Camden, Drayton, Greene, Hall, and Cooke: Five Eyewitnesses Who Saw Nothing —Part 1

by Ramón Jiménez

Shakespeare Oxford Newsletter, Vol. 38, No. 4, p. 1, Fall, 2002

(Ramon Jiménez is a very successful writer of history books including Caesar Against the Celts and Caesar Against Rome. He is a meticulous authorship researcher who, in a series of powerful papers, has provided convincing evidence against the Stratford Man and in favor of Edward de Vere as Shakespeare.)

William Camden

It is well known that the first references in print that connect William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon to the playwright Shakespeare appeared in the First Folio, seven years after his death. On the other hand, several literary men and others wrote about Stratford the town, and knew the Shakespeare living there, but never connected him to the playwright Shakespeare, with whom they were also familiar. William Camden, born in 1551, was the most eminent historian and antiquary of the Elizabethan age, and was deeply involved in the literary and intellectual world of his time. He knew Philip Sidney, was a valued friend of Michael Drayton, and is said to have been a teacher of Ben Jonson. His most famous work was Britannia, a history of England first published in Latin in 1586. He revised it several times before his death in 1623, and it was frequently reprinted.

Another of Camden's books was Remaines Concerning Britain, a series of essays on English history, English names, and the English language that he published in 1605. Camden wrote poetry himself, and in the section on poetry, he referred to poets as "God's own creatures." He listed eleven English poets and playwrights who he thought would be admired by future generations—in other words, the best writers of his time. Among the eleven were six playwrights, including Johnson, Chapman, Drayton, Daniel, Marston, and William Shakespeare.

Two years later, in 1607, Camden published the sixth edition of his Britannia which by then had doubled in size because of his extensive revisions and additions. He arranged the book by shire or county, with his description of each beginning in the pre-Roman period and extending to contemporary people and events. With Camden's interests and previous work in mind, it is surprising to find that in this 1607 edition, and in his subsequent editions, in the section on Stratford, he described this "small market-town" as owing "all its consequence to two natives of it, John de Stratford, Archbishop of Canterbury, who built the church, and Hugh Clopton, Mayor of London, who, at great expense, laid a stone bridge of 14 arches across the Avon." In the same paragraph, Camden called attention to George Carew, Baron Clopton, who lived nearby and was active in the town's affairs.

There is no mention of the well known poet and playwright, William Shakespeare, who had been born and raised in Stratford, whose family still lived there, and who probably by this date had returned there to live in one of the grandest houses in town. Elsewhere in Britannia, Camden noted that the poet Philip Sidney had a home in Kent. And we know he was familiar with literary and theatrical affairs because he was a friend of the poet and playwright Michael Drayton, and he noted in his diary the deaths of the actor Richard Burbage and the poet and playwright Samuel Daniel in 1619. He made no such note on the death of William Shakespeare of Stratford in April, 1616.

It might be suggested that Camden was unfamiliar with the Warwickshire area and wasn't aware that one of the leading playwrights of the day lived in Stratford-on-Avon. But could this be true? In 1597 Queen Elizabeth had appointed Camden to the post of Clarenceux King of Arms, one of the two officials in the College of Arms who approved applications for coats of arms. Two years later, John Shakespeare, William's father, applied to the College to have his existing coat of arms impaled, or joined, by the arms of his wife's family, the Ardens of Wilmcote. Some writers have asserted that William Shakespeare himself made this application for his father, but there is no evidence of that. What is likely is that William paid the substantial fee that accompanied the application.

The record shows that Camden and his colleague William Dethick approved the modification that John Shakespeare sought. However, in 1602 another official in the College brought a complaint against Camden and Dethick that they had granted coats of arms improperly to twenty-three men, one of whom was John Shakespeare. Although Camden and Dethick defended their actions, there is no record of the outcome of the matter, and the Shakespeare coat of arms, minus the Arden impalement, later appeared on the monument in Holy Trinity Church in Stratford. Because of this unusual complaint, Camden had good reason to remember John Shakespeare's application, and it is very probable that he had met both father and son. At the least, he knew who they were and where they lived.

William Camden had another occasion to come in contact with the Shakespeares. In the summer of 1600, when the famous Sir Thomas Lucy died, Camden bore the coat of arms in the procession and conducted the funeral at Charlecote, only a few miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Thomas Lucy also knew the Shakespeares. When he was a justice of the peace in Stratford, John Shakespeare was brought up before him more than once. John may even have attended his funeral, but it seems likely that William was too busy to go. During 1600, seven or eight of his plays were printed for the first time, and according to most orthodox scholars, in the summer of 1600 he was hurrying to finish up Hamlet.

So, even though William Camden revered poets, had several poet friends, and wrote poetry himself, even though he knew the Shakespeares, father and son, and even though he mentioned playwrights and poets in his books and in his diary, he never connected the Shakespeare he knew in Stratford with the one on his list of the best English poets.

Michael Drayton

Another interesting eyewitness was Michael Drayton, who was born and raised in Warwickshire, only about twenty-five miles from Stratford-on-Avon. It is hard to imagine that Michael Drayton was unaware of Shakespeare. The two were almost exact contemporaries, they both wrote poetry, and many critics have even found the influence of Shakespeare in Drayton's poetry. Also, they both wrote plays that appeared about the same time on the London stage in the late 1590s. In fact, in 1599 Drayton, along with Anthony Munday, Robert Wilson, and Richard Hathaway, wrote a play—Sir John Oldcastle—that was supposed to be a response to Shakespeare's plays about Falstaff.

In 1612 Drayton published the first part of Poly-Olbion, a series of poems comprising a topographical description of England and a county-by-county history that included well-known men of every kind. In it were many references to Chaucer, to Spenser, and to other English poets. But in his section on Warwickshire, Drayton never mentioned Stratford-on-Avon or Shakespeare, even though by 1612 Shakespeare was a well-known playwright. It seems that he never connected the writer to the William Shakespeare he must have known in Stratford.

How do we know he knew him? Many Stratfordians think so. Charlotte Stopes speculated that Drayton used to visit New Place for chats with Shakespeare. And Samuel Schoenbaum thinks it "not implausible" that Drayton and Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson as well, had that "merry meeting" reported in the 1660s by John Ward, the vicar of Stratford. In fact, more than one scholar has found evidence that Michael Drayton was the "Rival Poet" of the sonnets. But we have better evidence than that.

Drayton's life is well-documented. He had a connection to the wealthy Rainsford family, who lived at Clifford Chambers, a couple of miles from Stratford-on-Avon. Drayton had been in love with Lady Rainsford from the time she was Ann Goodere, a girl in the household in which he was in service in the 1580s. She was the subject of his series of love sonnets, Ideas Mirrour, published in l594. Although she rejected him and married Henry Rainsford in 1595, Drayton hung around their household and made himself a friend of the family. He apparently never stopped loving her, and from the early 1600s until his death in 1631 he made frequent visits to their home at Clifford Chambers, sometimes staying all summer.

Charlotte Stopes was certain that Shakespeare would have been "an honored guest" at the Rainsford home because of the family's literary interests, but there is no record of such a visit. But even if Shakespeare may never have visited the Rainsfords, the man who married his daughter certainly did. Dr. John Hall, Shakespeare's son-in-law, was the family doctor for the Rainsfords and once treated Drayton for a fever, probably at the Rainsford home. The doctor made a record of it in his case book and even noted that Drayton was an excellent poet. His treatment for Drayton's fever was a spoonful of "syrup of violets," but he recovered just the same.

Another reason that Drayton must have been aware of a playwright named Shakespeare was that in 1619 Sir John Oldcastle, the play Drayton had written with three others, was printed by William Jaggard and Thomas Pavier with Shakespeare's name on the title page. This is certainly something an author would notice.

It is very probable that if Drayton thought that Dr. Hall's father-in-law was the famous playwright and poet, he would have written or told someone about him. But there is no mention of him anywhere in his substantial correspondence. In all his writings—the collected edition is in five volumes—despite his mention of more than a dozen contemporary poets and playwrights, Drayton never referred to William Shakespeare at all until more than ten years after his death. When he finally did, he wrote four lines about what a good comedian he was. It is unclear whether he was referring to him as a playwright, an actor, or a person in some other capacity.

Thomas Greene

Our third eyewitness connects Michael Drayton and William Shakespeare of Stratford even more closely. In the 1603 edition of one of Drayton's major poems, The Barons' Wars, there appeared a commendatory sonnet—a Shakespearean sonnet—by one Thomas Greene. Also in 1603, the bookseller and printer William Leake published a poem by this same Thomas Greene titled A Poet's Vision and a Princes Glorie. In seventeen pages of forgettable verse, Greene predicted a renaissance of poetry under the new King, James I. (For more than twenty years, beginning in 1596, William Leake was the holder of the publishing rights to Venus and Adonis.)

Orthodox scholars agree that this Thomas Greene was none other than the London solicitor for the Stratford Corporation, and the Town Clerk of Stratford for more than ten years. He had such a close relationship with the Shakespeares that he named two of his children William and Anne, and he and his wife and children lived in the Shakespeare household at New Place for many months during 1609 and 1610. He was also the only Stratfordian contemporary of Shakespeare's to mention him in his diary. This was in connection with the Welcombe land enclosure matter, where he referred to him as "my cosen Shakspeare."

Thomas Greene was also a friend of John Marston, the dramatist, and they were both resident students at the Middle Temple during the mid-1590s. Yet nowhere in his diary or in his letters that have survived does Thomas Greene—apparently the author of a Shakespearean sonnet himself—mention that the Shakespeare he knew was a poet. What a shame that Greene made no comment in his diary about a book called Shakespeare's Sonnets, with its strange dedication to "our ever-living poet," that was published in London in 1609, about the time he was living in the Shakespeare household. Nor does Thomas Greene mention in his diary the death of the supposedly famous playwright in the spring of 1616.

Mrs. Stopes wrote, "It has always been a matter of surprise to me that Thomas Greene, who mentioned the death of Mr. Barber, did not mention the death of Shakespeare." For this she offers the astounding explanation—"Perhaps there was no need for him to make a memorandum of an event so important to the town and himself."

Dr. John Hall

Our fourth eyewitness is that same Dr. John Hall who cameto Stratford from Bedfordshire in the early 1600s and married Susanna Shakespeare in 1607. During his more than thirty years of practice in Warwickshire, Dr. Hall was esteemed one of the best physicians in the county, and was called often to the homes of noblemen throughout the area. As a leading citizen of Stratford, he was elected a burgess to the City Council three times before he finally accepted the office. On the death of his father-in-law in 1616, Dr. Hall, his wife Susanna, and their eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth moved into New Place with William Shakespeare's widow, Anne.

A few years after Dr. Hall's death in 1635, it transpired that he had kept hundreds of anecdotal records about his patients and their ailments—records that have excited the curiosity of both literary and medical scholars. Two notebooks were recovered, and one containing about 170 cases was translated from the Latin and published. The other, possibly once in the possession of the Shakespearean scholar Edmond Malone, has, unfortunately, disappeared. In the single surviving manuscript are descriptions of dozens of Dr. Hall's patients and their illnesses, including his wife Susanna and their daughter Elizabeth. Also mentioned are the Vicar of Stratford and various noblemen and their families, including Michael Drayton's friends the Rainsfords, and of course Drayton himself. In his notes about one patient, Thomas Holyoak, Hall mentioned that his father Francis had compiled a Latin-English dictionary. John Trap, a minister and the schoolmaster of the Stratford Grammar School, he described as being noted "for his remarkable piety and learning, second to none. Nowhere in the notebook that has survived is there any mention of Hall's father-in-law William Shakespeare.

This, of course, has vexed and puzzled scholars. Dr. Hall surely treated his wife's father during the ten years they lived within minutes of each other. Why wouldn't he record any treatment of William Shakespeare and mention his literary achievements as he had Michael Drayton's and Francis Holyoake's? The accepted explanation has always been that of the few cases in Dr. Hall's notebook that he dated, none bears a date earlier than 1617, the year after Shakespeare's death. For decades scholars have assumed that any mention of Shakespeare was probably in the lost notebook.

But recently this assumption came unraveled when a scholar found that at least four, and as many as eight, of the cases Hall recorded can be dated before Shakespeare died, even though the doctor didn't supply the dates himself. Because Dr. Hall nearly always noted the age and residence of his patients, most of them have been identified and their birth dates found in other sources. The earliest case in the existing manuscript can be dated in 1611, others in 1613, 1614, and 1615, and another four in 1616, the very year of Shakespeare's death.

It appears that Dr. Hall made his notes shortly after treating his patients, but didn't prepare his cases for publication until near the end of his life. Hall was aware and admiring of his patients' status and achievements, especially their scholarly and literary achievements, as his comments about Drayton, Holyoake, and others reveal. By 1630 William Shakespeare was well-known as an outstanding, if mysterious playwright.

In 1632 the Second Folio appeared, and there had been, of course, many plays issued in quarto, as well as several printed tributes. Thus, there is good reason to expect that Hall would have noted his treatment of William Shakespeare of Stratford during the ten years he knew him if he thought he were someone worthy of mention. It is indeed strange that in the early 1630s, as he was collecting the cases he wished to publish, he should neglect to include any record of his treating his supposedly famous father-in-law. Mrs. Stopes called it "the one great failure of his life."

Dr. James Cooke

Our fifth eyewitness is Dr. James Cooke, a surgeon from Warwick, who was responsible for the publication of John Hall's casebook. Although he was about twenty years younger than Hall, Cooke was acquainted with him from the time they both attended the Earl of Warwick and his family. In the 1640s a Parliamentary army was contending with the Royal army of Charles I in a civil war that would end with Charles' defeat and eventual beheading in 1649. The war ranged all over the western counties, and both royalists and rebels occupied Stratford-on-Avon on different occasions. In 1644 Dr. Cooke was attached to a Parliamentary army unit assigned to guard the famous Clopton Bridge over the Avon at Stratford.