Shakespeare’s greatest tragedies are nearly all driven by family dynamics: dysfunctional families, as in King Lear; families overwhelmed by external circumstances, as in Titus Andronicus; families fighting against each other, in the case of Romeo and Juliet; and families fighting themselves, as in Othello and Macbeth. It should come as no surprise that in arguably his greatest tragedy, Hamlet, ALL of these dynamics are present. Shakespeare was the first English playwright to capture the essence of what makes families so frustrating, so frail, and, ultimately, so beautiful.
For a Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon, the call to dinner was one ’twere well to heed, and heed quickly.
In a pot in the Henley house kitchen, over a low fire, bubbled a watery stew of onions, turnips, and leeks. There was a two-day-old quarter loaf of bread and a pitcher of ale on the long oak dining table. William’s mother, Mary Arden Shakespeare, took Mary (the hen) from the spit upon which she slowly roasted and, with six sure strokes of a cleaver, dismembered her. Dishes and mugs clattered noisily as the family passed their pewter plates to Mary one at a time to be filled.
There were six mouths to feed in the house: John, Mary, William, William’s younger brother Gilbert, his younger sister, Joan, and two-year-old Edmund. When the dinner was chicken, there were nine pieces of meat to be parceled out: two breasts, two thighs, two legs, two wings, and the back. John always got a breast and a thigh. Mary insisted on taking just the back; she was a light eater. Gilbert and Joan each got a leg and a wing. Mary picked apart the other wing and fed it to baby Edmund. William, the eldest, got the other breast.
That left a thigh.
It would sit there on the cutting board, oozing its sweet thigh juices as John, secure in his guaranteed, head-of-household second piece, boomed on at the head of the table about the day’s events, local politics, gossip of Queen Elizabeth’s court. The rest of the table ate silently, quickly, with furtive glances up, down, and across the table. Whoever finished their portion first, without appearing to be greedy, got the second thigh. William and Gilbert had the edge in size and reach, but Joan was always a dangerous outside threat.
William received his bowl of broth and his plate, and casually placed a finger atop the plumpest bit of Mary’s (the hen’s) breast.
“What men were those today, William?” asked Joan. It was a ploy. William would sometimes slip in a large bite before grace, but he couldn’t eat while he answered a question: and now the focus of the table was on him. Joan never liked to fall behind waiting for her plate.
“Men? What men? I know not — ”
Joan rolled her eyes and let out a short, sharp breath of impatience. “The men! Think you I know not a man by his beard when I see one? Though I be only thirteen, I know a man — ”
“I hope you know not a man yet,” sniggered Gilbert under his breath.
Everyone now had their plates, so William gave up and removed his hand from Mary’s (the hen’s) breast. John led grace before the meal.
“Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona quae de tua largitate sumus sumpturi. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen.”
“So who was it?” Joan asked as she tucked into her chicken.
Around his first bite, William replied, “Sir Thomas Lucy, no less. He was — ”
“Shopping for gloves, methinks, wasn’t it, William?” interrupted his father. “Falconing?”
“I’m not sure what he was after,” responded William. “He bought a codpiece.”
“Why be it called a codpiece, Mum?” asked Joan. “The piece covers not a cod.”
The entire table laughed.
“Nay, though the piece it covers may smell like one,” Mary answered quietly. “Especially as it ages,” she added with a smile to John. There was a collective groan from the table.
John replied, “As may the pond in which it swims, as it withers, dries, and becomes choked with weeds, my love.”
Mary laughed and kissed him on the head.
“A rare touch for Dad,” whispered Gilbert to William.
William thought the topic had been successfully deflected from Sir Thomas Lucy, whom his father was clearly loath to discuss.
But Joan was young and persistent. “I see not why the family Lucy has such a black name in this house. Methinks Spencer a bonny boy, and my age, too.”
“Four years your senior he is, and his face as spotted as his name,” said Gilbert as he sucked the marrow from Mary’s (the hen’s) right thigh.
“ ’ Tisn’t!” said Joan. “And what’s in a name, anyway?”
“Everything,” Gilbert replied. “Lucy is lousy, and lousy is Lucy. The word is one and the same.” In the Warwickshire dialect, the pronunciation was close indeed.
“Then am I the same as my sister Joan: dead and buried, with a mean headstone marking two years of life and a lifetime of death, and worms wriggling in and out my eye sockets.”
Joan was named after her own sister. John and Mary’s first child had died at six months. William saw in the pain that passed across his mother’s face the regret — which came whenever Joan mentioned Joan — that she had given her the same name. This Joan seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with mortality: crypts and poisons, suicides and stabbings, skeletons and skulls, fascinated her. She preferred to wear black clothing that contrasted with her notably pale skin and dark eyes.
“Methinks you find Spencer Lucy’s fine clothes and plumed hats more bonny than his face, Joan,” said Mary Shakespeare as she dug with delicate, crafty hands between two of Mary’s (the hen’s) back ribs for a bit of tender meat.
“And what harm in bonny clothes?” Joan said. “I should be happy to be Lady Lucy, and live at Charlecote with waiting maids and parks full of deer and rabbits, and attend the Queen. Yes, Your Highness! How fares Your Grace?”
John, who had been eating and swilling his ale in silence, slammed his mug down on the table. “No more!”
His family turned to him in surprise. It was not often, in recent years, that he got so worked up. “We’ll have no talk of a union of Shakespeares and Lucys at my table. A plague on their house.” He paused a moment, seemingly taken aback by his own outburst, then took his second piece of chicken.
As he chewed a crust of bread, William glanced furtively at his father. John used to be quick to anger, when he was bailiff and carried all the cares of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon on his shoulders, but he was just as quick to laugh.
Those were days that now seemed like a dream. William drifted out of the conversation as it turned to Joan’s sewing and Edmund’s appetite and other family matters. He tried to remember his father in his prime. William would have been nine — no, eight — at the peak of John Shakespeare’s wealth and standing in the community. William had fine clothes, and was learning letters and Latin from Simon Hunt, the schoolmaster at the New School before he left scandalously to study in Rheims. The other boys would stare at William in awe as he and his family went in formal procession from their home to Holy Trinity on Sundays, John carrying the ceremonial staff of his office, wearing his bailiff’s scarlet robes, and escorted by two sergeants at arms carrying deadly maces, to the family’s favored place at the front of the church.
John Shakespeare the glover was the most important man in town, and William his eldest son and heir. Laden wagons would roll in and out of the yard at Henley Street all day long, and John would retreat to the parlor with their drivers, talking tods of wool, the Queen’s monopoly, and the intransigence and corruption of the Guild of Glovers. John, as many glovers did, sold the wool from the sheep they kept for lambskin on a large and profitable black market. Soon he stopped making gloves altogether, and merely bought and sold wool. He grew wealthy quickly, and bought two fair houses in Stratford as investments, and leased them. He had two apprentices who lived amongst the bales of wool in the house’s voluminous attic. There was lamb for dinner more often than not, also beef, venison, veal, rich cheeses, pheasant, rabbit, whole stewed fish, cooked by a cook and served by a serving maid. Sometimes in the winter months a merchant from Plymouth or Lancashire would bring an offering of oysters and they would eat them by the hundred. William loved the oysters with their hint of the far-off sea and something else ineffable and irresistible.
John reveled in his role as bailiff. He ate, he drank, he held forth, he pomped and he circumstanced. These had always been his favorite things, and now he did them on the town’s penny. Ever a fixture at the Bear (the Catholic-leaning of the town’s two inns), John would now spend public money on his favorite private entertainments. He brought the first professional theater company to Stratford, hiring the Queen’s Men to perform a bit of Italian comedy about a servant trying simultaneously to serve two masters. Sitting in the bailiff’s reserved space in the front row of the Bear’s inn yard, John must have spilled a quart of ale during the performance, nearly choking as he sucked in a bit of cheese pie while laughing during an extended bit of business involving a lute teacher, his young female student, and an amorous salami. The performance was a smashing success, and Master Bailiff Shakespeare leapt on the stage and, with great theatricality of his own and after much bowing, laughing, and clapping on the back, lavished a generous prize of seventeen shillings on the appreciative troupe.
Then there had been — was it the very next summer? — the dreamlike day when William, a wide-eyed child, sat on the great lawn amongst dukes and earls, barons, viscounts, knights, and ladies — sitting not in the front, but not in the back, either — at Kenilworth Castle as the Earl of Leicester’s Men performed a watery pageant of Cupid and Aphrodite on the wide lake at the castle’s south side.
His mother sat next to him on one side, poised and dignified, and next to her were distant relatives: Ardens he had never met, including the best-dressed man he had ever seen. “Your cousin and the patriarch of your mother’s family, the master of Park Hall, Edward Arden,” John had whispered to William at their introduction. Next to him, his cold and beautiful wife, Mary Arden. And next to her, a proud and statuesque woman, dressed all in black. She wore openly a crucifix, and held in her hand a forbidden rosary, which she flipped quickly between her fingers.
“And who is the tall lady?” William had asked his father.
“Lady Magdalen, Viscountess Montague,” John whispered. “Once a lady of honor to Queen Mary, and even now, ’tis said, friendly with Her Majesty the Queen. A great woman, William, and great indeed in the Queen’s favor to practice so openly and without rebuke the Old Faith.”
The pageant began, and the splendors of it were too many for William later to recall. But the end he remembered. As if by magic, Aphrodite had risen on a bark from the waves. Cupid, at her side, had aimed his bow strung with love’s shaft at the Queen herself, sitting upon a gilded chair by the lake’s shore. The crowd had gasped, and the Queen’s guard drew around her, spears leveled. But Aphrodite raised Cupid’s arm as he fired, and the arrow went far astray, out over the lake, where it burst into a firework that lit up the water and ended the pageant to cheers of delight.
The Earl of Leicester, Sir Robert Dudley himself, had risen and smiled and bowed, and the Queen had risen and smiled with him and said in a voice loud enough for all to hear that she would never be wounded by such an errant, false shaft of love, that she would remain her people’s chaste Queen, and John Shakespeare and the crowd had roared, though Leicester’s hostly smile was a tight one.
As she passed out through the crowd on her sedan chair, the Queen had come within ten yards of the place where William and his father bowed in obeisance, and William had looked up. Her face was at the heart of a constellation of rich jewels and fabric, at the center of which her eyes blazed like the sun reflected off of polished onyx. Her skin he remembered only as a drift of white, like a frozen lake, for so it was painted, to hide the scars of age and smallpox. And as she waved her queenly gloved hand — the finest cheveril, the glover’s son William had noted, with fourchette and stitching extending almost to the second knuckle, fingers extra long and padded at the tips to accentuate her feminine hands, embroidered with white silk thread and pearls and golden beads — as she waved her hand to her subjects, her eyes and William’s had met. When she saw the eager, awed little boy next to the fat, ruddy-cheeked man in fading scarlet robes, the smallest hint of a smile had crossed the Queen’s lips. And then she was gone amidst a cheering and a ringing of bells.
Immediately following her had come the Earl of Leicester and his household. Leicester smiled proudly and nodded to the various nobility who bowed as he passed. He thanked them vociferously “For gazing upon this pageant, which is but a pale reflection of my true love and worship for Her Majesty.” His smile faded faintly as he glanced at Edward Arden, and Lady Magdalen with her rosary. He passed on, but the Earl of Warwick, behind him, stopped and glared at Arden.
“Master Arden! You do my Lord of Leicester wrong, sir!”
The cheering faded around them.
“I humbly beseech your pardon, my lord,” Arden replied to Warwick. “How have I offended mine host Leicester?”
“Play not the fool with me, sir,” Warwick replied. “All other of our rank and station wear Leicester’s livery this day, in honor of his beneficence in providing the day’s pageantry. Surely the rite and fashion is known to you?”
Young William looked around him, and noted that all the noblemen wore emblems of Leicester’s livery: tunics or sashes of blue and gold with devices of fleur-de-lis, or a bear leaning on a rough staff, or a lion, rampant, with two tails — all, that is, except Edward Arden.
There was uncomfortable shifting of feet. Leicester himself had stopped and turned to stare at Edward Arden, and was now awaiting his reply.
Arden glanced disdainfully at Leicester, then turned to Warwick. “I’faith, my lord, my livery is by its absence meant to honor the Earl of Essex.”
The hush quietened beyond silence.
It was rumored that Leicester was bedding Essex’s wife while he was making war in Ireland. Amidst the collective held breath, Arden continued, “To wear the livery of one who would take advantage of the distant commission of a Queen’s officer to gain private access to the officer’s lady, would be to honor a whoremaster.”
Leicester drew his sword and leapt forward, enraged. “God’s teeth, will you speak thus to me, even here?!” Arden also drew, and it might have turned into an ugly pageant indeed.
It was Viscountess Montague who stepped in between them. “Good my lords, I pray you put your weapons by. Let not the majesty and pageantry of the day be marred by such intemperance. It is not meet, to try so private a grievance in so public a court. Forbear, forbear.”
Leicester looked around at the festivities still going on outside their little circle, and, trembling in anger, sheathed his sword. “For that I would not stain the honor of the Queen, and as my Lady Magdalen is ever a voice of conscience, I shall stand down. But this slight, sir, is not slight, and will not unpunish’d go. Mark you.”
Without another word, Leicester had passed on, and Mary had hustled John and William straight back to Stratford.
After that extraordinary day, John’s mood seemed slowly to turn. His gifts and entertainments became less lavish day by day. He drank more and laughed less. The apprentices left one by one, and were not replaced. The cook was let go, and their sole help now was a string of increasingly poorly remunerated local girls, who came in a few hours daily — and later, weekly — to clean. Once, when William was home during his midday break from school and eating bread, John burst in the door, drunk at noon and raging at Mary because she was there.
“Blast and damn to hell guilds and the Queen, Leicesters and Lucys, and Luther and Lucifer alike! Fifty pounds, fifty pounds he owes me, doth John Luther, aptly named, the little Puritan flea, and now he hides himself behind ‘his’ Queen and accuses me of usury to my face, and of popery! And if he will accuse, Sir Thomas Lucy will prosecute, Leicester’s mangy hunting dog, rabid and drooling and willing to rend flesh for a scrap of meat tossed by the Earl. Marry, may not a man pursue his faith and his business with — OW! God’s WOUNDS!!!” he yelled, for he had walked shin-first into a corner of the best bed (which was set in the parlor, both for easy availability to drunken guests and to show off the family’s lustrous mahogany wealth). He sat on the bed, groaned, and continued, “The whoresons shall find the Queen looks kindly on her loyal subjects and appointed officers who serve the crown, not these worms who would eat the heart of her realm, marry! Fifty pounds!” He continued muttering as he limped heavily up the stairs into the second-best bed and fell asleep.
Fifty pounds. William, at the time, could barely conceive such a sum. In his mind, it would buy the finest house in Stratford, and he was not far from wrong. The next year, John rode in an “official capacity” to London as deputy to the next bailiff, his friend John Quiney, ostensibly to represent “the affairs of the borough according to their discretions.” In fact, it was a personal junket he had rammed through the town council. While in London on Stratford’s tab he sued John Luther for the fifty pounds and won.
But it was one of his last victories. The Guild of Glovers, run by Protestants and influenced by Leicester, got wind of John’s extracurricular activities in wool brokering, and he was fined twenty pounds. Twice. A house’s-worth of his fortune, equal to his entire inheritance from his own father, gone. Overextended, John mortgaged part of his wife’s family’s ancestral home, then defaulted on the loan. He was fined another twenty pounds for usury after charging a local wooler — a Protestant — twenty pounds for a short-term hundred-pound loan. Another house’s-worth, fare thee well. Recourse to the local authorities? None. He was a suspected Catholic with marriage ties to the powerful Ardens; the “authorities” were Protestant reformers happy to see Catholics on the ropes. He finally stopped leaving the house entirely unless it were to sneak down to the Bear at off-hours, preferring to simply stay at home and pretend to make gloves and drink and eat and hold forth. Yet he was still amiable and quick of wit. His fellow aldermen on the council were too kind to take his office away from him, and forgave him the taxes expected to help the poor. They simply noted him as missing from meetings, every fortnight, for ten years.
Thus had John Shakespeare gone from middle-class success story — a yeoman shaking his spear in upwardly mobile civic triumph — to holding the staff of his office in shadow and disgrace: a John False-staff, indeed.
William drifted back into the dinner table scene to see Joan holding out her empty plate to Mary. Gilbert thrust his forward a second too late. Mary reached out and speared the last bit of Mary (the hen) — the succulent thigh — and dropped it onto Joan’s plate. Joan discreetly stuck out her tongue at William and Gilbert across the table. Gilbert wrinkled his nose back.
William smiled; he always let Joan win.
Her victory secure, Joan took up her complaint again. “Still I know not why the house of Shakespeare, whose master was bailiff, must be held lower in esteem than the house of Lucy.”
Suddenly William felt Joan’s incomprehension as his own, and also anger rising from somewhere deep in the pit of his stomach. “Why? my sister asks, and rightly so. Why must the Shakespeares grunt and sweat under a weary life of gloves for the lily-white hands of Thomas Lucy, who feasts at Charlecote while we are left to gnaw at the bones of a single shriveled hen? Because of a matter of doctrine?! The wheezes and mutterings of aged bishops and choleric Puritan scholars?”
“William, not in front of Gil and Joan — ”
“I speak on their behalf, Mum,” William said without slowing down. “Are we not Catholic? We say a Catholic blessing before each meal, but what means it? We eat meat of a Friday, when the faithful eat fish. Our mother drags us to the church of a Sunday and we feign to honor the new rites, but then we slink back home and, behind closed doors, pray and beg forgiveness for the selfsame worship as a mortal sin! Why must we skulk so under these oppressors’ wrongs? Are we to hide here until at last they come to cut up the laymen as they cut up the priests?”
Mary and John had listened quietly. When William finished, John said haltingly, “William . . . we all do what we may, at what time we may. Elizabeth and her Puritan counselors will not live forever — ”
“Nor will I. Nor will Joan and Gilbert,” William interrupted.
His mother said calmly, “Mary, Queen of Scots, if she is restored to the throne, will restore the faith. We must wait and hope.”
“Elizabeth will never let her cousin accede to the throne. Mary will no more be Queen than Mary Arden Shakespeare, or Mary the hen,” William said, tossing his gnawed breastbone into the center of the table, and standing to pace restlessly. “Mayhap I should follow Thomas Cottom, and Robert Debdale of Shottery, and go to Rheims, and study the priesthood.”
Mary fell grey at the mention. “If you would serve the true church, your God, and your family, you would not do such a thing. Your family has need of you here, William. Gilbert, Joan, and Edmund need you here.”
Joan looked at her brother, terrified at the mention that he might leave. She held out what was left of Mary (the hen’s) last quarter. “Don’t go, Will. You can have the rest.”
William took a deep breath, and smiled at Joan. “Nay, Joanie,” he said, “nay. Fear not. I spoke but in jest. I’ll take neither a ship to Rheims nor your well-deserved bit of meat.”
He mussed Joan’s hair playfully, but as he did he spoke darkly to Mary and John.
“Yet if I must needs stay, then shall I do what little I may here.”
Without looking back at his parents, William walked out the front door and turned left. The air was heavy. Even as he strode down Henley Street, rain began to patter into the Meer Stream. He crossed into Bridge Street and finally through the open door of the Bear. He stood steaming in the doorway for a moment as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. There was a boisterous midday crowd.
William saw the figure he was looking for at a corner table in the shadows, washing down a meat pie with a cup of wine. William walked over and sat without being invited.
“I beg your mercy, good sir. I wonder if the office which late you offered remains unfulfilled?”
The horseman looked at him steadily.
“Ay, good lad. Indeed, I’ve spent a fruitless morning in search of another to do the errand.”
“Good sir, John Cottom was my teacher, my mentor, and my friend. I swear to you upon his family name, and upon mine, that if he be alive and to be found, I will deliver it unto him. Mayhap not today nor this week nor even by this year’s end, for I yet must school my class and bring my family bread. But if John Cottom yet lives I promise you this charge will be dispatched by me with the same diligence you have essayed to bring it thus far.”
The horseman nodded slowly. “Excellent well.” He rose and beckoned William to follow him. They went upstairs and into a cramped room.
Taking down the wrapped box from a high shelf, the horseman said, “God willing, this remembrance of Thomas Cottom will be delivered . . . as its owner was not.”
“Remembrance? What mean you?” William asked, going numb.
“Do you not know?” the horseman replied. “Forsooth, news travels from London to Stratford like unto a wounded snail! Thomas Cottom was martyred some weeks past.”
“Thomas Cottom is hanged?”
“Ay . . . and drawn and quartered, too, as a traitor to Her Majesty. My master Ely was the last to see him alive. Cottom’s last wish, cried most piteously, was that this box should find his brother.” He handed the box to a dumbfounded William.
“The head of the last to bear this burden stands skewered atop the gates of London. May you meet a better fate.”
The horseman then solemnly made the sign of the cross over William.
“Benedicite.”