hamlet in the parish of Old Stratford, made his will, which was proved on
July 9, 1582, and is now preserved at Somerset House. His house and
land, 'two and a half virgates,' had been long held in copyhold by his
family, and he died in fairly prosperous circumstances. His wife Joan,
the chief legatee, was directed to carry on the farm with the aid of her
eldest son, Bartholomew, to whom a share in its proceeds was assigned.
Six other children--three sons and three daughters--received sums of
money; Agnes, the eldest daughter, and Catherine, the second daughter,
were each allotted 6 pounds 13s. 4d, 'to be paid at the day of her
marriage,' a phrase common in wills of the period. Anne and Agnes were
in the sixteenth century alternative spellings of the same Christian
name; and there is little doubt that the daughter 'Agnes' of Richard
Hathaway's will became, within a few months of Richard Hathaway's death,
Shakespeare's wife.
Anne Hathaway's cottage.
The house at Shottery, now known as Anne Hathaway's cottage, and reached
from Stratford by field-paths, undoubtedly once formed part of Richard
Hathaway's farmhouse, and, despite numerous alterations and renovations,
still preserves many features of a thatched farmhouse of the Elizabethan
period. The house remained in the Hathaway family till 1838, although
the male line became extinct in 1746. It was purchased in behalf of the
public by the Birthplace trustees in 1892.
The bond against impediments.
No record of the solemnisation of Shakespeare's marriage survives.
Although the parish of Stratford included Shottery, and thus both bride
and bridegroom were parishioners, the Stratford parish register is silent
on the subject. A local tradition, which seems to have come into being
during the present century, assigns the ceremony to the neighbouring
hamlet or chapelry of Luddington, of which neither the chapel nor parish
registers now exist. But one important piece of documentary evidence
directly bearing on the poet's matrimonial venture is accessible. In the
registry of the bishop of the diocese (Worcester) a deed is extant
wherein Fulk Sandells and John Richardson, 'husbandmen of Stratford,'
bound themselves in the bishop's consistory court, on November 28, 1582,
in a surety of 40 pounds, to free the bishop of all liability should a
lawful impediment--'by reason of any precontract' [_i.e._ with a third
party] or consanguinity--be subsequently disclosed to imperil the
validity of the marriage, then in contemplation, of William Shakespeare
with Anne Hathaway. On the assumption that no such impediment was known
to exist, and provided that Anne obtained the consent of her 'friends,'
the marriage might proceed 'with once asking of the bannes of matrimony
betwene them.'
Bonds of similar purport, although differing in significant details, are
extant in all diocesan registries of the sixteenth century. They were
obtainable on the payment of a fee to the bishop's commissary, and had
the effect of expediting the marriage ceremony while protecting the
clergy from the consequences of any possible breach of canonical law.
But they were not common, and it was rare for persons in the
comparatively humble position in life of Anne Hathaway and young
Shakespeare to adopt such cumbrous formalities when there was always
available the simpler, less expensive, and more leisurely method of
marriage by 'thrice asking of the banns.' Moreover, the wording of the
bond which was drawn before Shakespeare's marriage differs in important
respects from that adopted in all other known examples. {21} In the
latter it is invariably provided that the marriage shall not take place
without the consent of the parents or governors of both bride and
bridegroom. In the case of the marriage of an 'infant' bridegroom the
formal consent of his parents was absolutely essential to strictly
regular procedure, although clergymen might be found who were ready to
shut their eyes to the facts of the situation and to run the risk of
solemnising the marriage of an 'infant' without inquiry as to the
parents' consent. The clergyman who united Shakespeare in wedlock to
Anne Hathaway was obviously of this easy temper. Despite the
circumstance that Shakespeare's bride was of full age and he himself was
by nearly three years a minor, the Shakespeare bond stipulated merely for
the consent of the bride's 'friends,' and ignored the bridegroom's
parents altogether. Nor was this the only irregularity in the document.
In other pre-matrimonial covenants of the kind the name either of the
bridegroom himself or of the bridegroom's father figures as one of the
two sureties, and is mentioned first of the two. Had the usual form been
followed, Shakespeare's father would have been the chief party to the
transaction in behalf of his 'infant' son. But in the Shakespeare bond
the sole sureties, Sandells and Richardson, were farmers of Shottery, the
bride's native place. Sandells was a 'supervisor' of the will of the
bride's father, who there describes him as 'my trustie friende and
neighbour.'
Birth of a daughter.
The prominence of the Shottery husbandmen in the negotiations preceding
Shakespeare's marriage suggests the true position of affairs. Sandells
and Richardson, representing the lady's family, doubtless secured the
deed on their own initiative, so that Shakespeare might have small
opportunity of evading a step which his intimacy with their friend's
daughter had rendered essential to her reputation. The wedding probably
took place, without the consent of the bridegroom's parents--it may be
without their knowledge--soon after the signing of the deed. Within six
months--in May 1583--a daughter was born to the poet, and was baptised in
the name of Susanna at Stratford parish church on the 26th.
Formal betrothal probably dispensed with.
Shakespeare's apologists have endeavoured to show that the public
betrothal or formal 'troth-plight' which was at the time a common prelude
to a wedding carried with it all the privileges of marriage. But neither
Shakespeare's detailed description of a betrothal {23} nor of the solemn
verbal contract that ordinarily preceded marriage lends the contention
much support. Moreover, the whole circumstances of the case render it
highly improbable that Shakespeare and his bride submitted to the formal
preliminaries of a betrothal. In that ceremony the parents of both
contracting parties invariably played foremost parts, but the wording of
the bond precludes the assumption that the bridegroom's parents were
actors in any scene of the hurriedly planned drama of his marriage.
A difficulty has been imported into the narration of the poet's
matrimonial affairs by the assumption of his identity with one 'William
Shakespeare,' to whom, according to an entry in the Bishop of Worcester's
register, a license was issued on November 27, 1582 (the day _before_ the
signing of the Hathaway bond), authorising his marriage with Anne
Whateley of Temple Grafton. The theory that the maiden name of
Shakespeare's wife was Whateley is quite untenable, and it is unsafe to
assume that the bishop's clerk, when making a note of the grant of the
license in his register, erred so extensively as to write Anne Whateley
of Temple Grafton' for 'Anne Hathaway of Shottery.' The husband of Anne
Whateley cannot reasonably be identified with the poet. He was doubtless
another of the numerous William Shakespeares who abounded in the diocese
of Worcester. Had a license for the poet's marriage been secured on
November 27, {24} it is unlikely that the Shottery husbandmen would have
entered next day into a bond 'against impediments,' the execution of
which might well have been demanded as a preliminary to the grant of a
license but was wholly supererogatory after the grant was made.
III--THE FAREWELL TO STRATFORD
Anne Hathaway's greater burden of years and the likelihood that the poet
was forced into marrying her by her friends were not circumstances of
happy augury. Although it is dangerous to read into Shakespeare's
dramatic utterances allusions to his personal experience, the emphasis
with which he insists that a woman should take in marriage 'an elder than
herself,' {25a} and that prenuptial intimacy is productive of 'barren
hate, sour-eyed disdain, and discord,' suggest a personal interpretation.
{25b} To both these unpromising features was added, in the poet's case,
the absence of a means of livelihood, and his course of life in the years
that immediately followed implies that he bore his domestic ties with
impatience. Early in 1585 twins were born to him, a son (Hamnet) and a
daughter (Judith); both were baptised on February 2. All the evidence
points to the conclusion, which the fact that he had no more children
confirms, that in the later months of the year (1585) he left Stratford,
and that, although he was never wholly estranged from his family, he saw
little of wife or children for eleven years. Between the winter of 1585
and the autumn of 1596--an interval which synchronises with his first
literary triumphs--there is only one shadowy mention of his name in
Stratford records. In April 1587 there died Edmund Lambert, who held
Asbies under the mortgage of 1578, and a few months later Shakespeare's
name, as owner of a contingent interest, was joined to that of his father
and mother in a formal assent given to an abortive proposal to confer on
Edmund's son and heir, John Lambert, an absolute title to the estate on
condition of his cancelling the mortgage and paying 20 pounds. But the
deed does not indicate that Shakespeare personally assisted at the
transaction. {26}
Poaching at Charlecote.
Shakespeare's early literary work proves that while in the country he
eagerly studied birds, flowers, and trees, and gained a detailed
knowledge of horses and dogs. All his kinsfolk were farmers, and with
them he doubtless as a youth practised many field sports. Sympathetic
references to hawking, hunting, coursing, and angling abound in his early
plays and poems. {27} And his sporting experiences passed at times
beyond orthodox limits. A poaching adventure, according to a credible
tradition, was the immediate cause of his long severance from his native
place. 'He had,' wrote Rowe in 1709, 'by a misfortune common enough to
young fellows, fallen into ill company, and, among them, some, that made
a frequent practice of deer-stealing, engaged him with them more than
once in robbing a park that belonged to Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote
near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he
thought, somewhat too severely; and, in order to revenge that ill-usage,
he made a ballad upon him, and though this, probably the first essay of
his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter that it
redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree that he was obliged
to leave his business and family in Warwickshire and shelter himself in
London.' The independent testimony of Archdeacon Davies, who was vicar
of Saperton, Gloucestershire, late in the seventeenth century, is to the
effect that Shakespeare 'was much given to all unluckiness in stealing
venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir Thomas Lucy, who had him oft
whipt, and sometimes imprisoned, and at last made him fly his native
county to his great advancement.' The law of Shakespeare's day (5 Eliz.
cap. 21) punished deer-stealers with three months' imprisonment and the
payment of thrice the amount of the damage done.
Unwarranted doubts of the tradition.
The tradition has been challenged on the ground that the Charlecote
deer-park was of later date than the sixteenth century. But Sir Thomas
Lucy was an extensive game-preserver, and owned at Charlecote a warren in
which a few harts or does doubtless found an occasional home. Samuel
Ireland was informed in 1794 that Shakespeare stole the deer, not from
Charlecote, but from Fulbroke Park, a few miles off, and Ireland supplied
in his 'Views on the Warwickshire Avon,' 1795, an engraving of an old
farmhouse in the hamlet of Fulbroke, where he asserted that Shakespeare
was temporarily imprisoned after his arrest. An adjoining hovel was
locally known for some years as Shakespeare's 'deer-barn,' but no portion
of Fulbroke Park, which included the site of these buildings (now
removed), was Lucy's property in Elizabeth's reign, and the amended
legend, which was solemnly confided to Sir Walter Scott in 1828 by the
owner of Charlecote, seems pure invention. {28}
Justice Shallow
The ballad which Shakespeare is reported to have fastened on the park
gates of Charlecote does not, as Rowe acknowledged, survive. No
authenticity can be allowed the worthless lines beginning 'A parliament
member, a justice of peace,' which were represented to be Shakespeare's
on the authority of an old man who lived near Stratford and died in 1703.
But such an incident as the tradition reveals has left a distinct impress
on Shakespearean drama. Justice Shallow is beyond doubt a reminiscence
of the owner of Charlecote. According to Archdeacon Davies of Saperton,
Shakespeare's 'revenge was so great that' he caricatured Lucy as 'Justice
Clodpate,' who was (Davies adds) represented on the stage as 'a great
man,' and as bearing, in allusion to Lucy's name, 'three louses rampant
for his arms.' Justice Shallow, Davies's 'Justice Clodpate,' came to
birth in the 'Second Part of Henry IV' (1598), and he is represented in
the opening scene of the 'Merry Wives of Windsor' as having come from
Gloucestershire to Windsor to make a Star-Chamber matter of a poaching
raid on his estate. The 'three luces hauriant argent' were the arms
borne by the Charlecote Lucys, and the dramatist's prolonged reference in
this scene to the 'dozen white luces' on Justice Shallow's 'old coat'
fully establishes Shallow's identity with Lucy.
The flight from Stratford.
The poaching episode is best assigned to 1585, but it may be questioned
whether Shakespeare, on fleeing from Lucy's persecution, at once sought
an asylum in London. William Beeston, a seventeenth-century actor,
remembered hearing that he had been for a time a country schoolmaster 'in
his younger years,' and it seems possible that on first leaving Stratford
he found some such employment in a neighbouring village. The suggestion
that he joined, at the end of 1585, a band of youths of the district in
serving in the Low Countries under the Earl of Leicester, whose castle of
Kenilworth was within easy reach of Stratford, is based on an obvious
confusion between him and others of his name. {30} The knowledge of a
soldier's life which Shakespeare exhibited in his plays is no greater and
no less than that which he displayed of almost all other spheres of human
activity, and to assume that he wrote of all or of any from practical
experience, unless the evidence be conclusive, is to underrate his
intuitive power of realising life under almost every aspect by force of
his imagination.
IV--ON THE LONDON STAGE
The journey to London.
To London Shakespeare naturally drifted, doubtless trudging thither on
foot during 1586, by way of Oxford and High Wycombe. {31a} Tradition
points to that as Shakespeare's favoured route, rather than to the road
by Banbury and Aylesbury. Aubrey asserts that at Grendon near Oxford,
'he happened to take the humour of the constable in "Midsummer Night's
Dream"'--by which he meant, we may suppose, 'Much Ado about Nothing'--but
there were watchmen of the Dogberry type all over England, and probably
at Stratford itself. The Crown Inn, (formerly 3 Cornmarket Street) near
Carfax, at Oxford, was long pointed out as one of his resting-places.
Richard Field, his townsman.
To only one resident in London is Shakespeare likely to have been known
previously. {31b} Richard Field, a native of Stratford, and son of a
friend of Shakespeare's father, had left Stratford in 1579 to serve an
apprenticeship with Thomas Vautrollier, the London printer. Shakespeare
and Field, who was made free of the Stationers' Company in 1587, were
soon associated as author and publisher; but the theory that Field found
work for Shakespeare in Vautrollier's printing-office is fanciful. {32a}
No more can be said for the attempt to prove that he obtained employment
as a lawyer's clerk. In view of his general quickness of apprehension,
Shakespeare's accurate use of legal terms, which deserves all the
attention that has been paid it, may be attributable in part to his
observation of the many legal processes in which his father was involved,
and in part to early intercourse with members of the Inns of Court. {32b}
Theatrical employment.
Tradition and common-sense alike point to one of the only two theatres
(The Theatre or The Curtain) that existed in London at the date of his
arrival as an early scene of his regular occupation. The compiler of
'Lives of the Poets' (1753) {32c} was the first to relate the story that
his original connection with the playhouse was as holder of the horses of
visitors outside the doors. According to the same compiler, the story
was related by D'Avenant to Betterton; but Rowe, to whom Betterton
communicated it, made no use of it. The two regular theatres of the time
were both reached on horseback by men of fashion, and the owner of The
Theatre, James Burbage, kept a livery stable at Smithfield. There is no
inherent improbability in the tale. Dr. Johnson's amplified version, in
which Shakespeare was represented as organising a service of boys for the
purpose of tending visitors' horses, sounds apocryphal.
A playhouse servitor.
There is every indication that Shakespeare was speedily offered
employment inside the playhouse. In 1587 the two chief companies of
actors, claiming respectively the nominal patronage of the Queen and Lord
Leicester, returned to London from a provincial tour, during which they
visited Stratford. Two subordinate companies, one of which claimed the
patronage of the Earl of Essex and the other that of Lord Stafford, also
performed in the town during the same year. Shakespeare's friends may
have called the attention of the strolling players to the homeless youth,
rumours of whose search for employment about the London theatres had
doubtless reached Stratford. From such incidents seems to have sprung
the opportunity which offered Shakespeare fame and fortune. According to
Rowe's vague statement, 'he was received into the company then in being
at first in a very mean rank.' William Castle, the parish clerk of
Stratford at the end of the seventeenth century, was in the habit of
telling visitors that he entered the playhouse as a servitor. Malone
recorded in 1780 a stage tradition 'that his first office in the theatre
was that of prompter's attendant' or call-boy. His intellectual capacity
and the amiability with which he turned to account his versatile powers
were probably soon recognised, and thenceforth his promotion was assured.
The acting companies.
Shakespeare's earliest reputation was made as an actor, and, although his
work as a dramatist soon eclipsed his histrionic fame, he remained a
prominent member of the actor's profession till near the end of his life.
By an Act of Parliament of 1571 (14 Eliz. cap. 2), which was re-enacted
in 1596 (39 Eliz. cap. 4), players were under the necessity of procuring
a license to pursue their calling from a peer of the realm or 'personage
of higher degree;' otherwise they were adjudged to be of the status of
rogues and vagabonds. The Queen herself and many Elizabethan peers were
liberal in the exercise of their licensing powers, and few actors failed
to secure a statutory license, which gave them a rank of respectability,
and relieved them of all risk of identification with vagrants or 'sturdy
beggars.' From an early period in Elizabeth's reign licensed actors were
organised into permanent companies. In 1587 and following years, besides
three companies of duly licensed boy-actors that were formed from the
choristers of St. Paul's Cathedral and the Chapel Royal and from
Westminster scholars, there were in London at least six companies of
fully licensed adult actors; five of these were called after the noblemen
to whom their members respectively owed their licenses (viz. the Earls of
Leicester, Oxford, Sussex, and Worcester, and the Lord Admiral, Charles,
lord Howard of Effingham), and one of them whose actors derived their
license from the Queen was called the Queen's Company.
The Lord Chamberlain's company.
The patron's functions in relation to the companies seem to have been
mainly confined to the grant or renewal of the actors' licenses.
Constant alterations of name, owing to the death or change from other
causes of the patrons, render it difficult to trace with certainty each
company's history. But there seems no doubt that the most influential of
the companies named--that under the nominal patronage of the Earl of
Leicester--passed on his death in September 1588 to the patronage of
Ferdinando Stanley, lord Strange, who became Earl of Derby on September
25, 1592. When the Earl of Derby died on April 16, 1594, his place as
patron and licenser was successively filled by Henry Carey, first lord
Hunsdon, Lord Chamberlain (_d._ July 23, 1596), and by his son and heir,
George Carey, second lord Hunsdon, who himself became Lord Chamberlain in
March 1597. After King James's succession in May 1603 the company was
promoted to be the King's players, and, thus advanced in dignity, it
fully maintained the supremacy which, under its successive titles, it had
already long enjoyed.
A member of the Lord Chamberlain's.
It is fair to infer that this was the company that Shakespeare originally
joined and adhered to through life. Documentary evidence proves that he
was a member of it in December 1594; in May, 1603 he was one of its
leaders. Four of its chief members--Richard Burbage, the greatest tragic
actor of the day, John Heming, Henry Condell, and Augustine Phillips were
among Shakespeare's lifelong friends. Under this company's auspices,
moreover, Shakespeare's plays first saw the light. Only two of the plays
claimed for him--'Titus Andronicus' and '3 Henry VI'--seem to have been
performed by other companies (the Earl of Sussex's men in the one case,
and the Earl of Pembroke's in the other).
The London theatres.