Dear Me,

  Another Shakespeare entry.  Woohoo!!

Shakespeare: A Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 7: But This is Worshipfull Society

There was a world beyond the house and garden of Henley Street.  Stratford remained a deeply conservative and traditional society.  At its centre was the small nuclear family, like that of the Shakespeares, which was close knit and self-sustaining.  Yet family was linked to family, and neighbour to neighbour, in a fundamental fashion.  A neighbour was more then a person or family who lived on the same street.  A neighbour was who you turned to for support, in times of distress, and the one to whom you offered help in return.  A neighbour was expected to be hard-working and reliable.

Many of the citizens of Stratford were connected by marriage and family alliances so that the town might be viewed as an extended family.  Friends were often referred to as "cousins", so that, for example, is Shakespeare would have been called "cousin Shakespeare" by those who didn't seem to have a blood relationship to him.  In his job as mayor John Shakespeare would have been "father" to the town as well as to his children.  The inheritance of place was a very powerful one.  It encouraged a deep sense of settlement and of posession.

Henley Street may serve as an image of this relatively small and enclosed community  The traveller reached it from Bridge Street, passing the Swan and the Bear inns on either side of the thoroughfare; Bridge Street was divided into two by a line of buildings known as Middle Row.  Back Bridge Street contained some of the more commodious shops as well as inns.  By the High Cross, where John Shakespeare kept his stall on market days, the street branched into Henley Street and a little southward into Wood Street.  Henley Street itself contained shops, like that of John Shakespeare, cottages and houses.  Like medieval streets in general, it was of mixed occupancy.

Shakespeare's immediate neighbour, was William Wedgewood, a tailor.  His tailor's shop was next to the Shakespeare's shop.  He owned two other houses in the same stretch of street, but was eventually compelled to leave Stratford when it was discovered that he committed bigotry, by marrying a woman while his first wife was still living.  He was also accused of being slanderous and quarreling with his neighbours.  Shakespeare must have become acquainted with the vagaries of human conduct at an early age.

Next to the Wedgewood house was the black smith of Richard Hornby, who forged links to fasten local prisoners.  He made use of the stream that ran past his house.  The tailor Wedgewood and the blacksmith Hornby seem to make an appearance in King John (1815 - 18) when a citizen, Hubert, remarks that

I saw a smith stand with his hammer (thus)

The whilst his Iron did on the Anuile coole,

With open mouth swallowing Taylors newes,

Who with his Sheeres, and Measurein his hand...

It is a moment of observation snatched out of time.

Hornby had five children, and the street was filled with children.  One Henley Street resident had seven children, and another fourteen.  As an infant Shakespeare could never have been alone.  It is the open life of the towns described in Romeo and Juliet, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Taming of the Shrew, and The Merry wives of Windsor.

On the further side of the stream lived another glover, Gilbert Bradley. Since he became godfather to one of John Shakespeare's other sons, it may be assumed that theirs was a friendly rivalry.  Further down the street lived George Whateley, a woolen-draper, who was wealthy enough to endow a small school at the time of his death.  He was a Roman Catholic, and his two brothers became fugitive priests.  Next to him was the haberdasher William Smith, who had five sons and was also Shakespeare's godfather.  Just beyond his shop and just across the street was the Angel Inn.  It was owned and managed by the Cawdrey family, who were also staunch Catholics.  One of their sons was a Jesuit priest in exile.  This was a very close community in every sense.

It would be impractical to name every person who lived in Stratsford, except to the extent that they emerge in Shakespeare's own life.  We find the Quineys, who visited Shakespeare in London, and one of them eventually married Shakespeare's younger daughter Judith, and so we can presume some degree of intimacy.  They were also fierce Catholics.

So Stratford contained a very large Catholic constituency of which the Shakespeares were a part. This does not imply that Shakespeare was a professed faith and assuming that he professed any only that he found the company of Catholics familiar.  The family of Nicholas Lane bought their clothes from a Catholic tailor in Wood Street.  In the same context it seems likely that the affluent Catholics preferred to lend money to their co-religionists.  In later years Shakespeare purchased his great house from a Catholic. 

The religious situation in Stratford was well known. Hugh Latimer, the reformer and Bishop of Worcester, declared that Stratford lay at "the blind end" of his dioceses.    His successor, John Whitgift, complained in 1577 that in the area around Stratford he could obtain no information on rescusants.  In a tolerant and like minded community, neighbour would not denounce neighbour.

Some of Shakespeare's schoolteachers were Catholic.  If John Shakespeare had indeed espoused Caltholicism, his example shows there was no hindrance to high office in town, which suggests a measure of sympathy among its leading citizens.  It represented a fragile compromise.Overtly partisan steps, like the concealment of renegade priests, could cause serious problems for those concerned.  And in any case the general drift of the time was towards a grudging acceptance of the new religion and the steady abandonment of the practices of the old faith.  By the seventeenth century Stratford had become notably more Protestant in tendency.  Yet in the latter half of the sixteenth century, despite royal injunctions and local purges, fines and sequestrations and imprisonments, the persistence of the Catholic faith in the town can clearly be seen.

This might have had a direct effect upon the Shakespeare household in one sense.  The dislike of the reformed religion meant that piety was transferred from the Church to the family.  The children might now be obliged to attend the new forms of worship and listen to Elizabethan homilies.  Since Shakespeare's eldest daughter, Susannah, remained a firm and prominent Catholic all her life, can it be assumed that the Shakespeares themselves retained this family tradition.  It has been referred that the community of Catholics was matriarchal in tendency,  Since the old faith is likely to have been transmitted through the women of the household, it throws an interesting light upon Shakespeare's attitude towards his closest female relations.