The Early Life Story
of William Shakespeare
Stratford, England, 1564-1569
(Page 5: Shakespeare's Father John)
An excerpt from "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius"
by Anthony Holden
Henry's younger brother John, the poet's father, was a Shakespeare of quite another stamp. Born in 1529, he was dubbed agricola, or husbandman, in documents relating to his father's estate; but by then, the early 1560s, he had long forsaken the traditional Shakespeare life on the land for what he saw as more prosperous urban pastures. Though raised in the family business of tenant-farming, John had set his sights higher from early youth, migrating to the thriving market town of Stratford by the mid-point of the century.
Settled in a lush, wooded valley, by then a decent-sized town of some 1,500 souls, Stratford-upon-Avon originally took its name from the point where a Roman road (or 'straet') crossed (or 'forded') the elegant river flowing through its heart. One of the oldest settlements in Christian England, Stratford is mentioned in the Domesday Book as the personal fiefdom of the Bishops of Worcester; by Shakespeare's day its agricultural tenants had won their emancipation, and formed the nucleus of a thriving mercantile community, with artisans and shopkeepers displaying their wares on market days alongside the usual livestock and country produce. Already the Avon (Welsh for 'river') was spanned, as still it is, by a handsome stone bridge built by Sir Hugh Clopton, a wealthy local mercer who had risen to become Lord Mayor of London. In the heart of Stratford, in the last decade of the fifteenth century, Clopton built himself the biggest house in town, which he called New Place. It was one measure of the subsequent success in London of another son of Stratford, the glover's boy William Shakespeare, that eventually he in turn would become the proud owner of New Place.
A hundred miles from the capital, but handily close to the major Midlands townships of Worcester and Warwick, Banbury and Oxford, Stratford was described by a contemporary map-maker as 'emporium non inelegans' — a market town not without its charms, already boasting the handsome thirteenth-century parish church of Holy Trinity, and the smaller but even older, equally finely detailed chapel of the Guild of the Holy Cross. Both would play significant roles in the life of John Shakespeare, and make cameo appearances in the works of his son. Beside the parish church, on the banks of the Avon, stood a charnel-house crammed to overflowing with the bones of the dug-up dead; the young William's religious dread of it, as he played in the churchyard as a child, finds apparent echoes in Macbeth's horror at Banquo's ghost and Juliet's feverish protests to Friar Laurence about marrying anyone other than Romeo:
O, bid me leap, rather than marry Paris,
From off the battlements of any tower,
Or walk in thievish ways, or bid me lurk
Where serpents are; chain me with roaring bears,
Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house,
O'er-cover'd quite with dead men's rattling bones,
With reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls . . .
We know that by 1552 John Shakespeare was living on the north-eastern side of town, in Henley Street, thanks to his ignominious debut in the town records on 29 April: fined a shilling, along with Humphrey Reynolds and Adrian Quiney, for making an unauthorised dunghill — sterquinarium, or midden heap — in front of the house of a neighbour, the wheelwright William Chambers. In those days of the plague, a fine equivalent to two days' pay for an artisan was a suitably stern judgement on those too idle to use the communal muck-hill at the rural end of the street. In a rare defiance of the family tradition (and his own later practice), John Shakespeare paid his fine promptly. Already, it seems, he had it in mind to become not just a worthy citizen of Stratford, but a civic eminence. This early misdemeanour appears to have proved no bar to his upward mobility.
After serving (we can but assume) the statutory seven-year apprenticeship, Shakespeare's father had entered trade as a glover and whittawer: a dresser of 'whitleather', soft light-coloured leather. Between 1556 and 1592 various legal documents concerning unpaid debts and bail sureties unambiguously describe Johannes Shakyspere, or Shakspere, or Shackspeare, as a 'glover'. His craft involved the 'tawing' of hides and skins — of deer and horses, goats and sheep, but not of protected livestock such as cattle or pigs — by soaking them in a solution of salt and alum (aluminium sulphate). The resulting leathers he fashioned not only into gloves, but belts, purses, aprons — whatever he could sell in his shop, or in the glovers' stall given prime position on market days beneath the clock of Stratford's Market Cross, today the traffic island at the junction of the High Street, Bridge Street and Henley Street, which leads to the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre.
The seventeenth-century diarist John Aubrey, one of the first to visit Stratford in search of Shakespeare evidence, reported unequivocally that the poet's father was a butcher. Aubrey is never the most reliable of witnesses, but it does seem plausible, in the light of later events, that there was a period in John Shakespeare's life when he might have defied the regulations strictly separating the otherwise allied professions of whittawer and butcher. He certainly traded openly in the wool of sheep slaughtered for their skins. The eastern wing of the Henley Street house which doubled as his leather goods store was known as 'the Woolshop'; when the floor was relaid in the nineteenth century, after the house had become an inn, the landlord testified to finding beneath the floorboards 'the remnants of wool, and the refuse of wool-combing . . . imbedded with the earth of the foundation'.So why not their meat as well, if under-the-counter, hugger-mugger? According to Aubrey, the young William himself would kill a calf 'in a high style, & make a speech'; and there are plenty of expert references to the art of butchery in the plays — not least to the expertise of the human butcher, or hangman, who performed the drawing and quartering which followed the half-hanging of convicted felons from cutpurses to Romanist recusants. Theirs are the hands of which Macbeth is thinking, thick with blood and entrails from a human belly, when he shudders at his own 'hangman's hands' after murdering Duncan.
'Is it not parchment made of sheep-skins?' Hamlet asks Horatio, who replies, 'Ay, my lord, and of calves'-skins too.' A Warwickshire antiquary has devotedly catalogued copious Shakespeare references to 'the hides of oxen and horses, to calf-skin, sheep-skin, lamb-skin, fox-skin and dog-skin, deer-skin and cheveril'. The poet knew that neat's-leather was used for shoes, sheep's leather for a bridle, that tanned leather could keep out water, and that deer's hide was the keeper's perquisite. 'He notices leathern aprons, jerkins and bottles, the "sow-skin bowget" or bag carried by tinkers.' He makes frequent reference to cheveril, or kid-skin, whose softness and flexibility suited it to the making of fine gloves — and thus, also, of fine Shakespearean metaphors. Mercutio jokes about Romeo's 'wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad', and Viola's clown about a sentence that 'is but a chev'ril glove to a good wit. How quickly the wrong side may be turn'd outward!' At the end of his writing career, in Henry VIII, the poet has a wise old lady speak of Anne Bullen's 'soft cheveril conscience', that would receive gifts if she might 'please to stretch it'. Calf-skins make an especially telling appearance in King John, when the Bastard Faulconbridge defiantly repeats an insult to the Duke of Austria: 'And hang a calf's-skin on those recreant limbs.' But the trade of Shakespeare's father is nowhere, perhaps, more authentically recalled than in Mistress Quickly's description of Master Slender in The Merry Wives of Windsor: 'Does he not wear a great round beard, like a glover's paring knife?'
Other legal documents, the key pieces of our jigsaw for this period, involve John Shakespeare in suits concerning the sale and purchase of timber, and barley, whose sole commercial use was for the manufacture of beer and ale. Clearly he was something of an entrepreneur, a jack of all trades — a 'Johannes factotum', as his son was enviously to be mocked, during his father's lifetime. John Shakespeare, again like his son after him, was also something of a property dealer. If by 1552 Shakespeare's father owned or rented all or part of the Henley Street house still held sacred (despite scant evidence) as The Birthplace, he soon added to his property portfolio with the purchase in 1556 of a freehold estate with garden and croft, tenementum cum gardino et crofto, in Greenhill Street (later to become known as More Towns End). The business must have been thriving, for that same year also saw him buy an adjacent house in Henley Street, complete with garden, which would become the east wing or Woolshop when the two properties were joined together as a handsome, three-gabled dwelling.
More than forty years on, in 1597, the Stratford records show John selling off a narrow strip of land alongside this property to a draper named George Badger, for the purpose of building a wall, and another small parcel to Edward Willis of King's Norton, who proposed to open an inn called the Bell. Thus we can be reasonably sure that Henley Street remained the Shakespeare family home, through many vicissitudes for its paterfamilias, over half a century and more. It was still in the family 150 years later.
In 1553, soon after John Shakespeare had settled there, the borough of Stratford-upon-Avon had received its formal charter of incorporation from the Crown. Subject to the whims of the lord of the manor — in this case the Earl of Warwick, who still nominated the vicar and schoolmaster, and had power of veto over the borough's choice of bailiff, or mayor — this afforded a large degree of self-government to an elected council of aldermen and burgesses, who themselves appointed lesser functionaries. As luck would have it, the ambitious glover had arrived in the right town at the right time, the perfect moment to establish a mercantile foothold in the community while answering its new need for civic leaders. Nor, presumably, would a badge of office — and thus local respectability — be all that bad for business.
John's first recognition came in September 1556, within three years of the borough's incorporation, when he was chosen as one of its two ale-tasters — an office for 'able persons and discreet', whose duties were to check that bakers made loaves of regulation weight, and brewers 'wholesome' ales and beers at regulation prices. The ale-taster's powers were considerable: those he found in breach of the regulations were liable to appear before the twice-yearly manorial court, or 'leet', which had the power to inflict punishments from fines to a whipping, a sojourn in the stocks or pillory, or even worse public humiliation in the 'cucking stool' — a chair in the shape of a giant chamber-pot, in which the offender was ducked in the river to the delighted derision of his clientele.
Within nine months of his appointment, in June 1557, the new ale-taster found himself on the wrong side of the law, blotting his copybook by failing to attend three sittings of the Court of Record in his official capacity. The 8d fine he paid seems to have been worth it, for that spring saw John Shakespeare with other priorities to take his mind off his duties.
Copyright © 1999 by Anthony Holden. All rights reserved. Posted with permission of http://www.twbookmark.com. Click here for ordering information for "William Shakespeare: The Man Behind the Genius" at Amazon.com.
