Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare by Stephen Greenblatt
Even as he called attention to the distance between himself and the rustic performers, then, Shakespeare doubled back and signaled a current of sympathy and solidarity. As when borrowing from the old morality plays and folk culture, he understood at once that he was doing something quite different and that he owed a debt. The professions he assigned the Athenian artisans were not chosen at random—Shakespeare’s London theater company depended on joiners and weavers, carpenters and tailors—and the tragedy they perform, of star-crossed lovers, fatal errors, and suicides, is one in which the playwright himself was deeply interested. In the period he was writing the “Pyramus and Thisbe” parody, Shakespeare was also writing the strikingly similar Romeo and Juliet; they may well have been on his writing table at the same time. A more defensive artist would have scrubbed harder in an attempt to remove these marks of affinity, but Shakespeare’s laughter was not a form of renunciation or concealment. “This is the silliest stuff that ever I heard,” Hippolyta comments, to which Theseus replies, “The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse if imagination amend them.” “It must be your imagination, then, and not theirs,” is her rejoinder (5.1.207–10)—the spectators’ imagination and not the players’—but that is precisely the point: the difference between the professional actor and the amateur actor is not, finally, the crucial consideration. They both rely upon the imagination of the spectators. And, as if to clinch the argument, a moment later, at the preposterous suicide speech of Pyramus—
Approach, ye furies fell.
O fates, come, come,
Cut thread and thrum,
Quail, crush, conclude, and quell
(5.1.273–76)
—Hippolyta finds herself unaccountably moved: “Beshrew my heart, but I pity the man” (5.1.279).
When in A Midsummer Night’s Dream the thirty-year-old Shakespeare, drawing deeply upon his own experiences, thought about his profession, he split the theater between a magical, virtually nonhuman element, which he associated with the power of the imagination to lift itself away from the constraints of reality, and an all-too-human element, which he associated with the artisans’ trades that actually made the material structures—buildings, platforms, costumes, musical instruments, and the like—structures that gave the imagination a local habitation and a name. He understood, and he wanted the audience to understand, that the theater had to have both, both the visionary flight and the solid, ordinary earthiness.
That earthiness was a constituent part of his creative imagination. He never forgot the provincial, everyday world from which he came or the ordinary face behind the mask of Arion.
CHAPTER 2
The Dream of Restoration
A STRATFORD LEGEND, recorded around 1680 by the eccentric, gossipy biographer John Aubrey, held that Will Shakespeare, apprenticed to be a butcher like his father, occasionally took a turn at slaughtering the animals: “When he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style, and make a speech.” The inquisitive Aubrey, trying to find out how young Shakespeare solved the problem of work and discovered his vocation, wanted to know what happened between the time that he left school, presumably at some point in the late 1570s or early 1580s, and the time, in the early 1590s, that he was first noted as a professional actor and playwright in London.
The mystery of what Shakespeare was up to in what scholars have dubbed the “Lost Years”—the years when he dropped from sight and left no traces in the documents of a notably record-keeping society—has generated mountains of speculation. Legends, some more or less plausible, began to emerge about seventy-five years after his death, that is, when those who could possibly have known him personally had all died off but people were still alive who could, in their younger years, have encountered his contemporaries and sought out information about him. Though Aubrey’s story about butchery is implausible—John Shakespeare was not a butcher and would not have been permitted by trade regulation to slaughter animals—it is a safe bet that from boyhood on Will had helped his father in the family business, the making and selling of gloves from the shop that occupied part of the family’s handsome double house on Henley Street.
No doubt he wrote poems in his spare moments, but his family would hardly have toiled to subsidize his idleness. Paper was expensive. A pack of paper that, neatly folded and cut, yielded about fifty small sheets would have cost at least fourpence, or the equivalent of eight pints of ale, more than a pound of raisins, a pound of mutton and a pound of beef, two dozen eggs, or two loaves of bread. Perhaps young Will carved his verses, like Orlando in As You Like It, on trees. All the same, he would have been expected to work. Indeed, there is an odd trace of the kind of contribution to the glove trade his special talents as a poet offered. Alexander Aspinall came to Stratford in 1582 to be master at the King’s New School, shortly after Will had finished his schooling there but when his younger brothers presumably were in attendance. In the seventeenth century, someone wrote down in a commonplace book—a notebook in which it was customary to record memorable or curious things—verses that accompanied a pair of gloves sent by Master Aspinall to the woman he was then courting:
The gift is small, the will is all.
Alexander Aspinall
The gloves were presumably bought at John Shakespeare’s shop, for the posy was noted as a trace of the famous poet: “Shaxpaire upon a pair of gloves that master sent to his mistress.” Instead of making a career writing plays, Will could have stayed at home and eked out a living as the writer of personalized jingles into which he slyly inserted his own name.
He did not, in fact, leave it all completely behind: gloves, skins, and leather show up frequently in the plays, in ways that seem to reflect an easy intimacy with the trade. Romeo longs to be a glove on Juliet’s hand, so that he could touch her cheek. The peddler in The Winter’s Tale has scented gloves in his pack “as sweet as damask roses” (4.4.216). “Is not parchment,” asks Hamlet, “made of sheepskins?” “Ay, my lord,” replies Horatio, “and of calf-skins too” (5.1.104–5). The officer in The Comedy of Errors wears a calf-skin uniform—he resembles “a bass viol in a case of leather” (4.3.22); Petruchio, in The Taming of the Shrew, has a bridle made of sheep’s leather; the cobbler in Julius Caesar resoles shoes made of neat’s leather; tinkers, according to The Winter’s Tale, carry sow-skin bags. When Shakespeare wanted to convey the fantastical world of the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he played with miniaturized versions of this trade: the “enamelled skin” shed by snakes is “wide enough to wrap a fairy in,” and the Fairy Queen’s followers war with bats “for their leathern wings / To make my small elves coats” (2.1.255–56, 2.2.4–5).
For Shakespeare, leather was not only a means of providing vivid detail but also the stuff of metaphor; it evidently came readily to mind when he was putting together his world. “A sentence is but a cheverel glove to a good wit,” quips the clown Feste in Twelfth Night, remarking on the ease with which language can been twisted, “how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward” (3.1.10–12). Young Will, assisting his father in the glover’s shop, no doubt observed the qualities of good “cheverel”—fine kidskin valued for its elasticity and pliability—and they made a strong impression on him: “O, here’s a wit of cheverel,” Mercutio teases Romeo, “that stretches from an inch narrow to an ell broad [big stretch: an ell was forty-five inches]” (Romeo and Juliet, 2.3.72–73). “Your soft cheveril conscience,” the reluctant Anne Boleyn is told in Henry VIII, would receive the king’s gifts, “If you might please to stretch it” (2.3.32–33).
John Shakespeare bought and sold wool as well as leather. Here he was violating the laws that restricted this business to authorized wool merchants. But the illegal trade, called wool brogging, was potentially lucrative, and he had the range of contracts both in the town and in the countryside to make it seem worth the risk. To make his deals, John would have had to travel to sheep pens and rural markets, and he is likely to have taken his eldest son with him. Here too Will’s ima
Other traces of the shop on Henley Street and the surrounding countryside are preserved in the plays and poems. A legal document, dated three years before Will’s birth in 1564, describes his father as an “agricola,” Latin for farmer. Long after he settled in Stratford, John Shakespeare not only dealt in agricultural commodities but also continued to buy and lease farmland around Stratford. Will must have been out in the country with his father and his mother all the time. (An inhabitant of Elizabethan Stratford, a town with only some two thousand inhabitants, was, in any case, only a short stroll away from the surrounding farms and woods.) One of the most beautiful and appealing aspects of his imagination is the ease, delicacy, and precision with which he enters into the lives of animals and describes the vagaries of the weather, the details of flowers and herbs, and the cycles of nature. He enters deftly as well into the business cycles of nature. “I am shepherd to another man,” says Corin in As You Like It, explaining to his visitors why he cannot offer them hospitality, “And do not shear the fleeces that I graze.” This is not an urban fantasy of shepherds piping melodies on oaten flutes, but an altogether more realistic world. “My master is of churlish disposition,” the shepherd adds.
Besides, his cot, his flocks, and bounds of feed
Are now on sale, and at our sheepcote now
By reason of his absence there is nothing
That you will feed on.
(2.4.73–75, 78–81)
Though he had intimate knowledge of the country—he had seen the inside of a shepherd’s “cot” (cottage) and knew that the grazing rights, the “bounds of feed,” would have been sold along with the flocks—William Shakespeare was not essentially a countryman, nor, despite his origins, was his father. Indeed, the son was powerfully struck less by his father’s rural wisdom than by his moneylending, for which he was twice taken to court in 1570, and by his property transactions, the real-world model for the maps, deeds, and conveyances that figure so frequently in the plays. The core biographical records of the poet’s adult life are real estate documents. Biographers have often lamented the plethora of these documents in the place of something more intimate, but Shakespeare’s lifelong interest in property investments—so unlike that of his fellow playwrights—may be more intimate a revelation than has been readily understood to be.
Will’s early years, in any case, must have been strongly marked by his father’s impressive entrepreneurial energy and ambition. John Shakespeare, the son of a tenant farmer from the small village of Snitterfield, was rising in the world. In the late 1550s he had made his first decisive move upward by wedding Mary Arden, the daughter of the man from whom his father had rented land. The Arden name was itself a significant piece of social capital: the family was one of Warwickshire’s most distinguished, tracing its lineage back to the Domesday Book, the great record of property holdings compiled for William the Conqueror in 1086. The Arden properties occupy four long columns in that record, and the great expanse of forest to the north and west of Stratford was still in Shakespeare’s time known as the Forest of Arden.
Mary’s father, Robert, was by no means a prominent member of this family; he was simply a prosperous farmer who kept seven cows, eight oxen for the plough, two bullocks, and four weaning calves. If the inventory made at the time of his death is any indication, the household had no table knives, forks, or crockery—domestic signs of social distinction in a period when ordinary folk ate with their fingers from wooden plates—and owned no books. In the Arden household, the most visible marks of culture were “painted cloths”—the low-cost equivalent of tapestries, typically captioned with sententious mottoes—of which the inventory lists two in the hall, five in the chamber, and four in the bedroom. (When he wrote The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare ironically recalled their homely lessons: “Who fears a sentence or an old man’s saw / Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.”) It is not clear that anyone in the household could read the mottoes on their painted cloths; perhaps they simply liked the effect of the writing on the walls.
In a world that took kinship seriously, it meant something to be related, if only distantly, to such a distinguished and wealthy man as Edward Arden of Park Hall, the great house near Birmingham. Arden was a name for anyone with social ambition to conjure with, and a name was by no means all the riches that Mary’s dowry held. Though she was the youngest of eight daughters, Mary was her father’s favorite. When he died in 1556—commending his soul, like a good Catholic, “to Almighty God, and to our blessed Lady Saint Mary, and to all the holy company of heaven”—he left his youngest daughter a tidy sum of money and his most valuable property, a farm called Asbies in the village of Wilmcote, along with other lands. John Shakespeare married well.
There is no record of precisely when John decided to leave the farm in Snitterfield and move to Stratford, where he must have apprenticed himself to a glover, but his neighbors were quick to recognize his virtues. In 1556, when he was still in his twenties, he was elected an ale-taster for the borough, one of the inspectors of bread and ale. The position was for people deemed “able and discreet,” who would not “let for favor or for hatred but do even right and punish as their minds and consciences would serve.” In the following years he held a steady succession of municipal offices: constable, in 1558–59 (responsible for keeping the peace); affeeror (responsible for fixing fines not set by statute); chamberlain, from 1561 to 1565 (responsible for the property of the corporation, including collecting revenues and paying debts and overseeing building repairs and alterations); alderman, in 1565; bailiff, in 1568–69; and chief alderman, in 1571.
This is the record of an impressively solid citizen and a locally distinguished public man, someone liked and trusted. In the patriarchal world of Tudor Stratford none of these positions was taken lightly. The constables in the year John Shakespeare served struggled to maintain order at a time of intense suspicion and the risk of communal violence between Catholics and Protestants. The aldermen looked into the lives of residents who were said to be living “immorally”; they could order the arrest of servants who had left their masters or apprentices who ventured out of doors after the curfew hour of 9 P.M.; they decided whether a wife who was said to be a “scold” should be tied to the “cucking stool” and ducked in the waters of the Avon. And the Elizabethan bailiff had powers that are hardly conveyed by our notion of a mayor: no one could receive a stranger into his house without the bailiff’s permission. Several of John Shakespeare’s offices involved regular contact with the magnates of the region: the lord of the manor, the Earl of Warwick, whose ancestors had held Stratford as a feudal fiefdom in the Middle Ages; wealthy gentlemen like Sir Thomas Lucy, who entertained the queen at his house in nearby Charlecote; the influential and learned bishop of Worcester, Edwin Sandys. Stratford was not directly ruled by any of these imposing figures; it was an independent town, having been incorporated as a royal borough in 1553. But the big men exercised considerable power as well as prestige, and local officials would have had to possess great skills of tact and cunning in order to uphold their rights. John Shakespeare must have been good at the task; he would not otherwise have been entrusted with his offices.
Then, around the time W