Shakespeare: A Life (5 page)

on an eighteenth-century blunder.'
⁶
Oldys, writing a century and a quarter after Shakespeare died,
presumably had no evidence as to the birth-date other than the
ambiguous words on the tablet in the poet's monument at Holy Trinity,
'obiit anno . . . Ætatis 53' (he died in his fifty-third year), and
Chambers believed that Oldys probably made 'an incorrect use' of
these.
⁷
Edmond Malone, the exacting eighteenthcentury Shakespeare scholar,
expressed doubt that Joseph Greene, a curate of Stratford and Oldys's
contemporary, had any authority for declaring 23 April as the
birth-date other than the monument. It has been said to be 'especially
appropriate' that Shakespeare should have been born on St George's
Day, the day of England's patron saint; but the wish certainly does
not add up to a fact. Had his birth and death really occurred on two
23rds, of April, such a coincidence would surely have been noted
within a hundred years of his death. Yet we have no sign of this.
Strong family loyalty may well have moved Shakespeare's granddaughter
Elizabeth Hall to honour his memory, just ten years after he died, by
marrying on 22 April. Elizabeth's honouring his birthday as the 22nd
remains only a good possibility, suggested at first by De Quincey; but
it is supported by what we know of the closeness of John and Mary
Shakespeare's people. Despite a record that includes lawsuits and a
family fray, Ardens and Shakespeares knew the force of family ties (as
when many of them helped young Robert Webbe, Margaret Arden's son, to
acquire their own individual shares in an estate).
⁸
In brief, it is possible that Shakespeare was born on either the
21st, 22nd, or 23rd, but the day is still unknown. It is no more
likely that his birth-date was Sunday, 23, than Saturday, 22 April
1564.

As a young woman who had known
the death of her infants Mary Shakespeare must have been apprehensive
that month. She perhaps lay on a bed supported by the same simple,
cross-cross system of ropes used in most Elizabethan homes, and heard
advice from servants or housewives in their stiff, practical white
bodices of 'durance' -- that stout cloth that appears in Stratford's
records typically as 'boddies of durance'.
⁹

Christening was a festival with apostle-spoons and a white
chrisomcloth, basins, ewers, and towels at the parish church. And yet
the

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chances of a boy baptized in time of plague were not good. If a baby
died, the town's bell might be sounded, as when the clerk records a
'ringing of ye grete bell' for three small children.
¹⁰
A boy who survived would wear swaddling-clothes until he was ready for a little russetcoloured dress.

In June plague broke out at Leicester, and soon after at Coventry. On
11 July, when the vicar wrote 'Hic incepit pestis' in his burials
register, the plague was at Stratford. It burst into the town's
centre, two houses from Ely Street where Thomas Deege lost an
apprentice and then his wife Joanna. (The transmitting flea settled on
black rats living in wattle-and-daub houses, in thatch or walls.)
Plague was then 300 yards from Henley Street. John Shakespeare, as an
officer of the council, did not leave town, and as a leading burgess
in the Stratford Corporation he was unlikely to allow his wife to
leave.

At these times, fires were lit
in streets. Windows were sealed; doors admitted no visitors. William
in infancy probably knew a hot, airless house -- and yet work carried
on in the town. The fright of Henley Street neighbours would have been
evident, and the fear of a young mother -- with her first-born son to
protect -- must have been considerable. In any case, death came close
to the Woolshop. The terror of an epidemic was greater because people
knew it was infectious -- but no one could say why it crept into one
house and not another. What was clear, in August, was that the
infection had spread out from Deege the weaver's into High Street and
Ely Street and beyond; it had seemed to fly over the Avon, not
bothering with the bridge. Shakespeare's echoing in
Timon of Athens
of the belief that plague is caused by poison 'in the sick air' ( IV.
iii. 110-11) corresponds to his town's known experience.

Nearly two-thirds of the dead in the summer and autumn were women. 'Comfort's in heaven', Shakespeare would write in
Richard II
,
and 'nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief' ( II. ii. 78-9) --
but the fact is that in a well-organized town, women gave comfort
nursing the sick. Plague bacilli of the bubonic variety are not
transmitted from one

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human being to another, but a related variety of plague, which could
have been present, is highly contagious. If one inhaled a few droplets
of sputum sneezed or coughed into the air by a victim of pneumonic
plague one's death was nearly certain. Victims of plague in its more
common variety, in which the bubonic bacilli reproduce quickly and
spread throughout the whole biological system, knew much pain. Some
did survive, after noting the buboes (or swellings) in armpit or neck,
and seeing on the skin 'God's tokens' of orange, reddish, or darker
spots.
¹¹
At risk, the council met four times in crisis, and levied its own
members for funds to help the stricken. On 30 August burgesses and
aldermen met in the Gild garden -- on wooden benches -to avoid
contagion.

By September, one out of
every fifteen people in the parish was infected. Entire households
began to perish. Working as acting chamberlain, John seems to have
called in clerical help from outside. Later in the autumn, fewer died,
but Dixon of the Swan lost two stepdaughters in November and December.
In the last six months of 1564, Mary's infant was the object of more
than a mother's usual care and vigilance, if only because the
conditions of a severe plague were unusual. The emotional pressure of
Mary's concern for William, her need for him to live, her prayers,
tenderness, and watchfulness may be inferred from what we know of
Stratford's suffering and Mary's previous experience of burying one or
two of her girls. We have evidence of a situation, and of course must
not suppose that we have access to her thoughts. But we need no
psychological theory to explain a mother's ardent, sensible care for
her son, day after day, when small children are dying. A pattern of
Mary's special care for her son is also likely to have been set in
these months. Her interest in him cannot have faded suddenly when
Stratford was free of plague, and it is pertinent for us to think of
his life ahead for a moment. William's confidence cannot be
dissociated from the emotional support he must have found at home. As a
man he would lack a quirky egotism, as seems clear from his
relatively peaceful career in the theatre, a hive of tension. He was
not involved in Ben Jonson's kind of embroilments, or Marlowe's. He
has a calm, fine control of emotive materials, and his Sonnets, in the
artfulness of their structures, reveal a lordly, easy play over
feelings.

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In early life he must have been the focus of Mary's very urgently watchful, intense love.

People had been warned of deaths. For the first time, London's
corporation had printed plague-bills as broadsheets to keep towns
informed; Stratford's council did well to preserve order, and women,
not yielding to panic, consoled the afflicted at the risk of their
lives. Shakespeare's feeling for civic order is related to what he
came to know of Stratford.

After a plague much was burned. Windows were flung open, rooms aired
and scrubbed. By the time William was 3 or4, his street would have
been as dusty and filled with stray dogs as ever. (Unmuzzled dogs kept
on troubling the council.) Henley Street also teemed with children,
and George Ainge had two sets of twins to add to his numerous lot; he
and his wife had thirteen offspring. George sold fine fabrics. John
Ainge, the baker, also of Henley Street, had seven children including
twins. An older boy might come in from Shrovetide football with a
bloody face, and younger boys and girls shouted or fought, ran,
babbled, and played. The area behind the houses on the Gild Pits side
might have been a badly managed green kindergarten, and adults cared
little out of doors for silence.

But
indoors a boy was in a polite, much more orderly, reserved world --
though the houses look hard and bare today. At John Shakespeare's now
combined dwelling, an oak-beam frame rises on a stone foundation-wall,
and at ground level timbers are close-studded or nine inches apart
(an early Tudor pattern to keep thieves from breaking into a house).
Wattle and daub, or plaster, fills in between the timber frames. The
upper storey has rectangular panels, so that rooms upstairs have less
timber and seem to invite decoration. John's hall, or the main
downstairs chamber, has a floor of broken, blue-grey stone from the
Alne hills. There is a brick-and-stone fireplace. Opening out of the
hall and not at right angles to the main façade, the kitchen has a
large hearth. Here one sees iron cooking-tackle, a hanger, a pothook
and chain, and a pair of cobbards to hold up spits.

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'Be not afeard', says Caliban in
The Tempest
,
'The isle is full of noises, | Sounds, and sweet airs, that give
delight and hurt not' ( III. ii. 138-9). A timbered house was full of
noises, and a boy heard stories and legends to explain them. Good and
bad fairies came into rooms to move objects about. Queen Mab, big as
an agate on an alderman's ring, did no harm -- nor did invisible
fairies on Midsummer Night's Eve. Nor did ghosts, gliding on dim
church-paths to return to clammy homes by sunrise. But villains in the
wilds beyond Stratford
might
do as much harm as M
^r
Fox, in an 'old tale' Shakespeare seems to recall from boyhood when Benedick reminds Claudio of it in
Much Ado:

Lady Mary, one day, on a visit to M
^r
, Fox saw him pull a lady upstairs. M
^r
Fox cut off her hand, which dropped with a glittering bracelet into
Lady Mary's lap. Lady Mary ran to her brothers' house, and when M
^r
Fox came to dine she told the guests of a dream. She spoke of her visit to M
^r
Fox's, and said at each turn of the story, 'it is not so, nor was it
so'. 'It is not so, nor was it so, and God forbid it should be so!'
said M
^r
Fox. 'But it is so, and it was so,' said Lady Mary,
'and here's the hand I have to show!' So all the guests drew their
swords and Cut M
^r
Fox into a thousand pieces.
¹²

A Tudor boy heard dozens of such stories. He might hear riddles in
Demands Joyous
, which had appeared in Wynkyn de Worde's version in 1511:

Demand: Why doth a cow lie down?
Response: Because it cannot sit.
Demand: Who killed the fourth part of all the people in the world?
Response: Cain when he killed Abel.
¹³

He would hear that deep quarry of human and divine truth, the Old
Testament, and would learn to pray. Mealtimes began with a long grace
before one touched a knife, spoon and trencher, or wooden plate. A boy
washed his hands before and after eating and would be watched by his
father, who wore a cap or hat at table; and he would be told to wipe
his hands after picking at his meat -- and wipe out the pewter or
leather cup after sipping ale or beer.

At table and elsewhere, he was taught 'all obeysance and courtesie',

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or decorum -- which turned him into a little actor at 3 or.4
¹⁴
Decorum meant knowing how to choose the appropriate word suitable to
the speaker and subject, or how to play one's role in a deferential
society. Through years of discipline, one might acquire a
well-fashioned mind, with good habits to discern what was proper in
relation to all things, places, times, persons. At last, one would
take a role upon the public stage befitting one's status.

John Shakespeare -- much concerned for status -- was to apply
repeatedly for a coat of arms and learn that the College of Heralds
conceded his father-in-law Robert Arden had been a 'gent. of worship'.
¹⁵
Mary's father may or may not have been of the Ardens who were
descended from 'Turchillus de Eardene', or Turchill of the Arden Forest,
whose lands in the Domesday Book fill over four columns. John seems
to have believed that Arden was of the gentry; and as a parvenu
himself, he would have credited his wife Mary's ability to
impart
courtesy. In any case, Shakespeare's courtesy is remarkable; it could
hardly have been picked up quickly at gentlemen's or noblemen's houses
(or at court, where there was too little to go round) since it
involved more than knowing when to bend the knee, or doff the hat:
deep courtesy is a habit of mind. In his plays his tragic kings,
usurpers, and lovers fail in part through indecorous conduct, and so
use language inappropriate to their character and status. Richard II
and Bolingbroke both sin against courtesy, and Hamlet's real and
imagined worlds have lost form, courtesy, or the balance and sanity of
decorum. 'The baby beats the nurse, and quite athwart | Goes all
decorum', Shakespeare writes in
Measure for Measure
( I. iii. 30-1).

His habit of mind in courtesy, even so, is in some ways that of an
Arden, old-fashioned or pre-Elizabethan. In his usual attitudes, he is
not so much coolly mercenary or aggressively thrusting as he is
humane, receptive, and alert to tenderness and the public good, as if
he had affinities with Warwickshire's past and the Gild his grandfather
Arden had joined. (His audacity does not thrive coldly.) To be sure,
400 years of community life, a well-run town, and a Gild that linked
the generations and influenced a local council in Elizabeth's day
helped to form the mind of Shakespeare. In his early years religious
troubles faded, and Stratford was not wholly torn from its past. The

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