Shakespeare’s Mother

Synopsis

This is a nonfiction article about Shakespeare’s mother.

Lady Macbeth and Gertrude are two of the most powerful characters in Shakespeare’s plays. Many people have scrutinized the relationship between Shakespeare and his wife for clues to these characters. This includes Stephen Greenblatt, a famous authority on Shakespeare.

There is another obvious explanation.

In his book, Will in the World, Stephen Greenblatt provides all the clues. I draw the obvious conclusion.

It was not on his own marriage that Shakespeare based these relationships, but his parents’. Lady Macbeth and Gertrude were based on Shakespeare’s mother.

Shakespeare’s Mother

“…perhaps… he told himself, imagining Hamlet and Macbeth…, marital intimacy is dangerous, …the very dream is a threat.” (Greenblatt, p140)

Preface

Most of the information in this article comes from the book, “Will in the World”, by Stephen Greenblatt. In his book, Greenblatt describes the world of William Shakespeare and postulates how it affected his plays. Greenblatt says:

“the whole impulse to explore Shakespeare’s life arises from the powerful conviction that his plays and poems spring not only from other plays and poems but from things he knew firsthand, in his body and soul.” (p120).

Using the information in that book, and my own observations of life and my slight understanding of a couple of Shakespeare’s most powerful plays, I present a new, expanded and entirely plausible explanation of the effects of one person in Shakespeare’s life that Greenblatt appears to have significantly underappreciated: his mother.

I’d like to thank my mother for providing an example of a strong (and thankfully virtuous) woman and mother.

I’d also like to note that Shakespeare grew up under the reign of Queen Elizabeth (the first), who artfully (so to speak) used personal and public politics in a world dominated by men to rule England for many years, with minimal warfare and internal disruption. It was in this environment that some of the greatest English writers, including Shakespeare, wrote.

All citations in this article are from the 2004 Norton paperback edition of that book.

Introduction

“[Shakespeare] is an artist who made use of virtually everything that came his way. He mined, with very few exceptions, the institutions and professions and personal relationships that touched his life. He was the supreme poet of courtship… And he was a great poet of the family, with a special, deep interest in the murderous rivalry of brothers and in the complexity of father-daughter relations… But… Shakespeare was curiously restrained in his depictions of what it is actually like to be married.” (p126–127)

Or was he? Greenblatt ignores two of the most famous of all of Shakespeare’s marriages.

This article is about two of the most famous women in Shakespeare’s play: the mothers in Macbeth and Hamlet.

Marriage in Shakespeare’s Plays

According to Greenblatt, in most of Shakespeare’s plays, marriage was represented by his marriage to his wife, and could be summarized as: “Wooing, Wedding, and Repenting” (pp 118–148).

According to Greenblatt:

“[t]here are two significant exceptions to Shakespeare’s unwillingness or inability to imagine a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy, but they are unnervingly strange: Gertrude and Claudius in Hamlet and the Macbeths.” (p137)

“…perhaps… [Shakespeare] told himself, imagining Hamlet and Macbeth…, marital intimacy is dangerous, that the very dream is a threat.” (p140)

Regarding the play Hamlet:

“These marriages are powerful, in their distinct ways, but they are also upsetting, even terrifying, in their glimpses of genuine intimacy. The villainous Claudius, fraudulent in almost everything he utters, speaks with oddly convincing tenderness about his feelings for his wife: ‘She’s so conjunctive to my life and soul… that, as the star moves not but in his sphere,/ I could not but by her”. (p137)

Gertrude seems equally devoted, even to the extent that she is willing to sacrifice her son to save her husband:

“She is not directly contriving to have her beloved son killed, but her overmastering impulse is to save her husband.” (p137).

“The deep bond between Gertrude and Claudius, as Hamlet perceives to his horror and disgust, is based upon… an intense mutual sexual attraction…” (p137)

Hamlet is “sickened by the very thought of his middle-aged mother’s sexuality” (p137).

Regarding the play Macbeth:

“If spousal intimacy in Hamlet is vaguely nauseating, in Macbeth it is terrifying. Here, almost uniquely in [Shakespeare’s opus], husband and wife speak to each other playfully, as if they were a genuine couple.” (p138).

Beyond that,

“…husband and wife play upon each other’s innermost fears and desires. They meet on the ground of a shared, willed, murderous ferocity… [One of the exchanges] takes the audience deep inside this particular marriage. Whatever has led Lady Macbeth to imagine the bloody scene she describes and whatever Macbeth feels in response to her fantasy — terror, sexual excitement, envy, soul sickness, championship in evil — lie at the heart of what it means to be the principal married couple conjured up by Shakespeare’s imagination…

“What is startling about… the whole relationship between Macbeth and his wife, is the extent to which they inhabit each other’s minds…” “The richness of this account… is vivid evidence of the wife’s ability to follow the twists and turns of her husband’s innermost character, to take her husband in. And her intimate understanding leads her to desire to enter into him” (p138?).

She pushes him to go further, be stronger. She tells him that his nature is

“too full o’ th’ milk of human kindness… Thou would be great, Art not without ambition…”

Shakespeare’s wife and his marriage

Shakespeare’s wife was the eldest daughter of “a staunchly Protestant farmer.” (pp116, 118). She was pregnant when they married; Greenblatt supposes this may have created a forced marriage and subsequent regret by Shakespeare. They were married for 34 years (pp120–125).

“For most of his married life [Shakespeare] lived in London, and [his wife] and children apparently remained in Stratford.” (p125)

There are no letters between them; it is likely that she could not read or write (p125).

“When Shakespeare, evidently gravely ill, came to draw up his will, in January 1616, he took care to leave virtually everything… to his elder daughter Susanna…”

Shakespeare’s Formative Years

Let’s look instead at Shakespeare’s upbringing and life with his parents.

Shakespeare’s parents

Shakespeare’s mother was Mary Arden. Her family

“was one of Warwickshire’s most distinguished, tracing its lineage back to the Doomsday Book the great record of property holdings compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086. The Arden properties occupy four long columns in the record, and the great expanse of forest to the north and west of Stratford was still in Shakespeare’s time known as the Forest of Arden.”

“In a world that took kinship seriously, it meant something to be related, if only distantly, to such a distinguished and wealthy man as Edward Arden of Park Hall, the great house near Birmingham. Arden was a name for anyone with social ambition to conjure with… Mary was her father’s favorite. When he died in 1556 — commending his soul, like a good Catholic, “to Almighty God, and to out blessed Lady Saint Mary, and to all her holy company of heaven” — he left his youngest daughter a tidy sum of money and his most valuable property.” (pp58–59)

For John Shakespeare (William’s father), Mary was also the daughter of his father’s boss. Mary was her father’s favorite, and with rich expectations. So how did he manage that?

Perhaps she found him to be very attractive.

When he left the farm and moved to Stratford, in 1556, two years before his marriage, his neighbors were quick to recognize his virtues…

Beginning in his twenties,

“he held a steady succession of municipal offices”, including constable, chamberlain, alderman, bailiff and chief alderman… “This is the record of an impressively solid citizen and locally distinguished public man, someone liked and trusted…” (p 59)

He is described as genial and good-natured (p67).

Tension in a Marriage

“For parents of John and Mary Shakespeare’s generation, the world into which they brought their children must have seemed strange, unsettling, and dangerous: within living memory, England had gone from a highly conservative Roman Catholicism — in the 1520s Henry VIII had fiercely attacked Luther and been awarded by the pope with the title “Defender of the Faith” — to Catholicism under the supreme headship of the king; to a wary, tentative Protestantism; to a renewed and militant Roman Catholicism; and then, with Elizabeth, to Protestantism once again. In none of these regimes was there a vision of religious tolerance. Each shift was accompanied by waves of conspiracy and persecution, rack and thumbscrew, ax and fire.” (p93–94)

“In the 1550s, when John Shakespeare moved to Stratford, the surrounding area was dotted with pyres on which local Protestant leaders… were burned to death by resurgent Catholics under Queen Mary” (p93).

John Shakespeare married his Catholic wife in 1558. This is the year that the Catholic Queen Mary died and was replaced on the throne by the Protestant Queen Elizabeth.

“The new queen quickly made it clear that she would return the country to [Protestantism] (p91).

“At first repression was relatively mild. Queen Elizabeth made it clear that she was interested more in obedience and conformity than in purity of conviction…. What she wanted was an outward act of adherence to her authority and to the official religious settlement.” (p92)

In 1570, “when William Shakespeare was six years old”, the pope issued an order (papal bull) excommunicating Queen Elizabeth and requiring that “all her Catholic subjects… presume not to obey [the Queen]” (p92.)

“The papal bull initiated a nightmarish sequence of conspiracy and persecution, plot and counterplot that continued throughout Elizabeth’s reign.” (p93)

“Stratford experienced the same sudden shifts, tensions, and ambiguities that marked much of the realm…” (p93)

Tension on the job

John Shakespeare, a public official, had to navigate these treacherous currents.

“Most people found it possible to keep their heads down, do what they had to do to conform with the official line, and reconcile their conscience to the shifts in doctrine and practice…. [F]or those who believed that the fate of their eternal souls depended on the precise form of worship… the shifts in official belief and regulated practice must have been excruciating….” (p94)

“It was not only the pious who found it difficult to keep their heads down…; it was also the ambitious… [even] small-scale civic leaders like John Shakespeare. As a constable in 1558–1559, he had to keep the peace between Catholics and Protestants in the tense years of transition from the reign of the Catholic Mary to that of the Protestant Elizabeth.” However, “as chamberlain, alderman, and bailiff, he had to carry out the policies of the regime, and that meant something more than keeping the peace.” [p94]

As chamberlain [“a few months before Will’s birth and in the years that followed”], John Shakespeare

“paid the workmen who went in with buckets of whitewash and ruined the medieval [Catholic] paintings… they covered the church walls…. The workmen also broke up the [______], putting a simple table in its place” “Town authorities proceeded to sell off the gorgeous vestments worn by the Catholic priests…“On the town council, he voted to dismiss the Catholic steward…” and hire a Protestant to replace him. (p95–96).

Tension in the household

Religion

However,

“the same town council… hired a succession of ‘impressively learned schoolmasters who had surprisingly strong Catholic connections…” (p95–96). “[T]he schoolmaster’s brother”, Thomas Cottam, had “gone abroad… and taken orders as a Catholic priest” (p96?).

In 1580, when Will was 16, Thomas Cotton secretly returned to England…

“intending to go to the neighborhood of Stratford”, carrying “several Catholic tokens” and a letter to ‘take council’ from the messenger in “’matters of great weight’.” However, Cottam was informed on and arrested when he arrived on the shores of England. He was tortured and later executed in the grisly way designed to demonstrate the full rage of the state… “The Stratford council must have been shaken by the arrest of Thomas Cotton” (p98),

As would be John Shakespeare and his wife.

“[I]f Will’s mother, Mary, was a pious Catholic, like her father, she may have kept religious tokens — a rosary, a medal, a crucifix — very much like those seized on the person of the priest….”. “… they might have found a highly compromising document to which John Shakespeare had apparently set his name: a piously Catholic ‘spiritual testament’, belying his public adherence to the Reformed faith.”

This document was found in the house in the 18th century. The document suggests that

“not only was there a split between his father and mother, the former the active agent of the Reformation in Stratford, the latter in all likelihood a Catholic…” (pp101–102).

It also suggests “a split within his father” (p102).

Will, age 16, would have been witness to the terrible tension within the household.

Money

Around 1577, when Will is 13, “things began to turn sour” in the household. John Shakespeare began mortgaging his properties. By 1586, when Will is 22, John

“ceased to be a person who counted for much in Stratford. His public career had ended, and his private situation had clearly deteriorated” (pp60–61).

By 1591, when Will is 27, his father was avoiding going to church apparently in order to avoid getting arrested for debt (p 62).

And — Drinking?

Shakespeare’s Falstaff is …

“a gentleman sinking into mire — but darker and deeper: a debauched genius; a fathomlessly cynical, almost irresistible confidence man; a diseased, cowardly, seductive, lovable monster; a father [my emphasis] who cannot be trusted. The drunkenness that… seems linked to gaiety, improvisational wit, and noble recklessness is unnervingly disclosed at the same time to be part of a strategy of cunning, calculation and ruthless exploitation of others. Invariably a failed strategy: the grand schemes, the imagined riches, the fantasies about the limitless future — all come to nothing, withering away in an adult son’s contempt for the symbolic father [my emphasis] who has failed him…. It is difficult to register the overwhelming power and pathos of the relationship between Hal and Falstaff [in Henry IV] without sensing some unusually intimate and personal energy.” (pp70–71)

Is this at least partially, an image of Shakespeare’s father? Was Sir John perhaps even named for Shakespeare’s father?

How did William Shakespeare feel about religion?

“By the time he was leaving school in 1579–1580, when he was fifteen or sixteen years old, had he come to acquire a comparable double consciousness? Shakespeare’s plays provide ample evidence for doubleness and more: at certain moments — Hamlet is the greatest example — he seems at once Catholic, Protestant, and deeply skeptical of both…” (p103)

In 1582, at age 18, Shakespeare marries Anne Hathaway, a Protestant.

In 1592, at the age of 28, Shakespeare leaves town for London. Eight years later, in 1600, at the age of 36, he writes Hamlet. His father dies the next year. Six years after that, at the age of 42, he writes Macbeth. His mother may still be alive.

According to Greenblatt, Will did not spend much time with his wife. In fact, until he left for London to start life as an actor then playwright, he was still living in the same house as his parents. How many of their conversations must he have witnessed!

There was one marriage that Shakespeare was able to observe closely, and for 15–16 of his most formative years — and that is of his parents.

Greenblatt has supposed that Shakespeare made extensive use of his everyday observations and experiences (as every writer knows); he describes how the characteristics of both Shakespeare’s father and of Shakespeare’s wife may have influenced characters in Shakespeare’s plays. For some reason, Greenblatt does not explore what role Shakespeare’s mother and the marriage of his parents might have had on Shakespeare’s plays.

Interestingly, instead, Greenblatt says, of arguably Shakespeare’s best and most well -known plays:

“There are two significant exceptions to Shakespeare’s unwillingness or inability to imagine a married couple in a relationship of sustained intimacy, but they are unnervingly strange: Gertrude and Claudius [Hamlet’s parents] in Hamlet and the Macbeths.” [my emphasis] (p137)

For this author, these two plays contain some of Shakespeare’s most famous marriages and of the strongest wives and, in one at least, manipulating mothers.

From above, we see Shakespeare’s mother as coming from an influential family and bringing lots of money; these might be characteristics of a powerful woman. In addition, she brings with her a strong Catholic upbringing during a time when, for a young, impressionable Shakespeare, being Catholic could be very dangerous. Yet Shakespeare’s father, perhaps unsure about his own religious leanings, must negotiate dangerous waters in the community. We can hear the voice of a strong, religiously fervent woman urging her weaker, vacillating husband to take dangerous steps… with highly dangerous consequences, which a young, frightened Shakespeare may have fled — to write about some years later, after his parents were no longer around to see his portrayal of their tumultuous marriage fraught with danger. And sexuality?

Gertrude and Lady Macbeth

Do I need to describe the sexuality of Gertrude and Lady Macbeth? And the dangerous machinations vis a vis their husbands? And, in Hamlet’s case, the danger these marriages create in a young son?

I suggest that in a smallish house, Shakespeare may have also witnessed the hot sexual energy between his mother and father, which, combined with the other tensions in the household, he came to perceive as very dangerous. Or as Greenblatt put it, for a young boy raised Catholic, “disturbing” [p?].

And also great source material for his plays, Hamlet and Macbeth.

So why are Gertrude and Lady Macbeth important?

Both Gertrude and Lady Macbeth provide images of strong women, operating within the constraints of their time.

So, what did a woman have to do in Shakespeare’s time (and through most of history)? At a time when issues were determined primarily by physical strength and birth control did not exist, for a woman to exert influence she had to rely on the strength of the men in her life — usually her husband. She needed to be persuasive, maybe appearing to be manipulative or, in duress, resorting to manipulation…. And, as women [and men] are well aware, sex a very powerful motivator for the adult male. And, I would argue, men are very frightened of the immense power a sexual woman can exert.

Both Gertrude and Lady Macbeth used this power to a degree that was apparently very frightening to a young and later an adolescent Shakespeare.

And, now, why is Shakespeare’s mother important?

If both Gertrude and Lady Macbeth represent Shakespeare’s mother, they appear to be the basis for two of the strongest characters in two of Shakespeare’s most important plays.

Perhaps more importantly, his mother’s character was fundamental not just to his work, but to the formation of the character of Shakespeare himself. Who helped create the self-confident, happy/easily amused, intelligent, educated, insightful child who grew up to be such a wonderful playwright, and could bring such wonderful characters to life and moral messages? If his father was entertaining, but morally weak and vacillating, perhaps it was his strong, morally courageous mother.