Shakespeare: A Life (7 page)

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
court' 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,
bombastic 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
And heard a mermaid on a dolphin's back
Uttering such dulcet and harmonious breath
That the rude sea grew civil at her song.

( 11. i. 149-52)

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