Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan

Author:Park Honan [Honan, Park]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General, History, Literary Criticism, European, Biography & Autobiography, Great Britain, Literary, English; Irish; Scottish; Welsh, Europe, Biography, Historical, Early modern; 1500-1700, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Performing Arts, History & Criticism, Shakespeare, Theater, Dramatists; English, Stratford-upon-Avon (England)
ISBN: 9780192825278
Publisher: Oxford University Press US
Published: 2000-03-15T06:28:26+00:00

The vendor William Underhill, who lived part of the year at Idlicote, was a Catholic recusant who appeared to Stephen Burman to be 'subtle, covetous, and crafty'. However bad he was, his elder boy was somewhat worse. Two months after the sale to Shakespeare, Underhill was killed by his son Fulke, then a legal minor, to whom he had orally bequeathed his lands. Once again, apparently, a murderer connected with the house used poison, as Claudius does in Hamlet, and Underhill died at Fillongley near Coventry on 7 July 1597. As a result, New Place was forfeited to the state for felony, and Fulke was hanged for murder in 1599. 20 Even when working on Hamlet, Shakespeare virtually had Fulke's parricide at his elbow, since the crime kept his right to the house insecure until the victim's second son Hercules Underhill came of age in 1602. In that year Hercules (who was born on 6 June 1581) secured a clear grant of the estate and confirmed its sale to the playwright. In buying the property, Shakespeare thus got in the strange bargain a father's alleged murder of a daughter, and the murder of a father by his son. He made good use of what he knew, and the Bott and Underhill stories familiarized him with the raw, primitive theme of family murder, which he was taking up with psychological realism. And indeed, what is important about Hamlet's origins is that the play was created not merely out of literary sources, or by a 'supposing' of events, but by a poet who took in ingredients from real life to assimilate them thoroughly with experiences of his own family, schooling, and town, and with his private aspirations, hopes, disappointments, and intellectual life. He knew Underhill, just as his father knew Bott; and the murders in Hamlet are not like pictures out of Ovid, not Titus-like, but intimately known happenings based in part on real, acutely judged events.

The house was a lucky purchase, whether or not tales of murder distracted his wife from her loss. On three sides, the place was surrounded by greenery. In front was 'a little court yard', according to George Vertue, who in 1737 made a pen-and-ink sketch of the house, and a second drawing showing servants') quarters on either side of the court. New Place was partly torn down and rebuilt on neo-classical lines by Sir John Clopton in 1702 (though the house was not finally demolished until 1759, by vicar Francis Gastrell of Frodsham), so

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