{"title":"The Shakespeares","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0004","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter uses new evidence to put John Shakespeare’s business career into a national political context for the first time, presenting a completely new narrative of his well-known Exchequer Court cases. It explains the overlooked limitations of the Exchequer documents previously used to describe his prosecutions for wool-dealing and usury from 1569 to 1572, and introduces an entirely different series of documents, the Exchequer writ files, which reveal that two significant cases against John continued into the 1580s. Other records show that by 1572 John had defaulted on a bond to the Exchequer for £133. Though they require careful interpretation, and through losses may underestimate the extent of John’s problems, the writ files connect his troubles to a national and parliamentary political scandal, which prompted Lord Burghley and others to seek to ‘reform’ the corrupt informer system, against the opposition of vested interests at Court, including the queen, and in the Exchequer. Really designed to protect the queen’s financial interests, Burghley’s administrative changes deepened John’s financial predicament by diminishing his chances of bribing his way out of trouble. By 1577 John was publicly identified as a Crown debtor, unable to pay his bond and therefore unable to participate in the local credit system, which led to his social and political decline in Stratford. Records from the early 1580s, when William became an adult, show how far his father had declined under assault from a system intended to protect the interests of the wealthy and powerful rather than equitable justice.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115732087","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Dudleys","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0002","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter one describes how the local ascendancy of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and his older brother, Ambrose, earl of Warwick, used the law and many cultural strategies to establish their Warwickshire authority, a transformative event that was the single most important influence on the county during William Shakespeare’s early life. It examines the relationship between local history and the past identities of the earldoms of Warwick and Leicester in sustaining the Dudleys’ authority in the county, surveying a range of material culture and social behaviour designed to consolidate the earls’ claims, in which Ambrose Dudley, earl of Warwick shared equally with his brother, Robert, earl of Leicester. It shows Ambrose’s active landlordship in Stratford and his other Warwickshire lands by re-examining surveys and land disputes in which he was involved, suggesting how the Dudleys invoked old feudal structures to their own advantage while reshaping local power structures to marginalize the Throckmorton kinship network, triggering their emerging feud with the prominent Warwickshire Catholic gentleman, Edward Arden. The chapter discusses the riots at Drayton Bassett in summer 1578 as part of resistance to Dudley expansion in the county, expansion best seen as a political project in support of the emerging Protestant state, but which provoked widespread fear about their intentions. Through the involvement of local men, including Shakespeare’s later friend Thomas Combe (d. 1609) we outline how Drayton Bassett represented the intrusion of national politics into life in Stratford and Warwickshire.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"387 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116480540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Conclusion","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"We conclude that the Dudley ascendancy was a political project that needs to be understood through the methodologies of material, political, and cultural history. This adds to the recent more nuanced understanding of religious allegiance in early modern England, and historians’ emerging challenge to an assumed consensus among the élite. We suggest new approaches to the Dudleys, the cultural legacy of Edward Arden, and new ways for historians of politics and theatre to examine the political activities of particular peerage families. We suggest how further investigation of Drayton Bassett could offer new understanding of how people in early modern Warwickshire negotiated their social and political interactions. The chapter re-examines the Shakespeares’ applications for coats of arms in 1596 and 1599–1600, by which date the family name had gained a new lustre, through published praise in 1598 of William’s skill in imitating a wide range of revered classical authors, and through the commercial, social capital that now accrued to a name which publishers from 1598 used for greater profits, using Shakespeare’s name not only on his own work, but on those of other authors. In a different social context, the recovered status of the Arden name at Court explains why the Shakespeares now wished to impale their arms with the Ardens, so recently attainted in blood. Robert Arden had survived years of Burghley’s abuse of the legal process to conceal major flaws in Edward Arden’s condemnation, so that after Burghley’s death, in May 1599 Elizabeth partially restored the Arden name.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"241 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132902935","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ardens","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0003","url":null,"abstract":"Chapter two focuses on the feud between Edward Arden and the earls of Warwick and Leicester, outlining the unique cultural identity of the Arden family in Warwickshire and their descent from the Saxon magnate, Turchil, the most significant landowner in the Midlands after the Norman conquest whose lands later formed the patrimony of the Beaumont earls of Warwick. The Beauchamps co-opted him into the lineage of the Warwick earldom to link their earldom with the legendary Guy of Warwick, which led to a dispute over lineage between Arden and the Dudleys, in which Edward Arden tried to use his ancestry to challenge their authority in the county. We also look at how this reinvigorated Guy of Warwick as a cultural icon, which can be linked to Shakespeare’s involvement in a play about Guy and his later interest in this legendary figure. The Dudleys responded with increased pressure on Arden through legal cases that threatened his tenure of his estate, and which became widely known as the cases moved from court to court, including the Warwick assizes and Star Chamber. These cases show how the Dudley ascendancy and the Arden dispute created an assault on popular memory in the county, through legal arguments creating pressure on social structures and requiring Warwickshire people to make choices reflecting both the political struggles within the county and the wider contests of the Elizabethan Reformation.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"88 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114840822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Trial of John Somerville and Edward Arden","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0005","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0005","url":null,"abstract":"The first detailed narrative of how the Dudleys set out to destroy Edward Arden by exploiting the mental problems of his son-in-law John Somerville, who lived just outside Stratford, but who had quarrelled with his wife, Margaret Arden Somerville, and her father, over financial differences. Using intermediaries the Dudleys provoked Somerville into riding towards London, armed with a pistol to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, and arranged for his arrest and interrogation. They then concocted evidence implicating Edward Arden, both to confirm their dominance over Warwickshire and to establish that Somerville was key to a vast international Catholic conspiracy against Elizabeth, a story that contained sufficient truth to enable a more radical Protestant agenda to be followed at Court and in the Privy Council, against Archbishop Whitgift’s and Sir Christopher Hatton’s conservative policies. The treason trial consistently broke with established procedures in rushing Arden, Somerville, and their families to condemnation, but the regime expended great efforts in broadcasting their ‘treason’ against the conflicting evidence known in Stratford and Warwickshire, especially that Arden had been in London when he was allegedly conspiring with Somerville just outside Stratford. The treasonous fiction also aimed to implicate Hatton in the treason, but though this failed, shockingly for contemporary society, several women from both families were condemned, and several more imprisoned in the Tower for some years, another example of the exercise of raw power by the Elizabethan regime in controlling collective memory that were very unlikely to have escaped William Shakespeare’s notice.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"2 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"123863468","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Aftermath","authors":"G. Parry, Cathryn Enis","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0006","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198862918.003.0006","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter traces the Stratford fallout from the condemnation of John Somerville, which undermined the social status of the Shakespeares’ close friends and neighbours, Adrian and Richard Quiney. After seizing Somerville’s estate the Exchequer concluded that the Quineys, having ostensibly borrowed money from Somerville, must now pay it immediately to the queen, despite their argument that the money actually belonged to the dowry of John’s underage sister, Margaret Somerville. Margaret’s subsequent unavailing attempts to recover her money, and the Quineys to avoid paying the queen, revealed to Stratford society the limitations of the traditional collaborative relationship between central government and local worthies responsible for maintaining the queen’s authority in their regions. The Exchequer applied the strict letter of the law: John Somerville’s signature and seal on the loan agreement counted for more than the equitable claims of the Quineys. More than the rental incomes diverted to the queen for the next decade to repay their debt, the Quineys suffered loss of face, since the Exchequer under Burghley made it evident that their previous public service did not entitle them to special consideration from their sovereign and her officers, because of their innocent association with Catholic ‘traitors’. The Exchequer continued to hound Margaret Somerville for a small debt until well into the reign of James, during which period Shakespeare acknowledged the name in 3 Henry VI, not as a discreet signal of his Catholic sympathies, of which this chapter shows no proof survives, but a comment on the abuse of power.","PeriodicalId":430407,"journal":{"name":"Shakespeare Before Shakespeare","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127756475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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