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| Crime, social climbing, shotgun weddings: meet the Shakespeares | Crime, social climbing, shotgun weddings: meet the Shakespeares |
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| Shakespeare’s inclusiveness, the overwhelming sense in the plays that all human life is there, means that focusing on any aspect of the work will produce dividends. Shakespeare and war, Shakespeare and love, Shakespeare and medicine, Shakespeare and sodomy: all provocative, all surprising, all resonant. But Shakespeare and the family is in a different league. He is, in a particularly potent sense, the Family Man. These fundamental relationships – mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, cousins – are at the heart of one play after another. How else could it be for a writer whose theme is the experience of being human? Which of us has not been formed, for better or for worse, by those relationships, or by their absence? And beyond the domestic kingdom, the family looms large in his work in quite another way: the destinies of nations, equally determined by blood ties. | Shakespeare’s inclusiveness, the overwhelming sense in the plays that all human life is there, means that focusing on any aspect of the work will produce dividends. Shakespeare and war, Shakespeare and love, Shakespeare and medicine, Shakespeare and sodomy: all provocative, all surprising, all resonant. But Shakespeare and the family is in a different league. He is, in a particularly potent sense, the Family Man. These fundamental relationships – mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, nephews, cousins – are at the heart of one play after another. How else could it be for a writer whose theme is the experience of being human? Which of us has not been formed, for better or for worse, by those relationships, or by their absence? And beyond the domestic kingdom, the family looms large in his work in quite another way: the destinies of nations, equally determined by blood ties. |
| Of course, Shakespeare was a family man in a less universal sense: he was born into a large one and he became the head of another (rather smaller). We know nothing of his private thoughts; we have no diaries, no letters, no conversation books. But we do know the important things in his life: where he was born, to whom and in what circumstances; where he was married, who his wife and children were, and where he lived. In particular, we know quite a lot about his father John, the son of a farmer, who had set himself up with some success as a glove-maker and leatherworker who was also in the wool trade (illegally, as it happens). John Shakespeare rapidly worked his way through local government: first he was elected borough ale-taster – nice work if you can get it – then chamberlain, which required him to arrange visits of travelling players to Stratford. No doubt little William had a front-row seat, thanks to his father’s job. Soon, John was elected high bailiff – mayor, in effect. The name of Shakespeare really counted for something in Stratford. | Of course, Shakespeare was a family man in a less universal sense: he was born into a large one and he became the head of another (rather smaller). We know nothing of his private thoughts; we have no diaries, no letters, no conversation books. But we do know the important things in his life: where he was born, to whom and in what circumstances; where he was married, who his wife and children were, and where he lived. In particular, we know quite a lot about his father John, the son of a farmer, who had set himself up with some success as a glove-maker and leatherworker who was also in the wool trade (illegally, as it happens). John Shakespeare rapidly worked his way through local government: first he was elected borough ale-taster – nice work if you can get it – then chamberlain, which required him to arrange visits of travelling players to Stratford. No doubt little William had a front-row seat, thanks to his father’s job. Soon, John was elected high bailiff – mayor, in effect. The name of Shakespeare really counted for something in Stratford. |
| His father's public disgrace – and the sudden poverty that followed – had to be character-forming | His father's public disgrace – and the sudden poverty that followed – had to be character-forming |
| But when William was 13, his father’s rise came to a shuddering halt. He was prosecuted for wool-dealing and, more seriously, for usury – extending loans with interest, a heinous offence in Elizabethan eyes. His debts barred him from attending council meetings and even prevented him from going to church, for fear of being arrested. Small-town dramas, these, but for a child, epic: seeing one’s father publicly disgraced, living with the obloquy – not to mention the sudden poverty – can only be character-forming. This traumatic jolt to the family may not be unconnected to Shakespeare’s astounding productivity and his drive towards stability and social standing, as well as providing the subject of much of his work: sudden dispossession, banishment, exile. Before his fall from grace, John Shakespeare had applied for a coat of arms; 25 years later it was finally granted, and it is widely assumed that it was his by now prosperous, renowned and well-connected son who had arranged it for him. The son had become his father’s father. | But when William was 13, his father’s rise came to a shuddering halt. He was prosecuted for wool-dealing and, more seriously, for usury – extending loans with interest, a heinous offence in Elizabethan eyes. His debts barred him from attending council meetings and even prevented him from going to church, for fear of being arrested. Small-town dramas, these, but for a child, epic: seeing one’s father publicly disgraced, living with the obloquy – not to mention the sudden poverty – can only be character-forming. This traumatic jolt to the family may not be unconnected to Shakespeare’s astounding productivity and his drive towards stability and social standing, as well as providing the subject of much of his work: sudden dispossession, banishment, exile. Before his fall from grace, John Shakespeare had applied for a coat of arms; 25 years later it was finally granted, and it is widely assumed that it was his by now prosperous, renowned and well-connected son who had arranged it for him. The son had become his father’s father. |
| We know much less about Shakespeare’s mother Mary, but the bare facts are suggestive. She was a cut above John socially – indeed, John’s father had been a tenant of Mary’s father. The Ardens were well-established Warwickshire gentry, and it is hard to believe that they regarded the vivacious young glover as a catch: it is not unreasonable to assume that it was love-match. Certainly, it was a productive partnership: Mary had eight children, though three of them – all daughters – died young. William had been preceded by two sisters, both killed by the plague. The boy was the first of John and Mary’s children to survive. A son and heir – how cherished he must have been. | We know much less about Shakespeare’s mother Mary, but the bare facts are suggestive. She was a cut above John socially – indeed, John’s father had been a tenant of Mary’s father. The Ardens were well-established Warwickshire gentry, and it is hard to believe that they regarded the vivacious young glover as a catch: it is not unreasonable to assume that it was love-match. Certainly, it was a productive partnership: Mary had eight children, though three of them – all daughters – died young. William had been preceded by two sisters, both killed by the plague. The boy was the first of John and Mary’s children to survive. A son and heir – how cherished he must have been. |
| His early years would have been dominated, according to Elizabethan custom, by his mother: fathers were more or less absent from their young children’s lives. Partly because of the high rate of infant mortality, children were lavished with affection, prized, coddled and adored; the early Elizabethans were the first generation to fill the nursery with toys. Until they went to school, boy children basked in the attentions of womenfolk: relatives, neighbours, even possibly, during the good years, a nurse. Shakespeare only rarely writes of the extraordinary intimacy between mothers and sons, but Hermione and Mamillius, in The Winter’s Tale, embody every affectionate and tender relationship of that sort; Hamlet and Gertrude, every dangerously close one. | His early years would have been dominated, according to Elizabethan custom, by his mother: fathers were more or less absent from their young children’s lives. Partly because of the high rate of infant mortality, children were lavished with affection, prized, coddled and adored; the early Elizabethans were the first generation to fill the nursery with toys. Until they went to school, boy children basked in the attentions of womenfolk: relatives, neighbours, even possibly, during the good years, a nurse. Shakespeare only rarely writes of the extraordinary intimacy between mothers and sons, but Hermione and Mamillius, in The Winter’s Tale, embody every affectionate and tender relationship of that sort; Hamlet and Gertrude, every dangerously close one. |
| Shakespeare’s siblings, about whom we know only the bare essentials, followed at regular intervals – Gilbert, born when Shakespeare was two, Joan when he was four, Anne two years later (she died aged eight, when Shakespeare was 15). Richard was born three years later, and Edmund, the last, who became an actor, arrived when Shakespeare was 16. William outlived them all, except for Joan. The death of children tolls through Shakespeare’s life, most notably the demise – almost certainly from plague – of his own son, Hamnet, at the age of 11, leaving behind a twin, Judith, and another sister, the Shakespeares’ firstborn, Susannah. | Shakespeare’s siblings, about whom we know only the bare essentials, followed at regular intervals – Gilbert, born when Shakespeare was two, Joan when he was four, Anne two years later (she died aged eight, when Shakespeare was 15). Richard was born three years later, and Edmund, the last, who became an actor, arrived when Shakespeare was 16. William outlived them all, except for Joan. The death of children tolls through Shakespeare’s life, most notably the demise – almost certainly from plague – of his own son, Hamnet, at the age of 11, leaving behind a twin, Judith, and another sister, the Shakespeares’ firstborn, Susannah. |
| Susannah, as it happens, had been conceived out of wedlock: Shakespeare’s wife Anne was three months pregnant when she walked down the aisle. It may have been a shotgun wedding; more interesting, perhaps, is the age gap between them. At 26, Anne was eight years older. Her only appearance in the historical record is, famously, in Shakespeare’s will, in which he leaves her his “second-best bed”; equally famously, it has been established that this was no slight, but a mark of profound affection – it is the bed in which they would have spent their married life. | Susannah, as it happens, had been conceived out of wedlock: Shakespeare’s wife Anne was three months pregnant when she walked down the aisle. It may have been a shotgun wedding; more interesting, perhaps, is the age gap between them. At 26, Anne was eight years older. Her only appearance in the historical record is, famously, in Shakespeare’s will, in which he leaves her his “second-best bed”; equally famously, it has been established that this was no slight, but a mark of profound affection – it is the bed in which they would have spent their married life. |
| His daughter Judith married a dodgy vintner, who got them both excommunicated | His daughter Judith married a dodgy vintner, who got them both excommunicated |
| Shakespeare himself disappears from the historical record for nearly a decade. Then, from 1592, he was mostly in London, so how much Anne saw of him is to be questioned. Certainly there were no more children, and it is to be presumed that Shakespeare missed his kids’ growing-up. From his mid-30s, though still based in London, he began to transfer his centre of operations back to his native town. The girls both married: Susannah satisfied every parent’s highest hopes by marrying a doctor, a brilliant and successful one. In 1608, she presented him with a child – the only grandchild Shakespeare knew, Elizabeth, of whom Shakespeare, relocated to Stratford, presumably saw more than he had done of his own children. | Shakespeare himself disappears from the historical record for nearly a decade. Then, from 1592, he was mostly in London, so how much Anne saw of him is to be questioned. Certainly there were no more children, and it is to be presumed that Shakespeare missed his kids’ growing-up. From his mid-30s, though still based in London, he began to transfer his centre of operations back to his native town. The girls both married: Susannah satisfied every parent’s highest hopes by marrying a doctor, a brilliant and successful one. In 1608, she presented him with a child – the only grandchild Shakespeare knew, Elizabeth, of whom Shakespeare, relocated to Stratford, presumably saw more than he had done of his own children. |
| Meanwhile, Judith made a spectacularly bad marriage (at the age of 31) to a dodgy vintner who managed not to get the marriage licence in time, which led to both of them being excommunicated, a terrifying punishment for an Elizabethan. Thomas Quiney was then prosecuted for “carnal copulation” with a local woman who had died along with their baby. All this happened in Shakespeare’s last couple of months, in time for him to change the provisions of his will to protect Judith’s legacy. In due course, Quiney and Judith had three children; the first, Shakespeare Quiney, died in infancy. But Shakespeare knew none of these children; he returned to Arthur’s bosom on 23 April 1616, not long after the wedding. | Meanwhile, Judith made a spectacularly bad marriage (at the age of 31) to a dodgy vintner who managed not to get the marriage licence in time, which led to both of them being excommunicated, a terrifying punishment for an Elizabethan. Thomas Quiney was then prosecuted for “carnal copulation” with a local woman who had died along with their baby. All this happened in Shakespeare’s last couple of months, in time for him to change the provisions of his will to protect Judith’s legacy. In due course, Quiney and Judith had three children; the first, Shakespeare Quiney, died in infancy. But Shakespeare knew none of these children; he returned to Arthur’s bosom on 23 April 1616, not long after the wedding. |
| Families do not come out of the plays tremendously well, it has to be said. The two most famous ones are those in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet’s family is a byword for all dysfunctional families, with its overwrought mother-son relationship, its physically absent though emotionally present father and its usurping stepfather. Nor is Hamlet’s the only family in the play: Polonius has two children whom he seeks to control, setting spies on to his own son when the boy goes to university, personally arranging for the King and Queen to eavesdrop on his hapless daughter Ophelia. The play’s third family – or dynasty, in this case – is that of Fortinbras, the young Norwegian crown prince who invades Denmark at the end of the play. Both he and Hamlet are named after their fathers, whom they live to avenge. But when Hamlet meets the ghost of the father with whom he is so obsessed, the spirit has no tenderness for his boy: he is in a lather of rage and agony, desperate to spur his son on to the revenge that alone will salve his soul. | Families do not come out of the plays tremendously well, it has to be said. The two most famous ones are those in Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Hamlet’s family is a byword for all dysfunctional families, with its overwrought mother-son relationship, its physically absent though emotionally present father and its usurping stepfather. Nor is Hamlet’s the only family in the play: Polonius has two children whom he seeks to control, setting spies on to his own son when the boy goes to university, personally arranging for the King and Queen to eavesdrop on his hapless daughter Ophelia. The play’s third family – or dynasty, in this case – is that of Fortinbras, the young Norwegian crown prince who invades Denmark at the end of the play. Both he and Hamlet are named after their fathers, whom they live to avenge. But when Hamlet meets the ghost of the father with whom he is so obsessed, the spirit has no tenderness for his boy: he is in a lather of rage and agony, desperate to spur his son on to the revenge that alone will salve his soul. |
| Fathers do rather tend to rage in Shakespeare: they are forever erupting unconscionably. “Shall I be heard?” roars Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, breaking into the nursery where his boy Mamillius is luxuriating in the playfully loving atmosphere created by his mother and her ladies-in-waiting. Juliet’s father responds to her refusal to marry the man he and his wife have lined up for her with such sudden and violent rage that even the nurse is shocked: | Fathers do rather tend to rage in Shakespeare: they are forever erupting unconscionably. “Shall I be heard?” roars Leontes in The Winter’s Tale, breaking into the nursery where his boy Mamillius is luxuriating in the playfully loving atmosphere created by his mother and her ladies-in-waiting. Juliet’s father responds to her refusal to marry the man he and his wife have lined up for her with such sudden and violent rage that even the nurse is shocked: |
| Wife, we scarce thought us blest That God had lent us but this only child | Wife, we scarce thought us blest That God had lent us but this only child |
| shouts Capulet. | shouts Capulet. |
| But now I see this one is one too much, And that we have a curse in having her: Out on her, hilding! | But now I see this one is one too much, And that we have a curse in having her: Out on her, hilding! |
| Similarly, in Much Ado about Nothing, when Leonato, the Governor of Messina, a genial old buffer, hears an unsubstantiated rumour that his daughter Hero has had sex with a stranger before her wedding, his immediate response is to wish her dead. In The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes, in an ecstasy of jealousy, denounces his heavily pregnant wife Hermione, throwing her into prison, where she gives birth to a daughter, whom he commands to be left on a mountainside to die. The oracle of Delphi proclaims Hermione’s innocence, but Leontes refuses to believe it. Hearing this, she dies (or seems to); their adored son Mamillius, shattered by the grief and distress that Leontes has inflicted on them all, dies, for real. | Similarly, in Much Ado about Nothing, when Leonato, the Governor of Messina, a genial old buffer, hears an unsubstantiated rumour that his daughter Hero has had sex with a stranger before her wedding, his immediate response is to wish her dead. In The Winter’s Tale, King Leontes, in an ecstasy of jealousy, denounces his heavily pregnant wife Hermione, throwing her into prison, where she gives birth to a daughter, whom he commands to be left on a mountainside to die. The oracle of Delphi proclaims Hermione’s innocence, but Leontes refuses to believe it. Hearing this, she dies (or seems to); their adored son Mamillius, shattered by the grief and distress that Leontes has inflicted on them all, dies, for real. |
| Together they embark on a royal rampage, drinking, whoring, robbing and outraging respectability | Together they embark on a royal rampage, drinking, whoring, robbing and outraging respectability |
| Elsewhere in the Shakespearean universe, fathers are exigent, cold, haughty. Henry IV, having secured the throne by political cunning, expects his son, also Henry, to emulate his example of sobriety and focus, but the boy knows better what he needs both as a man and as a future king, and seeks out an alternative father in the brothels of London. This other father, Sir John Falstaff, disreputable to the core but with the airs of a fallen monarch, pairs up with the lad, nicknaming him Hal, and together they embark on a royal rampage, eating, drinking, whoring, robbing and outraging respectability wherever they encounter it. The Boar’s Head provides an alternative family for the young Prince, with Mistress Quickly a fussing mother, Doll Tearsheet a randy cousin. When Falstaff and the Eastcheap gang have restored Hal to the human race, Hal brutally ditches the old ruffian and makes his peace with the real father, now dying, that he is about to succeed in the actual world. No mention, again, of mothers. With Coriolanus, the opposite is true: altogether too much mother. Volumnia, terrifying in her rigidity, drives him first into standing, reluctantly, for consul and then to his death. | Elsewhere in the Shakespearean universe, fathers are exigent, cold, haughty. Henry IV, having secured the throne by political cunning, expects his son, also Henry, to emulate his example of sobriety and focus, but the boy knows better what he needs both as a man and as a future king, and seeks out an alternative father in the brothels of London. This other father, Sir John Falstaff, disreputable to the core but with the airs of a fallen monarch, pairs up with the lad, nicknaming him Hal, and together they embark on a royal rampage, eating, drinking, whoring, robbing and outraging respectability wherever they encounter it. The Boar’s Head provides an alternative family for the young Prince, with Mistress Quickly a fussing mother, Doll Tearsheet a randy cousin. When Falstaff and the Eastcheap gang have restored Hal to the human race, Hal brutally ditches the old ruffian and makes his peace with the real father, now dying, that he is about to succeed in the actual world. No mention, again, of mothers. With Coriolanus, the opposite is true: altogether too much mother. Volumnia, terrifying in her rigidity, drives him first into standing, reluctantly, for consul and then to his death. |
| Brothers in Shakespeare are often contrasted, nice and nasty – Don Pedro and Don John in Much Ado, Edgar and Edmund in Lear, Orlando and Oliver in As You Like It – this pattern partly a reflection of the Elizabethan laws of primogeniture that resulted in the eldest brother taking the entire patrimony, leaving younger male siblings impoverished and at a loose end. | Brothers in Shakespeare are often contrasted, nice and nasty – Don Pedro and Don John in Much Ado, Edgar and Edmund in Lear, Orlando and Oliver in As You Like It – this pattern partly a reflection of the Elizabethan laws of primogeniture that resulted in the eldest brother taking the entire patrimony, leaving younger male siblings impoverished and at a loose end. |
| Brothers and sisters manifest the usual tensions: in Hamlet Ophelia resents her brother Laertes’s freedom, in Measure for Measure Claudio is bewildered by Isabella’s refusal to surrender her virginity if it will save his life. In Twelfth Night the twins Sebastian and Viola, each thinking the other dead, are profoundly grief-stricken; and the same play starts with the Countess Olivia in deep mourning for her late brother (“What a plague means my niece, to take the death of her brother thus?” testily demands the grumpy hedonist, her disreputable cousin Toby Belch). | Brothers and sisters manifest the usual tensions: in Hamlet Ophelia resents her brother Laertes’s freedom, in Measure for Measure Claudio is bewildered by Isabella’s refusal to surrender her virginity if it will save his life. In Twelfth Night the twins Sebastian and Viola, each thinking the other dead, are profoundly grief-stricken; and the same play starts with the Countess Olivia in deep mourning for her late brother (“What a plague means my niece, to take the death of her brother thus?” testily demands the grumpy hedonist, her disreputable cousin Toby Belch). |
| Of family life as such we see little in the plays, although the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet provides a stream-of-consciousness account of Juliet’s childhood, implying the great warmth of the extended family. She has forgotten nothing: how hard little Juliet gnawed at her nipple when she was breastfeeding her; how the little thing fell over one day and what she said. It is foolhardy to try to turn the plays into autobiography, but the particularity of the writing speaks of the closest observation and deep personal experience. Who was Juliet’s nurse, with her permanent memory haemorrhage? Or Prospero, the overcontrolling, deeply, desperately loving father? These are people Shakespeare has surely met – just as surely as they are people we have met. Another below-stairs witness, Launce, Proteus’s servant in Two Gentlemen of Verona, paints a particularly vivid picture of family grief at his leave-taking, with special reference to an honorary family member, his dog, Crab (“the sourest-natured dog that lives”). | Of family life as such we see little in the plays, although the Nurse in Romeo and Juliet provides a stream-of-consciousness account of Juliet’s childhood, implying the great warmth of the extended family. She has forgotten nothing: how hard little Juliet gnawed at her nipple when she was breastfeeding her; how the little thing fell over one day and what she said. It is foolhardy to try to turn the plays into autobiography, but the particularity of the writing speaks of the closest observation and deep personal experience. Who was Juliet’s nurse, with her permanent memory haemorrhage? Or Prospero, the overcontrolling, deeply, desperately loving father? These are people Shakespeare has surely met – just as surely as they are people we have met. Another below-stairs witness, Launce, Proteus’s servant in Two Gentlemen of Verona, paints a particularly vivid picture of family grief at his leave-taking, with special reference to an honorary family member, his dog, Crab (“the sourest-natured dog that lives”). |
| Nay, ’twill be this hour ere I have done weeping ... my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear... | Nay, ’twill be this hour ere I have done weeping ... my mother weeping, my father wailing, my sister crying, our maid howling, our cat wringing her hands, and all our house in a great perplexity, yet did not this cruel-hearted cur shed one tear... |
| Such familial warmth is the exception. There are loving couples in Shakespeare: in Julius Caesar, both Brutus and Caesar have, in Portia and Calphurnia, caring and steady spouses. Had Caesar heeded his wife’s premonitory dream, he might have lived. Coriolanus’s wife, Valeria, endures the lot of the soldier’s wife anxiously; brushed aside, swatted away, she falls silent in the face of her mother-in-law’s absolute certainty. Lady Macbeth goads and drives on her wavering husband to fulfil the destiny she insists is his: | Such familial warmth is the exception. There are loving couples in Shakespeare: in Julius Caesar, both Brutus and Caesar have, in Portia and Calphurnia, caring and steady spouses. Had Caesar heeded his wife’s premonitory dream, he might have lived. Coriolanus’s wife, Valeria, endures the lot of the soldier’s wife anxiously; brushed aside, swatted away, she falls silent in the face of her mother-in-law’s absolute certainty. Lady Macbeth goads and drives on her wavering husband to fulfil the destiny she insists is his: |
| I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. | I have given suck, and know How tender ’tis to love the babe that milks me: I would, while it was smiling in my face, Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums, And dash’d the brains out, had I so sworn as you Have done to this. |
| The deed once done, Macbeth falls apart. His wife, infinitely more resolute, castrates him verbally: “What, quite unmann’d in folly?” | The deed once done, Macbeth falls apart. His wife, infinitely more resolute, castrates him verbally: “What, quite unmann’d in folly?” |
| We do not, famously, know how many children Lady Macbeth had, but Macbeth’s vision of the future kings of Scotland tells him clearly that he has not founded a dynasty: it has all been pointless. The plays in the Wars of the Roses cycle are based on the dynastic imperative – ending happily ever after, so the dramatist would have us believe, with the crowning of Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, grandfather of the childless queen who reigned through the first 40 years of Shakespeare’s life. Elizabeth’s lack of offspring increasingly fed the paranoia and instability of her last years on the throne. Under her successor, her cousin James VI of Scotland, the country (despite his well-attested sexual ambivalence) was well provided with male heirs and a very pretty queen; Britain had a royal family again, which seemed, for a while, to guarantee the safety and stability of families across the land. It was an illusion: within a few short decades family was set against family, father against son, brother against brother. The dread scourge of civil war again descended on the land. | We do not, famously, know how many children Lady Macbeth had, but Macbeth’s vision of the future kings of Scotland tells him clearly that he has not founded a dynasty: it has all been pointless. The plays in the Wars of the Roses cycle are based on the dynastic imperative – ending happily ever after, so the dramatist would have us believe, with the crowning of Henry Tudor, the future Henry VII, grandfather of the childless queen who reigned through the first 40 years of Shakespeare’s life. Elizabeth’s lack of offspring increasingly fed the paranoia and instability of her last years on the throne. Under her successor, her cousin James VI of Scotland, the country (despite his well-attested sexual ambivalence) was well provided with male heirs and a very pretty queen; Britain had a royal family again, which seemed, for a while, to guarantee the safety and stability of families across the land. It was an illusion: within a few short decades family was set against family, father against son, brother against brother. The dread scourge of civil war again descended on the land. |
| He had another family – his colleagues in the theatre – and left them money to buy rings to remember him by | He had another family – his colleagues in the theatre – and left them money to buy rings to remember him by |
| Shakespeare lived to see none of it: he died in the bosom of his own family, back in Stratford-on-Avon, prosperous, making due and detailed provision for his offspring and their issue. He had, of course, another family: his colleagues in the theatre, which so often feels like a second family for those who work in it. In his will he left to the star for whom he wrote so many of his greatest roles, Richard Burbage, and to his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, money to buy rings, so they would remember him. Little did he know that it was this other family that would guarantee his immortality. | Shakespeare lived to see none of it: he died in the bosom of his own family, back in Stratford-on-Avon, prosperous, making due and detailed provision for his offspring and their issue. He had, of course, another family: his colleagues in the theatre, which so often feels like a second family for those who work in it. In his will he left to the star for whom he wrote so many of his greatest roles, Richard Burbage, and to his colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, money to buy rings, so they would remember him. Little did he know that it was this other family that would guarantee his immortality. |
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