This book argues that the key to Shakespeare’s thought world is the traditional society of Warwickshire and the conflicts engendered in it by the Tudor Reformation. The Reformation has been subject to major revision by historians during the last thirty years; the corollary, of course, is that the life of Shakespeare will need to be rethought too.
First, then, for the broad sweep: Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (2000), a very readable survey of the Tudor era with a rich bibliography; C. Haigh, English Reformations (1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and Voices of Morebath (2001), a study of one community in Devon, a model of the kind of change revealed in Warwick-shire sources (see here). See also K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); Patrick Collinson has written an important short study of Shakespeare’s religious background in his collection of essays Godly People (1983).
Next the Warwickshire background, the old society of Shakespeare’s parents and grandparents that shaped his first twenty years and beyond. A good introduction to Stratford is The History of an English Borough, ed. Bob Bearman (1997), with essays by Alan Dyer and Anne Hughes; on material life in Stratford, Jeanne Jones, Family Life in Shakespeare’s England 1570–1630 (1997) is a fascinating survey based on wills and house inventories, which is especially useful as a teaching aid. The Victoria County History is a great resource on individual parishes, and is now going online. On the politics and social life of Tudor Stratford, the starting point is the town council’s books Minutes and Accounts, Dugdale Society, 4 vols, ed. Savage and Fripp (1921–9); Vol V, ed. Levi Fox (1990) takes the story up to 1598. The crucial evidence of the survey of priests (see here) is in Vol III (1926); the priests’ replies are in Warwickshire Ecclesiastical Terriers, ed. D. M. Barratt, Dugdale Society (1955). The most valuable compilations of source material for the Forest of Arden are J. Rylands, Records of Rowington, 2 vols (1896, 1922) and Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor (1903); also The Register of the Guild of Knowle, ed. W. Rickley (1894). Further leads may be found in earlier writers, such as Charlotte M. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (1897) and Shakespeare’s Family (1907), and in E. Fripp, Shakespeare’s Stratford (1928), Shakespeare’s Haunts (1929) and Shakespeare Studies (1930). Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (1961) adds more detail. On family and neighbours in the religious courts (including the poet’s daughter Susanna), E. R. C. Brinkworth, Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court of Stratford (1972) is essential.
On the defacing of the guild chapel described in my prologue, the key text is J. G. Nichols and Thomas Fisher’s Ancient Allegorical Historical and Legendary Paintings (1838) along with Clifford Davidson, The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon-Avon (1988). On John Shakespeare’s business dealings, especially his career as a brogger, the background is in P. J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor England (1962). The remarkable brogger’s account book quoted here is Warwickshire Grazier and London Skinner, 1532–1555, ed. N. W. Alcock (1981). Extracts of the town book of Warwick were edited by Thomas Kemp as The Book of John Fisher in around 1899 for Warwick Corporation; a full publication is desirable. On Coventry: C. Phythian Adams, Desolation of a City (1979) and ‘Ceremony and the Citizen’ in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (1972); on village life in sixteenth-century Warwickshire, N. W. Alcock, People at Home (1993). The interviews in the Cotswolds here are from H. J. Massingham, Where Man Belongs (1946). The interview here comes from The Dillen, ed. A. Hewins (1981).
On Shakespeare biography the indispensable starting point is the brilliant Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1993 edition); the key documents are summarized in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), also in compact paperback edition; D. Thomas, Shakespeare in the Public Records (1985); and Bob Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (paperback, 1994). E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (1930) is still very useful for its transcription of sources. Park Honan’s recent Shakespeare: A Life (1998) is a very enjoyable survey by a literary scholar; K. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (2001) is a challenging tilt at what she sees as the myth of ‘gentle’ Will. These last two titles both contain many fresh insights.
On Tudor childhood and education there is a vast literature: see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997) and Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (1980); on Shakespeare’s knowledge of the curriculum the definitive work is T. Baldwin’s forbidding William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (1944). On Ovid see Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (2000) and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993); the Ovid translation used in my text is by A. D. Melville, Oxford World Classics (1986). On Seneca (see here) I am indebted to J. Lever, The Tragedy of State (1971) and on the Coventry mysteries to Diana Whaley’s ‘Voices From the Past: A Note on Termagant and Herod’ in Shakespeare Continuities: essays in honor of E. A. J. Honigmann, ed. J. Batchelor, T. Cain, C. Lamont (1997).
On the question of the Shakespeares’ Catholicism, controversy still rages; for background Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992); a useful introduction to sources is R. N. Swanton, Catholic England (1993). On the family there is much useful material in the older literature, such as John Semple Smart, Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition (1928); J. H. de Groot, The Shakespeares and the ‘Old Faith’ (1946); H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (1952); and Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (1973). On John’s testament the main facts are laid out in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975); in Patrick Collinson’s view, Godly People (1983), it is ‘virtually certain’ that the testament is genuine; Bob Bearman, however, in Shakespeare Survey (forthcoming 2003) suggests an eighteenth-century forgery is still possible, but it is hard to explain how that might have come about. For a parallel, William Bell’s testament and autobiography (see here) was composed in 1587 and published at Douai in 1633.
On the Jesuit missions: T. McCoog, The Reckoned Expense (1996); R. Simpson, Edmund Campion (1896); Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus (1875) is an essential collection; Tom McCoog has also published an alphabetical directory of Jesuits in Tudor and Stuart England. The publications of the Catholic Record Society are a mine of information in these matters.
On the ‘lost years’ E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (1985) is full of fascinating detail about Shakespeare and Lancashire, but with no smoking gun; Honigmann was followed recently by Anthony Holden’s enjoyable William Shakespeare (1999), but the Shakeshafte theory has not survived closer scrutiny: see now Bob Bearman in Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol LIII, No. 1 (2002). On his Lancashire patrons: Barry Coward, The Stanleys, Lords Stanley and Earls of Derby 1385–1672 (1983); and J. J. Bagley, The Earls of Derby (1985).
On the theatre in London: E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (1923); Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (1992 edition) and Play going in Shakespeare’s London (1987); Herbert Berry, Shakespeare’s Playhouses (1987); Shakespeare’s Globe Rebuilt, ed. J. Mulryne and M. Shewring (1997); Julian Bowsher, The Rose Theatre (1998); and a very interesting look at the material remains and their analogues, Jean Wilson, The Shakespeare Legacy (1995).
On the plays I have consulted both the new Arden editions and the handy and user-friendly Oxford editions. On the broader questions of play and text, R. Proudfoot, Shakespeare: Text, Stage and Canon (2001) and David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Book (2001) are informative, enjoyable and highly recommended. The Oxford Shakespeare Topics series, ed. Stanley Wells, offers an interesting crop of handy paperbacks, such as Robert Miola, Shakespeare’s Reading (2000) and Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (2000); other topics include women, masculinity, race, and film.
On Shakespeare’s early years in theatre there is still controversy. Again, there is much of value in E. K. Chambers’ Elizabethan Stage (1923). The money now is on the Queen’s Men, on whom see S. McMillin and S. MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (1998); E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The Lost Years (1985) favours Strange’s Men. As a portrait of his creative process, Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (1977) is still, to my mind, the most exciting read of its kind. Peter Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (1992) looks at the life of a working dramatist; P. Levi The Life and Times of William Shakespeare (1988) is good on the working poet; D. and B. Crystal, Shakespeare’s Words (2002) is an invaluable dictionary of his extraordinary vocabulary; Frank Kermode, Shakespeare’s Language (2000) is essential for anyone interested in the poet, or, for that matter, in poetry.
Many connections remain to be explored: one is Catholic poetics. Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (1999) opens up fascinating paths of inquiry: I owe my knowledge of ‘I C’ to her (see here), and I am also indebted to her unpublished paper ‘Why didn’t Shakespeare write religious verse?’. The Southwell connections also await close attention. Astonishingly he is not indexed in any recent Shakespeare biography. Till we get a full-length study, F. W. Brownlow, Robert Southwell (1996) is a handy guide; see too C. Devlin, The Life of Robert Southwell (1956) and Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the Writer (1935). Devlin’s Hamlet’s Divinity (1963), written from the Catholic side, gives vivid and suggestive accounts of topics such as the poisoning of Lord Strange, the Babington Plot and the sinister Topcliffe.
London: from an immense literature, pride of place goes to John Stow’s Survey of 1598; on the inns: John Taylor, The Carriers Cosmographie (1637); on the streets: A. Prokter and R. Taylor, The A-Z of Elizabethan London (1979) and R. Hyde, The A-Z of Georgian London (1992); on the location of the public and private theatres: E. K. Chambers, Elizabethan Stage (1923).
Many parish registers are now published, including St Helen’s and St Botolph’s, Bishopsgate; St Botolph’s, Aldgate, and St Mary’s, Aldermanbury; a transcript of St Olave’s, Silver Street, has been deposited by Professor Alan Nelson in the Guildhall library.
The Middlesex and Southwark Court Sessions and the records of the guilds and livery companies are another rich source of local detail. My account of the 1603 plague in Muggle Street, for example, is taken from Annals of the Barber Surgeons (1890). In addition to these sources, for my maps I used: The London Surveys of Ralph Treswell, ed. John Schofield (1987); David Mander, More Light, More Power: An Illustrated History of Shoreditch (1996); and M. Carlin, Medieval Southwark (1996), which has revolutionized the view of fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Southwark; histories of individual London wards and parishes include Sir John James Baddeley, Cripple gate (1922); and the unrivalled photographic archive of the National Monument Record in Swindon and the London search room, which are open to all researchers.
Foreign visitors: there are many anthologies. My quote about blank verse here is by Samuel Sorbière, whose seventeenth-century Voyage en Angleterre was published in English in 1709. See also F. M. Wilson, Strange Island (1955).
On censorship: Janet Clare, ‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority’, Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship (1999 edition).
On the Herbert family: M. Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (1988). C. Burrow, The Complete Sonnets and Poems (2002) came out after my draft was completed but supports the dating of the sonnets adopted here, with one surprising caveat – a perplexing hint that the Dark Lady poems might be the earliest in the sequence. I assume a statistical quirk here, as Burrow appears to do – most of the poems to the woman are surely from the same period of the later 1590s? Stephen Booth, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1977) offers a rich commentary, as does Katherine Duncan-Jones, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (1997), and I have gratefully profited from both. Mary Wroth’s sonnets are in Woman Poets of the English Renaissance, ed. M. Wynne-Davies (1999). On Emilia Lanier there is now a full-scale study by Susanne Woods, Lanyer: a Renaissance woman poet (1999). Some of William Herberts poetry was published in Poems Written by the Rt Hon William Earl of Pembroke… (1660).
On the Jews: James Shapiro, Shakespeare and the Jews (1996) has a wealth of references. On the Bassano family: D. Lasocki and R. Prior, The Bassanos (1995).
On Simon Forman there has been a recent flurry of interest, including Barbara Howard Traister, The Notorious Astrological Physician of London (2000); A. L. Rowse, Sex and Society in Shakespeare’s London (1973) has more on the poets circle. On sex, cross-dressing and gender: Stephen Orgel is typically challenging in Impersonations (1996). On the book industry: Peter Blayney, The Bookshops in St Paul’s Churchyard (1990). Blayney also wrote the indispensable The First Folio of Shakespeare (1991).
For the War of the Poets: James Bednarz, Shakespeare and the Poets’ War (2001) is a fascinating detective story on which I have relied for the chronology. On the tragedies and Greek translation I am indebted to Louise Schleiner, ‘Latinized Greek Drama in Shakespeare’s Writing of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol XLI (1990), whose version of the Latin Orestes I have adapted here. Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet’s Purgatory (2001) looks at the changing relationship between the living and the dead in the sixteenth century. On Othello, E. A. J. Honigmann’s new Arden edition (1999); on Elizabethan black people in general Nabil Matar, Turks, Moors and Englishmen (1999), and Shakespeare and Race, ed. Catherine M. Alexander and Stanley Wells (2000).
On Ireland: C. Highley, Shakespeare, Spenser and the Crisis in Ireland (1997). On Macbeth: Gary Wills, Witches and Jesuits (1995). On King Lear: F. Brownlow, Shakespeare, Harsnett and the Devils of Denham (1993), to which I am deeply indebted here. See too J. Murphy, Darkness and Devils (1984). Two valuable older critical works are John Danby, Shakespeare’s Doctrine of Nature (1949) and Philip Edwards, Shakespeare and the Confines of Art (1968).
On revision and collaboration: K. Muir, Shakespeare as a Collaborator (1960); John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (1995); in King Lear. Division of the Kingdoms, ed. Gary Taylor and Michael Warren (1983); in Othello: E. A. J. Honigmann’s Arden edition (1999). B. Vickers, Shakespeare Co-author (2002) came out too late to be used here, but bears out the view of his collaborations adopted in this book.
New finds: the widely publicized recent ‘finds’ have all proved illusory. The famous Funeral Elegy, which now appears in many editions of the collected works, including the Norton and Riverside, is clearly not by Shakespeare at all, but by John Ford; the poem ‘Shall I Die?’ has not found acceptance; nor, sadly, has Peter Levi’s seductive party piece for Alice Strange; but hopes of finding more Shakespeare are not yet over. The most likely recent Shakespeare find is printed in W. A. Ringler and S. W. May, ‘An Epilogue Possibly by Shakespeare’, Modern Philology (1972): found in the commonplace book of a member of the Hunsdon household, it is an epilogue spoken to the queen ‘by the players, 1598’ which closely resembles Puck’s epilogue in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A throwaway, but this looks like the real thing.
On the culture of James I’s reign: James Doelman, King James I and the Religious Culture of England (2000). On the late plays: Simon Palfrey, Late Shakespeare (1997) is good on the language. Contexts: The Tempest and Its Travels, ed. P. Hulme and W. Sherman (2000) and G. de Sousa, Shakespeares Cross-cultural Encounters (2002); Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden (1999) on statues coming alive, child death, and dismembered families. On the late music: J. P. Cutts in Music and Letters, Vol IIIVI (1955) and Musique de la Troupe de Shakespeare (1959); Johnson’s music is transcribed in Ayres, ed. I. Spink (1974).
For children: Michael Rosen, William Shakespeare (2002) and Andy Gurr’s very breezy photographic re-creation William Shakespeare (1995) are highly recommended. For younger children there are Marcia Williams’s irresistible comic book versions. Novels include Geoffrey Trease, Cue for Treason (1940) and Susan Cooper, King of Shadows (1999). A. Claybourne and R. Treays, The Usborne World of Shakespeare (2001) is especially recommended, with over fifty links to that ‘fantast-icall Engine, call’d Internet.
Finally, the afterlife: Stanley Wells, Shakespeare For All Time (2002) is a typically readable and humane survey; and John Gross, After Shakespeare (2002) has many gems; future editions might also include Michael Madhusudhan, a Bengali writer I first encountered nearly twenty years ago from the mouth of a wandering holy man one midnight on the burning ghats in Calcutta. A typical Bengali polymath, Madhusudhan was familiar with an incredible range of world literature, from Latin and Greek to Persian and Sanskrit; but in ‘The Hindu and the Anglo-Saxon’ (1856) he argues that English literature is the greatest, and Shakespeare the jewel in its crown. His favourite was the wonderful scene between Falstaff and Hal in the Blue Boar in Henry IV Part 1: Madhusudhan would trade it all for ‘Banish plump Jack and banish all the world’. So would this author. Additions for the paperback edition
In the two years since this book first appeared there has been much new work on Shakespeare’s life and work. Stephen Greenblatt’s Will in the World (2004), James Shapiro’s 1599 (2005) and Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare (2004) are full of exciting insights. On the texts, the latest editions in the new Arden Shakespeare and the Oxford Shakespeare continue to offer fresh insights and much closer dating of the plays. Recent recommended essay collections include Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, ed. D. Taylor and D. Beauregard (2003); Region, Religion and Patronage, ed. R. Dutton, A. Findlay and R. Wilson (2003); and the very stimulating Theatre and Religion, ed. R. Dutton, A. Findlay and R. Wilson (2003); Bob Bearman’s important reconsiderations of John Shakespeare’s Secret Testament and his civic and business career are in Shakespeare Quarterly (2003 and 2005). Shakespeare’s Sonnets by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells (2004) is a pithy summary of the scholarship in the excellent Oxford Shakespeare Topics series.