Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life
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Shakespeare Unbound: Decoding a Hidden Life
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Overview
At last—a key that unlocks the secrets of Shakespeare's life
Intimacies with Southampton and Marlowe, entanglements in London with the elusive dark lady, the probable fathering of an illegitimate son—these are among the mysteries of Shakespeare's rich and turbulent life that have proven tantalizingly obscure.
Despite an avalanche of recent scholarship, René Weis, an acknowledged authority on the Elizabethan period, believes the links between the bard's life and the poems and plays have been largely ignored. Armed with a wealth of new archival research and his own highly regarded interpretations of the literature, the author finds provocative parallels between Shakespeare's early experiences in the bustling market town of Stratford—including a dangerous poaching incident and contacts with underground Catholics—and the plays.
Breaking with tradition, Weis reveals that it is the plays and poems themselves that contain the richest seam of clues about the details of Shakespeare's personal life, at home in Stratford and in the shadowy precincts of theatrical London—details of a code unbroken for four hundred years.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781466855090 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Holt, Henry & Company, Inc. |
| Publication date: | 10/22/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 496 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
René Weis is a professor of English and vice-dean of the faculty of arts and humanities at University College, London. He is the author of The Yellow Cross and Criminal Justice.
Read an Excerpt
Shakespeare Unbound
Decoding a Hidden Life
By René Weis
Henry Holt and Company
Copyright © 2007 René WeisAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-5509-0
CHAPTER 1
Stratford 1564: Birth of a Genius
After William Shakespeare died, nearly four hundred years ago, a younger contemporary, Ben Jonson, wrote that he
loved the man and do honour his memory, on this side idolatry, as much as any. He was indeed honest and of an open and free nature; had an excellent fancy; brave motions, and gentle expressions wherein he flowed with that facility that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped. ... His wit was in his own power, would the rule of it had been so too.
Jonson is a great witness, trenchant, steeped in theater, and never fawning. This tribute provides a convenient starting point. He is talking about "the man," but almost at once conflates the man with the poet and playwright. Jonson did not distinguish categorically between the man and the work, and neither should we. The main reason for writing a biography of Shakespeare at all is those plays and poems, which have given untold pleasure to people the world over. If there is such a thing as a window into the soul of the subject, as in one of his sonnets Shakespeare suggested there was, his plays and poems are it.
Jonson has the immense advantage over us that he knew Shakespeare well. He anticipated that his friend would in the judgment of posterity outshine him and all his contemporaries, that he would be ranked above even Ovid, Virgil, Horace, and Homer. It was Jonson who best captured Shakespeare's legacy, in his elegy in the 1623 First Folio. He apostrophized his friend as the "soul of the age" and the "wonder of our stage" before, finally, claiming that Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time." In the course of this book, we will see how deep a trace his age and his own life left in these plays, which have proven every bit as timeless as Jonson predicted. We owe Jonson for authenticating the portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio. His address "To the Reader" faces the famous egg-headed depiction of Shakespeare by Martin Droeshout. The Droeshout engraving has not pleased the many, but it is a true likeness and, in Jonson's judgment, not a bad one at that:
To the Reader
This figure that thou here seest put,
It was for gentle Shakespeare cut,
Wherein the graver had a strife
With nature to outdo the life.
O could he have but drawn his wit
As well in brass, as he has hit
His face, the print would then surpass
All that was ever writ in brass.
But since he cannot, reader, look
Not on his picture but his book.
B[en] J[onson]
It is comforting to be told by someone in a position to know that the artist hit Shakespeare's face to the life. Very few past lives of people from backgrounds like Shakespeare's afford this luxury. In Shakespeare's case we are lucky enough to have one other authenticated representation: the famous bust in the chancel of Holy Trinity in his hometown. It was erected in the church during the lifetime of Shakespeare's sister, Joan, his widow, and his daughters. It was in place by the time the First Folio was published.
Shakespeare spent much of his life in the Warwickshire town where he was born. Compared with London, Stratford-upon-Avon was a backwater, but it was not therefore backward, nor was it small. Since the 1490s, it had been linked to the south of the country by an imposing stone bridge across the Avon. We know it as Clopton Bridge, after its builder the Stratford benefactor Sir Hugh Clopton, but in Shakespeare's day it was the "great bridge," "Stratford Bridge," or the "stone bridge." It was renowned throughout the region and it was well looked after by the borough. Shakespeare's imagination was steeped in the Warwickshire countryside as surely as William Wordsworth's was in the lakes and mountains of Cumbria, and in his imagery he frequently returns to it. This is as true of the painful, figurative English landscape of King Lear as it is of that so very Warwickshire-like magic wood in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Shakespeare never bought a property in London, choosing instead to base himself in a huge and comfortable new house in Stratford-upon-Avon after 1597. In London he was only ever a lodger, even though the capital was the scene of his great triumphs and where he kept company with the good, the true, and the reckless.
The outline of the Stratford that Shakespeare knew remains largely intact, a parallelogram with two main arteries on a north–south axis intersecting with a set of streets running from east to west. At the southern edge of the town and in splendid isolation on the Avon sits Holy Trinity, one of the most cherished silhouettes in all of rural England, as evocative as the paintings of Constable. Long ago, a medieval priory and township surrounded it: hence the name Old Town by which the area was already known in Shakespeare's time. A lane by that name still links Holy Trinity with the Bancroft, the old common on the Avon.
The other place of worship in town was the Gild Chapel of the Holy Cross. It sits right opposite the spot where the largest house in town once stood. Shakespeare bought that house in the 1590s; he and his family would have heard the din of the chapel bells every day and every night. "And when the clock struck, that was the sound that Shakespeare heard," wrote Virginia Woolf. The large bell in the tower of the Gild Chapel dates from 1633. Since 1992, it has again been sounding the curfew at eight o'clock each night. Shakespeare never heard it, but his daughters did. On the outside, the chapel looked the same in his lifetime as it does now. William was born just too late to see the interior in its former Catholic glory. His father was the borough chamberlain who in January 1564 paid for the mandatory Protestant vandalism of its mural paintings: "Item paid for defacing images in the chapel 2 shillings, 10 January 1564." Another 240 years passed before the wonderful frescoes bled through the whitewash in the Gild Chapel. Then they started to fade for good and now, some two hundred years on, they have almost entirely disappeared. Mercifully, they were copied in good time, so we know what they looked like.
South of the Gild Chapel sits the King's New School, named after King Edward VI. Although the bulk of the modern school has mostly retreated east inside the old grounds, the core of Shakespeare's late medieval grammar school is extant. Its long classrooms on the first two floors were spaces that he must have known well, and one of its inside chambers to the left of the staircase, at the southeastern end of the building, served as the town council's meeting room. The town was led from this chamber. Adjacent to the school, another set of timbered fifteenth-century buildings have somehow survived and bulge out onto the pavement. These are the Stratford almshouses.
Shakespeare was baptised in Holy Trinity on Wednesday, April 26, 1564. (The date corresponds to modern May 6, because the Elizabethans computed the year by the antiquated Julian calendar and England did not adopt the Gregorian calendar until 1752.) The spring of 1564 was a bad time to be born, because the plague was about to hit the town. Less than three months after Shakespeare's birth, the register of Holy Trinity ominously records "Hic incepit pestis," "Here the plague began." The statistics for Stratford baptisms tell their own story. In the year of Shakespeare's birth, the number of newborns dropped by half: whereas in each of 1562 and 1563 just over eighty children were born, in 1564 the total fell to thirty-nine. Among these twenty-five boys and fourteen girls was William Shakespeare. For 1565, the records show a rise again, to fifty-eight. The provinces were no more immune from visitations by the plague than London was, although there were no congested public places here for the infection to spread like wildfire, as it did in the big city.
This must have been an anxious time for Shakespeare's parents, John Shakespeare and Mary Arden. William was their third child and the first boy. Two sisters, Joan and Margaret, had preceded him, but neither had lived for more than a few months. Joan was baptised on September 15, 1558, and died, it seems, not long afterward. It took her parents four years to produce another daughter, Margaret, who died four short months later. The two girls were named after Mary Arden's sisters; as for "William," it was one of the most common first names in Elizabethan Stratford, although there were no Williams in the Shakespeare or Arden families. So the boy must have been named after a neighbor or friend or someone who was both. It is usually taken for granted that the haberdasher William Smith of Henley Street stood as Shakespeare's godfather. Smith and John Shakespeare had acted as the Corporation's "chamberlains" at the time of William's birth in April 1564. In this office they were charged with keeping the accounts of the borough that year, itemizing all its revenues and expenses. The two men seem to have got on well together, for William Smith called his son John, perhaps a reciprocal compliment. William Smith and John Shakespeare not only sat on the town council at the same time, they also lasted for fifty years in the same street in the same town. But it is just as likely that William Tyler rather than William Smith was Shakespeare's godfather. Tyler was a butcher with premises on the southeast side of Sheep Street near the Bancroft, roughly opposite the present "Cordelia" cottage. He was a few years older than John Shakespeare and he had a son called Richard who was born in the autumn of 1566. This Richard Tyler is famously remembered in the first draft of Shakespeare's will before being crossed out in the final version. He may also be linked to the naming of one of Shakespeare's daughters.
The fourth Shakespeare child to be born was another boy, Gilbert. He arrived in 1566 and was probably named after the glover Gilbert Bradley, who lived three doors east of John Shakespeare in Henley Street. For the next three years, Will and Gilbert were the only children in the family; they seem to have stayed friends and business partners throughout their lives. Gilbert was followed by a second Joan in 1569, and two years later another little girl arrived. She was called Anne after her mother's sister Agnes, the names Agnes and Anne being then interchangeable. Three years later, a further son arrived on the scene. He was baptised on March 11, 1574, and named Richard, after his grandfather Richard Shakespeare from the nearby village of Snitterfield. The next and last child was another boy, Edmund. He was baptised on May 3, 1580, when Will was sixteen, Gilbert fourteen, Joan eleven, and Richard six.
The name Edmund was rare in sixteenth-century Stratford and there were no Edmunds in the immediate Arden and Shakespeare families. The odds are that this child was named after Edmund Lambert from Barton-on-the-Heath, the husband of Mary Arden's sister Joan. There might be another reason for the choice of name: the connection to Edmund Campion. Campion became a saint of the Roman Catholic church in 1970; in 1580 his name was already revered in recusant circles, and the following year saw his martyrdom. Undoubtedly, some Edmunds were named for him. The Jesuit William Weston called himself William Edmunds to honor his friend Campion, with whom he had been at Oxford. His many years of incarceration at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire and in the Tower of London, followed by his eventual release into exile when he was on the verge of blindness, led to his saintly presence in Shakespeare's own lifetime. Shakespeare, Edmund Campion, William "Edmunds" Weston, Edmund Shakespeare, and Edmund (the bastard) Gloucester in King Lear all interleave in this story. The civil war between Catholics and Protestants was the deepest spiritual and political reality of the time.
Because of this, we may want to be aware of another man who was born in the same year as Shakespeare. The tall young aristocrat John Gerard joined the Society of Jesus at a time when to do so and return to England was virtual suicide. He did just that, and suffered dreadfully for his calling. There was a dash about this Jesuit Hotspur, who converted Penelope Rich (née Devereux) to the Catholic faith. She was the sister of the mercurial Earl of Essex and the object of the most famous sonnet cycle of the age, Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella. Gerard, a master of disguises, a wonderful writer and autobiographer, was also the close friend of a priest who found his way into Shakespeare's Macbeth, Father Henry Garnett. Shakespeare's and Gerard's lives ran on parallel tracks in the England of the period: the one, Shakespeare, inside the tent even if perhaps only just, the other, Gerard, militantly outside and thus exposed fully to the vengeful savagery of the Elizabethan state. Gerard's autobiography offers the most intimate, immediate, and intensely lived account of the years and of the country that Shakespeare inhabited.
* * *
With the birth in 1580 of Edmund Shakespeare, the family was complete. Mary Arden was probably about forty then. On November 24, 1556, when her father, Robert Arden of Wilmcote, made his will, she was still a spinster. Little Joan was born in September 1558, so Mary and John probably wed in the summer or autumn of 1557. Assuming that she was around eighteen during that first pregnancy, this would place her birth in 1540. John may have been Mary's senior by some ten years, because he was renting property in Henley Street by 1552. After a full seven-year apprenticeship as a glover, and having clearly worked hard already to set up on his own in Henley Street, he must have been in his early twenties then; he was born probably in or near 1530. John had spent his youth in the village of Snitterfield some three miles northeast of Stratford; his father, Richard, was a yeoman there. The name Snitterfield signifies "open land inhabited by snipe"; and the landscape is a bowl of rolling fields perfect for farming. When the Shakespeares pitched their tent here in the early sixteenth century, almost all the acreage around the village would have been held in common and cultivated. As a young man, John must have helped out his father in the family's fields down from their house and also in those that lay beyond the church on the right-hand side of the road to Luscombe and Norton Lindsey. These fields were known as Burman and Redhill; in the 1590s, Shakespeare's uncle Henry was fined for not maintaining a drainage ditch between them. Today a housing estate sits on fields that were once tilled by Shakespeares.
Thanks to sixteenth-century local records, we can identify Richard Shakespeare's farm, his messuage, with certainty. In 1504 the following property, which would become it, was sold to Mary Arden's grandfather Thomas Arden of Wilmcote: "one messuage and eighty acres of land at Snitterfield, the messuage being situated between the tenement of William Palmer and a lane called Maryes Lane, and extending in length from the King's highway to a small rivulet." The rivulet is the Bell Brook, which meanders along today's School Road through the lower village toward the Green; "Maryes Lane" corresponds to Bell Lane, while the "King's highway" is Church Road. The property that now straddles the south corner of Bell Lane and Church Road occupies the site of Shakespeare's grandfather's house. Whenever William Shakespeare visited Snitterfield to see his aunt and uncle, he would have passed this very spot. His roots were right here. In due course, the Shakespeare farm and its substantial lands, which rolled down all the way to Bell Brook, reverted to the Ardens, who had owned the freehold all along and now bequeathed it to Mary Arden's brother-in-law Edmund Lambert, whose home village, Barton-on-the-Heath, Shakespeare would put in one of his plays.
How John Shakespeare of Snitterfield turned up in Stratford as a glover we do not know, but he was a restless spirit on the make, and make it big he did at first, doing more than gloving. Rather, he started to trade in wool on a lucrative scale, and not always legally. He may not have had a racket going, but he got close enough to attract his own personal surveillance agent, whose reports on him survive in the National Archives in Kew. In October 1556, John Shakespeare acquired the eastern wing of the Birthplace from Edward West, as well as a house of a similar size in Greenhill Street from George Turnor. It is likely that this Turnor was related to the John Turnor who lived across from the Shakespeares in Henley Street. John Shakespeare was becoming a man of substance and a serious property owner. He had proven himself to be an astute businessman and artisan. He was a rising man, he was ready to marry, and marry he did. Mary Arden was not quite the boss's daughter, but she was as good as, given the relationship between his father and hers, and she stood to inherit considerable property in Wilmcote. In 1557 John and Mary Shakespeare embarked on their married lives in the Henley Street house.
Twenty-two years separate the Shakespeares' firstborn daughter, Joan, and baby Edmund. What Will Shakespeare made of Edmund's arrival, we cannot know. As the eldest of the surviving children, he was the man of the house after his father, who was by now struggling badly with debts and potential insolvency. If young William helped out with baby Edmund, it would have been timely training, because before long he would himself be lumbered with children: his daughter Susanna was only three years younger than her uncle Edmund. One wonders how sixteen-year-old Will responded to the sight of his pregnant and aging mother. The rituals and the physicality of childbirth in the period were raw and unavoidable. Usually a group of women would gather in the home of the woman who was giving birth. There would be no escaping the pain and the screaming; everyone, men, women, and children, knew what was going on, outside in the street as well as within the house. These elemental facts of life would have helped shape Shakespeare's imagination as much as anything. Shakespeare knows a great deal about motherhood. A mother's "pains," as he puts it, are never far from his mind, although mothers are much less prominent in his plays than fathers are. This is partly because the statute that forbade women to act onstage made it harder to portray mothers than fathers, daughters than sons. The impressive number of daughters in Shakespeare's plays, in the teeth of this practical difficulty, underlines the emotional hold on him of this particular bond.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Shakespeare Unbound by René Weis. Copyright © 2007 René Weis. Excerpted by permission of Henry Holt and Company.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraph,
Map: Stratford-upon-Avon in Shakespeare's Time,
Map: Henley Street in Shakespeare's Time,
Prologue,
1. Stratford 1564: Birth of a Genius,
2. William Shakespeare's Schooldays: c.1570–c.1578,
3. Meeting the Neighbors in 1582,
4. Enter Wife and Daughter: 1582–83,
5. Poaching from the Lucys: 1587?,
6. Bound for London: 1587,
7. Early Days in Shoreditch: 1587–90,
8. Likely Lads: Kit Marlowe and Will Shakespeare,
9. Living the Sonnets: 1590–,
10. The Rival Poet: 1592–93,
11. A Twenty-first-Birthday Poem: October 6, 1594,
12. Taming the Dark Lady: 1594–,
13. A Will "Made Lame by Fortune's Blows",
14. The Catholics and Oldcastle: 1594–96,
15. From Blackfriars to Bankside: 1596–99,
16. "Alack, My Child Is Dead": Wednesday, August 11, 1596,
17. Merry Wives and New Place: 1597,
18. Flight from the Fortress,
19. The Moneylender of London: October 25, 1598,
20. A Stratford Alexander in Henry V at the Globe: 1599,
21. Picturing a Poet and a Pantomime Rebellion: 1600–1601,
22. Daughters and Sons and Lovers: 1601–1602,
23. Affairs of the Body and Heart: 1602–1604,
24. "My Father's Godson": 1605–1606,
25. The Easter Rising of 1606: A Little Local Difficulty,
26. A Wedding and a Funeral: 1607,
27. Losing a Mother and a Daughter: 1609–1611,
28. "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night": 1612–15,
29. Shakespeare Dies: 1616,
30. Life After Death: 1623–,
Notes,
Main Characters,
Appendix,
Bibliographical Note,
Acknowledgments,
Index,
Also by René Weis,
About the Author,
Copyright,