Say John Shakespeare's bonnet was not orange tawny, what colour would it be?
Your straw colour. Your purple in grain. Your french crown colour. Or your perfect yellow.
Those be the colours the clients of John Shakespeare would recognise. Consult Bacon's Of Usurie, if you doubt me. That chicken-stuffing essayist knew his groats when it came down to the low trade of lending at high interest.
I don't want to make too much of this, believe me, dear reader. I met John Shakespeare once and did not dislike him, despite the way he stood next to me pissing in the jakes and kept clucking his tongue. But the fact remains that the man did rank, bad business as a usurer. No doubt butchery is too much like hard work when you're well-oiled, and the glover's scissors and compasses require too steady a hand. Hence the orange tawny bonnet, and the big bag of gold coins under the perfect yellow cloak. If you sit in the tavern all day, then why not let your money work for you?
It was somewhat of an open secret in Stratford, but I found no one who was prepared even many years later to talk much about it. At the time when Shakespeare's father practised his money-lending, all forms of such activity were illegal.
So severe a view of the crime was taken by the government that informers were rewarded by a grant of a half-share of the penalties imposed upon offenders. Thus, John Shakespeare faced at least two prosecutions before the Exchequer which I have turned up.
In the first, one Anthony Harrison of Evesham, Worcestershire, accuses John Shakespeare of having lent out the sum of PS100 to John Mussum of Wulton in Warwick, over a one-year period, at a rate of 20% interest. The transaction is reported to have taken place at Westminster. (JS travelled and traded more widely than you might think who think he was just a country yokel, sir.)
The second case arose at the instigation of one James Langrake of Whittlebury, Northamptonshire. He accused 'Shagpere alias Shakespeare', 'glover' of 'Stratford upon Haven', of lending out PS80 over a term of one month, to be repaid with 20% interest - an extortionate annual rate of interest of some 242%!
(Usury at 10% was the highest rate ever permitted in the last century, and then only at exceptional times or in exceptional circumstances. No usury at all was lawful when jolly Jack Shakespeare was caught.)
A writ was issued to bring 'Shagpere' (alias Shylock?) to court. He complied of his own volition, and was heavily fined.
Shakespeare's father was also found guilty of illegal wool-dealing. He had purchased 200 tods of wool (5600 pounds) in conspiracy with another illegal dealer, and 100 tods on his own account. He had no licences for any of this.
In fact, all his long life, John Shakespeare was embroiled in legal disputes. I refuse to tell the tale of the boring Lamberts. Suffice it to say that it involves his relentless pursuit of certain of his wife's relatives for sums of money owing to him, or allegedly owing to him. William himself was dragged into this by his dad.
Enough to say that by my calculations (after researches which by no means exhaust the matter) John Shakespeare was involved in no less than twenty-five legal suits or disputes over a forty-year period. Some of these were no more than cases of tradesmen collecting their debts. But some, as I've just shown, were a deal more shady.
Where does this leave young William?
Well, gentles, it is possible that he had employment for a while drafting bonds for his father's trading transactions. And it is certain that following his marriage to Anne Hathaway, the couple had to lodge in the Henley Street house. Susanna was born there, and the twins Hamlet and Judith two years later.
This, then, readers, was the world in which William Shakespeare was living - with a wife and three small children to keep, a mother perhaps unnaturally jealous of her daughter-in-law, and a father who was creeping about playing Shylock when not busy cavorting as Falstaff.
It is no wonder that our Shakespeare now turned briefly to a life of crime himself, as you shall quickly hear.
Chapter Fifty-Six In which Lucy is lousy
The story is soon told. Shakespeare fell in with bad company, a misfortune common enough to young, romantic fellows. Amongst them there were some who made a frequent practice of deer-stealing, and these engaged with him more than once in robbing a park that belonged to the magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, near Stratford. On moonlit nights they killed rabbits as well as deer. Worse, when Lucy threatened the poachers with prosecution, Will wrote a ballad upon him, which he then went and hung on the gates of Charlecote Park.
Pickleherring has in this 56th box the first stanza of that ballad, put down in writing for him by one of Shakespeare's accomplices in crime, the amiable Mr Thomas Jones of Tardebigge. It is all that Mr Jones could well remember. It goes like this:
A parliament member, a justice of peace,
At home a poor scarecrow, in London an ass,
If lousy is Lucy (as some volk miscall it)
Then Lucy is lousy, whatever befall it.
He thinks himself great,
Yet an ass in his state
We allow by his ears but with asses to mate.
If Lucy is lousy (as some volk miscall it)
Sing O lousy Lucy whatever befall it.
Apart from the rhythm (which I count a pleasant rollick), there are several points of interest to this stanza.
First, we might learn from it what Mr Shakespeare's voice sounded like when he was young, before he came to London - volk being the way he pronounced the word folk. Old Mr Jones was insistent upon this spelling - both that volk is the way Shakespeare wrote it, and also the way that he said it. 'It is the way, besides, that King Alfred would have said it,' he told me, with a great air of triumph. (A hit for my country history! A very palpable hit!) Yet I should in fairness add that the mild-mannered gentleman might have been missing the point, since by spelling the word volk Shakespeare could be extending some criticism of those among his fellows who pronounce the name Lucy as lousy. Already he is standing at a little distance from the crowd. They say Lucy as lousy. He doesn't. He says Lucy is lousy.
Second, we might observe that the lampoon is scurrile. Lucy's ass's ears are similar equipment to a cuckold's horns, and in lines 6 and 7 what is being suggested is that the man has to submit to buggery to achieve his sexual satisfactions. (I have even wondered whether Mr Jones modified the seventh line for what he took to be my maiden ears, and whether the fifth word in that line should not properly if improperly be rear.)
Third, there is a triple (if trivial) pun being made upon Lucy's coat of arms - 'three silver pikes gasping'. A pike is a luce is a louse.
Fourth, last, and most important, we can take pleasure in the way this whole tiny constellation of wit appears again years later in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where foolish Shallow is Lucy, with 'a dozen white luces' in his coat of arms.
Reminiscing for me, Mr Thomas Jones remarked that Will had never been much of a poacher. He was 'a cack-handed tradesman with a snare', and much too tender-hearted - once they had taken a hare alive, and Will had let her go before they could 'dacently' club her. Mr Jones also described, unbidden, the hated magistrate, saying that while Lucy was very thin and queer, he was 'lecherous as a monkey'. He had never heard of Falstaff's description of Justice Shallow: