Shakespeare Read online

  Stratford lay on the north bank of the Avon. The river was the most familiar presence in a landscape filled with trees, with orchards and with gardens. When it was in flood, whether in summer or in winter, it could be heard in every street. When “Avon was up,” according to Leland, the people attempting a crossing “stood in jeopardy of life.” In the summer of 1588, for example, it rose 3 feet an hour continuously for eight hours. A prominent local gentleman, Sir Hugh Clopton, financed the building of the stone bridge that survives still. But the flooded river has another important memorial. No Elizabethan dramatist invokes the river more often than Shakespeare; and, of the fifty-nine separate references, twenty-six concern the river in flood.1 The river was part of his imagination. There is a particular and peculiar image in The Rape of Lucrece, where an eddy of water is forced back by the current in the same direction from which it came; the phenomenon can be observed from the eighteenth arch of the stone bridge2 at Stratford.

  The bridge led by a walled causeway into Bridge Street, running through the middle of the town. It was part of a matrix of six or seven streets that supported 217 houses and two hundred families; the population of Stratford in the late sixteenth century has been estimated at approximately nineteen hundred. The streets themselves retained their medieval identity, as Sheep Street and Wood Street and Mill Lane still testify. Rother Street was named after the rother or local cattle that were sold there. Yet the majority of the houses were of relatively recent construction, having been erected in the fifteenth century by the close-timbered method. The timber was oak, felled in the adjacent forest, and the wooden frame was filled with the familiar wattle-and-daub. The foundations were of lias stone quarried in the neighbouring village of Wilmcote, from which Mary Arden came, and the roofs were of thatch. The windows were not glazed but were protected by thick wooden bars. These were natural and local dwellings in every sense.

  It was a well-watered town with various streams or streamlets running through the streets, with adjacent wells and ponds as well as standing water and cess-pools. Two doors down from Shakespeare’s house was a smithy that made use of the water from a stream called the Mere. He was never very far from the sound of water. The streets of Stratford were wide enough for wagons to pass each other, yet not so wide that they were not pestered by dunghills and gutters, ditches and mud walls. They were “paved” or cobbled on each side, but anything might flow down the middle channel. They were also encroached upon by uncultivated land, marked by makeshift and shapeless roads.

  Pigs, geese and ducks were not supposed to wander freely through the town but the presence of the pigs, in particular, was signalled by the numerous sties and yards in every street. There were many goodly houses, to use the expression of the day, but there were also hovels and tenements for the poorer sort, thatched barns for the storage of corn and many decayed outbuildings. There were stone crosses to show humankind the way; there was a pillory, stocks and a whipping post for those who defied the authority of the town’s governors, one of whom was Shakespeare’s father; there was also a gaol, a structure known as “the cage,” and a ducking stool. This was no Tudor idyll. The engravings of Stratford – of the mills and the market crosses, the church and the chapel – naturally display a world of stillness and of silence, populated by merchants or labourers in picturesque costume. The earliest photographs also show a world preternaturally solemn and still, the wide streets almost bare of human habitation. They do not evoke the pressing and chaotic life that was Shakespeare’s reality.

  Each trade had its own place and station. Pigs were sold in Swine Street, and horses in Church Way; sellers of hides took their place at the cross in Rother Market, while the salters and sugarers put up their stalls in Corn Street. The ironmongers and ropers were to be found in Bridge Street, while the “fleshers” or butchers were at the top of Middle Row. There were various markets for corn, cattle and cloth. When Shakespeare returned to Stratford in later life, there was a butter and cheese market at the White Cross just outside his front door.

  By four o’clock in the morning, the town had awakened; by five, the streets were filled with people. The traders and labourers breakfasted at eight, and took their dinner or nuncheon at noon; they finished their work at seven in the evening, at the end of a fourteen-hour day. The Statute of Artificers, however, promulgated in 1563, allowed one hour of sleep after the noonday meal. There were no holidays but the various holy days.

  Many of the Stratford trades had been followed for centuries. A survey of occupations, from 1570 to 1630, shows that the town had twenty-three butchers, twenty weavers, sixteen shoemakers, fifteen bakers and fifteen carpenters.3 These were “primary” occupations; townspeople, such as Shakespeare’s own father, engaged in a variety of different trades. John Shakespeare’s principal occupation was that of glover, one of twenty-three in the town, but he also earned his living as a trader in wool, a money-lender and a maker of malt. The brewing and selling of ale was a speciality in Stratford; no fewer than sixty-seven households were involved in the trade.4

  Yet underlying these trades, and the whole of the town’s economy, was the larger rhythm of the agricultural year with the February sowing and harrowing, the March pruning, the June haymaking, the reaping of August, the threshing of September and the pig-killing of November. There were horses and sheep and pigs and cattle and bees. There was tillage land and fallow land, meadow and pasture. “Again, sir, shal we sow the hade land with wheate?” a servant asks Justice Shallow in the second part of King Henry IV. “With red wheat, Dauy” (Part Two, 2704-5). Shakespeare evidently understood the language of the land.

  In 1549 the Bishop of Worcester was obliged to cede his manorial rights over Stratford to John Dudley, Earl of Warwick; the town was in that sense secularised. In 1553 it was granted a charter whereby the erstwhile officers of the Guild of the Holy Cross became aldermen; fourteen townsmen were given this role, and out of their number a bailiff or mayor was to be elected. They in turn chose fourteen other “burgesses,” and together they comprised the town council.

  They met in the old guildhall beside the chapel where their duties included the supervision of the bridge, the school and the chapel itself; the properties that once belonged to the guild were now used to garner income for the council. Although many regretted the demise of church authority, it represented a signal advance in local self-government. The bailiff and a chosen alderman acted as Justices of the Peace in place of the church court. There were two chamberlains and four constables, all appointed from this oligarchy of the more respectable townsmen. This was the world in which Shakespeare’s father flourished for a time; it was part of the fabric of Shakespeare’s childhood.

  The stocks and the pillory of Stratford, not to mention the gaol and the ducking stool, afford good reason to believe that the way of life in the town itself was thoroughly supervised. It has become customary to describe the England of Elizabeth I as a “police state,” but that is an anachronism. Yet it was a world of strict and almost paternal discipline. It was in other words still governed by medieval prescription. There was a keen sense of the difference between social classes and of the power granted to those who owned land. These were principles observed faithfully by Shakespeare himself. It was a world of patronage and prerogative, of customary observance and strictly local justice. Anyone who spoke disrespectfully of a town officer, or who disobeyed a municipal order, was placed in the stocks for three days and three nights. No one could lodge a stranger without the mayor’s permission. No servant or apprentice could leave the house after nine in the evening. Bowling was permitted only at certain times. Woollen caps were to be worn on Sundays, and it was obligatory to attend church at least once a month. There were no secrets in Stratford; it was an open society in which everyone knew everybody else’s business, where marital or familial problems became the common gossip of the immediate neighbourhood. There was no notion of “private” life in any sense that would now be recognised. It is suggestive, therefore, that Shakespea
re has often been credited with the invention of private identity within his dramas. He was keenly aware of its absence in the town of his birth.

  It is generally assumed that the nature or atmosphere of the town did not alter in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and did not materially change until well into the nineteenth century, but this is incorrect. Changing agricultural methods brought their own problems and uncertainties; in particular the enclosure of common fields, and the intensive rearing of sheep, sent many labourers away from the land. There were more vagrants and landless workers in the streets of the town. In 1601 the overseers of Stratford remarked upon the presence of seven hundred poor people, and these would in large part comprise labourers coming from the surrounding countryside. The migration of the poor also increased underlying social tensions. Between 1590 and 1620 there was a rapid increase in “serious offences” tried at the county assize.5

  The presence of the landless and unemployed exacerbated a problem that at the time seemed insoluble. How to prevent the poor from becoming ever more destitute? It was a period of rising prices. Sugar was 1s 4d a pound in 1586, 2s 2d in 1612. Barley was sold at 13s 13d a quarter in 1574, but by the mid-1590s this price had risen to £1 6s 8d. The increase of population also depressed the earnings of wage labourers. A mason was paid 1s 1d a day in 1570 but thirty years later, after a time of steeply rising prices, he was earning only 1s. These conditions were rendered ever more severe with a succession of four bad harvests after 1594; in the latter half of 1596, and the first months of 1597, there were many Stratford deaths that seem directly related to malnutrition. It was a time of famine. The mutinous citizens of Coriolanus, “in hunger for Bread” (21), were not some historical fantasy.

  Yet as the poor were reduced to the level of subsistence, or worse, yeomen and landowners became steadily richer. The growing population, and the demand for wool in particular, favoured land speculation on a large scale. It was a means of making easy profit that Shakespeare himself enjoyed, and he can in fact be cited as a major beneficiary of the economic change that proved so disadvantageous to the labouring poor. He was not in the least sentimental about such matters, and arranged his finances with the same business-like acumen that he applied to his dramatic career. But he saw what was happening.

  The nature of the new secular economy was becoming increasingly clear, in any case, and many studies have been devoted to Shakespeare’s expression of the change from medieval to early modern England. What happens when old concepts of faith and authority are usurped, when old ties of patronage and obligation are sundered? It is the transition from Lear to Goneril and Regan, from Duncan to Macbeth. There also emerged a disparity between polite and popular traditions that grew ever more pronounced; Shakespeare was perhaps the last English dramatist to reconcile the two cultures.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tell Me This: Who Begot Thee?

  There were two cultures in a more particular sense: old and reformed. The English Reformation of religion was begun in fury and in greed; such violent origins beget violent deeds. It was only during the cautious and pragmatic reign of Elizabeth that a form of compromise or settlement was reached.

  As a result of his anger and impatience with the Pope, Henry VIII had proclaimed himself to be the head of the Church in England, despatching several churchmen to their deaths for daring to deny his supremacy. His more ardent advisers, moved by the prospect of enrichment as much as by religious fervour, suppressed the monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands. It was the single largest blow to the medieval inheritance of England. The king was also responsible for the introduction of the English Bible into parish churches, an innovation which had more beneficent effects.

  Edward VI, after the death of his father, was more eagerly devoted to the destruction of Catholicism. He was the young Josiah, ready to tear down the idols. In particular he was emboldened to reform the prayer book and the liturgy, but his early death interrupted his programme of renewal. His measures were then reversed during the equally brief reign of Mary I, leaving the English people in some doubt as to the nature and direction of the nation’s faith. It was Mary’s successor, Elizabeth, who successfully found a middle path. She seemed intent upon placating as many factions as possible.

  It was part of her church “settlement” in which the vagaries of Catholicism and Protestantism were chastened. She ordained that church services should be held in English, but permitted the use of such papist tokens as the crucifix and the candlestick. By the Act of Supremacy she affirmed her position as the head of the Church of England, and by the Act of Uniformity she installed the Book of Common Prayer in every church. It was a somewhat rickety structure, stitched together by compromise and special pleading, but it held. She may have underestimated the power of the Puritan factions, as well as the residual Catholicism of the people themselves, but her control of religious affairs was never seriously in doubt.

  The Virgin Queen, however, was not necessarily mild with her more recalcitrant subjects. Recusants as they were known – those who refused to attend the services of the Church of England – were fined, arrested or imprisoned. They were considered to be traitors to their sovereign and their realm. Catholic priests and missionaries were tortured and killed. Commissioners made periodic and much advertised “visits” to towns where the old faith was said to persist, while the bishops made regular inspections of their dioceses in pursuit of renegade piety. It was perilous to be a Catholic, or a suspected Catholic.

  All these conflicts and changes found a vivid reflection in the life of John Shakespeare. The father of the dramatist was described in later life as “a merry Cheekd old man – that said – Will was a good Honest Fellow, but he durst have crackt a jeast with him at any time.”1 Since this sketch was first published in the mid-seventeenth century, from an ambiguous source, it need not be taken with any high degree of literalness. It is perhaps too close to the image of Falstaff, although we may surmise that the merry-cheeked roisterer of the history plays may bear some passing resemblance to a domestic original. What we know about Shakespeare’s father, and forefathers, can be more carefully measured by documentary reports.

  The ancestry of the Shakespeares stretches far back. Shakespeare’s own name had more than eighty different spellings – including Sakspere, Schakosper, Schackspere, Saxper, Schaftspere, Shakstaf, Chacsper, Shasspeere – perhaps testifying to the multifarious and polyphonic nature of his given identity. The variations suggest prolificity and universality. In Stratford documents alone there are some twenty different and separate spellings.

  The original family may have been of Norman derivation. In the Great Rolls of Normandy, dated 1195, there is found “William Sakeespee”; a late thirteenth-century Norman romance, Le Chatelain de Couci, was composed by “Jakemes Sakesep.” It is also true that the Shakespeare families of England preferred Christian names that were characteristically Norman. The surname itself seems to have had some militaristic association, and in Shakespeare’s lifetime there were some who were impressed by its martial ring. An early sixteenth-century text suggests that it was “imposed upon the first bearers … for valour and feats of arms.”2 It is suggestive, then, that when Shakespeare’s father applied for a coat of arms, he claimed that his grandfather had been rewarded by Henry VII for “faithfull amp; valeant service.”3 Shakespeare was also used as a nickname “for a belligerent person, or perhaps a bawdy name for an exhibitionist.”4 For this reason it was sometimes regarded as a “base” name. In 1487 Hugo Shakespeare wished to change his surname because “vile reputatum est”5 (it was considered “low”). Similar obloquy was later heaped upon the name of Dickens.

  The first mention of the name in English records is of “William Sakspeer” in 1248; he came from the village of Clopton, just a few miles outside Stratford. From the thirteenth century the name often occurs in Warwickshire records; it was a family name of long local settlement, in a literal sense part of the landscape. This may help to explain the rootedness of Shakespeare himself within E
nglish culture. Thomas Shakespere was living in Coventry in 1359. William Shakespere dwelled in the southern part of Balsall in 1385. Adam Shakespere was part of the manor of Baddesley Clinton in 1389. The religious guild of Knowle had as its members Richard and Alice Shakspere, in 1457, subsequently joined by Ralph Schakespeire in 1464. Thomas and Alice Shakespere, of Balsall, entered the same guild in 1486.

  There are many other Shakespeares of later date in Balsall, Baddesley, Knowle, Wroxall and neighbouring villages; the names and dates provide clear evidence of an extended family of siblings and cousins living within a geographical area a few miles in extent. Many of them were part of the guild of Knowle, fulfilling certain secular and religious obligations, and can therefore be considered good and observant Catholics. The prioress of the nuns’ house in Wroxall in the first years of the sixteenth century was Isabella Shakespeare; in 1526 that position, in characteristically medieval fashion, was in turn granted to Jane Shakspere. It was from this cluster of Shakespeares that William Shakespeare’s immediate ancestors came.

  His grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a farmer of Snitterfield, a village four miles north of Stratford. He was the son either of John Shakeschaffte of Balsall, or of Adam Shakespere of Baddesley Clinton; whatever his exact paternity, his origin is clear. He was an affluent farmer, commonly known as a husbandman, with two sets of land in the vicinity. Snitterfield itself was a scattered parish with a church and manor-house, ancient farmhouses and cottages, presiding over a mixed landscape of woodland and pasture, heath and meadow. This was the landscape for part of the dramatist’s childhood.