How to Teach Your Children Shakespeare (20 page)

Shakespeare’s Early Life

Stratford-upon-Avon at the time of Shakespeare’s birth was a prosperous market town of approximately eighteen hundred people. Shakespeare’s father, John Shakespeare, was a glove maker by trade, and Shakespeare was one of seven children, two of whom died in infancy. Because John Shakespeare was a bailiff (who functioned as a kind of mayor) of Stratford
when William was a youngster, we can be fairly certain that the boy attended the town’s grammar school from the age of five or six. At King Edward’s Grammar School, which can be visited to this day, Shakespeare would have attended classes six days a week learning Latin grammar and literature, then debate and rhetoric, and finally some Greek, from a series of teachers who were trained at Oxford University.

The school, of course, was for boys only, as were virtually all schools in the seventeenth century, and one of the school treats for the boys was to put on plays in Latin by ancient Roman authors. Certainly this was one of Shakespeare’s earliest encounters with the world of drama, and it is pleasing to assume that one play in which he performed was
The Menaechmi
by the Roman comic playwright Plautus.
The Menaechmi
is about twin brothers who are so identical that they cause untold confusion for a town full of colorful characters. Shakespeare based one of his earliest plays,
The Comedy of Errors
, on this plot; only Shakespeare did Plautus one better: He created two pairs of identical twin brothers, thereby doubling the comedy and the confusion.
The Comedy of Errors
is a perfect comedy for children since it relies less on subtlety than on classic elements of farce like mistaken identity and slapstick. It is also, by any measure, the shortest play Shakespeare ever wrote, so it is particularly good for younger children.

We can readily perceive from a survey of his plays that Shakespeare was a voracious reader. His favorite book seems to have been Ovid’s
Metamorphoses
, a collection of Roman mythological tales emphasizing transformation. A number of his plays and poems are based on Ovid’s stories, and approximately 90 percent of all of Shakespeare’s allusions to classical mythology refer to stories in
Metamorphoses
. Shakespeare also read widely in Virgil and Horace in Latin; Chaucer, Gower, and Spenser in English; and Petrarch and Boccaccio in Italian. In addition, he read a great deal of history in both English and Latin; and he seems to have spoken French with some proficiency—at least enough to write exchanges in French into some of his plays. In other words, despite never attending a university, Shakespeare was very well educated, to put it mildly.

The fact that Shakespeare’s father was a bailiff of Stratford also means that Shakespeare must have seen performances by the professional acting
companies that visited Stratford throughout his boyhood. This was precisely the period of English history when playwriting and playgoing were on the rise; and as new theaters were being built in London, so too bands of players roamed the countryside, bringing theater to market towns throughout England. As one distinguished historian puts it, “By the end of the century, theatergoing had developed into a craze.”

Shakespeare’s Mature Years

When he was eighteen, Shakespeare married a local woman named Anne Hathaway, who was twenty-six at the time. They had three children: a girl named Susanna, and twins named Hamnet and Judith. Hamnet died at the age of eleven, and while there are no firsthand accounts about how Shakespeare suffered, the plays contain repeated instances where a child dies and is deeply mourned. As for Shakespeare’s two daughters, Susanna and Judith both married, but Shakespeare’s direct family line died out in 1670.

King Edward VI grammar school in Stratford
(photo credit 21.1)

Chandos portrait of Shakespeare
(photo credit 21.2)

Compared with other dramatists of the time, we know a great deal about Shakespeare’s comings and goings throughout most of his life. We have six of his signatures on legal documents, and we have quite a few records of things like loans, fines, and land acquisitions. We also have a great many contemporaneous references to the man himself, and to his writings, by fellow writers and actors. What we do not have are any diaries or letters that might have told us how Shakespeare felt about things like family and friends. We
almost
had a family recollection of Shakespeare, but it never quite transpired: In 1661 a man named John Ward, the vicar of Stratford-upon-Avon, made a note in his diary that he should visit Judith Quiney, Shakespeare’s seventy-six-year-old daughter, and talk to her about her father before it was too late. But he waited too long, and Judith died before he got around to it. This is one of those literary “what ifs” that make the bookish among us grind our teeth in woe. It reminds me of Cassandra Austen burning the majority of Jane Austen’s letters after Jane’s death, apparently because she didn’t want her sister’s reputation tarnished.

From 1585 to 1592, when Shakespeare was between twenty-one and twenty-eight, we have no records of him at all. These are called the “lost years,” and almost since the time of Shakespeare’s death, scholars have speculated about what he was doing in those years. The speculations range from schoolteaching to practicing law to soldiering. In any case, starting in 1592 he begins to emerge in London as a playwright and actor. From this time on he is referred to in letters and other documents, and his name appears on many of the printed texts of his plays and poems.

During the period from 1592 until his retirement in 1613, Shakespeare lived and worked in London with occasional visits to Stratford to see his family. It is impossible to read anything into these domestic arrangements. Was Shakespeare unhappy at home, and did he flee to London to escape his family? Or was he a devoted father and husband who had to live in London to make a living in the theater? We just don’t know. All we really know about Shakespeare the man is that he was referred to more than once by his contemporaries as “gentle” Shakespeare and therefore appears to have been well liked; and that he was a successful businessman who ended up with a good deal of valuable property in Stratford, including one of the two best houses in the town.

Extant signature
(photo credit 21.3)

When we first hear about Shakespeare after those “lost years” of 1585–92, he is part of a London acting company called The Lord Chamberlain’s Men (later called The King’s Men). After a few years he became a “sharer,” or part owner, of the company; and we know from theater records of the time that he not only wrote plays for his company but also acted in them.

Throughout Shakespeare’s career, professional theater was organized around individual companies of players who could perform only under the patronage of the nobility. Thus, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men were in service to the Lord Chamberlain and wore his colors to official functions; in exchange, he granted them his protection and a license to perform. It was up to the companies to find their own venues for their performances, and such venues ranged from the courtyards of inns, to town squares, to the newly built permanent outdoor theaters in London with names like the Theatre, the Curtain, the Swan, the Fortune, and the Rose. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed in many if not all of them.

London also had a few indoor theaters in Shakespeare’s day (the most famous was called Blackfriars); and Shakespeare’s company was frequently invited to perform at court for Queen Elizabeth, then for her successor, King James.

The interior of the New Globe Theatre
(photo credit 21.4)

The Globe

We associate Shakespeare with one particular theater in London, the Globe, and the story of how it was constructed is so good that you should stop right now and tell it to your children. A tradesman named James Burbage had the vision to build the first-ever theater in London dedicated solely to housing theatrical productions. It was erected in 1576, and he named it, simply, the Theatre. By 1594 Shakespeare’s company was in residence there, and their leading actor was Richard Burbage, James’s son. Richard Burbage is a name to be reckoned with: He originated the roles of Richard III, Hamlet, Othello, and King Lear. (Not a bad resumé.) The Lord Chamberlain’s Men seemed destined to remain in the Theatre for years to come, but in 1597 the Burbages found their lease on the underlying land in jeopardy. (Not the theater building, just the land under it.) They tried to negotiate an extension, but the landlord refused to renew. What to do?

Here’s where the fun comes in. On the night of December 28, 1598,
Richard Burbage and his brother Cuthbert, as well as other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, including, we assume, Shakespeare, dismantled the entire building and transported it southward, timber by timber, across the Thames River. There, in an area called Southwark (pronounced “SUTH-ik”), they reassembled the theater and called it the Globe.

In early 1599, the Globe Theatre opened its doors to the public, where, for the next fourteen years, it housed the premieres of everything from
Hamlet
to
The Tempest
. It burned down in 1613 during a performance of Shakespeare and Fletcher’s
All Is True
(also known as
Henry VIII
), but a second Globe was rebuilt soon thereafter. That building was pulled down in about 1644, but tourists and playgoers can now visit a replica of the original Globe, which opened in 1997 only 250 yards from the site of the original.

Shakespeare’s Writing

As for Shakespeare’s greatest monument, the plays themselves, it is believed today that he wrote a total of thirty-eight (some scholars say thirty-nine or forty), and that a few of the lesser plays, such as
The Two Noble Kinsmen
and
Henry VIII
, were written with collaborators. (In addition, a few of the plays, including
Measure for Measure
and
Macbeth
, may have been altered slightly after Shakespeare’s death by a playwright named Thomas Middleton.) Shakespeare’s plays may be seen as falling into four periods, and although these periods are somewhat arbitrary, they are convenient for giving us a sense of Shakespeare’s overall output. It is impossible to be precise about the plays’ exact dates, but a basic chronology is generally agreed upon. And while the brief descriptions that follow are inevitably glib because they’re so short, you should use this list to familiarize yourself with the high points of the canon so that you can answer your children’s questions as we proceed. A chronology of all the plays appears at the end of the book.