Shakespeare: A Life Read Online Free PDF Page B

design, and alphabetic letters in a 'marke'
would not be proof of her ability to write. But what has become quite
clear, partly because time has worn away some of her clotted ink, is
that she drew her mark in one continuous movement. She appears to have
been familiar with a quill pen.
    If
she was indeed able to write phrases and sums and to read them, she
would have been of considerable use to her father. However that may
be, Robert Arden's belief in her dependability is evident. She can
hardly have been much older than 17 or 18 when he made his will. Young
women, at that time, were seldom named in wills as executors, and
Robert Arden's will is that of an alert, shrewd Catholic, who does not
wholly trust his own wife. Whether or not he came from a cadet branch
of the Catholic Park Hall Ardens, in Castle Bromwich in the parish of
Aston near Birmingham, he seems to have shared the Arden piety. His
father Thomas in 1501 had been able to use as a trustee the first of
the intently pious Throckmortons, of Coughton Court, who died on a
pilgrimage to Jerusalem and whose son, Sir George, spoke out against
Henry VIII's divorce. Robert Arden joined Stratford's pious
foundation. He chose as his will's first witness (as he had no need to
do) a curate so stubbornly Catholic as to be dismissed later from a
Snitterfield vicarage for adhering to the old faith. Wedded to John
Shakespeare, Mary may have found his religious views problematic or
unlike her father's, but John seems to have been brought up as a
Catholic, and their son William was raised in the shadow of the old
faith.
    By the late autumn in 1557 she
was living at Stratford. Young enough to have a chance of bearing a
healthy child, Mary Shakespeare failed at first. Her son William's
life itself was at risk in plague-time, and his birth-date was
important to her and would have been lovingly recalled until Mary
died. The wishful notion that he was born on 23 April was first
mooted, so far as we know, by William Oldys in a marginal note written
in all probability between 1743 and 1750, and properly belongs to
legends about Shakespeare 'The actual day of William's birth is
unknown', wrote E. K. Chambers in a statement that still holds good;
'a belief that it was April 23, on which day he died in 1616, seems to
rest
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on an eighteenth-century blunder.' 6 Oldys, writing a century and a quarter after Shakespeare died,
presumably had no evidence as to the birth-date other than the
ambiguous words on the tablet in the poet's monument at Holy Trinity,
'obiit anno . . . Ætatis 53' (he died in his fifty-third year), and
Chambers believed that Oldys probably made 'an incorrect use' of
these. 7 Edmond Malone, the exacting eighteenthcentury Shakespeare scholar,
expressed doubt that Joseph Greene, a curate of Stratford and Oldys's
contemporary, had any authority for declaring 23 April as the
birth-date other than the monument. It has been said to be 'especially
appropriate' that Shakespeare should have been born on St George's
Day, the day of England's patron saint; but the wish certainly does
not add up to a fact. Had his birth and death really occurred on two
23rds, of April, such a coincidence would surely have been noted
within a hundred years of his death. Yet we have no sign of this.
Strong family loyalty may well have moved Shakespeare's granddaughter
Elizabeth Hall to honour his memory, just ten years after he died, by
marrying on 22 April. Elizabeth's honouring his birthday as the 22nd
remains only a good possibility, suggested at first by De Quincey; but
it is supported by what we know of the closeness of John and Mary
Shakespeare's people. Despite a record that includes lawsuits and a
family fray, Ardens and Shakespeares knew the force of family ties (as
when many of them helped young Robert Webbe, Margaret Arden's son, to
acquire their own individual shares in an estate). 8 In brief, it is possible that Shakespeare was born