Shakespeare

There is another legend of this period, confirming Shakespeare’s status as a rustic cavalier of free and manly disposition who was shaped by nature rather than by art. It concerns his drinking, that English token of virile and unaffected behaviour. The story goes that he visited the neighbouring village of Bidford, whose male inhabitants were supposed to be “deep drinkers and merry fellows”; he wanted to “take a cup” with them but was told that they were absent. Instead he was invited to join “the Bidford sippers” (could they perhaps have been female?) and became so drunk in their company that he had to sleep beneath a tree. This hallowed crabtree was, by the eighteenth century, shown to visitors as “Shakespeare’s canopy” or “Shakespeare’s Crab.”⁹ The story has the advantage of being entirely unprovable. But it also has an inherent significance. It displays an instinctive tendency, among literary mythographers, to identify Shakespeare with his native soil and to portray him as a kind of genius loci. This is not in itself unwelcome, as long as it does not ignore all the sophistication and wit that Shakespeare brought to his unmistakable rural inheritance.

CHAPTER 15 At Your Employment, at Your Seruice Sir

John Aubrey remarked that Shakespeare “had been in his younger I yeares a Schoolmaster in the Countrey.” In the margin the diarist writes “from Mr. Beeston,” who was in certain respects a reliable source; William Beeston, actor, was the son of one Christopher Beeston, who had been a player in Shakespeare’s own company in the writer’s lifetime. Aubrey interviewed him towards the end of his life, but it seems to be an authentic piece of information. It would not be at all unusual for a clever young man of fifteen or sixteen to be employed as an “usher” or teacher for younger children.

There is some allusive contemporary evidence also. In one of a trilogy of plays published in 1606 and entitled The Return to Parnassus, a character based upon Shakespeare, Studioso, is parodied as a “schoolmaster” who teaches Latin to children in the country. The reference would have no point if it were not based upon prior information. There are so many references to schoolmasters and school curricula in his plays, far more than in those of any contemporary, that one scholar has been moved to describe Shakespeare as “the schoolmaster among dramatists.”¹ In his plays, too, the quotations and references often derive from passages that were used by masters as illustrations of grammatical rules. When he was laughing at Holofernes the master, perhaps he was also laughing at his own old self. But, if the tradition is correct, the inevitable question then arises. Where in the “countrey” was the young Shakespeare a schoolmaster?

Various locations have been suggested, from Berkeley Castle in Gloucestershire to Titchfield in Hampshire. His schoolmastering has also been placed closer to home, under the patronage of Sir Fulke Greville of Beauchamps Court twelve miles from Stratford; Greville, the father of the poet of the same name, was a local dignitary who took a great interest in matters of education. He was also related to the Ardens. It is interesting conjecture, but conjecture still.

In more recent years, in any case, the favoured locale for Shakespeare’s career as a young teacher has become Lancashire. The omens are good. Turn first to the last will and testament of a local grandee, Alexander Hoghton, of Hoghton Tower and Lea Hall near Lea in that county. Hoghton’s wife was a devout Catholic, and his brother was in exile as a result of his espousal of the old faith. In this will – executed on 3 August 1581-he leaves his musical instruments and players’ costumes to his half-brother, Thomas Hoghton, with this proviso.

And yf he wyll not keppe and manteyne playeres, then yt ys my wyll that Sir Thomas Heskethe, knyghte, shall haue the same Instrumentes and playe clothes. And I most herteleye requyre the said Sir Thomas to be ffrendlye unto ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte nowe dwellynge with me, and eyther to take theym unto his Servyce or els to helpe theym to some good master, as my tryste ys he wyll.²