Shakespeare

There were, as so frequently in seventeenth-century legal transactions, complications. Shakespeare brought in with him three co-purchasers or trustees to safeguard his interest. One of them was Heminges, his colleague from the King’s Men, and another was the landlord of the Mermaid Tavern, William Johnson. This suggests some familiarity on Shakespeare’s part with the famous drinking-place. The third trustee was John Jackson – also an habitué of the Mermaid – whose brother-in-law, Elias James, owned a brewery by Puddle Dock Hill. They were three local men of some repute, therefore, and represent precisely the kind of society to which Shakespeare had become accustomed. It has been suggested that Shakespeare chose these trustees so that a third of the property would not automatically be inherited by his wife, as her “dower” right, and there may have been some agreement (no longer extant) on its use after his death. In 1618, two years after his death, the trustees did in fact convey the gatehouse to John Greene of Clement’s Inn and to Matthew Morrys of Stratford “in performance of the confidence and trust in them reposed by William Shakespeare deceased, late of Stretford aforesaid, gent., … and according to the true intent and meaning of the last will and testament of the said William Shakespeare.”⁴

Morrys and Greene were part of Shakespeare’s extended family. Morrys had been the confidential secretary of William Hall, who was the father of John Hall, Shakespeare’s son-in-law, and had been entrusted with William Hall’s books on alchemy, astrology and astronomy in order to instruct John Hall on these arcane matters. Greene was a friend and neighbour, the brother of Thomas Greene who had resided for a while in New Place. It looks very much as if these two men were acting as agents on behalf of John Hall and his wife Susannah Shakespeare. It was the only London property owned by the Shakespeare family, and the beneficiaries may have wished to make good use of it. So by means of complication and indirection Shakespeare made sure that the house reverted to his oldest daughter rather than to his wife. Any interpretation is possible, the most likely being that Anne Shakespeare had neither need nor use for a house in the capital. She never actually visited London, as far as is known, and is hardly likely to have done so after the death of her husband. Or the whole matter may have simply been a technical or legal device to expedite a quick mortgage without incurring a fine. It is all too easy to over-interpret ancient documents.

The gatehouse did have a very curious history, however, largely concerned with its role as a papist “safe-house” in times of trouble. As the former home of the black friars, before the dissolution of the monasteries, it carried some ancient spirit of place. In 1586 a neighbour complained that the house “hath sundry back-dores and bye-wayes, and many secret vaults and corners. It hath bene in tyme past suspected, and searched for papists.”⁵ A relative of the Lancashire Hoghtons, Katherine Carus, died here “in all her pride and popery.”⁶ Then in later years it was used as a hiding-place for recusant priests, and it was searched many times. In 1598 it was reported that it had “many places of secret conveyance in it” as well as “secret passages towards the water.”⁷ The owners admitted to being adherents of the old faith, but denied harbouring priests. The papist connection may simply be coincidental, and Shakespeare may have purchased the house for quite other reasons, but it is suggestive of a certain affection or nostalgia.

It seems that he also leased out a set of rooms in the gatehouse to John Robinson, son of a Catholic recusant who had harboured priests in Blackfriars and brother of a priest who was lodged at the English College in Rome.

Robinson’s affiliations are really not in doubt, and he may in fact have acted as a “recruiting agent” for the Jesuit college at St. Omer.⁸ In his will Shakespeare refers to the gatehouse “wherein one John Robinson dwelleth scituat.” Some biographers suggest that Robinson was a servant rather than a tenant of Shakespeare, but the connection was in any case a close one. Robinson visited Stratford, and was one of those who attended New Place in Shakespeare’s dying days. He was a witness who signed the dramatist’s will. Nothing else is known of him. The cloak of Shakespeare’s invisibility covers those closest to him.

There is much that is perplexing about Shakespeare’s association with known or suspected recusants. A list of his acquaintance will reveal six men who suffered death for the old faith; in 1611 John Speed explicitly linked the dramatist with the Jesuit missionary, Robert Persons, as a “petulant poet” and “malicious papist”⁹ intent on treasonable practice. There is a connection, glimpsed by his contemporaries, but it remains occluded.