Shakespeare: A Life (6 page)

council had seen the town through sorrow. In London the Crown wanted
settlement, stability, a tactical delay with Spain (before a war
Elizabeth could ill afford); merchants had got round the Antwerp
embargo and would have Hamburg as an outlet -- cloth was being sold
abroad. Stratford after its plague was fairly happy, and John
Shakespeare was close to achieving high honour.

For his documents and dignity, John had a ring-seal with the initials
IS, to press in wax. Mary had a delicate seal, showing a running
horse.
¹⁶
Mary's pretty seal was typical of her time when simple but finely
shaped intaglios, rings, and necklaces were much liked, along with
bright colours in dress and decoration. At Wilmcote she had known
painted cloths, which kept out the draughts. Their tempera tints on
wide strips of canvas, for walls, showed biblical or mythological scenes
adorned with mottoes or 'sentences' ( Shakespeare recalls in
The Rape of Lucrece
:
'Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw | Shall by a painted cloth
be kept in awe' -- lines 244-5). Arden's house had eleven of such
wall-cloths, including one in an upstairs bedroom worth 26
s.
6
d.
(a good sum in 1556, the value of nine of his swine).
¹⁷
Their mottoes were no more subtle than the Elizabethan posies
(which Hamlet mocks) engraved on the flat inner surfaces of rings: 'MY
HEART AND 1, UNTIL I DYE' or 'NOT TWO, BUT ONE, TILL LIFE BE GONE'.
But the brevity, age, and universality of mottoes appealed to a people
who liked old, well-rubbed, pithy truth as much as wit and invention.
In Stratford's mainly oral culture, wisdom was stored up in
commonplaces, which are one early basis of the art of a poet who could
give audiences, at last, a maxim such as 'The readiness is all.'

The life in flowers and trees, gardens, orchards, and fields at all
seasons appealed to Mary's son, and no poet has responded with more
pleasure to nature. Yet the town was flat, and a boy's eyes might take
in nothing more amazing at first than cowslips, burnet, and clover, or
a river in flood, caterpillar swarms, or a 'curious-knotted garden'.
The devotion of the mature Shakespeare appears with odd intensity in
his making so much of banal nature, 'thistles, kecksies, burrs', or
the domestic garden, or nature's excess or waste. It is as if in his
early youth the drama of diurnal nature had been intense enough. A
small boy could not travel far, and orchards and gardens between Gild
Pits

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and the Woolshop perhaps had to satisfy him on many a day; later the
shire's variety drew him strongly. What this boy saw and felt in early
years was affected by his experience of Mary -- who for thirty months
had had him as her only child to adore, though she soon had others.
Gilbert Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity on 13 October 1566 --
and may have been named after the glover Gilbert Bradley who became a
capital burgess in 1565.

When
Gilbert was very small, William was in his fifth year, and well
cherished. One of his greatest gifts was his understanding of feeling,
and that was surely nourished by Mary. Heroines in his comedies would
be notable for their stability and their resourceful minds, and be as
affecting and vulnerable even when, like Julia or Rosalind, they had
wit and capability. He was to respond easily to an Ovidian love ethic,
and give a subtle and persuasive sense of how women feel and think. He
must have studied Mary well, and she, after pleasing her father, was
not likely to be hard with a son; he was not blighted by too many
rules.

Richard Mulcaster, who taught
the poet Spenser, wrote of the need to make a Tudor boy 'most able'.
Music is a 'glasse', says that teacher, 'wherein to behold both the
beawtie of concord, and the blots of dissension even in a politic body'.
¹⁸
If music helped one to know society it also changed moods at home and
lessened the divide between fathers and sons. Parents danced and
taught their children to dance, and many families had a tabor, lute,
or recorder. Shakespeare was not the only boy born into the middling
ranks to get a very expert, if informal, training in music's
fundamentals. Even in the Midlands one might know the sonorous drone
of a bagpipe. One could watch and hear morris-dancers at Whitsun, all
dressed in garish costumes with bells on ankles and a hobby horse (or a
horse's head in cloth or another light material) drawn over one
dancer's head. The disguises, with the strange rhythms of the morris,
appealed to many. This loud, outlandish ritual with its thwacking
sticks had in it an aspect of drama or emotive performance common to
all music, and a people in love with verbal rhythms fell easily under
music's spell. Elizabethans loved music, too, as an antidote to
boredom or low spirits; gloomy talk was disliked, though pessimism was
attractive when travelling players feigned it.

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In russet dresses, most often not of cotton but of coarse woollen
homespun, children were much loved, but without status -- as if they
were mere nits, gnats. A boy, however, before he was 6, could leave off
a russet dress. Till he did, he looked like a girl. Now he would wear a
jacket or jerkin over a doublet, and struggle into skinny, long,
knitted hose, though the hose often required mending and might be
saved if he wore common loose fustian slops, or shiny breeches pulled
in at the knee. He was then a small, unformed, man, eyeing his
father's world.

William was to know
his father's ill luck and downfall. (Partly because he served on the
council, we have evidence of John Shakespeare's life and of the family
experience of his son in years ahead.) In the late 1560s, however,
John scaled the heights, and became head of the borough's council. He
was then at last Master Shakespeare, mayor or High Bailiff Stratford,
and he knew his advantages as a townsman well enough since he was able
to send his little son to school.

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Paid for the foote stoole
tha
^t
M
^r
bayliff standeth on ij
^d
[2
d.
] (Borough accounts of Stratford-upon-Avon)

In the late 1560s Stratford had only about a dozen streets, fewer than
240 households, and a populace (lately reduced by epidemic) of 1,200
people at most; yet relatively speaking the market town was not small.
A day's ride to the north, Birmingham with its lorimers (makers of
metal parts for bridles and saddles), nailers, and other metal craftsmen
was about the same size, and the red-walled, cloth-manufacturing city
of Coventry less than twenty miles from Stratford had only 7,000 or
8,000 people -- though it was one of the largest English towns. The
largest city outside London was Norwich, with fewer than 15,000
inhabitants. Liverpool had 900 or 1,000, Gloucester about 5,000,
Worcester no more than 7,000. A majority of the Queen's subjects lived
in tiny, scattered villages and hamlets of fifty or sixty people or
less.

Certainly, a borough town of
some size and diversity of crafts gave one a chance to observe the
nation's practical life -- the real life of politics, trade, petty
crime, religion, passion, and fate. Among those who best understood
society and human aspirations in this age were Marlowe and
Shakespeare, both products of market towns and sons of craftsmen.
Christopher Marlowe grew up in a shoemaker's house in Canterbury, a
town of about 700 families. Shakespeare had advantages in belonging to a
mercantile governing class -- he was, after all, the eldest son in a
respectable bourgeois family which was one of the handful of families
that ran Stratford.

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John Shakespeare had become fairly affluent before rising to
prominence. Keeping the borough accounts for well over three years, he
even lent the town moderate sums of money; the council still owed him
7
s.
3
d.
when he made his last report ( 15 February 1566).
¹
The chamberlains' office kept up functions of the Holy Cross Gild's
proctors, and John's work carried prestige. He served longer than he had
to. He commissioned and constructed, repaired and hired, dealt with
good and bad workmen alike. As a director of accounts, he was bound
to rise to civic leadership. After William Bott -- who was then living
at New Place -- was expelled from council for failing to 'cum to hys
answer' for opprobrious words spoken, John Shakespeare was chosen
alderman in Bott's stead in July 1565.

And yet John's rise, no doubt, was partly a matter of necessity. The
Elizabethan Corporation found it hard to fill up its numbers; some of
the men who were most eligible to serve, as aldermen and bailiffs,
lived just outside the borough boundaries, and so declined their
services without penalty. A chamberlain of John's experience was a prime
asset, and any failure in his aldermanic duties would have been taken
at the council as no small matter.

It settled on him as a good choice in 1565. Two years later John was
nominated, with Ralph Cawdrey and Robert Perrott, to stand for
election as High Bailiff of the borough. The council's election had a
clear result, with only three votes cast for the glovemaker of Henley
Street as a tally shows:

o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o Robart perot o o o John shakspeyr Raf Cawdrey
²

After Perrott refused to serve, John declined, and with a good excuse.
The bailiwick was onerous and he may then have lacked time for the
office. A master glove-cutter was likely to keep three or four stitchers
busy, and he had a glover's shop to run. But when elected the next
year, he consented, and so in fur-trimmed robes and standing it seems
on the bailiff's footstool, he began to preside over Stratford on 1
October 1568.

We have a clerk's report of his first meeting in 'hall', and this

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includes words said or sanctioned by the new bailiff. He agreed to fine
stiffly men such as Perrott (who twice refused the bailiwick), but he
was politic about solidarity and apparently referred to his group as
the 'Brotherhode'or the 'Balyf and Bretherne' (words deleted in the
official order of 1 October). John's tact was traditional, and effective
at council, which was later told by arbitrators to 'be Lovers and
ffrendes' even with the likes of Perrott.
³

Stratford ruled itself well, and until William's thirteenth year his
father, as a trusted, moderate alderman, with disputes to settle and
rules to enforce, was at the centre of civic life. For a year John was a
justice of the peace, and thus an agent of the powerful Privy Council
at Westminster. He heard petty cases at Stratford's Court of Record,
framed laws at halls, served as coroner and clerk of the market, and
welcomed the judges after Easter and Low Sunday, and at the two
Leets, or Law Days. For another year ( 1571-2) he was to be a justice
and deputy bailiff, and his known duties seldom kept him far from
home.

An alderman's son heard something of the
collective
good of town, brethren, and of course family. To one's own father,
one owed love and respect. William was to refer to 'domestic awe' as
being as natural to children as night-rest
⁴
and, in time, he was to exploit the rending, moving Tudor theme of
the love and fealty due a parent. In his plays we have very good
evidence as to what he came deeply to understand, or signs of his
intimate knowledge. Filial ardour was a much-desired feature of Tudor
life, and in the London theatres it would be a common theme: what is
remarkable is that John's son later treated it so often with a
masterly flexibility and confidence, as if felt along the pulse. 'To
you your father should be as a god', Theseus warns Hermia in
A Midsummer Night's Dream
.
( 1. i. 47), and in this ethic, at least in the theatre, cool
compliance with a father's wishes is not enough. Cordelia's mere
dutifulness drives Lear to rage, and Desdemona's cold subservience
numbs her father's heart, before we hear that grief 'shore his old
thread in twain' ( V. ii. 213) when she defies him to marry the Moor.
Filial love motivates Prince Hal, but it compounds Hamlet's anguish, and
Macbeth's crime is the worse for its implicit and terrible element of
parricide.

Moreover, no son is immune to a father's particular, idiosyncratic

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influence, and John Shakespeare was an impressive and versatile man.
By and large, he pulled himself up by his bootstraps. His father
Richard Shakespeare was probably born a few miles to the north, either
at Balsall, Baddesley Clinton, Wroxall, or Rowington, the last a hive
of Catholics and the home of more sixteenth-century Shakespeares than
any other Warwickshire parish. It is certain that by 1529 Richard was a
husbandman at Snitterfield -- his name is copied as 'Shakstaff' four
years later -- and that he rented a house of Robert Arden that 'doth
abut on the High Street'.
⁵
After his death his goods in 1561 were valued at £38 17
s.
o
d.
(a sum befitting a prudent farmer) and his estate's administration
went to his son John, who was relying on his own acumen and skill. Our
earliest report of John in connection with a craft (when he is called
'Johannem Shakyspere de Stretforde,
in comitatu Warwicensi,
glover', on 7 June 1556, at the Court of Record) suggests that he was
by then independent of his father. A glover acquired a fine touch
after seven years' apprenticeship; cutting soft leather 'tranks' is an
art, and holed leather is not repairable. John had to be shrewd to be
free for civic duties, and his town service suggests an almost feudal
commitment. He broadened his money-making ventures, as many craftsmen
did, while competing with master glovers at Stratford and indirectly
at Worcester and Oxford; in fact, in records of 1573 and 1578 he is
also described as a 'whyttawer'. A whittawer (or white-tawyer) would
buy pelts from butchers or other sellers, boil some of his sheepskins
to make size to fill pores, tan the skins of goats, deer and other
animals with salt and alum (aluminium sulphate), hang them out in his
drying-sheds, and then shave them with paring knives and 'stake' the
skins to render them soft -- all before cutting, sewing, and finishing
a product.

Without helpers, John
could not have turned a profit, and his son had a chance to learn that
success in a craft depends on co-operation as well as painstaking
care. Tudor boys were made to emulate, and almost to revere, skilled
male and female artisans,
^★
and a wealth of

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