It is odd and striking that several of Stratford’s schoolmasters had connections to distant Lancashire, the part of the country where adherence to Catholicism remained particularly strong. John Cottam’s family property there was only ten miles from one of the principal residences of the wealthy and influential Catholic Alexander Hoghton. As the scholar Ernst Honigmann and others have suggested, Cottam could have been asked by the Hoghtons to recommend a promising young man to be a teacher to their children—not a licensed schoolmaster, someone who would have to be certified as a Protestant by the local bishop, but a private tutor for a large household. He could have proposed Will Shakespeare, who had just left school and who, since his father’s financial difficulties precluded his attending university, was looking for employment. Cottam would have been careful not only to find someone who possessed sufficient educational accomplishments—as it happened, he hit upon the most staggeringly talented young man in the kingdom—but also to find a good Catholic. For the devout Hoghtons almost certainly illegally harbored priests, along with illegal ritual objects and a large collection of banned or suspect books, and they would have wanted as servants only those whom they could trust to keep their dangerous secrets.
The small clue that Shakespeare sojourned in Lancashire has nothing in any obvious way to do with religion, Catholic or Protestant. Instead, it points to the theater. In his last will and testament, dated August 3, 1581, the dying Alexander Hoghton bequeathed all his “instruments belonging to musics [sic], and all manner of play clothes” to his brother Thomas, or, if Thomas does not choose to keep and maintain players, to Sir Thomas Hesketh. The will added, “And I most heartily require the said Sir Thomas to be friendly unto Fulk Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwelling with me and either to take them unto his service or else to help them to some good master.” “Shakeshafte” is not “Shakespeare,” and skeptics have pointed out that many local people were surnamed Shakeshafte. But in a world of notoriously loose spelling of names—in various records Marlowe is also Marlow, Marley, Morley, Marlyn, Marlen and Marlin—it is close enough, in conjunction with the Cottam-Hoghton connection, Shakespeare’s future profession, and other small hints to have convinced many scholars that it refers to Stratford’s Will.
The precocious adolescent—recommended by Cottam as intelligent, reasonably well educated, discreet, and securely Catholic—would have come north in 1580 as schoolmaster. The terms of the will suggest that he soon began to perform, at first probably only recreationally and then with increasing seriousness, with the players that Alexander Hoghton kept. Whatever his skills as a teacher, those he possessed as a player would have immediately brought him to the special attention of the household and its master, and the charismatic appeal of the young player would have enabled him—like Cesario in Twelfth Night—quickly to overleap other, older servants and become one of the trusted favorites. After Hoghton died in August 1581, Shakespeare could have passed briefly into the service of Hesketh and then might have been commended—as Hoghton had requested—to someone else. The likeliest candidate is a powerful neighbor of Hesketh’s who was even more interested in drama. That neighbor, Henry Stanley, the fourth Earl of Derby, and his son Ferdinando, Lord Strange, employed a talented, professionally ambitious group of players who were licensed by the Privy Council as Lord Strange’s Men. The principal players—Will Kempe, Thomas Pope, John Heminges, Augustine Phillips, and George Bryan—formed the core of the London company with which Shakespeare would later be associated, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The precise chronology of Shakespeare’s link with this group cannot be determined, but the link eventually formed the center of his professional career, and it is at least possible that the initial contact—a momentous acquaintance to be renewed later—was made in the north of England in 1581.
Will’s life, if he actually sojourned in the north, would have been a peculiar compound of theatricality and danger. On the one hand, a life of open, exuberant display, where for the first time Will’s talents—his personal charm, his musical skills, his power of improvisation, his capacity to play a role, and perhaps even his gifts as a writer—were blossoming in performances beyond the orbit of his family and friends. His performances would not have been exactly public, but neither were they simply private after-dinner entertainments. The Heskeths were immensely wealthy, while the Hoghtons and, still more, the Stanleys were feudal magnates. They were representatives of a world of riches, power, and culture that had not yet been completely assimilated into the centralizing, hierarchical scheme of the Tudor monarchy, just as they had not yet been assimilated into the state religion. With small armies of retainers and followers; with crowds of allies, relations, and tenants; with pride fed by the obsequious deference of all around them; and with generosity reinforced by their craving for reputation as “householders,” they entertained large companies of guests in banqueting halls that could easily serve as theaters. The brilliance of the performances in those halls redounded to the credit of the magnanimous host. Fulk Gyllome’s improvisational skills and gifts as an actor are unknown, but William Shakespeare’s proved sufficient to get him a place a few years later in London’s leading playing company. As for his imaginative power, if only the smallest fraction began to show itself in the halls of the wealthy Lancashire gentlemen, its intensity would more than explain the dying Hoghton’s benevolence.
On the other hand, Will would have lived a life of secrets, where even the lowliest servant knew things—a locked cabinet containing the chalice, books, vestments, and other objects with which to celebrate Mass; mysterious strangers bearing ominous rumors of Mary, Queen of Scots, or of Spanish armies; mutterings of conspiracies—that could, if revealed, bring disaster upon the family. Lancashire in this period was tense with expectation, suspicion, and anxiety. The moment that Will is likely to have sojourned there is precisely the moment that the Jesuit Campion headed in the same direction, seeking the relative security afforded by the most stubbornly Catholic of the queen’s subjects. Lancashire, in the view of the queen’s Privy Council, was “the very sink of popery, where more unlawful acts are committed and more unlawful persons held secret than in any other part of the realm.” On August 4, 1581, the day after Alexander Hoghton commended Shakeshafte to his friend Sir Thomas Hesketh, the Privy Council ordered a search for Campion’s papers “at the house of one Richard Hoghton”—Alexander’s cousin—“in Lancashire.” And later that year, at a time when Will may have been in his service, Hesketh was thrown into prison for failing to suppress recusancy in his household. The atmosphere at the entertainments in which Will would have performed was compounded of festivity and paranoia.
The mission, led by Campion and Robert Parsons, had aroused the piety of Catholics and deeply alarmed the government. Not only had the pope effectively sanctioned the assassination of the queen, but an expeditionary force led by a Catholic Englishman, Nicholas Sander, had recently landed in Ireland in an attempt to spark an uprising against the Protestant colonists. The attempt had failed miserably: after unconditionally surrendering on November 10, 1580, some six hundred Spanish and Italian troops and their Irish allies, including several women and priests, were all massacred by English soldiers led by Walter Ralegh. The cold-blooded ferocity of the English response was presumably meant to chill any future invasion plans, but no one could doubt the determination of the pope and his allies to topple the Elizabethan regime and reclaim the realm. Even those English Catholics who were steadfastly loyal to Elizabeth—and there were many—must have felt some stirring of hope that the slow, relentless strangulation of their faith might somehow be reversed by the missionary piety and heroic determination of the Jesuits.
Catholics throughout the country secretly read and circulated a remarkable document that came to be known as “Campion’s Brag,” in which the onetime Oxford don, the object of an intense national search, explained his mission. “In this busy, watchful and suspicious world,” he wrote in a tone of almost jaunty resignation, it was likely enough tha
t he would eventually be caught and pressed to reveal his designs. Therefore, to save everyone time and trouble, he offered in advance a plain confession. He had not been sent to meddle in politics; his charge was “to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors.” He knew, of course, that the authorities would claim that these activities, undertaken by a Catholic priest, were precisely what it meant to meddle in politics, and he knew that their response would be violent. But he and his companions were “determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes.” As for the charges of an international conspiracy, a sinister “enterprise” to invade and conquer England, he boldly played with them:
And touching our Society, be it know to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practices of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God, it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: so it must be restored.
The sublime confidence that Campion exuded here was evident also in the challenge that gave his pamphlet its nickname: though he would be loath, he wrote, to say anything that would sound like an “insolent brag,” he was confident enough of the transparent truth of the Catholic faith that he would undertake to debate any Protestant alive. His words have an odd ring to them, as if he were living not in a world of conspiracies, spies, and torture chambers but in a world in which scholars mount their books and ride out to chivalric contests: “I am to sue most humbly and instantly for the combat with all and every of them, and the most principal that may be found: protesting that in this trial the better furnished they come, the better welcome they shall be.”
For Campion, the cruelty of the English Protestant authorities was a sign of their fear of open debate and hence a sign of their despair. He followed up his challenge with a longer, more scholarly work in Latin—the Ten Reasons—which he originally intended to call Heresy in Despair. This work he somehow planned during months in which he managed to evade the agents sent to capture him, months of shifting disguises, frequent moves from house to house, terrifying alarms, narrow escapes. He wrote it during the only period and in the only place in which he had enough time, protection, and access to books to sit and write: in the late winter and early spring of 1581 in Lancashire. And even there, in the north, he was forced every few days to make sudden shifts in his hiding place in order to confound the government spies and informers. Dressed as a servant, he scurried from one recusant household to another, guided by a former student and his wife. “By them,” writes Campion’s fine nineteenth-century biographer Richard Simpson, “he was led to visit the Worthingtons, the Talbots, the Southworths, the Heskeths, Mrs. Allen the widow of the Cardinal’s brother, the Houghtons [sic], the Westbys, and the Rigmaidens—at whose house he spent the time between Easter and Whitsuntide (April 16).”
The Heskeths and the Hoghtons: it is altogether possible, then, that in the guarded spaces of one or the other of these houses Will would have seen the brilliant, hunted missionary for himself. Campion’s visits were clandestine, to be sure, but they were not narrowly private affairs; they brought together dozens, even hundreds of believers, many of whom slept in nearby barns and outbuildings to hear Campion preach in the early morning and to receive communion from his hands. The priest—who would have changed out of his servant’s clothes into clerical vestments—would sit up half the night hearing confessions, trying to resolve moral dilemmas, dispensing advice. Was one of those with whom he exchanged whispered words the young man from Stratford-upon-Avon?
Let us imagine the two of them sitting together then, the sixteen-year-old fledgling poet and actor and the forty-year-old Jesuit. Shakespeare would have found Campion fascinating—even his mortal enemies conceded that he had charisma—and might even have recognized in him something of a kindred spirit. Not in piety, for though Will (in this version of events) was a staunch enough Catholic at this point in his life to be trusted with dangerous secrets, there is no sign in his voluminous later work of a frustrated religious vocation. But Campion—a quarter century older than Will—was someone who came from a comparably modest family; who attracted attention to himself by his eloquence, intelligence, and quickness; who loved books yet at the same time was drawn to life in the world. His was a learned but not an original mind; rather he was brilliant at giving traditional ideas a new life through the clarity and grace of his language and the moving power of his presence. Witty, imaginative, and brilliantly adept at improvisation, he managed to combine meditative seriousness with a strong theatrical streak. If the adolescent knelt down before Campion, he would have been looking at a distorted image of himself.
The Jesuit too, perhaps, even in a brief encounter, might have noticed something striking in the youth. Campion was a gifted teacher who had, in safer times, written a discourse on education. The ideal student, Campion wrote, should be born of Catholic parents. He should have a mind “subtle, hot, and clear; his memory happy; his voice flexible, sweet, and sonorous; his walk and all his motions lively, gentlemanly, and subdued; and the whole man seeming a palace fit for wisdom to dwell in.” His years at school should plunge him into the classics: he must become intimate with “the majesty of Virgil, the festal grace of Ovid, the rhythm of Horace, and the buskined speech of Seneca.” And the good student is not merely the passive receptacle of high culture; he is an accomplished musician, a budding orator, and a gifted poet. In short, he is—if the harried fugitive Campion had occasion to observe him at all closely—the young Shakespeare.
Well, not quite. For Shakespeare was not on his way to the further studies—in philosophy, mathematics, astronomy, Hebrew, and, above all, theology—that Campion’s scheme of education envisaged. Moreover, in one key respect he had already no doubt violated the spirit of the plan, and he would go on to violate it as completely as possible. The ideal student is to study and to write poetry, Campion said, but with one significant exception: he is never to read or to write love poetry.
For his part, whether he actually met Campion in person or only heard about him from the flood of rumors circulating all through 1580 and 1581, Will may have registered a powerful inner resistance as well as admiration. Campion was brave, charismatic, persuasive, and appealing; everyone who encountered him recognized these qualities, which even now shine out from his words. But he was also filled with a sense that he knew the one eternal truth, the thing worth living and dying for, the cause to which he was willing cheerfully to sacrifice others as well as himself. To be sure, he did not seek out martyrdom. It was not his wish to return to England; he was doing valuable work for the church, he told Cardinal William Allen, in his teaching post at Prague. But he was a committed soldier in a religious order organized for battle, and when his general commanded him to throw his body into the fight, against wildly uneven odds, he marched off serenely. He would have taken with him young Shakespeare or anyone else worth the taking. He was a fanatic or, more accurately, a saint. And saints, Shakespeare understood all his life, were dangerous people.
Or perhaps, rather, it would be better to say that Shakespeare did not entirely understand saints, and that what he did understand, he did not entirely like. In the huge panoply of characters in his plays, there are strikingly few who would remotely qualify. Joan of Arc appears in an early history play, but she is a witch and a whore. King Henry VI has a saintly disposition—“all his mind is bent to holiness / To number Ave-Maries on his beads” (2 Henry VI, 1.3.59–60)—but he is pathetically weak, and his weakness wreaks havoc on his realm. The elegant young men in the court of Navarre swear to live a “Still and contemplative” existence, the lives of ascetic soldiers who war against “the huge army of the world’s desires” (1.1.14, 10), but Love’s Labour’s Lost shows
them quickly succumbing to charms of the princess of France and her ladies. The severe Angelo in Measure for Measure is a man who “scarce confesses / That his blood flows” (1.3.51–52), but he soon finds himself contriving to compel the beautiful Isabella, a novice in a nunnery, to sleep with him. Isabella, for her part, is impressively true to her chaste vocation, but her determination to preserve her virginity, even at the cost of her brother’s life, is something less than humanly appealing.
There are many forms of heroism in Shakespeare, but ideological heroism—the fierce, self-immolating embrace of an idea or an institution—is not one of them. Nothing in his work suggests a deep admiration for the visible church. Several of his conspicuously Catholic religious figures—Friar Laurence in Romeo and Juliet is an example—are fundamentally sympathetic, but not because they are important figures in the church hierarchy. On the contrary, Shakespeare’s plays almost always depict powerful prelates as disagreeable, and his little-known history play King John, though set in the early thirteenth century, attacks the pope in highly charged, anachronistically Protestant terms. How dare the pope, King John indignantly asks the papal legate, attempt to impose his will upon a “sacred king”?
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.