Shakespeare: A Life (12 page)

Stratford. A few boys, such as Roger Lock in 1577, or Richard Field in
1579, went to serve members of the London Stationers' Company, which
controlled aspects of the book trade. As a son of Henry Field the
tanner (whose inventory was later appraised by John Shakespeare),
Richard Field was apprenticed from 29 September 1579 to the stationer
George Bishop, and then agreed to learn printing for the first six
years under Thomas Vautrollier, an immigrant from Paris, who brought
out Calvin
Institutes
, a Latin Book of Common Prayer, and Ovid, Cicero, and other schoolbooks.

If William had an explicit contract to teach in the Midlands, we lack
it. We do, however, know of a family 'in the Countrey' -- the northern
family of Hoghton at Lea and Hoghton Tower in Lancashire -- who have
had a long-standing tradition that Shakespeare, as a young man,
served two years with them.
²
Lancashire was then a poor county, backward and feudal, and known to be
rough and dangerous for travellers. To the extent that they were
religious, many of its people were Catholic. If Alexander de Hoghton
wanted a 'Schoolmaster' for his retainers' children, he was wealthy
enough to hire more than one. Yet among the retinue listed in his
will, none is closer in name to Shakespeare than a 'servant', who is
listed with a certain Fulke Gillom and is called William Shakeshafte.
In the county there were a few families of Shakeshafte, but the name
was not common; the name Shakespeare was very rare in Tudor
Lancashire. An 'item' in Hoghton's will of 3 August 1581 interestingly
associates Gillom and Shakeshafte with players, musical instruments,
and 'all maner of playe clothes' or with a stock of players' clothes.
In the will, Hoghton leaves his instruments and costumes to his
half-brother Thomas, but, if Thomas refuses to keep an acting troupe,
it is Hoghton's wish that his friend, Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford,

shall haue the same Instrumentes & playe clothes. And I most
hertelye requyre the said Sir Thomas to be ffrendlye vnto ffoke
Gyllome and William Shakeshafte nowe dwellynge with me & eyther to
take theym vnto his Servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master
as my tryste is he Wyll[.]
³

The phrase 'dwelling with me' is an odd one to use of servants, unless
they 'dwell' in a special capacity. Also we cannot say that
Shakespeare's name was not assimilated to the more familiar northern
name

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of "Shakeshafte" by Hoghton, or by his attorney or clerk. Surnames were not thought to be unalterable or fixed.
⁴

This much of course does not prove the case, but it does leave open
the possibility that Shakespeare spent some months in the north of
England. In Lancashire the Hoghtons were second in influence only to
the earls of Derby, their friends; and the young Stratford poet was to
be associated with a Lancashire patron -- none other than the fourth
earl of Derby's son, Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange. A troupe or
troupes under the Strange or Derby name performed two-perhaps four or
more -- of Shakespeare's early plays.

Moreover it is rather unlikely that he entered the theatre without
influential help; we have no record of a Tudor playing company
recruiting on the road, though a notion of his suddenly joining a
travelling troupe of players is prized by romantic biographers. Some of
his early work was to be linked with the men of Ferdinando, and we
cannot deny that men under that patron formed the nucleus of the Lord
Chamberlain's company. If Shakespeare never knew Hoghton or Derby, it
is odd that he was known by their friends.

Certainly too in his youth, he knew a topography unlike Stratford's --
and knew it well. In childhood he was sheltered by a well-run market
town with its good borough council, mainly placid trades, seasonal
festivals, and 'free scole' -- and the climate was propitious: north
of the Avon the low ridges are drained by the Salwarpe, the Arrow, the
Alne, and other mild streams. This clement region produced excellent
fleece (and a 'considerable' wool-dealer such as his father for a time
had thrived). But western Lancashire has no such protection as the
Welsh Hills. Climatic differences between the Midlands plain and the
north enabled Warwickshire wool-dealers to market some of their best
fleece in sheep-raising regions of Lancashire. In his early plays
there are fine, closely observed images of mountains, the sea, and, it
seems, of an estuary landscape such as appears in a soliloquy of
Richard of Gloucester in
3 Henry VI
:

Why, then, I do but dream on sovereignty Like one that stands upon a
promontory And spies a far-off shore where he would tread, Wishing
his foot were equal with his eye,

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And chides the sea that sunders him from thence, Saying he'll lade it dry to have his way -( III. ii. 134-9)
⁵

These topographical images correspond with nothing in Warwickshire's
landscape. They may suggest that William has followed the fleece, that
he knows vistas around Lea, and that one of his teachers has sent him
north, with John Shakespeare's compliance.

Grammar-school boys were often under scrutiny because the law
enjoined masters to recommend promising pupils. Among five King's New
School masters in William's youth, no fewer than three were Lancashire
men -- Walter Roche (whom John Shakespeare knew), John Cottom, and
Cottom's successor Alexander Aspinall.

Thomas Jenkins -- the retiring master at Church Street -- was duly
replaced by John Cottom. We know that on 9 July 1579 Jenkins received
£6 from Cottom, a sum advanced to the latter by the borough council, and
so it is fairly evident that by around 9 July Cottom was assuming the
duties of master at Stratford's school. (The chamberlains accepted his
receipt, from ' John Cottom, Scholemaster of the foresaid towne of
Stretford', when they paid him wages 'for one half yere ended' on 21
December that year.
⁶
) Cottom (who preferred that spelling) was a son of Lawrence Cottam,
whose ancestral estate was at Dilworth in Lancashire; adjacent to
Cottam's estate was Alston, a country seat of Alexander de Hoghton.

It has become clear late in the twentieth century that Cottams and
Hoghtons had had close family connections, and both families were
Catholic. John Cottom was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford; he
had taken his BA on 19 June 1566 (in the same year as Jenkins). Three
months before Cottom began to teach at Stratford, his brother Thomas
Cottam, also a graduate of Brasenose, entered the Jesuit novitiate of
St Andrew in Rome -- on 8 April 1579. A year later, in June 1580,
Thomas Cottam left Rheims carrying on his person tokens of
identification -- including a medal, several coins, a gilt crucifix, and
two pairs of beads -- intended for delivery at Shottery. Whether or
not Cottam considered Shottery a stronghold ripe for missionary work,
the tokens were for members of the family of his fellow priest

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Robert Debdale. One token was for Debdale's brother-in-law John Pace,
who in the next year is mentioned as a chief creditor and as 'my
neighboure' in the will of Richard Hathaway, the father of Anne
Hathaway.
⁷

Father Cottam's journey to Shottery was cut short. He was captured,
arraigned and tried, and then executed at Tyburn on 30 May 1582.
Leaving Stratford at about the time of his brother's death, John
Cottom went back to Lancashire with his religious convictions
evidently stiffened, since his name (along with his wife's) later
appeared on northern returns for recusants, or those who failed to
attend church.

However, there is no
sign that obdurate Catholics succeeded one another as masters at
King's New School in Shakespeare's time. Jenkins had Roman Catholic
connections, and a London and Oxford background as Cottom did, and so
may have helped to secure his successor. But even Cottom had to accept
Anglican practices as a Stratford teacher, and indeed he could not have
continued teaching after Michaelmas in 1579 without a certificate of
conformity from the Bishop of Worcester. It would seem that Jenkins
and Cottom alike -while at Stratford -- met the approval of the borough
council, whose clerk routinely cites them in the Minutes and Accounts.
Yet the new master's Lancashire background is also clear. If
Alexander de Hoghton did ask Cottom to recommend to him a clever,
sympathetic young person to teach in the north, Cottom had Jenkins's
former pupils to turn to.

Among
them was William Shakespeare. We still lack a note in the hand of
Hoghton, Cottom, or anyone else to show that he went north, though the
risks of working for a distant, influential landowner may have seemed
to his parents smaller than the benefits. Other bright, educated sons
were leaving town; the times were uncertain. It is relevant, too,
that the employer's religion was not necessarily a drawback; John and
Mary Shakespeare appear to have been Catholics who conformed, as
thousands of similar conviction did, and they raised a son who
conformed: Shakespeare would show a close familiarity with Catholic
practices, and at least as much intimacy and sympathy with the 'old
faith', as any Protestant writer of his time. After his school years,
he put his Latin to use, presumably 'in the Countrey',

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and so we may ask what a country experience would have held for him.
We can only be tentative; an 'alternative narrative' can give us no
more than pictures from beyond the edges of Shakespeare's known
experience. But since there is a good possibility that he went to
Hoghton, we may suppose that he had experiences not wholly unlike
those a grammar-school boy would have had at Hoghton Tower and Lea,
and that in 1579 or 1580, after what may have been rough journey, a '
William Shakeshafte' found himself in the employ of a great family in
the north.

May we see this person in Lancashire?

If he was like Shakespeare just then, ' Shakeshafte' was no more than
a country lad of 16, about as shiny and neat in doublet and hose, or as
angular and graceful, as other boys would be. After school recitals
he would have been articulate, yet he had been trained in civility,
restraint, and the decorum of manners, so would have known enough to
be mainly silent and deferential. He would have to merit the approbation
of an employer in an odd milieu. If he had a prime Shakespeare family
trait, it was his ability to please, or rather to ingratiate himself so
as to win loyalty and trust, as William's father held the loyalty of
burgesses who kept him on the council (long after his absenteeism
began), or as Mary Arden had pleased her father enough to be a legal
executor as a young woman. To inspire affection and trust -- that, after
all, counted for more than brains, talent, or other assets in a
strict, hierarchical milieu, in which the young pleased in order to
survive. If ' Shakeshafte' was like our William, he also had
enthusiasm and energy, with enough imagination to offset the effect of
any overtaught, Latin-ridden cleverness of his own, and an
impressionable nature eager to absorb what it could.

Alexander de Hoghton was near the end of his life. A portrait, said
to be of him, shows a lean-cheeked man with thin eyebrows and an
intent, sidelong glance. Married to Dorothy Ashton and then to
Elizabeth Hesketh, he was close to 60 when in 1580 he came into full
possession of the Hoghton inheritance. A few years later this included

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over 20,000 acres of land, some two dozen mills and 400 cottages, and
the manors of Alston, Hoghton, and Lea. Much of Lancashire was then a
thinly peopled feudal domain with wide areas given over to moss and
marshland. Justices of the peace were few; several of the gentry kept
armed bands of retainers, and there was occasional violence, as when
the house of Alexander's half-brother, his heir Thomas, was attacked
at midnight by about eighty of Thomas Langton's armed men, using the
rallying-cry 'The crow is white!' 'Black, black!' shouted servants
within, but their master died in the mêlêe.
⁸

Giving the country a semblance of peace and order were the Stanleys,
the family of Alexander's close friend Henry, the fourth Earl of
Derby. With nearly regal powers and the county lieutenancy, the fourth
earl lived in as ostentatious a manner as his father had -- and, at
least since 1536, the Crown had acknowledged the family's importance.
In Lancashire, the queen in effect ruled through the Stanleys.

This meant that ' Shakeshafte' -- and any other Hoghton servantlived in
a milieu that was partly anachronistic. On visits to Alexander de
Hoghton, the Earl of Derby personified a regal political authority and
grandeur as if he were in fact the domain's monarch. An earl whose
household was the largest in Elizabethan England after the royal one,
and whose family spent £1,500 a year on food and had 140 people in his
entourage, expected ceremony and displays of loyalty.
⁹
Shakespeare himself may well have observed such an earl -- when 'in
the Countrey' or later -- inasmuch as he shows an easy familiarity with
the habits and psychology of men of enormous, medieval political
power. In Alexander's time, a certain tension was developing between
the earl and his son and heir Ferdinando, whose troupe were to have
some of Shakespeare's early work. In a friendly letter in 1571, the
Queen had asked the earl to send his heir, as a young boy, to her at
Windsor.
¹⁰
Influenced by his training at court, Ferdinando became obsessed with
something besides the theatre, namely religion in his county. He began
to denounce his own father in discreet letters to William Chadderton,
Bishop of Chester, whose diocese linked Cheshire and Lancashire. 'I
ame throughe with my father', wrote Ferdinando on 15 March 1582.
Separating himself from the ignominy of papistry in Lancashire the
next year, he hoped that 'your lordship

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