Shakespeare coat of arms

• 1. Introduction

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  In 1596, the heralds approved the Shakespeare coat of arms. William's only son, eleven-year-old Hamnet, had been buried just months before. There was no male heir to carry the honour the family had spent years pursuing. The grant would pass to daughters, grandchildren, and eventually to strangers who happened to share the name. Beneath the formal language of the grant documents lie questions that have kept scholars busy for centuries. Who really drove the application? What does the design mean? And why do the surviving drafts contain what at least one scholar would call outright fabrications?

  1720

• 2. A Glover's Aspiration

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  John Shakespeare, a glover and tradesman from Stratford-upon-Avon, first made enquiries about a coat of arms around 1575. He had served as the town's bailiff, a role of genuine local authority. He had married Mary Arden, a union that gave the family ties to an older local lineage. Those two credentials, the civic office and the marriage, made him a plausible candidate for a heraldic grant. Robert Cooke, a herald of the College of Arms, may have visited Warwickshire around that time. If Cooke made the trip, a meeting with John was possible. Cooke may even have sketched the basic pattern that would eventually underpin the grant. But the application stalled. Such processes were expensive, and John appears to have faced financial difficulties that set the project aside for two decades. When the application was eventually renewed, it was William, not his father, who had the resources and connections to see it through.

  1345

• 3. The 1596 Grant

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  William Dethick, the herald responsible for processing the 1596 application, left behind two draft versions of the grant document, and both have survived. The drafts differ from each other in minor ways. They appear to have served as working documents before the formal grant was finalized. That official version has not survived. A copy made in the late seventeenth century exists in its place.

  The palaeographer Charles Hamilton argued that the drafts were not actually written by Dethick. In Hamilton's analysis, the handwriting belonged to William Shakespeare himself. If that is correct, the documents represent rare surviving examples of the playwright's handwriting. The heraldry scholar Wilfrid Scott-Giles offered a different reading. He suggested that the visible corrections and additions on the drafts reflect conversations between William and the heralds as the documents took shape.

  In Macbeth, written about ten years after the grant, William included these lines: 'Upon my head they placed a fruitless crown / And put a barren sceptre in my grip, / Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, / No son of mine succeeding.' The grant, and the loss that preceded it, had left its mark on his writing long afterward.

  Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton, and Robert Devereux, the Earl of Essex, were men of significant influence whose backing William could reasonably hope for. Whether that backing was ever directly applied to the application, the documents do not confirm. What the drafts do describe in detail is the design itself, rendered in the formal language of English heraldry.

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• 4. Gold, Spear, and Falcon

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  'Gold, on a bend sable, a spear of the first, steeled argent.' Those words from the 1596 drafts describe a gold shield crossed by a black diagonal bar. The bar bears a gold spear with a silver tip. The crest above the shield shows a silver falcon with wings spread, perched on a wreath. The falcon holds a gold spear tipped in silver. A simple sketch accompanies the written description.

  The motto added to the arms reads Non Sanz Droict, old French for 'Not without right'. In one of the drafts, the motto was first written as 'Non, Sanz Droict', with a comma that shifts the meaning to 'No, without right'. That version was crossed out and corrected. Whether the error was a slip or an intentional joke has been debated. The Shakespeares appear never to have actually used the motto. Warwickshire County Council later adopted the corrected phrase as their own.

  Katherine Duncan-Jones, the Shakespeare scholar, connects the falcon to the coat of arms of Henry Wriothesley. Wriothesley's arms display four silver falcons or hawks. That link would give the design a personal dimension, connecting it to one of William's most significant patrons. Scott-Giles noted that the basic design may have been made when William was still a boy, which would predate any connection to Wriothesley entirely. Duncan-Jones also proposes that the colours of the shield carry a deeper claim: that the Shakespeare family had included crusading knights among their ancestors. Scott-Giles wrote more cautiously that, apart from the spear's visual allusion to the family name, the design holds no obvious further meaning. A more poetic reading treats the spear as something other than a weapon: less a lance than a silver-tipped golden pen. That design, once approved, did not pass without challenge.

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• 5. Fabrications and Challenges

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  A draft document from 1599 proposed combining the Shakespeare arms with those of the Arden family. The Ardens were the family of John's wife, Mary. Such a combination, known in heraldic terms as impaling, would have been considered of higher status than the Shakespeare arms alone. The draft appears to have requested arms from a more prestigious branch of the Arden family than Mary had actually descended from. That section was crossed out.

  James S. Shapiro, the Shakespeare scholar, has described the 1599 document as containing embellishments and outright fabrications. Such embellishment had a long precedent. The clergyman William Harrison wrote in 1577 that heralds 'do of custom pretend antiquity and service, and many gay things thereunto'. For reasons that remain unclear, the Shakespeares never used the combined coat. Scott-Giles suggested that William may simply have preferred the look of the original design on aesthetic grounds.

  Ralph Brooke, a rival of Dethick in the heraldic world, brought a formal challenge in 1602. Brooke contested several coats of arms that Dethick had approved, and the Shakespeare grant was among them. He raised two objections: that the Shakespeares did not qualify, and that the design too closely resembled an existing coat of arms. Dethick defended the grant, citing the distinction between the two designs and pointing to John Shakespeare's qualifications. The dispute was resolved in Dethick's favour. The design that emerged from these disputes would outlast every member of the Shakespeare family line.

  1314172012

• 6. In Fiction and Memory

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  Ben Jonson's 1599 comedy Every Man out of His Humour features a rustic character named Sogliardo who has just purchased a coat of arms. Sogliardo is told to take the motto 'Not without mustard'. Many scholars read this as a joke directed at William Shakespeare and his new heraldic standing. The falcon is the type of bird most frequently mentioned across Shakespeare's plays, suggesting the design had entered his imagination as a lasting presence.

  Richard II, written around 1595, contains a speech that mentions both a lance and a falcon. Those are the two central elements of the Shakespeare coat of arms. It has been suggested that William's negotiations with the heralds may have influenced that passage of verse.

  In the 1968 Star Trek episode 'Bread and Circuses', the character Claudius Marcus wears the Shakespeare coat of arms. The 2016 British sitcom Upstart Crow treats the pursuit of the arms as a running plot thread. John's desire for a coat of arms, and William's efforts to obtain one, recur across multiple episodes. The grant itself is finally awarded in the episode titled 'Wild Laughter in the Throat of Death'.

  Susanna Hall, William's daughter, used the Shakespeare coat of arms on her personal seal. Her daughter Elizabeth Barnard, the playwright's last surviving descendant, had the arms on her wax seal as well, though only partly visible there. Similar arms have been granted to others bearing the Shakespeare name, with grants recorded in 1858 and 1918. The most recent came in 1946, when the creation of the Shakespeare Baronetcy brought with it a new version of similar arms.

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