A Reappraisal of John Cottom, Stratford Schoolmaster
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Lancashire: A Reappraisal of John Cottom, Stratford Schoolmaster M ICHAEL W INSTANLEy VER THIRTy yEARS AGO ERNST HONIGMANN ’S SHAKESPEARE : T HE O“L OST YEARS ” developed the case that Shakespeare spent time in 1580–81 as a player-actor in Alexander Hoghton’s Lancashire home, thinly dis - guised as William Shakeshafte. 1 This view has since gained credence in some academic circles and particularly in the popular imagination and has been deployed to bolster the view that Shakespeare harbored Catholic sympathies. 2 Douglas Hamer, Robert Bearman, Glyn Parry, Thomas McCoog, and Peter Davidson have subjected this narrative to detailed empirical criticism, and others have aired scepticism. 3 But no one has yet challenged Honigmann’s central prem - I wish to thank Robert Bearman, Stanley Wells, Alison Findlay, Glyn Parry, Thomas McCoog, and Gordon Phillips for commenting on earlier or partial drafts of this essay; Angus Winchester for assistance with sources; Stephen Wilson for information about Christian names; Neil Hudson of Lancashire Parish Register Society for collecting details from parish registers; Sarah Rose for help in transcribing documents; John Thorley for assistance with translations from Latin; and Elizabeth Boardman for information from Brasenose College archives. The author accepts full responsibility for the evidence and argument presented here. 1 The name is variously spelt Cottam, Cottame, Cotham, Cottome, and Cottom. The herald’s spelling in family pedigree for 1613, for example, uses Cottam, but it is signed John Cottom, as are his other signatures. Cottom was clearly the family’s preferred spelling, and it is used here throughout, unless the original source cited specifically employs or refers to Cottam or Cotham. Hoghton is preferred to Houghton, but the latter is retained if spelled as such in the original text. Contemporary spellings of Tarnacre (e.g., Tarnaker) have been modernized unless cited within a direct quotation. 2 E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The “Lost Years” (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985); Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), xii, 60–70; Anthony Holden, William Shakespeare: His Life and Work (London: Little, Brown, 1999), 27, 56–61; Michael Wood (presenter), In Search of Shakespeare , miniseries (BBC, 2003; PBS Home Video, 2003), DVD; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Man - chester: Manchester UP, 2004), ch. 2; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (New york: W. W. Norton, 2004), ch. 3; Peter Ackroyd, Shakespeare: The Biography (London: Chatto and Windus, 2005), 77–82. Recent fictionalized accounts of Shakespeare’s early life also make much of this. 3 Douglas Hamer, “Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte?,” Review of English Stud - ies 21.81 (1970): 41–48; Robert Bearman, ‘“Was William Shakespeare William Shakeshafte’ Revisited,” Shakespeare Quarterly 53.1 (2002): 83–94; Glyn Parry, “New Evidence on William Shakespeare Quarterly 68.2 (2017): 172–191 © 2017 Folger Shakespeare Library SHAKESPEARE, CATHOLICISM, AND LANCASHIRE 173 ise that “John Cottom, the Stratford schoolmaster, was also linked with the Hoghton family” and that it was this personal connection that converted Shake - speare’s sojourn in Lancashire from “a possibility into a probability.” 4 This Lancashire connection is predicated on a longer established view that John, as the elder brother of Thomas Cottam—the Lancashire martyr who was executed on 30 May 1582—was a Catholic. His mere presence in Stratford has long been cited to suggest that the town as a whole had Catholic sympathies during Shakespeare’s formative years. This essay uses archival material not pre - viously consulted in order to reassess the evidence for the Cottom family’s pos - sible connections with the Hoghtons and, more widely, to challenge the gener - ally accepted assumption about John’s religious faith. The possibility that William Shakespeare of Stratford and the William Shake - shafte named in Alexander Hoghton’s will in 1581 could have been the same man had been mooted by Edmund Chambers in 1923 and developed over the next thirty years by Oliver Baker, Alan Keen, and Roger Lubbock. 5 Cottom’s alleged link with the Hoghtons was suggested by Robert Stevenson as early as 1958. Citing a land transaction of 1558, Stevenson claimed the Cottoms were neighbors of the Hoghtons in Dilworth—a township in the parish of Ribchester, a few miles to the northeast of Preston. 6 H. A. Shield, quoting an inquisition of 1619, Shakeshafte and Edmund Campion,” Shakespeare Yearbook 17 (2009): 1–27; Thomas M. McCoog and Peter Davidson, “Edmund Campion and William Shakespeare: Much Ado About Nothing? ,” in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits , ed. Thomas M. McCoog, 2nd ed. (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 2007), 165–85, summa - rized in Peter Davidson and Thomas McCoog, “Unreconciled. What evidence links Shake - speare and the Jesuits,” TLS (16 March 2007): 12–13; Terence G. Schoone-Jongen, Shake - speare’s Companies: William Shakespeare’s Early Career and the Acting Companies, 1577–1594 (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008), ch. 9. Although Michael Wood’s BBC TV series of 2003 elab - orated on the Lancashire connection, his book concluded that that there was “no convincing evi - dence” for it; see In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Worldwide, 2003), 87. Richard Dutton refers to the “tottering edifice of speculations” about Shakespeare’s Catholic and Lancashire con - nections; see William Shakespeare: A Literary Life (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave MacMillan, 1989), 7. Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare , ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003) remains agnostic and con - centrates instead on exploring regional theatrical culture more broadly (see p. 1). Takashi Kozuka, “Shakespeare in Purgatory: A Study of the Catholicising Movement in Shakespeare Biography” (PhD diss., University of Warwick, 2003). 4 Honigmann, Lost Years , 127. 5 E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage , vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), 280; and “William Shakeshafte,” in Shakespearean Gleanings (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1944), 52–56; Oliver Baker, In Shakespeare’s Warwickshire and the Unknown Years (London: Simpkin Marshall, 1937), 297–319. See also Alan Keen and Roger Lubbock, The Annotator (London: Putnam, 1954), 43–52. 6 Robert Stevenson, Shakespeare’s Religious Frontier (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1958), 67–84, esp. 69. 174 SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLy claimed to have identified the precise family in Dilworth as Lawrence and Ann Cottam whose land was “held of Sir Richard Houghton.” 7 Peter Milward later cited Cottom as a significant example of “a remarkable number of connections between Stratford and the part of Lancashire round Preston.” 8 However, it was Ernst Honigmann’s study that grabbed public attention and firmly established Cottom as the “essential link in the chain.” Honigmann, like Shield, claimed John’s parents were Lawrence and Ann Cottam and added their residence, High House, citing the work of Tom Smith. He also repeated Smith’s claim that this Ann later remarried William Ambrose of Woodplumpton. 9 Honigmann further claimed that John’s father not only was a tenant of the Hoghtons but also had other “long-standing connections” with them. As a result he maintained that Lawrence could well have suggested his son’s pupil in Stratford as a suitable tutor to Alexander Hoghton, and he repeated a claim made by Shield that “the John Cotham mentioned in Alexander Hoghton’s will might be the Stratford schoolmaster, even though John Cottom was still at Stratford when Alexander made his will.” He asserted that John returned to Lancashire in 1581 or 1582 and resided on an estate at Tarnacre, which his father “is thought to have made over” to him at the time, and that he maintained a close relationship with the Hoghtons into the early seventeenth century. 10 Richard Wilson elaborated on this claim, referring to John as a “business asso - ciate” named in the Hoghton family papers in the 1610s. 11 Independently, other scholars developed the case for John Cottom’s Catholi - cism. In 1929 Edgar Fripp surmised that John left Stratford because he “may 7 H. A. Shield, “A Stratford Schoolmaster,” The Month , n. s. 26, no. 2 (August 1961): 109–11. 8 Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1973), 39–42, esp. 41. Unfortunately Milward also wrongly states that Cottom returned to Essex, while his suggestion that Cardinal William Allen was a humble usher in the Stratford school after he lost his Oxford principalship seems hardly credible. He has further developed his views in “Shakespeare’s Jesuit Schoolmasters,” in Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare , ed. Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, (Manchester: Manchester UP, 2003), 58–70; and Shakespeare: The Papist (Ave Maria, FL: Sapientia Press, 2005), 21–42. 9 Honigmann, Lost Years , 41–42; Joseph Gillow, A Literary and Biographical History, or Bibli - ographical Dictionary of the English Catholic. From the Breach with Rome, in 1534, to the Present Time . Vol. 1 (London: Burns and Oates, 1885), 574; Tom C. Smith, A History of Longridge and District (Preston, UK: C. W. Whitehead , 1888), 140–44; Tom C. Smith and Rev. Jonathan Shortt, The History of the Parish of Ribchester (London: Bemrose and Sons, 1890), 242. Smith was totally confused. He linked Thomas Cottam the martyr to Knowle or Cottam Hall, quoting Gillow at length but without corroborating evidence, and then transposed some of Gillow’s infor - mation onto a family of the same name at High House. The inaccuracies and confusions in Smith’s pedigrees were even recognized by Gillow; see his notes to “A list of convicted recusants in the reign of Charles II; Lancashire,” in Miscellanea , vol. 6 (Catholic Record Society, 1909), 155n2. 10 Honigmann, Lost Years , 40–49, 126–27. Quotations are from pp. 42, 47–48. 11 Wilson, Secret Shakespeare , 57–63, 69, esp. 63. SHAKESPEARE, CATHOLICISM, AND LANCASHIRE 175 have been suspect .