Shakespeare: A Life (64 page)

lover, was a hatter and haberdasher of 35. John Lane himself, only 23,
was of an old, respectable, but eccentric family who fittingly had as a
coat of arms 'three fireballs, flaming'. His grandfather Nicholas
Lane had attacked a man with a crabtree cudgel; and the old man's
nephew, another Nicholas, was killed with a cowlstaff by Robert
Fisher, who was indicted for murder, but acquitted because he had
acted in selfdefence. John Lane was rowdy, and the churchwardens once
accused him of drunkenness.

But the
matter is not so simple. As a leader of the anti-Puritan cause in
town, John Lane became one of the five 'gentlemen' who organized a riot
against the intellectual incoming Puritan vicar, Thomas Wilson, who
was strongly approved by M
^r
Hall. What is fairly certain is
that, even if he also had a personal grudge, Lane -- as a leader of
anti-Puritan cohorts -- had political motives in defaming the
church-going, forthright M
^r
Hall, who had his own Puritan
allies. At any rate, Susanna was vindicated. Robert Whatcott, later to
witness the poet's will, appeared at the court at Worcester cathedral
for the plaintiff. Lane stayed away. Within a fortnight, he was
excommunicated.
⁶

Susanna herself had defied a church court twice. Unlikely to forget
his daughter's troubles whether or not he feared her rashness,
Shakespeare was prudent. The times were troubled, and he settled on a
policy of strict neutrality in the Welcombe crisis to come. In touch
with lawyers and wealthy landowners, he was keenly concerned for his
own heritable assets.

The Welcombe
crisis, as it turned out, excited most of the town. It was heralded by
yet another town fire, which, on 9 July 1614, as Levi Fox notices,
involved fifty-four houses and caused £8,000-worth of damage in less
than two hours. That very heavily burdened the council, which had to aid
those who had lost goods or houses, as well as help about 700 of the
poor.

Only a day after the fire, old
John Combe the money-broker died; he was said to be the richest soul
in town. He left £5 to Shakespeare, who is said to have penned an
epitaph on John Combe and his 10 per cent loans -- but these lines
echo a couplet on usury written by one 'H.P.' nine years earlier:

-385-

Ten in the hundred here ties engraved; A hundred to ten his soul is
not saved. If anyone ask who lies in this tomb, 'O ho!' quoth the
devil, ''tis my John-a-Combe.'

Most of the old man's fortune went to his nephew Thomas Combe, to
whom Shakespeare was to leave a very personal item, his sword.
⁷

It was Thomas's older brother William Combe who hoped to profit by
enclosing the open fields in Old Stratford, Bishopton, and Welcombe in
1614. At 28, William Combe was rich, aggressive, and determined, but it
was Arthur Mainwaring of Shropshire, steward to Lord Chancellor
Ellesmere, who first promoted the scheme with the help of his cousin,
William Replingham of Great Harborough. The parish fields, some owned
by Mainwaring, had grass for pasture as well as hay for mowing, and if
they were enclosed by hedges the arable tracts would all be given
over to sheep pasture. Agricultural efficiency might of course result,
but Sir Edward Greville had failed with his own hedging plans. There
was stubbornly angry resistance to any scheme for enclosing open
fields not only because public rights to the 'stubble and harvest
aftermath' would end, but because enclosure reduced employment. Sheep
husbandry required less work than arable farming (sheep devoured men,
as Sir Thomas More put it), and in the eyes of most folk it led to
hardship, poverty, and depopulation.

If the plan went ahead, Shakespeare could lose in two ways. The value
of his tithe-shares could drop, if pasture yielded less income for the
parish. Also, his Old Stratford land was affected (as we learned with
explicit details in 1994). For example he held 4 acres 'shooting and
lying into Fordes Greene', a furlong to be partly enclosed, and his
grasslands in the Dingles and about Welcombe Hills were involved.
⁸
The tithes and furlongs represented what Shakespeare had earned
from a life's work, or a portion of the total estate he meant to leave
to his heirs.

On 5 September,
Greene as the town's clerk drew up a neat list of freeholders whom the
plan would touch, and he described first (though mostly in excluding
negatives) the related land-holdings of 'M
^r
Shakspeare':

-386-

4. yard Land. noe common nor ground beyond Gospell Bushe, noe grownd
in Sandfield, nor none in Slowe Hill field beyond Bishopton nor none in
theenclosure beyond Bishopton.
⁹

On 23 September Greene next worriedly noted the council's unanimous
vote to resist enclosure. As Stratford's executive officer he feared
violence, it seems, with himself in the middle. Alerted, Shakespeare on
28 October conferred with Replingham, who agreed to compensate '
William Shackespeare' or his heirs or assigns for any 'loss, detriment
and hindrance' with respect to the annual value of the tithes.
¹⁰
Greene himself had a tithe-share, so his name was added to the covenant on the advice of Thomas Lucas, the poet's attorney.

With little to lose whether the plan went ahead or not, Shakespeare
thus might play a neutral role in any struggle to come. Greene, clearly,
was beset by nervous anxiety. Charged to see that the enclosures got
nowhere, he had a covenant with Replingham, and might face popular
wrath. In this state, Greene kept hectic notes from 15 November 1614
to 19 February 1617 -- his diary.

In
November, he was in London -- looking for a more toothy shark even
than Mainwaring, namely William Combe. Not finding him, he called upon
Shakespeare, who had reached the city with his son-in-law John Hall
on the 16th. 'My cousin Shakespeare coming yesterday to town', wrote
Greene, 'I went to see him how he did.' The poet was well informed,
very precise and specific, but also in an alert, tactfully mollifying
mood as the town clerk questioned him. There was nothing for Greene to
worry about it seems, as the planners never dreamt of going too far.
They had told him, Shakespeare declared, 'they meant to enclose no
farther than to Gospel Bush, and so up straight, leaving out part of
the Dingles to the Field, to the gate in Clopton Hedge and take in
Salisbury's piece'.
¹¹

Such preciseness, it seems, did little for Greene's nerves. Perhaps
noticing this, the poet changed his tack. He talked on 17 November in
London as if the enclosure crisis were months away (though it would
begin in December), and then as if it might never exist. M
^r
Hall picked up this colourful, changing thread and agreed with his
father-in-law. Shakespeare added that 'they mean in April to survey
the land, and

-387-

then to give satisfaction and not before'. One thinks of Goneril
reducing Lear's knights, until the threat to herself comes to nothing.
Anyway, M
^r
Hall joined in the reassuring talk. The poet 'and
Master Hall', Greene scribbled later, 'say they think there will be
nothing done at all'.

But back at
Stratford on 10 December, Greene sensed a storm and looked in vain for
Replingham, first at the Bear inn, then at New Place. The fact that
he hoped to find one of the planners at New Place, in its owner's
absence, might suggest that Greene's famous 'cousin' was not so
neutral. Shakespeare was close to the Combe family, and, in a crisis
of this sort, he may have been tempted to side with men of wealth who
had large estates to advance. At Stratford, the planners' cause was at
last openly joined by the wilful, ferocious William Combe, to whom
the council sent a deputation of six 'to present their loves', and
plead with him to desist. Thanking them, Combe would not budge; he
might begin, he let it be known, with a thaw, to dig ditches and plant
hedges. On 23 December, the council sent letters, signed by 'almost
all' of their members, to both Mainwaring and Shakespeare to get their
support. 'I also', Greene noted, 'writ of myself to my cousin
Shakespeare the copies of all of our oaths made then, also a note of
the inconveniences would grow by the enclosure.'

However, on 19 December the frost had broken. Enclosure of the land
began. Out near Welcombe, to prepare for hedge-planting, Combe's men
dug a trench which soon extended for 'at least fifty perches', 275
yards.

That defied the town. In their
response, the council, in the warlike tradition of Quiney who had
stormed the Bancroft, made the first violent move while the poet was
away. To be sure, this was cautious, or a kind of warlike gesture. Two
aldermen would fill in the ditches! They needed spades and good luck
-- but, first, to be
lawful
in battle, William Walford and
William Chandler bought a lease at Welcombe, so they became tenants
with rights of common on 6 January 1615. Unluckily, Combe heard that
several of 'the better sort' planned to fill his trenches. 'Oh would
they durst!' he told the bailiff angrily.

Before they picked up their spades, Greene advised the aldermen to
'go in such private manner as that none might see them go, lest others

-388-

might follow in Companies & so make a riot or a mutiny'. Out at
Welcombe, the two men, as Greene put it, 'endeavoured to hinder the
malefactors from their unlawful digging'. The result was ludicrous;
the two were cursed by the diggers, and while Combe sat on his horse
laughing, were thrown to the ground. So the enclosing party humiliated
the council -- except they had not reckoned on women. Word, it seems,
passed from kitchen to kitchen in the hamlets, as in the town. A small
army of women and children came out at night to fill in Combe's and
Mainwaring's ditches.

That female
protest deeply annoyed Replingham. He found women, in numbers,
difficult because they could not be 'thrown down' as Walford and
Chandler were. Replingham also had to confront an irate female, since
the one woman in town who represented the anti-closure party at a
raucous meeting with him on Thursday, 12 January 1615, was Judith
Shakespeare's friend Bess Quiney. As the meeting broke up, Greene
noticed, Replingham vowed he would give names to the bailiff 'for
doing Justice upon the women diggers'.

Despite appeals, threats, and petitions to the justices, the crisis
lasted. The Corporation obtained an injunction, on 2 April, against
Combe, who did not give up. Far from being stopped, he beat his tenants,
imprisoned them, impounded livestock, and depopulated the hamlet of
Welcombe, except for his own dwelling.

Back from the city, Shakespeare must have watched developments with
interest. In September, Greene made in the diary his most intriguing
entry, which seems to hint at Shakespeare's feelings: ' W
Shakespeare's telling J. Greene that I was not able to bear the
enclosinge of Welcombe'. J. Greene was John, the diarist's brother.
Greene started to write 'he', and changed that to the word 'bear'. Why
did he bother to jot another person's view of his own feelings? The
entry's meaning is still unclear, but it is just possible Greene made
no further slip in the pen and used 'bear' in the sense of 'promote' or
'sustain successfully'. Anyway, by the autumn of 1615 Combe had no,
chance of success, and the poet may have cared little. Even so, Combe
was not finally defeated until around 1617.
¹²

The Welcombe affair, though, illustrates Shakespeare's wish to seem
impartial without being disloyal to friends, and to protect the

-389-

value of his assets. His daughter Judith's feelings, in the Welcombe
crisis, may have been on the opposer's side, though it is not known
that she went out with women to fill ditches. As early as 4 December
1611, Judith had witnessed a deed of sale for Bess Quiney,
¹³
who unmistakably opposed Replingham, with whom the poet had a
covenant. If already out of step with her father, Judith was later to
alarm him, perhaps more terribly than she knew.

But it need not be true that the poet wanted the enclosure to succeed,
or that he cared nothing for the council's troubles, or the jobs of
field hands. Shakespeare's neutrality was convincing, and he had
earned some rest by 1615. The town did not impugn him because he had
stayed above the mêlée in the Welcombe affair, and apart from other
concerns, he had the future to consider. That is what his legal will
and his late friendships suggest.

With his friends, obviously, Shakespeare might at times be in that
alertly relaxed mood in which Greene found him when calling upon him
and the selfless, hard-working, outspoken M
^r
Hall in London.
The poet did not starve or go thirsty; he enjoyed himself, although
with caution and with some purpose. What Aubrey called his 'wellshap't'
body cannot -- when Shakespeare was 50 or 51 -- have been what it was
at 30. His effigy is not that of an athlete nor of a
bon vivant,
but he put on weight in his late years. That, alone, would not have
prevented him from riding. Moreover if he rode between a Midlands town
and London, he was perhaps able to ride merely four miles south of
Stratford to see his friend Thomas Russell at Alderminster.

This friend was born in 1570. Raised at Bruton in Somerset, Russell
was a charming and generous squire (as his gifts, in late life, show)
with a fine house in the city. His good nature accompanied him like a
benign star, and he had had some luck: in youth he inherited two
manors. He had been to The Queen's College, Oxford, then as a widower
had courted and wed a lady worth £12,000, Mrs Anne Digges, widow of
Thomas Digges the mathematician. Because her house at Philip Lane,
Aldermanbury was not very far from Silver Street, the

-390-