A bit of mystery, a touch of conjecture

Shakespearean scholars often make reference to the poet's "Lost Years," from the time he left grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon in the late 1570's until his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582, and then again for an extended period later in that decade and into the next, just prior to his earliest successes on the London stage and his literary vilification by a mean-spirited and envious rival,  Robert Greene, in 1592. Greene had written sneeringly of Shakespeare's presumptuousness in trying to compete with his university-trained betters. Shakespeare's education didn't extend beyond grammar school; how dare he write for the stage? At least that demeaning outburst allowed us to pinpoint Shakespeare's whereabouts.

A long-standing tradition, flavored with some traces of circumstantial evidence, holds that Shakespeare was for a while a "Schoolmaster in the Countrey," according to the late 17th-century diarist John Aubrey, who cites as his source the actor son of Christopher Beeston, who had been an actor in Shakespeare's company during the great writer's lifetime. Peter Ackroyd, in his masterfully written Shakespeare: The Biography, points out that teacher-and-student or otherwise pedantic scenes and references are unusually frequent in Shakespeare's plays, often harking back to the torturous grind of grammar school experience, with its "whining schoolboy.....creeping like snail/unwillingly to school" (As You Like It    Act II, Scene vii).

What makes this little touch of conjecture pertinent to Agecroft Hall is this: Ackroyd, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Wood, and  numerous other Shakespeare biographers have pointed to Lancashire (where Agecroft Hall once stood) as a possible venue for Shakespeare's brief career as a tutor of children. Lancashire was a stronghold of the Old Religion, Catholicism, and there is considerable evidence that Shakespeare's family might have continued to cling to the old faith. Several of William's grammar school teachers were Catholics from Lancashire. Might one of them have recommended a bright young pupil named William Shakespeare to serve as a tutor to the children of a wealthy Lancastrian landholder? Certainly a plausible theory. And the acting out of simple morality plays and other edifying fare was regarded as both a common and effective teaching tool in Tudor England, perhaps allowing Shakespeare to show the earliest glints of his brilliance.

Specifically, these biographers point to the intriguingly ambiguous will left by Alexander Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancashire. He left actors' costumes and musical instruments to his half-brother Thomas Hoghton, asking him to take into his service "ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwellinge with me" or to find someone who would. Given the nonexistence of spelling rules in Tudor England, and the fading memory of an aging man, might not "Shakeshafte" and Shakespeare be one and the same young man?

Hoghton Tower is but a half-day's walk, if that, from where Agecroft Hall once stood. Even some of the less professional or polished acting groups, under noble patronage, traveled about the county if not the country. A mobile form of entertainment, though slow on its tours by today's standards.

If such was the case, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Shakespeare, under the patronage of either the Hoghtons or later fellow Lancastrians Thomas Hesketh or Ferdinando Stanley (who as Lord Strange patronized the acting group The Lord Strange's Men) might conceivably have come to Lancashire's Agecroft Hall as a young actor or in some theatrical capacity, getting his feet wet in the trade.

Pictured above is Agecroft Hall as it stood in Lancashire in the latter part of the 19th century; the original portions of the structure date back to the 15th century. In 1926, having fallen into a state of significant deterioration, it was purchased by Virginia businessman Thomas C. Williams, Jr. The building was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic, and rebuilt on the banks of the James River in Richmond, where it stands to this day. Whether a young William Shakespeare ever counted its chimneys (Agecroft once had eleven hearths) is a tickler for the imagination.