Shakespeare

A gentler shepherd may nowhere be found:

Whose Muse, full of high thought’s invention,

Doth like himself heroically sound.

What name, other than “shake-spear,” does “heroically sound”? It is also highly appropriate for one who had written The Troublesome Raigne of King John as well as The First Part of the Contention and The True Tragedy . In truth it fits no other writer of the period. Colin Clout , written in draft form by the end of 1591, also includes Lady Strange as Amaryllis and Lord Strange as Amyntas. So the young Shakespeare is implicitly placed in noble company and therefore perhaps in noble society. It has been objected that at this date the young Shakespeare had written little or nothing of any consequence. This narrative has suggested that, on the contrary, he had already written a great deal that was popular and successful. What could be more natural than that he should be honoured by a poet who was part of the same culture and whose own epic of national identity and salvation, The Faerie Queene , was even then being published? In 1591, also, was published Spenser’s poem The Teares of the Muses , that alludes to “our pleasant Willy.” This poet is possessed by a “gentle spirit” and from his pen “large streams of honey and sweet nectar flow.” This would later become the standard description of Shakespeare’s sugared verses.

By 1591 he was already so successful that he must have been conveying funds to his wife and family; whether he appeared in person is another matter. He may have entrusted his moneys to the carrier. But the matters of his home town still concerned him. His father’s affairs in particular continued to exercise him. He was thoroughly informed, for example, of his father’s decision to file a bill of complaint in the Queen’s Bench at Westminster, in the late summer of 1588, to regain possession of the house in Wilmcote from their recalcitrant relative Edmund Lambert. The case was meant to be heard in 1590 but was then dropped or settled out of court, only to be revived eight years later. It has even been suggested that Shakespeare himself may have had to appear at Westminster to further his father’s case; the court document twice refers to John and Mary Shakespeare “simulcum Willielmo Shackespere filio suo,” together with William Shakespeare their son.

The fact that John Shakespeare pressed his case at Westminster suggests that he was not without funds. He also stood surety of £10 on behalf of a neighbour, and forfeited what was in fact a considerable sum. He was engaged in other acts of litigation. He was sued for £10 by another Stratford neighbour, arrested, released and then rearrested; then with the aid of a local lawyer, William Court, he took the case to the Queen’s Bench. We cannot assume, then, that Shakespeare left his family in any condition of penury.

John Shakespeare’s affairs were not confined to Westminster. He had been engaged in a dispute with one of his tenants, William Burbage, over a sum of £7. There were also further problems associated with John Shakespeare’s faith. In the spring of 1592 he was prominent on a list of Stratford townspeople who refused to attend church or, in the words of the investigation, “all such as refused obstinately to resort to the church.” 1The religious commissioners were used to various excuses for non-attendance and remarked that “it is said that these come not to church for fear of process of debt”-the church being a public and visible place where a debtor might be located – but this hardly applies to Shakespeare’s father. In the same year he was present on two local juries, in the full light of day. It is significant, then, that in his drama Shakespeare adopts a very lenient attitude towards oath-taking and oath-breaking, as if neither was of very much account. This was part of his recusant family’s experience, obliged to affirm or to utter what they did not necessarily believe. Or, as Hamlet says, “words, words, words.” Among the nine recusants who appeared on the list beside “Mr. John Shackspeare” were three men with the names of Fluellen, Bardolph and Court; these names reappear in Henry V . Shakespeare paid some attention to his father’s tribulations. Like Blake and Chaucer, he used real names in unreal situations. It was a private joke.

So Shakespeare stayed with Burbage’s men at the Theatre, while the rest of Lord Strange’s Men decamped with Alleyn to the Rose. But in 1592 the future of the London theatre was not all clear or secure for any theatrical company. At the beginning of June there was a riot among apprentices, who had gathered in Southwark to see a play; the affray spread to the other side of the river, and as a consequence the Privy Council issued an order to ban all drama and to close the theatres for three months. When in July Lord Strange’s Men begged the Privy Council to consider reopening the Rose, they threw an interesting light on the condition of all the players at this time. They were obliged to tour in the country, as a result of the closing of the London theatres, but “thearbie our chardge [is] intolerable, in travellinge the Countrie” so that they were close “to division and seperacion” whereby they would be “undone.” They also argued for the opening of the Rose as “a greate relief to the poore watermen theare” who had lost their custom. 2By the first week in August the lords of the Privy Council were pleased to grant their request on the condition that London was “free from infection of sickness.” But even as they issued their consent the plague was emerging once more in the city, and by 13 August it was “daily increasing in London.” 3Bartholomew Fair was banned. And there would be no more stage plays for the duration of the epidemic.

Burbage’s men were in the same parlous condition as their colleagues over the water. They could not work in London and, their livelihoods threatened, they were obliged to tour the country. It may well have been at this juncture that Burbage sought the patronage of Henry Herbert, the second Earl of Pembroke, to lend an air of respectability to the group of strolling players that included the young Shakespeare. In the stage directions of the playbooks owned by Pembroke’s Men there is the notation of “Will,” given no last name. One theatrical historian has suggested that he was “evidently a boy,” 4but in fact there is no indication of his age.

So we see Shakespeare moving from the Queen’s Men to Lord Strange’s Men and then onward to Pembroke’s, before he found his final home in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It did not mean that he was a “freelance” in the modern sense of that word, as some scholars have suggested, but rather that he followed old acquaintances and fellow actors as one company grew out of another. He was loyal, as well as immensely hard-working.

In the summer of 1592 the newly formed Pembroke’s Men were obliged to leave London. The available records suggest that the plague of this year was particularly virulent in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch where Burbage, Shakespeare and other players lived. The exact route of this late summer tour is not completely known, but there is a record of Pembroke’s Men playing at Leicester as one “stop” in a more extended tour that must have included Coventry, Warwick – and Stratford-upon-Avon. We may say with some confidence that Shakespeare was reunited with his family in the late summer of 1592.

Shakespeare and his companions travelled in a wagon, the players packed in with the baskets containing the costumes and with the essential stage properties. One of the actors of Pembroke’s Men, mortally ill in that summer, was obliged to sell his share of “apparell newe boughte.” 1They might manage, at best, approximately thirty miles per day. It was an uncomfortable and overcrowded mode of travelling, but the alternative was to walk. One of the stage directions in The Taming of a Shrew is “Enter two of the players with packs at their backs, and a boy.” It is possible that some players took their horses with them, but the cost of upkeep on an extended tour was very high. They lodged at inns for the night, and played there for the price of their beds and suppers. This manner of life, difficult and uncertain in many respects, did have the virtue of encouraging a sense of fraternity among the actors. They were an extended family. It may even have become, for Shakespeare, a welcome substitute for his existing one.