Where was William Shakespeare living in the 1590s? Around 1597/8, as has been known since the 1840s, Shakespeare was recorded as living in the parish of St Helen's, Bishopsgate, in the City of London. His name is listed, mundanely, in a series of parish/ward assessments for a national tax – the Lay Subsidy – largely required to fund Queen Elizabeth I's ongoing war in Ireland. This detail appears in most recent biographies of Shakespeare, but surprisingly little research has been done about its significance, given the questions it prompts – about when exactly Shakespeare moved to St Helen's, about why he chose to live there, and about who else lived in the parish.
It may be that exact answers to some of these questions cannot be discovered, but they remain worth asking; during this period, after all, the parish was the basic administrative unit for managing, controlling, taxing and documenting England's population. It was fundamental to most parishioners' lives, not least as attendance at the parish church's Sunday service was compulsory, and non-attendance could result in prosecution. Wherever he lived in London, Shakespeare would have been at least passingly familiar with his neighbours for this reason alone: that he probably saw many of them on a weekly basis, in church. These are people he would have passed often in the street, or, in the case of St Helen's, might be seen drawing their daily supply of water at the parish well and pump next to the graveyard.
The Lay Subsidy listing of 1598 that names Shakespeare is now preserved in the National Archives and viewable online. It includes him alongside forty-eight fellow residents of St Helen's. Nine of whom were French or Dutch protestants – “strangers” – some refugees, listed separately at the end. Interpreting this document is not a straightforward matter. For one thing, to be taxed, one had to have a valuation of £3 or above, with the three most common “tax bands” at £3, £5 or £10. Shakespeare was assessed at £5, making him, as Robert Bearman puts it in Shakespeare's Money (2016), “a man of fairly comfortable wealth” but “not a man possessed of great wealth”. He comes halfway down the list of valuations; thirteen of the parishioners placed above him are rated higher than £10, going up from £20 to one exceptional individual (of whom more below) rated at £300.
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