Mrs Shakespeare
Times Literary Supplement, 19 Feb. 1993
Sir, - Robert Nye (Letters, February 12) continues to confuse fiction with fact. Despite his disclaimer, he relies on literary fantasy instead of historical documents (like S. Schoenbaum, as I showed in the same issue). Nye's so-called "Mrs Shakespeare" absurdly misnames her only son "Hamnet", allegedly because her parish clerk (again like Schoenbaum) preferred that form. Yet she well remembers the 1580 inquest on Katherine Hamlett, drowned in the Avon, and duly notes its relevance to Hamlet. Unforfunately; she has missed the reference in her husband's 1616 will, where he himself dictated or indeed wrote the name as "Hamlett". Who can rationally doubt which form the Shakespeares preferred?
Nye offers an OED citation to bolster up his strange assertion that his "Mrs Shakespeare" used the word "pox" in 1623 "precisely as Massinger was to use it just eight years later". But in fact she had been dead for eight years before Massinger used it - imprecisely, as Nye's own reference shows. Her usage is manifestly an implausible fiction feigned to be fact, just as I complained. Besides, the real Mrs Shakespeare would surely have known that "pox" meant pocks, not flux.
She would also have known, even without help from the OED, what "recusant" meant in 1592: Nye (again like Schoenbaum) omits the preamble to the document he cites; it refers to "persons… presented ... or otherwise fownde owt to be Jhesuites, Seminarye preestes, fugitiues Or Recusantes ... Or vehementelye suspected to be sutche….". The chief commissioner concerned was the rabid anti-Papist Sir Thomas Lucy, traditionally also the persecutor of the young Shakespeare for deer-poaching. Nye (yet again like Schoenbaum) claims that John Shakespeare was definitely "listed as among those absent" "for fear of process for debt"; that is, he was named as a debtor, not a recusant. But the actual words used are only "It is sayd that" he felt any such fear; why this was said, and by whom; remains unclear. Nor should anyone assume that Catholicism and poverty were exclusive alternatives; on the contrary, the former was often the cause of the latter because of the punitive fines imposed.
Most of England was Catholic when John Shakespeare was born; his wife Mary Arden came from a Catholic family; their first child was christened by the Catholic Roger Dyos according to the Roman rite. The document that John Shakespeare signed was a fervent profession of Catholic faith (not a "will and testament" in any ordinary sense); its text is known to have been brought to England by the Jesuit mission of 1581. Nye's claim that "all the evidence is for a late conversion" c 1601 is sheer fantasy. The sole factual point, that John Shakespeare had been in office during (not "responsible for") the anti-Papist defacements of Stratford chapel, might merely mean that he was no saint and no martyr, not that he was no Catholic.
I suggest that if Robert Nye wishes to write a work of fiction on a factual basis he should get his facts right.
Eric Sams
32 Arundel Avenue,
Sanderstead, Surrey