Dear Me,

  The next chapter of Part One for Shakespeare: A Biography.

Cheers

Murielle

Shakespeare: A Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 16:  Before I Know My Selfe, Seeke Not to Know Me

Shakespeare came back to a larger but not necessarily happier family.  In the spring of 1580 his father had been summoned to the Queen's Bench in Westminster and when he did not appear was fined the large sum of £40.  The assumption  was that he was summoned  to the bar of justice for refusal to attend church services.  In the following year it was formally proclaimed that those who did not conform to the prescriptions of the Act of Uniformity would be fined the sum of £20 a month, and once they had gone through their money "all their good and a third part of their land.".  For Catholics there was now the clear danger of financial ruin.  Half of John Shakespeare's fine was levied  because of his reluctance to ensure that a Nottinghamshire hat-maker, John Audley, came to court.  On the same day Audley was in turn fined £10 for not bringing John Shakespeare to the court.  Historians have concluded that this system of mutual bail, uniting people from different regions and different jurisdiction was attempted by Catholics to find a way around the fines.  Yet Shakespeare's father did pay his fine suggesting that he lived still relative affluence.

When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in 1582, it was in the face of an uncertain future.  At eighteen, what career would have been open to him? In recent years there has grown an abiding belief that he had some training as lawyer's clerk in Stratford.  If he was not a clerk to a solicitor, he might have been a copiest or even a scrivener's apprentice.  

There is other evidence concerning Shakespeare's early career.  The first references to him somewhat slightingly as a former "noverint" or legal scrivener.  Several palaeographers have agreed that the available remnants of his handwriting, particularly in his signatures, give clear indication of a legal training.  One of those signatures appears in a volume entitled Archaionomia is a legal text, composed by William Lambarde, which contains a Latin translation of Anglo-Saxon edicts.  The signature of "Wm Shakespeare" within it is the object of considerable scholarly debate.  At a later date Lambarde was Master of Chancery when another of Shakespeare's fifty separate suits was entered there so there is every reason as to how Shakespeare would have been acquainted with him.

John Shakespeare's relatively late appearance as a plaintiff suggests another explanation for Shakespeare's knowledge of the law., he may have been assisting his father in the various legal maneuvers in which the Shakespeare family was engaged.  This might explain his excellent knowledge in property law. He could have been working for his father.

One other quasi-legal digression is of some pertinence.  If the young Shakespeare had indeed been working as a Stratford town clerk he would have been fully acquainted with the case of a young woman who had drown in the river in 1580.  It was implied that she had committed suicide but her family insisted that she had accidentally fallen in the river.  If this suggests images of Ophelia, then it is interesting that the name of the girl was Katherine Hamlett.

All this is speculation, but-if he did begin his career in a layer's office- he did not particularly care for it.  His emergence in London as an actor and playwright suggests that he willingly abandon law.  There was another change.  A short while after his return to Stratford in 1582, he was courting Anne Hathaway.