Shakespeare: The Biography by Peter Ackroyd Chapter 50

What Are You?  A Gentleman

Less than three months after his son's death, Shakespeare's father John was awarded a coat of arms by the Garter King of Arms. John Shakespeare was now a gentleman.  It is most likely the reason his father finally received his coat of arms was thanks to his famous son, William.  The cost of obtaining the coat of arms had then seemed prohibitive but, in the milder climate of Shakespeare's newfound wealth.   Obviously, he probably filed his father's suit before Hamnet's death as it would have been fitting for Shakespeare to wish to pass on his new status to his only son.

The coat of arms was a rebus, a pun on the name of Shakespeare.  On the grant of arms was a heraldic drawing sketched on the top of the page and showed a falcon holding spear, perched above a shield and crest. The motto was "Non sainz droict,"  which means "not without right".  The spear was of gold tipped with silver as if it were some courtly or ceremonial staff and the falcon itself was considered to be a noble bird.  The whole device is somewhat assertive and no doubt reflected the conviction of the Shakespeare makes that they were indeed.

Shakespeare seems to have been preoccupied with heraldry.  In Richard II he displays considerable technical knowledge of the subject, while Katherine says in The Taming of the Shrew (1028 - 30):

If you strike me, you are no Gentleman,

And if no Gentleman, why then no armes.

To which Petruchio replies:

A Herald Kate?  Oh put me in thy bookes

It was a way of setting himself apart from the still ambiguous reputation still enjoyed by most players.  It was also an indirect way of associating himself with the Ardens of his mother's line.  In a more immediate sense, he was restoring his family's reputation after the sudden and perplexing withdrawal of John Shakespeare from public business.

In this modern day it seems to be a mere contrivance, an honorific without meaning, but in the late sixteenth century it was a sign and emblem of true identity.  By combining emblem and reality, spectacle and decoration, heraldry became a Tudor obsession.  There were no less than seven standard texts on the subject.  In this context, Shakespeare was very much a man of his age.  In his world of drama is that of a great house or court.

But John Shakespeare's right to bear arms was not without critics.  From the late 1590s onwards the York Herald, Ralph Brooke, had challenged the decisions of the Greater King of Arms, William Dethick in granting arms to "unworthy recipients.  In Brooke's list of twenty-three "mean persons" who had been granted arms wrongly, the name of Shakespeare came fifth.  William Dethick came back, stating "the man was a magistrate of Stratford-upon-Avon: a Justice of the Peace.  He married the daughter and heir of Arden, of a good substance and ability."

The fact that the dispute had become public knowledge must have irritated Shakespeare but this did not prevent him from applying three years later for the Shakespeare arms to be impaled with the arms of the Arden family.

Yet, characteristically enough, Shakespeare was also able to satirise his own pretensions.  In Twelfth Night, performed in the period when Brooke was challenging Dethick's bestowal of arms upon the Shakespeares, the steward Malvolio has pretensions of gentility.  He is persuaded to wear yellow stockings "cross-gartered" - with a garter crossing on each leg - and his lower body would therefore have been as a grotesque parody of Shakespeare's coat of arms.