Shakespeare: A Life Read online

  Shakespeare

  A LIFE

  PARK HONAN

  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

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  OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

  Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York

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  Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries

  Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York

  © Park Honan 1999

  The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

  First published 1998 First issued as an Oxford University Press paperback 1999

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

  You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Honan, Park. Shakespeare: a life/ Park Honan. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 -- Biography. 2. Dramatists, English -- Early modern, 1500-1700 -- Biography. PR2894.H65 1998 822.3'3-dC21 98-22114 [B]

  ISBN 0-19-282527-5

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  Typeset in Galliard by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India Printed in Hong Kong

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  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations vii

  Introduction ix

  A Note on Conventions Used in the Text xvi

  I. A STRATFORD YOUTH

  1. BIRTH 3

  Stratford -- Master Bretchgirdle's arrival -- The chamberlain's first son

  2. MOTHER OF THE CHILD 11

  Mary Shakespeare at Henley Street --'Hic incepit pestis' -- Air and music

  3. JOHN SHAKESPEARE'S FORTUNES 25

  In the bailiff's family -- Debts and a downfall

  4. TO GRAMMAR SCHOOL 43

  A classroom -- Rhetoric at dawn -- The Lord of Misrule

  5. OPPORTUNITY AND NEED 60

  'In the Countrey' -- Upon a promontory -- Returning

  6. LOVE AND EARLY MARRIAGE 72

  Anne Hathaway and the Shottery fields -- A licence for lovers -- After

  Davy Jones's show

  II. ACTOR AND POET OF THE

  LONDON STAGE

  7. TO LONDON -- AND THE AMPHITHEATRE PLAYERS 95

  Streets and conduits -- Hirelings, repertory, and poets -- Crab the dog

  8. ATTITUDES 120

  Marlowe, Kyd, and Shoreditch --'I am the sea': Titus Andronicus and

  the Shrew -- The white rose of York

  9. THE CITY IN SEPTEMBER 145

  Plague and prospects -- The 'waspish little worme' and 'upstart

  Crow' -- Shagbag, The Comedy of Errors, and Love's Labour's Lost

  10. A PATRON, POEMS, AND COMPANY WORK 169

  To the 'Earle of Southampton' -- The sonneteer -- Politics and King John

  11. A SERVANT OF THE LORD CHAMBERLAIN 196

  Sharing with the Burbages -- Dreams and the doors of breath -- Falstaff,

  Hal, and a Henriad

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  12. NEW PLACE AND THE COUNTRY 225

  Gains and losses -- Two murders, New Place, and Mr Quiney's little

  faults --'This is the Forest of Arden'

  III. THE MATURITY OF GENIUS

  13. SOUTH OF JULIUS CAESAR'S TOWER 251

  Ben Jonson's thumb -- Shylock, the troubled Merchant of Venice, and

  Francis Meres -- Julius Caesar at the Globe

  14. HAMLET'S QUESTIONS 274

  Poets' wars and 'little eyases' -- The Prince's world -- Investments

  15. THE KING'S SERVANTS 295

  King James's arrival -- Pageantry, Measure for Measure, and All's Well

  That Ends Well -- The 'pluméd troops'

  16. THE TRAGIC SUBLIME 318

  Jennet's guest and Marie's lodger -- Time's perpetuity: Macbeth and

  King Lear -- Classical roots: Egypt, Rome, and Athens

  IV. THE LAST PHASE

  17. TALES AND TEMPESTS 353

  Susanna's marriage -- Lands of 'painful adventure' from Pericles to

  The Tempest -- A fire at the Globe

  18. A GENTLEMAN'S CHOICES 382

  Stratford friends and family affairs -- Making a will and the struggles of

  the Harts --'For all time'

  The Arden and Shakespeare Families 412

  Descendants of Shakespeare's Nephew Thomas Hart (b. 1605) Down to

  the Sale ofthe Birthplace in 1806 413

  A Note on the Shakespeare Biographical Tradition and Sources for his Life 415

  Notes 425

  Index 451

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  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

  (between pp. 240 and 241 )

  1. Shakespeare's Birthplace at Stratford, from a watercolour sketch made

  around 1762

  2. Mary Arden's house at Wilmcote, in the earliest known drawing

  3. South-east Prospect of Stratford-upon-Avon, 1746

  4. The High or Market Cross at Stratford

  5. Stratford's Middle Row

  6. Elizabethan gloves presented to the actor and manager David Garrick in

  1769 by John Ward, the actor

  7. Mary Shakespeare's 'marke' on a deed of 15 October 1579

  8. Macbeth and Banquo meet three 'weird sisters or faeries', in Raphael

  Holinshed's Chronicles, 1577

  9. A map of the world in Sir Humphrey Gilbert's A Discourse of a Discovery

  for a New Passage to Cataia, 1576

  10. Shakespeare's Consort in Sir Nathaniel Curzon's drawing of 1708

  11. Anne Hathaway's cottage, from an engraving of a sketch made in the

  summer of 1794

  12. The Grafton Portrait

  13. London Bridge and the city from the south, from a copy of an engraving

  by C. J. de Visscher

  14. The Bear Garden and the rebuilt Globe in 1616, from a copy of Visscher's

  engraving

  15. The Chandos Portrait

  16. Will Kempe, from Kempe's Nine Days Wonder, Performed in a Dance

  from London to Norwich, 1600

  17. Robert Armin, from Armin's Two Maids of Moreclacke, 1609

  18. Robert Greene, from John Dickenson's Greene in Conceit, 1598

  19. 'Shakespear ye Player by Garter', an outline drawing with a note by Ralph

  Brooke, the York Herald, in 1602

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  20. The title-page of the First Folio, 1623

  21. Henry Wriothesley, third Earl of Southampton

  22. Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange

  23. Richard Burbage

  24. Ben Jonson

  25. John Fletcher

  26. The Mountjoys' house as shown in the 'Agas' map of London

  27. Shakespeare's bust in the Church of the Holy Trinity, Stratford

  28. S
hakespeare's signature on the third page of his will

  29. Signature of Gilbert Shakespeare

  30. Signature of Susanna Hall

  31. Signature of Elizabeth Nash

  32. Signature of Elizabeth Barnard

  33. Shakespeare's monument in the Church of the Holy Trinity

  34. The Birthplace shortly before its restoration

  I should like to acknowledge the following sources of facsimile illustrations:

  Colgate University Library, Hamilton, New York (plate 10); Dulwich Picture Gallery,

  London, by permission of the Trustees (plate 23); Folger Shakespeare Library, by

  permission (plates 1, 4, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 24, 25, 26, 27, 33, 34); Edgar I. Fripp,

  Shakespeare: Man and Artist (1964.) vol. i, facing p. 81 (plate 6); The Huntington

  Library, San Marino, California, by permission (plates 8, 9); John Rylands University

  Library of Manchester, reproduced by courtesy of the Director and University

  Librarian (plate 12); National Portrait Gallery, London, by courtesy (plates 15, 21); Mary

  A. Porter, by kind permission (plate 22); Public Record Office (plate 28); Shakespeare

  Birthplace Trust Records Office, Stratford-upon-Avon, by permission (plates 2, 3, 5, 7,

  11, 29, 30, 31, 32).

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  INTRODUCTI0N

  Research into the Elizabethans is of such quality today that new material about Shakespeare, his town, his parents, his schooling, his friendships, or his career comes to light continually. My aim in this book is to show in an accurate narrative all that can be known of Shakespeare's life, at present, and to offer some account of his writing in relation to his life.

  I have tried to supply a dispassionate, up-to-date report on the available facts, and to add new and relevant material. I write for the general public, but think that scholars will find fresh details about Shakespeare here.

  This book differs from those biographies which imagine for him political roles, sexual relationships, or colourful intrigues not in the factual record. Imaginative reconstructions and elaborate psychological theories about him can be amusing; but, for me, they strain credulity. The attempt to understand his life is not new -- a start was made with Nicholas Rowe's forty-page sketch in 1709. Since then, a major effort of biographers has been to collect what is known about the playwright, to synthesize it, and in a sense to clean the bones of the ' Shakespeare documents' or to separate facts from myths and errors. That effort continues today. Our knowledge of him is refined in new editions of his plays or in searching performances of them, as well as in discoveries at Stratford's Birthplace Records Office, at the Public Record Office or county record offices, or at the great collections of Renaissance books and manuscripts at the British, Huntington, or Folger Shakespeare libraries. As data accumulates, so do myths. But what, surprisingly, emerges is that the factual truth as we piece it together is more exciting, suggestive, and tantalizing than anything so far dreamed up about him. What do the facts reveal of Shakespeare's relations with Marie Mountjoy or Jennet Davenant? Or about the murders connected with his house, and the brutal killing of a family friend? If we grant that not all of his work was miraculous, how did he come to write Hamlet? I find such questions more intriguing than

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  the suppositions of popular mythology, in which he is involved with so many Dark Ladies, poor boys, conspiracies, and meetings in taverns that only a miracle could explain how he found time for the stage.

  One cannot escape from documentary facts. Yet it must be said that biographical forms have had to evolve so as not to distort the historical record. A whole variety of recent views of history by those whose approaches have been linked with Fernand Braudel and the Annales school in France, or with Renaissance studies in Britain and America, for example, point to the reality of social contexts. And this is the essential new insight that applies to Shakespeare biography: the historical document with its pinpoints of light, its 'facts', is an illusory thing, unless the document is used in conjunction with other facts in the continuum of its own time. The only way any data from the Tudor past can validly be used to show what an individual was like is as the context for a well-researched and more or less linked or continuous account. It follows that an accurate life of Shakespeare may require more research today than was thought necessary even twenty or thirty years ago. Inevitably, a wary piecing together of a factual Tudor and Jacobean 'historical present' has its own pitfalls. But only in a contextualized, pertinent, and more or less continuous narrative will there be a chance to separate fact from supposition.

  What is most at stake is the matter of being accurate, or at least not woefully wrong, about individuals. I comment further on the Shakespeare biographical tradition in Appendix C, but here -- for a moment -- let me focus on lapses into untruthfulness. It may seem a trivial error of a recent writer to state that one day, in the 1570s, John Shakespeare took his small son William by the hand and led him over to Coventry to see the Queen's entertainments. But in inventing that incident (no record supports it) and supposing the father behaved as modern fathers might, the writer loses his chance to be accurate about a Tudor family. It is a more serious lapse, in an otherwise valuable documentary life, to establish almost no historical context for Shakespeare's schooling, his acting company, or his visits at Stratford. My point is that the form of a traditional 'documentary life' only poorly accommodates research into milieux, into changes over a span of

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  time, or into facts about any process or development in the life being described. Even E. K. Chambers, whose syntheses of the factual record are admirable, can plunge into the Sonnets for 'glimpses of a soul-side of Shakespeare' and conclude in part that the poet was 'tired of life before his time'. Now, I do not know that the creator of Falstaff and Rosalind was especially 'tired of life', though no remark by Chambers is to be quickly dismissed. But how are we to judge the validity of Chambers's intuition without an account of context and change in Shakespeare's developing life to support it?

  Cleaning one's teeth at Henley Street

  It is one thing to ask for a continuous factual account of Shakespeare, and another to give it. Any new synthesis will have hundreds of gaps. One must fail again and again to find out all one would like to know about a problem, but it is not impossible to learn about Tudor social milieux. The question, I think, is whether what we can know is susceptible to delicate and accurate use. Thus, for example, we know something of John Shakespeare's double house at Henley Street, but we can only say that it was normal in households of the country bourgeois, in the 1570s, for a boy to rise at one hour in the summer, at a later hour in winter, and to clean his teeth with a sweetish paste and a cloth. We cannot say that John's son, young William Shakespeare, did just that. But to cite a norm in this case is not trivial, irrelevant, or unfactual. Cleanliness in houses of skilled craftsmen and leading aldermen in the 1570s is related to notions of 'decorum', and of respect for the self, the family, and the crafts, which Shakespeare at an early point unmistakably imbibed. Again, it cannot factually be said that this boy knelt before his father for a morning blessing, but until we grasp what would have been normal in many households roughly similar to his own, we can have no context for his youth and little understanding of anything unique in his development. In Chapter 5, I have used a method of 'alternative narrative' to show some of the conditions he may have found if he worked briefly for Hoghton and Hesketh, and if the best-authenticated report about his youth is true. The evidence, to date, relating to his possible stay in Lancashire is neither dismissible

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  nor certain, and I have tried to show what has come to light about the matter after 400 years.

  What is new?

  Nothing that is 'new' in the present book is more central than the complex evolution in Shakespeare's mind and being that it tries to show. In ten years of work, I have examined every known source for his life, and though I use manus
cripts I have not hesitated to draw on past studies of the Shakespeare documents and a wide range of other works. For their relevance to his life, I begin with sudden changes at Tudor Stratford after its more or less sedate and secure 400 years of civic life. Similarly, I have tried to relate later developments in the Midlands town, in London, and in the varying fortunes of Shakespeare's main acting company (the Chamberlain's or King's men) to documentary facts about himself. Fresh details about his youth show that he did not leave home unprepared for his career. Evidence of his mother's quick intelligence and familiarity with a quill pen, new light on his father's managerial work and troubles and on schooling at the time, neglected evidence about the social revolution of the 1570s, and fresh details about the Hathaways of Shottery all give us a fuller picture. New, or recently discovered, information about the house where he was born, the illegal activities of acquaintances such as Sturley and Quiney, about Shakespeare's investments, and about his relations with his own relatives sharpen our picture.