2 - Shakespeare’s Life, Times, and Stage

Summary

The year’s most substantial contribution to our thinking on the shape of Shakespeare’s life and career is E. A. J. Honigmann’s Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’. Professor Honigmann has resurrected the suggestion first made by Oliver Baker in 1937, and later supported by E. K. Chambers, that the ‘William Shake-shafte’ mentioned in the 1581 will of Alexander Hoghton of Lea (in Lancashire) is in fact William Shakespeare. Douglas Hamer supposedly refuted the theory in 1970, but Professor Honigmann certainly knocks enough holes in that refutation to make a reopening of the case worthwhile; and in establishing a plausible Lancashire connection for Shakespeare – John Cottom, one of the Stratford schoolmasters during Shakespeare’s teens, was a native of Tarnacre, only ten miles from Hoghton’s Lea – he offers a possible answer to one of the more awkward questions posed by the whole proposition: why should a Midlander born and bred seek employment in the wilds of Lancashire? A further decisive factor would almost certainly have to be Roman Catholicism, since there is no doubt that the Cottom and Hoghton families, and their principal neighbours, had strong Catholic connections.