Shakespeare

At this late date it may seem a mere contrivance, an honorific without meaning, but in the late sixteenth century it was a sign and emblem of true identity. It afforded the bearer proper individuality as well as a secure place within the general hierarchy of the community. By combining emblem and reality, spectacle and decoration, heraldry truly became a Tudor obsession. There were no fewer than seven standard texts on the subject. In this, at least, Shakespeare was very much a man of his age. The world of his drama is that of the great house or of the court; none of his central protagonists is “low born,” to use the phrase of the time, but is a gentleman, a lord or a monarch. The only exceptions are the protagonists of The Merry Wives of Windsor, citizens all. The common people are, in the mass, described by him as “the rabble.”

But John Shakespeare’s right to bear arms was not without critics. From the late 1590s onwards the York Herald, Sir Ralph Brooke, had challenged the decisions of the Garter King of Arms, Sir William Dethick, in granting arms to apparently unworthy recipients. There were accusations of malfeasance, if not explicitly of fraud and bribery. In Brooke’s list of twenty-three “mean persons” who had been granted arms wrongly, the name of Shakespeare came fifth. The qualities of the recipient were called into question, to which William Dethick replied that “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.” There is at least one false note in this defence. Mary Arden was the daughter and heir of a very obscure branch of the Arden family, and it is likely that the Shakespeares exaggerated her ancestry. As in their former claim of a forefather rewarded by Henry VII, the ambition outran the reality.

The fact that the dispute had become public knowledge must have been an irritant, to put it mildly, to Shakespeare, whose assertive emblem and motto had now been cast into doubt. This did not prevent him, however, from applying three years later for the Shakespeare arms to be impaled with the arms of the Arden family. He may have done this “to please his Mother, and to be partly proud” (35-6), as the citizen says of Coriolanus, but it suggests the persistence and quality of his interest in such matters.

He also received some barbed criticism from a dramatic colleague. In Every Man out of His Humour Ben Jonson introduces a vainglorious rustic, Sogliardo, who acquires a coat of arms. “I can write myself a gentleman now,” he says; “here’s my patent, it cost me thirty pounds, by this breath.” The arms include a boar’s head to which an appropriate motto is suggested, “Not without mustard.” This has generally been taken, not without reason, as an allusion to Shakespeare’s “Not without right.” The mustard may also refer to the bright gold of the Shakespearian coat. So his newly found eminence did not go without some malicious comment.

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 to 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 seen as a grotesque parody of Shakespeare’s coat of arms.⁴ These arms were also yellow, with a black diagonal band. Malvolio is by far the most deluded and ridiculous character in the entire play, and in the cross-gartering episode he ambles and simpers upon the stage in a caricature of gentility. “Some are borne great … Some atcheeue greatnesse,” he declares. “And some haue greatnesse thrust vpon them” (1516-20). If Shakespeare played the part of Malvolio, as seems to be likely, the joke could not have been more explicit. It would have come naturally to Shakespeare – to parody his pretensions to gentility at the same time as he pursued them with the utmost seriousness, to mock that which was most important to him. It was a part of his instinctive ambivalence in all the affairs of the world.

CHAPTER 51 His Companies Vnletter’d Rude, and Shallow