The Science of Shakespeare

by Dan Falk

  We have taken a broad look at the growth of English science, with a focus on astronomy in particular; and along the way we have met some of the great minds at work in Oxford, Cambridge, and London in the second half of the sixteenth century. Now let us turn our attention to a provincial town in Warwickshire, and a very different kind of genius.

  6. “Who is it that can tell me who I am?”

  A BRIEF HISTORY OF WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  “Right, shall we start walking then?”

  The guide is Barbara, a middle-aged woman with gold hair and boundless energy. She corrals the dozen or so tourists who have signed up for the town’s most popular Shakespeare walk, and sets off from the meeting place—the Swan Fountain by the River Avon, a hundred yards or so from the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Either Barbara or one of her colleagues conducts the walk every day, as they have for the past eleven years. I follow the group as we explore the church where the playwright was baptized, and where his bones now rest; the famous Birthplace on Henley Street; the grammar school; and the handful of other locations linked in some way to the town’s most famous resident. From time to time we interrupt Barbara to ask questions. The man with the German accent seems to be the most inquisitive, or at least the most persistent. Barbara handles the queries deftly. Sometimes we clog up the sidewalk; we have to be reminded that there are regular Stradfordians here, ordinary men and women, including a large number of pensioners, who are just trying to get their shopping done. They must have mixed feelings about sharing their streets with so many bardolators.

  It is 2012, but in our minds it is the late 1500s. Stratford at that time was a provincial market town of some two hundred houses, known for its bustling fairs and for its strategic location on a crossing of the River Avon. The town’s name, as Barbara points out, tells of its origins: “Stratford” comes from the Old English word for street, combined with ford, the name for a river crossing; in other words, this was the site where an ancient Roman road crossed the Avon. In Shakespeare’s day, London would have been two days away by horseback; at least four days by foot. Oxford, with its famous university, was about half that distance.

  It was around 1550 that a man named John Shakespeare moved to Stratford from the nearby village of Snitterfield. John was a glove maker and also traded in wool and meat. He married a woman named Mary Arden, who came from a wealthy family in Wilmcote, a few miles away. John Shakespeare apparently did quite well for himself. He served on the town council and later became an alderman and, eventually, a bailiff (a position similar to that of mayor). He ended up buying two large properties in the town, including the one on Henley Street, now a mecca for Shakespeare fans from around the world. The two-story wattle-and-daub structure is built around a wooden frame; the sturdy oak beams would have come from the nearby Forest of Arden. The house is not remarkable architecturally, but was large enough to accommodate living quarters as well as a workshop, and would have marked the owner as a man of some means.

  Fig. 6.1 Birthplace of genius: The house on Henley Street, in Stratford-upon-Avon, is now a tourist attraction; in the 1550s, it provided John and Mary Shakespeare with space to raise their children, and for a workshop. Author photo

  John and Mary Shakespeare had eight children, including two daughters who died in infancy. Childbirth took place in the home, and was inherently risky for both mother and child. Infant mortality was high—perhaps twelve times higher than today. One out of five children died before their first birthday. Only three-quarters would live to the age of ten.* William, their third child and first son, was one of the lucky ones. We don’t know the exact date of his birth, but we do have the record of his baptism, from Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church. The parish records for April 26, 1564, indicate the baptism of “Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere” (“William, son of John Shakespeare”). Traditionally, a child was baptized three days after its birth, and so we celebrate Shakespeare’s birthday on April 23—which, by pleasant coincidence, is also the feast day of Saint George, England’s patron saint.

  ONE LAND, TWO FAITHS

  The England of William’s youth was very different from that of his father’s childhood. The old Catholic religion had been swept away—in theory, at least—with the reforms begun by Elizabeth’s father, Henry VIII, and a new Church of England installed in its place. Shakespeare’s father was caught up in this transformation. Stratford’s Guild Chapel was already three hundred years old when John Shakespeare arrived in town; its colorful stained-glass windows displayed Catholic saints, and its walls were covered in the iconography of the old faith. John Shakespeare was in charge of renovating the chapel to conform to the new order. Under his supervision, on a midsummer’s day in 1571, the windows were smashed and replaced with plain white glass. An earlier effort at “correcting” the chapel’s imagery had taken place a few years earlier, when the ornate frescoes on the walls were covered in whitewash. The Bible, too, had been replaced. A scholarly English translation of the scriptures, known as the Geneva Bible, had been published in England in the 1570s; this, along with the Bishop’s Bible of 1568 and the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549, were the primary religious works that Shakespeare would have encountered in his youth. Echoes of each of these books can be found throughout Shakespeare’s plays. (By the end of the playwright’s career there was yet another version of the Bible—the King James edition of 1611.) The scriptures, in one form or another, were ubiquitous. By law, the parish minister was required to give religious instruction to local boys, age six and up, on alternate Sundays and on holy days—though basic religious instruction would have already begun in the home.

  What kind of faith would John and Mary Shakespeare have instilled in their children? We will probably never know, but biographers aren’t shy about guessing. Much has been written on the question of John Shakespeare’s possible Catholic sympathies.* Perhaps, muses Stephen Greenblatt, the elder Shakespeare may have been of two minds on the issue of faith. He may have wanted “to keep both his options open” so as to cover all the spiritual bases, so to speak. “He had not so much a double life as a double consciousness.” For James Shapiro, the walls of the guild chapel—with the images of the old faith just visible beneath the fresh layers of paint—is an appropriate symbol of the religious confusion that hung over the times:

  To argue that the Shakespeares were secretly Catholic or, alternatively, mainstream Protestants misses the point that except for a small minority at one doctrinal extreme or other, those labels failed to capture the layered nature of what Elizabethans, from the queen on down, actually believed. The whitewashed chapel walls, on which, perhaps, an image or two were still faintly visible, are as good an emblem of Shakespeare’s faith as we are likely to find.

  Faith, once a cornerstone of English life, had become uncertain, a thing that could be tampered with or overhauled by powerful men and crafty politicians. Some people surely practiced a combination of the two faiths—adopting Protestant practices in public, while quietly keeping the Catholic faith at home. Religious tension, as Norman Jones notes, “was a fact of daily life.” How this tension affected William Shakespeare’s life—and his career—has been endlessly debated. As Jonathan Bate puts it, “His mind and world were poised between Catholicism and Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational thinking and visceral instinct, faith and scepticism.”

  Something else was in the air: For the first time, the people of England may have felt some small measure of personal freedom. One could choose—to some extent—one’s destiny. As Norman Jones notes, however, this could be a mixed blessing: “One had to make the right choices. God still ran the world, demanding obedience. But obedience to which theology? Which Church? Which economic order? Which master? Where could a person turn for intellectual certainty in a world of choice and confusion?” But perhaps there was an upside. Uncertainty may have nurtured creativity. “Confusion,” Jones notes, “made Shakespeare’s age one of the most culturally productive in English histo
ry.” It is sobering to imagine that Shakespeare, had he lived in a less turbulent time, would perhaps have been content to take up his father’s glove business.

  The country itself, meanwhile, was growing. The population stood at about four million, a figure that was increasing by roughly one percent every year during Elizabeth’s reign. Because of the rapid population growth, the demographics skewed young: About one-third of the population would have been under fifteen; half were under twenty-five. Average life expectancy at birth was forty-eight—but most of the danger was in the first few years. Those who lived to thirty would likely make it to sixty. Death, of course, was not a stranger. Disease was a perpetual threat, the bubonic plague the most feared of all. There were at least five outbreaks during Shakespeare’s lifetime. The plague hit the crowded cities harder than rural communities, but no corner of the country was safe. The plague-free years must have been a welcome respite; but even so, there were dangers. The combination of a rising population and uncertain harvests meant that demand often outstripped supply; when harvests failed, people died. Food prices rose, wages fell, and the gap between rich and poor widened. Lack of food could trigger riots, as depicted in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, and the “Poor Laws” were established to alleviate the suffering of the least well-off—and to reduce the chances of more severe rioting. The “working poor” seem to have been tolerated; those classified as “idle,” “rogues,” or “vagabonds” were demonized as disease carriers and threats to “good order”; they could be flogged and driven from town.

  For those who did have money, there were a variety of ways to show off one’s good fortune, with expensive clothing being the first choice. (As one clergyman noted, the land was full of “fickle-headed tailors” who were only too happy to satisfy demand for whatever the latest trend called for, adding that “nothing is more constant in England than the inconstancy of attire. Oh, how much cost is bestowed nowadays upon our bodies, and how little upon our souls.”) Many fashion trends originated on the Continent, and wine, silk, and lace were typically imported; but many items once brought from abroad were increasingly made in England, including felt hats, playing cards, soap, and fine cloth. For the poor, of course, such luxuries could only be dreamed of.

  * * *

  It helped if you were a man. Women had limited social and legal standing, and only marginally better economic status. If a woman was married, it was assumed that she would look after the home and the children, leaving her husband free to serve as breadwinner. (Widows and unmarried women had slightly more freedom, such as the right to own property and to sign contracts.) In language that is difficult to stomach today, a seventeenth-century political theorist declared, “Women [were made] to keep home and nourish their family and children, and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or commonwealth no more than children or infants.” A Dutch visitor, however, noted that English women “are not kept so strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere”:

  They go to market to buy what they like best to eat. They are well dressed, fond of taking it easy, and commonly leave the care of household matters and drudgery to their servants.… All the rest of their time they employ in walking or riding, in playing at cards or otherwise, in visiting their friends and keeping company, conversing with their equals (whom they term gossips) and their neighbours, and making merry with them at childbirths, christenings, churchings, and funerals; and all this with the permission and knowledge of their husbands, so such is the custom.

  ENTER ROSALIND, READING A PAPER

  Schooling, beyond the most basic home instruction, was almost exclusively reserved for boys and young men. However, girls from well-heeled families could attend an elementary school, and, on rare occasions, were allowed to matriculate at a grammar school. Even then, they were allowed to stay for only the first few years, and were not taught Latin. (The universities were strictly off limits.) Nonetheless, literacy rates among women were on the rise—partly as a result of the Protestant desire to give the largest number of people the ability to read the Bible. While only a handful of works were penned by English women before 1500, the number rose steadily over the next half century—during which time more than a hundred works were composed or translated by English women, including religious works, poetry, essays, advice books, diaries, and letters. (As Stephen Greenblatt has noted, it is remarkable how many of Shakespeare’s women are depicted reading.)

  * * *

  Schooling began at home, and the young Shakespeare would have been taught to read beginning at age four or five. If we are to try to picture William learning his letters, we should bear in mind that, at that age, boys and girls alike would have worn long gowns or dresses; it was only at about age six that a boy would be “breeched”—fitted with the breeches of the style worn by adult men. (In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes looks at his young son, and imagines himself at that age: “… I did recoil / Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreeched…” [1.2.153–54].) At age seven or eight William would have begun his studies at the local grammar school, adjacent to the guild chapel, an institution reestablished by Edward VI in the 1550s as the King’s New School. (We don’t have any actual record of William’s attendance, but as the son of a prominent town official, it’s a fairly safe assumption that he was in fact schooled there.) As noted in the previous chapter, the reign of Elizabeth would see an explosion of these grammar schools; by the end of the sixteenth century, England had about 160 such institutions, about one for every twelve thousand inhabitants (a much higher proportion than one finds even in Victorian times). As a result, basic literacy is thought to have reached 30 percent for men and perhaps 10 percent for women—higher, of course, for privileged classes and townsfolk than for the rural poor.

  “THE WHINING SCHOOLBOY, WITH HIS SATCHEL”

  The school day was long, running from six in the morning (seven in winter) to five or six in the afternoon. If the family had means, the boy would carry a lantern to light the way in the dark of winter. There was only a short break for recess, and another for lunch—for which William presumably headed home; the house on Henley Street was just a few blocks away. Students would recite the alphabet from a “hornbook” and read from the Bible. Writing was done with a goose-quill pen and inkhorn. The flavor of Elizabethan schooling is captured in Jacques’s famous speech on the seven ages of man, in As You Like It, in which the second age sees “the whining schoolboy, with his satchel / And shining face, creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school” (2.7.145–47). Later, from age eleven or so, William’s studies would have continued with grammar, logic, and rhetoric. A barrage of Latin grammar was unavoidable; Latin maxims were to be learned by heart. The older boys would learn the poetry of Ovid, Virgil, Cicero, and—as hinted at in the prologue—Horace. (Shakespeare’s plays echo the themes employed by all of these classical writers.) Older children were meant to speak exclusively in Latin, and could be punished for reverting to English.

  Every bit as important as the book and the pen was the birch rod, the chief implement for enforcing discipline, as depicted in numerous woodcuts from the era. As one schoolmaster explained, corporal punishment was simply a part of God’s plan, a practice that “God hath sanctified … to cure the evils of [students’] conditions, to drive out that folly which is bound up in their hearts, to save their souls from hell, to give them wisdom: so it [the rod] is to be used as God’s instrument to these purposes.” For the Elizabethans, a child, as one scholar has put it, was, “just a diminutive and exceptionally troublesome adult.”

  What did young William think of his schoolmasters? We can get a sense, perhaps, from the mocking tone in which the teacher Holofernes is portrayed in Love’s Labour’s Lost, and similar scenes in As You Like It and The Merry Wives of Windsor. In the latter play, a lad named William Page gives the master, a Welshman named Sir Hugh Evans, a hard time:

  EVANS:

  What is “lapis,” William?

  WILLIAM:

  A stone.

  EVANS:


  And what is “a stone,” William?

  WILLIAM:

  A pebble.

  EVANS:

  No, it is “lapis,” I pray you remember in your prain.*

  (4.1.27–31)

  If the plays of the ancient Romans whetted the young Shakespeare’s appetite for acting and dramatic writing, he would have another taste whenever traveling “players” (theater troupes) passed through town. (And owing to its location in the heart of England, Stratford would have witnessed more such shows than most towns of a similar size.) We know that the Earl of Leicester’s players dropped by in 1573 and 1576; Lord Strange’s Men in 1579; those of the Earl of Essex in 1584, and the Queen’s Men in 1587. It is not hard to picture William sitting wide-eyed in the audience for these touring performances, listening to each word and observing each gesture.