Shakespeare clan headcanon
Nov. 29th, 2014 11:00 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainI'm not really sure if these are notes for an actual honest-to-God novel, or for RPF, or just random and idle stuff that I amuse myself by thinking about, but I figured I ought to get some of them written down before I forget.
1) John and Mary Shakespeare's children were almost never called by their full names. The ones who survived infancy were invariably Will, Gil, Jo, Annie, Dick, and Ned. (This custom didn't extend to the next generation; Will's daughters were "Su" and "Ju" only to each other.)
2) Anybody who had ever met John Shakespeare would have recognized him in Timon of Athens. Will never properly finished the play because it cut too close to the bone.
3) Daughters were generally loved and valued as much as sons, and it was one of Mary Shakespeare's great griefs that of her four girls, only Jo lived to adulthood.
4) The family had hopes that Will would go to Oxford, and struggled to keep him in school after his father's financial difficulties, but his early marriage threw a wrench into the plans. John saw this as a betrayal. Mary was secretly a little glad. In the next generation, Hamnet was also intended for Oxford, but he really wanted to be an actor.
5) Dick was the only one of the brothers who had little formal education, having been born too late to attend grammar school during his father's prosperity and too early to be sent there by Will, who financed Ned's education after the theater business started to pay off. He became a farmer; though intelligent enough in agricultural matters, he lacked the family quick wits, and always felt uneasy when his brothers and sister settled in for a good round of flyting.
6) Will was fond of all of his siblings, but closest to Gil and Ned, the two brothers who followed him to London. It was a standing joke that he had written villains named Richard and Joan, but not Gilbert or Edmund, until Will decided to throw a wrench into things by writing King Lear. Until the day he died, Gil never stopped lobbying for a villain of his very own.
7) Anne Hathaway (called Nan) had a fairly good practical knowledge of such birth control methods as existed in the sixteenth century, and passed it along to her daughters. Susanna's conception was a choice, intended to reconcile both families to a reckless and financially improvident marriage.
8) The Dark Lady was a fictional character. Will's only real mistress was the theater, and he had thirty-eight illegitimate children. Nan sometimes thought it would have been easier to compete with a flesh-and-blood woman.
9) Nan and Judith could both read, but were never completely comfortable with the written word: Nan did not learn until she was an adult, and Judith was dyslexic. Susanna, on the other hand, was very bookish and taught herself Latin from her brother's schoolbooks. The Latin inscription on her mother's grave is exactly what it claims to be: Susanna's composition, not her husband's. Her father was, of course, limited by time and place in the possibilities that he could imagine; but being Shakespeare, he could imagine a lot, and he recognized on some level that Susanna was the child who ought to have carried out the family's never-fulfilled Oxford ambitions. Portia and Isabella and Helena were his gifts to her.
10) After his son Hamnet died, Will wrote no more tragedies for three years. After his youngest brother Ned died, he finished Coriolanus in haste, leaving out several deaths he'd intended to put in, and wrote no more tragedies ever.
11) Will wasn't gay, but his brother Gil was. Ned was a bit of a womanizer, but he might have settled down if he hadn't died at twenty-seven. Dick was courting a local widow in his usual slow, methodical way, and had every intention of continuing the Shakespeare line, when he was thrown from a horse at the age of thirty-nine. (Jo, of course, did marry and have children, but they were Harts, not Shakespeares.)
12) Unlike their parents, neither Susanna nor Judith married for love, although both marriages were reasonably happy. Susanna married John Hall for his books, and Judith married Tom Quiney because he was an old, good friend, and because he'd just gotten Margaret Wheeler pregnant and he really didn't want to marry her. Tom was definitely an attractive cad, but Judith had no illusions about this, and could live with a bit of caddishness.
13) The real reason why Susanna inherited nearly everything is that Judith and Tom were terrible with money; what they didn't spend, they gave away, usually on impulse and to the sort of people seventeenth-century society regarded as undeserving. Will's tacit wish was that Judith should be given not only enough to live well, but enough for a few generous impulses. Susanna honored this as long as she lived. Susanna's daughter, Elizabeth, didn't.
14) Judith and Tom raised an illegitimate granddaughter, born six months after their sons died of the plague. She grew up to be an actress.
1) John and Mary Shakespeare's children were almost never called by their full names. The ones who survived infancy were invariably Will, Gil, Jo, Annie, Dick, and Ned. (This custom didn't extend to the next generation; Will's daughters were "Su" and "Ju" only to each other.)
2) Anybody who had ever met John Shakespeare would have recognized him in Timon of Athens. Will never properly finished the play because it cut too close to the bone.
3) Daughters were generally loved and valued as much as sons, and it was one of Mary Shakespeare's great griefs that of her four girls, only Jo lived to adulthood.
4) The family had hopes that Will would go to Oxford, and struggled to keep him in school after his father's financial difficulties, but his early marriage threw a wrench into the plans. John saw this as a betrayal. Mary was secretly a little glad. In the next generation, Hamnet was also intended for Oxford, but he really wanted to be an actor.
5) Dick was the only one of the brothers who had little formal education, having been born too late to attend grammar school during his father's prosperity and too early to be sent there by Will, who financed Ned's education after the theater business started to pay off. He became a farmer; though intelligent enough in agricultural matters, he lacked the family quick wits, and always felt uneasy when his brothers and sister settled in for a good round of flyting.
6) Will was fond of all of his siblings, but closest to Gil and Ned, the two brothers who followed him to London. It was a standing joke that he had written villains named Richard and Joan, but not Gilbert or Edmund, until Will decided to throw a wrench into things by writing King Lear. Until the day he died, Gil never stopped lobbying for a villain of his very own.
7) Anne Hathaway (called Nan) had a fairly good practical knowledge of such birth control methods as existed in the sixteenth century, and passed it along to her daughters. Susanna's conception was a choice, intended to reconcile both families to a reckless and financially improvident marriage.
8) The Dark Lady was a fictional character. Will's only real mistress was the theater, and he had thirty-eight illegitimate children. Nan sometimes thought it would have been easier to compete with a flesh-and-blood woman.
9) Nan and Judith could both read, but were never completely comfortable with the written word: Nan did not learn until she was an adult, and Judith was dyslexic. Susanna, on the other hand, was very bookish and taught herself Latin from her brother's schoolbooks. The Latin inscription on her mother's grave is exactly what it claims to be: Susanna's composition, not her husband's. Her father was, of course, limited by time and place in the possibilities that he could imagine; but being Shakespeare, he could imagine a lot, and he recognized on some level that Susanna was the child who ought to have carried out the family's never-fulfilled Oxford ambitions. Portia and Isabella and Helena were his gifts to her.
10) After his son Hamnet died, Will wrote no more tragedies for three years. After his youngest brother Ned died, he finished Coriolanus in haste, leaving out several deaths he'd intended to put in, and wrote no more tragedies ever.
11) Will wasn't gay, but his brother Gil was. Ned was a bit of a womanizer, but he might have settled down if he hadn't died at twenty-seven. Dick was courting a local widow in his usual slow, methodical way, and had every intention of continuing the Shakespeare line, when he was thrown from a horse at the age of thirty-nine. (Jo, of course, did marry and have children, but they were Harts, not Shakespeares.)
12) Unlike their parents, neither Susanna nor Judith married for love, although both marriages were reasonably happy. Susanna married John Hall for his books, and Judith married Tom Quiney because he was an old, good friend, and because he'd just gotten Margaret Wheeler pregnant and he really didn't want to marry her. Tom was definitely an attractive cad, but Judith had no illusions about this, and could live with a bit of caddishness.
13) The real reason why Susanna inherited nearly everything is that Judith and Tom were terrible with money; what they didn't spend, they gave away, usually on impulse and to the sort of people seventeenth-century society regarded as undeserving. Will's tacit wish was that Judith should be given not only enough to live well, but enough for a few generous impulses. Susanna honored this as long as she lived. Susanna's daughter, Elizabeth, didn't.
14) Judith and Tom raised an illegitimate granddaughter, born six months after their sons died of the plague. She grew up to be an actress.
