Education: Case of a Vexatious Man

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Shaft & Spear. With that much evidence in hand. Book Dealer Keen started off on another quest: How might Shakespeare have come into possession of the Chronicle? The volume did bear one owner's name, Richard Newport, and a date, April 6, 1565. But when Keen investigated the signature, he found that it belonged to a Sir Richard Newport who had lived in Shropshire, some distance from Stratford. Nevertheless, Newport's family tree revealed some promising leads. He was related to a family named Fitton (Mary Fitton was the "Dark Lady" of the Sonnets), which in turn was related to the Houghtons of Lancashire. Sir Alexander Houghton, it seemed, kept a group of "playeres," and among these was a young man called William Shakeshafte. Keen's next question: Was

Shakeshafte by any chance Shakespeare? According to Stratford records, Shakespeare's grandfather was sometimes listed with a "shafte" rather than a "speare." As for young William himself, he was known only to have been a member of the Earl of Derby's players later in life. But some of those players had apparently come from the household of one Sir Thomas Hesketh of Rufford, who was not only related to Thomas Savage, one of Shakespeare's Globe Theater partners, but also to Sir Alexander Houghton, Shakeshafte's patron. In his will, Keen found, Houghton had recommended his players to Hesketh, and from there, the link to the Earl of Derby was clear.

"Obstinate Papist." Keen, however, soon discovered other leads. One was that Shakespeare's father got into trouble in Stratford, presumably for remaining a Roman Catholic. At that time, says Keen, he might well have wanted to send his son away from Stratford, and it was quite possible that he let him flee with his Catholic schoolmaster Simon Hunt, who apparently found his way to an English Catholic college in Rheims, France. In any case, Shakespeare was later to refer to that college in The Taming of the Shrew ("I . . . freely give unto you this young scholar that hath been long studying at Rheims"), and it would have been there that he would have met the exile Thomas Houghton, one of the college's benefactors and the Catholic brother of Shakeshafte's patron, Sir Alexander Houghton. The step from Rheims to Lancashire, says Keen, would then have been logical, for Houghton was known to have "an obstinate Papist" in his house.

Concludes Keen: "William Shakespeare has given us many a picture of many a life, but unhappily not a word about his own—a most vexatious man . . . Yet it is not difficult to see a pattern from which one might plot a new biography for him."