Strange Fowl

The Essay

The Subjunctive

Stratford and London

Hamnet and Hamlet

The Late Plays The Will and The Graves

The Letter to the Editor

Strange Fowl explains “Twins Theory” about Shakespeare’s family, questioning traditional beliefs about Hamnet and Judith’s paternity. This version of the biography presents Shakespeare’s life, relationships and legacy as based on this idea.

Shakespeare Twins Theory

Explore the life and times of Shakespeare with guided virtual or in-person tours tailored to your interests and questions.

Personalized Shakespeare Biography Tours

Delve into the study of authentic Shakespearean manuscripts and letters with expert commentary and analysis.

Rare Manuscripts and Letters Analysis

Experience Shakespeare’s life through engaging multimedia presentations combining visuals, narration, and historical context.

Fujifilm X-T3 photo product or photo camera gear.

Shakespeare Biography Multimedia Presentations

Attend insightful lectures covering Shakespeare’s life, controversies, and legacy by seasoned Shakespeare scholars.

Shakespeare Biography Lectures

Strange Fowl has been a work-in-progress for some years and is likely to remain so for some time to come. It will be updated further as the project continues. Tim Curtis is a retired lawyer. He lives in London. David Green lives in Portsmouth. He writes about books and music, mostly, at <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="http://davidgreenbooks.blogspot.com/">http://davidgreenbooks.blogspot.com/</a> They met at school in Gloucester in 1971.

Soutbank near Shakespeare's Globe Theater. January 2020, London, UK.

Contact Us

We called it ‘Twins Theory’. It first occurred to Mr. Curtis many years ago now that Hamnet and Judith, the twins born to Anne Hathaway might not have been Shakespeare’s genuine offspring. When presented with it, Mr. Green couldn't see why not and was glad to be involved. We found no trace of it in any of the biographies we read. For several years we worried that the next would mention it and checked them but none of them ever did. The more we looked, the less trace of it we found and the only question was what we were going to do with it.The theory came to any sort of wider attention in the TLS, on the letters page, as a contribution to the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death in April 2016. For such an innocent submission of an alternative reading of one aspect of Shakespeare’s life, we were surprised by both the dearth of reaction but, where there was any, the out-of-hand dismissal of such an idea. It wasn’t that controversial and wasn’t meant to be scurrilous or subversive. We weren’t casting aspersions on the Stratford man of the sort that suggested he hadn’t even written his own plays. It was, and remains, a theory, as circumstantial and anecdotal as much recognised, and widely available, Shakespeare biography but it fits as well with other established material as the widely-accepted story that Shakespeare fathered three children if not better. We aren’t quite so sure. He might have had three. He might have had one. But, also, he might have had two.As soon as one makes assumptions, one is on unsafe ground. For the most part, we all believe what we want to believe but, if that makes us comfortable, it doesn’t always help us to consider what else might have been, or what was.&nbsp; The theory wasn’t well received by those who saw it on its first appearance in print. Some readers might not like long-held views of Shakespeare’s life being subject to adjustment and most won’t adjust theirs but we would be glad to hear explanations as to ‘if not, why not’ rather than flat denial. &nbsp;It could ‘conceivably be proven false’, as Karl Popper would have liked, but that hasn’t happened yet.&nbsp;

Introduction

“It's subjunctive history. You know, the subjunctive? The mood used when something may or may not have happened. When it is imagined.”&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Alan Bennett, The History BoysThere is much Shakespeare biography written in the subjunctive mood. Readers who prefer to go no further than what is forensically evidenced have Samuel Schoenbaum’s William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life but most biographers prefer to make assumptions, to a greater or lesser extent, to provide a fuller picture based on established facts but then find themselves describing things that weren’t necessarily real.The date of birth has been traditionally set at 23rd April, 1564, on account of a record of the baptism on the 26th, which fits neatly with both St. George’s Day and the more reliable date of his death in 1616 but it also runs the risk of inadvertently making him die on his birthday without having been born on it.That he would have attended the grammar school on Church Street in Stratford is a safer guess but is without proper corroboration.&nbsp; The books that accumulate, claiming that the ‘real’ Shakespeare has been made known to us once and for all, all depend on jumping from bare clues to their authors’ vivid imaginings but most of that is what might have been, from the quite likely to the wildly creative. It leaves the field open for all-comers to make their own Shakespeare for themselves. As Prof. Jonathan Bate pointed out in his review of Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife, in the Daily Telegraph<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>,One antecedent of this book is Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own, in which she created Shakespeare's imaginary sister 'Judith' as a device to explore the lot of the woman writer. But it was also Virginia Woolf who recognised that all Shakespearean biography is veiled autobiography.It might seem as though every conceivable aspect of Shakespeare biography has been examined and pored over and thus exhausted over the hundreds of years and so it comes as some surprise that it has always been so readily accepted that Hamnet and Judith, the twins born to Anne in January 1585, were named after Hamnet and Judith Sadler, the Stratford friends of the family that have been extrapolated into godparents.Their role as godparents has been so generally attributed to the Sadlers that it has hardened into an unquestioned fact for many biographers and it has gone unchallenged in the absence of alternative explanations. The Sadlers ran a baker’s shop nearby on the corner of High Street and Sheep Street and eventually named one of their children William. Hamnet is eventually a witness to and beneficiary of Shakespeare’s will to the tune of 26s 8d to buy a mourning ring. But he is never referred to as a godparent or anything more than those references. Hamnet (or Hamlett, or Hamblett) was not a common name and so it’s reasonable to assume that the naming of the boy born to Anne is associated with the local baker. But, as Iachimo observes in Cymbeline,You may wear her in title yours: but, you know, strange fowl light upon neighbouring ponds. Your ring may be stolen too: so your brace of unprizable estimations; the one is but frail and the other casual;<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>Not everything that happens or is said in a Shakespeare play can be referenced back to autobiographical detail and Iachimo might not be specifically warning about adultery but he might be saying that you never know what unexpected visitor might trespass on what was thought to be your sphere, like a friend having an affair with your wife. Cymbeline is concerned with such suspicions and the Arden edition, ed. J.M. Nosworthy, notes those lines with,Iachimo’s precise meaning is obscure but is, presumably, sexual. We may equate the strange fowl with the ‘birds of prey’ in Measure for Measure (II i 2) and the neighbouring ponds may be equivalent to the ‘peculiar river’ in the same play (I ii 91).Not only does an outsider invade one’s domain but someone takes another’s title in theirs and there is a ‘brace of unprizable estimations’ which is ‘casual’.While it was once very much the fashion to study the text in the light of Roland Barthes’ 1967 essay, The Death of the Author, the English Literature industry has turned completely round and literary biography wants to find the life in the work and the work in the life. Neither extreme is entirely satisfactory and some of the life is likely to be found in some of the work while the text remains the primary object under enquiry.It’s possible that Hamnet Sadler was the biological father of the twins, that Shakespeare realized as much and named Hamnet and Judith after their Stratford friends as a permanent reminder. Sadler might have been the father of the twins in just as subjunctive a way as he might have been their godparent.There are any number of ways in which Shakespeare might have known he was not the father, whether having suspicions confirmed or circumstances that prevailed at the time. The most convincing would have been that he was already in London by April 1584, as John Aubrey ‘guesses’ in his life or, as Prof. E.A. J. Honigman offers in Shakespeare: the Lost Years, in Lancashire. Prof. Honigman dates the ‘lost years’ from 1585, taking the christening of the twins as evidence that Shakespeare was in Stratford then, but the register only records them on 2nd February as ‘sonne and daughter to William Shakespeare’, not that he was there to witness the occasion.The first record of Shakespeare in London is not until 1592 when Robert Greene, in his Groatsworth of Wit, bought with a million of repentance, writes,for there is an vpstart Crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his Tygers hart wrapt in a Players hyde, supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blanke verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Iohannes fac totum, is in his owne conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrey.By 1592, Shakespeare would have had eight years to have made his name as a dramatist so renowned as to upset the established writers in the market, the ‘University wits’ who considered it their territory and not that of a provincial newcomer. He might have done it in less but from arrival, to finding work in a theatre, acting in plays, writing his own and then becoming sufficiently well-known for it to provoke this sort of attack would not have been an overnight sensation. While one does need to be born a genius, it is also necessary to serve some sort of apprenticeship and gain an audience before it is widely recognized.While so much Shakespeare biography is conjecture and supposition, some is more persuasive than some other. While readily accepting that, John Southworth, in Shakespeare, The Player (Sutton, 2000), investigates how he might have gained access to his theatrical career and makes a case for it beginning at the age of 16 when the most likely of the touring companies that visited Stratford that he might have joined are Worcester’s Men who were there in 1580. Southworth also estimates the acting apprenticeship as seven years during which time he would have learned lines from plays by Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, traces of which he forensically finds echoes of in Titus Andronicus, Henry VI, The Taming of the Shrew and Arden of Faversham, for which he gives Shakespeare a co-author credit. This is exactly the period required to be filled to explain the ‘lost years’ and allows him time to become fully conversant with all aspects of playwriting which time spent teaching in Lancashire at Hoghton Tower would not.While Southworth doesn’t question the parentage of the twins and has Shakespeare back in Stratford in 1584 to provide Anne with further progeny he only does so to facilitate such requirements. It is equally possible that he was on tour and beginning to progress to bigger parts as his acting career, which Southworth regards a success, developed. Very few biographers put Shakespeare’s departure from Stratford as early as 1580-82 and it wasn’t a once-and-for-all leavetaking but not being there in April 1584 would be all the evidence he needed to know that Hamnet and Judith were not his flesh and blood.In her brilliant Ungentle Shakespeare, Katherine Duncan-Jones attributes the Groatsworth of Wit to Thomas Nashe who used the newly-departed Greene’s name as cover for his attack but, more tellingly, she has Shakespeare with the Queen’s Men by 1589, adding that they picked the best talent from other companies which would have Shakespeare doing an apprenticeship elsewhere before coming to their notice.Be that as it may, William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway, who only Germaine Greer among recent biographers makes a point of calling Anne Shakespeare, produce no more children between them at a time when families were committed to producing sufficient offspring to compensate for the high infant mortality rate. William was one of eight, three of which did not survive into adulthood and the Sadlers proceeded to have fourteen, of which six died in infancy. The&nbsp; impression gained by some observers of a ‘shotgun’ wedding is given some credence by the appearance at the ceremony of two friends of the Hathaway family, Sandells and Richardson, and the hasty arrangements involving only one reading of the banns. But Sonnet 145, filling in towards the end of the collection organized with several numerological significances, looks like a further glimpse of a less than harmonious union.145 is the only sonnet written in eight syllable lines and as such has been suggested as ‘early’ work, possibly from 1582. For Don Paterson it is ‘clichéd’, ‘incompetently rhymed’ and ‘tasteless’ and so not comparable with the other 153<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>. The lady has said, ‘I hate’ before changing her mind and Shakespeare makes play with a pun on the name Hathaway,I ‘hate’ from ‘hate’ away she threwAnd saved my life, saying ‘not you’.&nbsp;Even at this distance, signs of marital or pre-marital discord are readily picked up, the domestic bliss of the fireside chat at the end of the day between David Mitchell and Lisa Tarbuck in Ben Elton’s Upstart Crow using as much licence as the device of having Christopher Marlowe alive and well beyond 1593 and regularly in Stratford. It is no surprise that Anne has no more children, not only in line with the suggestion that difficulties bearing twins might have affected her chances of having more, but also that her husband was away and they might no longer have been so enamoured of each other. Katherine Duncan-Jones suspects that ‘conjugal relations between William and Anne ceased some time in the 1580s’<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a>. If she wasn’t allowing the twins to be credited to William, she might have dated it more specifically to April 1584 when the twins were conceived, or even before then.When Susannah was born in 1583, William and Anne weren’t to know that they would be having twins next that they could name after their friends. Sadler is said to have been a ‘life-long’ friend and likely to have met Shakespeare at school. If they were so keen to make these friends godparents and name their children after them, the first daughter would have been called Judith. Of course, the idea might not have occurred to them at the time and twins might have presented an ideal opportunity to use the pair of names. That the Sadlers subsequently name a child William as late as 1598 doesn’t suggest they made the reciprocal gesture as a priority. &nbsp;While all the reasons for thinking that Sadler might have been the father of the twins are circumstantial and in the subjunctive, the pieces fit together to provide a coherent alternative narrative that overcomes a number of difficulties in the traditional account. The story of Shakespeare becoming father of twins in a growing family and an atmosphere of domestic harmony doesn’t fit so well with him making his way to London soon after. While he might want to leave the indelible mark of Sadler in their names and feel slighted at the infidelity it’s not clear that he is too put out by local events in Stratford when he has a career to pursue in London if he’s either already there or making plans to go. Or perhaps the infidelity provided the impetus behind his departure. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Bate, Jonathan, Germaine Greer on Ann Hathaway - and herself, review of Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, Daily Telegraph, 7/08/2007<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Nosworthy, Cymbeline (Arden, 1955), Act 1, Sc 4, l.85-87.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> Paterson, Don, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010), 443.&nbsp;<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://www.theheraldrysociety.com/articles/shakespeare-part-2-shakespeare-among-the-heralds/">https://www.theheraldrysociety.com/articles/shakespeare-part-2-shakespeare-among-the-heralds/</a>&nbsp;

Those that would have Shakespeare first going to London on foot give him six days to get there. Even by horsepower, it would have been at least a two day journey. It would have been difficult for him to have found time for a four day round trip home again very often with increasing responsibilities in the theatre, acting, writing and becoming a shareholder in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men and then the King’s Men, in the Curtain Theatre and then The Globe.&nbsp; While this would have presented obvious difficulties in producing further children, nobody has ever suggested that Anne went to London either.Prof. Greer pictures Anne as self-sufficient smallholder in Stratford, independent and not missing her absent husband<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. The Sonnets and a number of anecdotes of Shakespeare in London make it easier to believe in him involved with fair youths, dark ladies and those that frequented the theatres than poignantly missing the wife he left back at home. On the authority of Richard Burbage’s diary there is a story of Shakespeare overhearing Burbage arranging an assignation with a lady but getting in ahead of the actor and, when caught in the act, pointing out that ‘William the Conqueror came before Richard III’. The story is given more credence than such an apparently fanciful story might have been on account of being reported by Burbage.The Sonnets are not to be accepted as pure autobiography but Katherine Duncan-Jones, among others, provides enough notes on their context and contemporary references to persuade us that they are not entirely fictional either with the thematic progress of the first eighteen addressed to the fair youth, the triangular relationship involving the dark lady, for whose identity there are a number of candidates, and the rival poet. Much of this is thought to have taken place in the 1590’s with Prof. Duncan-Jones finding that Sonnets 1-17 could be from May 1597.Don Paterson, in his Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets, is in less doubt than anybody,The question, ‘was Shakespeare gay?’ is so stupid as to be barely worth answering, but for the record: of course he was. Arguably he was a bisexual, of sorts. But for all the wives, mistresses and children I’m not entirely convinced by his heterosexual side. Mostly, his heart just wasn’t in it; when it was, his expressions of heterosexual love are full of self-disgust.Don need not worry about two of the children he’s crediting Shakespeare with there but his admission of bi-sexuality gives his claim some coherence as well as it substantiating the reason why there weren’t as many children as other families produced. Anthony Burgess is even less forensic by entertaining the possibility on the grounds of him being a theatrical type,Will would not be shocked by evidence of homosexuality: he may have been inclined to it himself: he was, after all, a member of the theatrical profession.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>William and Anne are living largely separate lives, it’s only a matter of when that began. But Shakespeare has taken responsibility for his family at home and continues to invest in property and land in Stratford to retire there eventually, once he’s made his fortune in London. New Place, the second biggest house in Stratford, is purchased in 1597 and he has interests in such commodities as corn and malt. The theatre is only one of his income streams and the extant documentary record of his life, and all his signatures on legal documents, are evidence of considerable business acumen.Aubrey imagines Shakespeare’s return trips to Stratford being no more than once a year while others fondly see him having enough time for a more regular commute and actually writing plays in Stratford. There is more agreement that if it needs at least one overnight stay to break the journey, he stops at Oxford and stays in the Tavern in Cornmarket Street, run by John Davenant and his wife, Jeanette. Jeanette gives birth to the future dramatist and Poet Laureate, Sir William, in 1606 and, in a less disputable naming after a godparent, names him after Shakespeare.For some it might seem too far-fetched but Davenant became a writer of some contemporary reputation (for debauchery as well as writing), acquired the Chandos portrait believed in places to be of Shakespeare and eventually claimed that Shakespeare was his real father. The internet can find quotations of anything from 1 in 10 to 1 in 50 children being the subject of misattributed paternity and that likelihood includes all those cases in which nobody notices or suspects otherwise. It is tempting to believe him except that he doesn’t start making the claim until later, and often in the advanced stages of a drinking session, and it looks a bit like a fantasy or a publicity stunt. However, the story does give us the chance to offer Shakespeare an illegitimate son as compensation for the deceased boy, and his sister, that we are suggesting might not have been his. It also makes Jeannette at least a minor candidate for the role of ‘dark lady’.And while Shakespeare is conducting whichever of the extra-marital affairs one wants to credit him with in London, Oxford or elsewhere, with none of his work indicating that he’s missing her but taken up with other liaisons, Anne might be doing something similar in Stratford. Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s Ulysses is aware of the possibility. Stephen cites Hamlet and Gertrude as evidence of Anne’s faithlessness and,The conclusive evidence of Ann’s guilt is that for thirty-four years, from the day of the marriage to the day of Shakespeare’s death, there is no news of her except that she had to borrow forty shillings from her father’s shepherd, and that Shakespeare, in his will, left her his second-best bed.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Harry Blamires, The New Bloomsday Book&nbsp;Edmond Malone, in 1780, took Sonnet 93 and its,So shall I live, supposing thou art true,Like a deceived husband&nbsp;as a clue to Shakespeare’s extra-marital affairs ‘presupposing hers: she must have provoked it’, as Margreta Da Grazia summarizes it in her essay, Putting Horns on the Bard <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>. References to jealousy in such plays as Othello and The Winter’s Tale are based on unfounded suspicions and are no more relevant than whether Shakespeare’s motive was revenge or not and it’s not at all clear why they would be but the simile comes readily to Shakespeare, possibly some ten years after the event and, going beyond Malone into Sonnet 94, he reflects that,sweetest things turn sourest by their deedswhen such repairs as those reported in 145 are no longer viable.&nbsp;Rene Weis, in Shakespeare Revealed, is another open to the idea that,it is worth considering whether Shakespeare was perhaps sexually betrayed by one of his brothers<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a>and,that Shakespeare committed adultery while he was in London is scarcely in doubt.&nbsp;Hamnet Sadler was available, too.How concerned Shakespeare is about the wife he has left behind and what feelings any such liaisons might arose in him is open to doubt but he could be unconcerned about having Anne for himself, having moved to London without her, while still resenting her perceived disloyalty. While we might be tempted to see him as a feckless absentee husband, it’s also possible to regard him as providing for his family with his accumulating wealth for appearance’s sake even though he knows they are not all his. His ambitions of ‘gentlemanly’ status are well documented. Being such admirers of his work, it is difficult for some to separate out the wonderful writing from the man that wrote it and they are tempted to bestow upon him a kindly, humane nature who can do no wrong but that’s not what George Orwell says in Why I Write, generalizing, one would hope,All writers are vain, selfish, and lazy,Like many entrepreneurs or impresarios, Shakespeare needed to be in London to make his fortune. Like Bach, Handel and Mozart, he produced sublime work for a living rather than for art’s sake. That doesn’t mean he liked London, from which the stench was still noticeable from twenty miles away and, like the many who have made their profits there, he regarded somewhere else as home. Thus he continues to invest in Stratford with the intention of retiring back there eventually. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Greer, Germaine, Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, 2007)<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Burgess, Anthony, Shakespeare (Vintage, 1996), 114.<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> De Grazia, Margreta, Putting Horns on the Bard, How Shakespeare came to be seen as a cuckold&nbsp; (TLS no. 6264, 21/4/23)<a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Weis, Rene, Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 2007), 275

The Shakespeare Circle was a series of essays published in 2015 by Cambridge University Press, edited by Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, an Alternative Biography with the Shakespeare-shaped hole in the middle, made of those family, friends and associates in his life. While the boy Hamnet was given a chapter, Hamnet Sadler was not. If only they had asked !The boy dies in 1596, aged 11, presumed to be a victim of the plague. Traditional biographies have Shakespeare at the graveside, mourning the loss of his only son and the inheritor of his legacy. This grief is extended into the speech in King John,Grief fills the room up of my absent child, Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me, Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words, Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form;But not all scholars date King John from after Hamnet’s death. Neither is the idea that Hamlet and the onset of darker themes in the plays being traceable to the loss of the child any more than circumstantial. In fact, the plays that come immediately after 1596 are some of the lighter, more optimistic of the whole oeuvre, such as The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing and As You Like It. Katherine Duncan-Jones questions the idea of there even being a ‘Tragic Period’.The idea that Shakespeare would have been in Stratford for the funeral is undermined by the need to get the news to him in London, or even finding him further afield on tour, leaving London in time of plague, and him travelling back in time. Not only that, but wondering quite how upset he was at the passing of the twin he knew he hadn’t fathered is further reason to doubt his attendance whereas Hamnet Sadler is much more likely to have been there.If Hamlet, as is argued by James Shapiro in 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare, is the big, personal statement, longer, more complex and made with more than just box office in mind, it isn’t necessarily named after the boy. The boy was named after the Stratford acquaintance. The play is based on the story of Amleth, taken from The Revenge of Amleth in The History of the Danes by Saxo Grammaticus, written in the early C13th, in which the hero feigns madness as part of a plot to revenge the murder of his father by his uncle. A now lost revenge tragedy, possibly by Thomas Kyd, was on the London stage in the 1580’s in the period when Shakespeare arrived there.Shapiro makes the case that Hamlet is something more to Shakespeare than his other work by showing how he,tinkered obsessively – far more than his reputation for never blotting a line would suggest.The excessive four-hour length of the full text of the play, the series of ‘doublings’ of plot (two revenges), character (two Hamlets, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern), language (‘book and volume’, ‘fantasy and trick’), the number of neologisms and the inclusion of a treatise on the theatre all make Hamlet more than it needed to be to fill the two and a half hours of an afternoon in the theatre and it is about a son with the wrong father but that is only a part of a much bigger design.The reason for the darker themes from 1600 onwards can be as easily attributed to the death of his father, John, in 1601 or a new awareness of mortality as Shakespeare arrives in middle age.

If the proliferation of Hamnets, Hamlet and Amleth aren’t enough, there are a number of wills involved, too- Will Shakespeare, his ambiguous use of the word ‘will’ in the sonnets and elsewhere and his last will and testament.Like the Sonnets, the marriage and the ‘Lost Years’, the evidence that the will provides sets more questions than it answers.Shakespeare rewrites the will, apparently keeping pages 2 and 3 but replacing page 1 so that the scribe has to write smaller towards the bottom of the page to accommodate the revised wording, realizing halfway down that he’s running out of space. The provisions of the will begin with the bequest to Judith and the stringent conditions attached to them. Judith has married Thomas Quiney on 10th February, 1616 and the will is revised on 25th March.&nbsp; Quiney is a disreputable vintner, on a charge of fornication among other misdemeanours. The words ‘Sonne-in-law’ are struck out of the will completely and Shakespeare goes to some lengths to ensure that Judith’s interests are protected against any claims of his but it is noticeable that Susannah’s inheritance is more generous, unconditional and, having made a successful marriage to the physician, John Hall, she is more substantially provided for. While this may be circumspect on Shakespeare’s part, one can wonder why Susannah was not only made executor ahead of Anne but also fared so much better and had become the favourite daughter beyond Judith’s ill-advised choice of husband.It is usually assumed that Anne would have automatically inherited one third of the estate, including the bed she slept in and so the problematic ‘second best bed’ is not necessarily the insult that it looks like to some, but what is already hers. Shakespeare goes to greater lengths to make specific provision for other friends. She is, however, provided for and Hamnet Sadler is a witness. Time might have soothed away much of the difficult feeling caused by their extra-marital business thirty-two years earlier. Shakespeare’s last period in London was marked by a move to an entirely different sort of play in which,&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; when hardly botheringTo be a dramatist, the Master turned awayFrom his taut plots and complex charactersTo tapestried romances, conjuringWith rainbow names and handfuls of sea-sprayAnd from then turned out happy Ever-afters.&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Louis MacNeice, AutolycusThe theme of ‘late’ plays like The Tempest, The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline is reconciliation and however much one wants to resist mapping the life onto the work, or vice versa, one can’t help but notice the return to Stratford and making the best of bygones being bygones generating the feeling that an attempt is being made, as far as possible, for all that is well, or can’t by then be helped, to end well. Whether or not Shakespeare was a convivial character, there is a story that his death, which he might have been anticipating already, was brought forward by a drinking session during a social visit from Ben Jonson and in the company of local poet, Michael Drayton. He is, however, characteristically astute in having set his lands in order.Katherine Duncan-Jones will have none of that, seeing the retirement in Stratford as anything but idyllic. He doesn’t become ill and die because he drinks; he drinks because he’s ill and then dies. She sees him as still angry and only amending the will under sufferance. Neither version of events sits well with Judith being William’s flesh and blood but both would be in line with her not being so.Hamnet is not buried with the family in front of the altar in Holy Trinity Church and can’t be expected to be. He died before the family acquired the right to be buried there, not as the family of the great writer but as an important Stratford family who could afford to be. And if he died too early, perhaps Judith died too late because the five graves fit into the available space beside the previously established plot of a long-serving vicar. On the other hand, there has been found enough space for, in order, left to right, from under the bust of Shakespeare up on the wall,Anne, died 1623; William, 1616; Thomas Nash, who married Susannah’s daughter, Elizabeth, 1647; John Hall, 1635 and Susannah, 1649.Judith lived until the age of 77 and died in 1662 by which time there was only room for her outside in the graveyard, as recorded in the parish records, on February 9th <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. Those that have been given places in the family plot, though, are the closest Shakespeare could get to a line of male succession, not unlike his concern about his status as a ‘gentleman’, the application for a coat of arms and the standing of his family. One can’t help feeling that Judith might have been found a more auspicious resting place had it been thought priority enough. The will and the graves suggest a set of preferences in family relations while Shakespeare does as much as he respectably ought to for those less favoured. <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> <a target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/parish-register-entry-recording-judith-shakespeare-quineys-burial">https://shakespearedocumented.folger.edu/resource/document/parish-register-entry-recording-judith-shakespeare-quineys-burial</a> accessed 27/08/2024

The Late Plays, The Will and The Graves

Twins theory had been thought about, added to and discussed for ten years by the time of the four hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. There had been no mention of it anywhere else as far as we could see. If it was going to be offered to a wider audience, 2016 looked like as good a time as any. It was thought perhaps a letter to The Times, or similar, might be a suitable place for it.The Anniversary edition of the Times Literary Supplement on April 22nd was a special edition, Shakespeare 400 Years On, featuring contributions from eminent writers on the subject. In his piece, In pursuit of Shakespeare, Michael Pennington asked a few questions to which there were unlikely to be satisfactory answers, such as,Why Shakespeare wrote a series of comedies directly after his son’s death…Or why he mourned the death of his son Hamnet by writing a searing speech of grief for Arthur’s mother in ‘King John’ when the audience knows Arthur isn’t dead at all.Perhaps we could help. The following week, the TLS very kindly printed our modest proposal on the letters page, that,Perhaps it was because Hamnet, and his twin sister, Judith, were not his children but were fathered by Hamnet Sadler, the family friend in Stratford whose wife was called Judith, traditionally identified as godparents.We were most gratified, finally putting the idea on record in such an august publication in front of a worldwide audience of literary cognoscenti. But not everybody was as pleased with it as us. The letter didn’t generate much response on the letters page. There were a few replies in which correspondents took up their own issues generated by what we had said but none engaged with the paternity issue either for or against it.There was some reaction on Twitter, which was there to be found if one looked for it. It was led by Prof. Stanley Wells, who was then as yet still to be knighted, Honorary President of the Birthplace Trust who tweeted,One can only hope that the fatuous letter in @TlS suggesting that Hamnet Sadler fathered Shakespeare's twins is intended to be funny.But, no, it wasn’t.Prof. Wells was followed in by Paul Edmondson after which a representative of Oxford University observed that there was no evidence, another academic picked up that Judith wouldn’t be in the graveyard as we had said because it had been cleared a number of times since those days – which wasn’t really the point - and the objections reached a high point of incredulity by asking, ‘whatever next, Shakespeare was Venusian?’ The derision was extended to the TLS itself with the publication of the letter cited as symptomatic of the paper being not as good as it used to be and falling behind its rivals.It never occurred to us to sign up to Twitter, which was probably beneath our dignity, to take up such points because, as they had found, the short form of the medium does not have the capacity to explain why not. Those who had taken the trouble to express their objection to the theory hadn’t given us any hint as to why it wasn’t possible.We were not Oxfordians, or Mark Rylance, daring to suggest that the Stratford man was not the author of his own plays. We had been great admirers of his work since school and trips from Gloucester to the RSC productions in Stratford. We didn’t regard ourselves as ‘controversialists’ as Prof. Wells advertises himself. We just wondered if an alternative reading of the life had been missed. And it doesn’t rewrite the life very radically in the light of the long-standing suspicion of an unhappy marriage, the long periods of separation and the questions that had always been raised about the ‘second-best bed’ in the will.We were as much non-plussed as disappointed, not only by the underwhelming reaction, its entirely negative response and summary dismissal but people will believe what they want to believe and we left it at that until finding we had time to set it out as best we can and, like any theory, it is open to amendment, augmentation or evidence to the contrary.Select BibliographyAubrey, John, Brief Lives, ed. Richard Barber (Boydell, 1982)Ackroyd, Peter, Shakespeare, the Biography (Chatto &amp; Windus, 2005)Bate, Jonathan, Germaine Greer on Ann Hathaway - and herself, review of Shakespeare's Wife by Germaine Greer, Daily Telegraph, 7/08/2007Blamires, Harry, The New Bloomsday Book (Routledge, 1966)Burgess, Anthony, Shakespeare (Vintage, 1996)De Grazia, Margreta, Putting Horns on the Bard, How Shakespeare came to be seen as a cuckold&nbsp; (TLS no. 6264, 21/4/23)Duncan-Jones, Katherine, Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Arden, 1997)&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp; Ungentle Shakespeare, Scenes from His Life (Arden, 2001)Edmondson, Paul, and Wells, Stanley, ed., The Shakespeare Circle (Cambridge, 2015)Greer, Germaine, Shakespeare’s Wife (Bloomsbury, 2007)Holden, Anthony, William Shakespeare his life and work (Abacus, 1999)Honigmann, E.A.J., Shakespeare: the ‘lost years’ ( Manchester University, 1985)MacNeice, Louis, Selected Poems (Faber, 1964)Paterson, Don, Reading Shakespeare’s Sonnets (Faber, 2010)Saxo Grammaticus, The Revenge of Amleth, translated by Soren Filipski in The Norse Hamlet (Hythloday Press, 2013)Schoenbaum, Samuel, A Compact Documentary Life (Oxford, 1977)Shakespeare, ed. J.M. Nosworthy, Cymbeline (Arden, 1955),Shapiro, James, 1599, a Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (Faber, 2005)Southworth, John, Shakespeare The Player (Sutton, 2000)Times Literary Supplement, nos. 5899, 22/4/2016, and 5900, 29/04/2016Trussler, Simon, Will’s Will, The Last Wishes of William Shakespeare (The National Archives, 2007)Weis, Rene, Shakespeare Revealed (John Murray, 2007)