Shakespeare: The World as Stage

by Bill Bryson

In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.

imprisoning

Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what.

Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending on status.

soup. Happily, since Henry VIII’s break with Rome, eating meat on Friday was no longer a hanging offense, though anyone caught eating meat during Lent could still be sent to prison for three months.

Nearly every aspect of life was subject to some measure of legal restraint. At a local level, you could be fined for letting your ducks wander in the road, for misappropriating town gravel, for having a guest in your house without a permit from the local bailiff.

Among skilled craftsmen—a category that included John Shakespeare—some 60 percent could read, a clearly respectable proportion.

Elizabethans,

Anyway, as should be obvious, his ability to write or not could have had absolutely no bearing on the capabilities of his children.

John was prosecuted (or threatened with prosecution—the records are sometimes a touch unclear) for trading in wool and for money-lending, both highly illegal activities.

John Shakespeare was probably guilty, for he also traded (or so it would seem) in large quantities of wool. In 1571, for instance, he was accused of acquiring 300 tods—8,400 pounds—of wool. That is a lot of wool and a lot of risk.

Shakespeare’s mother, Mary Arden, provides us with a history that is rather more straightforward, if not tremendously vivid or enlightening.

She was the mother of eight children: four daughters, of whom only one lived to adulthood, and four sons, all of whom reached their majority but only one of whom, Will, married.

Seven of the eight Shakespeare children appear to have been named after close relations or family friends. The exception was William, the inspiration for whose name has always been a small mystery, like nearly everything else about his life.

Boys normally attended the school for seven or eight years, beginning at the age of seven. The schoolday was long and characterized by an extreme devotion to tedium. Pupils sat on hard wooden benches from six in the morning to five or six in the evening, with only two short pauses for refreshment, six days a week.

“creeping like snail / Unwillingly to school.”

Shakespeare had a great deal of Latin, for the life of a grammar-school boy was spent almost entirely in reading, writing, and reciting Latin, often in the most mind-numbingly repetitious manner. One of the principal texts of the day taught pupils 150 different ways of saying, “Thank you for your letter” in Latin.

The bride, according to the ledger, was not Anne Hathaway but Anne Whateley of nearby Temple Grafton—a mystery that has led some biographers to suggest that Shakespeare courted two women to the point of matrimony at the same time and that he stood up Anne Whateley out of duty to the pregnant Anne Hathaway. Anthony Burgess, in a slightly fevered moment, suggested that young Will, “sent on skin-buying errands to Temple Grafton,” perhaps fell for “a comely daughter, sweet as May and shy as a fawn.”

The marriage license itself is lost, but a separate document, the marriage bond, survives. On it Anne Hathaway is correctly identified. Shakespeare’s name is rendered as “Shagspere”—the first of many arrestingly variable renderings.

particularly when one’s father is so indebted that he can barely leave his own house for fear of arrest and imprisonment. Clearly there was much urgency to get the couple wed.

Until 1604 the age of consent was twelve for a girl, fourteen for a boy.

Her gravestone describes her as being sixty-seven years old at the time of her death in 1623.

We know also that she had three children with William Shakespeare—Susanna in May 1583 and the twins, Judith and Hamnet, in early February 1585—but all the rest is darkness. We know nothing about the couple’s relationship—whether they bickered constantly or were eternally doting.

1587, when Shakespeare was twenty-three, an incident occurred among the Queen’s Men, one of the leading acting troupes, that may have provided an opening for Shakespeare.

In nearly every year for at least 250 years, deaths outnumbered births in London.

The bulk of the population was packed into 448 exceedingly cozy acres within the city walls around the Tower of London and Saint Paul’s Cathedral.

In Shakespeare’s day the City was divided into a hundred or so parishes, many of them tiny, as all the proximate spires in the district attest even today (even when there are far fewer churches than in Shakespeare’s time). The

By modern standards the whole of greater London, including Southwark and Westminster, was small. It stretched only about two miles from north to south and three from east to west, and could be crossed on foot in not much more than an hour.

In his great and stately Survey of London, published in 1598, when he was in his seventies, John Stow noted with dismay how many districts that had formerly looked out on open fields where people could “refresh their dull spirits in the sweet and wholesome air” now gave way to vast encampments of smoky hovels and workshops.

Most of the districts that we think of now as integral parts of London—Chelsea, Hampstead, Hammersmith, and so on—were then quite separate, and in practical terms often quite distant, villages.

courtiers, servants, bureaucrats, and hangers-on, Westminster was the largest and busiest palace in Europe and headquarters for the English monarch and her government—though Elizabeth, like her father before her, used it only as a winter residence.

The principal geographical feature of the city was the Thames.

The bridge was already venerable when Shakespeare first saw it.

The other dominant structure in the city was old Saint Paul’s Cathedral, which was even larger than the one we see today, though its profile was oddly stunted.

People of all classes loved their foods sweet.

Such was the popularity of sugar that people’s teeth often turned black, and those who failed to attain the condition naturally sometimes blackened their teeth artificially to show that they had had their share of sugar, too. Rich women, including the queen, made themselves additionally beauteous by bleaching their skin with compounds of borax, sulfur, and lead—all at least mildly toxic, sometimes very much more so—for pale skin was a sign of supreme loveliness.

Beer was drunk copiously, even at breakfast and even by the pleasure-wary Puritans. (The ship that took the Puritan leader John Winthrop to New England carried him, ten thousand gallons of beer, and not much else.) A gallon a day was the traditional ration for monks, and we may assume that most others drank no less.

Criminality was so widespread that its practitioners split into fields of specialization. Some became coney catchers, or swindlers (a coney was a rabbit reared for the table and thus unsuspectingly tame); others became foists (pickpockets), nips, or nippers (cutpurses), hookers (who snatched desirables through open windows with hooks), abtams (who feigned lunacy to provide a distraction), whipjacks, fingerers, cross biters, cozeners, courtesy men, and many more.

It is often noted, for instance, that Shakespeare’s plays are full of ocean metaphors (“take arms against a sea of troubles,” “an ocean of salt tears,” “wild sea of my conscience”) and that every one of his plays has at least one reference to the sea in it somewhere.

Caroline Spurgeon

One possibility for how Shakespeare spent these missing years, embraced with enthusiasm by some scholars, is that he didn’t come to London by any direct route, but rather went to northern England, to Lancashire, as a recusant Catholic.

There is certainly no shortage of possible Catholic connections. Throughout Shakespeare’s early years, some four hundred English-born, French-trained Jesuit missionaries were slipped into England to offer illicit religious ser vices to Catholics, often in large secret gatherings on Catholic estates.

In 1580, when William was sixteen, Campion passed through Warwickshire on his way to the more safely Catholic north.

The thought is that this Cottom may have taken Will with him. What adds appeal to the theory is that the following year a “William Shakeshafte” appears in the household accounts of Alexander Hoghton, a prominent Catholic living just ten miles from the Cottom family seat. Moreover Hoghton in his will commended this Shakeshafte to a fellow Catholic and landowner, Thomas Hesketh, as someone worth employing. In the same passage Hoghton also mentioned the disposition of his musical instruments and “play clothes,” or costumes. “This sequence,” notes the Shakespeare authority Robert Bearman, “suggests that this Shakeshafte was either a household musician

In 1857 she produced her magnum opus, The Philosophy of the Plays of Shakspere [sic] Unfolded, published by Ticknor and Fields of Boston. It was vast, unreadable, and odd in almost every way. For one thing, not once in its 675 densely printed pages did it actually mention Francis Bacon; the reader had to deduce that he was the person whom she had in mind as the author of Shakespeare’s plays. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was at the time American consul in Liverpool, provided a preface, then almost instantly wished he hadn’t, for the book was universally regarded by reviewers as preposterous hokum.

It is true that William Shakespeare used some learned parlance in his work, but he also employed imagery that clearly and ringingly reflected a rural background. Jonathan Bate quotes a couplet from Cymbeline, “Golden lads and girls all must, / As chimney sweepers, come to dust,” which takes on additional sense when one realizes that in Warwickshire in the sixteenth century a flowering dandelion was a golden lad, while one about to disperse its seeds was a chimney sweeper.