by Park Honan
Nearly two-thirds of the dead in the summer and autumn were women. 'Comfort's in heaven', Shakespeare would write in Richard II, and 'nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief' ( II. ii. 78-9) -- but the fact is that in a well-organized town, women gave comfort nursing the sick. Plague bacilli of the bubonic variety are not transmitted from one
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human being to another, but a related variety of plague, which could have been present, is highly contagious. If one inhaled a few droplets of sputum sneezed or coughed into the air by a victim of pneumonic plague one's death was nearly certain. Victims of plague in its more common variety, in which the bubonic bacilli reproduce quickly and spread throughout the whole biological system, knew much pain. Some did survive, after noting the buboes (or swellings) in armpit or neck, and seeing on the skin 'God's tokens' of orange, reddish, or darker spots. 11 At risk, the council met four times in crisis, and levied its own members for funds to help the stricken. On 30 August burgesses and aldermen met in the Gild garden -- on wooden benches -to avoid contagion.
By September, one out of every fifteen people in the parish was infected. Entire households began to perish. Working as acting chamberlain, John seems to have called in clerical help from outside. Later in the autumn, fewer died, but Dixon of the Swan lost two stepdaughters in November and December. In the last six months of 1564, Mary's infant was the object of more than a mother's usual care and vigilance, if only because the conditions of a severe plague were unusual. The emotional pressure of Mary's concern for William, her need for him to live, her prayers, tenderness, and watchfulness may be inferred from what we know of Stratford's suffering and Mary's previous experience of burying one or two of her girls. We have evidence of a situation, and of course must not suppose that we have access to her thoughts. But we need no psychological theory to explain a mother's ardent, sensible care for her son, day after day, when small children are dying. A pattern of Mary's special care for her son is also likely to have been set in these months. Her interest in him cannot have faded suddenly when Stratford was free of plague, and it is pertinent for us to think of his life ahead for a moment. William's confidence cannot be dissociated from the emotional support he must have found at home. As a man he would lack a quirky egotism, as seems clear from his relatively peaceful career in the theatre, a hive of tension. He was not involved in Ben Jonson's kind of embroilments, or Marlowe's. He has a calm, fine control of emotive materials, and his Sonnets, in the artfulness of their structures, reveal a lordly, easy play over feelings.
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In early life he must have been the focus of Mary's very urgently watchful, intense love.
People had been warned of deaths. For the first time, London's corporation had printed plague-bills as broadsheets to keep towns informed; Stratford's council did well to preserve order, and women, not yielding to panic, consoled the afflicted at the risk of their lives. Shakespeare's feeling for civic order is related to what he came to know of Stratford.
Air and music
After a plague much was burned. Windows were flung open, rooms aired and scrubbed. By the time William was 3 or4, his street would have been as dusty and filled with stray dogs as ever. (Unmuzzled dogs kept on troubling the council.) Henley Street also teemed with children, and George Ainge had two sets of twins to add to his numerous lot; he and his wife had thirteen offspring. George sold fine fabrics. John Ainge, the baker, also of Henley Street, had seven children including twins. An older boy might come in from Shrovetide football with a bloody face, and younger boys and girls shouted or fought, ran, babbled, and played. The area behind the houses on the Gild Pits side might have been a badly managed green kindergarten, and adults cared little out of doors for silence.
But indoors a boy was in a polite, much more orderly, reserved world -- though the houses look hard and bare today. At John Shakespeare's now combined dwelling, an oak-beam frame rises on a stone foundation-wall, and at ground level timbers are close-studded or nine inches apart (an early Tudor pattern to keep thieves from breaking into a house). Wattle and daub, or plaster, fills in between the timber frames. The upper storey has rectangular panels, so that rooms upstairs have less timber and seem to invite decoration. John's hall, or the main downstairs chamber, has a floor of broken, blue-grey stone from the Alne hills. There is a brick-and-stone fireplace. Opening out of the hall and not at right angles to the main façade, the kitchen has a large hearth. Here one sees iron cooking-tackle, a hanger, a pothook and chain, and a pair of cobbards to hold up spits.
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'Be not afeard', says Caliban in The Tempest, 'The isle is full of noises, | Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not' ( III. ii. 138-9). A timbered house was full of noises, and a boy heard stories and legends to explain them. Good and bad fairies came into rooms to move objects about. Queen Mab, big as an agate on an alderman's ring, did no harm -- nor did invisible fairies on Midsummer Night's Eve. Nor did ghosts, gliding on dim church-paths to return to clammy homes by sunrise. But villains in the wilds beyond Stratford might do as much harm as Mr Fox, in an 'old tale' Shakespeare seems to recall from boyhood when Benedick reminds Claudio of it in Much Ado:
Lady Mary, one day, on a visit to Mr, Fox saw him pull a lady upstairs. Mr Fox cut off her hand, which dropped with a glittering bracelet into Lady Mary's lap. Lady Mary ran to her brothers' house, and when Mr Fox came to dine she told the guests of a dream. She spoke of her visit to Mr Fox's, and said at each turn of the story, 'it is not so, nor was it so'. 'It is not so, nor was it so, and God forbid it should be so!' said Mr Fox. 'But it is so, and it was so,' said Lady Mary, 'and here's the hand I have to show!' So all the guests drew their swords and Cut Mr Fox into a thousand pieces. 12
A Tudor boy heard dozens of such stories. He might hear riddles in Demands Joyous, which had appeared in Wynkyn de Worde's version in 1511:
Demand: Why doth a cow lie down?
Response: Because it cannot sit.
Demand: Who killed the fourth part of all the people in the world?
Response: Cain when he killed Abel. 13
He would hear that deep quarry of human and divine truth, the Old Testament, and would learn to pray. Mealtimes began with a long grace before one touched a knife, spoon and trencher, or wooden plate. A boy washed his hands before and after eating and would be watched by his father, who wore a cap or hat at table; and he would be told to wipe his hands after picking at his meat -- and wipe out the pewter or leather cup after sipping ale or beer.
At table and elsewhere, he was taught 'all obeysance and courtesie',
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or decorum -- which turned him into a little actor at 3 or.4 14 Decorum meant knowing how to choose the appropriate word suitable to the speaker and subject, or how to play one's role in a deferential society. Through years of discipline, one might acquire a well-fashioned mind, with good habits to discern what was proper in relation to all things, places, times, persons. At last, one would take a role upon the public stage befitting one's status.
John Shakespeare -- much concerned for status -- was to apply repeatedly for a coat of arms and learn that the College of Heralds conceded his father-in-law Robert Arden had been a 'gent. of worship'. 15 Mary's father may or may not have been of the Ardens who were descended from 'Turchillus de Eardene', or Turchill of the Arden Forest, whose lands in the Domesday Book fill over four columns. John seems to have believed that Arden was of the gentry; and as a parvenu himself, he would have credited his wife Mary's ability to impart courtesy. In any case, Shakespeare's courtesy is remarkable; it could hardly have been picked up quickly at gentlemen's or noblemen's houses (or at court, where there was too little to go round) since it involved more than knowing when to bend the knee, or doff the hat: deep courtesy is a habit of mind. In his plays his tragic kings, usurpers, and lovers fail in part through indecorous conduct, and so use language inappropriate to their character and status. Richard II and Bolingbroke both sin against courtesy, and Hamlet's real and imag
ined worlds have lost form, courtesy, or the balance and sanity of decorum. 'The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart | Goes all decorum', Shakespeare writes in Measure for Measure ( I. iii. 30-1).
His habit of mind in courtesy, even so, is in some ways that of an Arden, old-fashioned or pre-Elizabethan. In his usual attitudes, he is not so much coolly mercenary or aggressively thrusting as he is humane, receptive, and alert to tenderness and the public good, as if he had affinities with Warwickshire's past and the Gild his grandfather Arden had joined. (His audacity does not thrive coldly.) To be sure, 400 years of community life, a well-run town, and a Gild that linked the generations and influenced a local council in Elizabeth's day helped to form the mind of Shakespeare. In his early years religious troubles faded, and Stratford was not wholly torn from its past. The
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council had seen the town through sorrow. In London the Crown wanted settlement, stability, a tactical delay with Spain (before a war Elizabeth could ill afford); merchants had got round the Antwerp embargo and would have Hamburg as an outlet -- cloth was being sold abroad. Stratford after its plague was fairly happy, and John Shakespeare was close to achieving high honour.
For his documents and dignity, John had a ring-seal with the initials IS, to press in wax. Mary had a delicate seal, showing a running horse. 16 Mary's pretty seal was typical of her time when simple but finely shaped intaglios, rings, and necklaces were much liked, along with bright colours in dress and decoration. At Wilmcote she had known painted cloths, which kept out the draughts. Their tempera tints on wide strips of canvas, for walls, showed biblical or mythological scenes adorned with mottoes or 'sentences' ( Shakespeare recalls in The Rape of Lucrece: 'Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw | Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe' -- lines 244-5). Arden's house had eleven of such wall-cloths, including one in an upstairs bedroom worth 26s. 6d. (a good sum in 1556, the value of nine of his swine). 17 Their mottoes were no more subtle than the Elizabethan posies (which Hamlet mocks) engraved on the flat inner surfaces of rings: 'MY HEART AND 1, UNTIL I DYE' or 'NOT TWO, BUT ONE, TILL LIFE BE GONE'. But the brevity, age, and universality of mottoes appealed to a people who liked old, well-rubbed, pithy truth as much as wit and invention. In Stratford's mainly oral culture, wisdom was stored up in commonplaces, which are one early basis of the art of a poet who could give audiences, at last, a maxim such as 'The readiness is all.'
The life in flowers and trees, gardens, orchards, and fields at all seasons appealed to Mary's son, and no poet has responded with more pleasure to nature. Yet the town was flat, and a boy's eyes might take in nothing more amazing at first than cowslips, burnet, and clover, or a river in flood, caterpillar swarms, or a 'curious-knotted garden'. The devotion of the mature Shakespeare appears with odd intensity in his making so much of banal nature, 'thistles, kecksies, burrs', or the domestic garden, or nature's excess or waste. It is as if in his early youth the drama of diurnal nature had been intense enough. A small boy could not travel far, and orchards and gardens between Gild Pits
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and the Woolshop perhaps had to satisfy him on many a day; later the shire's variety drew him strongly. What this boy saw and felt in early years was affected by his experience of Mary -- who for thirty months had had him as her only child to adore, though she soon had others. Gilbert Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity on 13 October 1566 -- and may have been named after the glover Gilbert Bradley who became a capital burgess in 1565.
When Gilbert was very small, William was in his fifth year, and well cherished. One of his greatest gifts was his understanding of feeling, and that was surely nourished by Mary. Heroines in his comedies would be notable for their stability and their resourceful minds, and be as affecting and vulnerable even when, like Julia or Rosalind, they had wit and capability. He was to respond easily to an Ovidian love ethic, and give a subtle and persuasive sense of how women feel and think. He must have studied Mary well, and she, after pleasing her father, was not likely to be hard with a son; he was not blighted by too many rules.
Richard Mulcaster, who taught the poet Spenser, wrote of the need to make a Tudor boy 'most able'. Music is a 'glasse', says that teacher, 'wherein to behold both the beawtie of concord, and the blots of dissension even in a politic body'. 18 If music helped one to know society it also changed moods at home and lessened the divide between fathers and sons. Parents danced and taught their children to dance, and many families had a tabor, lute, or recorder. Shakespeare was not the only boy born into the middling ranks to get a very expert, if informal, training in music's fundamentals. Even in the Midlands one might know the sonorous drone of a bagpipe. One could watch and hear morris-dancers at Whitsun, all dressed in garish costumes with bells on ankles and a hobby horse (or a horse's head in cloth or another light material) drawn over one dancer's head. The disguises, with the strange rhythms of the morris, appealed to many. This loud, outlandish ritual with its thwacking sticks had in it an aspect of drama or emotive performance common to all music, and a people in love with verbal rhythms fell easily under music's spell. Elizabethans loved music, too, as an antidote to boredom or low spirits; gloomy talk was disliked, though pessimism was attractive when travelling players feigned it.
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In russet dresses, most often not of cotton but of coarse woollen homespun, children were much loved, but without status -- as if they were mere nits, gnats. A boy, however, before he was 6, could leave off a russet dress. Till he did, he looked like a girl. Now he would wear a jacket or jerkin over a doublet, and struggle into skinny, long, knitted hose, though the hose often required mending and might be saved if he wore common loose fustian slops, or shiny breeches pulled in at the knee. He was then a small, unformed, man, eyeing his father's world.
William was to know his father's ill luck and downfall. (Partly because he served on the council, we have evidence of John Shakespeare's life and of the family experience of his son in years ahead.) In the late 1560s, however, John scaled the heights, and became head of the borough's council. He was then at last Master Shakespeare, mayor or High Bailiff Stratford, and he knew his advantages as a townsman well enough since he was able to send his little son to school.
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3
JOHN SHAKESPEARES F0RTUNES
Paid for the foote stoole that Mr bayliff standeth on ijd [2d.] (Borough accounts of Stratford-upon-Avon)
In the bailiff's family
In the late 1560s Stratford had only about a dozen streets, fewer than 240 households, and a populace (lately reduced by epidemic) of 1,200 people at most; yet relatively speaking the market town was not small. A day's ride to the north, Birmingham with its lorimers (makers of metal parts for bridles and saddles), nailers, and other metal craftsmen was about the same size, and the red-walled, cloth-manufacturing city of Coventry less than twenty miles from Stratford had only 7,000 or 8,000 people -- though it was one of the largest English towns. The largest city outside London was Norwich, with fewer than 15,000 inhabitants. Liverpool had 900 or 1,000, Gloucester about 5,000, Worcester no more than 7,000. A majority of the Queen's subjects lived in tiny, scattered villages and hamlets of fifty or sixty people or less.
Certainly, a borough town of some size and diversity of crafts gave one a chance to observe the nation's practical life -- the real life of politics, trade, petty crime, religion, passion, and fate. Among those who best understood society and human aspirations in this age were Marlowe and Shakespeare, both products of market towns and sons of craftsmen. Christopher Marlowe grew up in a shoemaker's house in Canterbury, a town of about 700 families. Shakespeare had advantages in belonging to a mercantile governing class -- he was, after all, the eldest son in a respectable bourgeois family which was one of the handful of families that ran Stratford.
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John Shakespeare had become fairly affluent before rising to prominence. Keeping the borough accounts for well over three years, he even lent the town moderate sums of money; the council still
owed him 7s. 3d. when he made his last report ( 15 February 1566). 1 The chamberlains' office kept up functions of the Holy Cross Gild's proctors, and John's work carried prestige. He served longer than he had to. He commissioned and constructed, repaired and hired, dealt with good and bad workmen alike. As a director of accounts, he was bound to rise to civic leadership. After William Bott -- who was then living at New Place -- was expelled from council for failing to 'cum to hys answer' for opprobrious words spoken, John Shakespeare was chosen alderman in Bott's stead in July 1565.
And yet John's rise, no doubt, was partly a matter of necessity. The Elizabethan Corporation found it hard to fill up its numbers; some of the men who were most eligible to serve, as aldermen and bailiffs, lived just outside the borough boundaries, and so declined their services without penalty. A chamberlain of John's experience was a prime asset, and any failure in his aldermanic duties would have been taken at the council as no small matter.
