GOOD FRIEND FOR JESUS SAKE FORBEARE,
TO DIGG THE DUST ENCLOASED HEARE:
BLESTE BE YE MAN YT SPARES THES STONES,
AND CURST BE HE YT MOVES MY BONES.
In 1693 a visitor to the grave was told that the epitaph was “made by himself a little before his death.” If so, these are probably the last lines that Shakespeare wrote. Perhaps he simply feared that his bones would be dug up and thrown in the nearby charnel house—he seems to have regarded that fate with horror—but he may have feared still more that one day his grave would be opened to let in the body of Anne Shakespeare.
CHAPTER 5
Crossing the Bridge
IN THE SUMMER of 1583 the nineteen-year-old William Shakespeare was settling into the life of a married man with a newborn daughter, living all together with his parents and his sister, Joan, and his brothers, Gilbert, Richard, and Edmund, and however many servants they could afford in the spacious house on Henley Street. He may have been working in the glover’s shop, perhaps, or making a bit of money as a teacher’s or lawyer’s assistant. In his spare time he must have continued to write poetry, practice the lute, hone his skills as a fencer—that is, work on his ability to impersonate the lifestyle of a gentleman. His northern sojourn, assuming he had one, was behind him. If in Lancashire he had begun a career as a professional player, he must, for the moment at least, have put it aside. And if he had had a brush with the dark world of Catholic conspiracy, sainthood, and martyrdom—the world that took Campion to the scaffold—he must still more decisively have turned away from it with a shudder. He had embraced ordinariness, or ordinariness had embraced him.
Then sometime in the mid-1580s (the precise date is not known), he tore himself away from his family, left Stratford-upon-Avon, and made his way to London. How or why he took this momentous step is unclear, though until recently biographers were generally content with a story first recorded in the late seventeenth century by the clergyman Richard Davies. Davies wrote that Shakespeare was “much given to all unluckiness in stealing venison and rabbits, particularly from Sir———Lucy, who had him oft whipped and sometimes imprisoned and at last made him fly his native country to his great advancement.” The early-eighteenth-century biographer and editor Nicholas Rowe printed a similar account of the “Extravagance” that forced Shakespeare “both out of his country and that way of living which he had taken up.” Will had, in Rowe’s account, fallen into bad company: he began to consort with youths who made a practice of deer poaching; in their company, he went more than once to rob Sir Thomas Lucy’s park at Charlecote, about four miles from Stratford.
For this he was prosecuted by that gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill usage, he made a ballad upon him. And though this, probably the first essay of his poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the prosecution against him to that degree, that he was obliged to leave his business and family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.
By the mid-eighteenth century this story had acquired a sequel related by Dr. Johnson: having fled his home “from the terror of a criminal prosecution,” Will found himself alone in London, without money or friends. He picked up enough to live on by standing at the playhouse door and holding the horses of those that had no servants. “In this office he became so conspicuous for his care and readiness,” Johnson writes, “that in a short time every man as he alighted called for Will. Shakespear, and scarcely any other waiter was trusted with a horse while Will. Shakespear could be had. This was the first dawn of better fortune.” There is something appealing about Shakespeare as the patron saint of parking lot attendants, but few biographers of the last two centuries have taken this story seriously. The problem in part is that archival scholars began to recognize that Shakespeare’s family, even in the period of his father’s decline, remained part of a network of kin and friends; that his father never lost everything; and that therefore the vision of the uprooted young man holding horses at the playhouse door, in penury and isolation, is unlikely.
As for the deer-poaching story itself, though four independent versions were in circulation by the later seventeenth century, recent biographers have treated it too with comparable skepticism. For one thing, Sir Thomas Lucy did not have a deer park at Charlecote at the time in question; for another, whipping was not a legal punishment for poaching in this period. But these arguments are not decisive. While Lucy did not keep an enclosed park at the time that Shakespeare would have been caught poaching, he did maintain a warren, an enclosed area where rabbits and other game, possibly including deer, could breed. And he was evidently not indifferent to his property rights: he hired keepers to protect the game and watch for poachers, and he introduced a bill in Parliament in 1584 against poaching. As for whipping, it may not have been a legal punishment, but the justice of the peace may have been inclined to teach the young offender a lesson, particularly if he suspected that the poacher and his parents might be recusants. No doubt it would have been improper for Sir Thomas Lucy, as justice of the peace, to sit in judgment on a case in which he himself was the alleged victim, but it would be naive to imagine that local magnates always stayed within the letter of the law or carefully avoided conflicts of interest. After all, the story refers to Shakespeare’s sense of ill-usage—that is, to his being treated worse than he felt he deserved to be treated for what he was caught doing.
The question, then, is not the degree of evidence but rather the imaginative life that the incident has, the access it gives to something important in Shakespeare’s life and work. The particular act with which he was charged has by now ceased to have much meaning, and the story correspondingly has begun to drop away from biographies. But in Shakespeare’s time and into the eighteenth century the idea of deer poaching had a special resonance; it was good to think with, a powerful tool for reconstructing the sequence of events that led the young man to leave Stratford.
For Elizabethans deer poaching was not understood principally as having to do with hunger; it was a story not about desperation but about risk. Oxford students were famous for this escapade. It was, for a start, a daring game: it took impressive skill and cool nerves to trespass on a powerful person’s land, kill a large animal, and drag it away, without getting caught by those who patrolled the area. “What, hast not thou full often struck a doe,” someone asks in one of Shakespeare’s early plays, “And borne her cleanly by the keeper’s nose?” (Titus Andronicus, 2.1.93-94). It was a skillful assault upon property, a symbolic violation of the social order, a coded challenge to authority. That challenge was supposed to be kept within bounds: the game involved cunning and an awareness of limits. After all, one was not supposed to beat up the keeper—then misdemeanor turns into felony—and one was not supposed to get caught. Deer poaching was about the pleasures of hunting and killing but also about the pleasures of stealth and trickery, about knowing how far to go, about contriving to get away with something.
Throughout Shakespeare’s career as a playwright he was a brilliant poacher—deftly entering into territory marked out by others, taking for himself what he wanted, and walking away with his prize under the keeper’s nose. He was particularly good at seizing and making his own the property of the elite, the music, the gestures, the language. This is only a metaphor, of course; it is not evidence that young Will engaged in actual poaching. What we know, and what those who originally circulated the legend knew, is that he had a complex attitude toward authority, at once sly, genially submissive, and subtly challenging. He was capable of devastating criticism; he saw through lies, hypocrisies, and distortions; he undermined virtually all of the claims that those in power made for themselves. And yet he was easygoing, humorous, pleasantly indirect, almost apologetic. If this relation to authority was not simply implanted in him, if it was more likely something he learned, then his formative learning experience may well have been a nasty encounter with one of the principal authorities in his
district.
For in all the versions of the story something went wrong: Shakespeare was caught and then treated more harshly than he felt was appropriate (and indeed than the law allowed). He responded, it is said, with a bitter ballad. Versions of the ballad have predictably surfaced—none of them interesting as poetry or believable as Shakespeare’s actual verses. “If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it, / Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it,” etc. More interesting is the idea that Shakespeare must have responded to harsh treatment with an insulting piece of writing, presumably an attack on Lucy’s character or the honor of his wife.
Modern biographers are skeptical largely because they believe that Shakespeare was not that kind of person and that Lucy was both too powerful and too respectable to be slandered. “In public feared and respected, Sir Thomas in his domestic affairs appears to have been not unamiable,” observes one of Shakespeare’s most amiable and brilliant biographers, Samuel Schoenbaum. “He wrote testimonial letters for an honest gentlewoman and an ailing servant.” But the late-seventeenth-century gossips who circulated the story may have had a better understanding of that world. They grasped that a man like Lucy could combine geniality and public-spiritedness—entertaining the queen at Charlecote, keeping a company of players, acting boldly and decisively in times of plague—with ruthless violence. They knew that it was dangerous to write anything against a person in authority—you could be charged with “scandalium magnatum,” slandering an official—and at the same time that such writing was the prime weapon of the powerless. Above all, they believed that something serious must have driven Shakespeare out of Stratford, something more than his own poetic dreams and theatrical skill, something more than dissatisfaction with his marriage, and something more than the limited economic opportunities in the immediate area.
They doubted, in other words, that Shakespeare simply wandered off to London in search of new opportunities. Whether he was helping in his father’s failing business, or working as a poor scrivener (a noverint, as it was sometimes called) in a lawyer’s office, or teaching the rudiments of Latin grammar to schoolboys, they believed that without some shock Shakespeare would have continued in the rut that life had prepared for him. With the family’s lands mortgaged, his education finished, no profession, a wife and three children to support, he had already begun to deepen that rut for himself. Rumormongers heard something that led them to believe that trouble with authority drove him out and that the authority in question was Sir Thomas Lucy. They thought too that something Shakespeare wrote was involved in the trouble.
Early biographers not only went in search of the missing satiric poem but also carefully scanned Shakespeare’s printed works for traces of his early encounter with the angry justice of the peace. Centuries ago both Rowe and Davies pointed to the opening scene in The Merry Wives of Windsor, in which Shakespeare depicts pompous Justice Shallow complaining that Falstaff has killed his deer and threatening a Star Chamber suit. Shallow stands on his dignity; he is, as his nephew Slender says, “a gentleman born,” one who “writes himself ‘Armigero’ in any bill, warrant, quittance, or obligation: ‘Armigero.’” “Ay, that I do, and have done any time these three hundred years” (1.1.7–11). Laughter is directed at the self-importance that is crystallized in the lovingly reiterated Latinism “Armigero,” one who bears a coat of arms. The mockery ripples across a whole class of gentry inordinately proud of their birth and eager to maintain a distinction between their inherited status and that of mere upstarts. (Some argued in this period that a family must have had a coat of arms for at least three generations before it could be securely identified as authentically armigerous.) But Rowe and Davies suggest that Shallow was intended specifically as a dig at Sir Thomas Lucy, Will’s persecutor for the crime of deer poaching.
This suggestion is apparently borne out by the ensuing flurry of jokes on the heraldic symbol of the Lucy family, a freshwater fish called a luce. It is not only Shallow who writes himself “Armigero,” adds Slender: “All his successors gone before him hath done’t, and all his ancestors that come after him may. They may give the dozen white luces in their coat” (1.1.12–14). There follows an exchange that is by now almost entirely obscure—it is cut in most modern performances—and that even in Shakespeare’s time would have been difficult to follow. It depends upon a series of puns unintentionally generated by Sir Hugh Evans, the Welsh parson who pronounces “luces” as “louses” and “coat” as “cod”—Elizabethan slang for “scrotum.” As in the schoolroom scene from the same play, obscenities are scribbled in the margins of respect. The dialogue manages, with a perfect miming of innocence, to deface the Lucy coat of arms.
But if this is the case—if Shakespeare was taking symbolic revenge on the proud man who had humiliated him and persecuted him over some infraction or other—then it was a muted, delayed, and half-hidden revenge. The Merry Wives of Windsor was written in 1597–98, at least a decade after events that might have driven Shakespeare out of Stratford. Closer to those events, as if to placate his persecutor, the playwright had gone out of his way in one of his earliest plays, 1 Henry VI, to present an admirable portrait of a Lucy ancestor, Sir William Lucy.
The “Armigero” satire was hardly violent or bitter—it was the quietly mocking laughter of someone whose wounds were no longer raw. And it was a laughter that did not insist on identifying its object outside the charmed circle of the play. Very few of the members of the audience could have picked up on the specific allusion to a Warwickshire notable: it was there—if it was there at all—principally for the playwright himself and a small group of his friends. And in laughing at a person who is proud of his coat of arms, the playwright was also quietly turning the laughter back upon himself. For The Merry Wives of Windsor was written immediately in the wake of Shakespeare’s own successful attempt to write himself “Armigero” by renewing his father’s application for gentlemanly status. Perhaps it was only the achievement of the coat of arms that enabled him to make fun of Lucy and at the same time to distance himself from his own social desire.
Shakespeare was a master of double consciousness. He was a man who spent his money on a coat of arms but who mocked the pretentiousness of such a claim; a man who invested in real estate but who ridiculed in Hamlet precisely such an entrepreneur as he himself was; a man who spent his life and his deepest energies on the theater but who laughed at the theater and regretted making himself a show. Though Shakespeare seems to have recycled every word he ever encountered, every person he ever met, every experience he ever had—it is difficult otherwise to explain the enormous richness of his work—he contrived at the same time to hide himself from view, to ward off vulnerability, to forswear intimacy. And in the case of his encounter with Thomas Lucy, he may, by the late 1590s, have buried inside light public laughter the traces of an intense fear that had once gripped him.
Even after he had moved to London and established himself as an actor and playwright, Shakespeare might not have been able to conceal entirely that as a young man he had fallen afoul of a Warwickshire magnate. But he had ample reason to recast and to sanitize whatever it was that had sent him packing. Hidden within the legend of Thomas Lucy’s deer park may have been a more serious trouble, which the poaching episode, whether or not it actually occurred, at once represented and concealed. Long before he floated the hints in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare may in his private conversation have told the story of a slightly comical misadventure to account for his departure from Stratford. The story might have served as a convenient cover, all the more convenient if it had at least some basis in fact: it acknowledged that Lucy played a role, but a role that could be parodied in no more disturbing a figure than Justice Shallow. It acknowledged too that Shakespeare was in trouble, but trouble of the kind, more winked at than prosecuted, for which Oxford students were famous. The far more serious threat that Lucy would have posed—his role not as defender of his game but as relentless persecutor of recusancy—was effaced, and Stratford t
ook on the tranquil glow of a sleepy country town.
But in the 1580s ordinary life in Stratford, as elsewhere, had not been tranquil. The capture, trial, and execution of Campion and the other Jesuit missionaries had by no means settled the religious struggles in England. It was not only a matter of international plots and the ambitions of the great. Even if he was altogether untouched by fantasies of martyrdom, even if he had plunged into the everyday concerns of a family man in a provincial town, Shakespeare could not have lived his life as if there were no questions about belief. No one with any capacity for thought at this moment could have done so.
Many men and women in England—more radical Protestants as well as Catholics—were dissatisfied with the religious settlement and felt that they could not worship as they wished. Shakespeare unquestionably knew such people; members of his own family may have been among them. For the more pious, the experience must have been anguishing: they believed that their eternal salvation, and the salvation of their kin and fellow countrymen, depended upon their form of worship and upon the faith that this worship expressed. This is why, for example, a young Warwickshire gentleman, John Somerville of Edstone, began in the summer of 1583 to spend a great deal of time in intense conversation with a gardener on the estate of his father-in-law. The conversation was not about the flowers; the man dressed as a gardener was Hugh Hall, a Catholic priest, whom his father-in-law secretly harbored.
Will Shakespeare was at this point a virtual nobody, the knockabout son of a failing glover; John Somerville, educated at Oxford, was wealthy, wellborn, and well connected. But there could have been a distant family link between these two young men from Warwickshire: Somerville had married the daughter of Edward Arden of Park Hall, the head of the family probably distantly related to Mary Arden, Shakespeare’s mother. And these possible cousins may both have had implanted in them from childhood the same longing to restore England to the old faith.