Environmental history and the muckhill fine for Shakespeare's father

When it comes to Shakespeare’s biography, there often seems to be another aspect of early modern life to learn about or a new or different way to understand a detail that we already know. Perhaps that is an inevitable part of the nature of biography, as we discussed with Professor Brian Cummings in a classic Shakespeare Unlimited podcast episode.

This February, for example, the British newspaper The Guardian offered a bit of character rehabilitation for Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, referring to an incident that took place in 1552, when he was probably still in his 20s, long before Shakespeare was born. The headline reads “Shakespeare expert overturns fly-tipper myth about playwright’s father,” adding: “Exclusive: John Shakespeare’s muckhill fine in 1552 was a waste disposal toll rather than a punishment, researcher says.”

A “fly-tipper,” for those unfamiliar with the British term, is essentially what Americans would call a litter bug, someone who discards trash and other waste in public spaces—perhaps a minor offense compared to other legal misdeeds, but hardly a sign of civic virtue or hygienic living.

In casting doubt on the fly-tipper claim, the Guardian story highlighted the findings of an article in the spring 2024 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly, “John Shakespeare’s Muckhill: Ecologies, Economies, and Biographies of Communal Waste in Stratford-upon-Avon, circa 1550-1600.” Shakespeare Quarterly is a leading journal in Shakespeare studies that is published for the Folger Shakespeare Library by Oxford University Press.

The document from April 1552 that records the muckhill fine, as well as other matters, can be seen in full in Shakespeare Documented. As translated in the Shakespeare Quarterly article, it reads in part: “Humphrey Reynolds, Adrian Quyney, and John Shakyspere made a muckhill in a place called Hendley [sic] Street against the ordinance of the court. Therefore they [are fined].” The full passage about the muckhill fine, shown here, includes the three names in the first line.

“Hendley” Street refers to Stratford’s Henley Street, which has a special significance for William Shakespeare enthusiasts. This is the street where he was born in 1564 and then grew up in the family home. The fine suggests that his father, who came to Stratford from the nearby village of Snitterfield, most likely already lived on Henley Street by 1552, although he may or may not have been at that address by then.

But what did the document refer to? One of the two authors of the Shakespeare Quarterly article, David Fallow, told the Guardian that a “fine” was understood differently in 1552 than it would be today. “A fine was simply a charge, a rent or rates. There was no moral imputation to John Shakespeare’s fine at all. Stratford muckhills in his time were rentable resources, for which the town could collect taxes.” As the article suggests, the document also appears to be describing a single muckhill made or built by three Stratford residents, not just separate littering incidents by each of the three people named.

Moreover, “muckhills,” as the article explains, were more like public compost heaps, as Fallow’s co-author Elizabeth E. Tavares says in a recent interview about the muckhill story for That Shakespeare Life podcast. “We think about them as large compost heaps and community heaps that are productively decaying in particular spaces, which ends up being far more productive. And the legal records in Stratford are really specific about this. They call them muckhills, as separate from garbage.”

During the course of years covered by the article, from 1550 to 1600, it suggests that a permanent system of six muckhills—one of them in Henley Street—was established. Muckhills produced material of value for different purposes. John Shakespeare was a “whittawer,” a leather goods maker who specialized in fine leather for products such as gloves. Fallow told the Guardian that “while the heap was certainly muck, it was related to Shakespeare’s trade. It included urine, which decayed into ammonia, to be used for softening and tanning leather hides, among other processes.”

The Shakespeare Quarterly article notes that more recent biographies, including The Private Life of William Shakespeare (2021) by Lena Cowen Orlin, former Executive Director of the Folger Institute, which was excerpted on this blog and discussed on Shakespeare Unlimited, and Lois Potter’s The Life of William Shakespeare: A Critical Biography (2012), work to “situate the muckhill fine within its cultural context” in Stratford, including Orlin’s writing “on the ambivalence of the archival record as to the relative legality of the muckhill.”

But for many years—even centuries—the muckhill fine was seen in a very different way by other authors,  even including the father of psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud. In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud wrote, “We do not think highly of the cultural level of an English country town in the time of Shakespeare when we read that there was a tall dungheap in front of his father’s house in Stratford.”

As Fallow told The Guardian, Freud—and a number of authors writing earlier Shakespeare biographies—“were absolutely wrong” to take the fine in that way. Instead, Fallow said, he “was taken aback to discover that the town’s 16th-century inhabitants had a far more sophisticated approach to waste disposal than had been realised, with citizens paying a fee for the convenience of keeping a muckhill on their property.”

In the past, however, as Fallow and Tavares’s Shakespeare Quarterly article puts it, “by the time E. K. Chambers was moving into print his magisterial surveys of Elizabethan theater and other documents related to William Shakespeare, it had become commonplace to represent Stratford, like pre-industrial England more generally, as (in Chambers’s words) ‘dirty and ignorant . . . an unmeet cradle for poetry.’” And in particular, to lastingly represent the young John Shakespeare as a careless fly-tipper.