at-arms and she bore him at least three children—two sons, Thomas who survived to adulthood and Lewis who didn't, and a daughter Elizabeth who became a nun. The marriage is presumed to date from c.1364 and Philippa is thought to have died in about 1387.

6. Moore, ‘Notices of the Life of Lord Byron', 136n.

7. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
, 173.

8.
ibid
.

9. Malone,
Supplement to the Edition of Shakespeare's Plays
, i, 653.

10. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
, 247.

11. Thomas De Quincey, quoted in Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
, 322.

12.
ibid
., 312. The allegation was repeated in Rees's
Cyclopaedia
(1819).

13. Moore, ‘Notices of the Life of Lord Byron', 136n.

14. Hunter,
New Illustrations
, i, 51.

15. Joyce,
Ulysses
, 247.

16. Schoenbaum,
Shakespeare's Lives
, 765.

17. Holden,
William Shakespeare
, 63–4.

18. Guizot,
Shakespeare et son temps
, 22–3.

19. Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, 147.

20. Price,
Shakespeare's Unorthodox Biography
, 14.

21. Armstrong,
Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis
, 2–3.

22.
ibid
., 3.

23. [Cooke],
How to chuse a good wife from a bad
, Sig. [A2v].

CHAPTER ONE

1. Rowe, ‘Some Account of the Life &c of Mr. William Shakespeare', in Rowe,
Works of Shakespeare
, i, ii–iii.

2. Holy Trinity Parish Register, SBTRO, DR 243/1.

3. Eccles,
Shakespeare in Warwickshire
, 63.

4. The thirteenth-century
Legenda Sanctorum
of Jacopus de Voragine, printed by Caxton in 1483 as
The Golden Legend
.

5. Worcestershire Record Office, 008.7, 16/1601; Schoenbaum,
Documentary Life
, illustration facing p. 69.

6. Hoskins, ‘The Rebuilding of Rural England, 1570–1640', 44–59.

7. NA, Prob. 11/64/31; Schoenbaum,
Documentary Life
, 60; complete transcript, Gray,
Shakespeare's Marriage
, 221–3.

8. Fripp,
Shakespeare
, 184.

9. According to the International Genealogical Index a Catherine Hathaway married a Henry Widdowes at Shipton-under-Wychwood, Oxfordshire, in 1590.

10.
M&A
, iii, 137.

11. e.g. Wood,
In Search of Shakespeare
, 81.

12. Warwickshire Corn Enquiry,
M&A
, v, 58.

13.
Henslowe's Diary
, 90.

14.
ibid
., 89.

15.
ibid
., 126.

16.
Belvedere or the Garden of the Muses
, Sig. [b2v].

17.
Henslowe's Diary
, 138.

18.
ibid
., 65.

19.
ibid
., 166.

20. Dulwich College MSS, vol. 1, Article 33 (
Henslowe's Diary
, 295).

21.
Henslowe's Diary
, 183.

22.
ibid
., 193.

23.
ibid
., 186–7.

24.
ibid
., 206.

25.
ibid
., 221.

26.
ibid
., 208.

27.
ibid
., 221, 222.

28. Vicar General's Book No. 4, f. 301v, Principal Probate Registry, Somerset House, in Gray,
Shakespeare's Marriage
, 233–4.

CHAPTER TWO

1. That is, if the first Joan Shakespeare in the baptismal register of Holy Trinity is his daughter, and perhaps even later if—as I suspect—Joan is the child of another John Shakespeare.

2. SBTRO, ER3/1923; Halliwell-Phillipps,
Outlines
(7th edn 1887), ii, 173; Hone,
The Manor
, 125, 310; Chambers,
William Shakespeare
, 30–1;
VCH: Warwickshire
, iii, 44.

3. SBTRO, Miscellaneous Documents, ii, 21; Halliwell-Phillipps,
Outlines
(7th edn 1887), ii, 173–6.

4. Wood,
In Search of Shakespeare
, 27.

5.
M&A
, ii, xlvi, xlviii, 110; iii, 14.

6.
M&A
, v, 149, 161.

7. Emanuel van Meteren,
Album
, quoted by Plowden in
Tudor Women
, 1–2.

8.
M&A
, iv, 12, 24, 28, 29, 34.

9.
M&A
, iii, 142, 154, iv, 89.

10.
M&A
, iv, 67, 128; Eccles,
Shakespeare in Warwickshire
, 100.

11.
Stratford-upon-Avon Inventories
, i, 195–6.

12. Dekker,
The Shoemakers' Holiday
, III. ii. 131–9, in
Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker
, 54.

13. Prior, ‘Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500–1800', 95.

14. Deloney,
Jack of Newbery
, 68.

15. SBTRO, BRU 15/1/130, 178; Bess Quiney's mother-in-law also participated in her husband's business:
M&A
, iii, 14.

16. SBTRO, BRU 15/1/129, 177.

17.
M&A
, iii, 31 (Council Book A, 87).

18.
M&A
, iii, 19 (Council Book A, 186).

19.
M&A
, iii, 24 (Council Book A, 190).

20. Schoenbaum,
Documentary Life
, 60.

21. Ferne,
The Blazon of Gentrie
, 58–60.

22.
M&A
, iii, 68–9; NA, Court of King's Bench, Anglia 20b 21a Trinity Term, 22 Eliz.

CHAPTER THREE

1. Duncan-Jones,
Ungentle Shakespeare
, 17.

2. Browne,
Britannia's Pastorals
, Book I, Song iv.

3.
Corydon's Commendation
, The Second Part, in
Pepys Ballads
, i, 81.

4.
A New Ballad intituled, I have fresh Cheese and Creame
, in
Pepys Ballads
, i, 48.

5.
Greenes Vision
, Sig. D2—[D2
^V
].

6. ‘he weeps like a wench that had shed her milk',
All's Well That Ends Well
, IV. iii. 110–11.

7.
Turner's Dish of Lenten Stuff
, in
Pepysian Garland
, 34.

8. Holden,
William Shakespeare
, 63–4.

9.
The Winter's Tale
, IV. iii. 9–12.

10. Fripp,
Master Richard Quyny
, 85.

11.
A Maydens Lamentation for a Bedfellow. Or, I can, nor will no longer lie alone
, in
Pepys Ballads
, i, 67.

12. ‘Coridon's Song', in
Englands Helicon
, 114.

13. Laslett,
World We Have Lost
, 81.

14. Stone,
Family, Sex and Marriage
, 43–4; Wrigley and Schofield,
Population History of England
, 255.

15. Laslett,
World We Have Lost
, 82.

16. Brodsky, ‘Widows in Late Elizabethan London: Remarriage, Economic Opportunity and Family Orientations', 127–8.

17. Deloney,
The Gentle Craft
, 12.

18. Deloney,
Jack of Newbery
, 9.

19.
ibid
.

20.
ibid
., 19.

21.
DNB
.

22. Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, 125–6.

23. e.g. letter of 28 October 1598, Abraham Sturley to Richard Quiney, SBTRO, BRU 15/1/145.

24. The evidence for this is her signature in full on an indenture of 1647, reproduced in Fripp,
Shakespeare
, facing p. 905, as Birthplace Catalogue, No. 69.

25. Eason,
The Genevan Bible
, 1–12.

26. Weston,
Autobiography of an Elizabethan
, 164–5.

27. Quoted from the thesis of N. Evans by Spufford,
Small Books and Pleasant Histories
, 34.

28. Cressy, ‘Education and Literacy in London and East Anglia, 1580–1700', 99–100, 111–13, 129–35.

29. Spufford,
Small Books and Pleasant Histories
, 21.

30. Cross, ‘Great Reasoners in Scripture: Women Lollards 1380–1530' Schofield, ‘Illiteracy in Pre-Industrial England: The Work of the Cambridge Group for the History of Population and Social Structure'.

31. Rhodes,
The Countrie Mans Comfort
, quoted in Spufford,
Small Books and Pleasant Histories
, 10.

32. SpufFord, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers', 407–35.

33. Bownde,
The Doctrine of the Sabbath
, 242. See also Baskervill,
The Elizabethan Jig
, and Brody,
The English Mummers and their Plays
.

34. Maden, ed., ‘The Daily Ledger of John Dome, 1520', quoted in Spufford,
Small Books and Pleasant Histories
, 14.

35.
ibid
.

36. Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, 55.

37.
The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney
, 211.

38. Dekker and Webster,
Westward Ho
, I. ii. 120–1, in
Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker
, ii, 329.

39.
Westward Ho
, II. i. 75–105 (the whole exchange is rather longer than as quoted here).

CHAPTER FOUR

1. Gurr, ‘Shakespeare's First Poem: Sonnet 145', 221–6.

2.
Joan is as good as my Lady. To the Tune of What care I how faire she be
, in
Pepys Ballads
, i, 159–60.

3. Kyd,
Soliman and Perseda
, I. ii. 6–9, 15–16, in
Works of Thomas Kyd
, 655.

4.
As You Like It
, V. iii. 21–6.

5. Gataker,
A Good Wife Gods Gift
, 11.

6. E.g. 4 & 5 Philip & Mary, c. 5, and 39 Eliz., c. 9.

7. Duncan-Jones,
Ungentle Shakespeare
, 217–18.

8.
Love's Labour's Lost
, IV. iii. 322–3.

9. Ascham,
The Scholemaster
(1570), in
English Works
, 205.

10. [Becon],
The golden boke of christen matrimonye
.

11. Googe,
Eglogs, Epytaphes and Sonettes
, ‘Notes of his Life and Writings', 10.

12.
ibid
.

CHAPTER FIVE

1.
As You Like It
, V. i. 13–58.

2. Holden,
William Shakespeare
, 65.

3. Worcester Diocesan Registry, 28 November 1582; Gray,
Shakespeare's Marriage
, 204.

4. Steel, 323.

5. Holden,
William Shakespeare
, 65.

6.
ibid
.

7. Lee,
A Life of William Shakespeare
. Schoenbaum remarks: ‘Lee allowed this passage to remain intact throughout his lifetime, despite the fact that twenty years earlier Gray had refuted Lee's inferences in
Shakespeare's Marriage
(1905) pp. 48–57' (Schoenbaum,
Documentary Life
, 65).

8. Collins,
Sidney Papers
, ii, 81.

9.
ibid
., 90.

10.
CSPD
, Eliz. cclxviii.

11.
Henry VI, Part 1
, V. v. 11–13.

12. Brinkworth,
Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court
, 122–3;
M&A
, v, 97.

13.
ibid
., 131.

14.
ibid
., 132.

15.
ibid
., 135.

16.
ibid
., 142.

17. Greenblatt,
Will in the World
, 123.

18. Ingram,
Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England
, 286.

19. Brinkworth,
Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court
, 127.

20.
ibid
., 138.

21. Boswell,
The Kindness of Strangers
, 100–2, 186, 258–9, 261–4; Wrightson, ‘Infanticide in the Early Seventeenth Century', 10–22.

22. Episcopal Register, Worcester Cathedral, f. 43v, 27 November 1582.

23. Eccles,
Shakespeare in Warwickshire
, 41.

24. Honan,
Shakespeare
, 81–2.

25. Fripp,
Shakespeare
, 191.

26. Burgess,
Shakespeare
, 57.

27.
Love's Labours Lost
, V. ii. 886–9, 895–8.

CHAPTER SIX

1. Perkins,
Of Christian Oeconomie
; Swinbume,
A Treatise of Spousals
, 219–20.

2. Laslett,
World We Have Lost
, 141–2.

3. [Bullinger],
The Christian State of Matrimony
, Sig. [H8]v.

4. [Watson],
Holsome and Catholyke doctryne concernynge the seuen sacramentes
, f. clxxii.