Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries (Coyote Canyon Press Classics)

First published in 1897 (revised and enlarged in 1907) this book by Charlotte Carmichael Stopes remains one of the finest written about Warwickshire during the age of Shakespeare. In the words of Shakespearian scholar Samuel Schoenbaum: "This work places Shakespeare in his Warwickshire context, then often misunderstood, by presenting brief sketches of neighbors and relations whose lives touched his own. Stopes' dramatis personae include Richard Field, who printed Shakespeare's first book; Sir Thomas Lucy, master of Charlecote; Dr. John Hall, the dramatist's son-in-law; the poet Drayton, who took physic from Hall; the great Clopton family, owners of Clopton Hall from the time of Henry III; the Combes, from whom Shakespeare bought 107 acres of land near Stratford; and William Underhill, the late owner of New Place poisoned by his young son Fulke. Less familiar figures also receive chapters: John Somerville of Edreston, for example, who with a fever in his brain set out for London to shoot the Queen and put her head upon a pole; although clearly mad, he was executed. There are sections too on the clergy of Stratford, and on the local schoolmasters. It is a novel collection which sheds indirect light on Shakespeare himself. The effect is to counter [a previous biographer's] unwittingly mischievous description of Stratford as 'a bookless neighbourhood,' so greedily seized upon by the heretics-Stopes points out that one man alone, the Rev. John Marshall of Bishopton, left 187 books in 1607..In these pages of Shakespeare's Warwickshire Contemporaries a new note, tough-minded and critical, makes itself felt. That note would distinguish much of twentieth-century biography."