Mainly about Shakespeare and Lancashire traditions
For me, the most important
evidence lies in the two old and persistent traditions in the Hoghton and
Hesketh families, which not only corroborate each other but are the only two in
the whole country associating him with specific families. These continued
completely independently in both families and both can be demonstrably traced
back to way before any Shakespeare scholarly interest was shown.
Not until 1923, when Chambers
noted Alexander Hoghton's will of 1581 naming William Shakeshafte, partially
transcribed by Piccope and printed by
the Chetham Society in 1860. There had, however, been several publications in
Lancashire before, which linked Shakespeare with the County Palatine.
A mystery to me, but most were
picked up later.
Oliver Baker was the first to
wax enthusiastic about the possibility of Shakespeare having spent some of his
'lost years' in Lancashire and published his speculations in 1937.
Yes, this was all they still
were. Although he visited Lancashire and some of the main sites, he did no
research amongst documents; but over the next few decades more and more
documentary evidence piled up. These all caused little flurries of excitement
and Keen's findings caused a great stir in
the 1950s, but nothing came of these until Honigmann
produced the first scholarly book in 1985. This caused another stir, but was
then largely ignored until rather recently, when the conference at Lancaster University and Hoghton
Tower in 1999 attracted a lot of media attention and greater general
interest. At the same time there has been an explosion in 'Catholic
Shakespeare' literature, coming from very different directions but all
converging on the Hoghtons.
By no means.
There seems to be an
insistence on the production of a document actually stating that William
Shakespeare was William Shakeshafte. That sounds as if you don't require
documents for proof. But everything I have read about tracing family history or
historical facts insists that documentary proof must be found.
I agree completely when
tracing a family history back through censuses and civic records in the 19th
century, and parish and other records back to the beginning of the 17th
century. But from the 16th century back these are just not available in many
cases. So many family papers disappeared without trace and without any record
of how and why they might have disappeared. What is quite remarkable in the
case of four of 'my' families is that documentary records have survived of how,
when and where some of these disappeared. Many Stanley papers were lost when Lathom House
was razed to the ground in the Civil War and more went into a furnace later (Coward). The Shakespeare family papers went up
in flames in a fire in Warwick in 1694, reported by witnesses and printed in
1729 (Schoenbaum, pp. 305-6). Arderne
family papers are reported as disappearing by an eye-witness at the beginning
of the 19th century in a letter printed by Earwaker.
Many Hoghton portraits and papers disappeared in a fire, reported by Miller. In cases like this, there is little
hope of discovering documents that prove certain events. If a tradition has
survived as the only record, let us just be thankful that it has.
How reliable are oral family
traditions?
Some would say not at all and
immediately throw them out of the window. However, I have come across so many
that were demonstrably true and proved by documents that I would never reject a
tradition out of hand and certainly not an early report within two or three
generations after the event or death of the person in question, and
particularly in an age when telling stories at the family hearth was a common
pastime. My requirements for an oral tradition are that it must be dateable
back to the first half of the 19th century, have no self-serving interest, and
make sense within surrounding historical facts. If these conditions are met,
then strip away any peripheral details, particularly the weird and wonderful,
and the kernel, in my experience, usually contains the historical truth.
Many, but let's concentrate
here on two published rather early. The first concerns Myles Standish, and in
his case the family traditions were all printed by the middle of the 19th
century (Winsor), so there are no problems with
proving those dates. As mentioned in my 'Main conclusions',
the family tradition that he had inherited Duxbury Hall was ultimately proved
by a single document in the Standish of Duxbury MSS, which at the same
time proved his ancestry in this family. This was a case where the tradition
was far more reliable than the documentation pieced together painstakingly by
Rev. Porteus (1914, 1920). After two
centuries, however, the family had become rather vague as to how and why he
might have inherited Duxbury Hall and forgotten that his son Alexander had
renounced his claim when the Assize Court in Lancaster awarded him compensation
in 1655. They had also lost his will (not yet discovered and printed), so
didn't realise that the lands that he had never managed to regain possession of
were a Standish of Standish estate and nothing to do with Duxbury Hall. All
these details had been fused and confused and the final version was that he had
been cheated out of Duxbury Hall - the wrong estate. The kernels were therefore
'cheated out of an estate' (proved by the text of his will) and 'inherited
Duxbury Hall' (proved by the document mentioned above). The reason Rev. Porteus did not discover this is that he
died in the 1950s before the Standish of Duxbury MSS resurfaced in 1965.
All versions sent William
Stanley to Russia for three years, although one with a ridiculous itinerary and
another with impossible dates, and all had garbled versions of him meeting Dr
Dee, an old family friend, at the Emperor's court in Moscow. The accepted facts
(all well established in documents and published long ago) are that he did
indeed know Dr John Dee
(the famed traveller to various Eastern European courts as mathematician,
astrologer, alchemist, etc.) very well, but visited him mainly in Manchester,
where he was appointed Warden of the College in 1595 and where he lived in a
house owned by the Earls of Derby; Dr John Dee
never visited Moscow (most of his time in Eastern Europe was in Poland and
Bohemia); the Dr Dee, physician to the Russian Emperor for seventeen years, but
far too late for William Stanley to have visited him, was his eldest son Dr
Arthur Dee. My findings included that William Stanley was mysteriously missing from
any documentation in Lancashire or anywhere else in England from 1590-3, which
for various other solid reasons was the most logical date for a potential stay
in Russia. The inevitable conclusion was that the two Dr Dees, father and son,
had become muddled in local folk-lore by someone whose knowledge of history and
geography was not too sparkling. The two kernels left in all versions were
'Russia' and 'three years' and I doubt
if we will ever know any more details. As mentioned before, the Derby family papers
largely disappeared during the Civil War, including perhaps any letters written
from Russia. An additional relevant fact was that by the time the tradition of
him as 'a great traveller' was recorded in the 1740s, the senior line had died
out and the Derby title inherited by a junior line (incidentally, married to a
Standish of Duxbury widow). Although this family must have heard a lot about
William's travels at the time, on the other hand it was not their own family
tradition, so had even less chance of surviving intact.
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