by Michael Wood
We have but collected them, and done an office to the dead … without ambition either of self-profit or fame, only to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare … And there we hope, to your diverse capacities, you will find enough both to draw and hold you; for his wit can no more lie hid than it could be lost. Read him, therefore, and again, and again, and if then you do not like him, surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.
If it were not for the efforts of Hemmings and Condell, half of the plays would never have seen the light of day. Among other tributes was one from Ben Jonson, Shakespeare’s cantankerous colleague, who still couldn’t resist a last jibe about his ‘small Latin and less Greek’. But Jonson was generous enough to recognize that his old rival had surpassed even the greatest of the ancient Greeks and Romans: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time.’
EPILOGUE:
WHAT’S PAST IS PROLOGUE
IN THE TWENTY-FIRST century most countries are no longer traditional societies, or will soon cease to be. England was the first to go through such a great cultural and psychological transformation, and the struggles that began there in the sixteenth century were a harbinger of those that have been fought in many parts of the world since. By its very nature, of course, modernity destroys tradition, the ‘givenness’ of the past. Like archaeologists, today we sift through the wreckage, examining texts and physical remains to reconstruct an idea of our history; but what is most exciting and valuable is to find a living continuance of the past that is still meaningful in the present. It can still be seen in surviving traditional societies, such as in south India, where it is possible to wander out of a high-tech computer block in Bangalore into a temple and see and hear the same rituals and language in the same building that people have used for 1000 years.
And what is the analogy for us in Britain? It is certainly not religion. The language of King James’s Bible or the Book of Common Prayer is no longer thought to be comprehensible, or even relevant, and has almost vanished from our lives. Where these texts are still spoken in public, they come in a modern translation drained of its poetry and numinous power. Today there is only one part of sixteenth-century English culture still expressed in the original language as a regular public performance or ritual: Shakespeare’s plays. His is the one case where the authentic language and thought of that time is still seen as integral to the national culture. And his is also the one case where sixteenth-century texts are still taught in their original language at the core of the national school curriculum. The religious language of the sixteenth century is gone; the tremendous words of the ‘Great Sentence’ for the dead have faded away. But Hamlet is still here.
This tells us something about the nature of the English Reformation and its 400-year aftermath in which we still live. The texts at the centre of the Tudor government’s conception of the national culture have no place today. Yet the texts of a popular mass medium, which frequently questioned the ways of authority and asked people to think for themselves, still matter to us. It is Shakespeare’s plays that are our living contact with the people of his time.
Our modern world began in the sixteenth century. Caught between tradition and modernity, religion and magic, state absolutism and individual conscience, even ordinary people glimpsed the beginning of the end, not only of the institutional structures but also of the ideas that had ruled people’s lives for so long. For some, all religion was revealed as the construction of men, all sacred texts merely as human works. In Queen Mary’s day Devon villagers held a marriage ceremony for a goose; others turned to atheism. People no longer knew what to think. Although he remained a Christian and a Bible reader, Shakespeare was deeply involved in all this questioning, evolving his own new world of words to mediate ‘the revolution of the times’.
In his parents’ day England had been a traditional society, a land of rood screens and female saints, holy wells and incantation magic, church ales and painted devils. Like many of his generation, Shakespeare knew that lost world through his parents. His tales exist on a profound psychological level, transcending language in their portrayal of character, love and friendship, power and suffering. Across cultures they have the entertaining and educative power of the fairy tales they often shadow. But they work on other levels too. His background enabled Shakespeare to incorporate into his drama the beliefs, the active mythology and the imagery of the pre-Reformation world: his characters are its kings and queens, priests and witches, mothers and fathers, clowns and fairies. This no doubt helps explain his great popularity in the eyes of his own audience, but it also helps us understand his continuing relevance today. He brings back to life the world we have lost. This will perhaps become even more apparent in the twenty-first century, as, through globalization, our past accelerates away from us at an ever faster rate. The changes we are now going through may turn out to be even more profound and far-reaching than those experienced by his contemporaries. Like the paintings in the guild chapel with which this story began, humanity’s encoded memories are being erased everywhere across the planet. But it is perhaps for this reason that, rather than diminishing in relevance, Shakespeare’s humanity, his language, his humour and his toughness of mind will become all the more valuable to us as our own ‘revolution of the times’ unfolds.
‘The Ditchley Portrait’ of Elizabeth I by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, c. 1592. When Shakespeare was born her England was a small place, nothing compared with the great contemporary powerhouses of civilization: Moghul India, Safavi Iran, Ottoman Turkey and Ming China.
The guild chapel in Stratford today, showing the remains of the wall painting of Christ and the Last Judgement.
The mural, as uncovered in 1804. This was one of the images whitewashed by Shakespeare’s father in the winter of 1563.
The Henley Street house as it was in 1769.
The house from the rear today. It is likely, but not certain, that Shakespeare was born here.
Anne Hathaway? A 1708 sketch from a Tudor portrait.
The original entry in Latin for William’s baptism, 26 April 1564.
The first-floor schoolroom in Stratford’s Guildhall, where William studied from the age of seven.
A Flemish Protestant family of the middle class in the late sixteenth century. This was the kind of material life to which Shakespeare’s parents aspired.
Edmund Campion, whose 1580 mission was a turning point in the ruin of the English Catholic community. It appears to have sucked in Shakespeare’s father.
The Arden-Somerville Plot. Somerville is arrested (left) and strangles himself in prison (right). The plot touched Shakespeare’s family, but William retained his Arden links and was a friend of Somerville’s brother.
The baptism register of William’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, who were named after his Catholic neighbours, the Sadlers. In 1585 William had not abandoned the old social and religious loyalties of his family.
Bishopsgate and the theatre inns – Shakespeare’s first known address. He lived close to St Helen’s until 1596. Among his neighbours were the madrigalist Thomas Morley, the poet Tom Watson and the sinister spy Robert Poley.
Middle Temple Hall, where Shakespeare played Twelfth Night, is still used by lawyers for feasts and plays.
The Green Dragon inn, a base for Suffolk carriers. This photograph was taken c. 1880.
An unknown Elizabethan aged twenty-four in 1588, the same age as Shakespeare in the year he perhaps came to London. It closely resembles the Folio engraving, so could this be a portrait of the artist as a young man?
The comic Richard Tarlton, with tabor and pipe. ‘A wondrous plentiful pleasant extemporal wit’, Tarlton drew packed crowds in town halls up and down the land; the queen herself was a fan.
A detail of a presumed portrait of Marlowe at Cambridge in 1585, aged twenty-one. The superb padded doublet with its bossed gold buttons suggests a flashy undergraduate ‘ruffed out in his silks in the habit of a malcontent’.
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p; The Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare’s patron, c. 1594. ‘The dear lover and cherisher as well of the lovers of poets as of the poets themselves,’ wrote the journalist Thomas Nashe.
The only known image of Robert Southwell. The marks of privation are clearly visible in his face.
The coat of arms designed by the College of Arms for John Shakespeare in 1596 for his ‘posterity’ – ten weeks after the death of his only grandson.
The view from Southwark across to St Paul’s. Southwark was the centre of the Elizabethan entertainment industry – ‘a licensed stew’ as one Puritan preacher called it. The area contained 300 inns and brothels, some mentioned in the plays Shakespeare wrote when he lived here.
Sixteenth-century houses in Bermondsey Street, Southwark, which were still standing in 1893. In Shakespeare’s day the street was the haunt of ‘fences’ who disposed of stolen goods.
William Herbert. No youthful image survives of the beautiful boy, who attracted devotees of both sexes, including his ‘servant’, Shakespeare.
Mary Herbert, c. 1590. Patron, poet and editor, Mary was adored by poets for her generosity and her intellectual powers. Shakespeare used her manuscript play on Antony for his show on the same theme.
Ben Jonson, who sniped at Shakespeare’s ‘Tales, Tempests and other such Drolleries’ but ‘loved him this side idolatry, as much as any’.
The 1605 printing of Hamlet advertised bonus scenes. ‘The younger sort takes much delight in Venus and Adonis,’ wrote one contemporary, ‘but Hamlet pleases the wiser sort.’
London c. 1605 with the Globe theatre in the foreground and the magnificent St Paul’s across the river.
Shakespeare’s neighbourhood from 1602 to c. 1606. Silver Street was the home of gold- and silversmiths, and several of Shakespeare’s theatre colleagues lived close by, including John Hemmings.
The Agas map (c. 1558) shows Shakespeare’s house with a double gable on the corner of ‘Muggle St’ and ‘Sylver St’.
Richard Burbage. Recent restoration of the portrait suggests he had a drinker’s nose.
A noble Moor. The Moroccan ambassador painted in England in the winter of 1600–1.
Sixteenth-century housing at Cloth Fair, Smithfield, demolished in 1900. This gives some idea of how the corner of Silver Street would have looked. The Mountjoys’ house was probably of three storeys with an attic.
Shakespeare seems to have lost his seal ring early in 1616. It was found near Stratford church in 1810.
Shakespeare’s signature on his will, March 1616. The pronounced deterioration in his handwriting in the previous four years suggests a degenerative illness, perhaps alcoholism.
The burial register of William Shakespeare, ‘gentleman’, 25 April 1616. By then he was a pillar of the local community. Later the story surfaced that he had received the last rites as a Catholic. If true, it would be typical of the torn loyalties of so many of his generation.
FURTHER READING
This book argues that the key to Shakespeare’s thought world is the traditional society of Warwickshire and the conflicts engendered in it by the Tudor Reformation. The Reformation has been subject to major revision by historians during the last thirty years; the corollary, of course, is that the life of Shakespeare will need to be rethought too.
First, then, for the broad sweep: Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (2000), a very readable survey of the Tudor era with a rich bibliography; C. Haigh, English Reformations (1993); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and Voices of Morebath (2001), a study of one community in Devon, a model of the kind of change revealed in Warwick-shire sources (see here). See also K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971); Patrick Collinson has written an important short study of Shakespeare’s religious background in his collection of essays Godly People (1983).
Next the Warwickshire background, the old society of Shakespeare’s parents and grandparents that shaped his first twenty years and beyond. A good introduction to Stratford is The History of an English Borough, ed. Bob Bearman (1997), with essays by Alan Dyer and Anne Hughes; on material life in Stratford, Jeanne Jones, Family Life in Shakespeare’s England 1570–1630 (1997) is a fascinating survey based on wills and house inventories, which is especially useful as a teaching aid. The Victoria County History is a great resource on individual parishes, and is now going online. On the politics and social life of Tudor Stratford, the starting point is the town council’s books Minutes and Accounts, Dugdale Society, 4 vols, ed. Savage and Fripp (1921–9); Vol V, ed. Levi Fox (1990) takes the story up to 1598. The crucial evidence of the survey of priests (see here) is in Vol III (1926); the priests’ replies are in Warwickshire Ecclesiastical Terriers, ed. D. M. Barratt, Dugdale Society (1955). The most valuable compilations of source material for the Forest of Arden are J. Rylands, Records of Rowington, 2 vols (1896, 1922) and Records of Wroxall Abbey and Manor (1903); also The Register of the Guild of Knowle, ed. W. Rickley (1894). Further leads may be found in earlier writers, such as Charlotte M. Stopes, Shakespeare’s Warwickshire Contemporaries (1897) and Shakespeare’s Family (1907), and in E. Fripp, Shakespeare’s Stratford (1928), Shakespeare’s Haunts (1929) and Shakespeare Studies (1930). Mark Eccles, Shakespeare in Warwickshire (1961) adds more detail. On family and neighbours in the religious courts (including the poet’s daughter Susanna), E. R. C. Brinkworth, Shakespeare and the Bawdy Court of Stratford (1972) is essential.
On the defacing of the guild chapel described in my prologue, the key text is J. G. Nichols and Thomas Fisher’s Ancient Allegorical Historical and Legendary Paintings (1838) along with Clifford Davidson, The Guild Chapel Wall Paintings at Stratford-upon-Avon (1988). On John Shakespeare’s business dealings, especially his career as a brogger, the background is in P. J. Bowden, The Wool Trade in Tudor England (1962). The remarkable brogger’s account book quoted here is Warwickshire Grazier and London Skinner, 1532–1555, ed. N. W. Alcock (1981). Extracts of the town book of Warwick were edited by Thomas Kemp as The Book of John Fisher in around 1899 for Warwick Corporation; a full publication is desirable. On Coventry: C. Phythian Adams, Desolation of a City (1979) and ‘Ceremony and the Citizen’ in Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700, ed. P. Clark and P. Slack (1972); on village life in sixteenth-century Warwickshire, N. W. Alcock, People at Home (1993). The interviews in the Cotswolds here are from H. J. Massingham, Where Man Belongs (1946). The interview here comes from The Dillen, ed. A. Hewins (1981).
On Shakespeare biography the indispensable starting point is the brilliant Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1993 edition); the key documents are summarized in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975), also in compact paperback edition; D. Thomas, Shakespeare in the Public Records (1985); and Bob Bearman, Shakespeare in the Stratford Records (paperback, 1994). E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare (1930) is still very useful for its transcription of sources. Park Honan’s recent Shakespeare: A Life (1998) is a very enjoyable survey by a literary scholar; K. Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (2001) is a challenging tilt at what she sees as the myth of ‘gentle’ Will. These last two titles both contain many fresh insights.
On Tudor childhood and education there is a vast literature: see David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (1997) and Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (1980); on Shakespeare’s knowledge of the curriculum the definitive work is T. Baldwin’s forbidding William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols (1944). On Ovid see Shakespeare’s Ovid, ed. A. B. Taylor (2000) and Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (1993); the Ovid translation used in my text is by A. D. Melville, Oxford World Classics (1986). On Seneca (see here) I am indebted to J. Lever, The Tragedy of State (1971) and on the Coventry mysteries to Diana Whaley’s ‘Voices From the Past: A Note on Termagant and Herod’ in Shakespeare Continuities: essays in honor of E. A. J. Honigmann, ed. J. Batchelor, T. Cain, C. Lamont (1997).
On th
e question of the Shakespeares’ Catholicism, controversy still rages; for background Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars (1992); a useful introduction to sources is R. N. Swanton, Catholic England (1993). On the family there is much useful material in the older literature, such as John Semple Smart, Shakespeare: Truth and Tradition (1928); J. H. de Groot, The Shakespeares and the ‘Old Faith’ (1946); H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (1952); and Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (1973). On John’s testament the main facts are laid out in Samuel Schoenbaum, Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (1975); in Patrick Collinson’s view, Godly People (1983), it is ‘virtually certain’ that the testament is genuine; Bob Bearman, however, in Shakespeare Survey (forthcoming 2003) suggests an eighteenth-century forgery is still possible, but it is hard to explain how that might have come about. For a parallel, William Bell’s testament and autobiography (see here) was composed in 1587 and published at Douai in 1633.
