Roaring Boys by Judith Cook Read Free Book Online Page B

place. One incident which occurred in Stratford when he was fifteen years old is worth recording. Shortly before Christmas 1579 the body of a young girl was found in the River Avon, caught under the bare branches of the willows at Tiddington. It was thought she went into the water on 17 December, but the inquest was not held until 11 February 1580 and it is suggested therefore that in the meantime she was temporarily buried. At the end of the hearing the twelve members of the jury, having heard all the evidence, brought in a verdict of accidental death. It was decided that ‘she, going with a milk pail to draw water from the river Avon, and standing on the bank of the same, suddenly and by accident, slipped and fell into the river and was drowned
and met her death in no other wise or fashion
’ (my italics). 6 The latter phrase suggests that there were those who said otherwise, rumours of suicide after being jilted by a lover perhaps? But the jury had obviously given her the benefit of the doubt. Had they brought in a suicide verdict the result would have been a hasty re-interment at some nearby crossroads after the Coroner had announced that the deceased ‘regardless of salvation of her soul and led astray by the instigation of the Devil, threw herself into the water and wilfully drowned herself’, thus forfeiting her right to burial in hallowed ground. Why this sad little story is apposite is because the girl’s name was Katherine Hamlet and her death and subsequent burial recalls that of Ophelia.
    Shakespeare, after leaving school at thirteen, went into the family business. The story of how at the age of eighteen he got the much older Anne Hathaway pregnant, subsequently married her in a ceremony which had all the hallmarks of a shotgun wedding presided over by her brothers, of the birth of that child, Susanna, followed by twins, Hamnet and Judith, and his subsequent disappearance from Stratford is too well known to go into further. All we know for sure is that he went away leaving his parents to care for his deserted wife and children, no small responsibility for Mary Shakespeare who still had small children of her own. Shakespeare’s supposedly ‘missing years’ have given rise to a wide variety of theories based on his subsequent work: that he was a soldier in the Low Countries (
Henry
V), studied at the Inns of Court (The
Merchant of Venice
), went to sea (
Pericles
and
The Tempest
), was employed as a tutor by Lord Strange in Derbyshire (any play involving comic schoolmasters) and, of course, that hoary old chestnut, that he simply ran off to London after having been caught poaching on the Lucy estate at Charlecote, just outside Stratford, and then stood around outside the Globe holding the horses of those attending performances until someone noticed him, a theory which falls down somewhat when we know he was in London ten years before the Globe was even built.
    There is a more prosaic and practical possibility. Since nobody knows when Shakespeare actually left Stratford it could well be that the ‘missing years’ were few. During 1587 five different theatre companies visited Stratford, one of which was the Queen’s Men in June. They arrived in the town two men short for, while they were performing in Oxford, one of their actors, William Knell, was killed in a fight with a fellow player, John Towne. In the evidence given at the inquest, held on 13 June in the town of Thame, it was stated that Knell, fighting drunk, had picked a quarrel with Towne and drawn his sword on him. Towne had been forced to defend himself while calling out to Knell to stop the fight. Knell had refused to do so and Towne ‘fearing for his life’ had struck out and run him through. Towne was therefore now in custody. 7
    Losing two actors would have been pretty disastrous for a small touring company. For Shakespeare, already drawn to the theatre and frustrated with his life in the family business and with his domestic circumstances,