by Park Honan
It settled on him as a good choice in 1565. Two years later John was nominated, with Ralph Cawdrey and Robert Perrott, to stand for election as High Bailiff of the borough. The council's election had a clear result, with only three votes cast for the glovemaker of Henley Street as a tally shows:
o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o Robart perot o o o John shakspeyr Raf Cawdrey 2
After Perrott refused to serve, John declined, and with a good excuse. The bailiwick was onerous and he may then have lacked time for the office. A master glove-cutter was likely to keep three or four stitchers busy, and he had a glover's shop to run. But when elected the next year, he consented, and so in fur-trimmed robes and standing it seems on the bailiff's footstool, he began to preside over Stratford on 1 October 1568.
We have a clerk's report of his first meeting in 'hall', and this
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includes words said or sanctioned by the new bailiff. He agreed to fine stiffly men such as Perrott (who twice refused the bailiwick), but he was politic about solidarity and apparently referred to his group as the 'Brotherhode'or the 'Balyf and Bretherne' (words deleted in the official order of 1 October). John's tact was traditional, and effective at council, which was later told by arbitrators to 'be Lovers and ffrendes' even with the likes of Perrott. 3
Stratford ruled itself well, and until William's thirteenth year his father, as a trusted, moderate alderman, with disputes to settle and rules to enforce, was at the centre of civic life. For a year John was a justice of the peace, and thus an agent of the powerful Privy Council at Westminster. He heard petty cases at Stratford's Court of Record, framed laws at halls, served as coroner and clerk of the market, and welcomed the judges after Easter and Low Sunday, and at the two Leets, or Law Days. For another year ( 1571-2) he was to be a justice and deputy bailiff, and his known duties seldom kept him far from home.
An alderman's son heard something of the collective good of town, brethren, and of course family. To one's own father, one owed love and respect. William was to refer to 'domestic awe' as being as natural to children as night-rest 4 and, in time, he was to exploit the rending, moving Tudor theme of the love and fealty due a parent. In his plays we have very good evidence as to what he came deeply to understand, or signs of his intimate knowledge. Filial ardour was a much-desired feature of Tudor life, and in the London theatres it would be a common theme: what is remarkable is that John's son later treated it so often with a masterly flexibility and confidence, as if felt along the pulse. 'To you your father should be as a god', Theseus warns Hermia in A Midsummer Night's Dream. ( 1. i. 47), and in this ethic, at least in the theatre, cool compliance with a father's wishes is not enough. Cordelia's mere dutifulness drives Lear to rage, and Desdemona's cold subservience numbs her father's heart, before we hear that grief 'shore his old thread in twain' ( V. ii. 213) when she defies him to marry the Moor. Filial love motivates Prince Hal, but it compounds Hamlet's anguish, and Macbeth's crime is the worse for its implicit and terrible element of parricide.
Moreover, no son is immune to a father's particular, idiosyncratic
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influence, and John Shakespeare was an impressive and versatile man. By and large, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. His father Richard Shakespeare was probably born a few miles to the north, either at Balsall, Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, or Rowington, the last a hive of Catholics and the home of more sixteenth-century Shakespeares than any other Warwickshire parish. It is certain that by 1529 Richard was a husbandman at Snitterfield -- his name is copied as 'Shakstaff' four years later -- and that he rented a house of Robert Arden that 'doth abut on the High Street'. 5 After his death his goods in 1561 were valued at £38 17s. od. (a sum befitting a prudent farmer) and his estate's administration went to his son John, who was relying on his own acumen and skill. Our earliest report of John in connection with a craft (when he is called 'Johannem Shakyspere de Stretforde, in comitatu Warwicensi, glover', on 7 June 1556, at the Court of Record) suggests that he was by then independent of his father. A glover acquired a fine touch after seven years' apprenticeship; cutting soft leather 'tranks' is an art, and holed leather is not repairable. John had to be shrewd to be free for civic duties, and his town service suggests an almost feudal commitment. He broadened his money-making ventures, as many craftsmen did, while competing with master glovers at Stratford and indirectly at Worcester and Oxford; in fact, in records of 1573 and 1578 he is also described as a 'whyttawer'. A whittawer (or white-tawyer) would buy pelts from butchers or other sellers, boil some of his sheepskins to make size to fill pores, tan the skins of goats, deer and other animals with salt and alum (aluminium sulphate), hang them out in his drying-sheds, and then shave them with paring knives and 'stake' the skins to render them soft -- all before cutting, sewing, and finishing a product.
Without helpers, John could not have turned a profit, and his son had a chance to learn that success in a craft depends on co-operation as well as painstaking care. Tudor boys were made to emulate, and almost to revere, skilled male and female artisans, ★ and a wealth of
____________________ ★ But a skilled female sewer of leather tranks, for example, often earned appreciably less than a male sewer; it has been estimated that about half of London's apprentices in the crafts and trades were female.
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gloving images in the plays suggests that William knew his father's craft well. In The Merry Wives, Slender swears 'by these gloves', and Mistress Quickly enquires of him, 'Does he not wear a great round beard, like a glover's paring-knife?', Romeo exclaims to his lady aloft, 'O, that I were a glove upon that hand', and Romeo's rash, wittiest friend understands the pliable, soft quality of kid-skin -- or cheveril -used for the best, costliest gloves: 'O, here's a wit of cheveril, that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad', says Mercutio. 'Hang nothing but a calf's skin', mocks the Bastard in King John, and allusions to sheep-skin, lamb-skin, fox-skin, dog-skin, and deer-skin in the plays might conjure up a whittawer's drying-shed.
Any craft demanded all of the self, very strong commitment or le cœur au métier for a part of the day, a principle not quite inconsistent with John Shakespeare's occupying himself, too, with grain, timber, and wool. Tudor work was suffused with spiritual significance and William was to plunge whole-heartedly into the hard work of an acting troupe, though his attitudes to his métier would be complex.
As handmade objects were costly, they called for ceaseless maintenance. A boy learned that his own body thrived on vigilance, exertion, and not too much sleep; his elders, in a rural town, often rose at 3 or 4 a.m. in summer; 5 a.m. in winter. Tooth decay was attributable to 'humours' or to little worms in the teeth, but he cleaned his teeth with a soft cloth and a sweet paste. He washed, dressed, heard morning prayers, knelt for a blessing, and after a light breakfast (often of bread, butter, and cheese) helped his parents if the day was not a schoolday. Mary, as an alderman's wife, may have had servants to direct; her husband, for his part, would have required help for a weekly market. On Thursday, stalls or booths were erected along High and Fore Bridge Streets as they converged at the High Cross -- a square structure, on pillars, topped by a cupola and a clock with a brass hand (gilded in 1579); a chain and staple attached a standard measure. Here at the market centre, John Shakespeare and the glovers had pride of place in selling wares. Some of their best gloves were bought as gifts: a fringed pair of Midlands manufacture, given to the Queen at Oxford, in 1566, survives as a sign of the craft. 6
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A bell closed Stratford's market at II a.m.; otherwise, church festivals, fairs, harvests, and the seasons set the rhythms of town life. A Bridge Ale raised funds for the two bridge wardens, and harvests influenced purchases: John Shakespeare had bought his Woolshop and Greenhill Street house in the worst harvest year of the century, and he would buy again when conditions were depressed. 7 The town's private life unfolded itself: moral faults were aired, when the vicar's court ordered a fornicator to stand in church. The 'bawdy cour
t' held closed sessions, but later records show that adulterers and those who violated the Sabbath were cited and often on public view; William and his family knew some of these souls:
Elizabeth Wheeler: in the court itself she brawled with these words: 'Goodes woondes, a plague a God on you all, a fart of ons ars for you'; excommunicated.
Thomas Haman: 'for openinge his shopp windowes on Sabothe and holye dayes in tyme of divine service and sermon tyme'.
Hamlet Sadler: for not receiving the Eucharist: he appeared and petitioned time to cleanse his conscience; ordered a day to receive; he promised faithfully to obey; dismissed.
Judith, wife of Hamlet: for the same; she appeared; she promised as above; dismissed.
Richard Wheeler: 'for calling the wife of Richard Brookes whore and sowlike whore, with divers other filthy speeches' was ordered 'to repayre unto the parish church of Stratford the next Sabaoth at Morning Prayer and there to stand during the tyme of Morning Prayer before the pulpitt in his usuall apparell until thend of the second lesson'.
Anne Ward, spinster: for incontinence with Daniel Baker . . . ordered to do public penance in a white sheet. 8
A wide variety of trades became known to the son of John Shakespeare, who by the 1570s, as a wool dealer and after two years as bailiff and deputy bailiff, knew some of the town's drapers, haberdashers, dyers, weavers, and fullers in the wool and textile trades, and those in leather such as skinners, saddlers, and shoemakers. John had dealt as an officer with tipplers, victuallers, and brewers, and he would have
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known those connected with farming such as corn-dealers and maltsters, chandlers, coopers, smiths, wheelwrights, ploughwrights, and tuggerers (makers of carts and gear). He also dealt with men of the learned class such as John Bretchgirdle, who died in 1565, or the vicar's former pupil, John Brownsword, schoolmaster, who for Latin verse was to be cited in Francis Meres Palladis Tamia, a rather lax but revealing survey of English poetry in 1598. William had a good introduction to the town's endeavour, and a boy who was to study people had much to observe in his own relatives, though he hardly knew his grandparents. Old Richard Shakespeare had died (his wife's death is unrecorded), as had Mary Ardcn's parents, before William's birth, though Mary's stepmother Agnes lived on at Wilmcote until her burial on 29 December 1580. William's pious, eccentric uncle Henry Shakespeare, who farmed at Ingon and Snitterfield, assaulted one of his other uncles, Edward Cornwell, and at another time failed to pay for oxen and cooled off in prison. Mary's swarm of nieces and nephews was nearby, and strange fowl alighted upon neighbouring ponds: next door to the Woolshop lived Wedgewood the bigamist tailor, who had left a wife in Warwick to marry another while the first was still alive, though his reputation for 'noughty matters & quarelling with his honest neighbours' caught up with him and he fled when William was about II. 9
In contrast, William's early schooldays were tedious. Even if we dismiss all mockery of school in his writing, we are left with the fact that no Oxford-educated master attended to younger boys, who instead usually went to 'petty school' classes, for boys and girls, under the likes of William Gilbard, alias Higgs. Higgs, a keeper of clocks, served now and then as under-schoolmaster up to 1574. and had a bent for Latin. He took pupils through the English alphabet, the Lord's Prayer, and an exorcism as seen on the shiny hornbook -- a slab of wood tacked over with transparent horn. Its first line was the Christcross-row or 'crossrow', since it began with a cross. 'Yes, yes, he teaches boys the horn-book', we hear of Holofernes in Love's Labour's Lost ( V. i. 45), and Clarence cites the crossrow on the way to prison to explain King Edward's fear of the name 'George' in Richard III:
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He . . . from the cross-row plucks the letter 'G' And says a wizard told him that by 'G' His issue disinherited should be.
( 1. i. 54-7)
Poets cited the well-known hornbook to advantage -- but it was dreary work for anyone quick to learn, and slow plodding in primers followed it. William had to sit through an hour's catechizing (required of everyone over 6 and under 20) at the vicar's clerk's afternoon service, and it is certain that a chance to fish, to be footloose near the Avon, or to find Thomas Badger's or anyone else's eyrie of swans, and watch hunters who used trained hawks to catch waterfowl, or even to await a turn at archery at the 'butts', would have pleased a bored boy more than all he ever heard from an under-master or vicar's clerk.
As the world changed, public events touched home. People were aware of local musters, and of an urgency reminiscent of earlier upheavals under Queen Mary, caused by the revolt of the northern Catholic earls. That, however, was crushed, and Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth. Then pedlars sold ballads about the bizarre retreat from Scotland of Mary Queen of Scots, taken as a prisoner to Ashby de la Zouch and on to Leicester and Coventry. The tale of Leir or Lear, a fabulous King of Leicester, was cited at about this time in a letter appealing for clemency with the Scottish Queen. Driven from Britain by two unkind, unnatural daughters, Leir was restored to his throne at last by his third child, a 'noble Cordela'. 10
But the Queen at Westminster did not play 'Cordela', and alarm over the nation's Catholic enemies increased after the beginning of a revolt in the Spanish Netherlands, and again after the massacre in France of thousands of Protestants in a bloodbath starting on St Bartholomew's Day, in August 1572. That confirmed a widespread, popular belief in a Catholic League to exterminate Protestantism. England's coast was put in a state of readiness. At Stratford, the borough council was alerted by calls for men, horses, armour, weapons, or for a 'dressing of harness' or a 'dressing of two pikes and a bow' day after day, with billmen on field parade and pikemen in corselets and
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canvas jacks (sleeveless tunics lined with metal plates). William knew that sight of armour and stir of alarm, and pikemen in tramped-down muddy meadows would have entertained crowds of young people. The young had other entertainers, too, in jugglers, sword-fighters, dancing bears, or sometimes bear-wards who set dogs on a bear chained to a stake.
Of delight for many, young and old -- in Stratford's changing fairground activity -- were the performers of 'pastymes', or plays and interludes. To imitate a custom at court and please their own households, noblemen kept player-companies at low fees, so the players travelled for part of the year to boost their income. William's father was the bailiff when two companies played in the Gild hall, and John's officer paid the Queen's men and the Earl of Worcester's men out of the borough purse. At least five times after John was bailiff, Worcester's players came back to impress townspeople with a compound art -- their drums (and perhaps tabors), their spectacle, and their rhetoric. The young could be transfixed by what they heard, and the rare experience of watching a drama might burn into rural memories, and be recalled for a lifetime. At Stratford one saw some of the nation's best acting, as groups under the patronage of Leicester, Warwick, Derby, Strange, Berkeley, and Essex (among other companies) arrived during William's boyhood or early manhood. As a matter of record, he grew up with plays, within a few hundred yards of where fine actors, from time to time, performed in the Gild hall or the Bridge Street innyards or the market areas. And we speak here of recorded, authorized arrivals, and not of the wandering, illegal groups of actors who reached every town.
No one tutored at home in 'courtesie' or in care for the social situation and word, and no one being trained at school in affective discourse, would have been indifferent, for long, to the quality of plays or players. An alertness to manners in daily life improved audiences, and the troupes appealed to people who could judge their quality. Stale, stiff old chronicles creaked (not that they were unknown in the 1570s). Morality plays with the funny, coarse Vice, laughing his evil as he pared his nails with a lath dagger, gave way to a more complex moral play -- avoiding wild mockery of Rome and other topics of the
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early years of Elizabeth's reign. Yet the players' menu varied. One might see, arranged for eight actors or more, Thomas Preston's lively, bombas
tic comic and tragic scenes in Cambyses (which Falstaff alludes to), and, in Coventry, the 'hogh tuysday' or Hock Tuesday play -staged on the Tuesday after Easter when women held sway over the town's men -- or even the last of the superb medieval religious works, the Corpus Christi mystery plays, which were performed as late as 1579. To many a town outside London, the actors brought new, competitive plays, well acted and in their deft combining of elements offering something for everyone. People in Warwickshire waited for months between arrivals of touring companies, and in that respect William and other schoolboys were starved for theatre and would have been eager to hear the player's drums. He was not to forget innovative plays of a sort common at this period, or the sheer energy of carnival in older dramas -- or the multiple planes of reality in mixed, antic works which the men of Worcester or Essex or Strange could set before a town.
Nothing suggests that John Shakespeare disliked the players. After all, he had seen two companies paid in his bailiwick. But there is no evidence that he went afield for reasons other than business or the law, or that he took William or Gilbert to the royal entertainments at Kenilworth in 1575. People did hear that an aleconner, an inspector of ales (who probably held the post as a sinecure), caused Coventry's Hocktide play-actors to perform there. And they heard of the Queen's arrival with her courtiers, ban-dogs, and bears, and of a pageant of the Lady of the Lake (on Monday, 18 July) when Triton rode on a mermaid, and Arion on a dolphin's back spoke verse to Her Majesty. In A Midsummer Night's Dream, the facts are changed since a mermaid rides on a dolphin, but Oberon reminds Puck, as if to conjure up the Kenilworth pageant:
once I sat upon a promontory
