an eloquent letter in his own hand written to William Shakespeare in 1598. It is worth bearing in mind that John Shakespeare rose through a series of positions of authority in which an inability to read would have been a tiresome, if not insuperable, handicap. Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not has absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.
Literate or not, John was a popular and respected fellow. In 1556 he took up the first of many municipal positions when he was elected borough ale taster. The job required him to make sure that measures and prices were correctly observed throughout the town – not only by innkeepers but also by butchers and bakers. Two years later he became a constable – a position that then, as now, argued for some physical strength and courage – and the next year became an ‘affeeror’ (or ‘affurer’), someone who assessed fines for matters not handled by existing statutes. Then he became successively burgess, chamberlain and alderman, which last entitled him to be addressed as ‘Master’ rather than simply as ‘Goodman’. Finally, in 1568, he was placed in the highest elective office in town, high bailiff – mayor in all but name. So William Shakespeare was born into a household of quite a lot of importance locally.
One of John’s duties as high bailiff was to approve payment from town funds for performances by visiting troupes of actors. Stratford in the 1570s became a regular stop for touring players, and it is reasonable to suppose that an impressionable young Will saw many plays as he grew up, and possibly received some encouragement or made some contact that smoothed his entrance into the London theatre later. He would at the very least have seen actors with whom he would eventually become closely associated.
For four hundred years that was about all that was known of John Shakespeare, but in the 1980s some discoveries at the Public Record Office showed that there was another, rather more dubious side to his character.
‘It appears that he hung out with some fairly shady fellows,’ says David Thomas. Four times in the 1570s, John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution – the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money lending, both highly illegal activities. Usury in particular was considered a ‘vice most odious and detestable’, in the stark phrasing of the law, and fines could be severe, but John seems to have engaged in it at a seriously committed level. In 1570 he was accused of making loans worth £220 (including interest) to a Walter Mussum. This was a very considerable sum – well over £100,000 in today’s money – and Mussum appears not to have been a good risk: at his death his entire estate was worth only £114, much less than John Shakespeare had lent him.
The risk attached to such an undertaking was really quite breathtaking. Anyone found guilty of it would forfeit all the money lent, plus interest, and face a stiff fine and the possibility of imprisonment. The law applied – a little unfairly, it must be said – to any extension of credit. If someone took delivery of, say, wool from you with the understanding that he would repay you later, with a little interest for your trouble, that was considered usury too. It was this form of usury of which John Shakespeare was probably guilty, for he also traded (or so it would seem) in large quantities of wool. In 1571, for instance, he was accused of acquiring three hundred tods – 8,400 pounds – of wool. That is a lot of wool and a lot of risk.
We cannot be certain how guilty he was. Informers, as David Thomas points out, sometimes brought actions as a kind of nuisance ploy, hoping that the accused, even if innocent, would agree to an out-of-court settlement rather than face a costly and protracted trial in London, and one of John Shakespeare’s accusers did have a record of bringing such malicious suits.
In any case something severely unfavourable seems to have happened in John’s business life, for in 1576, when William was twelve, he abruptly withdrew from public affairs and stopped attending meetings. He was listed at one point among nine Stratford residents who were thought to have missed church services ‘for fear of processe for debtte’. His colleagues repeatedly reduced or excused levies that he was due to pay. They also kept his name on the roll for another ten years in the evident hope that he would make a recovery. He never did.
Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening. She came from a minor branch of a prominent family. Her father farmed, and the family was comfortable, but probably no more than that. She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married. Not a great deal is known about any of them apart from Will. Joan, born in 1558, married a local hatter named Hart and lived to be seventy-seven. Gilbert, born in 1566, became a successful haberdasher. Richard was born in 1574 and lived to be not quite forty, and that is all we know of him. Edmund, the youngest, became an actor in London – how successfully and with which company are unknown – and died there at the age of twenty-seven. He is buried in Southwark Cathedral, the only one of the eight siblings not to rest at Holy Trinity in Stratford. Seven of the eight Shakespeare children appear to have been named after close relations or family friends. The exception was William, the inspiration for whose name has always been a small mystery, like nearly everything else about his life.
It is commonly supposed (and frequently written) that Shakespeare enjoyed a good education at the local grammar school, King’s New School, situated in the Guild Hall in Church Street, and he probably did, though in fact we don’t know, as the school records for the period were long ago lost. What is known is that the school was open to any local boy, however dim or deficient, so long as he could read and write – and William Shakespeare patently could do both. King’s was of an unusually high standard and was generously supported by the town. The headmaster enjoyed an annual salary of £20 – roughly twice what was paid in other towns and even more, it is often noted, than the headmaster at Eton got at the time. The three masters at the school in Shakespeare’s day were all Oxford men – again a distinction.
Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and was characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week. (The seventh day was probably given over largely to religious instruction.) For much of the year they can hardly have seen daylight. It is easy to understand the line in As You Like It about a boy ‘creeping like snail unwillingly to school’.
Discipline was probably strict. A standard part of a teacher’s training, as Stephen Greenblatt notes, was how to give a flogging. Yet compared with many private or boarding schools Stratford’s grammar provided a cushioned existence. Boys at Westminster School in London had to sleep in a windowless grain room, bereft of heat, and endure icy washes, meagre food and frequent whippings. (But then, these were conditions not unknown to many twentieth-century English schoolboys.) Their schoolday began at dawn as well, but also incorporated an additional hour of lessons in the evening and private studies that kept some boys up late into the night.
Far from having ‘small Latin and less Greek’, as Ben Jonson famously charged, Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing and reciting Latin, often in the most mindnumbingly repetitious manner. One of the principal texts of the day taught pupils 150 different ways of saying ‘Thank you for your letter’ in Latin. Through such exercises Shakespeare would have learned every possible rhetorical device and ploy – metaphor and anaphora, epistrophe and hyperbole, synecdoche, epanalepsis and others equally arcane and taxing. According to Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, in their introduction to the Oxford edition of the Complete Works, any grammar school pupil of the day would have received a more thorough grounding in Latin rhetoric and literature ‘than most present-day holders of a university degree in classics’. But they wouldn’t have received much else. Whatever mathematics, history or geography Shakespeare knew, he almost certainly didn’t learn it at grammar school.
Formal education stopped for Shakespeare probably when he was about fifteen. What became of him immediately after that is unknown – though many legends have rushed in to fill the vacuum. A particularly durable one is that he was caught poaching deer from the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and