Read Online Shakespeare by Bill Bryson - Free Book Online

Shakespeare’s plays are full of ocean metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles,” “an ocean of salt tears,” “wild sea of my conscience”) and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere. But the idea that this argues for a maritime spell in his life shrivels slightly when you realize that sailor appears just four times in his work and seamen only twice. Moreover, as Caroline Spurgeon long ago noted, Shakespeare’s marine allusions mostly depict the sea as a hostile and forbidding environment, a place of storms and shipwrecks and unsettling depths—precisely the perspective one would expect from someone who wasn’t comfortably acquainted with it. In any case there is an obvious danger in reading too much into word frequencies. Shakespeare refers to Italy in his work more often than to Scotland (35 times to 28) and to France far more than to England (369 references to 243), but we would hardly suppose him French or Italian.
    One possibility for how Shakespeare spent these missing years, embraced with enthusiasm by some scholars, is that he didn’t come to London by any direct route, but rather went to northern England, to Lancashire, as a recusant Catholic. The idea was first put forward as long ago as 1937 but has gained momentum in recent years. As it now stands it is a complicated and ingenious theory based (as I believe its proponents would freely enough concede) on a good deal of supposition. The gist of it is that Shakespeare may have passed his time in the north as a tutor and possibly as an actor (we must, after all, get him ready for a theatrical career soon afterward), and that the people responsible for this were Roman Catholics.
    There is certainly no shortage of possible Catholic connections. Throughout Shakespeare’s early years, some four hundred English-born, French-trained Jesuit missionaries were slipped into England to offer illicit religious ser vices to Catholics, often in large secret gatherings on Catholic estates. It was dangerous work. About a quarter of the missionaries were caught and dreadfully executed, though others were simply rounded up and sent back to France. Those who escaped capture, or were brave enough to return and try again, often worked exceedingly productively. Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion between them were said to have converted (or reconverted) twenty thousand people on a single tour.
    In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north. He stayed with a distant relative of Shakespeare’s, Sir William Catesby, whose son Robert would later be a ringleader of the Gunpowder Plot. One of the masters at Shakespeare’s school during his time there (always assuming he was there) was John Cottom, who came from a prominent Catholic family in Lancashire and whose brother was a missionary priest closely associated with Campion. In 1582 this latter Cottom was caught, tortured, and put to death, along with Campion himself. Meanwhile his older brother, the schoolmaster, had left Stratford—whether in a hurry or not is unknown—and returned to Lancashire, where he declared his Catholicism openly.
    The thought is that this Cottom may have taken Will with him. What adds appeal to the theory is that the following year a “William Shakeshafte” appears in the household accounts of Alexander Hoghton, a prominent Catholic living just ten miles from the Cottom family seat. Moreover Hoghton in his will commended this Shakeshafte to a fellow Catholic and landowner, Thomas Hesketh, as someone worth employing. In the same passage Hoghton also mentioned the disposition of his musical instruments and “play clothes,” or costumes. “This sequence,” notes the Shakespeare authority Robert Bearman, “suggests that this Shakeshafte was either a household musician or player or both.”
    According to one