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. 161r; 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 one, is amused that William, who would later be mocked for his “small Latin and less Greek” still learned “far more Latin and Greek than is commanded by most college graduates today.” The “intense concentration on language” meant that “boys from the age of eight onwards spent around nine hours a day, six days a week, in all but seven weeks a year on literary exercises such as learning by rote, writing according to formulae, reproducing sententiae, imitating classical authors, and constructing arguments for and against set propositions” (Van Es 2013, p. 4). A boy could not fail to become good at the construction of arguments and have an armory of literary tropes and figures to draw upon when instructed to create compositions of their own. This emphasis on eloquence and rhetorical skills would stand many other playwrights in good stead. George Chapman, Thomas Kyd, John Webster, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson all relied on their “schoolboy training” and no wonder.
William’s education was strikingly different to that of his parents. Neither John nor Mary could write, although both clearly functioned successfully in daily life and business, whether in the home or workshop. And yet, William’s parentage was not unusual for a professional playwright, indeed it was “entirely typical” (Van Es 2013, p. 2). The list of Shakespeare’s contemporaries’ fathers’ occupations provides a roster of artisan trades: Christopher Marlowe (shoemaker); Anthony Munday (stationer); John Webster (cartwright); Henry Chettle (dyer); Thomas Kyd (scrivener); Robert Greene (cordwainer or saddlemaker).
His schooling may have exposed a young Shakespeare to classical literature, but everyday Stratford town life exposed him to popular drama. Robust traditions of playing in provincial England ranged from the acting companies who performed under the protection of a member of the nobility, and took his name, through to informal local groups of actors, neighbors, or guilds gathering to make theater in domestic or communal spaces.2 Much of this playing went on under the radar since the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds (and an even more draconian measure passed in 1598) stipulated that all traveling players had to be attached to a “baron of the realm or any other honourable person of greater degree.”3 The Queen’s Men, formed as the result of a Privy Council directive designed to take back control of the anarchic world of playing, were expected to entertain their patron, the queen, of course, but also spent much of the year touring. It was a relentless life on the road, with limited runs in each town: only three shows for the Queen’s Men, even less for other companies.4 But stars were born and occasionally fortunes made: the renowned comedian
