Shakespeare

Simon Hunt was succeeded by Thomas Jenkins, a Londoner and son of a “poor man” and “old servant” of Sir Thomas White; he had been a student of Latin and Greek at St. John’s College, Oxford, which had been established by the very same Sir Thomas White. White was a Roman Catholic, and St. John’s College was known to be sympathetic to Catholic undergraduates. Edmund Campion, Catholic saint and martyr, was attached to St. John’s College, and taught Thomas Jenkins there. Jenkins can therefore be considered to be indulgent, at the very least, to the Catholic cause. He can also be considered an expert classicist, and it was he who first introduced Shakespeare to the work of Ovid. He was in every sense a dedicated teacher; he had requested two years’ absence from his Oxford college “that he may give himself to teach children.”¹¹

When Jenkins resigned in 1579 he found his own replacement in John Cottam, a fellow scholar from Merchant Taylors’ and Oxford University. Cottam’s younger brother, Thomas Cottam, was a Jesuit priest and missionary who resided at Douai with Simon Hunt. There they were joined by a fellow pupil of Shakespeare, Robert Debdale, the son of a Catholic farmer from Shottery. The associations with Shakespeare are close, therefore, and almost pressing. Thomas Cottam returned to England with a letter from Robert Debdale to his father. Both Thomas Cottam and Robert Debdale were later arrested, for their proselytising activities in England, and executed. From allusions in his plays it is clear that Shakespeare followed the career of his erstwhile schoolfellow with some interest. He was, you might say, one of the fraternity.

John Cottam left the King’s New School in the year of his brother’s execution. The last connection with Shakespeare’s schooldays was another master, Alexander Aspinall, popularly supposed to be the model for the pedantic dunce Holofernes. And so the unfortunate man entered the creative imagination of the English. But since he did not enter the school until Shakespeare was eighteen, the connection may not be a close one. The young man no longer attended the New School; but he did know Aspinall, and may have observed his pedagoguery with an eye more objective than that of a school-boy. He is even believed to have written a set of verses, to accompany Aspinall’s present of gloves (bought from John Shakespeare) to an intended bride:

The gift is small

The will is all:

Asheyander Asbenall.

Funnily enough, the little poem sounds like Shakespeare, and may count as some amends for Holofernes.

CHAPTER 13 That’s Not So Good Now

In the early years of Shakespeare’s schooling his father persevered in illegal dealings in wool and in money-lending. They were in a sense conventional offences, and not likely to injure John Shakespeare’s reputation in any significant way. They were noted in the public records but he continued with his normal civic duties, and at the beginning of 1572 he and Adrian Quiney travelled to London in order to represent their town at the lawcourts in Westminster. There was a dispute with the lord of the manor, the Earl of Warwick. A few months later John Shakespeare was in Warwick to attend a post-mortem on a local miller. Throughout this period he attended the requisite “halls” when the council met for business.

There is a pretty story concerning another journey, during which he might have been accompanied by his son. Elizabeth I was engaged in one of her periodic progresses when, in the summer of 1575, she arrived at Kenilworth Castle; this castle was only twelve miles from Stratford, and the dignitaries of the locality were no doubt asked to attend in honour of Her Majesty. The Earl of Leicester’s Men were here to entertain her, but there were also various masques and pageants, dramatic spectacles and games, performed before her. One of these theatrical interludes included the presentation of a mermaid and various nymphs upon an artificial lake, followed by Arion riding upon a dolphin. It was part of the general extravagance of allegory and classical reference employed on such occasions, but many of Shakespeare’s biographers have insisted that it inspired a reference in Twelfth Night to “Arion on the Dolphines backe” (54) and a speech by Oberon from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (504-6):

… thou remembrest

Since once I sat vpon a promontory,

And heard a Mearmaide on a Dolphins backe …

It is at least suggestive. And a pretty story does no harm.