Dear Me,

   So here is the summary of Part One.  Hopefully everything I've learned so far will stick in my brain.
Cheers

Murielle

Summary

PART ONE

SHAKESPEARE: A BIOGRAPHY

by

Peter Ackroyd

William Shakespeare is supposed to have been born 23 April 1564,
Three days later, on 26 April 1564, the baby was baptized and the name written in the parish registry Guilelmus Filius Johannes Shakespeare.
Despite a high infant mortality rate and outbreak of the plague three months after his birth, baby William survived.  Surely it was a relief to his parents, who had lost two daughters before the birth of their son.
Warwickshire was often described as the heart of England with the clear implication that Shakespeare was the very core Englishness himself.
The Shakespeare family had lived in the area since the thirteenth century.  Shakespeare came from farming stock.  His grandfather was an affluent farmer and his father, John, was a quickly rising star in public life.
John Shakespeare started his prosperous career at an early age as an apprentice glove maker.  At the age of twenty-seven he was probably already practicing his trade for more than a few years.
He had a ground floor shop at the front of his house and employed two apprentices.  He belonged to a glover's guild and like other glovers, John also acted as unlicenced  wool broker.  His action would have been considered illegal because he did not belong to a wool trader's guild and he had been charged in court twice for the crime.He also lent money at an illegal interest rate.  The legal rate was 10 percent, but John Shakespeare lent at 20 percent.
He also speculated on property.  He bought three houses and rented two of them out for £40.

There has been much speculation about his literacy.  He signed with a mark rather than a signature.  The fact he could not write does not mean he could not read.  Reading and writing were considered different skills.  It would have been hard for him to conduct business if he could not read.
Then there is the question of his religion.  He had his son baptized within the rites of Anglican communion and the minister was Protestant.  But John might have also hidden in the rafters from the house on Henley Street.  It was an explicit "spiritual testament".    John's mark appeared on it as well as the information on his patron saint "St. Winnifred".  St. Winnifred had her shrine in Holywell, a place of pilgrimage for the wealthy Catholic families of Warwickshire.
If the testament was signed by John Shakespeare and concealed in the attic the suggestion could be the he was or had become a secret practising Catholic.
In 1553 John married Mary Arden, the daughter of his father's old landlord.  Three years later he began his slow rise in Stratford when he was appointed as one of two "tasters".  These tasters were borough officials who ensured the quality of bread and ale provided in the district.  In 1561 he was elected as chamberlain, in charge of the property and revenues of the Stratford corporation and was the chamberlain for four years.
He was appointed as one of fourteen aldermen in 1565 and from that time on was known as "Master Shakespeare"  In 1571 he was appointed high alderman and deputy to his successor as mayor.
The family house on Henley Street was built in the early sixteenth century and originally made of two or even three houses.  It was probably a noisy house in which every conversation in the house may have been heard.  In Shakespeare's plays is the unmistakable impressions of a childhood in the house on Henley Street.  There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps.  The women's work of needle work and embroidery have been mentioned as well as the men's work as carpentry, hooping and joinery.  No other Elizabethan dramatist uses so many domestic allusions.
The house also had a garden and Shakespeare knew about 108 plants.  The flowers in his plays were native to Warwickshire.  He used the local names for flowers such as dandelions, which were know as "golden lad" before becoming "chimney sweep" when they became white and fluffy.
In 1569 the theatre came to Stratford.  Under the protection of the mayor, John Shakespeare, the new player of London were allowed to perform in the guildhall and inn-yards of the town.  It was an important moment in history when the five year old boy was first able to watch the world of pageantry.
It is also likely that John Shakespeare took William to Coventry, only twenty miles away to watch the celebrated cycle of mystery plays.  Little Shakespeare saw the characteristics mingling of farce and spiritual, piety and pantomime.  It has often been suggested that some of the power of Shakespeare's history plays derived from his use of the elements of Christ's Passion that he would have seen in the mysteries.
At the age of five or six, Shakespeare would have begun attending elementary school, as it was expected that sons of a "rising family would attend" school in preparation for education advancement.
Shakespeare would have become acquainted with the delights of reading and writing as well as arithmetic.  In later life he practiced a "secretary hand" close to the one he used as a model in the first English book on hand-writing.
Somehow, he came to known the Bible very well.  He may have had more of a retentive memory than a religious capacity, but it is one of his most significant sources.  \before he entered this new domain the young Shakespeare would have to demonstrate he could read and write English so that he was ro study the Latin tongue.  He was about to be introduced to the language of the educated world.
The day would have been started at six or seven in the morning.  The prayers of day were recited, followed by lessons that would have continued until nine, where a breakfast of ale and bread.  At eleven, he would have gone home for dinner, returning to school at one.  During the course of the afternoon was a fifteen munute recess with the day done at five.
Shakespeare's own references to his school days are not entirely happy.  The whining school boy creeping like a snail to school is well enough but other allusions to the plight of the pupil forced to labour over his text.
In the second year of school, Shakespeare's understanding of grammar was to the test in a collection of phrases.
In his third year he read the stories of Aesop in the simple Latin translation.  He learned the art of richness and elaboration into the living world.  He began to read the Metamorphoses of Ovid.  In later life Shakespeare was said to possess the :soul" of Ovid in his own sweet verses.  He was entranced by its fantastic artifice and what can only be described as its pervasive sexuality.  Ovid was also the favourite of Christopher Marlow and Thomas Nash.
The final stages of Shakespeare's education were perhaps the formative ones.  What we would call creative arts, the Elizabethans called rhetoric.
It the early years of Shakespeare's schooling his father persevered in illegal dealings in wool.  They were in a sense conventional offences and didn't hurt John Shakespeare's reputation.  It cannot be said that Shakespeare's father's fortunes during this time were in decline as he had bought the two house adjoining the house of Henley Street to accommodate the ever growing Shakespeare family.
At the beginning of 1577, John Shakespeare left council abruptly.  There have been many reasons given for his absence, but a likely cause was his possible adoption of the old religion.  The year before his withdrawl from council a grand ecclesiastical commission was established by the Privy council to investigate the religion of the nation.
Shakespeare was thirteen when his father left public office.  In such a small town it seems he would have felt his father's departure from public life quite sharply.  His father social decline could also be why Shakespeare had such a preoccupation with gentility and restoring the family honour.  
When Shakespeare was fifteen, it was possible that his father paid the £5 for his son to continue his education after the age of fourteen.  It would be only after this age that he would have learned the "lesse Greeke" of which Ben Jonson accused him of.
It has also been suggested that Shakespeare worked as a lawyer's clerk, or found employment as a schoolmaster in the country.  He may have been called up for military service because of his apparent knowledge of the technical terms of seamanship has convinced some that he served in the English navy but you can never overestimate his powers of assimilation and empathy.
The movements of the young Shakespeare has become the subject of serious debate related to his religious alliances. 
At the age of fifteen or sixteen, Shakespeare may have journeyed away from home but returned around 1580,  His return was in the face of an uncertain future.  At eighteen, what career would have been open to him?  In recent years it has been believed that he had some training as a lawyer's clerk.  If he did do this, he wasn't particularly fond of it, as evidence to his emergence in London as an actor and playwright suggests he abandon it willingly.  Though his professional life wasn't the best, his personal life was doing better.  In 1582 he began to court Anne Hathaway, whom he probably knew through their father's relationship.  Anne was the oldest daughter of her father';s house and as such took on a fair amount of household duties, chief among  them to look after her little brothers and sisters.
She was eight years older than him.  When they married he was eighteen and she was twenty-six.  The difference of age has aroused speculation of her seduction and his inexperience.  This does less than justice to Shakespeare's intelligence and insults Anne, like many of the silent wives of famous men, has endured much criticism.
Anne was four moths along by the time of their wedding day.  Their first child was probably conceived in the last two weeks of September because at the end of November her guardians hastened to Worcester to obtain a special licence.  The haste was necessary since the period of Advent was at hand and marriages, were mostly restricted.  Anne's condition may have become evident and neither she nor her guardians wished the baby to be illegitimate.
After the ceremony, there would have been a wedding feasts.  The couple may have recieved gifts of silver or food.  The guests in return were given gloves as presents of gloves, since the father of the groom was a glove maker, there was no difficulty in getting them.