His younger brother, Henry, continued the family tradition of farming; he rented land in Snitterfield and in a neighbouring parish. What little is known of him suggests pugnacity and a certain independence of mind. He was fined for assaulting one of his close relations — the husband of one of Mary Arden’s sisters — and in his eighties he was excommunicated from the church for failing to pay his tithes. He was also fined for breaching the Statute of Caps; he refused, in other words, to wear a cap on Sundays. He was fined on other occasions for various agricultural misdemeanours, and gaoled at different times for debt and for trespass. He was, perhaps, a “black sheep” in the Stratford farm landscape. But he exhibited a fierceness and hardiness that would inspire any young relative. Shakespeare might have inherited the vices of his uncle as well as the virtues of his father. Despite his reputation as a bad debtor Henry Shakespeare was good at acquiring and keeping his money. At his death a witness deposed that there was “plenty of money in his coffers”; his barns, too, were filled with corn and hay “of a great value.”9 Shakespeare came from a family of undoubted affluence, with all the ease and self-confidence that such affluence encourages.
CHAPTER 6
A Witty Mother,
Witlesse Else Her Sonne
It is an undoubted fact,” Charles Dickens once wrote, that “all remarkable men have remarkable mothers.” In the lineaments of the mature William Shakespeare, then, we might see the outline of Mary Arden. She is a formidable figure. She could plausibly claim to be part of a family that extended beyond the Norman Conquest. The Ardens had been “Lords of Warwick” and one of their number, Turchillus de Eardene, was credited in the Domesday Book with vast extents of land.1 The immediate beneficiaries of this wealth and gentility were the Ardens of Park Hall, in the north of the county of Warwickshire. They were a strongly Catholic family who were eventually harried and persecuted for their faith.
There is no proof that the Ardens of the village of Wilmcote were related to the wealthy landowners of Park Hall. In matters of lineage, however, what can be asserted or suggested is more important than that which can be proved. The shared surname was probably enough. It seems likely that the Ardens from whom Mary Arden was descended considered themselves to be connected, in however distant a fashion, with other branches of the Ardens and indeed with the grand families who were related to other Ardens— families such as the Sidneys and the Nevilles.
It has often been suggested that male actors are prone, in their earliest years, to identify with the mother; they internalise her behaviour and adopt her values. This at least is one explanation for the overriding concern for nobility and gentility in Shakespeare’s subsequent drama; he was known for playing kingly roles, and the aristocratic world is at the heart of his design. Could his mother have taught him his fastidiousness and his disdain? In the quest for an alternative Shakespeare, it has often been suggested that the dramatist was actually a well-known aristocrat; among these hypothetical aliases can be found the seventeenth Earl of Oxford and the sixth Earl of Derby. So it is a matter of the greatest irony that Shakespeare may have already considered himself to be of noble stock. He may even be alluding to his parents’ marriage at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (82-3):
Since once he plaide a Farmers eldest sonne,
“Twas where you woo’d the Gentlewoman so well.
Mary Arden’s father, Robert Arden, was an affluent yeoman farmer who owned two farmhouses and possessed more than 150 acres of land. Of such farmers William Harrison wrote that they “commonlie live wealthilie, keepe good houses, and travel to get riches … and with grazing, frequenting of markets and keeping of servants do come to great welthe.”2 Robert Arden was in fact the most prosperous farmer, and the largest landowner, in Wilmcote. The village itself was three miles from Stratford, situated in cleared woodland; it was close to the very edge of the forest from which the family derived its name. The Ardens were nourished with a specific sense of belonging.
They lived here in a single-storey farmhouse, built at the beginning of the sixteenth century, with its barns and its cowsheds, its dovecote and its woodpiles, its pump and its apiary. Robert Arden possessed oxen and bullocks, horses and calves and colts and sheep, bees and poultry. There were plentiful quantities of barley and oats. Shakespeare’s mother, just like Shakespeare’s father, was brought up as an integral part of a working farm. This may be the best way of describing Robert Arden himself: he was of ancient farming stock, with pretensions to gentility.
An inventory of his possessions has survived. Among these were the farmhouse at Snitterfield, where Richard Shakespeare and his family had recently lived, as well as the house in Wilmcote. In that household there was a hall and a second chamber for sleeping, as well as a kitchen, but the accommodation was still somewhat cramped; Mary Arden had six sisters, and she grew up in an environment where there was much competition for attention and affection. In the inventory, too, there are references to table-boards and benches, cupboards and little tables in the hall or principal room; there were shelves, too, and three chairs. From these bare memoranda we can fill a sixteenth-century room in imagination. The second chamber contained a feather bed, two mattresses and seven pairs of sheets, as well as towels and tablecloths kept in two wooden coffers.
In the rooms were hung painted cloths for decoration and edification. These depicted classical or religious scenes, such as Daniel in the Lions’ Den or the Siege of Troy, and would have dominated the interiors of this relatively modest farmhouse. Mary Arden was bequeathed at least one of these painted tapestries in her father’s will, and it is most likely to have ended up on a wall in Henley Street. In Macbeth Shakespeare refers to the “Eye of Childhood that feares a painted Deuill” (595-6), and Falstaff mentions “Lazarus in the painted cloth” (1 Henry IV, 2287).
When Mary Arden brought the painted cloth with her from her family home, and became the mistress of Henley Street, she was probably in her seventeenth or eighteenth year. Her husband was a decade older and already, as we have seen, a rising man. She was the youngest of Robert Arden’s daughters, and may have some claim to being the most favoured. Alone among her kin she was left a specific piece of land. Her father bequeathed to her “all my lande in Willmecote cawlid Asbyes and the crop apone the grounde sowne and tyllide as hitt is.”3 From this we may deduce that she was dependable and practical. No farmer would leave land to an incompetent daughter. She was also healthy and vigorous, giving birth to many children and living to the age of sixty-eight. We may plausibly imagine her also to be energetic, intelligent and quick-witted; in a household of seven sisters she would also have learnt the virtues of tact and compliance. It is not known whether she was literate, but her mark upon a bond is well formed and even graceful. She could wield a pen in a single movement. Her private seal was of a galloping horse, an emblem of agility and industry. The fact that she had a seal at all is a sign of affluence and respectability. Shakespeare has left no record of her, but it has been surmised that her outlines can be glimpsed in a number of strong-minded mothers who appear in his dramas — Volumnia extolling Coriolanus’s achievements, the Countess reminding Bertram of his duty, the Duchess of York berating King Richard. It is also possible, and indeed plausible, that the high-spirited and intelligent young women of the comedies owe something to the memories of his mother.