Shakespeare

John Shakespeare’s affairs were not confined to Westminster. He had been engaged in a dispute with one of his tenants, William Burbage, over a sum of £7. There were also further problems associated with John Shakespeare’s faith. In the spring of 1592 he was prominent on a list of Stratford townspeople who refused to attend church or, in the words of the investigation, “all such as refused obstinately to resort to the church.”¹ The religious commissioners were used to various excuses for non-attendance and remarked that “it is said that these come not to church for fear of process of debt”-the church being a public and visible place where a debtor might be located – but this hardly applies to Shakespeare’s father. In the same year he was present on two local juries, in the full light of day. It is significant, then, that in his drama Shakespeare adopts a very lenient attitude towards oath-taking and oath-breaking, as if neither was of very much account. This was part of his recusant family’s experience, obliged to affirm or to utter what they did not necessarily believe. Or, as Hamlet says, “words, words, words.” Among the nine recusants who appeared on the list beside “Mr. John Shackspeare” were three men with the names of Fluellen, Bardolph and Court; these names reappear in Henry V. Shakespeare paid some attention to his father’s tribulations. Like Blake and Chaucer, he used real names in unreal situations. It was a private joke.

So Shakespeare stayed with Burbage’s men at the Theatre, while the rest of Lord Strange’s Men decamped with Alleyn to the Rose. But in 1592 the future of the London theatre was not all clear or secure for any theatrical company. At the beginning of June there was a riot among apprentices, who had gathered in Southwark to see a play; the affray spread to the other side of the river, and as a consequence the Privy Council issued an order to ban all drama and to close the theatres for three months. When in July Lord Strange’s Men begged the Privy Council to consider reopening the Rose, they threw an interesting light on the condition of all the players at this time. They were obliged to tour in the country, as a result of the closing of the London theatres, but “thearbie our chardge [is] intolerable, in travellinge the Countrie” so that they were close “to division and seperacion” whereby they would be “undone.” They also argued for the opening of the Rose as “a greate relief to the poore watermen theare” who had lost their custom.² By the first week in August the lords of the Privy Council were pleased to grant their request on the condition that London was “free from infection of sickness.” But even as they issued their consent the plague was emerging once more in the city, and by 13 August it was “daily increasing in London.”³ Bartholomew Fair was banned. And there would be no more stage plays for the duration of the epidemic.

Burbage’s men were in the same parlous condition as their colleagues over the water. They could not work in London and, their livelihoods threatened, they were obliged to tour the country. It may well have been at this juncture that Burbage sought the patronage of Henry Herbert, the second Earl of Pembroke, to lend an air of respectability to the group of strolling players that included the young Shakespeare. In the stage directions of the playbooks owned by Pembroke’s Men there is the notation of “Will,” given no last name. One theatrical historian has suggested that he was “evidently a boy,”⁴ but in fact there is no indication of his age.

So we see Shakespeare moving from the Queen’s Men to Lord Strange’s Men and then onward to Pembroke’s, before he found his final home in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. It did not mean that he was a “freelance” in the modern sense of that word, as some scholars have suggested, but rather that he followed old acquaintances and fellow actors as one company grew out of another. He was loyal, as well as immensely hard-working.

CHAPTER 33 An’t Please Your Honor Players

In the summer of 1592 the newly formed Pembroke’s Men were obliged to leave London. The available records suggest that the plague of this year was particularly virulent in the neighbourhood of Shoreditch where Burbage, Shakespeare and other players lived. The exact route of this late summer tour is not completely known, but there is a record of Pembroke’s Men playing at Leicester as one “stop” in a more extended tour that must have included Coventry, Warwick – and Stratford-upon-Avon. We may say with some confidence that Shakespeare was reunited with his family in the late summer of 1592.