443 



SHAKSPERE, WILLIAM. 



SHAKSPERE, WILLIAM. 



444 



court ; and on the 29th of September, in the seventh of Elizabeth, we 

 have nineteen names subscribed, aldermen and burgesses. There is 

 something in this document which suggests a motive higher than mere 

 curiosity for calling up these dignitaries from their happy oblivion, 

 saying to each, " Dost thou use to write thy name ? or hast thou a 

 mark to thyself like an honest, plain-dealing man?" Out of the 

 nineteen, six only can answer, "I thank God I have been so well 

 brought up that I can write my name." We were reluctant to yield 

 our assent to Malone's assertion that Shakspere's father had a mark to 

 himself. The marks are not distinctly affixed to each name in this 

 document ; but subsequent discoveries establish the fact that he used 

 two marks one, something like an open pair of compasses ; the other, 

 the common cross. Even half a century later, to write was not held 

 indispensable by persons of some pretension. One of the aldermen of 

 Stratford in 1565, John Wheler, is described in the town-records as a 

 yeoman. He must have been dwelling in Stratford, for we have seen 

 that he was ordered to take the office of high bailiff, an office demanding 

 a near and constant residence. We can imagine a moderate landed 

 proprietor cultivating his own soil, renting perhaps other land, seated 

 in a house in the town of Stratford, such as it was in the middle of 

 the 16th century, as conveniently as in a solitary grange several miles 

 away from it. Such a proprietor, cultivator, yeoman, we consider 

 John Shakspere to have been. In 1556 John Shakspere was admitted 

 at the Court-leet to two copyhold estates in Stratford. Here then is 

 John Shakspere, before bis marriage, the purchaser of two copyholds 

 in Stratford, both with gardens, and one with a croft, or small inclosed 

 field. In 1570 John Shakspere is holding, as tenant under William 

 Clopton, a meadow of fourteen acres, with its appurtenances, called 

 Ingon, at the annual rent of eight pounds. When he married, the estate 

 of Asbies, within a short ride of Stratford, came also into his posses- 

 sion ; and so did some landed property at Snitterfield. With these 

 facts before us, scanty as they are, can we reasonably doubt that John 

 Shakspere was living upon his own land, renting the land of others, 

 actively engaged in the business of cultivation, in an age when men of 

 substance very often thought it better to take the profits direct than 

 to share them with the tenant ? The belief that the father of Shakspere 

 was a small landed proprietor and cultivator, employing his labour and 

 capital in various modes which grew out of the occupation of land, 

 oflers a better, because a more natural, explanation of the circumstances 

 connected with the early life of the great poet, than those stories which 

 would make him of obscure birth and servile employments. Take old 

 Aubrey's story, the shrewd learned gossip and antiquary, who survived 

 Shakspere some eighty years : " Mr. William Shakespear was born at 

 Stratford-upon-Avon, in the county of Warwick. His father was a 

 butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours that 

 when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade ; but when he killed a 

 calf lie would do it in high style, and make a speech. There was at that 

 time another butcher's son in this town that was held not at all inferior 

 to him for a natural wit, his acquaintance and coetanean, but died young." 

 The story, however, has a variation. There was at Stratford, in the 

 year 1693, a clerk of the parish church, eighty years old, that is, he 

 was three years old when William Shakspere died, and he, pointing 

 to the monument of the poet with the pithy remark that he was the 

 " best of his family," proclaimed to a member of one of the Inns of 

 Court that "this Shakespeare was formerly in this town bound 

 apprentice to a butcher, but that he ran from his master to London." 

 His father was a butcher, says Aubrey ; he was apprenticed to a 

 butcher, says the parish clerk. Akin to the butcher's trade is that of 

 the dealer in wool. It is upon the authority of Betterton, the actor, 

 who, in the beginning of the last century, made a journey into 

 Warwickshire to collect anecdotes relating to Shakspere, that Rowe 

 tells us that John Shakspere was a dealer in wool : " His family, as 

 appears by the register and the public writings relating to 

 that town, were of good figure and fashion there, and are mentioned 

 as gentlemen. His father, who was a considerable dealer in wool, 

 had so large a family, ten children in all, that though he was his 

 eldest son, he could give him no better education than his own em- 

 ployment." Malone was a believer in Rowe's account ; and he was 

 confirmed in his belief by possessing a piece of stained glass, bearing 

 the arms of the merchants of the staple, which had been removed 

 from a window of John Sbakspere's house in Henley Street. But, 

 unfortunately for the credibility of Rowe, as then held, Malone made 

 a discovery, as it is usual to term such glimpses of the past : " I began 

 to despair of ever being able to obtain any certain intelligence con- 

 cerning his trade ; when, at length, I met with the following entry, 

 in a very ancient manuscript, containing an account of the proceed- 

 ings in the bailiff's court, which furnished me with the long-sought-for 

 information, and ascertains that the trade of our great poet's father 

 was that of a glover; " "Thomas Siche de Arecotte in com. Wigorn. 

 querif versus Johm Shaky spere de Stretford, in com. Warwic. Glover, 

 in plac. quod reddat ei oct. libras, &c." This Malone held to be 

 decisive. Mr. Collier and Mr. Halliwell affirm that the word Glo, with 

 the second syllable contracted, is glover : and we accept their in- 

 terpretation. But we still hold to the belief that he was, in 1556, a 

 landed proprietor and an occupier of land; one who, although sued as 

 a glover on the 17th June of that year, was a suitor in the same 

 court on the 19th November, in a plea against a neighbour for 

 unjustly detaining eighteen quarters of barley. We think, that 



butcher, dealer in wool, glover, may all be reconciled with our position, 

 that he was a landed proprietor, occupying land. Harrison, who 

 mingles laments at the increasing luxury of the farmer, with some- 

 what contradictory denouncements of the oppression of the tenant by 

 the landlord, holds that the landlord is monopolising the tenant's 

 profits. " Most sorrowful of all to understand, that men of great 

 port and countenance are so far from Buffering their farmers to have 

 any gain at all, that they themselves become GRAZIERS, BUTCHERS, 

 TANNERS, SHEEP-MASTERS, WOODMEN, and denique quid won, thereby to 

 enrich themselves, and bring all the wealth of the country into their 

 own hands, leaving the commonality weak, or as an idol with broken 

 or feeble arms, which may in time of peace have a plausible show, but, 

 when necessity shall enforce, have an heavy and bitter sequel." Has 

 not Harrison solved the mystery of the ' butcher ; ' explained the 

 tradition of the ' wool-merchant ; ' shown how John Shakspere, the 

 ' woodman,' naturally sold a piece of timber to the corporation, which 

 we find recorded ; and, what is most difficult of credence, indicated 

 how the ' glover ' is reconcileable with all these employments '] We 

 open an authentic record of this very period, and the solution of the 

 difficulty is palpable : In John Strype's ' Memorials Ecclesiastical 

 under Queen Mary I.,' under the date of 1558, we find this passage : 

 " It is certain that one Edward Home suffered at Newent, where this 

 Deighton had been, and spake with one or two of the same parish 

 that did see him there burn, and did testify that they knew the two 

 persons that made the fire to burn him ; they were two glovers or 

 FELLMONGERS." A fellmonger and a glover appear from this passage 

 to have been one and the same. The fellmonger is he who prepares 

 skins for the use of the leather-dresser, by separating the wool from 

 the hide the natural coadjutor of the sheep-master and the wool- 

 man. 



We have now to inquire who was the mother of William Shakspere 1 

 His father died in 1601. On the 9th of September 1608, we have an 

 entry in the Stratford register of burial, " Mary Shakspere, widow." 

 It is stated in a bill of chancery, of the date of November 24th, 1597, 

 that John Shakspera and Mary his wife were " lawfully seised in their 

 demesne as of fee as in the right of the said Mary of and in ona 

 messuage and one yard land, with the appurtenances, lying and being 

 in Wylnecote." In the will of Robert Arden, dated November 24th 

 1556, we find, "I give and bequeath to my youngest daughter Mary 

 all my land in Willmecote, called Asbyes, and the crop upon the 

 ground," &c. We snail presently have occasion more particularly to 

 refer to a grant of arms made to John Shakspere in 1569, and con- 

 firmed in 1599. In the latter document it is recited that he " had 

 married the daughter and one of the heirs of Robert Arden, of 

 Wellingcote." The grandfather of Mary Arden was groom of the 

 chamber to Henry VII., and he was the nephew of Sir John Arden, 

 squire of the body to the same king. Sir John Arden was a son of 

 Walter Arden, and of Eleanor, the daughter of John Hampden of 

 Buckinghamshire. There were thus the ties of common blood 

 between William Shakspere and one of the most distinguished men 

 of the next generation John Hampden, who was a student in the 

 Inner Temple when the poet died. Mary Arden's property has been 

 computed to be worth some hundred and ten pounds of the money of 

 her time. It is probable that Mary Arden became the wife of J ohn 

 Shakspere soon after her father's death, which was in 1556. 



Of these parents, then, was William Shakspere born, in 1564, in 

 the town of Stratford. But in what part of Stratford dwelt his 

 parents in the year 1564 ? It was ten years after this that his father 

 became the purchaser of two freehold houses iu Henley-street houses 

 that still exist houses which the people of England have agreed to 

 preserve as a precious relic of their greatest brother. William 

 Shakspere, then, might have been born at either of his father's copy- 

 hold houses, in Qreenhill-street, or in Henley-street ; ho might have 

 been born at Ingon ; or his father might have occupied one of the two 

 freehold houses in Henley-street at the time of the birth of his eldest 

 son. Tradition says, that William Shakspere was born in one of these 

 houses ; tradition points out the very room in which he was born. 

 Whether Shakspere were born here, or not, there can be no doubt 

 that this property was the home of his boyhood. 



At the time when Shakspere's father bought this house, it was, no 

 doubt, a mansion as compared with the majority of houses iu Strat- 

 ford. There is an order from the Privy Council to the bailiff of 

 Stratford, after a great fire which happened there in 1614, pointing 

 out that fires had been very frequently occasioned there "by means 

 of thatched cottages, stacks of straw, furzes, and such-like combustible 

 stuff, which are suffered to be erected and made confusedly in most 

 of the principal parts of the town without restraint." Stratford, like 

 nearly every other town of England in that day, closely built, imper- 

 fectly drained, was subject to periodical visitations of the plague. 

 From the average annual number of births and burials we may infer 

 that the usual number of the inhabitants was about 1200. When 

 William Shakspere was about two months old, the plague broke out in 

 this town, and, in the short space of six months, 238 persons, a fifth of 

 the population, fell victims. The average annual mortality was 

 about forty. No one of the family of Shakspere appears to have died 

 during the visitation. In 1566 another son, Gilbert, was born. The 

 head of this growing family was actively engaged, no doubt, in 

 private and public duties. In 1568 John Shakspere became the 



