Francis Langley - Shakespeare and Dispute With Gardiner

Shakespeare and Dispute With Gardiner

Langley also had an unknown connection with William Shakespeare. In November of 1596 two writs of attachment, similar to modern restraining orders, were issued to the sheriff of Surrey, the shire in which Southwark is located. First, Langley took out a writ against two parties named William Gardiner and William Wayte; William Wayte then took out a writ against William Shakespeare, Langley, and two women named Anne Lee and Dorothy Soer.

William Gardiner was a corrupt Surrey justice of the peace. Leslie Hotson describes Gardiner's life as a tissue of "greed, usury, fraud, cruelty and perjury". Shortly before these events he had brought charges of slander against Langley, for having accused him of perjury. Langley defended himself robustly, insisting that the accusation was true. Gardiner dropped the charges. William Wayte was Gardiner's stepson, described in another document as "a certain loose person of no reckoning or value being wholly under the rule and commandment of said Gardiner".

Shakespeare's role in this dispute is unclear. Anne Lee and Dorothy Soer, the two women named with Shakespeare in the second writ, are unknown. Shakespeare may have been connected with Langley through the Pembroke's Men, with whom he probably worked in the early 1590s, since they played at least two of his earliest works, Titus Andronicus and Henry VI, Part 3; his later company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, may have acted a season at the Swan in the summer of 1596. He appears to have been living in the area at the time. Hotson argues that a dispute of some sort between Langley and Gardiner probably escalated after Gardiner's bluff was called over the slander charges. He believes that Gardiner took his revenge by threatening Langley's theatre interests, persecuting "Langley and Shakespeare and his fellow actors at the Swan" with the support of Puritan opponents of the theatre. This may have involved threats to destroy the theatre itself, since Gardiner obtained an order to demolish Langley's theatre some months after the writs were issued, though the order was soon rescinded. The luckless Wayte, as Gardiner's agent, would have been on the receiving end of the backlash from supporters of the theatre. The feud ended with Gardiner's death in November 1597.