Shakespeare

Hearne and Pope both confirm that William Davenant claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son as well as his godson. As Hearne notes in a bracket, “In all probability he [Shakespeare] got him.” They both retold the story of how the boy was once asked by an elderly townsman why he was running home; he replied “to see my godfather Shakespeare.” To which the old gentleman replied, “That’s a good boy, but have a care that you don’t take God’s name in vain.”⁵

The story was no doubt apocryphal, and had in fact been applied to others beside Shakespeare, but at the time it reinforced the general belief that the dramatist was something of a philanderer. William Davenant, in later life, did nothing to dispel the rumour that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son: he continued to advertise the fact with pride. As Aubrey noted, “that notion of Sir William’s being more than a poetical child only of Shakespeare was common in town.” ⁶ Since William Davenant was himself a poet and playwright, he may have had some slight excuse for defaming his mother and claiming such distinguished parentage. He did indeed serve Shakespeare well. He himself revised Macbeth and The Tempest, with the assistance of John Dryden, and helped to maintain the continuity of Shakespearian drama; he was also instrumental in the revival of nine plays after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.

Murals from the sixteenth century have been uncovered at the Crown, one of them with the monogram of “IHS” which is the characteristic Catholic sign of Christ. William Davenant himself was in later life a Catholic and a Royalist. So Shakespeare stayed in congenial company. Davenant was also said to have a semblance of Shakespeare’s “open Countenance” but the resemblance could not have been exact; he had lost his nose as a result of mercury treatment for syphilis. As a contemporary noted, “the want of a Nose gives an odd Cast to the Face.”⁷ Certainly he inherited nothing of Shakespeare’s genius.

It is interesting to speculate, however, about the physical appearance of Shakespeare then in his mid-forties. The slimness, if not the sprightliness, of youth had long gone. He had been a handsome and well-shaped man, according to Aubrey’s report, but by now he must have become a little portly. It is not inconceivable that he actually became rather fat. His auburn or chestnut hair had withered on the vine, and it is likely that his cranium was already as bare as it appears in the Droeshout engraving which decorates the frontispiece of the Folio. From that engraving, too, we gain some acquaintance with his full lips, his straight and sensitive nose, his watchful eyes. The beard he sported in his earlier life has gone, leaving behind a small moustache. A professional phrenologist has concluded, from the shape of the head, that the dramatist was possessed of “ideality, wonder, wit, imitation, benevolence, and veneration” with “small destructiveness and acquisitiveness.” His cranium also evinces “great susceptibility, activity, quickness and love of action.”⁸

There is no doubt that he would have dressed well; his neatness and general cleanliness are well attested from his work. The standard dress of an Elizabethan gentleman included a bejewelled and quilted silk doublet, with a ruff for formal occasions; the doublet was covered with a jerkin, manufactured perhaps of fine leather or costly cloth. He wore breeches, an Elizabethan form of short trousers, that were fastened at the doublet and tied at the knees. The codpiece, plumped up by stiff packing, was out of favour by the end of the century. The shirt beneath his doublet was of cambric or of lawn. It could be tied or worn open at the front; in some apocryphal portraits of Shakespeare the wide collars of the shirt are draped over the doublet. The tail of the shirt was used as a form of underwear. He sported silk stockings and variously coloured leather “pumps” or shoes, with heels and soles of cork. He owned a cloak, reaching anywhere from the waist to the ankles and characteristically worn over one shoulder. And he carried a sword, as the mark of a gentleman. He had a tall hat; the higher the hat, the higher the social status. Dress was an essential aspect of late Tudor society. As one instructor on the art of being a gentleman put it, “The sum of a hundred pounde is not to be accompted much in these dayes to be bestowed of apparell for one gentleman.”⁹ There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was strident or ostentatious in his dress – far from it – but he would have been as elegant as the best of his contemporaries.