The Late Mr Shakespeare (13 page)

Now that if only for a moment the boy Shakespeare had held the future in his memory, he was no longer content to listen to the tales told by the midwife Gertrude.

Instead, he had his own stories to tell. On winter evenings, once a week, Mary Shakespeare would sit sewing shrouds by the fire and little Willy was allowed to stay up late to entertain her while his father was busy fulfilling himself at the alehouse. As a reward, when they heard the chimes at midnight, if John had not come home, his mother would take the lad to bed with her, and play sweet tricks upon his person. But that is not the point.

What tales did William Shakespeare tell his mother?

He told her who set the sun on fire, what poppies dream, and where breath goes when it is breathed out on a frosty morning.

He told her of a great bird called a Ruck, that could carry a man on its back.

He told her of a floating island that danced in the sea to the sound of music made by sunlight on the waves.

He told her of a spindle that caught fire for love of the queen’s fingers who used it at her spinning.

He told her of cities at the bottom of the sea, and of rusty anchors that had been found fixed in the tops of mountains.

He told her of a baker who thought his body was made of butter and who would not sit in the sun or near the fire for fear of melting.

He told her of the worlds that were inside each flake of the falling snow.

He told her the story of the two swallows that were lazy in love and so missed the flying of the other swallows South. How the two birds could not think what to do when winter came, so flew down under the waters of the River Avon and held their breath. And how the Avon froze over, and when the ice broke a fisherman found the two swallows in a block of ice, locked beak to beak where they had breathed into each other, kissing to keep alive under the water. And how the fisherman took the birds in the ice and warmed them on his stove, and when the ice fell away as water hissing on the stove, the swallows flapped their bright blue wings and flew out of the window.

He told her of the werewolves of Meath, and the tale of the white raven.

He told her how Launcelot fought with the demon cats.

He told her of Richard Sans Peur and the unquiet corpse.

He told her of Merlin and Vivian, and of the fly with the wooden leg.

He told her of Hamlet in Scotland, and of True Thomas and the Queen of Elphame.

He told her of the widow who wore horseshoes, and the tale of the mouse, the bird, and the sausage.

He told her of fairy rings,
*
and of how he had danced in them with men wearing silver shoon and green pantaloons that were buttoned with bobs of silk.

All this, and more, the boy William Shakespeare told his mother Mary, by the fireside, according to some.

But others say that he never said much at all.

I have learnt from sources outside the family that the boy was in fact at first mistaken for a dunce. These neighbours report that Shakespeare was slow to read and slower to write, and that far from pouring out stories by the glow of a winter fire he was a moping and miserable child, taciturn in the extreme, who never spoke unless he was spoken to. He would shut himself up in his bedroom, and cared for no companions. Sometimes he would burst into tears for no reason that anyone could understand. At other times, he would stare into someone’s face for many minutes together, without appearing to observe them or acknowledging who they were. There were neighbours wise enough to see madness in these peculiarities, but none who discerned the self-absorption of beginning genius.

This uninspired version of the childhood of William Shakespeare would have it that he learnt his letters finally from an old illuminated manuscript. Then, according even to his detractors, a sudden change took place in the boy, and at seven years old, it is said, he would read without urging,
and read anything and everything, from morning to night, if his mother would let him. She, for her part, only worried at this development, lest her son go blind.

He was a handsome child, all seem agreed. His eyes were blue, flecked (when he was excited) with the wild burning colour of bracken in autumn. At other times (when he was thoughtful) they were as deep and inscrutable as a forest pool cobbled with leaves and shadows that do not move. His features were fine, yet delicate. His forehead was slightly out of proportion to the rest of his face. His hair in those days was gold – not the colour of common straw, but the kind of pure, fiery gold you find hidden in strange amber. His lips were red and full, if a touch ascetic. His nose was straight and long, very wide at the nostrils. His hands were large, with long, tapering fingers which he was fond of waving about as he talked, and making shadow-pictures with on the wall. Everyone praised the gentleness of his manner. The number of times WS has been described as ‘gentle’, man and boy, is indeed remarkable. Sometimes I wish he had been less so. Had he not been so gentle it might have been easier to know him, or to remember what one encountered apart from the gentleness. But I do not think he was gentle through and through. When I seek to find an emblem for the heart of William Shakespeare the image that comes most readily and indelibly to mind is of a snow-gentled hawthorn. There was always something sharp at the core of his sweetness. Yet he was, as even Ben Jonson admitted, a very lovable spirit; and, indeed, he was honest, and of an open and free nature.

This was the boy William Shakespeare who at the end of August, 1571, being then seven years and four months old, was admitted into the Grammar School at Stratford.

Here’s Shakespeare’s hornbook. The handle, pierced with a round hole, has lost the piece of string which once attached the little primer to his girdle. A single leaf of yellow parchment is set in the gnawed oak frame, with a slice of transparent horn protecting it. This went with him every day when he went to school.

Here is Shakespeare’s alphabet, both large and small, followed by a barbaric regiment of monosyllables:
ab eb ib ob ub / ba be bi bo bu
. (I read the chant straight across at the second line. See where Holofernes comes from, with his baaing and his bleating?)

Here is Shakespeare’s Lord’s Prayer, his
Paternoster
cut out in black-letter, with above it his
In nomine
, in Gothic script:
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, & of the holy Ghost
.

This pellucid horn, cool to the touch, was what saved these letters from Shakespeare’s inky fingers as he pored over
them. I hold in my aged hand what he held once in his young one, reciting in the big schoolroom, at the top of the stone stairs, under beams of chamfered oak, the master enthroned on high at his desk before him, his assistant behind, rod ready for the boys who had not learnt their lesson.

Ben Jonson sneered that the late Mr Shakespeare knew ‘small Latin, and less Greek’, but I say that the education he received at the King’s New School at Stratford was not to be sniffed at. Learning was highly thought of there in Shakespeare’s youth, and the magister got
£
20 a year (which was more than a master at Eton). The school itself was free to the sons of notable citizens. John Shakespeare was certainly that in the year that William entered it. That was the year the butcher served as bailiff to the town. That year and the next Will was in what they called ‘petty school’, sitting down with the other boys, but learning the rudiments. In fact he never studied the
quadrivium
– arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy. His lot was the
trivium
– the first or ‘trivial’ part of the medieval curriculum, still then in vogue. In other words, Shakespeare learnt the essentials of all knowledge: grammar itself, and logic, and rhetoric. He left before he got to the second stage.

Why did he leave?

I’ll be coming to that, as my grandfather the bishop used to promise his choirboys.

So what did Shakespeare learn from this trivial schooling?

He learnt an educated disbelief. I think he learnt above all how to take what he needed from his studies, how to leave the rest.

And what exactly did he study?

Latin, some Greek, more French than you might think
likely in the provinces (in
Henry V
the dialogue in that language is grammatically accurate if not idiomatic). History. Biblical bits and pieces – I’ve counted more than two hundred references to things in the Bible in his plays, nearly all of them of an unmystical cast, thank God; for instance, he seems to have been especially impressed by the story of Cain and Abel, the treachery of Judas, and the parable of the Prodigal Son. Then, of course, he studied the major Roman poets and historians and orators. And how to parse a sentence. And how to scan.

Which authors in particular did he read there?

Ovid (I have his copy, with his signature), Virgil, the comedies of Plautus, and the tragedies of Seneca. Prudentius, Boethius, Livy, Sallust. But all such education comes out only in his prentice work. There he can’t help letting us know what he knows, like a bright boy forever raising his arm in the classroom. Later, Mr S stopped showing off. He forgot what he had read, and he wrote without reading. But even then the occasional memory from that room at the top of the open stone staircase came in useful. Palingenius, for instance, whose
Zodiac of Life
, running to 9000 Latin hexameters, he’d had to parse, memorise, and translate at the rate of one hundred lines a week, gave him one remembered line:
All the world’s a stage
. Horace came in handy when he was writing the sonnets, so it seems, and in
Titus Andronicus
you will find an aphoristic villain who has read him also, ‘in the grammar long ago’.

Would you make William Shakespeare a great scholar?

Not at all, sir. Not like John Selden, or Ben Jonson. Not even like William Smith, his exact contemporary, who went on from Stratford school to matriculate at Oxford.

Wasn’t he fancy’s child?

Madam, I perceive you know your Milton! But Milton never knew our man at all. Leonard Digges, stepson to one of his executors, got it better in another of those prefatory poems in the Folio, where he says,
Nature only helped him
. By her
dim light
Mr Shakespeare made his way. No scholar he, yet his scholarship was profound. What he learnt in the King’s New School was from the
method
of what was done there in the name of education, where every side of every question was considered, and different voices encouraged equally to express opposing views. In place of dogmatic definition, versatility of presentation was in favour. No bad training for a future dramatist.

Which book left most mark on him, apart from the Bible?

William Lyly’s
Grammar
. He quotes it in his plays ten times or more.

Does that mean he admired it?

I’d say not. I think it only means he remembered it. I have seen Shakespeare’s desk in the Stratford schoolroom. In the lid of it he carved the words
Nulla emolumenta laborum
(‘There is no reward for work’), which is Lyly turned upside-down. In fact, sobersides Lyly is often comical, though of course he didn’t mean to be. His
Grammar
is full of saws that cut no ice for William. For instance, ‘
homo
is a common name to all men.’ Mr S has Gadshill, a sententious thief, recite this schoolboy wisdom to impress his partners in crime. They are duly impressed. But the Bailiff’s son wasn’t. The
Grammar
also promotes a Calvinistical morality, which Mr Shakespeare always found amusing. For instance, it claims ‘it is most healthful to get up at dawn.’ This sounds more plausible in Latin, and Sir Toby invokes that Latin in
Twelfth Night
.
A
drunkard, in truth he goes to bed with the sunrise, like John Shakespeare.

Do you make Shakespeare out a cynic, like yourself?

Madam, you flatter me. I know nothing of Antisthenes, nor Diogenes neither. As for Mr Shakespeare, what his Stratford education gave him was the start of a way of understanding human nature in all its complexity and contradictoriness. That understanding, though, was never anybody’s but his own. Consider: Ben Jonson had much the same sort of schooling, at Westminster, under Camden, and applied himself much more thoroughly to the curriculum. His
Catiline
is a fair example of the result – a classical construction, good warring against evil, all clear as cold. But if you take Shakespeare’s version of the same material in
Julius Caesar
what you find is a hero who is in part a villain, and a tyrant who is heroic. Which is more true to life, the truer poetry? WS, by the way, never got his due from Jonson, and he knew it. He was responsible for getting Jonson’s first plays put on, and his rival resented that. If you look at everything Jonson said about Shakespeare there is always some barb concealed in there amidst the praise. He knew that Shakespeare was the better dramatist, and it choked him. He was always a praiser of himself, and a contemner and scorner of others. As for Mr WS, he never went in much for criticising other writers. But he made one pun sending up Jonson’s classical pretensions, when he stood godfather to a son of Ben’s, and gave the boy a dozen latin spoons (that is, spoons made of latin, a kind of brass). These, he said, were for Jonson to translate. Shakespeare himself never needs translation, nor does his verse ever sound translated. Ovid I know he loved. But he remembered him mostly from
Golding’s English version – though he did employ a Latin couplet from the
Amores
as epigraph to
Venus and Adonis
. You could say he got his five-Act structure from Terence and Plautus. But what he filled it with is pure impure English hodge-podge.

Who were William Shakespeare’s teachers at his school?

First, Simon Hunt. Then, Thomas Jenkins. Last, John Cotton.

Do we know much about them?

Enough, perhaps. Hunt and Cotton were both Catholics. Hunt had to see down a little rebellion among his pupils, following the St Bartholomew Massacre. They smashed some windows and threw a few books about. I can’t see Willy having any great stomach for this, even at eight years old. Hunt was a man of parts, evidently. When his religion forced his resignation, he went off abroad, where he became a Jesuit, and died in Rome. Cotton was probably a good teacher, too. He was a graduate of Brasenose College, Oxford.

What about Thomas Jenkins? Was he a Papist?

No, sir. He was some sect of Puritan. Shakespeare makes fun of him, I believe, in the character of Sir Hugh Evans in
The Merry Wives of Windsor
, where there is a schoolroom scene in which he makes fun of himself too, as a recalcitrant pupil called Will. Quite evidently this Welsh Jenkins was far from possessing a powerful brain. What is certain is that right in the middle of one school year, when Shakespeare was fourteen, the governors got rid of the teacher suddenly. He was given
£
6 to relinquish his duties and hand the cane over to Cotton, a competent master of the old type, lately down from Oxford.

Do you say Shakespeare was taught well? By two Papists and a Puritan!

I say nothing of the sort. I say he learnt from their extremes a
via media
, a middle way.

Which master had the greatest influence upon him?

Jenkins, in my opinion. He taught him something about foolishness. And remember that he was a Welshman, and that he seems (judging from his caricature as Hugh Evans) to have abused the English language thoroughly. It is just possible that he was the person who first gave William Shakespeare some notion of the possibilities that lie in stitching Latin and Saxon words together to make new compounds, and of playing off the one strain in our tongue against the other. The portrait of Evans is not without affection. And someone such may well have served to set the boy Shakespeare off on the love-affair with language that lasted all his life, finding new terms for new times, setting fire to English!

How did his school day go? Do we have any details?

He lived close by the school – about a quarter of a mile away. The bell started ringing at a quarter to six every morning in summer, an hour later in winter. On the stroke of six the pupil was supposed to be in class. So Will would rise and say his prayers and wash his morning face until it shone and sometimes comb his hair and greet his parents and always collect his books and then shoulder his satchel before creeping like a snail unwillingly down Henley Street and Chapel Street to the corner of Chapel Lane where the school was situated just behind the Guild Chapel. There were thirty desks in the room beneath the long rafters. Everyone chanted ‘Good morning, sir’ to the master, then lessons would begin with choral singing. (Will’s favourite,
as I have reason to know, was the 24th Psalm, especially verses 7 to 10.) This morning session lasted until eleven. Will would then trot home to help his mother with the housework. You can suppose from what he has to say about schools and schoolboys in his plays that he always went out a good bit faster than he came in. If he was lucky then his father might be in a jovial mood and allow him to draw ale from the cask and pour it into a pitcher and say grace for the family before they all sat down to dinner at noon – this was a privilege of being the eldest son. After dinner he would go back to school at one o’clock, and stay there until five, with just fifteen minutes’ recreation. Thursdays and Saturdays, he had half-days, school finishing at noon. Sundays there was no school. Then he went to church.

Were the boys flogged?

Soundly, sir, when they were obstinate and ungovernable. Moral advice would also be given to complete their punishment. ‘God has sanctified the rod,’ as Seager says in his
The Schoole of Vertue and the Book of Good Nourture for Children
, the last word on the subject, published when William Shakespeare was just thirteen. ‘Thus it must be used as the instrument of God.’ I knew myself a schoolmaster who in winter would ordinarily on a cold morning whip his boys over, for no other purpose than to get himself a heat.

When are you going to tell us some more about the Misses Muchmore?

Fie, madam! Shame upon you! Do you want
your
pretty bottom smacked, or what?