Chapter One
There Was a Starre Daunst, and Under That Was I Borne
William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23
April 1564, or St. George’s Day. The date may in fact have been 21
April or 22 April, but the coincidence of the national festival is
at least appropriate.
When he emerged from the womb into the world of time, with the
assistance of a midwife, an infant of the sixteenth century was
washed and then “swaddled” by being wrapped tightly in soft cloth.
Then he was carried downstairs in order to be presented to the
father. After this ritual greeting, he was taken back to the
birth-chamber, still warm and dark, where he was laid beside the
mother. She was meant to “draw to her all the diseases from the
child,” before her infant was put in a cradle. A small portion of
butter and honey was usually placed in the baby’s mouth. It was the
custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare’s brains
reduced to jelly.
The date of Shakespeare’s christening, unlike that of his birth, is
exactly known: he was baptised in the Church of the Holy Trinity, in
Stratford, on Wednesday 26 April 1564. In the register of that
church, the parish clerk has written Guilelmus filius Johannes
Shakespere; he slipped in his Latin, and should have written
Johannis.
The infant Shakespeare was carried by his father from his birthplace
in Henley Street down the High Street and Church Street into the
church itself. The mother was never present at the baptism. John
Shakespeare and his newborn son would have been accompanied by the
godparents, who were otherwise known as “god-sips” or “gossips.” On
this occasion the godfather was William Smith, a haberdasher and
neighbour in Henley Street. The name of the infant was given before
he was dipped in the font and the sign of the cross marked upon his
forehead. At the font the gossips were exhorted to make sure that
William Shakespeare heard sermons and learned the creed as well as
the Lord’s Prayer “in the English tongue.” After the baptism a piece
of white linen cloth was placed on the head of the child, and
remained there until the mother had been “churched” or purified; it
was called the “chrisom cloth” and, if the infant died within a
month, was used as a shroud. The ceremony of the reformed Anglican
faith, in the time of Elizabeth, still favoured the presentation of
apostle-spoons or christening shirts to the infant, given by the
gossips, and the consumption of a christening cake in celebration.
They were, after all, celebrating the saving of young William
Shakespeare for eternity.
Of his earthly life there was much less certainty. In the sixteenth
century, the mortality of the newly born was high. Nine per cent
died within a week of birth, and a further 11 per cent before they
were a month old; in the decade of Shakespeare’s own birth there
were in Stratford 62.8 average annual baptisms and 42.8 average
annual child burials. You had to be tough, or from a relatively
prosperous family, to survive the odds. It is likely that
Shakespeare had both of these advantages.
Once the dangers of childhood had been surmounted, there was a
further difficulty. The average lifespan of an adult male was
forty-seven years. Since Shakespeare’s parents were by this standard
long-lived, he may have hoped to emulate their example. But he
survived only six years beyond the average span. Something had
wearied him. Since in London the average life expectancy was only
thirty-five years in the more affluent parishes, and twenty-five
years in the poorer areas, it may have been the city that killed
him. But this roll-call of death had one necessary consequence. Half
of the population were under the age of twenty. It was a youthful
culture, with all the vigour and ambition of early life. London
itself was perpetually young.
The first test of Shakespeare’s own vigour came only three months
after his birth. In the parish register of 11 July 1564, beside the
record of the burial of a weaver’s young apprentice from the High
Street, was written: Hic incipit pestis. Here begins the plague. In
a period of six months some 237 residents of Stratford died, more
than a tenth of its population; a family of four expired on the same
side of Henley Street as the Shakespeares. But the Shakespeares
survived. Perhaps the mother and her newborn son escaped to her old
family home in the neighbouring hamlet of Wilmcote, and stayed there
until the peril had passed. Only those who remained in the town
succumbed to the infection.
The parents, if not the child, suffered fear and trembling. They had
already lost two daughters, both of whom had died in earliest
infancy, and the care devoted to their first-born son must have been
close and intense. Such children tend to be confident and resilient
in later life. They feel themselves to be in some sense blessed and
protected from the hardships of the world. It is perhaps worth
remarking that Shakespeare never contracted the plague that often
raged through London. But we can also see the lineaments of that
fortunate son in the character of the land from which he came.
Chapter Two
Shee Is My Essence
Warwickshire was often described as primeval, and contours of
ancient time can indeed be glimpsed in the lie of this territory and
its now denuded hills. It has also been depicted as the heart or the
navel of England, with the clear implication that Shakespeare
himself embodies some central national worth. He is central to the
centre, the core or source of Englishness itself.
The countryside around Stratford was divided into two swathes. To
the north lay the Forest of Arden, the remains of the ancient forest
that covered the Midlands; these tracts were known as the Wealden.
The notion of the forest may suggest uninterrupted woodland, but
that was not the case in the sixteenth century. The Forest of Arden
itself included sheep farms and farmsteads, meadows and pastures,
wastes and intermittent woods; in this area the houses were not
linked conveniently in lanes or streets but in the words of an
Elizabethan topographer, William Harrison, “stand scattered abroad,
each one dwelling in the midst of his own occupying.” By the time
Shakespeare wandered through Arden the woods themselves were
steadily being reduced by the demand for timber in building new
houses; it required between sixty and eighty trees to erect a house.
The forest was being stripped, too, for mining and subsistence
farming. In his survey of the region, for his Theatre of the Empire
of Great Britaine of 1611, John Speed noticed “great and notable
destruction of wood.” There never has been a sylvan paradise in
England. It is always being destroyed.
Yet the wood has always been a token of wildness and resistance. In
As You Like It and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in Cymbeline and Titus
Andronicus, it becomes a symbol of folklore and of ancient memory.
The great prehistoric forest of the Arden gave refuge to the British
tribes against the Roman invaders of their land; the name of Arden
itself derives from Celtic roots, meaning high wooded valleys. It
was the Celts who named the Ardennes in the region of north-eastern
France and Belgium. The same woods provided cover for the Celtic
people from the marauding Saxon tribes of the Hwiccas. The legends
of Guy of Warwick, imbibed by Shakespeare in his infancy, tell of
the knight’s hermitic concealment in the forest. His sword, used in
his fight against the encroaching Danes, was kept as a memorial in
Warwick Castle.
So Arden was a place of concealment as well as of industry; it was
an area that outlaws and vagrants might enter with impunity. That is
why wood-dwellers were regarded with some disfavour by those from
more open habitations. Wood-dwellers were “people of lewd lives and
conversation”; they were “as ignorant of God or any course of
civil life as the very savages amongst the infidels.” Thus the
history of rebellion mingles with that of savagery and possible
insurrection. The history runs very deep, and is inseparable from
the land itself. When in As You Like It Touchstone enters the wood,
he declares that “I, now am I in Arden, the more foole I” (761).
Shakespeare’s mother was Mary Arden. His future wife, Anne Hathaway,
dwelled in the outskirts of the forest. His consciousness of the
area was close and intense.
Beyond the Wealden, in the south of the county, lay the Fielden. In
Saxton’s map of Warwickshire, issued in 1576, this region is almost
wholly devoid of trees except for those growing in groves and small
woods. The rest of the land had been changed to scrub and pasture,
with the arable territory sweeping across the hills. In his
Britannia William Camden described it as “plain champaign country,
and being rich in corn and green grass yieldeth a right goodly and
pleasant prospect.” John Speed saw the view from the same spot as
Camden, on the summit of Edgehill, and noticed “the medowing
pastures with their green mantles so imbrodered with flowers.” It is
the quintessential picture of rural England. It was as much part of
Shakespeare’s vision as the forests beyond. It has been surmised
that the Fielden was rich and Protestant, while the Wealden was poor
and Catholic. This is the shorthand of popular prejudice, but it
suggests a context for that balancing of oppositions that came so
instinctively to Shakespeare.
The climate of Stratford was of a mild temper, protected by the
Welsh hills. There was much moisture in the land and in the air, as
the various streams running through Stratford itself would have
testified. The clouds from the south-west were known as “Severn
Jacks” and presaged rain. Only “the Tyrannous breathing of the
North,” as Imogen remarks in Cymbeline, “Shakes all our buddes from
growing” (257-8).
But what, in the larger sense, has this landscape to do with
Shakespeare or Shakespeare with the landscape? Some future genius of
topography may elucidate what has become known as the territorial
imperative, the sense of place that binds and determines the nature
of those who grow up on a certain spot of ground. Yet, in relation
to Shakespeare, we may already venture one conclusion. The evidence
of his work provides unequivocal proof that he was neither born nor
raised in London. He does not have the harshness or magniloquence of
John Milton, born in Bread Street; he does not have the hardness of
Ben Jonson, educated at Westminster School; he does not have the
sharpness of Alexander Pope from the City or the obsessiveness of
William Blake from Soho. He is of the country.
Chapter Three
Dost Thou Loue Pictures?
Stratford is a meeting place of roads crossing the Avon river; afon
is the Celtic name for river. The area had been settled from the
Bronze Age. There were barrows and stone circles, lying now
neglected, and there were “lowes” or graves where meets or open
courts once gathered. A Romano-British village was established on
the outskirts of the present town, lending weight and substance to
the weathered and enduring atmosphere of the place.
Stratford means a Roman straet, a paved road or highway, crossing a
ford. In the seventh century a monastery was established, by the
banks of the river; this was first in the possession of Aethelard,
subordinate king of the Hwiccas, but was then transferred into the
ownership of Egwin, Bishop of Worcester. Since this was soon after
the conversion of the Saxons to the Christian faith, we may say that
Stratford had a connection with the old religion from the earliest
times. The church in which Shakespeare was baptised was erected on
the site of the old monastery, and the dwellings of the monks and
their servants were once on land now known as “Old Town.” The
Domesday surveyors of 1085 carefully noted the presence of a village
on this spot, comprising farmers and labourers as well as the
ecclesiastical community; there was a priest, together with
twenty-one “villeins” and seven “bordarii” or cottagers.
It began to prosper in the thirteenth century. A fair of three days
was instituted in 1216; it was supplemented by four other fairs held
at various times of the year, one of which lasted for fifteen days.
A survey of 1252 reports 240 “burgages,” or properties held on a
yearly rental from the lord of the manor, as well as numerous shops,
stalls and tenements. Here were shoemakers and fleshmongers,
blacksmiths and carpenters, dyers and wheelwrights, engaged in
trades that Shakespeare would still have seen on the streets of his
childhood. The medieval town itself was approximately the same size
as it was at the time of Shakespeare’s birth. To be aware of
continuity-to be settled within it-was in a real sense his
birthright.
The open country beyond the town has been described as “tumbled
down,” covered with thorn bush and populated by rabbits. There were
few trees and no hedges, but flat land all around sprinkled with
cowslips and clover and yellow mustard. This unenclosed territory
comprised meadow land, arable land and rough pasture stretching
towards the hills. Of all writers, Shakespeare has the widest
vocabulary on the variety of weeds to be found in such places,
disentangling the hemlock from the cuckoo-flower, the fumiter from
the darnel.
There had been a church in Stratford, dedicated to the Holy Trinity,
since the early thirteenth century. It was erected beside the river,
of local undressed stone and yellow stone from the Campden quarries,
in the utmost harmony with the landscape; it possessed a wooden
steeple and was surrounded by elm trees, with an avenue of lime
trees leading to the north porch.
Shakespeare would have known the ancient bone-house on the north
side of the chancel, where the skeletons of the long-dead had been
deposited; it had also been a dormitory for the singing boys and a
study for the minister. Shakespeare and his contemporaries were
familiar with death, although this did not prevent Juliet from
crying out against the “Charnel house” with its “reekie shanks and
yealow chaples sculls” (2259). Local legend suggests that the
playwright had this bone-house in mind when he wrote this passage in
Romeo and Juliet, and local legend may be right. His own grave was
to be situated just a few feet from it, within the church itself,
and his solemn curse against anyone who “moves my bones” acts as a
reminder. There were other intimations of mortality: a college, or
house for chantry priests praying in perpetual intercession for the
dead, had been erected on the western side of the churchyard in
1351.
Of equal antiquity was the Guild of the Holy Cross, established in
Stratford at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This was a
society of lay people devoted to the festivals and institutions of
their faith; it was a “friendly society” where, by payment of an
annual subscription, its members would be assured of a fitting
funeral. But it was also a communal society, with its own wardens
and beadles who supervised the interests of the town as well as the
benefactions of the church.
If Shakespeare knew one public building in Stratford thoroughly
well, it was the chapel of this guild; it was erected beside the
school where he was taught, and each weekday morning he attended
prayers here. And then there were the bells. The little bell called
the boy to school in the morning; the great bell tolled at dawn and
dusk, and was “the surly sullen bell” of the sonnet that tolled at
the time of dying and the time of burial. It eventually tolled for
Shakespeare when he was laid in the Stratford ground.
(Continues…)
Nan A. Talese
Copyright © 2005
Peter Ackroyd
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-385-51139-6
Excerpted from Shakespeare
by Peter Ackroyd
Copyright © 2005 by Peter Ackroyd.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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