Dear Me,

  Another fun round of Shakespeare: A Biography!!  Hold on to your hats folks, this is gonna be a wild ride!

Enjoy!

Murielle

Shakespeare: A Biography

By

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 9: This Prettie Lad Will Prove Our Countries Blisse

In the late sixteenth century, children were customarily trained by means of strict discipline.  A boy would take off his cap before addressing his elders and would wait upon his parents at table, standing rather than sitting during the meal.  He got up early and recited his morning prayers, he washed his hands and face, combed his hair and then went down stairs, where he would kneel for his parents' blessing before breakfast.  He would address his father as "sir", although "dad" does appear in one of Shakespeare's plays.  "Dad" is in fact the formal Welsh word for father, and therefore part of the border dialect that Shakespeare knew very well.

Twentieth-century sociologists have emphasised the severity of the sixteenth-century household, where patriarchal authority was dominant and where repression and punishment was the most convenient means of dealing with children of either sex.  There should be room for doubt in such a broad analysis as Shakespeare's plays are often concerned with the failure of parental authority.  The children become "unruly" or "unbridled".  Shakespeare's children are in any case observant and serious.  They demonstrate respect and obedience, but there is no hint of fear or subservience.  In his dramas, father and son are generally placed in amicable or idealised relationship.  So we may prefer the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist.

If there is one aspect of a writer's life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood.  It arises unbidden and announced in a hundred different texts.  It is the very source of the writing itself and remains undefiled.  It is of the utmost interest that the children of Shakespeare's plays are all equally precocious and posses great confidence in themselves.  They are also oddly aware and articulate, talking to their elders without any sign of strain or inferiority.  In Richard III one of the little prices is described (1580-1) by his malveolent uncle as

Bold, wuicke, ingenious, forward capable,

He is all the mothers, from the top to toe.

It has become customary to place the  young Shakespeare in the conventional Elizabethan world of childhood, engaged in games such as penny-prick or shovel-board.  In his own plays Shakespeare mentions football and bowls, hide-and-seek, as well as rural games of muss and dun in the mire.  He even mentions chess, although he does not appear to know its rules.  It is likely that he was in certain aspects an odd child.  He was precocious and observant but he was one who stood apart.

There can be no doubt that he devoured books.  Much of his early reading comes back in his drama.  Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books?  He alludes to Malory's Morte d'Arthur and the old English romances of Sir Degore and Bevis of Southampton.  For similar reasons the young Shakespeare has been pictured turning the pages of Copland Kynge Appolyne of Thyre, Hawes's Pass Tyme of Pleasure and Bocha's The Tragedies of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates.  There were also the folk stories and the fairy tales of his neighbourhood, given so long a lease on life in his late plays.

Mary Arden's own role in Henley street was central.  With the help of a servant she was obliged to wash and to wring, to make and mend, to back and brew, to measure the malt and corn, to tend to the garden and the dairy, to clothe the children and to prepare the meals.  As a girl growing up on the Arden farm she would have in addition been accustomed to milk the cows, skim the milk, to make butter and cheese, to feed the pigs and the poultry.  She would have been expected to be practical and capable.

A brother was born in Shakespeare's third year.  Gilbert Shakespeare was baptised in the autumn of 1566.  He died at the age of forty-five, having had an unremarkable life as a tradesman glover in Stratford.  He was the dutiful son.  Other sons followed with the curiously coincidental names of two of Shakespeare's villains, Richard and Edmund, and there were two daughters, Joan and Anne.

More than any other dramatist of his period Shakespeare is concerned with family.  In his plays violence erupts between brothers more frequently than between fathers and sons.  The father may be weak or self-serving, but he is never the target of hostility or revenge.

Much attention has been paid instead to the nature of sibling rivalry in Shakespeare's plays, more specifically to the pattern of the younger brother usurping the place of the older.  Edmund replaces Edgar in his father's affection and Richard III mounts upon the bodies of his siblings.  Rivalry between brothers emerges as effortlessly and instinctively in his dramas as if it were a principle of composition.

The conditions in the Shakespeare household were of course wrapped in the vital redium of daily life.  There are stray intimations of status and aspiration. In 1568, the year he became mayor of Stratford, John Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms.  It was natural and practical for a mayor to have a coat of arms for various memorials and banners.  Now that he was appointed to high civic office he was able to seal his prominence by becoming a gentleman.

John Shakespeare wished to be enlisted in this :"register of the Gentle and Noble" and, to qualify, he would need to demonstrate that he owned property and goods to the value of £250 and that he lived without the taint of manual labour, his wife was supposed to "dress well" and to "keep servants".  He presented a pattern for his coat of arms to the College of Heralds and his application was duly noted. The arms of a flacon, a shield and a spear embossed in gold and silver; the falcon is shaking its wings and holds a spear of gold in its right talon.  Hence we interpret "shake spear".  The motto was "Non Sanz Droict" or "Not Without Right".  It is a bold assertion of gentility.  For unknown reasons John Shakespeare did not proceed with his application.  He may have been unwilling to pay the herald's large fees or he may had only a passing interest in what seems essential to have been a civic duty.

But then, twenty-eight years later, his son arranged it for him.  William renewed his father's application, with the original coat of arms and succeeded.  At last his father was a gentleman.  But if it had been a long-cherished ambition, it may have been partly to please his mother.  He was upholding his mother's claims to gentility.