Contested Will by James Shapiro Page B

empanelled and a verdict was reached in Shakespeare’s favour, since, when payment was still not made, a second writ was issued by the Stratford Court of Record – this time against Addenbrooke’s surety, Thomas Horneby, a local blacksmith, who was now responsible for both debt and damages. We don’t know more than this. Why Shakespeare was so eager to prosecute neighbours over a loan is not known, but it was not the kind of story that pleased his admirers – and coupled with the belated publication of that undelivered letter discovered by Malone decades earlier, in which Richard Quiney asked Shakespeare for a £ 30 loan, a case was building that Shakespeare cared more about cash than art.
    The pressure to find the right biographical materials – documents that reinforced rather than undermined what people wanted to believe about Shakespeare – led to new fakes and forgeries, including, in 1811, Richard Fenton’s anonymously published Tour in Quest of Genealogy in which he describes purchasing at an auction in southwest Wales some books and a manuscript that had been in the possession of ‘an eccentric and mysterious stranger’. The purchase turned out to include ‘a curious journal of Shakespeare, an account of many of his plays, and memoirs of his life by himself’. One of Shakespeare’s journal entries answered the question that had long puzzled those who wondered how a young man from rural Stratford could have mastered foreign languagesand was familiar with leading Italian authors:
    Having an earnest desire to lerne foraine tongues, it was mie goode happ to have in my father’s howse an Italian, one Girolamo Albergi, tho he went by the name of Francesco Manzini, a dyer of wool; but he was not what he wished to pass for; he had the breeding of a gentilman, and was a righte sounde scholar. It was he who taught me the little Italian I know, and rubbed up my Latin; we read Bandello’s Novells together, from the which I gathered some delicious flowers to stick in mie dramatick poseys.
    It may have been taken as a jest by knowing readers at the time – but excerpts were still being republished as fact as late as 1853.
    It came as a considerable relief to Shakespeare’s admirers when in the 1830s the ambitious young researcher John Payne Collier began publishing pamphlets outlining a series of biographical finds, drawn especially from a new and untapped source: the papers of Sir Thomas Egerton, a well-placed Elizabethan official who had served as Solicitor General as well as Lord Keeper of the Great Seal to Elizabeth I, and then as Lord High Chancellor to James I. Collier had become friends with Egerton’s descendant, Lord Francis Egerton, who then employed him to publish a catalogue of the ancestral holdings. Collier’s first pamphlet, New Facts Regarding the Life of Shakespeare (1835), offered twenty-one new documents related to Shakespeare’s life, nine of them from this collection.
    At long last, someone had discovered something having to do with Shakespeare’s life in London. Collier’s most exciting find was a certificate listing Shakespeare as a shareholder in Burbage’s company at the Blackfriars Theatre as early as 1589. The problem of the ‘Lost Years’ was half-solved – so much for the old canard, beloved even by Samuel Johnson, that Shakespeare had spent the late 1580s holding horses for gentlemen playgoers outside the theatre. Collier’s discoveries also pulled back the veil on Shakespeare’s final years in London. By then, another document revealed, Shakespeare’s stake in the Blackfriars Theatre hadgrown to over £ 1,400, a monumental sum. Another great find was a warrant from King James, dated January 1610, appointing Shakespeare and three others to train ‘a convenient number of children who shall be called the Children of her Majesties Revels’ in the art of ‘playing Tragedies,