straitened condition of the Shakespeares, and the danger of Mary's losing Asbies, and therefore left her by will the sixth part of the Snitterfield property which she had inherited.

At any rate, on the appointed day, September 29, 1580, John Shakespeare came "to the dwelling house of the said Edmund Lambert," and tendered the £40 due for the redemption of Asbies. But Lambert flatly refused to accept it, "saying that he owed him other money, and unless that he, the said John, would pay him all together, as well the said forty pounds as the other money which he owed him over and above, he would not receive the said forty pounds." Possibly this "other money" was that referred to in a list of debts due to Roger Sadler, appended to Sadler's will (proved on January 17, 1579): "Item, of Edmund Lambert and ... Cornish, for the debt of Mr. John Shakespeare, vli." Lambert, no doubt, was forced to pay the sum, and hence his angry insistence that his brother-in-law refund that amount before redeeming the Wilmecote property. John, however, was unable to pay both sums demanded; and thus Asbies, as well as the Snitterfield properties, was lost to the Shakespeares for ever.1

But the £40 in cash which Lambert refused to accept did not, as we should naturally expect, ease the pecuniary distress of the unfortunate glover. Possibly this was due to his being at once called upon to pay a fine of £40 imposed on him by the court at Westminster. The Coram Rege Roll, Trinity, 22 Elizabeth (i.e., May 22June 12, 1580), shows that "John Shakespeare, of Strat

1 From later suits over the property it appears that Lambert orally promised that, after the other moneys owing to him had been paid, he would at any time accept the £40, and restore Asbies to the Shakespeares. Lambert died in 1587, and his son refused to abide by his father's promise.

? For the details that have been discovered see C. C. Stopes, Shakespeare's Environment, pp. 41–42.

ford-super-Avon, in Co. Warr., yeoman,' 1 was fined £20 because he failed to appear before the Queen in her court at Westminster, as summoned, to be bound over to keep the peace; and his two securities, John Awdley, of Nottingham, in the neighboring county of Notts, hatmaker, and Thomas Colley, of Stoke, in the adjacent county of Stafford, were each fined £10. At the same time John was fined an additional £20 because, as one of the sureties for Awdley, he failed to bring that person before the Queen on the day specified. The nature of the indiscretion which warranted a summons to the court at Westminster is not revealed, but the records, brief as they are, suggest an important unwritten chapter in John's life. The payment of the two fines amounting to £40 must have been a serious blow to him in his already straitened circumstances.2

We are not surprised to discover that during the next five years, from 1580 to 1585, he was absent from all meetings of the Town Council - with a single exception: in 1582 he attended one meeting, apparently in order to vote for his friend John Sadler, then a candidate for the office of High Bailiff. At last, in 1586, he was dropped from the list of Aldermen, and another person was elected in his place, the reason assigned being: “Mr. Shakespeare doth not come to the halls when they be warned, nor hath not done, of long time." The kindly sympathy of his fellow Aldermen is revealed by their long sufferance in his case, and by the fact that during

1 The shoemaker by the name of John Shakespeare did not come to Stratford until four years later; see Halliwell-Phillipps, Outlines, ii, 137–40.

* Possibly this is why he was not able to accept Lambert's offer for redeeming Asbies, as explained in note 1, page 30.

3 So far as the records show, and these are almost complete. Very often John was the only Alderman absent.

The brother of Hamnet Sadler, for whom the poet named his only son. There seems to have existed the warmest friendship between the Sadlers and the Shakespeares.

all these years they had exacted from him no fine for absence.1

John had now sunk to the very bottom of his fortunes, and we must next turn our attention to his eldest son, who was destined soon to restore the family prestige, and to make the name "Shakespeare" far more illustrious than the village glover could ever have dreamed in the palmiest days of his success as "Justice of the Peace and Bailiff of the Town" of Stratford.2

1 Halliwell-Phillipps, followed by Lee and others, states that the John Shakespeare harassed in the courts during 1585 and 1586 by John Brown for a certain debt, was the poet's father. There is considerable doubt about this. In 1586, after securing a writ of distraint, Brown made a return that the said John "had nothing whereon to distrain." But the poet's father had not a little property in Stratford. In this year he was accepted in Coventry as sufficient bail for one Pryce indicted for felony; in the following year he offered to redeem Asbies with £40, and in 1590 he is listed as the owner of two houses in Henley Street. Even Halliwell-Phillipps admits that the words "are not to be taken literally." Mrs. Stopes suggests that the person was the John Shakespeare who lived at Clifford Chambers near Stratford. Furthermore the John Shakespeare mentioned in a list of recusants in 1592 as "not coming monthly to church" because of "fear of process of debt," may not be, as some scholars suppose, the poet's father. The records of 1591 and 1592 show him not as hiding from the constable, but as conspicuous in the law courts themselves, and as serving with other well-known citizens in making the post mortem inventories of the goods of Ralph Shaw and of Henry Field. Nor is there any definite reason for believing that he had not conformed to the established religion. It was while he was Chamberlain of the town that the images in the Guild Chapel were "defaced"; when he became High Bailiff he took the oath of supremacy; and in 1571, while he was Chief Alderman, the ecclesiastical vestments were ordered to be sold. For further and convincing evidence that John was a Protestant, see Fripp, op. cit., pp. xxxi, xlvii-viii, li, 128. The recusant may have been the shoemaker, John Shakespeare, who had attained some prominence in Stratford, having been elected ale-taster in 1585, and Constable in 1586; and in the year of this return he was serving as Master of the Company of Shoemakers. His disappearance from Stratford shortly after may have been the result of this persecution. Or, as has been suggested by others, the person may have been the John Shakespeare of Clifford Chambers. In view of the doubt attaching to both of these episodes, it seems proper to treat them only in a footnote.

? Most of the documents on which this chapter is based will be found reproduced in J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps' monumental Outlines, ii, 11-17, 17382, 215-48; and in Richard Savage and Edgar I. Fripp, Minutes and Accounts of the Corporation of Stratford-upon-Avon, 1921. Other documents have been referred to in the footnotes.

CHAPTER III

BOYHOOD AND EARLY ENVIRONMENT

For two and a half years William was "the only child" of John and Mary. Upon him, therefore, the fond young parents would lavish all their affection. Moreover to him, as their "first-born son and heir," they would tie their heartstrings in a way that probably set him apart from the later children. He was to inherit, so they thought, all the family property - Asbies, the gem of the Arden estate, a portion of the Snitterfield farms once tilled by his grandfather, and the valuable Stratford realties gradually being accumulated by his father. If we may believe that in 1576 the prosperous Alderman made a tentative step towards securing a coat of arms, we catch a glimpse of the secret ambition he cherished for his son. Surely it was in William, rather than in the other children, that John and Mary garnered up their hearts.

It is not difficult for us to picture the boy. We know that he had auburn hair, large hazel eyes, ruddy cheeks, a high forehead, and a gentle disposition. Perhaps this last quality came to him from his mother. "Mary Arden! the name breathes of poetry!" exclaims Knight. May we not safely add that her son's poetry breathes of her? For surely it was at his mother's knee that he acquired his conception of those gentle and noble elements of woman's character which he so effectively embodied in his plays. His father was of a different type, frankly bourgeois, with a cheery disposition and a readiness to "crack a jest" that won him favor with his neighbors. The Plume Manuscript,' on the authority of Sir John Mennes, sup1 Anecdotes compiled by Archdeacon Thomas Plume about 1656.

plies us with a vivid description of him, which, though already quoted, will bear repetition:

He (Shakespeare) was a glover's son. Sir John Mennes saw once his old father in his shop — a merry-cheekt old man that said, "Will was a good honest fellow, but he darest have crackt a jest with him at any time." 1

Brief as this is, it gives us a full-length sketch of the village tradesman. And it reveals to us, too, the genial relations that must have existed between him and his little son, who, we know, inherited much of his temper. Bishop Fuller, writing of the dramatist, tells us that his "genius generally was jocular," and we have evidence of his ability to hold his own with the best wits of the day. When, indeed, we consider the diversified characters of his mother and father we can understand the extraordinary range of his sympathies - from a Desdemona and an Imogen to a Falstaff and a Dogberry a range unequaled by any other poet.

In the Henley Street home, among reasonably well-todo circumstances, at least at first, young William grew up as the eldest of six children. Gilbert was two and a half years younger, Joan five years younger, Anne seven and a half years younger, Richard ten years younger, and Edmund, the baby, sixteen years younger. All lived to maturity except Anne, who died at the attractive age of eight. We may suppose that William, as the eldest brother, was required to care for the smaller children; and this, perhaps, constituted his earliest training for his

2

1 Sir John Mennes could hardly have said that he himself saw John Shakespeare in his shop; but doubtless he was quoting some one who had seen him there. The error is probably due to the writer of the Plume MS.

2 The affection in which little Anne was held is indicated by the fact that her father, though at this time in very straitened circumstances, ordered at her funeral not only the bell but also the use of the pall, which was commonly dispensed with.