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AROUND SHAKESPEARE

EARLY

Identifying some of the religions around the realm—the last chapter’s task—was not at all as challenging as deciding which features of each likely surfaced in the conversations of ordinary yet alert subjects. Retrieving the religion around Shakespeare—this chapter’s assignment—would be easier if it were not so difficult to locate him, particularly in the years after he finished formal schooling and, later, as he moved about London and Southwark. He was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire in 1564, educated there in the 1570s, and married nearby. Of that we can be sure. He was in London or outside the city walls in Shoreditch by the late 1580s, occasionally returning to Stratford to visit his family and then to retire a few years before his death in 1616. But, in London, he gets lost—lost to us, that is. We cannot tell where he first lodged. Plausibly, Shoreditch, because the theaters were there, and many players lived where they worked. But glovers, his father’s London colleagues, congregated in Bishopsgate Ward, so he might have joined them upon coming to the city—or later. We know only that he changed residences from Bishopsgate to Bankside by 1599 and that he moved back across the Thames to Cripplegate ward on Silver Street soon after.¹

Beyond the above, we are left with questions. What routes did he take to the theater districts? How often did he pass St. Paul’s Cathedral? Did he pause to hear parts of the outdoor sermons at Paul’s Cross or to see what the booksellers in the churchyard stocked? He eventually purchased the gatehouse at Blackfriars, yet there is no evidence that he ever lived there. Did he spend leisure time among playgoers in Holborn or with barristers at the Inns of Court? Where did he drink? Where, if at all, did he pray? We shall find Shakespeare—and religion—in London in due course. First, to Stratford!

Shakespeare’s parents were two of the twelve hundred or so souls in Stratford during the second half of the sixteenth century. His father, John, was elected constable six years before his birth and, four years later, served a single term as the town’s high bailiff or mayor. By then, the senior Shakespeare was a prosperous glover, but he traded in more than just leather goods. John profited particularly from real estate transactions.² He and his wife, Mary (Arden), may have been fond of the old faith, although, if so, they were discreet, for Catholicism in Warwickshire during the 1560s and 1570s diminished one’s chances for solvency and political influence. Religiously reformed notables Thomas Lucy and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, maintained homes nearby and were vigilant, as was Edwin Sandys, a reformist, when he was bishop of Worcester. John Whitgift, in the same see somewhat later, was equally watchful. All four were intolerant of Catholics.

The religiously reformed, vigilant, and intolerant had ample opportunities to watch John Shakespeare. For his part, as constable, coroner, alderman, and bailiff at various times, he could hardly afford to be dismissive of the established church’s commissions. On his watch, the images of Saints Helena, George, and Thomas à Becket on the interior walls of Stratford’s parish church were painted over. Perhaps he was following orders, opting to appease and please his religiously reformed and influential neighbors while secretly sharing the faith of other locals who sent their sons abroad to study for the Catholic priesthood. Perhaps he winked or looked the other way as local Catholics opened their homes to—and hid—priests returning from the Continent to keep alive enthusiasms for the old faith.³ We can only guess, but we know that the Shakespeares’ home on Henley Street had nothing comparable to the passages and compartments installed elsewhere to keep fugitive priests from pursuers. Nonetheless, the Shakespeare residence could very well have concealed a critical document for two centuries, a will with John’s signature that reportedly was discovered by a repairman working between the rafters in the eighteenth century. Expatriate Jesuit missionaries, crossing from the Continent in the late 1570s and thereafter, were known to distribute unsigned copies of the text that told the testators’ families and friends to pray for the souls of their dear departed and that suggested the effectiveness of such prayers in getting the deceased through purgatory more speedily.⁴ Unfortunately, the signed will was lost after it was copied; hence, we cannot confirm the authenticity of the original and of the signature.⁵

But, even if we could, we would still not be sure that William knew of the will. Literary historian Richard Wilson steers around uncertainties of that sort, accepting the existence of the will and presuming that the senior Shakespeare was a covert Catholic—covert to a point, for Wilson also imagines that the younger Shakespeare could not have missed “the fervor with which [his] father put his name to [the] text.”⁶ But one could concede the document’s discovery as well as the authenticity of John Shakespeare’s signature without the supposed “fervor,” conjuring up a different scene in the house on Henley Street. For John could well have been hedging his bets; he might have been compensating for those compromises that preserved his political position, fixing his signature without the enthusiasm that Wilson imagined and without his son’s knowing. Or perhaps John Shakespeare’s conscience caught up with him. Many Catholics, known now as church papists, feigned conformity to preserve their properties and positions in society but were not at all anxious about their dissembling. According to their critics, the dissemblers cradled “a conscience so large [they] could never wander from it,” which means that, unperturbed, they prayed with their religiously reformed neighbors.⁷ But William’s father might not have been among the camouflaged yet relatively carefree church papists. Alas, John’s conscience is not available for inspection, but there is evidence that he avoided the services of the established church.

In 1592, by which time his son was living in London, the senior Shakespeare was reprimanded for “absenting [himself from public worship] for feare of processe.”⁸ If we take seriously the reason given for his truancy—“feare of processe”—we must rule out or, at the very least, scale down the importance of John’s scruples or conscience. He was accused of staying away to avoid his creditors. The explanation is quite plausible, inasmuch as persons expecting payment of outstanding bills were known to corner their prey at churches; the statute requiring presence at worship conveniently brought delinquent, elusive debtors to a particular place at an appointed time. “Feare of processe,” furthermore, suggests financial difficulties, and we possess independent evidence of just that. Selling what was called “fell wool,” the wool plucked from the skins acquired for the manufacture of gloves, glovers occasionally dabbled in speculation. Other Midlands merchants and consumers blamed the glovers for hoarding what herders sold them and for problems on the supply side and the rising prices that resulted. Yet, when demand dried up and prices declined after glovers extended their credit to increase their stocks, their position in the market became unenviable. We know that John Shakespeare purchased his last property in 1575. Thereafter he was regarded as a man of limited means; his colleagues on the town council agreed to reduce his fees and forgive a fine assessed against him for failing to participate in their deliberations. He subsequently resigned. Is it unreasonable to assume that, seeing no financial or political advantages in feigning reformed religious sentiment, John Shakespeare decided to stay away from church to dodge his creditors and the consequences of having become what Robert Bearman calls “a business failure”?⁹

Assumptions must substitute for reliable intelligence about piety and poverty in William Shakespeare’s home, and the same applies when we try to learn about the religion around him at school. His two schoolmasters’ schoolmasters were Catholics, although Simon Hunt and Thomas Jenkins would have been reckless—teaching in Warwickshire during the 1570s—to tilt curricula or catechesis toward Rome. John Cottom, who succeeded Jenkins, was the brother of a priest, later martyred, but we cannot tell whether Cottom mixed faith of any sort with lessons. Yet, if he had, it would be of little consequence for our studies, because William Shakespeare left school just as Cottom came to Stratford. As for the student’s seriousness, William’s career and learning surely suggest it, but his plays sniped at schoolmasters—at Pinch, his charlatan in The Comedy of Errors, and at the pedant Holofernes in Love’s Labors Lost. Might the mockery onstage indicate that the bard had been bored by his formal studies and contemptuous of those who presided over them?¹⁰

When we turn from home and school to the parish church with its two chapels, we again find that scraps of information about the religion around Shakespeare hardly make a meal. Two or three ministers simultaneously served parishioners. The curate at one chapel, St. Peter’s in Bishopston, stocked his large library with works by the reformists’ paladin, Dudley Fenner, but also with a few treatises by Catholic martyr Thomas More.¹¹ That curate was unquestionably a bibliophile, but nothing betrays his religious preference. His sometimes colleague at the parish’s other chapel, All Souls’ in Luddington, is more forthcoming, as it were; he was suspended from the ministry for nonconformity by Bishop Whitgift, who was already on record as an enemy of those taking liberties with prescribed forms of worship. Ten years earlier, Whitgift anticipated that “great contentions and brawlings” were sure to follow if “every man, as he listeth[,] alter and change” the prevailing religious settlement.¹² But the chaplain’s suspension was lifted in 1584, presumably after his compliance.

Still, we do possess substantial evidence for the reformist cast of the Stratford ministry. In 1586, puritans delivered to Parliament a survey of parish clergy. Surveyors enthusiastically commended Richard Barton, vicar of the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity, the town’s parish church, as a remarkably “learned, zealous, and godlie” man. “What a happy age if our church were fraight of manie such,” they concluded, thrusting Barton forward as an exception to the misrule that, they complained, would very soon have grave consequences for the quality of ministry in all of England’s dioceses.¹³ But we cannot tell whether Barton had any meaningful contact with the Shakespeares. And William’s whereabouts when the survey was taken are unknown. He might never have heard the “godlie” vicar preach. Barton’s predecessor, John Bretchgirdle, had baptized the bard-to-be, according to parish records, but, for all we know, baptism could well have been the last as well as the first time he was touched by a pastor until his wedding. So, conceivably, William Shakespeare’s most memorable encounters at the parish church, into late adolescence, were not conversations with clergy but confrontations with hired hands at Holy Trinity, who were commissioned, as were others in nearby Warwick, to clear the churchyard of bothersome boys.¹⁴

William was married to Anne Hathaway in church, of course, at Temple Grafton. His father-in-law, Richard, later named a Catholic as executor of his estate, but that hardly signals that Hathaway was fervently or even casually an advocate for the old faith. A month before his daughter’s wedding in 1582, Richard voted, as a juror, to secure the interests of a religiously reformed litigant in a property dispute to deny the claims made by a local Catholic.¹⁵ Had the local records been better preserved, we would know more about the Hathaways—and, for that matter, about the Shakespeares—but too much has gone missing. The loss of the minutes for the proceedings of the vicar’s court at Holy Trinity during Barton’s tenure is particularly regrettable, for the docket no doubt was full. Although many tithe cases reached diocesan courts, where officials, calculating what was due, on occasion quite literally counted sheep, a number of controversies related to probate, defamation, and general discipline were sifted in Stratford, two of every three years.¹⁶

Local officials had other obligations. They were required by the bishops of Worcester to track and sometimes to track down expatriate Catholic missionaries who, having returned to the realm, were passing through Worcestershire and Warwickshire on their way north. Moreover, local officials were also to see to it that anyone who offered hospitality to those sojourners was fined. Such fines, along with forfeitures for failing to attend church, sometimes seemed to have the desired effect. After two-thirds of his estates had been sequestered, Catholic Thomas Blunt, for one, joined the ranks of the religiously reformed.¹⁷ Successes of that sort cut the number of Catholic gentry who were eager to harbor the itinerant “massing priests.” Still, the priests on the road (and on the run) distributed spiritual consolations for their hosts’ and their friends’ material losses—specifically, papal indulgences for anyone risking destitution to save the realm from “the wicked ways of . . . heresy.”¹⁸

The risk, however, was seldom as great as those who devised the disincentives hoped. Fines frequently were forgiven soon after they were levied. As a result, doors around Stratford still opened to receive the missionaries, and tales of their courage and of their harrowing escapes stirred sympathy in select circles, where Jesuit Henry Garnet’s daring flight “in the dead time of the night” was almost certainly taken as a token of God’s favor as often as it was retold.¹⁹

Religious reformers also valued inspiring stories that featured God’s favor. They relied on sermons to stir sympathy and spread the good news that Christians were saved by faith and repentance rather than by pilgrimages and penances. The reformers’ problem was delivery. Too few were qualified to preach, and many who were qualified were denied licenses because they objected to the prescribed liturgy of the established church. Reformists took stock in 1586 and found clerical leadership sadly lacking in the realm. Barton, as we learned, was exceptional—but an exception. He got high marks for his ministry in Stratford’s parish church, yet survey results generally disheartened the puritan surveyors. Innuendo and insult signaled their discontent, but a few delinquents were outed explicitly and abusively—although perhaps none as vituperatively as Jeffrie Jones of Corlie, north of Coventry and not far from Stratford, who was dubbed a “dumbe” (unpreaching) pastor and a “drunkard, gamster, quareller, swearer, pilferer, [and] adulterer.” To be sure, most incumbents seem to have practiced their professions in that gray area between the ghastly and “godlie,” where parishioners likely placed Thomas Crocket, who served the church in Preston Baggot—five miles from the Shakespeares on Henley Street. Crocket “seemeth to be zealous,” the survey noted, but he had something of a drinking problem. In the last analysis, however, the reformists cared less about what came into their colleagues’ mouths than what issued from them, less about diet or decorum than about the quantity and quality of sermons. Hence, what most disturbed them was that only forty-one of the one hundred and eighty-six clergy listed for the diocese of Worcester were licensed to preach.²⁰

The survey and the complaints that preceded and attended its release annoyed conformist bishops and their allies in Parliament. Before he was named to the see of Worcester, Whitgift called the complainants “contentious captains” of the puritan party.²¹ On leaving Worcester for the see of Canterbury, he accused them of picking fights about insignificant practices and rubrics simply to secure power for themselves and for partisans in the parishes.²² And the very reformist whom he thought to be captain of those querulous “captains,” Thomas Cartwright, his nemesis at Cambridge in 1570, arrived in the diocese of Worcester soon after Whitgift left. Cartwright twice found his way to Stratford yet settled in Warwick, ten miles north, where Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester, appointed him chaplain at the hospital.²³ By then, Leicester was the puritans’ most reliable patron in the Midlands; his candidates for profitable leases or for livings ordinarily got them. He interfered in Peterborough to protect a dissident preacher, successfully countering the diocesan notoriously disinclined to “cherish” or “encourage” criticism.²⁴ Leicester had leverage locally because he was influential at Court, where his powerful friends—notably William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and Francis Walsingham, Elizabeth’s indefatigable envoy and formidable “spymaster”—were quick to defend him when Catholic critics predicted that ambition would “prick him forward” and that he would rally the realm’s puritans, undermine its episcopacy, overturn Elizabeth, and make himself king.²⁵

But one could make a case that neither Leicester nor Cartwright was responsible for the textures of puritan dissent around Shakespeare. Former Marian exile Anthony Gilby settled not far from Stratford and, from the 1560s, criticized the prescribed, purportedly reformed liturgies. Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntington, placed Gilby in Ashby-de-la-Zouch, northeast of Warwick, and Gilby drew his friends to the area to preach. Their prophesying at Southam and energetic ministries seem to have been successful. Southam was one of several parishes that answered omnia bene when diocesan commissions circulated inquiries about defections to Catholicism.²⁶

Should we then credit Gilby, who, having declined an episcopal appointment on his return from exile, informally assumed leadership of the reformists in Warwickshire and Leicestershire and was “widely regarded as byshopp”?²⁷ But to conformists, Gilby’s treatises and sermons posed a threat. They compared his network in the Midlands to the supposedly seditious circle of reformists organized by his London friends Thomas Wilcox and John Field. Conformists argued that both sets of malcontents undermined the regime’s and realm’s stability—which was precisely the line later taken up, to great effect, by Richard Bancroft.²⁸ Gilby had answers as early as 1581, identifying the conformists’ attack with “the old crafte of Satan [who] charge[s] God’s servaunts as factious and seditious.”²⁹ Still, the charges stuck. Gilby died before his caustic replies earned him time in prison, yet his clerical friends in the Midlands—notably, Humphrey Fenn of Coventry and Daniel Wyght of Stretton as well as Cartwright of Warwick—were apprehended and jailed for “denying her Majesty’s lawful authority” to govern churches as she and her conformist bishops saw fit. The three confined reformists thought of themselves as “prisoners in poperie,” referring to their jailers—John Whitgift of Canterbury and Bishop Aylmer of London—as papal tyrants.³⁰

We will likely never know what Shakespeare thought of the charges and counter-charges, although our third chapter finds that several of his plays were hard on the church’s hierarchy, but we do know that friends of the imprisoned Midlands ministers spoke up. Job Throckmorton, who was elected to represent Warwick in the Parliament of 1586, complained about “tiranicall dealing against the Lord’s faithful ministers.” Not long before registering his complaint, he accompanied Cartwright to Stratford. The two may have been canvassing the reformed churches there for the puritans’ survey of the ministry. Possibly, on that occasion, Throckmorton uttered an insult that was later printed—namely, that Whitgift, who by then would have had nearly three years to reenergize the ministry as the archbishop of Canterbury, was “not worthy to carry Cartwright’s books.”³¹

Conformists were quick to come to Whitgift’s defense and also drew Throckmorton’s fire. He blamed their “envenomed mouthes” for the “kitchen rhetorike” and for “speeches so opprobrious” that they forced his friends, well-meaning reformists, to defend their reputations and petition their way out of prison.³² Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter Cathedral, concluded confidently that the Midlands’ commoners were too astute to be gulled by Throckmorton’s attacks on conformists and by his puritanical insistence that the realm’s bishops be “unspotted.”³³ But we cannot calculate from this distance whether the scalding criticisms of Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright were influential, or of only passing interest, in Stratford. Maybe much the same should be said about the Earl of Leicester’s patronage of puritans. Of course, all of this was part of the religion around Shakespeare, although when Leicester dropped into conversations around Henley Street, talk may simply have turned to the renovations to his castle at nearby Kenilworth. His reformist sympathies may have been of no interest to the local workmen who gossiped about the project. William Shakespeare, in any event, may not have been at hand to hear them. A few literary historians believe he left for Lancashire soon after leaving school in Stratford. And if he did go north, the religion around him was more recusant—resistant to reform—than reformed.

Parts of Lancashire were doggedly Catholic from 1536, when participants in what was called the Pilgrimage of Grace demanded that King Henry VIII recatholicize the region as well as others, to the last decade of the century, when, rumor had it, the northwest would welcome an invasion from Spain or Scotland to initiate “the alteration of [reformed] religion.”³⁴ High sheriff Richard Holland, reporting to the queen’s Council at the time Shakespeare may have been north, confirmed that “either none at all or verie small reformation [was] had” there.³⁵ Conspiracies to rescue Mary Stuart almost invariably featured that region of the realm. Lancashire was thought to be the best place to take the Queen of Scots for safekeeping.³⁶

Stratford schoolmaster John Cottom hailed from there. His neighbor Alexander Hoghton hired a man named William Shakeshafte, who appears to have had some interest in theater. To this day, the locals say that Hoghton’s Shakeshafte was William Shakespeare of Stratford. Some historians agree, conjecturing that Cottom introduced Hoghton to Shakespeare and that the latter’s presence, years later, among the playmakers associated with Lancashire’s Lord Ferdinando Stanley can be explained by the soon-to-be playwright’s residence in the north and connections with Catholics there.³⁷

Evidence for Shakespeare’s lodging in Lancashire for a time is very suggestive but far from conclusive. Yet what seems all but incontestable is that Hoghton and his neighbors were fond of the old faith and were beneficiaries of the local magistrates’ “gentle dealinge” with the region’s Catholics. Reformist Edward Fleetwood of Wigan despaired that the statutes against the likes of Hoghton were unenforced, explaining—by complaining—that there were too few “sounde gentlemen” around to staff the commissions, which were instructed to supply the queen’s Council with “sufficient intelligence” about “inconvenient persons” in the region.³⁸

From articles of inquiry that survive, we know that both politics and religion were in play, although results, as Fleetwood noted, were hardly impressive. Commissioners required that persons suspected of being “inconvenient[ly] Catholic” relay what they knew about—and confide their reactions to—the papal excommunication of Elizabeth in 1570. Had they heard that she had been “denounced” in Rome as “no rightull governour of England”? Were they appalled that Pope Pius V had absolved “subjects of this realm from all obedience to hyr”? Did Lancashire gentry think that Jesuits and other expatriate priests were “lawfully executed” for having tried to rally resident Catholics and to stir rebellion? Were Lancashire Catholics genuinely opposed to Rome’s overreaching?³⁹ Perhaps, as Fleetwood groused, the interrogations were “gentle” in the north, but they did produce at least one notable defection: Lord Stanley apologized for the “backwardnes” of his father’s faith, promising the bishop of Chester that Lancashire Protestants would soon see that no one would “shewe himself more forward” in their cause than he, when he succeeded his “backward” father as earl of Derby.⁴⁰

Many interpreters who think Shakespeare lived (as Shakeshafte) among Lancastrian Catholics appreciate, as does John Cox, that “even absolutely certain documentary evidence concerning [the playwright’s] formation in the traditional faith would not amount to evidence that [he] retained that faith” as an adult.⁴¹ Hence, proponents of a steadfastly, if slyly, Catholic Shakespeare hunt for late Tudor confessional “backwardnes” in his plays. When Prospero bids farewell in The Tempest, Richard Wilson hears “the most positive affirmation ever made on an English Renaissance stage of the Catholic belief in the power of intercessory prayer to the Saints and Virgin.” Wilson places great emphasis on the old magician’s final request that the playgoers’ “indulgence set [him] free,” explaining that both playwright, scripting his protagonist’s farewell, and playgoers, hearing it, had in mind the indulgences that circulated among English Catholics who assisted expatriate priests and Jesuits with the reconversion of the realm.⁴²

But Wilson almost certainly overbids his hand. Of course, whether in Warwickshire or Lancashire, Shakespeare could have heard about—and have been impressed by—those expatriate priests, whom we met in the first chapter and will meet again in the third. Returning to England at great personal risk, they were intent on flaying the “faults and follyes” of reformed churches.⁴³ But Shakespeare could also have been impressed by reformers’ indictments of those very same priests. Prospero’s talk of indulgences tells us neither that Shakespeare admired recusants who harbored seminarians and Jesuits from abroad nor that he thought less favorably of the church papists, who feared that the old faith was ill-served by overzealous advocates and who turned them away. Elizabethan Catholics had a range of reactions to the missionaries and to friends’ and adversaries’ advice that they accommodate the realm’s religiously reformed authorities. Some Catholics prayed for the “Roman” reconquest of England; others were unsettled by a premonition of the violence that unquestionably would have attended a reversal of that magnitude. Elizabethan Calvinist sentiments were pluriform as well; reformists, whom conformists believed to be too “forward,” accused accusers of too often looking backward, looking, specifically, to Rome.⁴⁴ And the Calvinists’ controversies and quarrels gave William Shakespeare much to tell us about the religion around him, as we shall learn, although neither reformed nor unreformed religion appears to have tempted him devoutly to develop any readily identifiable and steadfastly held confessional opinions. We are not wrong to ask about his view of “unlawfull mynisters” in the Midlands—that question generates a few intriguing readings of his plays—but we would be unwise to expect a definitive answer.⁴⁵

Shakespeare was in Stratford to marry in 1582 and stayed for the birth of his daughter soon thereafter. Chances are that he remained (or returned) for the birth of twins two years later. We may assume that he knew something of the conformists—John Whitgift, after all, was bishop of Worcester from 1577 to 1583—and of reformists, although there is nothing directly connecting him to Throckmorton, Gilby, and Cartwright. As for local recusants and church papists, John’s as well as William’s familiarity with some—and perhaps with many—seems reasonable. Both father and son possibly met expatriate missionaries and Jesuits passing through. Conceivably, William Shakespeare was welcomed into Catholic circles yet was confessionally unaligned when he left Stratford for London, presuming that a resourceful player might do better by a growing family than a glover encumbered with his father’s debts.

LONDON

The Court was close to the city, as was the royal residence at Whitehall in Westminster. The government, that is, was a stroll down the Strand from London’s commercial district, the shops, taverns, and tenements that constituted the highest-density spot in England. Intellectual exchange around St. Paul’s Cathedral was brisk. Outdoor preaching at Paul’s Cross attracted crowds, and the churchyard was fringed with bookstalls, from which readers bought what had just been published in their realm as well as pamphlets, books, and broadsheets from Scotland and the Continent. Bishop Aylmer’s scouts were busy during the 1580s in the very surrounds of St. Paul’s, listening for seditious conversation and looking for subversive literature. They hoped to stop the circulation of anything sold or said that would encourage papists rumored to be scheming in Holborn or puritans participating in secret clerical conferences, like the one in Aldgate where Thomas Cartwright was said to consult with local reformists when he came from Warwickshire.⁴⁶

Aylmer was unfriendly to visiting dissidents and to outspoken reformists in his own diocese. The suppression of agitation for liturgical change was, for him, the sine qua non of responsible diocesan policing. But, to reformists, policing was less important than preaching. They suggested that, rather than suspend persons protesting the established church’s liturgies, bishops should suspend unpreaching pastors and get rid of clerical colleagues who, like one “dumbe” Essex minister, “suffer[ed] noe other to preache” in his parish.⁴⁷ But, on what we might call staffing issues, Aylmer and his immediate successors present what seems to be a creditable record. By 1603, there were more than five hundred preachers in the six hundred thirteen parishes in the diocese of London.⁴⁸ Yet such statistics did not silence protests against the purges of pastors who refused, selectively, to use the Prayer Book. Shakespeare may have encountered one as he entered London for the first time—or while passing through Bishopsgate to and from the theaters in the suburb of Shoreditch. For, to avoid conducting funerals by the Prayer Book—that is, with the gestures and formula that it required—some nonconformists in the city exported their dead, carrying the corpses through London’s gates for burial and “unreverentlye tumblinge” them into pits.⁴⁹ That Shakespeare met mourners during makeshift funerals is, admittedly, a wild guess, if only because the bereaved who defied authorized procedures presumably would have avoided a public display. But guesswork will be necessary while we are in London, as it was on our travels through Warwickshire and Lancashire, for no one registered the playwright’s coming and going in the city. We do not know precisely where or when he settled in St. Helen’s parish. We read only that creditors went looking for him there during the mid-1590s.⁵⁰

The parish church had been part of a priory that was “dissolved” and dismantled earlier in the century. Thereupon, the local company of leather sellers purchased the nuns’ hall.⁵¹ Given Shakespeare’s Stratford experience, we can assume that he knew his way around leather and glovers. His father, John, had traveled to London and no doubt knew practitioners of his craft there. The company’s presence in Bishopsgate may have been the reason William took rooms in that ward. It was only a ten-minute walk from the playhouses in Shoreditch. A late seventeenth-century source supposes that Shakespeare lodged closer to the theaters, but the statement to that effect was stroked out, as if John Aubrey, who formulated it, learned something to the contrary later. Aubrey’s original is often trusted, but Bishopsgate seems a better bet, because there is no direct evidence that the playwright packed and traveled from Shoreditch to St. Helen’s, save for his coming home after a day’s or evening’s business was done.⁵²

If he walked the main road, he passed St. Ethelburga and St. Botolph’s, Bishopsgate, his ward’s other parish churches. Their principal patrons, the Gresham family, with others’ assistance, made certain that there was plenty of preaching around Shakespeare. Thomas Gresham endowed a lectureship in the 1570s to correct for the “smattering of soom ordinarie points but slenderly handled in the pulpits.”⁵³ In the 1580s, the vestry at St. Botolph’s financed weekly sermons to supplement the curate’s performances.⁵⁴ And the Greshams were prominent among dozens of subscribers who contributed each year to pay the lecturers at St. Helen’s. The parish was in the queen’s gift, and she added a tidy sum for “a sufficient preacher” to fill the pulpit four times every year.⁵⁵