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Shakespeare’s Cheshire and Lancashire Connection and his Tangled Family Web by Carol Curt Enos takes Ernst Honigmann’s Shakespeare: the Lost Years to a more comprehensive and detailed level in its search for evidence that William Shakespeare spent his late teen years in the homes of Catholic holdouts in Lancashire, proof that he, too, at great risk, clung to the Catholic religion. Enos focuses on Mary Arden Shakespeare’s distant Arderne relatives scattered throughout Lancashire and Cheshire, detailing their hitherto unexplored ties to powerful Catholic families: Stanley (Earls of Derby), Fitton, Hoghton, Hesketh, Gerard, Leigh, and many more. Shakespeare is known to have begun his professional theater career in Lancashire with Ferdinando Stanley around 1590, a logical sequel to his earlier service in the homes of two powerful Catholics, Alexander Hoghton and Sir Thomas Hesketh, in the early 1580s. In this scenario, Shakespeare would have been at the heart of the Catholic mission in England with seminary and Jesuit missionary priests, notably Edmund Campion and Robert Persons, smuggled into the country to perpetuate the Catholic faith. Extensive, detailed genealogy tables display and clarify the complicated intermarriages of these Catholic families uncovering several new Shakespeare/Lancashire connections: 1) Edward Alleyn, a nephew of Sir Thomas Hesketh, 2) John Gerard, Jesuit priest, served by John Fulwood, stepbrother of Mary Arden, 3) John Arderne, valued servant of both Henry Stanley, 4th Earl of Derby and his son, Ferdinando Stanley, 4) William Leveson and Thomas Savage, Globe Theater trustees, probably acquainted with Shakespeare in the 1580s, 5) Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton’s family relationship to Shakespeare, 6) The Park Hall Ardens’ family ties to Robert Devereux, 7) The Park Hall Ardens’ family ties to Richard Neville who claimed Westmorland title, 8) Shakespeare’s family’s involvement in Catholic plots against the
