Sir – Mistress Quickly at the Painted Room? I can agree with David Webb (Possible visitor, September 25) that the notion of Shakespeare having been the father of poet laureate Sir William Davenant is far-fetched, but then there is no reason to suppose that John Aubrey believed it.

 

Aubrey was a serious scientist, antiquary and biographer, who saw the value of recording opinions (he was a pioneer folklorist), and is no longer seen as an ‘unreliable gossip’ (see Kate Bennet’s forthcoming OUP edition of his Brief Lives). 

 

And so Shakespeare at the Tavern? Aubrey first met Oxford’s great historian Anthony Wood at the same Tavern in 1667, and later supplied information on Davenant for Wood’s history of Oxford writers (the Athenae Oxonienses). Wood knew the family in Oxford (Davenant’s daughter continued to run the Tavern in Wood’s lifetime), and he had no reason to doubt the fact that Shakespeare stayed there, since he repeats it in his own account. And Aubrey, in stating that Shakespeare stayed in the Tavern on his annual visits to Stratford, actually had three potential sources: Anthony Wood; Sir William Davenant, and his brother the Rev Robert Davenant, Fellow of St John’s College and a ‘venerable Dr of Divinity’. Now Robert was only 12 when Shakespeare died, and his memory of the visits when he was a toddler was reported by Aubrey: “I have heard parson Robert say that Mr. W. Shakespeare haz given him a hundred kisses.”

 

I do not for a moment suspect that two brothers conspired to concoct and that Wood chose to believe an improbable story; so we can safely repeat as a certainty that No. 3 Cornmarket with its Painted Room is one of the very few buildings in existence in which Shakespeare actually stayed.

 

Julian Munby, Oxford