When I began to write this book, I planned an ending where William Shakespeare, who has left the stage as his eyesight fades, goes up the stairs with his wife and discovers that she has never loved the words he used to woo her, but has loved him, and still does, as he finds that he loves her.
Instead I wrote this.
There is nothing in this story that conflicts with any fact I have been able to find about William Shakespeare, though there are many points where this book is not the same as others’ conjectures about who he was and what he did. It is commonly said, for example, that Shakespeare’s plays were not published until after he died, by his friends who certainly arranged their publication in case some of them were lost, but earlier drafts of individual plays survive. It is impossible to know if they were pirated by actors who had played in them, or by those in the audience who took notes, or if Shakespeare himself arranged their sale. There are also records of his plays being performed even after his retirement from London, and before the publication of his collected plays after his death, especially Romeo and Juliet and Hamlet.
We know parts of Shakespeare’s life only from the records of the times: the subjects he would have learnt at school, where reading was valued but writing frowned upon; the food he would have eaten; the weather and those years when even the River Thames froze and it seemed summer would never come to England; the world where a man was supposed to keep to the estate he had been born to.
We know most about William Shakespeare from his plays. They tell us that few or none were written by one man; as was the custom, he took older plays and stories and even others’ poems and speeches and cast them into works of his own. He also rewrote them, as others would do after and probably before his death. The plays make it clear the author knew many older plays and classical works, and, of course, that he was a genius. A literary genius does not necessarily mean a financial one as well, but Shakespeare seems to have been both.
We also know the court, church and financial records of his family, and around those facts I wove this book.
The last six months of Shakespeare’s life were eventful ones, filled with the disgrace that must have blighted the household after so many years spent achieving, through careful financial planning, the estate and high regard of gentleman who was entitled to wear the King’s red livery from such humble and debt-ridden beginnings.
We also know that two months before he is said to have died Shakespeare wrote his will, stating that he was in full health; and that many, including those who had presumably seen him a few days before, were startled by his so unexpected death.
What healthy man writes his own epitaph for his tombstone? And one like that on Shakespeare’s grave? No words about his plays, his poems, his family. No ‘May he rest in heaven’ or ‘May flights of angels sing him to his rest’. Shakespeare had written epitaphs for others. Why did his own speak only of not disturbing his bones? At the time, it was relatively common for a family like Shakespeare’s to eventually have a family vault built and install a revered ancestor inside with his descendants. Why should Shakespeare mind if his bones were moved? Unless, of course, he wished to hide what his coffin held.
This is a work of fiction. And yet its ending is not just possible, but plausible.
William Shakespeare might well have decided to escape the growing disgrace brought upon his family. In fact, it was worse than I have described. For the sake of simplifying the plot, I have left out vile accusations against his other daughter, Susanna, which seem to have been quite unfounded but nevertheless would have been devastating, and other gossip. This was a time when it was easy to vanish and become just another foreigner at a foreign court. It was also a time when melodramatic plots, like the Overbury murder scandal referred to in this book, happened in real life, as well as in Shakespeare’s plays. A man might die of plague the day he caught it; or a king change a land’s religion to allow him to marry at will. Why should Shakespeare not add a final melodramatic plot to his life?
There are only two ways this theory could be proved or disproved: to look at Shakespeare’s bones (if anything remains but dust) to see if his DNA matches that of any of his family, though their remains too would be hundreds of years old and possibly useless. Shakespeare also appears to have no direct — or at least legitimate — descendants living now. Alternatively, the skull could be examined to see if it matches that of the man in the only portrait we have of Shakespeare. However, a 2016 MRI study of his grave showed there was no skull there — the one piece of evidence that might have identified whose bones lie there. The skull may have been stolen; or perhaps a skull was never there, in case the coffin was opened. Even if it was stolen, whose was it? Without the skull conforming to the distinctive shape in the portrait, we may never know.
Perhaps a manuscript may be found in a Venetian chest, or in a library in Verona, or high up on a bookshelf at the University of Bologna, with a poem that bears Shakespeare’s textual markers. This form of analysis is called stylistics, and it can be accurate enough to be accepted as evidence in court. And when we see the name on that ‘maybe’ manuscript, we can look for other works by the man who was once known as William Shakespeare, gentleman.
I began this book thinking I knew Shakespeare’s story. I continued to write, thinking ‘this is plausible’. I now think this ending is at least as likely as the commonly accepted story of Shakespeare’s death.
William Shakespeare, gentleman, might have died while William Shakespeare, poet, lived and wrote for years to come.
Yet perhaps I couldn’t write of Shakespeare’s death because I have never felt him to be dead. Shakespeare lives for all of us under the spell of all those words. Wherever they are read or spoken, Shakespeare cannot die.
WHAT HAPPENED NEXT?
Anne — known even these days as Anne Hathaway — Judith, Thomas Quiney, Susanna and Elizabeth and Dr Hall lived on. I could include their biographies here, but they have been written about many times and what is known of them is easily accessible.
But — as far as we know — none received an invitation to visit Venice, or Verona, to stay with an aging poet there. Or if they did, they did not write of it for future generations to read.
FOOD AND BOWELS
These mattered in Shakespeare’s England.
Labourers ate three meals a day. A gentleman ate dinner at about midday, then supper. Those meals said not just what you ate, but who you were. Could you afford to pay the church fine to eat meat on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays and other fasting days? Who did you dine with? Was your food from your own estate — which was the mark of a gentleman — or all bought from a market or a tavern? What gifts of food did you give, and what were you given? Food showed your status, health, and an indication of the health of your estate in the days when a gentleman’s household was almost self-sufficient as well as providing prodigious leftovers for the local poor. Recording that you ate heat-forced asparagus in January would mean that next year, in winter’s lean months, you could expect to eat it again, if you remembered to check that your beds were supplied with fresh manure to heat up the asparagus as the manure decayed.
Bowels and ‘waters’ mattered too, because the health of your bowels told you much about your own health in a time when there were no thermometers, blood-pressure monitors or blood tests, and few scientifically valid medical tests beyond taking the pulse, listening to the chest and checking the colour of your eyes. As Shakespeare’s own plays show, what a man ate was supposed to determine his moods. Burnt meat, for example, might bring choler or anger, as might mustard (see The Taming of the Shrew).
Courtiers routinely checked the contents of the King’s, Queen’s or any great man’s chamber pot, to know their health in order to better care for them. A sensible man did the same, and might keep a record, to know which foods suited him and which did not. This book was for William Shakespeare only. Writing about his bowels would be as important as writing about his love of food or finances, and in robust post-Tudor England, only slightly more private.
THE GENTLEMAN
It is difficult to translate the concept of ‘gentleman’ into today’s terms. It was not just a description of a man’s wealth and how he lived, not directly by trade or craft but on land rents and other suitable investments, but also a legal term. When Shakespeare bought a family coat of arms of a black banner bearing a silver spear, with the motto ‘Non sanz droict’ or ‘Not without right’, he also turned his whole family into ‘gentry’, officially part of the well-born of England. Their position was just below knights, who had the right to bear arms, although this right was somewhat confused by then as every man in England had the duty to arm himself with bow and arrows, and most males who could afford to wore swords, daggers or rapiers, even if they had no legal right to.
Position in society determined where you sat at table; whom you might marry; what jewels or clothes you might wear, and from what material; even how many meat courses you were allowed to eat at dinner. The craft of ‘player’ was relatively new when Shakespeare became one, and their position in society unclear. But it was still decidedly a trade, and while a craftsman might (rarely) become a gentleman, a gentleman would disgrace his family by earning money from a craft. A poet, on the other hand, was respected, and men of any station might write poems, essays or other worthy books.
Socially, there is no doubt that Shakespeare triumphed when he ‘burnt his books’ and became a gentleman. But could a writer as prolific as Shakespeare, who wrote with such inspired fury that he did not stop to blot his words, ever truly stop creating? The man who wrote the plays we know must have woven stories in his mind, even as a child; played with words as others played with bows and arrows as a youth. And when he was a gentleman? I believe Shakespeare would have written still.