Simon Andrew Stirling, Shakespeare's Bastard, the Life of Sir William Davenant (The History Press)L.C. Knights' essay How Many Children Had Lady Macbeth? argued that the play didn't mention any children but neither did it say she had none. It's not in the text and so the question should be not put. It is, however, perfectly legitimate to ask how many children had William Shakespeare, not only because it is of biographical interest but it could be any number from one to five, so it makes for a good game, and who knows about any more than that. Simon Andrew Stirling gives an account of Davenant's life here, allowing us to decide if we want to count him among Shakespeare's offspring. He is a radical historian, keen to offer his own often unorthodox views but supports them with impressive close readings and research. He is not quite radical enough to avoid the general assumption that Hamnet and Judith Shakespeare were Shakespeare's children but he quotes Davenant as having said that the lost play, Cardenio, was written to provide for another illegitimate child. So, we don't question whether Susanna was Shakespeare's daughter but, after that, you can mix and match the twins, Davenant and the further rumoured illegitimate issue to reach your eventual estimate.
The weakness of Davenant's claim is that he appears to have started the rumour himself, elevating himself from godson to flesh and blood at some stage of his adult career. Some affectation was not beyond him if he thought it made him look better, like the way he restyled his name D'Avenant but, if he inherited the Shakespeare DNA, he similarly made his way to London at an early age in pursuit of fame and fortune, wrote poetry and plays, mixed with high society and, furthermore, actually gained a knighthood and was, not quite officially perhaps, Poet Laureate. Although his mother was known for her wit and charm, John Davenant, her husband, was described as a 'melancholy man' and was not.
I've wanted this story to be true for quite some time with no way of deciding whether to believe it or not. Stirling's book doesn't convince me completely but it doesn't put me off. However, although Davenant's life is worth a biography in itself, the question on which it is predicated is the very least of our concerns by the time we've finished. The book is made of four sections, going back from Davenant's last days to his birth. It is an odd and unsatisfactory feeling to be moving forwards towards events that have piled up behind you. But Stirling wants to save his best material to the end. The end is 1605, the year of the Gunpowder Plot, for example, and, by the time Stirling has taken us through all of his conclusions based on his reading of the Sonnets, the plays of that year and the political and religious zeitgeist of the time, we have much more to think about than Davenant's parentage.
Before that, we have seen Davenant's role in the Civil War, his position as the opposite of republican Milton, his life possibly saved by a casting vote when Parliament had to decide on which 'malignants' were to be executed, the reprieve possibly being due to Milton's influence. His work, such as Gondibert, was admired by such as Thomas Hobbes, Abraham Cowley and Henry Vaughan. He lost his nose through syphilis, and you can imagine how funny it was when contemporary wits remarked of the 'No' vote that put him on trial rather than execute him,
some Gentlemen, out of pitty, were pleased to let him have the Noes of the House, because he had [no nose] of his own
But however affable and popular, witty and charming he was, I can't help noticing that after he is released from the Tower in 1652, he is deeply in debt and his first wife has died, then in very short order he has married the wealthy Dame Anne Cademan, proceeds to spend all her money, persuuades her to sell her jewellery and by 1655, she is dead as well and Davenant gets leave to travel abroad and 'promptly married his third wife', the widowed Henrietta-Maria du Tremblay which 'went some way towards resolving Davenant's chaotic finances'.
So, we can assume he was quite capable of charming a rich widow with or without a nose. But it's a great shame that such an eventful life so vividly lived should be overshadowed by Stirling's propositions at the climax of the book.
I'm more than happy to buy the idea that Jeanette (or Jane, or Jennet) Davenant is the Dark Lady, loved by Shakespeare in 1593 when she then makes him jealous by also consorting with his friend, the Earl of Southampton. Later, in 1605,William Davenant is said to be the result of a re-kindled relationship and if, as Stirling says, Antony is 42 and the dark Cleopatra 38 in Antony and Cleopatra, written late in 1605, then, no, I don't believe in coincidences and those are the ages of Shakespeare and Jeanette then, too.
I'm delighted to find Willobie His Avisa, the poem from 1594, brought into use. It places the action of the Shakespeare-Jeannette-Southampton triangle very specifically near Bristol and if this is good, it's very, very good but I don't know if accepting that means that we have to attribute A Lover's Complaint to John Davies and admit it was not Shakespeare and thus the 1609 edition of the Sonnets was not seen through the presses by the poet.
The last two lines of Sonnet 125, O thou my lovely Boy, are missing but that poem reads better addressed to a baby than to a boyfriend. And 126 goes straight on to consider the Dark Lady. I'm still with it.
The gap in between H and ALL in the dedication of the Sonnets, where all other words are separated only by a full stop, is a cipher that indicates that the words should not be separated and it says Mr. W. Hall, which was the name Shakespeare used on undercover work, that he was a Catholic insider involved in the Gunpowder Plot, which was only ever going to be used as an incitement to anti-Catholic feeling (and worked) but somewhere along the line of the argument, it's not that I can't quite follow it, it's only that somewhere in its thread, one assumption or deduction must be a step too far.
I'm not convinced that Shakespeare was forced from the London theatres by revelations made by the publication of the Sonnets, edited not by him but in a way to discredit him and I'm still less convinced that Ben Jonson murdered him. to 'shut him up'. 1616 was a bit late for that. Stirling has had to revise and moderate some of his more imaginative theories before now and it seems he had some investment in the result of the scrutiny of the skull in the Beoley ossuary, which he would have liked to have been Shakespeare's (which is apparently not in the grave at Holy Trinity Church, Stratford) but is now identified as that of a 70 year old woman.
So, what do you know, the small skull there doesn't mean Shakespeare was a small person, it means it belonged to a little, old lady.
It's been a while since I mentioned Thom Gunn here and so I'm glad to quote the early poem, Mirror for Poets,
It was a violent time. Wheels, racks and fires
In every writer's mouth, and not mere rant.
Certain shrewd herdsmen, between twisted wires
Of penalty folding the realm, were thanked
For organizing spies and secret police
By richness in the flock, which they could fleece.
That's only the first stanza, before Thom named Shakespeare, Jonson and Southampton in the second. How much did he know? Does the 'herdsmen' , and subsequently 'flock' meaning also congregation, refer to Jeanette's maiden name, Sheppard, whereby she was related to the C16th composer, which in turn suggests we shouldn't think of her as simply a pub landlady in Oxford city centre. Or do the 'wires' refer us to the dark lay's hair in Sonnet 130, My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun, or are they misunderstood communications.
One can do a great deal with close reading but I still remember discovering the real meaning of 'forensic' was not 'highly detailed' as in fingerprints but actually something that can be used as evidence, that will stand up in court. I realize Ben Jonson had form for dispatching a previous enemy into the next world but that wouldn't be admissable evidence in court either.
It's a compelling account and the fact it doesn't come from an established bastion of Shakespeare Studies does not count against it. But it's a stretch to accept it all because we've been asked to accept less lurid versions of the story before and many of those are unconvincing by now. I might say I enjoyed it this side accepting it but a good time was had by all. While making the Dark Lady much more readily identifiable, there are a few too many leaps of faith from what we have been led to assume to think that this replaces quite all the previous accounts. If Stirling still thinks that the twins, Hamnet and Judith, were genuinely Shakespeare's children then he remains locked into that same old glib story while being carried away by what are much more dubious imaginings.
But, hidden away in the title of the book, there is still the original question. Was Shakespeare Davenant's father. I am a betting man but I prefer to bet on things when I believe it's one thing or the other, not when I'm guessing. By now, if I had to make a decision, I'd go for No, partly because there is something a bit suspicious about books like this. And, if not, then the other illegitimate child was only invented by Davenant to bolster his own story.
How many children had William Shakespeare?
One.
