Shakespeare: A Life (59 page)

The Gunpowder Plot still cast a long, curious shadow. After he was
found with a bag of popish 'relics', George Badger the alderman went
to prison; also sent to prison was one William Reynolds, perhaps the
same man (a son of Catholic recusants) who was remembered in the
poet's will. But, much worse for those at New Place, Shakespeare's elder
daughter Susanna broke a new, severe law -- the aim of which (in the
words of the act) was to penalize 'persons popishly affected'. Among
twenty others on 5 May 1606, she was cited in a complaint in the
court's act book, which, as it refers back to preceding entries, reads
rather drily:

Officium domini contra
Susannam Shakespeere similiter similiter
dimissa

What this amounts to is that, at the age of 23, Susanna was charged
with the fault of not receiving the Anglican sacrament at Easter, 20
April, and so became liable to a stiff fine of between £20 and £60.
Along with six others, she increased the fault by ignoring a summons,
though cited personally by the apparitor. Hence her penalty was
reserved for the next court -- when the word 'dimissa', after her entry,
indicates that she was discharged.
¹

In his plays Shakespeare minimizes the Protestant -- Catholic
conflict, and he did not advertise his beliefs. But Susanna's beliefs
were likely to be unsettled, and about a year later, at 24, she was wed
to John Hall, a church-going physician. It is wrongly supposed that in
her mid-twenties a Stratford woman would have been thought a little
'old' for the altar. A modern account represents Anne Hathaway, at
her marriage at 26, as 'long in the tooth', and supposes that
Shakespeare may have wed to save 'his fading siren of Shottery'. Those
are poor male guesses, nothing more. Parish registers are helpful, and
a survey based on them shows that the 'mean' age for women at first
marriage in twelve parishes (including Alcester near Stratford) during
150 years after Anne's wedding, was just 26. (For a quarter of a
century, the age at first marriage for women was even higher in
Stratford.)
²
At 24, the elder daughter of the owner of New Place might have had a fair choice among the town's bachelors.

But Susanna accepted M
^r
Hall -- a physician who lacked a doctoral

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degree. His sister, Sara, had wed a Cambridge scholar of 'physick'
who had that degree, but one could practise medicine without a
doctorate. Born in 1575 and raised in the rustic village of Carlton,
Bedfordshire, in the family of a physician, John Hall had gone thirty
miles away to Queen's College, Cambridge; he took his Bachelor's
degree in 1593, his Master's in 1597, and then travelled in France.
What had brought him to the Midlands? His parish of Carlton was not
close to Stratford, but Sir Thomas Lucy had inherited a manor at
Carlton. Abraham Sturley had worked for Lucy, and Mr Hall includes a
Sturley among his patients. With a few local connections, he set up a
practice before marrying Susanna on 5 June 1607.
³

To judge from his plays, Shakespeare viewed the role of a father at a
wedding as of deep sacramental importance. In Lear, Othello, or Romeo
and Juliet, it suggests tragic consequences to come if a father
flouts his sacred role, either by 'giving away' his child without her
consent, or by withholding it when she marries. And as at Holy Trinity, a
country wedding's symbolism would have been important to him. Boys
wore sprigs of rosemary tied to their sleeves as symbols of fidelity;
bridesmaids carried cakes or garlands of gilded wheat to symbolize
fertility. The father accompanied the bride to the altar.

'Who giveth this woman to be married unto this man?' the priest would
call out. The father then relinquished the bride, and after that his
role in his daughter's life had ended. He watched as the couple
plighted troths, and as the groom placed the ring on the bride's finger
with these words: 'With this ring I thee wed, with my body I thee
worship, and with all my worldly goods I thee endow.'

Yet even for a bride's father, weddings were as hopeful as they are
today. John and Susanna might produce children, and at about this time
in Act V in Pericles Shakespeare wrote one of his most moving
testaments of a father's love for a daughter. He also saw the abased
side of a father's supposedly blameless love, and symbolized an
entwined, difficult, incestuous feeling in paternal love in Pericles.
His love for Susanna was complex and intense, and one finds signs of
it in his legal will and indirectly in his late plays. The recent
evidence, coming to light in 1994, implies that John and Susanna knew
that they would have the Old Stratford acres he had bought from the
Combes,

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and this may have figured in the marital settlement.
⁴
The Halls, alert to his good will, probably settled before long not
far from New Place, at the street of Old Town, in a timber-framed
house known today as Hall's Croft, and Susanna gave birth to her only
child, Elizabeth Hall, baptized on 21 February 1608. At 43,
Shakespeare was a grandfather.

What
did he think of his son-in-law? John Hall's social rank as a physician
was not very high, and medical knowledge was more widely diffused
then than today. The doctors in the plays so far had been nondescript,
or burlesqued as Dr Caius is in Merry Wives, but Lord Cerimon in
Pericles
-- who restores the hero's wife after her 'burial' at sea -- is a selfless practitioner, not unlike Mr John Hall in bringing

to my aid the blest infusions
That dwells in vegetives, in metals, stones.

(xii. 32-3)

M
^r
Hall in fact used 'infusions' which he prepared even with 'Coral' and
'Pearl', and carried his remedies up to forty miles from home. His
first casebook is lost, but his second, which begins in 1617, tells us
very interestingly of his medical habits. With herbs and 'Pearl', he
once treated a Catholic priest, and noted that 'beyond all expectation
the Catholick was cured'. ('Blessed be God', Hall noted in Latin,
though his pious words for a Roman priest were omitted after Hall's
death when his casebook was printed.) Shakespeare knew his son-in-law
for nearly a decade, and one gathers that the two were fairly
intimate. They appear together in London for example in Thomas Greene
Diary
(which Stratford's worried town clerk kept from 1614 to
1617 during a local civic crisis), and Hall's notions of curing with
coral and pearl were likely to be remembered. 'Of his bones are coral
made', wrote the poet for Ariel in The Tempest.

Those are pearls that were his eyes;
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich an strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell.

(I. ii. 401-5)

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Hall's cures may not have inspired the song, but to be acquainted with
him was to know his strange, transforming liquids and Elizabethan
pharmacopoeia. He disliked blood-letting. Some of his ways were
superstitious, but he preferred what was mild. He used more than a
hundred separate botanical herbs, and Hall's garden, like New Place's
gardens, became known for its varieties of plants.

Once when Susanna was 'tormented with the Cholick', he gave her an
enema of flowers, and then 'I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made
hot. This brought forth a good deal of Wind, and freed her from all
Pain' -- and so 'Mrs. Hall of Stratford, my Wife' was cured.

Neuralgia was not unknown to Shakespeare's descendants, and when
Elizabeth, as a child, had what he diagnosed as 'Tortura Oris', with
pain on her face's left side and then on her right, Hall produced his
fullest case-history. The child became worse. But in late stages, when
she was weak, he massaged spices into her back, poured almond oil
over her head and squeezed it up her nose, until she was 'delivered
from Death'.
⁵

Asked later to sit on Stratford's council, he twice declined (even as
he was to refuse a knighthood). Then he accepted, only to be fined for
being absent. When he flared up at that lack of reason, he was
expelled from the council. One of M
^r
Hall's enemies became
Daniel Baker, an ultra-Puritan linen-draper of High Street, who as
bailiff in 1602 had helped to ensure the banning of plays.
Narrow-minded and truculent, he was symptomatic of a new order in
Shakespeare's late years: for the town's crafts had all but died out,
and retail merchants were in power. There was insecurity among the
burgesses partly because Stratford was at once a borough, a manor, and
a parish, so boundaries of control overlapped. The haberdashers,
mercers, and drapers could be rule-bound, ceremonial, aggressive. M
^r
Hall was to call them 'forsworne villaines'; they damned him for 'false imputations'.
⁶
They plotted to get rid of the local vicar (effectively as it turned
out) before Shakespeare died, and Hall was to defend the next,
well-educated, vicar against the council's wrath.

Even Puritan drapers usually went to Anglican service, and Hall was
of Puritan inclination himself; but in these years, class or rank was a
contentious factor in the town's life. Local politics had much to do
with one's calling, friends, and education -- and what helped to divide

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Stratford was the contempt of well-educated, professional men such as John Hall for the airs of common tradesmen.

A few months after Elizabeth's birth, the poet's mother had died.
Mary Shakespeare was buried on 9 September 1608. Summoned by the
vicar's clerk that October, the poet's sister Joan and her husband
William Hart appear to have administered her estate.

Mary Shakespeare had used a quill pen deftly, joined her husband in a
law suit, and seen more than one of her sons through petty school.
From such evidence as exists and from genetic probability, she emerges
as an intelligent, quick-minded, eager, and selfless person of use to
generations of males, since it is likely that she had helped her father,
husband, and eldest son in turn, in a managerial capacity at Arden's
farm and Henley Street. Shakespeare had kept his Sonnets out of print
while she lived. Eight months after she died they were registered for
publication. Their bawdry might have troubled a countrywoman less than
some of her son's odd, ironic assertions, which are a gateway to one of
the most complex of psyches. The most tangled and contradictory of
his relationships, one suspects, was always with his mother. His
troubled attitudes to women are too deep to be of anything but early
origin. There is no biographical evidence that he abhorred women, but
in relation to female sexuality he had become fastidiously
self-protective. The Sonnets cast an odd light in their obsession with
sexual pollution or contamination, itself a theme in Hamlet, Measure
for Measure, and Timon. The difference between his troubled views of
sexuality, and the love he felt for his grown daughters, has a bearing
on tensions in his late plays in which he sketches women in a new
light and on occasion mocks himself; but it is not so certain, in view
of his daughters' eventual problems, that he was confidential or at
ease with the daughters he cared for.

We are to see more of Susanna's temperament, but he could not have
been luckier in his son-in-law. In December 1607 the doctor's father,
William Hall of Acton, made out a will in which the claims of an elder
son were overlooked and John Hall as a younger son was named as his
father's inheritor and 'sole executor'.
⁷
The poet too appears to have trusted Hall above other men he knew.

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A few of his Sonnets had been in circulation ever since 1598, when
Meres noted that 'private friends' had access to them. Some, perhaps,
had won admirers. John Weever as a young
littérateur
imitates the
form of a Shakespeare sonnet in a lyric called 'Ad Gulielmum
Shakespear' published in his Epigrammes ( 1599), but he could have seen
the three sonnets in Romeo and Juliet. Weever dedicated Epigrammes to
Sir Richard Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancashire -- and there is
another vague link between the Sonnets and Lancashire. A manuscript of
Sonnet 2 has been found in a collection made either by Sir Edmund
Osborne, or by his second wife Anne, whose mother Mary was a sister of
the same Sir Richard Hoghton ( 1570-1630), of Hoghton Tower.
⁸

Somewhat less significant is a long poem called
Willobie his Avisa,
licensed on 3 September 1594 and probably written by an
undergraduate. Its likely author Henry Willobie had entered St John's
College, Oxford, before transferring to Exeter College and taking a
degree in 1595. Five years earlier Henry Willobie's elder brother
William had married Eleanor Bampfield, whose sister in the same month
married Thomas Russell. This is of interest since Shakespeare was to
name Russell as an overseer of his will and leave him £5.

The poem, in a leisurely manner, concerns a frustrated lover, one
'Henrico Willobego. Italo-Hispalensis', or 'H.W.', whose 'familiar
friend W.S.', recovering from a 'like' passion of his own, is bent on
seeing if love will 'sort to a happier end for this new actor, than it
did for the old player'. The allusions to 'W.S., new actor, old
player' are few, vague, and also tantalizing, though there is nothing
in
Avisa
that could not be imagined, perhaps, by a reader of
Shakespeare's Ovidian poems who knew that he was also a stage actor.
Still, it is silly to be too confident.
Avisa
refers to
Shakespeare Lucrece, and, as we learned in recent times, a resident at
one of the Inns of Court, a certain 'H. M. of the Middle Temple',
links these two poems in a semi-erotic work of his own in 1605:

We reade (
Avisa
) as reports the Writer
We reade that Lucrece was persude after:
The Strange Fortune of Alerane or My Ladies Toy
.
⁹

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