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