Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

  What were the changes for which he was paying? They were the material manifestations of the reformed religion, calculated acts of symbolic violence against the traditional Catholic religious observance, ways of compelling the community to acknowledge the new order and to observe its practices. Somewhere within the actions there is a theology, subtle doctrinal and philosophical arguments by relentlessly sober intellectuals. But the deeds in Stratford, for which the chamberlain disbursed the payments, were not subtle: men with hammers, awls, and grappling hooks violently changed the appearance of the church and the form of worship that would take place within it.

  Paymaster for the ideological vandals, John Shakespeare acted officially as a committed Protestant, the agent of the Reformation in Stratford. On the town council, he voted to dismiss the Catholic steward Roger Edgeworth and to hire the Protestant Bretchgirdle—an unusually well-educated man, with a library that contained humanist classics as well as theology—to replace the Catholic curate. It is difficult to gauge how earnestly John Shakespeare oversaw these actions. He could have regarded them with the enthusiasm of a zealot, and yet the picture as a whole suggests a more complicated attitude.

  The same town council that hired the new vicar Bretchgirdle also hired for the King’s New School a succession of impressively learned schoolmasters who had surprisingly strong Catholic connections. The schoolmasters would have had to put in an appearance of conformity to the Anglican church—for such appointments would have been officially approved by the staunchly Protestant Earl of Warwick and the bishop of Winchester—but each evidently harbored loyalty to the ancient faith. Judging from their choices, John Shakespeare and his colleagues cannot have been too eager to identify old believers or apply any ideological test to those who would teach Stratford’s children. On the contrary, they allowed—winked at or perhaps even connived at—the teaching of the young not merely by those who might have had some residual regard for the cult of the saints or the Virgin but by those who evidently possessed a deep Catholic commitment. Originally from Lancashire, in the north of England, where the old faith was clung to most tenaciously, Simon Hunt, Will’s teacher between the ages of seven and eleven, took the drastic step of leaving Stratford in 1575 for the Continent to attend the Catholic seminary at Douai and, eventually, to become a Jesuit. Why drastic? Because the decision meant that he would either spend the rest of his life in exile or return to England in secret, knowing that the authorities would hunt him down, if they could, and execute him as a seditious traitor. During his years as Stratford schoolmaster, Hunt evidently did not keep his convictions entirely to himself. He seems to have taken at least one of the students from the school with him to Douai—Robert Debdale, who was about seven or eight years older than Will. The Debdales from nearby Shottery were a Catholic family, and Hunt may have had his eye out for other promising children of recusants. He may have taken an interest in William Shakespeare, whose mother was related, albeit distantly, to one of the area’s major Catholic families and may even have been related to the Debdales.

  The defection of Hunt and Debdale did not seem to deter the Stratford authorities when they chose the next schoolmaster: Thomas Jenkins, a graduate and fellow of St. John’s College, Oxford, had a letter of recommendation from the Catholic founder of that college, Sir Thomas White. Like all other Oxford and Cambridge colleges, St. John’s was officially Protestant—no other affiliation would have been permitted in an educational institution—but it had the reputation of welcoming Catholics who were willing to conform and profess loyalty to the queen. This double consciousness—a tenaciously held inward Catholic faith coupled with a steadfast public adherence to the official religious settlement—was widespread in England, where there were many so-called church papists. Jenkins, who would have known and may have studied with the brilliant Catholic scholar Edmund Campion, also a fellow at St. John’s, is likely to have been adept at maintaining this delicate balance. The pious Campion himself managed to stay for several years within the bounds of conformity—during which time he deeply impressed the Protestant Earl of Leicester and Queen Elizabeth herself with his brilliance—but in 1572 he embarked for Douai on a course that led him to the priesthood, enlistment in the Jesuits, a teaching post in Prague, and a return to England as a clandestine missionary.

  Thomas Jenkins taught in Stratford for four years, from 1575 to 1579, and hence must have been, together with Simon Hunt, a significant schoolteacher in Will’s life. Then, at about the time Will would have left the King’s New School, Jenkins resigned his post and was succeeded by another Oxford graduate, John Cottam. Like Simon Hunt a native of Lancashire, Cottam, who presumably taught Shakespeare’s younger brothers and whom Will certainly came to know, also had strong Catholic connections. His younger brother, Thomas, had gone abroad, after graduating from Oxford, and taken orders as a Catholic priest.

  In June 1580 the schoolmaster’s brother secretly returned to England as part of the mission led by Campion and a fellow Jesuit, Robert Parsons. Thomas Cottam was intending to go to the neighborhood of Stratford—specifically, to the village of Shottery. He carried a letter of introduction from his close friend and fellow priest, Robert Debdale, who had only five years earlier attended the Stratford grammar school. Debdale had entrusted Cottam with several Catholic tokens—a medal, several Roman coins, a gilt crucifix, and strings of rosary beads—for his family and urged them in his letter to “take counsel” from the messenger “in matters of great weight.”

  Cottam never reached Shottery. He had made the mistake on the Continent of confiding in a fellow English Catholic named Sledd. Sledd turned out to be an informer, and he provided a precise description of Cottam to the authorities. “Searchers,” as they were called, were watching for him at the ports, and he was arrested as soon as he disembarked at Dover. He had a brief moment of remission: the man in whose custody he was placed to be brought to London turned out to be a secret Catholic, and he let his prisoner escape. But in December 1580, when this custodian in turn was threatened with imprisonment, Thomas Cottam turned himself over to the authorities.

  Determined to pry from Cottam his innermost secrets, officials in the Tower employed one of their most horrible devices, the scavenger’s daughter. This instrument of torture was a hoop of iron that slowly closed around the prisoner’s spine, bending it almost in two. Evidently, the government did not get enough from their interrogation to warrant an immediate trial. Instead, they kept their prisoner in the Tower almost a year, until they had captured other members of the mission. Cottam was then arraigned as a traitor, together with the others, in November 1581. On May 30, 1582, he was executed in the grisly way designed to demonstrate the full rage of the state: he was dragged on a hurdle through the muddy streets to Tyburn, past jeering crowds, and then hanged, taken down while he was still alive, and castrated; his stomach was then slit open and his intestines pulled out to be burned before his dying eyes, whereupon he was beheaded and his body cut in quarters, the pieces displayed as a warning. Robert Debdale met the same fate a few years later.

  The Stratford council must have been shaken by the arrest of Thomas Cottam. It was one thing to have quietly hired three Catholic schoolmasters in succession; quite another to have a Catholic priest, suspected of treason, apprehended on his way to the neighborhood, in all likelihood to visit his schoolmaster brother as well as the Debdales. In December 1581, a month after Thomas’s arraignment, John Cottam resigned from his position at the King’s New School in Stratford and returned to the north. The council may informally have suggested that he leave, or, alternatively, he may simply have felt more comfortable back in Catholic Lancashire, at a safe distance from the vigilant Warwickshire sheriff, Sir Thomas Lucy, who had long been active in ferreting out priests in disguise and their recusant allies.

  Why would the state have been so concerned about a young Oxford-educated priest carrying a few beads? From the perspective of the Catholics, such a person was a heroic idealist, abandoning all prospect of tran
quility, career, honor, comfort, and family and risking his life daily to serve the embattled community of the faithful. Ordained at a seminary on the Continent and then smuggled back into a kingdom that had become the mortal enemy of his religion, a priest like Cottam would hope to elude informers and find shelter in the house of a sympathetic Catholic. There, disguised as a domestic servant or a child’s tutor, he would preach, celebrate communion at a clandestine altar, hear confession, administer last rites to the dying, and perhaps, as Robert Debdale did, conduct exorcisms. From the perspective of the Protestants, he was at best a poor, deluded fool and, more likely, a dangerous fanatic, a conspirator in the service of a foreign power. He was, that is, a traitor, directed by his sinister masters in Rome and willing to do anything to return England to the power of the pope and his allies.

  Protestant fears were not ungrounded. The Roman Catholic Church had invited English Catholics to rebel, and the meaning of this invitation was made explicit in 1580, when Pope Gregory XIII proclaimed that the assassination of England’s heretic queen would not be a mortal sin. The proclamation was a clear license to kill. It was precisely at this time that the priest Thomas Cottam, with his small packet of Catholic tokens, was arrested on his way to the vicinity of Stratford. Small wonder that his brother’s tenure as the town’s schoolmaster was abbreviated: John Shakespeare and his fellow council members—and particularly those who had close Catholic kin—must have felt queasy. The trail could quite easily have led to them.

  Such fears might seem absurd, for the schoolmaster John Cottam had done nothing wrong. But it will not do to underestimate the mood of paranoia and the reality of threat all through these dangerous years. The assassination of Elizabeth, early in her reign, would almost certainly have changed everything in the religious climate of England. And if it was in hindsight unreasonable to fear, as many people did, that thousands of English Protestants would be massacred as the French Huguenots had been, it was by no means irrational to suspect conspiracies—there were many—or to fear that some English Catholics would welcome and support a foreign invasion. The widespread persecution of Catholics made such support virtually inevitable; from this distance, what seems extraordinary is how many pious English Catholics remained loyal to a regime that was intent on crushing them.

  Already by the acts that established the Church of England, the Mass was outlawed; it was made illegal to hold any service, except those contained in the Book of Common Prayer. A fine of one shilling was imposed for failure regularly to attend the parish church. In 1571, after the papal bull of excommunication, Parliament made it treason to bring into the country any papal bull or to call the queen a heretic. It was also illegal to go abroad for ordination or to bring into England or to receive any devotional object, “tokens, crosses, pictures, beads or other such like vain things from the Bishop of Rome.” In 1581, in the wake of the Jesuits’ clandestine mission, Parliament made it treason to reconcile oneself or anyone else to the Catholic Church with the aim of dissolving allegiance to the monarchy. By 1585 it was treason to be a Catholic priest, and by law it was illegal (and after 1585 a capital offense) to harbor priests or, knowingly, to give a priest aid or comfort. The penalty for failure to attend Protestant services in the local parish was raised to an astronomical twenty pounds per week. Though the fine cannot have been imposed very often, it hung, as a threat of ruin, over everyone who stayed away from church. Even the very few who could afford to pay such a penalty began to imitate poorer Catholic families: once their children reached the age of sixteen—the age at which the fines took effect—parents would send them to distant neighborhoods, where they were less likely to be caught by the oppressive system.

  If Thomas Cottam had been apprehended in Stratford, there might well have been house-to-house searches, conducted by the sheriff. His arrest in London spared the local Catholic population that full-scale terror, but the Jesuit mission of 1580 and the tangled conspiracies of the ensuing years led to intensified rumormongering, spying, and sporadic raids on suspect recusant houses. Many of those houses harbored secrets that close scrutiny could have uncovered, and the house on Henley Street might not have been exempt. For example, if Will’s mother, Mary, was a pious Catholic, like her father, she may have kept religious tokens—a rosary, a medal, a crucifix—very much like those seized on the person of the priest. And if the searchers had done a thorough job—and they were on occasion notoriously thorough, ripping open virtually everything in every room—they might have found a highly compromising document to which John Shakespeare had apparently set his name: a piously Catholic “spiritual testament,” belying his public adherence to the Reformed faith.

  The original document is lost—its contents are known only through a transcript—but given the risks attending such a declaration of faith, the survival of any trace of it at all is remarkable. In the eighteenth century a master bricklayer, retiling the house that had once belonged to the Shakespeares, found the six-leaf manuscript, sewn together with thread, between the rafters and the tiling. The manuscript, minus the first page, eventually reached the great editor of Shakespeare Edmond Malone, who published it but then, subsequently, had doubts about its authenticity, noting certain anomalies in the handwriting and spelling. That authenticity, though it remains open to question, was considerably bolstered by the discovery in the twentieth century of the document’s source, a formulary written by the great Italian statesman and scholar Cardinal Carlo Borromeo. The Jesuits Campion and Parsons stayed with Borromeo in Milan, on their way to England, and could have received the text directly from him then. Translated and printed, with spaces left blank for the insertion of the names of the faithful, copies were smuggled into England and secretly distributed. Campion himself may have given them out when he passed through the Midlands, stopping in Lapworth, twelve miles from Stratford, where his host was the staunch Catholic Sir William Catesby, a relative by marriage of the Ardens. John Shakespeare could have received his copy from any number of people involved in the clandestine network of Jesuit sympathizers whom Lucy and the other Warwickshire officials were attempting to destroy.

  The “spiritual testament” conflicts wildly with the iconoclastic violence that Chamberlain John Shakespeare authorized and paid for. What this suggests is that for Will, when he was growing up, there was not only a split between his father and mother, the former the active agent of the Reformation in Stratford, the latter in all likelihood a Catholic, but also a split within his father. One side of him was the alderman who voted to dismiss Stratford’s priest and replace him with a Reformed minister, the official who signed off on the whitewashing of the old frescoes and the smashing of the altar, the smiling public man who negotiated on behalf of the city with zealous Protestants like Thomas Lucy. The other side of him was the man whose name appeared on the “spiritual testament,” who prayed for the special protection of the Virgin Mary and his personal saint, St. Winifred, who expressed an intense sense of his unworthiness as a “member of the holy Catholic religion.” This was presumably the official who helped to hire the Catholic schoolmasters Hunt, Jenkins, and Cottam; and perhaps it was even the recusant who stayed away from church services and had his friends on the council cover his absence with the claim that he was worried about arrest for debt.

  Perhaps the secret Catholic was the real John Shakespeare, and the Protestant civic officer was only the worldly, ambitious outward man. Alternatively, perhaps John Shakespeare, securely Protestant for most of his adult life, only briefly returned (during an illness, say, or simply to placate his wife) to the Catholicism he had left behind. Did John Shakespeare’s eldest son know the truth? Could he have been sure which was the “real” father—the one who was moving up in the world or the one who kept the peace at home and perhaps in his heart by succumbing to the old fears and longings? He might have sensed that his father was playing a part, without ever knowing securely where the boundary lay between fiction and reality. He might have overheard whispered arguments between his father and m
other and observed furtive acts. And at some point—to continue this line of speculation—he might have reached a strange but plausible conclusion: his father was both Catholic and Protestant. John Shakespeare had simply declined to make a choice between the two competing belief systems. Many of the people Will had encountered—the schoolmasters Simon Hunt, Thomas Jenkins, and John Cottam were presumably all examples—lived double lives: they outwardly conformed to the official Protestant religious settlement, at least enough to secure their jobs, but they inwardly adhered to the old faith. But John Shakespeare, his son may have observed, was something else. He wanted to keep both his options open—after all, he had seen enough of the world to know that there might be a drastic change of direction again; he wanted to cover himself in relation both to this life and to the afterlife; he was convinced that both positions, however incompatible they might seem to be, were possible to hold at once. He had not so much a double life as a double consciousness.

  And Will? By the time he was leaving school in 1579–80, when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, had he come to acquire a comparable double consciousness? Shakespeare’s plays provide ample evidence for doubleness and more: at certain moments—Hamlet is the greatest example—he seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply skeptical of both. But though the adult Shakespeare was deeply marked by the religious struggles, what the adolescent believed (if he himself even knew what he believed) is wholly inaccessible. Out of a tissue of gossip, hints, and obscure clues a shadowy picture can be glimpsed, rather as one can glimpse a figure in the stains on an old wall.