Dear Me,

   So since I didn't get to finish yesterday's entry on time, I have to do a twofer to catch up...wheee!  Ahh well, such is my devotion to this pointless project that I am willing to work extra hard on it.  I think it may be the powers that be are telling me to focus on this particular period in time?  *Sigh* Great, now I have to make up new characters and plot...about what?!  Damn it!  I guess it's off to the library I go to see if I can't find something in fiction that might deal with this time period.  Arrrggghhhh!!! Fluck!

Anyway, on with the show!!

Cheers

Murielle

Shakespeare: The Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 15: At Your Employment, at Your Service Sir

John Aubrey remarked "that Shakespeare had been in his younger yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey."  It would not be all that unusual for a clever young man of fifteen or sixteen to be employed as a teacher for younger children.

There is some allusive contemporary evidence and various locations to where he taught have been suggested, from Berkeley Castle to Gloucestershire to Tichfield in Hampshire.  His schoolmastering has also been placed closer to home, under the patronage of Sir Fulke Greville of Beachamp Court, twelve miles from Stratford.  Greville, the father of the poet of the same name, was a local dignitary who took great interest in matters of education.  He was also related to the Ardens.  It is an interesting hypothesis, but still just a hypothesis.

In more recent years the favoured locale for Shakespeare's career as a teacher has become Lancashire.

The omens are good. Turn first to the last will and testament of a local grandee, Alexander Hoghton, Hoghton's wife was a devout Catholic, and his brother was in exile as result of his devotion to the old religion.  In this will he left his musical instruments and players costumes to his half-brother, Thomas Heskethe, with this provision.

And yf he wyll not keppe and manteyne players, then yt ys my wyll that Sir Thomas Heskethe, knyght, shall haue the same instrumentes and playe clothes.  And I most herteleye requyre the said Sir Thomas to be ffrendlye unto ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte nowe dwellyng with me and euther to take theym unto his servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master, as my tryste ys he wyll.

Ever since this will was discovered in the mid-nineteenth century it has provoked a great deal of interest and controversy.    In a subsequent part of the will he was also left 40 shillings a year.  He is named among forty other household servants, but the bequest does suggest some form of special recognition.  How had he come to deserve this?  If he had already spent two years in Hoghton Tower his remarkable gifts would have already been apparent.  If we leave aside these doubts and misgivings then we have a description of the young Shakespeare as an actor in a Catholic household where he may have been introduced as a schoolmaster.

Many scholars disagree.  The movements of the young Shakespeare have become the subject of serious debate relating to the question of his religious allegiances.  Was he actually a crypto-Catholic or sympathizer and friend to the Catholics?  Was he ever in the north of England at all?

But, if these accounts are accurate, there are further ramifications.  The Hoghton and Hesketh families were very well acquainted with t he household of the earls of Derby, who had huge influence in Lancashire.  In his history plays Shakespeare emphasises the truth and loyalty of the Stanleys, the surname of the Derby family.  In Richard III Sir William Stanley tears the crown from the villainous king's prostrate head.  Lord Strange (related to the Derby's) was a Catholic nobleman of great wealth and power.  He patronised a group of players known as Lord Strange's Men.  Some biographers have enrolled Shakespeare in this acting company during the time he lived at Hoghton Tower.  Lord Strange's Men toured the country and were well known in London.  With one deft explanation we can move the young Shakespeare from provincial schoolmastering to the stages of the innyards in the capital.

So, at the age of fifteen or sixteen, Shakespeare may have journeyed away from home.  Once you understand the Catholic network of sixteenth century England, it seems to be entirely sensible and explicable course of action.  The young teacher would have been expected to teach Latin from the dramatic passages of Plautus and of Terence.  It is easy to see how Shakespeare rhetorical and theatrical gifts might find expression in such an atmosphere.  

On 12 September Alexander Hoghton died in what appeared to have been suspicious circumstances.  Then, at the close of the year, Sir Thomas Hesketh-to whom Hoghton had recommended "Shakesafte"- was consigned to prison of the grounds that he had failed to curb the practice of the Catholic faith among his servants.  All of his friends and retainers would naturally come under suspicion from the queen's emissaries.  The net of suspicious was being drawn tightly over these Lancastrian households.  By the summer of 1582 he is to be found once more in Stratford.