Mainly about Shakespeare's ancestry and Lancashire connections
In a nutshell, that his father
John's ancestry is 99.99% certain in the Shakeshaftes of Lancashire and Mary
Arde(r)n(e)'s ancestry 100% certain in the Ardernes of Cheshire. She was
related to pretty well everyone who has ever appeared in the 'Shakespeare in
Lancashire' story and was John's third wife and William's stepmother. They
married in c. 1575 as a genteel widow and a rich widower, and their combined
families included ten or eleven children. They spent most of the 1580s in the
North West and most of the 1590s in London.
It doesn't really, but an
awful lot of people have been hunting for the last few centuries and never
found it, so there is a certain satisfaction in having solved some of these
particular puzzles. It also serves to explain many anomalies and mysteries that
have bedevilled all biographers since Rowe,
who attempted to produce the first seamless biography in 1709.
That has been a constant
mystery to me, but the basic answer is that by concentrating most of their
efforts on Shakespeares/ shaftes and Ardernes/ Ardens in the Midlands they
were, quite simply, looking in the wrong place. I just seem to have come along
at the right time with my Lancashire genealogical research and wide reading in
the history of the county. I also happen to have spent most of my youth in a
valley round the corner of the moors from Hoghton Tower and
known most of my life about the tradition that he had spent a couple of years there
and a short time with the Heskeths
of Rufford
Old Hall. Like so many others, I've always been a fan of his works and
never paid much attention to his biography, but was intrigued when I kept
bumping into so many of his associates and contemporaries in my little bit of
Lancashire, and started to investigate further.
Among the most important were Edmund Spenser, a
fellow poet and admirer, whom tradition places in the family of Hurstwood Hall
near Burnley; Edward
Alleyn, a fellow actor, whose mother was a Towneley of
Towneley (Keen); Ferdinando Stanley, Lord
Strange, whose Players performed some of Shakespeare's early works, and whose
wife Alice, a kinswoman of Spenser's, was a close friend of Alexander Standish
of Duxbury; and Ferdinando's brother William, 6th Earl of Derby, who was a
strong contestant as an authorship candidate at the beginning the 20th century.
In pursuing Myles Standish's story I had also come across many Lancashire
religious luminaries who had continued to prominent positions in Elizabeth's reign
and in some cases produced prominent children and also founded local grammar
schools (Kay). Every time I pursued any of these I
found myself going around in the same circles, with Shakespeare always in the
middle or hovering at the edge. During this time I was living in Bavaria (for
twenty-two years in the meantime) and pursuing its history. Particularly when
reading about the Holy Roman Empire and the Counter-Reformation, I was reminded
again and again of so many Lancastrian connections that somehow seemed to be
connected with Shakespeare.
Well, yes. To give but two
examples: Ferdinando, Lord Strange (son and heir of the 4th Earl of Derby of Lancashire)
was named in 1558 after the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II (whose
family regularly married Bavarian princesses), which introduced this name into
Lancashire. Many local gentry sons were
later given this name, one can only presume as god-sons or in emulation. I
found it intriguing that lots of little Lancashire lads were running around at
the end of the 16th century, whose name, at least, connected them to an Emperor
and Ferdinand and Isabel of Spain. Also Munich was one of the main bastions of
the Jesuits north of the Alps at a time when Catholic Lancashire gentry were
sending large numbers of children to be educated abroad, with several returning
to England as Jesuit priests. Many passed through Munich on their way from the
schools-in-exile in Flanders and Northern France to the English College in
Rome. All these connections gradually started to fall into place when pursuing
Shakespeare's ancestry and biography.
He's often been associated with
Strange's Players, both in London in the 'conventional' biography and as part
of the 'Shakespeare in Lancashire' theory. And he's often been associated with
the Jesuits. In his lifetime his name was linked to Robert Parsons (sometimes
spelt Persons), head of the English Jesuits in Rome, and if he really did spend
time in Lancashire, it would have coincided with the stay there in 1580-1 of Edmund Campion. In
reading the history of the Preston area (where my father was born) it is
difficult to miss the presence of Edmund Campion, as it
is so widely reported. People still remembered his charisma and oratorical
skills a century later, and he was similarly praised for a sermon in Munich on
his way from Rome to Lancashire. From the Munich end I knew about Jesuit drama
and their use of theatricals as a pedagogical aid and from the Lancashire end I
knew about it mainly because of Stonyhurst College, not
far from Hoghton
Tower. If Shakespeare really was with the Catholic Hoghtons and
Heskeths, this would certainly help to explain his early interest and
involvement in the theatre.
Return to Helen Moorwood’s Shakespeare
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