by Shakespeare
The Quineys also married into another family, the Sadlers, who were in turn closely connected with the Shakespeares. John Sadler, who lived in Church Street, was the owner of several mills and barns in Stratford; he was also a landowner and proprietor of the Bear Inn in Stratford. He had been bailiff of the town, and John Shakespeare voted for his second term.
The Bear Inn was eventually sold to the Nash family of Stratford; they too were Catholic, and they also married into the Shakespeare family. The host of the Bear Inn, Thomas Barber, was also a Catholic. A few months before his death Shakespeare was concerned to protect “Master Barber’s interest.” It is important to recognise the line of sympathies and affiliations beneath the surface of Stratford life. A kinsman of John Sadler, Roger Sadler, was also a baker; when he died, money was owed to him both by John Shakespeare and by Thomas Hathaway.
A member of the Combe family left money to Shakespeare in his will, and in turn Shakespeare bequeathed another Combe his sword. It may have been the ceremonial sword that he wore on state occasions, in his somewhat unlikely position as Groom of His Majesty’s Chamber, and therefore of some value. The Combes sold land to the dramatist, and shared with him an income from certain tithes. It was, in other words, a close-knit collaboration between two families. The Combes were described as “one of the leading Catholic families of Warwickshire,”2 but they also serve as an example of the conflicting religious commitments of the era; of two brothers, one was a Catholic and one a Protestant. There was also a family tradition of money-lending, not unknown among wealthy Stratfordians, as we have seen, and Shakespeare is popularly believed to have written some doggerel on the subject that was placed on the grave of John Combe.
In his last will and testament, drawn up as he lay dying in his home town, Shakespeare left 26s 8d each to Anthony Nash and John Nash, for the purchase of memorial rings. Anthony Nash farmed the tithe land that Shakespeare owned, and was close enough to him to act as his representative in various Stratford dealings. John Nash, too, acted as a witness on his behalf. They were Catholics who in characteristic fashion entered the network of marriage and kinship with the Quineys and the Combes and of course the Shakespeares. Anthony Nash’s son married Shakespeare’s granddaughter.
The dying dramatist left the same amount to “Hamlett” Sadler, as he calls him, and to William Reynolds. Reynolds was a fervent Catholic who shared prison with George Badger for his beliefs. A priest in disguise found refuge from his pursuers in Reynolds’s house. Shakespeare also left 20 shillings in gold to his godson, William Walker; he was the son of Henry Walker, a mercer and alderman who lived on the High Street. In the way of such things, his grandfather was very well acquainted with Shakespeare’s grandfather. Among the witnesses to the will was one Julius or July Shaw, a trader in wool and malt who lived on Chapel Street. His father, also a wool-dealer, had known John Shakespeare very well. So we have a group of generally affluent and no doubt sharp-witted businessmen, bluff enough but straightforward and practical. They must have been shrewd judges of markets and of people, used to saving money and driving bargains. This was the solution in which Shakespeare was formed.
So Stratford contained a very large Catholic constituency of which the Shakespeares were a part. This does not necessarily imply that Shakespeare himself professed that faith – assuming that he professed any – only that he found the company of Catholics familiar. It seems in certain respects to have been a clannish society. The family of Nicholas Lane, a Catholic landowner who lent money both to John and to Henry Shakespeare, bought their clothes from a Catholic tailor in Wood Street.3 In the same context, therefore, it also seems likely that affluent Catholics preferred to lend money to their coreligionists. In later years Shakespeare purchased his great house from a Catholic, William Underhill, who was compelled to sell as a result of the vast sums of money he had expended on recusancy fines. We may see in Shakespeare’s purchase a mixture of shrewd commercial calculation and semi-fraternal sympathy.
On any conservative reckoning it is possible to identify some thirty Catholic families within the town, and of course the available records are by their nature incomplete and inconclusive. There would have been many more papists, who concealed their private beliefs from the local authorities. They became, in the language of the day, “church papists” whose attendance at the Protestant churches masked their true faith. It has been speculated that the majority of churchgoers in Stratford were of this sort.
The religious situation in Stratford was in any case well known. Hugh Larimer, the reformer and Bishop of Worcester, declared that Stratford lay at “the blind end” of his diocese, and one of Latimer’s colleagues confirmed that in Warwickshire “great Parishes and market Townes [are] utterly destitute of God’s word.”4 One of his successors, John Whitgift, complained in 1577 that in the area around Stratford he could obtain no information on recusants; in a tolerant and like-minded community, neighbour would not denounce neighbour. The papistical images in the guild chapel were lime-washed, on the orders of John Shakespeare, more than four years after a royal injunction had ordered their removal. It only finally occurred after the leading Catholic family in the town, the Cloptons, had fled abroad for safety. In any case the lime-washing of the offending images was hardly in direct obedience with the administrative injunction to “utterly extinct and destroy” such images so that “there remains no memory of the same.” John Shakespeare merely covered them over, perhaps in the hope of better days.
Lying concealed upon the walls of the chapel were depictions of two local Saxon saints, Edmund and Modwena, for those who wished to celebrate the blessedness of their region; there was a fresco of the martyrdom of Thomas Becket, while kneeling at the altar of St. Benedict in Canterbury; there was a painting of St. George in mortal combat with the dragon, a princess standing behind him. Here also were images of angels and of devils, saints and dragons, monarchs and armed men in battle. Here in this Stratford chapel were hidden the images of the Catholic world. We will see some of them freshly revealed within Shakespeare’s plays.
Certain of Shakespeare’s schoolteachers were Catholic. If John Shakespeare had indeed espoused Catholicism, his example shows there was no hindrance to high office in the town, which in turn suggests a measure of quiescence or even sympathy among its leading citizens. But it represented a fragile compromise. External legislation, and the presence of religious commissioners, could create tensions within the community. Overtly partisan steps, like the concealment of renegade priests, could cause serious problems for those concerned. And in any case the general drift of the time was towards a grudging acceptance of the new religion and the steady abandonment of the practices of the old faith. By the early seventeenth century Stratford had become notably more Protestant in tendency. The town was never ruled by “precise fools” or “Scripture men,” as the more formidable Puritans were known, but it eventually came to accept the ambiguous orthodoxy of the Church of England. Yet in the latter half of the sixteenth century, despite royal injunctions and local purges, fines and sequestrations and imprisonments, the persistence of the Catholic faith in the town can clearly be seen.
This might have had a direct effect upon the Shakespeare household in one important sense. The dislike of the reformed religion meant that piety was transferred from the Church to the family. The children might now be obliged to attend the new forms of worship and listen to Elizabethan homilies. But the lessons of the old faith, and the rites of the once popular religion, might still be taught and practised in the home. It was the place of safety. Since Shakespeare’s eldest daughter, Susannah, remained a firm and prominent Catholic all of her life, can it be assumed that the Shakespeares themselves retained this familial tradition of inherited piety? It has been inferred that the community of Catholics was matriarchal in tendency, and that the woman’s “inferior legal and public identity afforded her a superior devotional status, a fuller membership of the Catholic Church.”5 Since the old faith is likely to have been transmitted thro
ugh the women of the household, it throws an interesting light upon Shakespeare’s attitude towards his closest female relations.
CHAPTER 8
I Am a Kind of Burre, I Shal Sticke
There are some human, beliefs that lie below the level of professed faith and orthodoxy. As a child Shakespeare learned of the witches who created storms and of the Welsh fairies who hid in foxgloves. “Queene Mab” of Romeo and Juliet is derived from the Celtic word, mab, meaning infant or little one. There is a Warwickshire term, “mab-led,” signifying madness. Shakespeare knew of the toad with the medicinal jewel in its head, and of the man in the moon who carried a bundle of thorns. In the Forest of Arden, as his mother might have told him, there were ghosts and goblins. “A sad Tale’s best for Winter,” says the unfortunate child Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, “I haue one of Sprights and Goblins” (538-9). All his life Shakespeare had a very English sense of the supernatural and the marvellous, a predilection that goes hand in hand with a taste for horror and sensationalism in all of its forms. He brings ghosts into the history plays, and witches into Macbeth. The plots of the fairy stories can be glimpsed in his adult drama. Pericles is one of the old tales told round the hearth. In similar fashion ballads and folk tales charge the plot of The Taming of the Shrew. They were part of his Stratford inheritance.
The zealots of the reformed Church were not well disposed towards such idolatrous relics as maypoles and church ales, but local observances survived their displeasure. The bells rang out on Shrove Tuesday, and on the feast of St. Valentine the boys sang for apples; on Good Friday the labourers planted their potatoes and on the morning of Easter Day the young men went out to hunt hares. There were “whitsun lords” in Warwickshire as late as 1580, together with all the panoply of mumming and morris-dancing. The pageant of St. George and the Dragon, for example, was performed on the streets of Stratford every year. Shakespeare saw the sheep-shearing feasts at Snitterfield, and resurrected one of them in The Winter’s Tale. The May-games of his youth return in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is not some saga of “merry England,” but the very fabric of life in a conservative and ritualised society immediately before the permanent changes induced by the reformation of religion.
The stray details of that enduring life emerge in a hundred different contexts. Real names of places and of people are enlisted in Shakespeare’s drama. His aunt lived in the hamlet of Barton-on-the-Heath, and it rises again as Burton-Heath in The Taming of the Shrew; Wilmcote becomes Win-cot. The names of William Fluellen and George Bardolph are found in a list of Stratford recusants, beside that of John Shakespeare. His father also engaged in business with two wool-dealers, George Vizer of Woodmancote (locally pronounced Woncote) and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, and they reappear in a line from Henry IV, Part Two. “I beseech you sir to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkes a’ th hill” (2725-6). In the play Visor is described as an “arrant knave,” which may suggest some familial dispute with him.
The words and phrases of Shakespeare’s childhood are recalled in his writing. He uses “fap” to mean drunk, “third-borough” for constable, and “aroynt” for leave. There is also the matter of pronunciation. The sound of the language spoken by Shakespeare in his native county was nearer to Saxon than to Norman French, as if its original powers had not been dispelled by the culture of the conquerors. You would have heard the Saxon origins in words pronounced as “blewe” and “deawe,” “emonges” and “ouglie,” “togyther” and “woork.” Extra consonants were added to lend emphasis to certain words, in “chardge” and “mariadge,” “priviledge” and “pidgeon,” “sutch” and “druncke.” They appear, too, in “whote” and “womand,” “dogge” and “dinne,” “drumme” and “sinne.” The language of Shakespeare’s region was thicker and more resonant than that of London. Vowels were lengthened, too, in “hond” and “husbond,” “tyme” and “wyde,” “fairnesse” and “wantonesse.” A similar variousness and richness are found in “marrie” and “wittie,” “dutious” and “outragious,” “heretique” and “reumatique.”
This was the language that Shakespeare spoke as a child. It was immediately recognisable as a country accent, and he may have endeavoured to lose it on his arrival in London. His characters are, after all, engaged in a perpetual act of performance and re-invention. But there was then no “standard” English. He used his Stratford idiom in his writing, for example, although the fussiness of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened his native sonority. Any standardisation or modernisation of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength; a shadow is not as dim and veiled as a “shaddowwe,” a cuckoo does not sing like a “kuckow,” and music is not as enchanting as “musique.” In the old language we can still hear Shakespeare talking.
Shakespeare understood the country very well, with what Edgar in King Lear calls its “low fermes / Poore pelting villages, sheep-coates and milles” (1190-1), but his debt to the Stratford of his childhood is particular and profound. He knew the channels that drew off the Avon floods and the conies that come out of their burrows after the rain, the fragile mulberries and the “Tradesmen singing in their shops.” The fact that, all his life, he invested in the lands and properties of the immediate neighbourhood testifies to the hold Stratford exerted upon him. It was the site of his earliest ambitions and expectations and, as we shall see, he wished to restore the fortunes of the Shakespeares there through his personal achievement. He wanted to reassert his father’s name among his fellow townsmen. Stratford was also the permanent home of his family, and the place to which he returned at the end of his life. It remained the centre of his being.
CHAPTER 9
This Prettie Lad Will
Proue Our Countries Blisse
In the late sixteenth century, children were customarily trained by means of strict discipline. A boy would take off his cap before addressing his elders and would wait upon his parents at table, standing rather than sitting during the meal. He rose early and recited the morning’s prayers; he washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and then went downstairs where he knelt for his parents’ blessing before breakfast. He would commonly address his father as “sir,” although “dad” does appear in one of Shakespeare’s plays. “Dad” is in fact the formal Welsh word for father, and therefore part of the border patois that Shakespeare knew very well.
Twentieth-century sociologists have emphasised the severity of the sixteenth-century household, where patriarchal authority was dominant and where repression or punishment was the most convenient means of dealing with children of either sex. There must be room for doubt in such a broad analysis, however, and Shakespeare’s plays themselves are often concerned with the failure of parental authority. The children can become “unruly” or “unbridled”; the rod of birch is “more mock’d than fear’d.” Shakespeare’s children are in any case observant and serious, sharp-eyed and often sharp-tongued; they demonstrate respect and obedience, but there is no hint of fear or subservience. In his drama, too, father and son are generally placed in amicable or idealised relationship. So we may prefer the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist.
If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood. It arises unbidden and unannounced in a hundred different contexts. It cannot be denied or misrepresented without severe psychic disturbance on the surface of the writing. It is the very source of the writing itself, and must necessarily remain undefiled. It is of the utmost interest, then, that the children of Shakespeare’s plays are all equally precocious and acute, possessing great confidence in themselves. They are sometimes “wayward” and “impatient.” They are also oddly aware and articulate, talking to their elders without any sign of strain or inferiority. In Richard III one of the little princes, soon to be despatched to an unhappy end, is described (1580-1) by his malevolent uncle as
Bold, quicke, ingenious, forward, capable,
He is all the mothers, fr
om the top to toe.
It has become customary to place the young Shakespeare in the conventional Elizabethan world of childhood, engaged in games such as penny-prick or shovel-board, harry-racket or barley-break; in his own plays Shakespeare mentions football and bowls, prisoner’s base and hide-and-seek, as well as the rural games of muss and dun in the mire. He even mentions chess, although he does not appear to know its rules. But it is likely that he was in certain respects an odd child. He was precocious, too, and observant; but he was one who stood apart.
There can be no doubt at all that he devoured books. Much of his early reading comes back in his drama. Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books? He alludes to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, so beloved by Mistress Quickly, and the old English romances of Sir Degore and Sir Eglamour and Bevis of Southampton. Master Slender lends Alice Shortcake The Book of Riddels and Beatrice refers to The Hundred Merry Tales. Some of his earlier biographers concur that he possessed a copy of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and Richard Robinson’s translation of Gesta Romanorum, the legends of which form the staple of some of his plots. For similar reasons the young Shakespeare has been pictured turning the pages of Copland’s Kynge Appolyne of Thyre, Hawes’s Pass Tyme of Pleasure and Bochas’s The Tragedies of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates. There were also the folk stories and the fairy tales of his neighbourhood, given so long a lease on life in his late plays.
