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Shakespeare
Bill Bryson


From bestselling author Bill Bryson comes this compelling and concise biography of William Shakespeare, our greatest dramatist and poet.Examining centuries of myths, half-truths and downright lies, Bill Bryson makes sense of the man behind the masterpieces. As he leads us through the crowded streets of Elizabethan England, he brings to life the places and characters that inspired Shakespeare’s work, with his trademark wit and accessibility. Along the way he delights in the inventiveness of Shakespeare’s language, which has given us so many of the indispensable words and phrases we use today, and celebrates the Bard’s legacy to our literature, culture and history.Drawing together information from a vast array of sources, this is a masterful account of the life and works of William Shakespeare, one of the most famous and most enigmatic people ever to have lived – not to mention a classic piece of Bill Bryson, author of ‘A Short History of Nearly Everything’ and ‘Notes from a Small Island’.















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First published in Great Britain by HarperPress in 2007

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Table of Contents


Cover Page (#ud4a08867-3751-5585-9f3d-cde9dd3b5d9e)

Title Page (#u4e1b70b2-f5c1-5839-b359-1ccfcf76c0e4)

Copyright (#u12b1cc37-f8d2-513c-b982-88a7f3b9b4bb)

Dedication (#uf1d3f3e8-c440-5bcf-9f79-61725d365d6b)

Foreword (#u198f8170-16b0-5d7f-a33d-b6d7398b6fec)

Chapter One: In Search of William Shakespeare (#ucdb2e0a3-0199-5e48-a9fe-386bb0a05fe7)

Chapter Two: The Early Years, 1564–1585 (#u3bddfa2e-120b-5f13-aa16-aa09708a86fd)

Chapter Three: The Lost Years, 1585–1592 (#u8f21cf0f-e471-51cd-9cc9-210f7e2255de)

Chapter Four: In London (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Five: The Plays (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Six: Years of Fame, 1596–1603 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Seven: The Reign of King James, 1603–1616 (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Eight: Death (#litres_trial_promo)

Chapter Nine: Claimants (#litres_trial_promo)

Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

Praise (#litres_trial_promo)

By the same author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)


To Finley and Molly and in memory of Maisie




Foreword (#ulink_6dbb0182-1ea5-576d-8357-5380db438a23)


A FEW YEARS AGO, a kindly New York publisher named James Atlas approached me out of the blue and asked me if I would like to write a biography for a series of books he was launching, to be called Eminent Lives.

Each book in the series was to be about forty thousand words, considerably less than half the length of a conventional biography. The idea was that each book would be long enough to have some substance while yet remaining concise.

James sent me a list of the subjects that had already been assigned. I was disappointed to find that nearly all the figures that jumped to my mind as candidates had already been taken. It was only when I went through the list a second time that I realized that no one had selected William Shakespeare, and impetuously I offered to take him on. To my surprise, and slight subsequent panic, James readily assented.

I hardly need point out that I am not a Shakespearean authority, but luckily Britain is full of people who are, and prudently I turned to them. The book that follows has almost nothing to do with what I think of William Shakespeare (though I admire him very much, of course), but is instead about what I learned of William Shakespeare from people who have spent lifetimes studying and thinking about him. I remain immensely grateful to them all, in particular to the great and scholarly Stanley Wells, now retired as chairman of the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust.

What is perhaps most extraordinary about William Shakespeare, bearing in mind that he has been dead for four hundred years, is how lively his world remains. Hardly a month goes by that there isn’t some fairly momentous claim or discovery relating to his life or work – never more so perhaps than in 2015 when a South African academic named Francis Thackeray suggested that Shakespeare may have filled the bowl of his little clay pipe with marijuana and possibly even cocaine. The assertion is based on an analysis of pipe remains found in the garden of New Place, Shakespeare’s last home in Stratford-upon-Avon. Never mind that nobody knows whether Shakespeare ever actually smoked a pipe or whether the pipe fragments belonged to him or his gardener or someone who owned the property later. Still, if it turns out that anybody in Elizabethan England was smoking cannabis and cocaine, that would be arresting news indeed, and it has to be said that no one would have examined the pipe fragments so fastidiously had there not been a Shakespeare connection.

Three other rather more notable events have bounced into the world of Shakespearean scholarship since this volume was first published and should perhaps be mentioned here. The most exciting – not to say incendiary – was the announcement in 2009 by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust that it had acquired a new and definitive portrait of William Shakespeare.

Called the Cobbe portrait, it is the work of an unknown artist, and shows a youthful, rather dashing man of healthy complexion, dapper attire and a keen air of intelligence and sensitivity, all of which stands in sharp contrast to the other existing likenesses said to be of Shakespeare. The painting had previously hung in the Cobbe family’s ancestral home near Dublin and was long thought to be a portrait of Sir Walter Raleigh.

‘I was sceptical indeed to begin with,’ Stanley Wells told me at the time of the unveiling. ‘There are a lot of paintings that have been claimed to be of William Shakespeare on pretty dubious grounds. But the more I considered the evidence for this one, the more I grew persuaded. I would say I am 90 per cent convinced now it is genuine.’

It is a terribly exciting thought. Unfortunately, it has also encountered a good deal of criticism. Sir Roy Strong, the art historian, dismissed claims for the portrait’s authenticity as ‘codswallop’. Katherine Duncan-Jones of Oxford University thought the man in the portrait ‘too grand and courtier-like to be Shakespeare’, and in a long critical article for the Times Literary Supplement characterized the evidence as ‘not hugely compelling’. She suggested it was a portrait of a Sir Thomas Overbury.

At about the same time that the Cobbe portrait came to light, archaeologists from the Museum of London caused much scholarly excitement by announcing the discovery of the foundations of London’s first purpose-built theatre on the site of a disused warehouse in Shoreditch in east London. Built in 1576 and so indubitably original that it was called simply The Theatre, it is the oldest theatre positively associated with Shakespeare and was probably where Romeo and Juliet was first performed.

Soon afterwards, archaeologists also found the foundations of a nearby theatre, with similar Shakespeare connections, called the Curtain. Only modest fragments of both theatres survive, but so little is known about the physical aspects of Elizabethan theatres that even the discovery of some small runs of brick and stone is a matter of excitement and value.

Also causing a pleasant stir was the rediscovery and return to Durham University of a missing First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays taken from the university library by a light-fingered opportunist in 1998. It had been gone for so long that most people had assumed it to be lost for ever. Happily, the volume was sent for a valuation to the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, where it was recognized as the missing Durham volume. The Folger alerted the FBI and a man named Raymond Scott was arrested, tried and eventually sentenced to eight years in prison for the theft.

The folio, mercifully undamaged, is now back in the university library on Palace Green in Durham, where it had resided peacefully since 1664. The question of how many First Folios there are in the world is an interesting and surprisingly challenging one, and is discussed at some length in the pages that follow. Suffice it to say for the moment that the rediscovery of one missing volume is cause for rejoicing. I am faithfully assured that it will not be stolen again.




Chapter One In Search of William Shakespeare (#ulink_614d26e0-dc43-5a94-951f-3fb3d4a6501b)


BEFORE HE CAME into a lot of money in 1839, Richard Plantagenet Temple Nugent Brydges Chandos Grenville, second Duke of Buckingham and Chandos, led a largely uneventful life.

He sired an illegitimate child in Italy, spoke occasionally in the House of Commons against the repeal of the Corn Laws, and developed an early interest in plumbing (his house at Stowe, in Buckinghamshire, had nine of the first flush toilets in England), but otherwise was distinguished by nothing more than his glorious prospects and many names. But after inheriting his titles and one of England’s great estates, he astonished his associates, and no doubt himself, by managing to lose every penny of his inheritance in just nine years through a series of spectacularly unsound investments.

Bankrupt and humiliated, in the summer of 1848 he fled to France, leaving Stowe and its contents to his creditors. The auction that followed became one of the great social events of the age. Such was the richness of Stowe’s furnishings that it took a team of auctioneers from the London firm of Christie & Manson forty days to get through it all.

Among the lesser-noted disposals was a dark oval portrait, twenty-two inches high by eighteen wide, purchased by the Earl of Ellesmere for 355 guineas and known ever since as the Chandos portrait. The painting had been much retouched, and was so blackened with time that a great deal of detail was (and still is) lost. It shows a balding but not unhandsome man of about forty, who sports a trim beard. In his left ear he wears a gold earring. His expression is confident, serenely rakish. This is not a man, you sense, to whom you would lightly entrust a wife or grown daughter.

Although nothing is known about the origin of the painting or where it was for much of the time before it came into the Chandos family in 1747, it has been said for a long time to be of William Shakespeare. Certainly it looks like William Shakespeare – but then really it ought to, since it is one of the three likenesses of Shakespeare from which all others are taken.

In 1856, shortly before his death, Lord Ellesmere gave the painting to the new National Portrait Gallery in London as its founding work. As the gallery’s first acquisition, it has a certain sentimental prestige, but almost at once its authenticity was doubted. Many critics at the time thought the subject was too dark-skinned and foreign-looking – too Italian or Jewish – to be an English poet, much less a very great one. Some, to quote the late Samuel Schoenbaum, were disturbed by his ‘wanton’ air and ‘lubricious’ lips. (One suggested, perhaps a touch hopefully, that he was portrayed in stage make-up, probably in the role of Shylock.)

‘Well, the painting is from the right period – we can certainly say that much,’ Dr Tarnya Cooper, curator of sixteenth-century portraits at the gallery, told me one day when I set off to find out what we could know and reasonably assume about the most venerated figure of the English language. ‘The collar is of a type that was popular between about 1590 and 1610, just when Shakespeare was having his greatest success and thus most likely to sit for a portrait. We can also tell that the subject was a bit bohemian, which would seem consistent with a theatrical career, and that he was at least fairly well to do, as Shakespeare would have been in this period.’

I asked how she could tell these things.

‘Well, the earring tells us he was bohemian,’ she explained. ‘An earring on a man meant the same then as it does now – that the wearer was a little more fashionably racy than the average person. Drake and Raleigh were both painted with earrings. It was their way of announcing that they were of an adventurous disposition. Men who could afford to wore a lot of jewellery back then, mostly sewn into their clothes. So the subject here is either fairly discreet, or not hugely wealthy. I would guess probably the latter. On the other hand, we can tell that he was prosperous – or wished us to think he was prosperous – because he is dressed all in black.’

She smiled at my look of puzzlement. ‘It takes a lot of dye to make a fabric really black. Much cheaper to produce clothes that were fawn or beige or some other lighter colour. So black clothes in the sixteenth century were nearly always a sign of prosperity.’

She considered the painting appraisingly. ‘It’s not a bad painting, but not a terribly good one either,’ she went on. ‘It was painted by someone who knew how to prime a canvas, so he’d had some training, but it is quite workaday and not well lighted. The main thing is that if it is Shakespeare, it is the only portrait known that might have been done from life, so this would be what William Shakespeare really looked like – if it is William Shakespeare.’

And what are the chances that it is?

‘Without documentation of its provenance we’ll never know, and it’s unlikely now, after such a passage of time, that such documentation will ever turn up.’

And if not Shakespeare, who is it?

She smiled. ‘We’ve no idea.’



If the Chandos portrait is not genuine, then we are left with two other possible likenesses to help us decide what William Shakespeare looked like. The first is the copperplate engraving that appeared as the frontispiece of the collected works of Shakespeare in 1623 – the famous First Folio.

The Droeshout engraving, as it is known (after its artist, Martin Droeshout), is an arrestingly – we might almost say magnificently – mediocre piece of work. Nearly everything about it is flawed. One eye is bigger than the other. The mouth is curiously mispositioned. The hair is longer on one side of the subject’s head than the other, and the head itself is out of proportion to the body and seems to float off the shoulders, like a balloon. Worst of all, the subject looks diffident, apologetic, almost frightened – nothing like the gallant and confident figure that speaks to us from the plays.

Droeshout (or Drossaert or Drussoit, as he was sometimes known in his own time) is nearly always described as being from a family of Flemish artists, though in fact the Droeshouts had been in England for sixty years and three generations by the time Martin came along. Peter W.M. Blayney, the leading authority on the First Folio, has suggested that Droeshout, who was in his early twenties and not very experienced when he executed the work, may have won the commission not because he was an accomplished artist but because he owned the right piece of equipment: a rolling press of the type needed for copperplate engravings. Few artists had such a device in the 1620s.

Despite its many shortcomings, the engraving comes with a poetic endorsement from Ben Jonson, who says of it in his memorial to Shakespeare in the First Folio:

O, could he but have drawne his wit

As well in brasse, as he hath hit

His face, the Print would then surpasse

All that was ever writ in brasse.

It has been suggested, with some plausibility, that Jonson may not actually have seen the Droeshout engraving before penning his generous lines. What is certain is that the Droeshout portrait was not done from life: Shakespeare had been dead for seven years by the time of the First Folio.

That leaves us with just one other possible likeness: the painted, life-size statue that forms the centrepiece of a wall monument to Shakespeare at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, where he is buried. Like the Droeshout it is an indifferent piece of work artistically, but it does have the merit of having been seen and presumably passed as satisfactory by people who knew Shakespeare. It was executed by a mason named Gheerart Janssen, and installed in the chancel of the church by 1623 – the same year as Droeshout’s portrait. Janssen lived and worked near the Globe Theatre in Southwark in London, and thus may well have seen Shakespeare in life – though one rather hopes not, as the Shakespeare he portrays is a puffy-faced, self-satisfied figure, with (as Mark Twain memorably put it) the ‘deep, deep, subtle, subtle expression of a bladder’.

We don’t know exactly what the effigy looked like originally, because in 1749 the colours of its paintwork were ‘refreshed’ by some anonymous but well-meaning soul. Twenty-four years later, the Shakespeare scholar Edmond Malone, visiting the church, was horrified to find the bust painted, and ordered the churchwardens to have it whitewashed, returning it to what he wrongly assumed was its original state. By the time it was repainted again years later, no one had any idea of what colours to apply. The matter is of consequence because the paint gives the portrait not just colour but definition, as much of the detail is not carved on but painted. Under whitewash it must have looked rather like those featureless mannequins once commonly used to display hats in shop windows.

So we are in the curious position with William Shakespeare of having three likenesses from which all others are derived: two that aren’t very good by artists working years after his death, and one that is rather more compelling as a portrait but that may well be of someone else altogether. The paradoxical consequence is that we all recognize a likeness of Shakespeare the instant we see one, and yet we don’t really know what he looked like. It is like this with nearly every aspect of his life and character: he is at once the best known and least known of figures.



More than two hundred years ago, in a sentiment much repeated ever since, the historian George Steevens observed that all we know of William Shakespeare is contained within a few scanty facts: that he was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, produced a family there, went to London, became an actor and writer, returned to Stratford, made a will, and died. That wasn’t quite true then and it is even less so now, but it is not all that far from the truth either.

After four hundred years of dedicated hunting, researchers have found about a hundred documents relating to William Shakespeare and his immediate family – baptismal records, title deeds, tax certificates, marriage bonds, writs of attachment, court records (many court records – it was a litigious age) and so on. That’s quite a good number as these things go, but deeds and bonds and other records are inevitably bloodless. They tell us a great deal about the business of a person’s life, but almost nothing about the emotions of it.

In consequence there remains an enormous amount that we don’t know about William Shakespeare, much of it of a fundamental nature. We don’t know, for one thing, exactly how many plays he wrote or in what order he wrote them. We can deduce something of what he read, but don’t know where he got the books or what he did with them when he had finished with them.

Although he left nearly a million words of text, we have just fourteen words in his own hand – his name signed six times and the words ‘by me’ on his will. Not a single note or letter or page of manuscript survives. (Some authorities believe that a section of the play Sir Thomas More, which was never performed, is in Shakespeare’s hand, but that is far from certain.) We have no written description of him penned in his own lifetime. The first textual portrait – ‘he was a handsome, well-shap’t man: very good company, and of a very readie and pleasant smooth witt’ – was written sixty-four years after his death by a man, John Aubrey, who was born ten years after that death.

Shakespeare seems to have been the mildest of fellows, and yet the earliest written account we have of him is an attack on his character by a fellow artist. He appears to many biographers to have spurned his wife – famously he left her only his second-best bed in his will, and that as an apparent afterthought – and yet no one wrote more highly, more devotedly, more beamingly, of love and the twining of kindred souls.

We are not sure how best to spell his name – but then neither, it appears, was he, for the name is never spelled the same way twice in the signatures that survive. (They read as ‘Willm Shaksp’, ‘William Shakespe’, ‘Wm Shakspe’, ‘William Shakspere’, ‘Willm Shakspere’ and ‘William Shakspeare’. Curiously, one spelling he didn’t use was the one now universally attached to his name.) Nor can we be entirely confident how he pronounced his name. Helge Kökeritz, author of the definitive Shakespeare’s Pronunciation, thought it possible that Shakespeare said it with a short a, as in ‘shack’. It may have been spoken one way in Stratford and another in London, or he may have been as variable with the pronunciation as he was with the spelling.

We don’t know if he ever left England. We don’t know who his principal companions were or how he amused himself. His sexuality is an irreconcilable mystery. On only a handful of days in his life can we say with absolute certainty where he was. We have no record at all of his whereabouts for the eight critical years when he left his wife and three young children in Stratford and became, with almost impossible swiftness, a successful playwright in London. By the time he is first mentioned in print as a playwright, in 1592, his life was already more than half over.

For the rest, he is a kind of literary equivalent of an electron – forever there and not there.



To understand why we know as little as we do of William Shakespeare’s life, and what hope we have of knowing more, I went one day to the Public Record Office – now known as the National Archives – at Kew, in west London. There I met David Thomas, a compact, cheerful, soft-spoken man with grey hair, the senior archivist. When I arrived, Thomas was hefting a large, ungainly bound mass of documents – an Exchequer memoranda roll from the Hilary (or winter) term of 1570 – onto a long table in his office. A thousand pages of sheepskin parchment, loosely bound and with no two sheets quite matching, it was an unwieldy load requiring both arms to carry. ‘In some ways the records are extremely good,’ Thomas told me. ‘Sheepskin is a marvellously durable medium, though it has to be treated with some care. Whereas ink soaks into the fibres on paper, on sheepskin it stays on the surface, rather like chalk on a blackboard, and so can be rubbed away comparatively easily.

‘Sixteenth-century paper was of good quality, too,’ he went on. ‘It was made of rags and was virtually acid free, so it has lasted very well.’

To my untrained eye, however, the ink had faded to an illegible watery faintness, and the script was of a type that was effectively indecipherable. Moreover the writing on the sheets was not organized in any way that aided the searching eye. Paper and parchment were expensive, so no space was wasted. There were no gaps between paragraphs – indeed, no paragraphs. Where one entry ended, another immediately began, without numbers or headings to identify or separate one case from another. It would be hard to imagine less scannable text. To determine whether a particular volume contained a reference to any one person or event, you would have to read essentially every word – and that isn’t always easy even for experts like Thomas, because handwriting at the time was extremely variable.

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


(#ulink_f2a09bb3-21fa-53eb-90a7-3bdac5ef7832) – 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.

* (#ulink_b61ec6c3-b50c-5cc3-9ba5-16791ccd8ca3) 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 (#ulink_fd10a72f-61cc-5f7b-90ef-6ba2c4b4e4f6)


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.

Even while Elizabeth survived, the issue of her succession remained a national preoccupation throughout her reign – and thus through a good part of William Shakespeare’s life. As Frank Kermode has noted, a quarter of Shakespeare’s plays would be built around questions of royal succession – though speculating about Elizabeth’s successor was very much against the law. A Puritan Parliamentarian named Peter Wentworth languished for ten years in the Tower of London simply for having raised the matter in an essay.

Elizabeth was a fairly relaxed Protestant. She favoured many customary Catholic rites (there would be no evensong in English churches now without her) and demanded little more than a token attachment to Anglicanism throughout much of her reign. The interest of the Crown was not so much to direct people’s religious beliefs as simply to be assured of their fealty. It is telling that Catholic priests when caught illegally preaching were normally charged not with heresy but with treason. Elizabeth was happy enough to stay with Catholic families on her progresses around the country so long as their devotion to her as monarch was not in doubt. So being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism, was another matter, as we shall see.

Catholics who did not wish to attend Anglican services could pay a fine. These non-attenders were known as recusants (from a Latin word for refusing), and there were a great many of them – an estimated fifty thousand in 1580. Fines for recusancy were only 12 pence until 1581, and in any case were only sporadically imposed, but then they were raised abruptly – and, for most people, crushingly – to £20 a month. Remarkably some two hundred citizens had both the wealth and the piety to sustain such penalties, which proved an unexpected source of revenue to the Crown, raising a very useful £45,000 just at the time of the Spanish Armada.

Most of the Queen’s subjects, however, were what was known as ‘church Papists’ or ‘cold statute Protestants’ – prepared to support Protestantism so long as required, but happy and perhaps even quietly eager to become Catholics again if circumstances altered.

Protestantism had its dangers, too. Puritans (a word coined with scornful intent in the year of Shakespeare’s birth) and Separatists of various stripes also suffered persecution – not so much because of their beliefs or styles of worship as because of their habit of being wilfully disobedient to authority and dangerously outspoken. When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the Queen’s mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alençon,


(#ulink_727d5b41-c810-532e-aaa5-c6d517b878be) his right hand was cut off. Holding up his bloody stump and doffing his hat to the crowd, Stubbs shouted ‘God save the Queen!’, fell over in a faint, and was carted off to prison for eighteen months.

In fact he got off comparatively lightly, for punishments could be truly severe. Many convicted felons still heard the chilling words: ‘You shall be led from hence to the place whence you came…and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes.’ Actually, by Elizabeth’s time it had become most unusual for anyone to be disembowelled while they were still alive enough to know it. But exceptions were made. In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.

The monarch enjoyed extremely wide powers of punishment and Elizabeth used them freely, banishing from court or even imprisoning courtiers who displeased her (by, for instance, marrying without her blessing), sometimes for quite long periods. In theory she enjoyed unlimited powers to detain, at her pleasure, any subject who failed to honour the fine and numerous distinctions that separated one level of society from another – and these were fine and numerous indeed. At the top of the social heap was the monarch, of course. Then came nobles, high clerics and gentlemen, in that order. These were followed by citizens – which then signified wealthier merchants and the like: the bourgeoisie. Then came yeomen – that is, small farmers – and last came artisans and common labourers.

Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what. A person with an income of £20 a year was permitted to don a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year could wear all the satin he wished, but could have velvet only in his doublets, but not in any outerwear, and then only so long as the velvet was not crimson or blue, colours reserved for Knights of the Garter and their superiors. Silk netherstockings, meanwhile, were restricted to knights and their eldest sons, and to certain – but not all – envoys and royal attendants. Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could use for a particular article of apparel and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on, through lists of variables almost beyond counting.

The laws were enacted partly for the good of the national accounts, for the restrictions nearly always were directed at imported fabrics. For much the same reason there was for a time a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping domestic capmakers through a spell of depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Most of the other sumptuary laws weren’t actually much enforced, it would seem. The records show almost no prosecutions. Nonetheless they remained on the books until 1604.

Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status. A cardinal was permitted nine dishes at a meal while those earning less than £40 a year (which is to say most people) were allowed only two courses, plus soup. Happily, since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, eating meat on Friday was no longer a hanging offence, though anyone caught eating meat during Lent could still be sent to prison for three months. Church authorities were permitted to sell exemptions to the Lenten rule, and made a lot of money doing so. It’s a surprise that there was much demand, for in fact most varieties of light meat, including veal, chicken and all other poultry, were helpfully categorized as fish.

Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff. Our very first encounter with the Shakespeare name is in relation to one such general transgression in 1552, twelve years before William was born, when his father, John, was fined one shilling for keeping a dung heap in Henley Street in Stratford. This wasn’t just a matter of civic fussiness but of real concern because of the town’s repeated plague outbreaks. A fine of a shilling was a painful penalty – probably equivalent to two days’ earnings for Shakespeare.

Not much is known about John Shakespeare’s early years. He was born about 1530 and grew up on a farm at nearby Snitterfield, but came to Stratford as a young man (sparing posterity having to think of his son as the Bard of Snitterfield) and became a glover and whittawer – someone who works white or soft leather. It was an eminently respectable trade.

Stratford was a reasonably consequential town. With a population of roughly two thousand at a time when only three cities in Britain had ten thousand inhabitants or more, it stood about eighty-five miles north-west of London – a four-day walk or two-day horseback ride – on one of the main woolpack routes between the capital and Wales. (Travel for nearly everyone was on foot or by horseback, or not at all. Coaches as a means of public transport were invented in the year of Shakespeare’s birth but weren’t generally used by the masses until the following century.)

Shakespeare’s father is often said (particularly by those who wish to portray William Shakespeare as too deprived of stimulus and education to have written the plays attributed to him) to have been illiterate. Illiteracy was the usual condition in sixteenth-century England, to be sure. According to one estimate at least 70 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women of the period couldn’t even sign their names. But as one moved up the social scale, literacy rates rose appreciably. Among skilled craftsmen – a category that included John Shakespeare – some 60 per cent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.

The conclusion of illiteracy with regard to Shakespeare’s father is based on the knowledge that he signed his surviving papers with a mark. But lots of Elizabethans, particularly those who liked to think themselves busy men, did likewise even when they could read, rather as busy executives might today scribble their initials in the margins of memos. As Samuel Schoenbaum points out, Adrian Quiney, a Stratford contemporary of the Shakespeares, signed all his known Stratford documents with a cross and would certainly be considered illiterate except that we also happen to have an eloquent letter in his own hand written to William Shakespeare in 1598. It is worth bearing in mind that John Shakespeare rose through a series of positions of authority in which an inability to read would have been a tiresome, if not insuperable, handicap. Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not has absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.

Literate or not, John was a popular and respected fellow. In 1556 he took up the first of many municipal positions when he was elected borough ale taster. The job required him to make sure that measures and prices were correctly observed throughout the town – not only by innkeepers but also by butchers and bakers. Two years later he became a constable – a position that then, as now, argued for some physical strength and courage – and the next year became an ‘affeeror’ (or ‘affurer’), someone who assessed fines for matters not handled by existing statutes. Then he became successively burgess, chamberlain and alderman, which last entitled him to be addressed as ‘Master’ rather than simply as ‘Goodman’. Finally, in 1568, he was placed in the highest elective office in town, high bailiff – mayor in all but name. So William Shakespeare was born into a household of quite a lot of importance locally.

One of John’s duties as high bailiff was to approve payment from town funds for performances by visiting troupes of actors. Stratford in the 1570s became a regular stop for touring players, and it is reasonable to suppose that an impressionable young Will saw many plays as he grew up, and possibly received some encouragement or made some contact that smoothed his entrance into the London theatre later. He would at the very least have seen actors with whom he would eventually become closely associated.

For four hundred years that was about all that was known of John Shakespeare, but in the 1980s some discoveries at the Public Record Office showed that there was another, rather more dubious side to his character.

‘It appears that he hung out with some fairly shady fellows,’ says David Thomas. Four times in the 1570s, John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution – the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money lending, both highly illegal activities. Usury in particular was considered a ‘vice most odious and detestable’, in the stark phrasing of the law, and fines could be severe, but John seems to have engaged in it at a seriously committed level. In 1570 he was accused of making loans worth £220 (including interest) to a Walter Mussum. This was a very considerable sum – well over £100,000 in today’s money – and Mussum appears not to have been a good risk: at his death his entire estate was worth only £114, much less than John Shakespeare had lent him.

The risk attached to such an undertaking was really quite breathtaking. Anyone found guilty of it would forfeit all the money lent, plus interest, and face a stiff fine and the possibility of imprisonment. The law applied – a little unfairly, it must be said – to any extension of credit. If someone took delivery of, say, wool from you with the understanding that he would repay you later, with a little interest for your trouble, that was considered usury too. It was this form of usury of which John Shakespeare was probably guilty, for he also traded (or so it would seem) in large quantities of wool. In 1571, for instance, he was accused of acquiring three hundred tods – 8,400 pounds – of wool. That is a lot of wool and a lot of risk.

We cannot be certain how guilty he was. Informers, as David Thomas points out, sometimes brought actions as a kind of nuisance ploy, hoping that the accused, even if innocent, would agree to an out-of-court settlement rather than face a costly and protracted trial in London, and one of John Shakespeare’s accusers did have a record of bringing such malicious suits.

In any case something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was twelve, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs and stopped attending meetings. He was listed at one point among nine Stratford residents who were thought to have missed church services ‘for fear of processe for debtte’. His colleagues repeatedly reduced or excused levies that he was due to pay. They also kept his name on the roll for another ten years in the evident hope that he would make a recovery. He never did.



Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening. She came from a minor branch of a prominent family. Her father farmed, and the family was comfortable, but probably no more than that. She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married. Not a great deal is known about any of them apart from Will. Joan, born in 1558, married a local hatter named Hart and lived to be seventy-seven. Gilbert, born in 1566, became a successful haberdasher. Richard was born in 1574 and lived to be not quite forty, and that is all we know of him. Edmund, the youngest, became an actor in London – how successfully and with which company are unknown – and died there at the age of twenty-seven. He is buried in Southwark Cathedral, the only one of the eight siblings not to rest at Holy Trinity in Stratford. Seven of the eight Shakespeare children appear to have been named after close relations or family friends. The exception was William, the inspiration for whose name has always been a small mystery, like nearly everything else about his life.

It is commonly supposed (and frequently written) that Shakespeare enjoyed a good education at the local grammar school, King’s New School, situated in the Guild Hall in Church Street, and he probably did, though in fact we don’t know, as the school records for the period were long ago lost. What is known is that the school was open to any local boy, however dim or deficient, so long as he could read and write – and William Shakespeare patently could do both. King’s was of an unusually high standard and was generously supported by the town. The headmaster enjoyed an annual salary of £20 – roughly twice what was paid in other towns and even more, it is often noted, than the headmaster at Eton got at the time. The three masters at the school in Shakespeare’s day were all Oxford men – again a distinction.

Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and was characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week. (The seventh day was probably given over largely to religious instruction.) For much of the year they can hardly have seen daylight. It is easy to understand the line in As You Like It about a boy ‘creeping like snail unwillingly to school’.

Discipline was probably strict. A standard part of a teacher’s training, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, was how to give a flogging. Yet compared with many private or boarding schools Stratford’s grammar provided a cushioned existence. Boys at Westminster School in London had to sleep in a windowless grain room, bereft of heat, and endure icy washes, meagre food and frequent whippings. (But then, these were conditions not unknown to many twentieth-century English schoolboys.) Their schoolday began at dawn as well, but also incorporated an additional hour of lessons in the evening and private studies that kept some boys up late into the night.

Far from having ‘small Latin and less Greek’, as Ben Jonson famously charged, Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing and reciting Latin, often in the most mindnumbingly repetitious manner. One of the principal texts of the day taught pupils 150 different ways of saying ‘Thank you for your letter’ in Latin. Through such exercises Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis and others equally arcane and taxing. According to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in their introduction to the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, any grammar school pupil of the day would have received a more thorough grounding in Latin rhetoric and literature ‘than most present-day holders of a university degree in classics’. But they wouldn’t have received much else. Whatever mathematics, history or geography Shakespeare knew, he almost certainly didn’t learn it at grammar school.

Formal education stopped for Shakespeare probably when he was about fifteen. What became of him immediately after that is unknown – though many legends have rushed in to fill the vacuum. A particularly durable one is that he was caught poaching deer from the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and prudently elected to leave town in a hurry. The story and its attendant details are often repeated as fact even now. Roy Strong, in the scholarly Tudor and Jacobean Portraits, states that Shakespeare left Stratford in 1585 ‘to avoid prosecution for poaching at Charlecote’, and that he was to be found in London the following year. In fact, we don’t know when he left Stratford or arrived in London, or whether he ever poached so much as an egg. It is, in any case, unlikely that he poached deer from Charlecote, as it didn’t have a deer park until the following century.

The only certainty we possess for this early period of Shakespeare’s adulthood is that in late November 1582, a clerk at Worcester recorded that William Shakespeare had applied for a licence to marry. The bride, according to the ledger, was not Anne Hathaway but Anne Whateley of nearby Temple Grafton – a mystery that has led some biographers to suggest that Shakespeare courted two women to the point of matrimony at the same time, and that he stood up Anne Whateley out of duty to the pregnant Anne Hathaway. Anthony Burgess, in a slightly fevered moment, suggested that young Will, ‘sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton’, perhaps fell for ‘a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn’.

In fact, Anne Whateley probably never existed. In four hundred years of searching, no other record of her has ever been found. The clerk at Worcester was not, it appears, the most meticulous of record keepers. Elsewhere in the ledgers, in the same hand, scholars have found ‘Barbar’ recorded as ‘Baker’, ‘Edgcock’ confused with ‘Elcock’ and ‘Darby’ put in place of ‘Bradeley’, so turning Hathaway into Whateley was by no means beyond his wayward capabilities. Moreover – for Shakespeare investigators really are tireless – the records also show that in another book on the same day the clerk noted a suit concerning a William Whateley, and it is presumed that the name somehow stuck in his mind. No one, however, has yet found a convincing explanation for how Temple Grafton came into the records when the real bride was from Shottery.

The marriage licence itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare’s name is rendered as ‘Shagspere’ – the first of many arrestingly variable renderings. The marriage bond cost £40 and permitted the marriage to proceed with one reading of the banns instead of the normal three, so that it might be conducted the sooner. The £40 was to indemnify the Church authorities against any costly suits arising from the action – a claim of breach of promise, for instance. It was a truly whopping sum – something like £20,000 in today’s money – particularly when one’s father is so indebted that he can barely leave his own house for fear of arrest and imprisonment. Clearly there was much urgency to get the couple wed.

What makes this slightly puzzling is that it was not unusual for a bride to be pregnant on her wedding day. Up to 40 per cent of brides were in that state, according to one calculation, so why the extravagant haste here is a matter that can only be guessed at. It was unusual, however, for a young man to be married at eighteen, as Shakespeare was. Men tended to marry in their mid- to late twenties, women a little sooner. But these figures were extremely variable. Christopher Marlowe had a sister who married at twelve (and died at thirteen in childbirth). Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.

We know precious little about Shakespeare’s wife and nothing at all about her temperament, intelligence, religious views or other personal qualities. We are not even sure that Anne was her usual name. In her father’s will she was referred to as Agnes (which at the time was pronounced with a silent g, making it ‘ANN-uss’). Agnes and Anne were often treated as interchangeable names. We know also that she was one of seven children and that she evidently came from prosperous stock: though her childhood home is always referred to as Anne Hathaway’s cottage, it was (and is) a handsome and substantial property, containing twelve rooms. Her gravestone describes her as being sixty-seven years old at the time of her death in 1623. It is from this alone that we conclude that she was considerably older than her husband. Apart from the gravestone, there is no evidence for her age on record.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare – Susanna in May 1583, and the twins Judith and Hamnet in early February 1585 – but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple’s relationship – whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting. We don’t know if she ever accompanied him to London, saw any of his plays, or even took an interest in them. We have no indication of any warmth between them – but then we have no indication of warmth between William Shakespeare and any other human being. It is tempting to suppose that they had some sort of real bond for at least the first years of their marriage – they had children together on two occasions, after all – but it may actually be, for all we know, that they were very loving indeed and enjoyed a continuing (if presumably often long-distance) affection throughout their marriage. Two of the few certainties of Shakespeare’s life are that his marriage lasted till his death and that he sent much of his wealth back to Stratford as soon as he was able, which may not be conclusive proof of attachment, but hardly argues against it.

So, in any case, we have the position of a William Shakespeare who was poor, at the head of a growing family, and not yet twenty-one – not the most promising of situations for a young man with ambitions. Yet somehow from these most unpropitious circumstances he became a notable success in a competitive and challenging profession in a distant city in seemingly no time at all. How he did it is a perennial mystery.

One possibility is often mentioned. In 1587, when Shakespeare was twenty-three, an incident occurred among the Queen’s Men, one of the leading acting troupes, that may have provided an opening for Shakespeare. Specifically, while touring the provinces, the company was stopped at Thame, a riverside town in Oxfordshire, when a fight broke out between William Knell, one of the company’s leading men, and another actor, John Towne. In the course of their fight, Towne stabbed Knell through the neck, mortally wounding him (though evidently in self-defence, as he was subsequently cleared of blame). Knell’s death left the company an actor short, and raised the possibility that they recruited or were joined by a stage-struck young William Shakespeare when they passed through Stratford. Unfortunately, there is no documentary evidence to connect Shakespeare to the Queen’s Men at any stage of his career, and we don’t know whether the troupe visited Stratford before or after its fateful stop in Thame.

There is, however, an additional intriguing note in all this. Less than a year later Knell’s youthful widow, Rebecca, who was only fifteen or sixteen, remarried. Her new partner was John Heminges, who would become one of Shakespeare’s closest friends and associates and who would, with Henry Condell, put together the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works after Shakespeare’s death.

But a few intriguing notes are all that the record can offer. It is extraordinary to think that before he settled in London and became celebrated as a playwright, history provides just four recorded glimpses of Shakespeare – at his baptism, his wedding, and the two births of his children. There is also a passing reference to him in a lawsuit of 1588 filed by his father in a property dispute, but that has nothing to say about where he was at that time or what he was doing.

Shakespeare’s early life is really little more than a series of occasional sightings. So when we note that he was now about to embark on what are popularly known as his lost years, they are very lost indeed.

* (#ulink_0047fc61-e9a1-5354-92d4-10ea9dcc91e6) It was an unlikely courtship. The Queen was old enough to be his mother – she was nearly forty, he just eighteen – and the Duke moreover was short and famously ugly (his champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard). It was only the Duke’s death in 1584 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.




Chapter Three The Lost Years, 1585–1592 (#ulink_3751d80d-e996-535d-90f4-3c5cee53f7a1)


FEW PLACES IN history can have been more deadly and desirable at the same time as London in the sixteenth century. Conditions that made life challenging elsewhere were particularly rife in London, where newly arrived sailors and other travellers continually refreshed the city’s stock of infectious maladies.

Plague, virtually always present somewhere in the city, flared murderously every ten years or so. Those who could afford to left the cities at every outbreak. This in large part was the reason for the number of royal palaces just outside London – at Richmond, Greenwich, Hampton Court and elsewhere. Public performances of all types – in fact all public gatherings except for church-going – were also banned within seven miles of London each time the death toll in the city reached forty, and that happened a great deal.




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