Religion Around Shakespeare. Peter Iver Kaufman

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