But That Was in Another County: William Shakespeare and the “Clayton Loan” of 1592 and 1600

I n the year 1600, one “William Shackspere” successfully sued John Clayton, yeoman, of Willington, Bedfordshire, for the return of £7 plus penalty for a total of £10. ¹ According to the text of the lawsuit entered on the Plea Rolls of the Court of King’s Bench (at the time, Queen’s Bench), the loan was transacted on 22 May 1592 in the parish of St. Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, London. Details of the suit were first published in 1882 by J. O. Halliwell-Phillipps, who identified the moneylender with “the great dramatist.” ² In 1898 Sidney Lee agreed: “Shakespeare inherited his father’s love of litigation, and stood rigorously by his rights in all his business relations. In March 1600 he recovered in London a debt of 7 l. from one John Clayton.” ³ The issue was raised again in 1916 by Charlotte Stopes, who was the first to analyze the document in detail. ⁴ By 1925, Lee had turned skeptic: “There is nothing to identify John Clayton’s creditor with the dramatist, nor is it easy to explain why he should have lent money to a Bedfordshire yeoman.” ⁵ In an accompanying footnote, Lee thanked “Mrs. Stopes” for fully identifying the source document. Five years later, in 1930, E. K. Chambers seconded Lee’s skepticism, followed by B. Roland Lewis in 1940. ⁶

In 1950 Leslie Hotson announced his discovery, in two Lay Subsidy Rolls for Bedfordshire, of a John Clayton, husbandman, of Willington (1593), and of a William Shakespeare, husbandman, of nearby Campton (1596). ⁷ Hotson concluded, “With this new light, I think we can regard the question as settled.” ⁸ Though he did not quite say so, Hotson meant that the matter was settled in the negative: John Clayton did not take a loan from the poet-playwright. The majority of Shakespeare biographers have accepted Hotson’s verdict, mostly in silence. ⁹ In a representative summary, The Reader’s Encyclopaedia of Shakespeare asserts that “it is undoubtedly this William Shakespeare [from Campton] and not the poet who was involved in the suit.” ¹⁰

Not all biographers have been persuaded by Hotson’s evidence, however. Of Lee’s and Chambers’s respective dismissals, Stanley Wells commented dryly, “Chambers, like Sidney Lee, sees no reason for identifying this Shakespeare with the dramatist, but gives no cogent reasons for not doing so.” ¹¹ E. A. J. Honigmann, urging that Shakespeare was not averse to financial profit, argued that “he and his father were involved in money-lending.” While referencing the 1592 loan, Honigmann cautioned, “The Clayton suit still awaits further investigation.” ¹² Taking Honigmann’s moneylending thesis to an extreme, Diana Price, in Shakespeare’s Unorthodox Biography, proffered an account of William Shakespeare that she describes as “largely conjectural, but the character profile and narrative sketch are better supported by the evidence than is the traditional story.” Her Shakespeare, a minimally talented money-grubber, “converts his daily receipts into more money by making high-interest loans, just as his own father had. In 1592, he makes a £7 loan in Cheapside to John Clayton.” ¹³ (In fact, the interest rate on the Clayton loan is unrecorded. Clayton was sued for the additional £3 because he defaulted.) In Contested Will, James Shapiro characterized the Clayton loan as the “rockbottom” of Halliwell-Phillipps’s “knack for finding uninspiring facts about Shakespeare’s business dealings.” He nevertheless conceded, “Scholars still can’t agree whether this was our Shakespeare or another.” ¹⁴

In 2012 John M. Rollett attempted to identify William Shackspere of the Clayton loan through his attorney, one Thomas Awdley. Among the Lay Subsidy Rolls for London, Rollett found a Thomas Audeley, citizen and grocer, whose father hailed from Henlow, Bedfordshire, a few miles from Campton. In light of this county connection, Rollett questioned any relationship to William Shakespeare of Warwickshire and London. ¹⁵ In Shakespeare’s Money (2016), Robert Bearman cited Rollett in apparent agreement. ¹⁶

In fact, the recently developed website Anglo-American Legal Tradition (AALT), based in the O...