The Shakespeare Arms


A quatercentenary contribution

 

Times Literary Supplement, Oct. 1996

 

October 20, 1596 is the date on both the draft and the redraft of a grant of arms to Shakespeare's father, John, with the motto "non sans droict" and the device of a falcon shaking a spear. A third draft, dated 1599, permits John to combine those arms with those of the Ardens, the family into which he married. All three drafts were prepared, and are preserved in the London College of Arms; the desired arms and permission were later officially confirmed.

    As Mayor of Stratford-upon-Avon, John Shakespeare had already applied for arms some thirty years earlier. However, he had lost office and fallen on hard times by 1576; and he was a Catholic recusant in a compulsorily Protestant society. No arms had been granted by the College up to 1596. By then, however, William had long lived in London; and he had good reason to renew the application. That August, his only son, Hamlet, had died, at the age of eleven-and-a-half. The play of Hamlet was put on at the Swan, also in late 1596 (as I sought to show in the TLS of September 22, 1995). King John, usually assigned to 1596, contains a moving speech about how "Grief fills the room up of my absent child”. Nothing else could take little Hamlet's place: the male line died with him. But there could still be some continuity; a coat of arms would ennoble not only John Shakespeare but, as the 1596 reapplication puts it, “his children, issue and posterity”. At that time, only William had children of his own - Susanna, who was thir­teen, and Hamlet's surviving twin, Judith.

    So William duly approached the College of Arms. no doubt in person. It still occupies the same site, in Queen Victoria Street, just across the Thames from his Bankside lodgings. All the experts, including two heralds, have always assumed that the documents were penned by the Garter King of Arms himself, Sir William Dethick; and they were indeed explicitly de­signed for his approval and signature. Yet exalted officers of the Crown would rarely prepare their own drafts, then or now; and Dethick's known handwriting is quite different, as the New York documents expert Charles Hamilton has pointed out (in In Search of Shakespeare, 1985). Hamilton further argues that all three drafts are in Shakespeare's own hand. But the present Archivist of the College of Arms rejects this finding, on the ground that only a herald (whether Dethick or another), or an accredited deputy, could ever have prepared any such documents.

     These are well reproduced in Schoenbaum's William Shakespeare: A documentary life (1975). They can be read only by those versed in Tudor secretary hand, and then only with difficulty because of their many erasures. But inspection will confirm that the first draft contains some 555 words, of which seventy-five are about John Shakespeare; the other 480 relate to heraldic declarations and descriptions. In the former category only one word is scored through; in the lat­ter, the tally is fifty. Would a College writer have got more than a tenth of his own work wrong (including the year of his sovereign's reign, which he twice misstates as the 39th instead of the 38th)? And the mistakes extend to the writer's second thoughts even more than his first. He carefully inserts thirty new words over caret signs, and then proceeds to cross out eight of those words, again in the same section about her­aldry. He should have deleted a ninth word, but failed to do so. His added afterthoughts about the Shakespeares, however, contain no deletions or errors. So he was better briefed about that family than his own formulae. He might nevertheless still be identifiable as a herald or deputy, if his unreliable drafting and quirky penmanship could be seen elsewhere in the College archives. But no such identification has ever been made, although many drafts in various hands, from the same period, have been preserved. So this drafter remains memorable solely for specializing in Shakespeare grant applications, twice in 1596 and once in 1599.

    Alternatively, the drafter was Shakespeare himself, in whose hand the observed kinds and proportions of errors and corrections would be entirely predictable. A professional writer already in his sovereign's service, keenly inter­ested in heraldry (as demonstrable in canonical plays and other documents from 1596 onwards) and personally known to officers of the College (as the sometime herald Scott-Giles has sug­gested) could easily have ascertained and repro­duced the basic style and formulae. And his fame at the time could readily provide a reason for the retention of these unique documents in the College archives.

    There is therefore a strong case for the further palaeographic analysis of these three College documents. I have suggested recognition signs in my recent essays on Shakespeare's penman­ship and orthography in The Real Shakespeare (1995) and Shakespeare's Edward III (1996). Typical traits include wide variability of letter-formation; arbitrary capitalization, including large C for small c; minim errors; the use of y for i; a disjoined o; a form of p for par, per and pre (as, in "pt'', "pson" and "psent''); an overhead loop for a medial "er" and many others. All these and other shared mannerisms are plainly observable in one or more of the three drafts under review.

    The published text of Edward III now gener­ally assigned to Shakespeare by specialists in the subject, was also dated 1596. It describes (lines 1494-1352) how King Edward invests his son with a suit of armour before Crécy, but then refuses to help him (1615-91) in battle. The Prince soon returns triumphant (1633-55). At first sight, these passages display no very striking resemblance or relevance to any applications made to the College of Heraldson behalf of John Shakespeare. But the College documents and the anonymous play share among others the following words and phrases (Edward III in brackets): ancient custom, appeareth [appearing], arms, bearing, children [son], coat, colours, continued [continual], crest, dignities [dignify], falcon. father, grant, honour, impale [impall], name, noble, prince, rewarded [reward], set upon a hel­met [set this helmet on], shield, spear [lance], steeled. Again the appearances are readily explicable as the product of the same handin every sense.