THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, April 28, 1996 TAG: 9604260603
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Column
SOURCE: George Tucker
LENGTH: Medium: 85 lines
Shakespeare, born 432 years ago this year in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England, had two ties with Virginia's infancy.
First: Scholars have proven that he drew the graphic imagery for the storm scene at the beginning of The Tempest (1611), from an account of the wreck of a Jamestown-bound vessel that foundered on the coral reefs of Bermuda in 1609. Second: Lower Brandon, earlier known as Martin's Brandon, one of the most famous James River plantations, was at one time the joint property of Richard Quiney, the eldest son of one of Shakespeare's boyhood companions. Since one of Quiney's brothers married Shakespeare's daughter Judith and was also the principal in a scandal that might have hastened her father's death, that makes the second connection even more titilating.
To deal with the shipwreck first: In May 1609, nine vessels headed by the Sea Venture sailed for Virginia loaded with settlers and much-needed supplies. Two months later the expedition, known in Virginia history as the Third Supply, ran afoul of a tropical hurricane during which the Sea Venture became separated from the fleet and was wrecked a few days later on the coast of Bermuda.
One of the passengers was William Strachey, the first officially appointed secretary of the Virginia colony and an ancestor of Lytton Strachey, the well-known 20th century English biographer. When Strachey reached Jamestown a year later he wrote a long letter to an unidentified London friend in which he vividly described the shrieking winds and towering waves that drove Sea Venture with its masts and rigging eerily illuminated with St. Elmo's fire to its doom.
Shakespeare was writing The Tempest when Strachey's letter arrived in England. Since he and the new colony's first official secretary had once moved in the same literary circles, it is generally believed that he was permitted to read the bad news from the New World. In any event, the telling details of the storm scene in The Tempest paralleled those described by Strachey, making it clear that there was a strong connection between Shakespeare's play and Strachey's letter.
Although Shakespeare's second tie with early Virginia does not have a literary significance, it reveals the strong associations that then existed between those who remained in relative comfort in the Mother Country and those who established the far-off outpost on the James River.
John Shakespeare, the poet's father, was an intimate friend of Adrian Quiney, a Stratford mercer who died the year Jamestown was founded. His son Richard (1552-1602), was a schoolmate of Shakespeare's. He, in turn, had a son, also named Richard, who moved to London during the period of Shakespeare's greatest creativity and became a prosperous grocer and investor in foreign enterprises. Interestingly, he married the niece of the wife of John Harvard, the founder of Harvard University.
The younger Richard Quiney also provided the second link between Shakespeare and Virginia. In 1643, he became the joint owner of a $4,500 acre tract on the south side of the James River that was then known as Martin's Brandon. Even though Quiney never came to the colony, he contributed toward the development of the land and it remained in his family until 1720, when it became Harrison Fiefdom.
But there was an even more interesting Quiney-Sharkespeare connection that was going on on the the other side of the Atlantic during Shakespeare's lifetime.
Richard Quiney, the part owner of Martin's Brandon, had a younger brother Thomas, who was apparently quite a blade. In February 1616, only a few months before Shakespeare's death, he married the latter's 31-year-old daughter Judith. Since the couple had disregarded an ecclesiastical ruling prohibiting marriages during Lent, they were temporarily excommunicated. Even so, Thomas Quiney's troubles were not over. One month after he married Shakespeare's daughter, he was charged with impregnating a local woman named Margaret Wheeler. For that offense Quiney was sentenced to do penance in a white sheet for three Sundays in the parish church, a penalty that was subsequently remitted when he agreed to pay a fine of five shillings and make a private confession to his minister.
According to Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court of Stratford by E.R.C. Brinkworth (1972), Quiney's sexual dereliction was ``the biggest scandal that Stratford had seen for years.'' adding, ``For Shakespeare the whole affair must have been a terribly searing experience.''
Now, however, the scandal is ancient history. For the important thing for all Virginians to remember is that the Bard did not hesitate to utilize details from the wreck of a Jamestown-bound vessel to enhance the storm scene in one of his most poetical dramas. by CNB