CHAPTER 72
After the death of his father Shakespeare’s visits to Stratford, in order to see his widowed mother as well as his wife and family, are likely to have become more frequent. It was a slow process of readjustment, or reorientation, that would finally result in his living for long periods of time in his home town. It represents the return of the native, one of the most characteristic passages of human experience. In his later plays, too, Shakespeare celebrates the reunification of families and the reconciliation of old differences. There is one other additional fact to add to this homecoming, which is to be found in Oxford.
The association with Shakespeare and Oxford is not well understood— there are somewhat implausible suggestions that he used the Bodleian Library that was established in 1602—but it is clear enough that he habitually stopped at Oxford on his journeys between London and Stratford. We know this from three separate sources. One was a diary kept by an Oxford antiquary, Thomas Hearne, in which he states that Shakespeare “always spent some time at the Crown tavern in Oxford kept by one Davenant.” Thirty years later Alexander Pope, who could not have known of Hearne’s diary, has the same story to the effect that
Shakespeare often baited at the Crown Inn or Tavern in Oxford, in his journey to and from London. The landlady was a woman of great beauty and sprightly wit; and her husband, Mr. John Davenant, (afterwards mayor of that city) a grave melancholy man, who as well as his wife used much to delight in Shakespeare’s pleasant company.1
Aubrey completes the story with the note that “Shakespeare did comonly in his journey lye at this house in Oxon: where he was exceedingly respected.”2
John and Jennet Davenant were a London couple—Davenant was a wine-importer living in Maiden Lane—who had somehow become acquainted with Shakespeare. One contemporary stated that Davenant was “an admirer and lover of plays and play-makers, especially Shakespeare.” 3 In 1601, after six of their children had died at birth or in early infancy, they decided to move to the healthier atmosphere of Oxford. Here they managed a tavern, then known simply as the Tavern, a four-storeyed building on the east side of Cornmarket. It was not an inn, which could take in travellers, but a place for convivial drinking. If Shakespeare did indeed stay with the Davenants, as seems very likely, he would have done so as a guest rather than a customer. The air seems to have been beneficial, and the Davenants acquired a family of seven healthy children. Their first-born son, Robert, recalls Shakespeare covering him with “a hundred kisses.” 4 Their second son William, apparently named after Shakespeare and the dramatist’s godson, has left a more equivocal story.
Hearne and Pope both confirm that William Davenant claimed to be Shakespeare’s illegitimate son as well as his godson. As Hearne notes in a bracket, “In all probability he [Shakespeare] got him.” They both retold the story of how the boy was once asked by an elderly townsman why he was running home; he replied “to see my godfather Shakespeare.” To which the old gentleman replied, “That’s a good boy, but have a care that you don’t take God’s name in vain.”5
The story was no doubt apocryphal, and had in fact been applied to others beside Shakespeare, but at the time it reinforced the general belief that the dramatist was something of a philanderer. William Davenant, in later life, did nothing to dispel the rumour that he was Shakespeare’s illegitimate son: he continued to advertise the fact with pride. As Aubrey noted, “that notion of Sir William’s being more than a poetical child only of Shakespeare was common in town.” 6 Since William Davenant was himself a poet and playwright, he may have had some slight excuse for defaming his mother and claiming such distinguished parentage. He did indeed serve Shakespeare well. He himself revised Macbeth and The Tempest, with the assistance of John Dryden, and helped to maintain the continuity of Shakespearian drama; he was also instrumental in the revival of nine plays after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660.
Murals from the sixteenth century have been uncovered at the Crown, one of them with the monogram of “IHS” which is the characteristic Catholic sign of Christ. William Davenant himself was in later life a Catholic and a Royalist. So Shakespeare stayed in congenial company. Davenant was also said to have a semblance of Shakespeare’s “open Countenance” but the resemblance could not have been exact; he had lost his nose as a result of mercury treatment for syphilis. As a contemporary noted, “the want of a Nose gives an odd Cast to the Face.”7 Certainly he inherited nothing of Shakespeare’s genius.
It is interesting to speculate, however, about the physical appearance of Shakespeare then in his mid-forties. The slimness, if not the sprightliness, of youth had long gone. He had been a handsome and well-shaped man, according to Aubrey’s report, but by now he must have become a little portly. It is not inconceivable that he actually became rather fat. His auburn or chestnut hair had withered on the vine, and it is likely that his cranium was already as bare as it appears in the Droeshout engraving which decorates the frontispiece of the Folio. From that engraving, too, we gain some acquaintance with his full lips, his straight and sensitive nose, his watchful eyes. The beard he sported in his earlier life has gone, leaving behind a small moustache. A professional phrenologist has concluded, from the shape of the head, that the dramatist was possessed of “ideality, wonder, wit, imitation, benevolence, and veneration” with “small destructiveness and acquisitiveness.” His cranium also evinces “great susceptibility, activity, quickness and love of action.”8
There is no doubt that he would have dressed well; his neatness and general cleanliness are well attested from his work. The standard dress of an Elizabethan gentleman included a bejewelled and quilted silk doublet, with a ruff for formal occasions; the doublet was covered with a jerkin, manufactured perhaps of fine leather or costly cloth. He wore breeches, an Elizabethan form of short trousers, that were fastened at the doublet and tied at the knees. The codpiece, plumped up by stiff packing, was out of favour by the end of the century. The shirt beneath his doublet was of cambric or of lawn. It could be tied or worn open at the front; in some apocryphal portraits of Shakespeare the wide collars of the shirt are draped over the doublet. The tail of the shirt was used as a form of underwear. He sported silk stockings and variously coloured leather “pumps” or shoes, with heels and soles of cork. He owned a cloak, reaching anywhere from the waist to the ankles and characteristically worn over one shoulder. And he carried a sword, as the mark of a gentleman. He had a tall hat; the higher the hat, the higher the social status. Dress was an essential aspect of late Tudor society. As one instructor on the art of being a gentleman put it, “The sum of a hundred pounde is not to be accompted much in these dayes to be bestowed of apparell for one gentleman.”9 There is no reason to believe that Shakespeare was strident or ostentatious in his dress—far from it—but he would have been as elegant as the best of his contemporaries.
The Droeshout image, approved by Shakespeare’s colleagues after the playwright’s death as a fitting accompaniment to the collected edition of the plays, is perhaps the closest to a true resemblance. Martin Droeshout could not have been working from life, since he was only fifteen at the time of Shakespeare’s death. But he was part of a dynasty of Flemish artists living in London. His father, Michael Droeshout, had been an engraver and his uncle, Martin Droeshout, was a painter. It is possible, then, that the younger Martin Droeshout based his engraving upon an earlier likeness now lost. It is also relatively close to the image adorning the monument above Shakespeare’s tomb in the church at Stratford. That bust shows Shakespeare with a beard, which suggests that he grew it or shaved it according to mood.
The sculpture has been described by one Shakespearian as resembling that of “a self-satisfied pork butcher.”10 That it is a good likeness is not in doubt, however, because an early chronicler of Shakespeare’s Stratford believed that “the head was evidently taken from a death-mask.”11 It must have been acceptable to Shakespeare’s immediate family, who commissioned it. It was executed by Gerard Johnson, a Dutch artist who lived near the Globe in Southwark. He had ample opportunity, therefore, to study his subject. There is no reason why a great writer should not resemble a pork butcher, satisfied or otherwise, and it is at least ironic that later accounts did make him a butcher’s apprentice. He may have possessed that corpulent and ruddy glow that seems to be peculiar to English butchers. And why should he not look satisfied?
There are other portraits which claim some attention from posterity, if only because the quest for Shakespeare’s face is an unending one. They all provide varying degrees of resemblance. One painting, now known as the “Chandos portrait” (c. 1610), depicts a man in his early forties wearing a black silk doublet; he is of muddy or swarthy complexion, and his black curls lend him a gypsy or continental appearance. He is also wearing a gold earring. It was once suggested, half in earnest, that it was a portrait of Shakespeare dressed to play Shylock. The painting itself has a long and complicated history, which is as much as to say that its provenance is uncertain.
A more refined and noble image presents itself in the painting known as the “Janssen portrait” (c.1620), in which a sensitive face surmounts an exquisite doublet. The “Felton portrait” (c. eighteenth century) is executed on a small wood panel, and displays a man in his thirties with an enormous forehead but no other distinguished or distinguishing characteristics. The “Flower portrait” is close to the Droeshout engraving, and has led some scholars to believe that it is in fact the lost original for the Folio engraving; it is dated 1609, and has been painted on top of a Madonna of the fifteenth century. But there have been arguments over the authenticity of the dating. And so the matter rests. All of these paintings have a family resemblance, but all of them may be derived from Droeshout.
The one notable exception would seem to be the Grafton portrait (c. 1588), which has already been described in the context of Shakespeare’s own life. It shows a young and fashionably dressed man in his early twenties, and was previously dismissed on the grounds that the young Shakespeare could not have been so affluent at such an early stage of his career. That is no longer a reasonable supposition, as we have seen, and so the merits of the painting can be taken on their own. If it is placed next to the Droeshout engraving, a consonance of youth and middle age begins to emerge. All of these representations, hovering in the realm of uncertainty and conjecture, resemble Shakespeare in more than a pictographic sense; they are a token of his elusiveness in the world. They also suggest that the appearance of the man may have been quite different from any mental or cultural image of Shakespeare that currently exists. He may have been swarthy. He may have worn an earring. He may in later life even have been fat.