Shakespeare

Hall became a confidant of Shakespeare, travelling with him to London on occasions, and “proving” his father-in-law’s will. He kept a medical diary or case-book, which was published after his death with the somewhat exotic title of Select Observations on English Bodies. Here we find evidence that Doctor Hall tended his own family. When Susannah was suffering from the torments of the colic, for example, “I appointed to inject a Pint of Sack made hot. This presently brought forth a great deal of Wind, and freed her from all Pain.” In her youth their daughter, Elizabeth, suffered serious spasmodic pain. Her father rubbed spices into her back, and massaged her head with almond oil until she was “delivered from Death.” Hall believed in herbal cures, in other words, and treated other patients with pearl, powder of leaf gold and other precious minerals. He used emetics and purgatives to good effect. One happy patient wrote that “In regard I kno by experience: that hee is most excellent In that arte.”¹ It can be supposed that he also treated his father-in-law, in Shakespeare’s declining years, although no record of his ministrations has been recovered.

It is interesting, however, that in his previous plays Shakespeare had used the language and terminology of what might be called folk medicine, with allusions to wormwood and ratsbane, syrup and balsam, but from the time of his friendship with his son-in-law he introduced a more exotic range of medicines such as hebenon and coloquintida, mallow and mandragora. In All’s Well That Ends Well writes of the fistula and alludes to Galen and Paracelsus; in Pericles the doctor, Cerimon, revives Thaisa with “the blest infusions that dwels in Vegetiues, in Mettals, Stones”(1239-40). It is hard to escape the conclusion that his interest in such matters was quickened by his son-in-law’s successful remedies. When in Troilus and Cressida Thersites recites a list of maladies, including cold palsies and sciatica, he might have been reading from Dr. Hall’s case-book.

There is also proof in this case-book that Hall as by no means an extreme Puritan. He successfully treated a Catholic priest and noted that “beyond all expectation the Catholicke was cured,” adding in Latin “Deo gratias.” We may imagine him to have been a moderate Puritan, married to a recusant and therefore content to overlook religious differences.

There were other births and deaths in the immediate Shakespeare family. The register of St. Leonard’s Shoreditch records the birth, on 12 July 1607, of “Edward Shakesbye, the sonne of Edward Shakesbye, was baptised the same day – morefilds.” The fact that he was baptised on the same day as his birth suggests that there was some urgency about the matter, and indeed a month later the baby died. On 12 August he was buried in St. Giles Cripplegate, where the register duly notes “Edward sonne of Edward Shackspeere, Playenbase-borne.” The infant was the son of Shakespeare’s younger brother. The name “Edward” in the church registers is a transcription error for “Edmund,” and is a common enough confusion in documents of the period; the mistake was prompted by the unfortunate child’s own name.

So we can deduce that Edmund Shakespeare had travelled to London and had taken up the profession of “Player,” imitating the career of his famous brother. Whether he had taken up the profession on his brother’s advice, or whether he had simply followed his example, is not known. The fact that his son was baptised in Shoreditch and buried in Cripplegate must mean that Edmund was living in the northern suburbs, and that he was probably playing at the Curtain Theatre. He was living very close to Shakespeare’s lodgings in Silver Street, in fact, and it is even possible that he shared them with him. There is no official record of his marriage, so he had also sired a bastard son. This was a not uncommon phenomenon in early seventeenth-century London but it does suggest that Edmund Shakespeare, now in his mid-twenties, was living a somewhat irregular existence as a player.