7. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 162-185

Third Age: Lover, Chapter 11, Before the Bawdy Court

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In 1612, Shakespeare was a witness in a civil case in the Court of Requests at Westminster, Belott vs. Mountjoy. Mr. and Mrs. Mountjoy, from whom Shakespeare rented lodgings, had hired an apprentice, Stephen Belott, with a view to his marrying their daughter and taking over their business. But when they failed to pay the dowry agreed on, Belott took them to court. Shakespeare was called as a character witness for Belott, and revealed in the testimony that Mrs. Mountjoy had asked him to persuade Belott to go through with the marriage. Shakespeare knew something about persuading young men to marry, the subject of Venus and Adonis, the first group of sonnets, and the plays All's Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.

Cases involving marital problems could be tried in either a civil court or an ecclesiastical one. "The church consistory courts ... heard many cases involving sex, marriage, adultery, and divorce. They were the place where love entered the public arena." So many of Shakespeare's plays hinge on love disputes that it's worth recalling that "he would have been exposed to questions of a similar kind when as a boy and a young man he witnessed his fellow townspeople doing penance in the church or the marketplace, or when -- as is bound to have happened in a small community -- he heard the gossip about the latest case to have come before the consistory court. Given the nature of its most interesting business, the people gave that institution a more colloquial name: the 'bawdy court.'"

In fact, Shakespeare's own daughter, Susanna Hall, was plaintiff in a bawdy court case in 1613, when she accused John Lane of slandering her by saying that she was a loose woman who had had an affair with a man named Rafe Smith. Lane failed to appear at the hearing and "was excommunicated and Susanna's name was cleared -- if a name can ever fully be cleared once an alleged scandal has reached the public domain." And in 1608 both his brother Richard and his sister Joan were defendants in cases in the bawdy court, although details of the accusations have not survived.

Women, who were habitually encouraged to be silent and submissive, had the opportunity to become active agents in the bawdy court, just as fictional women are active agents -- usually wittier and more eloquent than the men -- in Shakespeare's comedies. According to one historian, in the city of London in the early seventeenth century, 80 percent of sex and marriage cases were brought to the bawdy courts by women. 

In Shakespeare's plays, however, most of the "noxious gossips and accusers" are men: Iago, Claudio, Don John, Bertram, Posthumus, "and for that matter the entire body of the Greek generals slandering Cressida." Even the notorious "bed tricks" in which an unfaithful man is tricked into sleeping with his own wife, as in All's Well and Measure for Measure, are documented in the records of the bawdy court.

There is a sense, then, in which the theater, so often condemned as a place of extreme bawdry, functioned as an alternative bawdy court.... A church court case and a staging of The Taming of the Shrew: each in its way could be a testing of the limits of domestic violence and the language of sexual combat.... To a Shakespearean audience, the trial of Queen Hermione for adultery in The Winter's Tale would at one and the same time have evoked a high-level treason trial and a mundane bawdy-court marital case.... Shakespeare's most sustained dramatization of bawdy court matter occurs at the climax of All's Well That Ends Well, one of the bitter comedies that he seems to have written around the time that he was being dragged into the marital business of the Mountjoy household. 

As for Shakespeare's own extramarital sex life, Bate notes that he "seems to have had a reputation for being sexually active outside his marriage," as exemplified by the familiar story that when Richard Burbage was playing Richard III, Burbage made an assignation with a woman after the play, but Shakespeare got there first and enjoyed her favors. "Then message being brought that Richard the Third was at the door, Shakespeare caused return to be made that William the Conqueror was before Richard the Third."

Inevitably, given that there is "a preoccupation with sexual disease in the plays written early in the reign of King James," some have speculated that Shakespeare himself contracted syphilis. "Given the close links between the theaters, the taverns, and the sex trade, Shakespeare would have seen many people suffering the grotesque symptoms of the pox. But we cannot rule out the possibility that he became infected himself.... The only women in Timon of Athens are a pair of prostitutes who put in a brief appearance in order to be abused by Timon in a series of speeches that allude to the symptoms of secondary and tertiary syphilis, including the playwright's own affliction of premature baldness."

The prolonged separation of William and Anne also raises the question of how faithful either of them may have been to the other. "The Winter's Tale was written sixteen years after 1594, the year when he became firmly established as a London-based writer and player with the formation of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. Is it a coincidence that it is a play about a man who asks his wife for a second chance after sixteen years of separation?" And both The Winter's Tale and Cymbeline center on unfaithful wives. "If we are to play the game of inferring Shakespeare's love life from his plays, then we cannot rule out the possibility that he was -- or imagined himself to be -- the victim of marital infidelity as well as the perpetrator of it."

Such inferences underlie the speculations of those who see the bequest to Anne of the "second-best bed" as an insult to her. Others point to the scarcity of happily married couples in the plays:

Petruchio and Kate are a match for each other, but theirs is hardly a tranquil household. Hotspur and his Kate in Henry IV Part 1 have terrific gusto, but their relationship is tempered by the sense that he is happier astride his horse than his wife..... Aufidius in Coriolanus speaks of his love for his wife and his happiness on his wedding night, but suggests that he takes more pleasure in ... reminiscing about a dream of wrestling Coriolanus to the ground.... Of all Shakespeare's married couples, the pair who seem most intimate, whom the audience senses are in love as man and wife as they were when first they wooed, are the Macbeths. That is a fact that may give pause for thought.

The only one of Shakespeare's plays that has the word "love" in its title is Love's Labour's Lost. It bears some resemblance to a book by Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academy, published in France in 1577 and in an English translation in 1586. Set at the time of the French religious civil wars in the second half of the sixteenth century, it tells of four gentlemen who retreat from the world and under the guidance of an elderly tutor study moral philosophy. The setup of Shakespeare's play is similar, and it "seems to have been written not long after the king of Navarre converted to Catholicism and took the French throne. 'Paris is worth a mass,' he was reputed to have said." In the play, Navarre suggests to three noblemen, whose names are those of actual nobles of the king's court, that they retreat from the world (and women), now that they have won the war, and devote themselves to study.

The premise of the exercise is that there is no place for love in intellectual life. Shakespeare, who did not of course spend three years in the all-male environment of an Oxford or Cambridge college, clearly thought that this was nonsense and set about mocking the idea. Love, he proposes instead, is at the center of intellectual life. The really interesting task is not to reject it, but to find the appropriate language to express it.

Berowne agrees to the king's plan, but like Shakespeare he is skeptical of it. "The unfolding action proves Berowne right. Wisdom, as often in Shakespeare, comes from the mouth of a fool: the clownish Costard's irrefutable statement that "It is the manner of a man to speak to a woman" comes to the core of the play.... Love's Labour's Lost is a play packed with wit, elegance, philosophical reflection, and filthy jokes. For Shakespeare, love meant immersing oneself in each of these four dimensions." In the end, the Princess of France arrives with three ladies, and they show the foolishness of the men's retreat.

3. Soul of the Age, by Jonathan Bate, pp. 30-52

First Age: Infant; Chapter 3, The Boy From the Greenwood

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Shakespeare's paternal grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a yeoman farmer; his maternal grandfather, Robert Arden, owned the land that Richard farmed. It lay on the edges of the Forest of Arden. "Like Corin in As You Like It, the Arden family farmed on the edge of the forest.

In the romance, Rosalynd, by Thomas Lodge that was Shakespeare's source for As You Like It, the forest was actually the Ardennes, in France. Although Shakespeare "domesticated the setting," hints of that foreign location remain in the play: "The first we hear of the exiled Duke is that, 'like the old Robin Hood of England,' he is in the forest with a group of 'merry men.' Ostensibly the qualifier 'of England' is an indication that the action is supposed to take place in France, but the deeper effect is to identify Arden with Sherwood."

One of the themes of the play is the contrast of "the natural order of the forest with the flattery and envy of the court" -- the two polarities of Shakespeare's own life, Stratford versus London. Shakespeare invented two characters not in Lodge's original, Jaques and Touchstone, who "spar with each other because the satire of the former and the witty foolery of the latter are rival modes of mocking courtly pretensions."

"The merging of Ardennes and Arden is only the most extreme example of Shakespeare's tendency to swerve back to his point of origin." The fairies and artisans of A Midsummer Night's Dream are more English than Athenian, and in All's Well That Ends Well, Helen "disguises herself as a pilgrim on the way to 'Saint Jaques le Grand." Since she is traveling between Italy and France, Samuel Johnson, who assumed that the object of her pilgrimage was the shrine of Santiago de Compostela in Spain, "remarked that she appeared to have gone someway out of her road." But Shakespeare is also alluding to the parish church of St. James the Great in Snitterfield, the village where his father was born. Other such allusions appear in the Henry IV plays: "Peto was the name of a commissioner in a 1581 Stratford law case involving John Shakespeare, while a Bardolph and a Fluellen appear alongside Shakespeare's father in a 1592 list of those absent from church for fear of process for debt."

"The social and natural ecology of rural Warwickshire plays a key part in his vision.... He was a provincial outsider, and that may go some way to explaining why he was so fascinated by outsiders such as Shylock the Jew and Othello the Moor in Venice." The first reference we have to him in London, by the rival playwright Robert Greene in 1592, stigmatize him as an outsider, "an upstart crow." "English culture has a long history of men from the professions, armed with degrees from the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, looking down their noses at hardworking men from a trade background who lack a degree (which in the Elizabethan age allowed you to call yourself a gentleman). Greene's Groatsworth of Wit goes on to call Shake-scene a 'rude groom' and a 'peasant.'"

But Shakespeare was up to the challenge, and he wrote Venus and Adonis "as if to show that you didn't need an Oxford or Cambridge degree to turn out elegant poetry in imitation of the classics of ancient Rome." But even in it he introduces elements of country life that have an actuality that comes from direct observation, such as his account of "poor Wat," a hunted hare. "There can be little doubt that poor Wat is a Shakespearean memory of a pursuit through the warrens of his native Warwickshire." In one of his earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew, he adapts an earlier anonymous play. Both begin with the framing device of Christopher Sly watching the performance, but in the earlier play "this scene is completely without local realization, whereas Shakespeare's version ... is full of detail, ranging from questions of the proper pedigree of rural gentry families to specific Warwickshire place-names."

About ten years later, writing As You Like It, he uses his own given name, William, for the country bumpkin  who encounters the court fool Touchstone.

Katherine Duncan-Jones brilliantly suggests that Touchstone as well as William is a version of Shakespeare: "Their dialogue can be read as an exchange between the wealthy and quick-witted playwright and the provincial youth he has left behind him in the Forest of Arden."

Shakespeare's Warwickshire origins are also reflected in the play King John, which is, Bate asserts, the one history play "that most explicitly asks what it might mean to speak for England." It deals with the questions of legitimacy and inheritance that were especially significant "at a time when an aged childless queen was sitting on the throne." King Lear also deals with the question of legitimacy in the conflict between the virtuous legitimate heir Edgar and the villainous bastard Edmund, but King John provocatively reverses things with "a more challenging possibility: suppose that a great king dies and that his bravest, most honest, and most intelligent son is an illegitimate one."

The Bastard in King John was born in Northamptonshire and "is the voice of Shakespeare's own place of origin, the Midlands, deep England. He is given a choice: to inherit the Falconbridge estates or take his 'chance' and assume the name, though not the patrimony, of the royal father who sired him out of wedlock." The Bastard's identification with the Shakespearean Midlands is also emphasized by his allusion to his his half-brother as "Colbrand the Giant," a legendary Danish invader who was defeated by Guy of Warwick in a popular folk tale. "If Robert Falconbridge is symbolically Colbrand, then Philip the Bastard is symbolically Guy, a Warwickshire folk hero. Perhaps he is even a version of Robin Hood, with the sheriff of Northampton standing in for his colleague from Nottingham." And just as Robin Hood was a supporter of Richard Coeur de Lion, "As the play progresses, the Bastard's role shifts to that of stand-in for the dead Coeur de Lion.... The Bastard is the conscience of the nation, the symbolic heir of Lionheart, the voice of the shires." And Bate sees him as a surrogate for Shakespeare as well: "Who speaks for deep England? A challenger of legitimacy. An entrepreneur. A player. A man who idealizes the shires even as he leaves them to enter the theater, the market, the emergent empire. Who speaks? A Shakespeare."

The only other member of his family to follow William Shakespeare to London was his brother Edmund, sixteen years his junior. Edmund died in 1607, and the records of the church where he was buried, "a short walk from the Globe Theatre," list him as "a player." It's possible that he served as an apprentice to his brother, for a list of the apprentices in the company of the Lord Chamberlain's Men dated 1597 or early 1598 includes the name "Ned." Edmund would have been the right age at the time, about seventeen. Bate says that Edmund probably died of the plague: "For most of the time from the summer of 1606 to the summer of 1608, plague raged and the theaters remained closed." William probably spent much of this time in Stratford, where his daughter Susanna married the physician John Hall in June 1607 and gave birth to a daughter, Elizabeth, the following February.

John Hall was a skilled herbalist, and he left a casebook describing many of his cures.

We must always be wary of attempts to map Shakespeare's life onto his work. But writers cannot avoid drawing on their experience. Is it a coincidence that in Shakespeare's earlier works there are just two comic doctors -- Pinch in The Comedy of Errors and Caius in The Merry Wives of Windsor -- whereas in the plays written after John Hall's arrival in Stratford-upon-Avon, there are several dignified, sympathetically portrayed medical men? Among them are the physician who has to deal with that difficult patient Lady Macbeth, the doctor who revives the exhausted King Lear in the quarto version of that play, and Dr. Cornelius in Pericles, that play about father and daughter, death and rebirth, written in the wake of Edmund Shakespeare's death and during the final months of the pregnancy of Susanna and perhaps the first weeks of the life of Shakespeare's first grandchild, Elizabeth.

The later plays also make much of the contrast of city and country: the court in Sicilia and the countryside of Bohemia in The Winter's Tale, and the court in Cymbeline contrasted with the countryside of Wales.

For Shakespeare, London was the place associated with the pursuit of honor, status, wealth, and recognition at court, but also the place of plague and mass death. And of the commercialization of sex: the link between the theater industry and the sex trade was symbiotic.... Stratford-upon-Avon, in contrast to London, was associated with stability, community, garden, field, and health.... It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Shakespeare turned to pastoral romance in the plague years around 1607-10: of all his plays, Cymbeline and The Winter's Tale are the ones that have the most distinctive air of having been written back home in Stratford.

John Hall's herbal knowledge also dovetails with his father-in-law's own botanical interests. Of the reference to Innogen's mole, "cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops / in the bottom of a cowslip," Bate asks, "Is there any other English poet, save the countryman John Clare, who has such an eye as this?" (Bate has written a biography of Clare.) Ophelia's flowers and Lear's garland are two of the more familiar instances of Shakespeare's botanical knowledge. "When Lear's fantastic garland is described, it contains exactly what one would find in an arable field and its margins in England at the end of summer or the beginning of autumn.... Shakespeare, brought up in the country, had a field education, in all probability before he even went to school."

Shakespeare was born into the herbal economy of rural England.... Perhaps because he toured Kent with his fellow actors, Shakespeare observed the thriving samphire-gathering trade on Dover cliff. But he always remained more interested in the domestic rather than the global plant economy. He evinced little interest in the international spice trade. Not even The Tempest, with its imperial matter and semi-New World setting, is about the things on which empire was built; trade, spice.... Provincial Shakespeare, who had been an infant deep in the shires, was always more interested in different species of pear and apple than the globalized nutmeg and saffron market.

[Bate's observations reinforce something I've always thought about in considering the arguments of those who claim that the country bumpkin couldn't have written the sophisticated plays, and that therefore they must have been the work of an educated nobleman like the Earl of Oxford. But turn the argument on its head: Would Oxford -- or Bacon, or Marlowe, or Queen Elizabeth, to name the more far-fetched "contenders" -- have had the kind of first-hand knowledge of rural life and specifically of Warwickshire that Bate amply demonstrates William Shakespeare to have had?]