Shakespeare

Elizabethans were as free with their handwriting as they were with their spelling. Handbooks of handwriting suggested up to twenty different – often very different – ways of shaping particular letters. Depending on one’s taste, for instance, a letter d could look like a figure eight, a diamond with a tail, a circle with a curlicue, or any of fifteen other shapes. A’s could look like h’s, e’s like o’s, f’s like s’s and l’s – in fact, nearly every letter could look like nearly every other. Complicating matters further is the fact that court cases were recorded in a distinctive lingua franca known as court hand – ‘a peculiar clerical Latin that no Roman could read’, Thomas told me, smiling. ‘It used English word order but incorporated an arcane vocabulary and idiosyncratic abbreviations. Even clerks struggled with it because when cases got really complicated or tricky, they would often switch to English for convenience.’

Although Thomas knew he had the right page and had studied the document many times, it took him a good minute or more to find the line referring to ‘John Shappere alias Shakespere’ of ‘Stratford upon Haven’, accusing him of usury. The document is of considerable importance to Shakespeare scholars, for it helps to explain why in 1576, when Will was twelve years old, his father abruptly retired from public life (about which more in due course), but it was only found in 1983 by a researcher named Wendy Goldsmith.

There are over a hundred miles of records like this in the National Archives – nearly ten million documents altogether – in London and in an old salt mine in Cheshire, not all of them from the relevant period, to be sure, but enough to keep the most dedicated researcher busy for decades.

The only certain way to find more would be to look through all the documents. In the early 1900s an odd American couple, Charles and Hulda Wallace, decided to do just that. Charles Wallace was an instructor in English at the University of Nebraska who just after the turn of the century, for reasons unknown, developed a sudden and lasting fixation with determining the details of Shakespeare’s life. In 1906 he and Hulda made the first of several trips to London to sift through the records. Eventually they settled there permanently. Working for up to eighteen hours a day, mostly at the Public Record Office on Chancery Lane, as it then was, they pored over hundreds of thousands – Wallace claimed five million* – documents of all types: Exchequer memoranda rolls, property deeds, messuages, pipe rolls, plea rolls, conveyancings and all the other dusty hoardings of legal life in sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century London.

Their conviction was that Shakespeare, as an active citizen, was bound to turn up in the public records from time to time. The theory was sound enough, but when you consider that there were hundreds of thousands of records, without indexes or cross references, each potentially involving any of 200,000 citizens; that Shakespeare’s name, if it appeared at all, might be spelled in some eighty different ways, or blotted or abbreviated beyond recognition; and that there was no reason to suppose that he had been involved in London in any of the things – arrest, marriage, legal disputes and the like – that got one into the public records in the first place, the Wallaces’ devotion was truly extraordinary.

So we may imagine a muffled cry of joy when in 1909 they came across a litigation roll from the Court of Requests in London comprising twenty-six assorted documents that together make up what is known as the Belott–Mountjoy (or Mountjoie) case. All relate to a dispute in 1612 between Christopher Mountjoy, a refugee Huguenot wigmaker, and his son-in-law, Stephen Belott, over a marriage settlement. Essentially, Belott felt that his father-in-law had not given him all that he had promised, and so he took the older man to court.

Shakespeare, it appears, was caught up in the affair because he had been a lodger in Mountjoy’s house in Cripplegate in 1604 when the dispute arose. By the time he was called upon to give testimony eight years later, he claimed – not unreasonably – to be unable to remember anything of consequence about what had been agreed between his landlord and the landlord’s son-in-law.

The case provided no fewer than twenty-four new mentions of Shakespeare and one precious additional signature – the sixth and so far last one found. Moreover, it is also the best and most natural of his surviving signatures. This was the one known occasion when Shakespeare had both space on the page for a normal autograph and a healthily steady hand with which to write it. Even so, as was his custom, he writes the name in an abbreviated form: ‘Willm Shaksp’. It also has a large blot on the end of the surname, probably because of the comparatively low quality of the paper. Though it is only a deposition, it is also the only document in existence containing a transcript of Shakespeare speaking in his own voice.

The Wallace find, reported the following year in the pages of the University of Nebraska Studies (and forever likely to remain, we may suppose, that journal’s greatest scoop), was important for two other reasons. It tells us where Shakespeare was living at an important point in his career: in a house on the corner of Silver and Monkswell Streets near St Aldermanbury in the City of London. And the date of Shakespeare’s deposition, 11 May 1612, provides one of the remarkably few days in his life when we can say with complete certainty where he was.

The Belott–Mountjoy papers were only part of what the Wallaces found in their years of searching. It is from their work that we know the extent of Shakespeare’s financial interests in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres, and of his purchase of a gatehouse at Blackfriars in 1613, just three years before his death. They found a lawsuit in which the daughter of John Heminges, one of Shakespeare’s closest colleagues, sued her father over some family property in 1615. For Shakespeare scholars these are moments of monumental significance.

Unfortunately, as time passed Charles Wallace began to grow a little strange. He penned extravagant public tributes to himself in the third person (‘Prior to his researches,’ read one, ‘it was believed and taught for nearly fifty years that everything was known about Shakespeare that ever would be known. His remarkable discoveries have changed all this…and brought lasting honor to American scholarship’) and developed paranoid convictions. He became convinced that other researchers were bribing the desk clerks at the Public Record Office to learn which files he had ordered. Eventually he believed that the British government was secretly employing large numbers of students to uncover Shakespeare records before he could get to them, and claimed as much in an American literary magazine, causing dismay and unhappiness on both sides of the Atlantic.

Short of funds and increasingly disowned by the academic community, he and Hulda gave up on Shakespeare and the English, and moved back to the United States. It was the height of the oil boom in Texas, and Wallace developed another unexpected conviction: he decided that he could recognize good oil land just by looking at it. Following a secret instinct, he sank all his remaining funds in a 160-acre farm in Wichita Falls, Texas. It proved to be one of the most productive oilfields ever found anywhere. He died in 1932, immensely rich and not very happy.

With so little to go on in the way of hard facts, students of Shakespeare’s life are left with essentially three possibilities: to pick minutely over legal documents as the Wallaces did; to speculate (‘Every Shakespeare biography is 5 per cent fact and 95 per cent conjecture,’ one Shakespeare scholar told me, possibly in jest); or to persuade themselves that they know more than they actually do. Even the most careful biographers sometimes take a supposition – that Shakespeare was Catholic or happily married or fond of the countryside or kindly disposed towards animals – and convert it within a page or two to something like a certainty. The urge to switch from subjunctive to indicative is, to paraphrase Alastair Fowler, always a powerful one.

Others have simply surrendered themselves to their imaginations. One respected and normally level-headed academic of the 1930s, the University of London’s Caroline F.E. Spurgeon, became persuaded that it was possible to determine Shakespeare’s appearance from a careful reading of his text, and confidently announced (in Shakespeare’s Imagery and What it Tells Us) that he was ‘a compactly well-built man, probably on the slight side, extraordinarily well-coordinated, lithe and nimble of body, quick and accurate of eye, delighting in swift muscular movement. I suggest that he was probably fair-skinned and of a fresh colour, which in youth came and went easily, revealing his feelings and emotions.’

Ivor Brown, a popular historian, meanwhile concluded from mentions of abscesses and other irruptions in Shakespeare’s plays that Shakespeare sometime after 1600 had undergone ‘a severe attack of staphylococcic infection’ and was thereafter ‘plagued with recurrent boils’.

Other, literal-minded readers of Shakespeare’s sonnets have been struck by two references to lameness, namely in Sonnet 37:

As a decrepit father takes delight

To see his active child do deeds of youth,

So I, made lame by Fortune’s dearest spite,

Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth.

And again in Sonnet 89:

Say that thou didst forsake me for some fault,

And I will comment upon that offense.

Speak of my lameness, and I straight will halt

and concluded that he was crippled.

In fact it cannot be emphasized too strenuously that there is nothing – not a scrap, not a mote – that gives any certain insight into Shakespeare’s feelings or beliefs as a private person. We can know only what came out of his work, never what went into it.

David Thomas is not in the least surprised that he is such a murky figure. ‘The documentation for William Shakespeare is exactly what you would expect of a person of his position from that time,’ he says. ‘It seems like a dearth only because we are so intensely interested in him. In fact we know more about Shakespeare than about almost any other dramatist of his age.’

Huge gaps exist for nearly all figures from the period. Thomas Dekker was one of the leading playwrights of the day, but we know little of his life other than that he was born in London, wrote prolifically, and was often in debt. Ben Jonson was more famous still, but many of the most salient details of his life – the year and place of his birth, the identities of his parents, the number of his children – remain unknown or uncertain. Of Inigo Jones, the great architect and theatrical designer, we have not one certain fact of any type for the first thirty years of his life other than that he most assuredly existed somewhere.

Facts are surprisingly delible things, and in four hundred years a lot of them simply fade away. One of the most popular plays of the age was Arden of Faversham, but no one now knows who wrote it. When an author’s identity is known, that knowledge is often marvellously fortuitous. Thomas Kyd wrote the most successful play of its day, The Spanish Tragedy, but we know this only because of a passing reference to his authorship in a document written some twenty years after his death (and then lost for nearly two hundred years).

What we do have for Shakespeare are his plays – all of them but one or two – thanks in very large part to the efforts of his colleagues Henry Condell and John Heminges, who put together a more or less complete volume of his work after his death – the justly revered First Folio. It cannot be overemphasized how fortunate we are to have so many of Shakespeare’s works, for the usual condition of sixteenth- and early-seventeenth-century plays is to be lost. Few manuscripts from any playwrights survive, and even printed plays are far more often missing than not. Of the approximately three thousand plays thought to have been staged in London from about the time of Shakespeare’s birth to the closure of the theatres by the Puritans in a coup of joylessness in 1642, 80 per cent are known only by title. Only 230 or so play texts still exist from Shakespeare’s time, including the thirty-eight by Shakespeare himself – about 15 per cent of the total, a gloriously staggering proportion.

It is because we have so much of Shakespeare’s work that we can appreciate how little we know of him as a person. If we had only his comedies, we would think him a frothy soul. If we had just the sonnets, he would be a man of darkest passions. From a selection of his other works, we might think him variously courtly, cerebral, metaphysical, melancholic, Machiavellian, neurotic, light-hearted, loving, and much more. Shakespeare was of course all these things – as a writer. We hardly know what he was as a person.

Faced with a wealth of text but a poverty of context, scholars have focused obsessively on what they can know. They have counted every word he wrote, logged every dib and jot. They can tell us (and have done so) that Shakespeare’s works contain 138,198 commas, 26,794 colons, and 15,785 question marks; that ears are spoken of 401 times in his plays; that dunghill is used ten times and dullard twice; that his characters refer to love 2,259 times but to hate just 183 times; that he used damned 105 times and bloody 226 times, but bloody-minded only twice; that he wrote hath 2,069 times but has just 409 times; that altogether he left us 884,647 words, made up of 31,959 speeches, spread over 118,406 lines.

They can tell us not only what Shakespeare wrote but what he read. Geoffrey Bullough devoted a lifetime, nearly, to tracking down all possible sources for virtually everything mentioned in Shakespeare, producing eight volumes of devoted exposition revealing not only what Shakespeare knew but precisely how he knew it. Another scholar, Charlton Hinman, managed to identify individual compositors who worked on the typesetting of Shakespeare’s plays. By comparing preferences of spelling – whether a given compositor used go or goe, chok’d or choakte, lantern or lanthorn, set or sett or sette, and so on – and comparing these in turn with idiosyncrasies of punctuation, capitalization, line justification and the like, he and others have identified nine hands at work on the First Folio. It has been suggested, quite seriously, that thanks to Hinman’s detective work we know more about who did what in Isaac Jaggard’s London workshop than Jaggard did himself.

Shakespeare, it seems, is not so much a historical figure as an academic obsession. A glance through the indexes of the many scholarly journals devoted to him and his age reveals such dogged investigations as ‘Linguistic and Informational Entropy in Othello’, ‘Ear Disease and Murder in Hamlet’, ‘Poisson Distributions in Shakespeare’s Sonnets’, ‘Shakespeare and the Quebec Nation’, ‘Was Hamlet a Man or a Woman?’ and others of similarly inventive cast.

The amount of Shakespearean ink, grossly measured, is almost ludicrous. In the British Library catalogue, enter ‘Shakespeare’ as author and you get 13,858 options (as opposed to 455 for ‘Marlowe’, for instance), and as subject you get 16,092 more. The Library of Congress in Washington contains about seven thousand works on Shakespeare – twenty years’ worth of reading if read at the rate of one a day – and, as this volume slimly attests, the number keeps growing. Shakespeare Quarterly, the most exhaustive of bibliographers, logs about four thousand serious new works – books, monographs, other studies – every year.

To answer the obvious question, this book was written not so much because the world needs another book on Shakespeare, as because this series does. The idea is a simple one: to see how much of Shakespeare we can know, really know, from the record.

Which is one reason, of course, it’s so slender.

* This was probably stretching it. If the Wallaces averaged five minutes, say, on each document, it would have taken them 416,666 hours to get through five million of them. Even working around the clock, that would represent 47.5 years of searching.

Chapter Two The Early Years, 1564–1585

WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three and five million – much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to take a continuous, heavy toll. Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat. The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 per cent. In London as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perished.

But plague was only the beginning of England’s deathly woes. The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and haemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast, amorphous array of fluxes and fevers – tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship’s fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever – as well as ‘frenzies’, ‘foul evils’ and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous type. These were, of course, no respecters of rank. Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

Even comparatively minor conditions – a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth – could quickly turn lethal. Almost as dangerous as the ailments were the treatments meted out. Victims were purged with gusto and bled till they fainted – hardly the sort of handling that would help a weakened constitution. In such an age it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents.

Many of the exotic-sounding diseases of Shakespeare’s time are known to us by other names (their ship’s fever is our typhus, for instance), but some were mysteriously specific to the age. One such was the ‘English sweat’, which had only recently abated after several murderous outbreaks. It was called ‘the scourge without dread’ because it was so startlingly swift: victims often sickened and died on the same day. Fortunately many survived, and gradually the population acquired a collective immunity that drove the disease to extinction by the 1550s. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mercifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigour. But no sooner had these perils vanished than another virulent fever, called ‘the new sickness’, swept through the country, killing tens of thousands in a series of outbreaks between 1556 and 1559. Worse, these coincided with calamitous, starving harvests in 1555 and 1556. It was a literally dreadful age.

Plague, however, remained the darkest scourge. Just under three months after William’s birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic incepit pestis, ‘Here begins plague’, beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in non-plague years, 16 per cent of infants perished in England; in this year, nearly two-thirds did. One neighbour of the Shakespeares lost four children. In a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in life wasn’t writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year.

We don’t know quite when he was born. Much ingenuity has been expended on deducing from one or two certainties and some slender probabilities the date on which he came into the world. By tradition, it is agreed to be 23 April, St George’s Day. This is the national day of England, and coincidentally also the date on which Shakespeare died fifty-two years later, giving it a certain irresistible symmetry, but the only actual fact we have concerning the period of his birth is that he was baptized on 26 April. The convention of the time – a consequence of the high rates of mortality – was to baptize children swiftly, no later than the first Sunday or holy day following birth, unless there was a compelling reason to delay. If Shakespeare was born on 23 April – a Sunday in 1564 – then the obvious choice for christening would have been two days later on St Mark’s Day, 25 April. However, some people thought St Mark’s Day was unlucky and so, it is argued – perhaps just a touch hopefully – that the christening was postponed an additional day, to 26 April.

We are lucky to know as much as we do. Shakespeare was born just at the time when records were first kept with some fidelity. Although all parishes in England had been ordered more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1538, to maintain registers of births, deaths and weddings, not all complied. (Many suspected that the state’s sudden interest in information-gathering was a prelude to some unwelcome new tax.) Stratford didn’t begin keeping records until as late as 1558 – in time to include Will, but not Anne Hathaway, his older-by-eight-years wife.

One consideration makes arguments about birth dates rather academic anyway. Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, which wasn’t created until 1582, when Shakespeare was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 23 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May. Because the Gregorian calendar was of foreign design and commemorated a Pope (Gregory XIII), it was rejected in Britain until 1751, so for most of Shakespeare’s life, and 135 years beyond, dates in Britain and the rest of Europe were considerably at variance – a matter that has bedevilled historians ever since.

The principal background event of the sixteenth century was England’s change from a Catholic society to a Protestant one – though the course was hardly smooth. England swung from Protestantism under Edward VI to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back to Protestantism again under Elizabeth. With each change of regime, officials who were too obdurate or dilatory to flee faced painful reprisals, as when Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and colleagues were burned at the stake in Oxford after the Catholic Mary came to the throne in 1553. The event was graphically commemorated in a book by John Foxe formally called Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, touching Matters of the Church but familiarly known then and ever since as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – a book that would provide succour to anti-Catholic passions during the time of Shakespeare’s life. It was also a great comfort to Elizabeth, as later editions carried an extra chapter on ‘The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England’, praising her brave guardianship of Protestantism during her half-sister’s misguided reign (though in fact Elizabeth was anything but bravely Protestant during Mary’s reign).

Though it was an age of huge religious turmoil, and although many were martyred, on the whole the transition to a Protestant society proceeded reasonably smoothly, without civil war or wide-scale slaughter. In the forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign, fewer than two hundred Catholics were executed. This compares with eight thousand Protestant Huguenots killed in Paris alone during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, and the unknown thousands who died elsewhere in France. That slaughter had a deeply traumatizing effect in England – Christopher Marlowe graphically depicted it in The Massacre at Paris and put slaughter scenes in two other plays – and left two generations of Protestant Britons at once jittery for their skins and ferociously patriotic.

Elizabeth was thirty years old and had been queen for just over five years at the time of William Shakespeare’s birth, and she would reign for thirty-nine more, though never easily. In Catholic eyes she was an outlaw and a bastard. She would be bitterly attacked by successive Popes, who would first excommunicate her and then openly invite her assassination. Moreover, for most of her reign a Catholic substitute was conspicuously standing by: her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Because of the dangers to Elizabeth’s life, every precaution was taken to preserve her. She was not permitted to be alone out of doors and was closely guarded within. She was urged to be wary of any presents of clothing designed to be worn against her ‘body bare’ for fear that they might be deviously contaminated with plague. Even the chair in which she normally sat was suspected at one point of having been dusted with infectious agents. When it was rumoured that an Italian poisoner had joined her court, she had all her Italian servants dismissed. Eventually, trusting no one completely, she slept with an old sword beside her bed.