LITMIR.BIZ

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the working playwright, the man of the theater.

      Samuel Schoenbaum (1991, p. 5), who should know, argues that the records “nevertheless possess a pattern and significance of their own.” The problem is that the pattern and significance is not always to our taste:

Perhaps the reason we so desperately want the plays to speak to us, is that the story the legal documents tell us is not always the story we want to hear. Many biographers have been troubled by Shakespeare’s lack of civic or institutional philanthropy (given his affluence) in his will or by the evidence of Shakespeare hoarding grain in 1599, at a time when a series of bad harvests meant that many of Stratford’s poor were starving, especially as he writes about exactly this scenario at the beginning of Coriolanus. Or by the fact that in a Stratford protest against proposed land enclosures by William Combe in 1614–15, Shakespeare hired a lawyer to protect his own land and appears to have supported Combe.

       (Maguire and Smith 2012, p. 109)

      Whatever the reasons for the lack of traditional “documentary” biographical materials, it has had an effect on our understanding of Shakespeare’s life. Since nature abhors a vacuum, “later ages have filled the picture with guesswork, legend and sentiment,” writes Dutton (2016, p. 2), who is tolerant of guesswork, but critical of legend and sentiment. And harnessed “Shakespeare” to their cause.

      Emma Smith (2012, p. 223) offers a scathing critique of this kind of thing: claims that “he retained the old religion of Roman Catholicism, or that he was gay, or that he was politically conservative, or whatever, tend to reveal more about the priorities of the speaker than the subject.” Smith’s list is a little slippery. “Gay” is a modern term: if we call Shakespeare gay we are very obviously co-opting modern terminology to understand a man 400 years dead. But keeping the “old religion” and “politically conservative” are less straightforward. Both concepts meant something very different then than they do now. Shapiro (2005b, pp. 9–10) is excellent on this:

      Even the meaning of such concepts as individuality was different. Writers, including Shakespeare, were only beginning to speak of “individual” in the modern sense of “distinctive” or “special”, the exact opposite of what it had long meant, “inseparable”. This was also an age of faith, or at the least one in which church attendance was mandatory; religion, too played a greater role in shaping how life, death and the afterlife were imagined. All this suggests that, as much as we might want Shakespeare to have been like us, he wasn’t. We call this period early modern or pre-modern for good reason.

Let’s go back to April 1564, the documentary record, and conventional life-writing. “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” is baptised in Holy Trinity Parish Church, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire. He is named William by his parents John and Mary perhaps in honor of their friends and business associates, William Smith the haberdasher and William Tyler the butcher. Baby William, one of eight children to be born to the Shakespeares, but one of only five who would survive into adulthood, will become the most famous British playwright, perhaps the most famous writer in English, ever known.

      That Latin quotation means William, son of John Shakespeare. The archive begins with a statement of patriarchal lineage because this is what “family” means in Tudor England. The patriarchal archive was then elaborated with anecdote. In 1657, the first story about Shakespeare’s family would be recorded: he “was a glover’s son – Sir John Mennes saw once his old Father in his shop – a merry cheeked old man – that said – Will was a good Honest Fellow – but he darest have cracked a jest with him at any Time” (Plume MS 25, fo. 161^r; transcription in Tromly 2010, p. 278). No matter that Mennes was only two years old when the elder Shakespeare died in 1601, this story informed and still informs the kinds of the Lives we write. Stewart (2016, p. 66) points to Stephen Greenblatt’s (2004) understanding of “merry-cheeked” as an allusion to John Shakespeare’s heavy drinking, which leads him to surmise an alcoholic legacy that Will sought to evade. Duncan-Jones (2001) offers a more niche interpretation: John is a prototype for the husband of Juliet’s Nurse.

      There is not an absence of archival evidence as such (and what we do know grows each year). Instead, the evidence which survives skews the telling of Shakespeare’s life in particular directions. Those two examples above, for example, are rooted in patriarchal understandings of what is significant to a man’s life. But there are new questions that can be asked of what has been known for centuries, and familiar anecdotes can be viewed in different ways. Shakespeare’s life, and his Lives, start looking a little different when those questions are asked.

      Smith offers a powerful reminder of what’s at stake. “Shakespeare’s stock is so high that to recruit him to your ideological team is a real coup” (Smith 2012, p. 223). Suddenly having the man on our team, not just his writing, becomes important. We feel the need to recruit the author himself, not just his works. This may be why biographies should still be attempted. Yes, any and all biographies are fictions, but the lives they tell were not. Our picture of Shakespeare the man is, in the end, created by the questions we ask of the archive we have, by the value we place on different kinds of documentation: those questions and values have, for centuries, been predominantly driven and informed by elite, white men. We need different eyes looking at Shakespeare. His plays matter to us, but what we write about the man matters too.

Chapter One

      William was not the first-born of John and Mary Shakespeare, for two baby daughters had died back in 1558 and 1563, but he was the first to survive infancy. Our post-Romantic, post-Freudian idea that the child maketh the man is anachronistic to a Tudor boyhood, but there were aspects of William’s early years which necessarily shaped the adult and writer he would become.¹ Class was one of them. What the Elizabethans called “degree” mattered in Shakespeare’s time. Baby William and his four surviving siblings grew up in a substantial house in a busy market town, Stratford-upon-Avon. His father John, making good money, was able to buy the house next door as well, and at some point linked the two to make “a single, imposing, close-timbered building” (Schoenbaum 1991, p. 7) Mary, William’s mother, who brought land to the marriage, came from a nearby village, her family being prosperous, well-established farmers, the Ardens.

The “intimacy of daily life” (Edmondson and Wells 2015a, p. 329) in the Shakespeare household in Henley Street can be hard to imagine: the manicured buildings in Stratford-upon-Avon today now give very little sense of the dirt and chaos of a sixteenth-century house and thoroughfare. It’s a valuable corrective to read that “the first reference to the father of the National Poet occurs in April 1552, when he was fined a shilling for making a dungheap (sterquinarium) before his house” (Schoenbaum 1991, p. 7). The dung-heap maker, John, made his money in various ways: glove making, tanning, dealing in wool and corn, and some moneylending. The last two were the most lucrative for him, despite or because of his lack of a dealer’s licence and his tendency to charge in excess of the legal rate of interest (Fallow 2015). John was, suggests Potter (2012, pp. 42–43), adept at illegal wool-brogging, “buying wool outside the town, smuggling it in so as to avoid paying duty on it, and undercutting the official market, known as the Staple of Wool, by selling it more cheaply.” The wealth he accrued, never mind how, came with responsibilities. Men of John Shakespeare’s financial standing were expected to involve themselves actively in the civic life of the town. This John did, being elected chief burgess three years before William’s birth and then High Bailiff (the name for the Stratford-upon-Avon mayor) in the year his son turned four. So, we can place young William in a fairly prosperous, comfortable, and locally influential household as a child. What is more, John Shakespeare’s status gave him the right to have his sons educated without charge at the King’s New School in Stratford.

      Records don’t survive from the period, but most assume that William went there, “because otherwise how could he have learned about Ovid and Plautus?” (Garber 2004, p. 163). Marjorie Garber’s question reveals that education didn’t mean quite the same in the 1570s as it does in our own time. Lessons focused primarily on classical texts, Ovid and Plautus amongst others, and the curriculum was demanding. Garber (ibid.), for

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