Shakespeare (9 page)

More than any other dramatist of his period Shakespeare is concerned with the family; the nature and continuity of the family are invested with the utmost resonance, and can become a metaphor for human society itself. In his plays violence erupts between brothers more frequently than between fathers and sons. The father may be weak or self-serving, but he is never the target of hostility or revenge.

Much attention has been paid instead to the nature of sibling rivalry in Shakespeare’s plays, more specifically to the pattern of the younger brother usurping the place of the older. Edmund replaces Edgar in his father’s affections, and Richard III mounts upon the bodies of his siblings. The Wars of the Roses, as recounted by Shakespeare, can be regarded as a war between brothers. Claudius murders his brother, and Antonio conspires against Prospero. There are other variations upon this sensitive subject. Shakespeare refers to the murder of Abel by his younger brother, Cain, on twenty-five separate occasions. There is also the pervasive presence of envy and jealousy, most aptly captured in the fear of betrayal manifested by characters as diverse as Leontes and Othello. It is one of Shakespeare’s great themes. The biographer should resist the comfortable position of an armchair psychologist, but the connections are at least suggestive. Rivalry between brothers
emerges as effortlessly and instinctively in his drama as if it were a principle of composition.

The conditions in the Shakespeare household were of course wrapped in the vital tedium of daily life, beyond the purview of the dramatic imagination. There are, however, stray intimations of status and aspiration. In 1568, the year he became mayor or bailiff of Stratford, John Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms. It was natural, and practical, for a mayor to have a coat of arms for various memorials and banners. Now that he was appointed to high civic office he was able to seal his prominence by becoming a gentleman. Those known as gentlemen were “those whome their race and blood or at least their virtues doo make noble and knowne.”
²
They comprised some 2 per cent of the population.

John Shakespeare wished to be enlisted in this “register of the Gentle and Noble”
³
and, to qualify, he would need to demonstrate that he owned property and goods to the value of £250 and that he lived without the taint of manual labour; his wife was supposed to “dress well” and “to keep servants.”
⁴
He presented a pattern for his coat of arms to the College of Heralds, and his application was duly noted. The formula for his arms contained a falcon, a shield and a spear embossed in gold and silver; the falcon is shaking its wings, and holds a spear of gold in its right talon. Hence we interpret “shake spear.” The motto accompanying the device is
“Non Sanz Droict”
or “Not Without Right.” It is a bold assertion of gentility. For unknown reasons, however, John Shakespeare did not proceed with his application. He may have been unwilling to pay the heralds’ large fees. Or he may have had only a passing interest in what seems essentially to have been a civic duty.

But then, twenty-eight years later, his son arranged it for him. William Shakespeare renewed his father’s application, with the original coat of arms, and succeeded. At last his father was a gentleman. But if it had been a long-cherished ambition, it may have been done partly to please his mother. He was upholding his mother’s claims to gentility.

I
n 1569 the theatre
came to Stratford. Under the auspices of John Shakespeare, the mayor, the new players of London were allowed to perform in the guildhall and in the inn-yards of the town. It is an important moment in Shakespeare’s own history, too, when the five-year-old boy was first able to witness the world of pageantry and seeming. His father invited two sets of players to entertain the town, the Queen’s Men and the Earl of Worcester’s Men. It would indeed have been all-round entertainment complete with music and dancing, singing and “tumbling”; actors were also expected to be minstrels and acrobats. There were dumb-shows, and speeches, and pageants with drums and trumpets. There were duels and wrestlings. How much the young Shakespeare saw, or remembered, is an open question. But there is testimony from an exact contemporary who witnessed the players in Gloucester. He recalled that “at suche a play, my father tooke me with him and made mee stand between his legges, as he sate upon one of the benches, where we saw and heard very well.” It was a play of king and courtiers, of songs and transformations and colourful costumes. This contemporary goes on to say that “this sight took such impression in me that when I came towards mans estate,
it was as fresh in my memory as if I had seen it newly acted.”
¹

There were many more opportunities for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to see the London players. Ten groups of them came to Stratford
over the next few years, as part of their touring “circuit.” In one year alone five companies passed through. The Queen’s Men visited the town three times, and the Earl of Worcester’s Men travelled here on six separate occasions. There were performances by the Earl of Warwick’s Men, the Earl of Oxford’s Men, the Earl of Essex’s Men and several other groups of travelling players. They generally comprised companies of seven or eight, unlike the earlier players who numbered three men, a boy and a dog. The young Shakespeare would have been able to watch the best of the London troupes, therefore, imbibing the poetry and the spectacle of the emerging stage. The names of some of the plays in performance convey perhaps the atmosphere of the period—
A Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, Cambises, Horestes, Enough Is as Good as a Feast, Damon and Pithias, The Longer Thou Livest The More Fool Thou Art
are only some of a number of dramas that poured forth from the newly secularised profession of play-writing. The playwrights took their material from anything and everything—from histories to collections of romance, from the classical plays performed at the Inns of Court to popular burlesque, from spiritual allegory to fantastic legend. It was a world of witty repartee and declamation, but it was also a world of imaginary countries and mysterious islands, of strange seas and caverns, of unvarnished evil and unearthly goodness, of dramatic lament and generally exaggerated feeling. The young Shakespeare could watch these plays unfolding before him. He would inevitably, if unconsciously, acquire a sense of dramatic space and an ear for heightened dialogue or for declamations. It is appropriate that the English drama was coming to slow maturity in the same period as Shakespeare himself; they were both children of their time, sharing a newly awakened sense of possible achievement.

There were other forms of dramatic entertainment in Stratford. Whitsun “pastimes,” for example, were still being devised in 1583 by Davy Jones, a relative of the Shakespeares by marriage. These were mumming plays with plenty of ritual and symbolic action. Costumes and masks were worn; the characters were given names such as Big Head or Pickle Herring, while the action itself was concerned with slayings and miraculous healings. In
Return of the Native
Thomas Hardy describes what must have been one of the last true mummers’ plays, with a battle between St. George and a Turkish knight.

It is also likely that John Shakespeare took his son to Coventry, only twenty miles away, to witness the celebrated cycle of mystery plays performed in
that city. They were not formally discontinued until Shakespeare had reached his fifteenth year. In five separate dramatic passages Shakespeare mentions the performances of the popular stage villain of these religious entertainments, King Herod. He also uses the expression “All hail” as a harbinger of unfortunate events. In the New Testament Jesus uses this form of address as a blessing. But in the mystery plays it is given to Judas as a sign of threat, on greeting Christ before betraying him. We can infer that Shakespeare has picked up the unhappy connotations of the phrase from watching the mystery plays. So he was acquainted with the pageant wagons and their epic cycle, from Creation to Judgement. He heard the vulgar comedy of the “low” characters and the refined sentiments of their superiors. He saw the characteristic mingling of farce and spirituality, piety and pantomime; he listened to the mixture of lyrical songs and pounding pentameter, of Latinate diction and Anglo-Saxon demotic. It was an inclusive drama containing no less than the history of the world and the character of its peoples, played out against the background of eternity. It has often been suggested that some of the power of Shakespeare’s history plays is derived from his use of the elements of Christ’s Passion that he would have witnessed in the mysteries; the whole notion of his cyclical dramas, taking in so much of the history of the kingdom, seems a direct reflection of his earliest dramatic experiences.

Shakespeare himself refers to the “Death Mouth,” the portal of Hell constructed for the mingled fascination and alarm of the populace. The “Porter of Hell,” who played a large part in the mystery plays, re-emerges as the Porter in
Macbeth
. Critics have discerned parallels between the mystery plays and the plots of
Lear, Othello
and
Macbeth
. The baiting of Jesus reappears
in Julius Caesar
and
Coriolanus
. Shakespeare’s was the last era of the medieval mysteries. Yet throughout the history of English culture we see continuity rather than closure. Part of that continuity lies in the achievement of Shakespeare himself, who conveyed all the enchantment, ambiguity and passion of the old religious drama within the new forms of theatre. The masques in his plays are medieval in inspiration, as are the names of such characters as Slender and Shallow and Benvolio. One of Shakespeare’s last plays,
Pericles
, reverts to the medieval pageant form of the miracles. If he had not seen one when he was a child, then his is indeed a miracle of reinvention.

A
nd when Davy Jones
performed the Whitsun pastimes in front of the people of Stratford, was his young relative a part of the cast? The first accounts of his life suggest that in his youth Shakespeare was already an aspiring actor. In 1681 John Aubrey reports that “I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade, but when he kill’d a Calfe, he would do it in a
high style
, and make a Speech.”
¹
The “neighbours” may by the time of Aubrey’s visit have realised that their town had harboured a famous actor and tragedian, and shaped their memories accordingly; Aubrey himself is in any case a most unreliable narrator. It has often been proved, however, that behind the most fanciful account there lies a substratum of truth. And there may be a piece of authenticity even here. The act of “killing a calf” was in fact a dramatic improvisation performed by itinerant players at fairs or festivals; it was a form of shadow-play behind a cloth and in the accounts of the royal household in 1521 there is a payment to a man for “killing of a calfe before my ladys grace behynde a clothe.” (It is interesting that the image of the arras or cloth is a leitmotif in Shakespearian drama.) If there is a true memory in the neighbours’ reminiscences, therefore, it would be that of the young Shakespeare acting.

There is nothing so unusual in that. We are told that the young Molière—the actor and dramatist whom Shakespeare most closely resembles—was a “born actor.”
²
Dickens, with whom there are other similarities to Shakespeare, confessed that he had been an actor from his earliest childhood. The idea of acting here is not simply one of histrionics or bravado; it means the ability and the desire to perform in front of other people. It may represent a longing to be free of restricting circumstance, an urge towards more powerful or more interesting status, what Ulysses in
Troilus and Cressida
describes as the “spirit” that “in aspiration lifts him from the earth” (2453-4). That is why there are various speculations about the young Shakespeare joining a group of travelling players, during one of their sojourns in Stratford, before accompanying them to London.