In Search of Shakespeare Read online

  THINGS SEEN, THINGS OVERHEARD

  The life of a brogger supplies another hint of the world Shakespeare knew as a boy. He would have seen wool bagged up in tods (of 28 pounds) in the woolshop or stored in the barn behind the house in Henley Street. Perhaps he also accompanied his father on business trips – in traditional societies the eldest son helps the father as soon as he is big enough, and certainly by the time he is eight. Operating on the shady side of the law, broggers usually combined their wool dealings with farming or a respectable trade like John’s. They would arrange their buying in April or May, when sheep farmers could estimate the year’s clip reasonably well. The broggers would collect the wool in June after shearing, and then resell, perhaps taking it to regional markets where they had contacts. Thame in Oxfordshire was one – even today fleeces are graded and priced there in the old barns by the church.

  This world is vividly brought to life in a Warwickshire wool brogger’s account book which has survived from the 1540s and 1550s. The entries in Peter Temple’s ledger give an idea of how John’s business worked, and name people he might have known; for example, 18 tods ‘Bought of Richard Quiney of Fleckenhoe at 21sh the tod’. This is the world that Shakespeare later vividly described in The Winter’s Tale: ‘Let me see – every ’leven wether tods; every tod yields pound and odd shilling; fifteen hundred shorn, what comes the wool to?’

  Temple’s account book also details payments for packing the wool and carrying it to London, either to Leadenhall Market or to the Wool Staple in Westminster. In return dealers sent back goods to meet special needs in sheep farming, as well as fish and exotic groceries. The brogger’s book mentions ‘Half a hundred of allam; 6 lb almonds; 2 lb rice; 4 lb sugar; 2 tapnets [baskets] of figs’. And again in The Winter’s Tale Shakespeare has the shepherd’s son shopping for the same edible luxuries for his shearers’ fair:

  Let me see; what am I to buy for our sheep-shearing feast? [He takes out a paper. ] Three pounds of sugar, five pound of currants, rice – what will this sister of mine do with rice? But my father hath made her mistress of the feast, and she lays it on… I must have saffron, to colour the warden pies; mace – dates – none; that’s out of my note; nutmegs, seven; a race or two of ginger – but that I may beg; four pound of prunes, and as many of raisins o’ the sun.

  All this close observation might suggest that in his childhood Shakespeare got to know quite a lot about the gloving trade and the hard-nosed business conducted between country shepherds and wool dealers from the towns.

  So there was no sheltered upbringing for young Shakespeare. Through his father’s wheeler-dealing the child was brought into contact with every level of society, with the world of business and of profit and loss, and it would come out later in his language. As a mature writer he would be particularly good at social interaction, especially between men. Even the gaps in colloquial speech, the things left out, are very precisely observed.

  This rich rural vocabulary, full of dialect words that Shakespeare was to use to such great effect in his plays and poetry, has already been mentioned. Sometimes contemporary records give us precise parallels to his language. For example, the itinerant labourers and others who came through Warwick and Stratford were recorded in the 1580s in the books of the magistrate John Fisher, still kept in Warwick Town Hall. Here we meet cattle drovers, sheep stealers, unemployed labourers, discharged veterans from the Irish wars, pickpockets, coney catchers and ‘bawdy baskets’. Wonderful tales they are too, such as the saga of Ursula Reddish at the Sign of the Unicorn in Warwick, and her lover, a womanizing bigamist wool-carder from Manchester, an ‘evil fellow and a shifter’.

  This is the raw, unmediated life of small-town Warwickshire in Shakespeare’s youth. People from all over the country, from as far as Berwick and especially Lancashire and Yorkshire, with their different accents and stories, are interviewed here. All the lower-class characters in Shakespeare’s plays work so well because they speak authentically. The Warwick town books show us their real-life counterparts, people like ‘Henry Carre with his wife or woman and a pedlar’s pack’ (Autolycus from The Winter’s Tale?) and Dorothy Grene, whipped for the theft of a fine woman’s overskirt on the road from Stratford and summonsed under her alias ‘coosyning doll’ (Doll Tearsheet from Henry IV Part 2?).

  Even in the nineteenth century, the colourful Warwickshire dialect had changed very little since Shakespeare’s time. Take the arrival of the itinerant workforce at pea-picking time (a time to date things by, as Mistress Quickly does in Henry IV Part 2), ‘with long black coats and black beards and black tea cans a dangling in my face and shoes that looked as if they’d been tramped to the end of the earth and back … and strange names they was an all, like feet hitting gravel: Dag and Lop and Clommer and Grauncher and Dink’. It is hard to believe that this world survived into Victoria’s day, but here, recorded from a near-centenarian in late twentieth-century Stratford, is the world of Autolycus’s sheep-shearings in the mouths of Autolycus’s descendants:

  Their tales came straight from fairy-land: strawberries big as taters, cider apple country, fields upon fields of lilies, all colours of the rainbow, as far as the eye could see, an army of wapses, each one as fierce as a ferret, man traps, wading through peppermint ’till you stank o’ nothin’ else! Mothers on Waterside shouted their kiddies indoors and such a clucking started up you’s thought the old fox was in the hencoop.

  CRISIS IN THE NORTH

  But at peascod time in 1569, when William was five, grimmer news came with the newcomers along the road from Warwick and Coventry: rumours of a rebellion that shook Elizabeth’s still precarious hold on power. In Stratford the corporation would find itself caught up in the growing momentum of events, which would eventually upset the uneasy equilibrium in the town and force change willy-nilly.

  The crisis had begun over the border in Scotland. Early in the year the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, daughter of James V of Scotland and widow of François II of France, had fled into England after her forces’ defeat at the Battle of Langside and had thrown herself on Elizabeth’s ‘hospitality’. Some English and foreign Catholics saw Mary as a potential successor to Elizabeth, so the English government acted with extreme caution, fearing they were ‘holding a wolf by the ears’. In February 1569 Mary was brought down to the Midlands; the High Sheriff of Warwickshire ordered a watch on all roads and the interrogation and punishment of vagabonds. Monthly searches for strangers were carried out in all the boroughs; unlawful or riotous games were banned. On 27 June Sir Thomas Lucy, the leading JP in the Stratford area, raised a levy of 640 men from the shire, including ‘honest and habell men’ from Stratford. The corporation minutes tell of archery practice at the butts by the river; Robert Locke was paid to clean the armour and harness; Robert ‘the joiner’ was put to work on new gunstocks; and Simon Biddle dressed two pikes and a bow.

  Rumours spread of a rising in the north, and of a secret marriage between Mary and the Catholic Duke of Norfolk. On 8 October the Spanish ambassador wrote to his king, Philip II: ‘the Earls of Northumberland Westmorland, Cumberland and Derby and the whole body of the Catholics will take forcible possession of Mary and make themselves masters of the Northern Counties and re-establish the Catholic Faith’. The rebellion broke out in November with echoes of earlier northern revolts against Tudor rule, in particular the Pilgrimage of Grace at the time of Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries in 1536. On 14 November Charles Percy, the Earl of Northumberland, called on ‘all true and faithful subjects’ to restore ‘the ancient customs and liberties to Gods Church’. Then the rebels entered Durham and celebrated Catholic mass in the cathedral. The news came south like wildfire. Mary was taken for safety to Coventry, while the Warwickshire levies prepared to march north. For a moment Elizabeth’s hold on power seemed uncertain.

  But the alarm quickly subsided. On the approach of Elizabeth’s army, the rebellion collapsed. Stratford, with its leanings to the Old Religion, felt the fall-out. The vicar, curat
e and schoolmaster all left, the vicar in the middle of the crisis in November, the schoolmaster at Christmas. The curate was pointedly described in the town minutes as fugitivus, a fugitive who had apparently sympathized with the rising.

  AFTERMATH: THE TOWN ‘ON THE BLIND SIDE OF THE DIOCESE’

  The town books for the following year disclose signs of a reaction in Stratford. A retainer of Sir Thomas Lucy was now installed as steward. During 1570 the corporation were required to remove the stained glass from the guild chapel, and a year later, at the first meeting chaired by the new mayor, Adrian Quiney, it was resolved that the Catholic copes and vestments should be sold off: ‘First, one suit of blue velvet vestments being three in number … one suit of white damask, three in number, two copes of tawny velvet, one cope of white damask, one cope of blue velvet, three stoles, and three gloves or manuaries for the hands [for handling relics]’.

  And so, thirteen years after the Protestant queen’s accession, the corporation finally lost their treasured vestments, what Puritans liked to call ‘the relics of the Amorites’.

  In February 1571 Elizabeth was excommunicated and declared illegitimate by Pope Pius V, a pivotal moment in the religious conflicts of Tudor England. From now on the conflict of loyalties would become intense, and many faithful English Catholics would soon find their position intolerable. Elizabeth’s local men, such as Robert Dudley, would put increasing pressure on local gentry who stuck by the Old Faith – people like Edward Arden. And, as the 1570 town minutes suggest, more pressure to come into line would be placed on local communities, especially one as notorious as Stratford, that ‘ungodly town … on the blind side of the diocese’. The times were beginning to change.

  Such events, no doubt, were the topic of conversation behind the closed doors of the council chamber at the guildhall, and in Henley Street. Every alderman knew the meaning of what had happened, and if the six-year-old William was listening at home, he would have understood something too: a first lesson, perhaps, in the way that great national events impinge on local affairs; in the way that ordinary people can be swept up in the whirlwind of history. When seen in the eyes and heard in the whispers of one’s parents, such struggles of power and conscience are things a child never forgets.

  CHAPTER THREE

  EDUCATION: SCHOOL AND BEYOND

  JOHN SHAKESPEARE, AS bailiff of Stratford, was entitled to send his son to the town’s free school, once attached to the guild, but now, in the mid-sixteenth century, a grammar school financed by the corporation. Boys normally started grammar school at the age of seven, by which time they were already expected to be able to read and write basic English, and to have basic reading skills in Latin. So William would have begun his tuition at home, or at petty school, when he was about five years old.

  ‘MY MOTHER GAVE IT TO ME’

  In Stratford the petty school for both boys and girls was held in the guild chapel, and perhaps a special teacher came round to hold handwriting classes on particular days. Shakespeare’s style of writing is what was called the ‘secretary’s hand’, which appears among the thirty-seven styles illustrated in the first English book on handwriting, published in 1570 by Beau Chesne, a French school-master living in London; the poet’s writing closely resembles Beau Chesne’s example. Most likely he learned basic letter forms at petty school from a handwriting teacher who used that book.

  But it is just possible that he received some tuition at home. Although, as mentioned earlier, his father probably never learned to read and write, his mother may have had some ability, at least in reading. She was competent in legal matters, serving as an executrix and a juror, and her mark on documents has all the appearance of someone who knew how to use a pen: her elegantly formed ‘M’ uses the edge and then the flat of the quill, with a stylish decorative circle reminiscent of her son’s flamboyant habit with his own initials. She also employed a personal seal of a running horse (her father bred horses), which again suggests someone who was literate and accustomed to handling her own affairs.

  So could Mary have been Shakespeare’s first teacher? In her childhood in Wilmcote in the late 1540s did she have access to chapbooks and prayer books? At any rate, it was not uncommon for women to teach their children, particularly in rural Catholic homes. Titus Andronicus, possibly Shakespeare’s earliest play, contains one of those throwaway remarks in a plot device that he invented:

  TITUS: Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so?

  YOUNG LUCIUS: Grand Sire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphosis; my mother gave it me.

  The poets mother, Mary, is one of the figures in his life we could wish to know better.

  MYTH AND MAGIC: STORIES AT HIS MOTHER’S KNEE

  The Stratford of Shakespeare’s childhood has often been painted as a town with little culture and few books. But this was far from the case. Several members of the town council were literate, and some are known to have possessed books. John Bretchgirdle, the vicar who baptized Shakespeare, owned an impressive library. A clergyman, carpenter and Latin scholar, Bretchgirdle bequeathed more than thirty books to friends, townsfolk and their children, and to the grammar school – among them works by Cicero, Josephus, Virgil and Horace, Aesop’s Fables, and a Greek lexicon. The schoolmaster at the same time, John Brownsword, was a Latin poet who composed a poem to Sir Thomas Lucy modelled on Ovid’s Metamorphoses. So Stratford was far from being a cultural desert.

  But in trying to get a sense of Shakespeare’s early education we shouldn’t exaggerate the importance of books. The household in Henley Street might have possessed the odd book: a Bible, for example, an old prayer book or a primer. In a culture where women were expected to be doctor and apothecary as well as housekeeper, Mary might also have had an almanac to ascertain the best time for blood-letting, and a herbal to augment her country-woman’s knowledge of the medicinal uses of plants. But in Stratford, book-owning families were still a rarity: house inventories of the day tend not to mention books. And although the English were beginning to be fascinated by the possibilities of books and print, this was still above all an oral culture. Telling stories was the key; hearing them was the first stage in a child’s education.

  In his plays Shakespeare alludes to tales, retold by almost every Tudor writer on Warwickshire, that appear in the folk plays, songs and ballads of his day. Every child would have been familiar with them, and one in particular, the tale of Guy of Warwick, may serve as an example of the rich popular culture of the region in the mid-sixteenth century.

  Guy was a legendary Saxon hero who fought the invading Danes, overthrew the giant Colbrand, went on crusade to the Holy Land to do battle with the Saracens, and finally returned to Warwickshire to live as a hermit in the Forest of Arden. There on his deathbed he was reunited with his childhood sweetheart, who had thought him long dead. A tale of adventure, monsters and fairy-tale mishaps, this medieval romance is also a story of redemption and has some curious resonances in Shakespeare’s works. As a boy he may even have been told that Guy of Warwick was his kinsman: his mother’s family claimed him as their ancestor.

  To Warwickshire writers, the Arden of these tales was the mythic heart of England, a wilderness, a place of refuge from powerful enemies, which also gave access to the world of magic and fairies. ‘The land is uncanny and enchanted – it is called Arden the great,’ declares one fourteenth-century poem. Shakespeare would put that magical Arden into his pastoral comedy, As You Like It.

  The legend’s portrayal of Arden as a fairyland also recalls the fantastically rich portrayal of the fairy world in Shakespeare’s plays, which surely harks back to tales heard in his childhood. Although A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set in Athens, the wood and its spirits – Puck or Robin Goodfellow, Cobweb, Moth, Mustardseed and Peaseblossom – are English through and through. They are all part of the pre-Reformation imagination. For the Protestants, fairies, like ghosts, had been devised by popish priests from an earlier era to ‘keep the ignorant in awe’; Protestants saw the fairy kingdom as ‘a mixt relig
ion, part pagan part papistical’. It is easy to forget Shakespeare was old-fashioned even in his own day for his love of fairyland, and it is no accident that in his greatest plays he chooses the form, and sometimes the substance, of fairy tales.

  ‘SMALL LATIN AND LESS GREEK

  In due course young William moved on to the grammar school: for seven years from 1571 he attended Big School (as opposed to petty school) in Church Lane, between the almshouses and the guild chapel. Given the controversy that still surrounds the authorship of the plays, and the persistence of the myth that Shakespeare must have been an uneducated provincial, that last sentence may seem over-confident. But it can be stated for near certain, even though the early records of King Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford have not survived, because this is one instance where direct biographical evidence from the plays is indisputable. Their author, as we know from the contemporary testimony of his friends and colleagues, was William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon. In these plays, the patterns of his quotation and his remembered reading betray the fact that the author was steeped in the Tudor grammar school curriculum. Although this does not prove that the school was in Stratford, it does offer very strong circumstantial evidence that he went to grammar school; and since John Shakespeare was entitled to send his son to the one in Stratford, and lived in that town for the whole period in question, it is as good as certain that this was the school that William attended.