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But we cannot tell whether Barton had any meaningful contact with the Shakespeares. And William’s whereabouts when the survey was taken are unknown. He might never have heard the “godlie” vicar preach. Barton’s predecessor, John Bretchgirdle, had baptized the bard-to-be, according to parish records, but, for all we know, baptism could well have been the last as well as the first time he was touched by a pastor until his wedding. So, conceivably, William Shakespeare’s most memorable encounters at the parish church, into late adolescence, were not conversations with clergy but confrontations with hired hands at Holy Trinity, who were commissioned, as were others in nearby Warwick, to clear the churchyard of bothersome boys.¹⁴

      William was married to Anne Hathaway in church, of course, at Temple Grafton. His father-in-law, Richard, later named a Catholic as executor of his estate, but that hardly signals that Hathaway was fervently or even casually an advocate for the old faith. A month before his daughter’s wedding in 1582, Richard voted, as a juror, to secure the interests of a religiously reformed litigant in a property dispute to deny the claims made by a local Catholic.¹⁵ Had the local records been better preserved, we would know more about the Hathaways—and, for that matter, about the Shakespeares—but too much has gone missing. The loss of the minutes for the proceedings of the vicar’s court at Holy Trinity during Barton’s tenure is particularly regrettable, for the docket no doubt was full. Although many tithe cases reached diocesan courts, where officials, calculating what was due, on occasion quite literally counted sheep, a number of controversies related to probate, defamation, and general discipline were sifted in Stratford, two of every three years.¹⁶

      Local officials had other obligations. They were required by the bishops of Worcester to track and sometimes to track down expatriate Catholic missionaries who, having returned to the realm, were passing through Worcestershire and Warwickshire on their way north. Moreover, local officials were also to see to it that anyone who offered hospitality to those sojourners was fined. Such fines, along with forfeitures for failing to attend church, sometimes seemed to have the desired effect. After two-thirds of his estates had been sequestered, Catholic Thomas Blunt, for one, joined the ranks of the religiously reformed.¹⁷ Successes of that sort cut the number of Catholic gentry who were eager to harbor the itinerant “massing priests.” Still, the priests on the road (and on the run) distributed spiritual consolations for their hosts’ and their friends’ material losses—specifically, papal indulgences for anyone risking destitution to save the realm from “the wicked ways of . . . heresy.”¹⁸

      The risk, however, was seldom as great as those who devised the disincentives hoped. Fines frequently were forgiven soon after they were levied. As a result, doors around Stratford still opened to receive the missionaries, and tales of their courage and of their harrowing escapes stirred sympathy in select circles, where Jesuit Henry Garnet’s daring flight “in the dead time of the night” was almost certainly taken as a token of God’s favor as often as it was retold.¹⁹

      Religious reformers also valued inspiring stories that featured God’s favor. They relied on sermons to stir sympathy and spread the good news that Christians were saved by faith and repentance rather than by pilgrimages and penances. The reformers’ problem was delivery. Too few were qualified to preach, and many who were qualified were denied licenses because they objected to the prescribed liturgy of the established church. Reformists took stock in 1586 and found clerical leadership sadly lacking in the realm. Barton, as we learned, was exceptional—but an exception. He got high marks for his ministry in Stratford’s parish church, yet survey results generally disheartened the puritan surveyors. Innuendo and insult signaled their discontent, but a few delinquents were outed explicitly and abusively—although perhaps none as vituperatively as Jeffrie Jones of Corlie, north of Coventry and not far from Stratford, who was dubbed a “dumbe” (unpreaching) pastor and a “drunkard, gamster, quareller, swearer, pilferer, [and] adulterer.” To be sure, most incumbents seem to have practiced their professions in that gray area between the ghastly and “godlie,” where parishioners likely placed Thomas Crocket, who served the church in Preston Baggot—five miles from the Shakespeares on Henley Street. Crocket “seemeth to be zealous,” the survey noted, but he had something of a drinking problem. In the last analysis, however, the reformists cared less about what came into their colleagues’ mouths than what issued from them, less about diet or decorum than about the quantity and quality of sermons. Hence, what most disturbed them was that only forty-one of the one hundred and eighty-six clergy listed for the diocese of Worcester were licensed to preach.²⁰

      The survey and the complaints that preceded and attended its release annoyed conformist bishops and their allies in Parliament. Before he was named to the see of Worcester, Whitgift called the complainants “contentious captains” of the puritan party.²¹ On leaving Worcester for the see of Canterbury, he accused them of picking fights about insignificant practices and rubrics simply to secure power for themselves and for partisans in the parishes.²² And the very reformist whom he thought to be captain of those querulous “captains,” Thomas Cartwright, his nemesis at Cambridge in 1570, arrived in the diocese of Worcester soon after Whitgift left. Cartwright twice found his way to Stratford yet settled in Warwick, ten miles north, where Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, appointed him chaplain at the hospital.²³ By then, Leicester was the puritans’ most reliable patron in the Midlands; his candidates for profitable leases or for livings ordinarily got them. He interfered in Peterborough to protect a dissident preacher, successfully countering the diocesan notoriously disinclined to “cherish” or “encourage” criticism.²⁴ Leicester had leverage locally because he was influential at Court, where his powerful friends—notably William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s indefatigable envoy and formidable “spymaster”—were quick to defend him when Catholic critics predicted that ambition would “prick him forward” and that he would rally the realm’s puritans, undermine its episcopacy, overturn Elizabeth, and make himself king.²⁵

      But one could make a case that neither Leicester nor Cartwright was responsible for the textures of puritan dissent around Shakespeare. Former Marian exile Anthony Gilby settled not far from Stratford and, from the 1560s, criticized the prescribed, purportedly reformed liturgies. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntington, placed Gilby in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, northeast of Warwick, and Gilby drew his friends to the area to preach. Their prophesying at Southam and energetic ministries seem to have been successful. Southam was one of several parishes that answered omnia bene when diocesan commissions circulated inquiries about defections to Catholicism.²⁶

      Should we then credit Gilby, who, having declined an episcopal appointment on his return from exile, informally assumed leadership of the reformists in Warwickshire and Leicestershire and was “widely regarded as byshopp”?²⁷ But to conformists, Gilby’s treatises and sermons posed a threat. They compared his network in the Midlands to the supposedly seditious circle of reformists organized by his London friends Thomas Wilcox and John Field. Conformists argued that both sets of malcontents undermined the regime’s and realm’s stability—which was precisely the line later taken up, to great effect, by Richard Bancroft.²⁸ Gilby had answers as early as 1581, identifying the conformists’ attack with “the old crafte of Satan [who] charge[s] God’s servaunts as factious and seditious.”²⁹ Still, the charges stuck. Gilby died before his caustic replies earned him time in prison, yet his clerical friends in the Midlands—notably, Humphrey Fenn of Coventry and Daniel Wyght of Stretton as well as Cartwright of Warwick—were apprehended and jailed for “denying her Majesty’s lawful authority” to govern churches as she and her conformist bishops saw fit. The three confined reformists thought of themselves as “prisoners in poperie,” referring to their jailers—John Whitgift of Canterbury and Bishop Aylmer of London—as papal tyrants.³⁰

      We will likely never know what Shakespeare thought of the charges and counter-charges, although our third chapter finds that several of his plays were hard on the church’s hierarchy, but we do know that friends of the imprisoned Midlands ministers spoke up. Job Throckmorton, who was elected to represent Warwick in the Parliament of 1586, complained about “tiranicall dealing against the Lord’s faithful ministers.” Not long before registering his complaint, he accompanied Cartwright to Stratford. The two may have been canvassing

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