Shakespeare

On 12 September Alexander Hoghton died in what appear to have been suspicious circumstances. Then, at the close of this year, Sir Thomas Hesketh – to whom Hoghton had recommended “Shakeshafte”-was consigned to prison on the grounds that he had failed to curb the practice of the Catholic faith amongst his servitors. All of his friends and retainers would naturally come under renewed suspicion from the queen’s emissaries. The net of suspicion was being drawn tightly over these Lancastrian households, and it was perhaps high time that the young Shakespeare made a convenient departure. By the summer of 1582, at the very latest, he is to be found once more in Stratford.

CHAPTER 16 Before I Know My Selfe, Seeke Not to Know Me

He came back to a larger but not necessarily happier family. In the spring of 1580 John Shakespeare had been summoned to the Queen’s Bench in Westminster and, when he did not appear, was fined the large sum of £40. He was not alone in his transgression, since approximately two hundred men and women from different counties were caught up in the same punitive action and fined various amounts to a maximum of £200. The supposition must inevitably be that these “malcontents” were brought to the bar of justice for recusancy or refusal to attend church services. In the following year it was formally proclaimed that those who did not conform to the prescriptions of the Act of Uniformity would be fined the sum of £20 per month, rising to “all their goods and a third part of their land.” For Catholics there was now the clear danger of financial ruin. Half of John Shakespeare’s fine was levied because of his reluctance or inability to ensure that a Nottinghamshire hat-maker, John Audley, came to court. On the same day Audley himself was in turn fined £10 for not bringing John Shakespeare to the Queen’s Bench. Historians have inferred that this system of mutual bail, uniting people from various regions and different jurisdictions, was an attempt by Catholics to circumvent the collection of any fines. Yet Shakespeare’s father did pay his fine, as recorded in the Coram Regina Roll, suggesting that he lived still in relative affluence.

When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in 1582, it was in the face of an uncertain future. At the age of eighteen, what likely career might have been open to him? In recent years there has grown an abiding, if not universal, belief that he had some training as a lawyer’s clerk in Stratford. It was not an unnatural progress. For a quick and intelligent young man there were many possible “openings” in his home town. One of the old schoolmasters at the Free School, Walter Roche, had a lawyer’s practice in Chapel Street. John Shakespeare used the services of William Court in the same street. If he was not clerk to a solicitor, he might have been a copyist or even a scrivener’s apprentice. It is also possible that as a result of his father’s influence he worked in the office of Henry Rogers, the town clerk of Stratford, situated in Wood Street.

His drama is striated with legal terminology, particularly with that concerning property law. There is scarcely a play in which words or phrases from the courts are not employed. The sonnets are filled with similar references, to such an extent that it has even been supposed that they were addressed to a member of one of the Inns of Court. It could just as well be argued that the age of Shakespeare was excessively litigious, and that any Elizabethan would of necessity have acquired a great deal of knowledge about the law. As one contemporary put it, “now every Raskall will tak upon to knowe the laws as well as the best gentleman.”¹ The law was an inevitable part of ordinary social life.