Dear Me,

   Shakespeare Part 1 Chapter 8.  Fun fun!

Murielle

Shakespeare: A Biography

by

Peter Ackroyd

Part One

Chapter 8: I am a Kind of Burre, I Shal Sticke

There are some human beliefs that lie below the level of professed faith.  As a child Shakespeare learned of the witches who created storms and of the Welsh faeries who hid in foxgloves.  "Queeene Mab" of Romeo and Juliet is derived from the Celtic word, mab, meaning infant or little one. Shakespeare knew of the toad with the medicinal jewel in its head and of the man in the mood who carried a bundle of thorns.  His mother may have taught him that in the Forest of Arden lived ghosts and goblins.  All his life Shakespeare had a very English sense of the supernatural, a predilection that goes hand in hand with a taste for horror and sensationalism.  He brings ghosts into his history plays, and witches into Macbeth.  The plots of the fairy stories can be glimpsed in his adult drama.  Pericles is one of the old tales told round the heath.  In similar fashion ballads and folk tales charge the plot of The Tamping of the Shrew.  They were part of his Stratford inheritance.

The zealots of the reformed Church were not well disposed towards such idolatrous relics as maypoles and church ales, but local observances survive their displeasure.  The bells rang out on Shrove Tuesday, and on the feast of St. Valentine the boys sang for apples; on Good Friday the labourers planted their potatoes and on the morning of Easter Day the young men went out to hunt hares.  There were "whitsun lords" in Warwickshire as late as 1580, together with all the panoply of mumming and morris-dancing.  The May games of his youth returned in A Midsummer Night's Dream.  This is not some saga of "merry England." but the very fabric of life in a conservative and ritualised society immediately before the permanent changes induced by the reformation of the religion.

The stray details of that enduring life emerge in a hundred different contexts.  Real names of places and of people are enlisted in Shakespeare's drama.  His aunt lived in the hamlet of Barton-on-the-Heath, and it rises again as Burton-Heath in The Taming of the Shrew.  The names of William Fluellen and George Bardolph are found in a list of Stratford recusant, beside that of John Shakespeare.  His father also engaged in business with two wool-dealers, Geiorge Vizer and Perkes reappear in a line from Henry IV, Part Two, "I beseech you sir to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkes a' th hill" (2725-6).  In the play Visor is decribed as an :arrant knave," which may suggest some familial dispute with him.

The words and phrases of Shakespeare's childhood are recalled in his writing.  He uses "fap" to mean drunk and "third-borough" for constable, and "aroynt" for leave.  There is also the matter of pronunciation.  The sound of the language spoken by Shakespeare in his native country was nearer to Saxon than Norman French.  You would have heard the Saxon origins in words pronounced as "blewe" and deawe," "emonges" and "oulgie".

This was the language that Shakespeare spoke as a child.  It was immediately recognisable as a country accent, and he may have endeavoured to lose it on his arrival in London.  His characters are, after all, engaged in a perpetual act of performance and re-invention.  But there was no "standard" English.  He used his Stratford idiom in his writing, for example, although the fussiness of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened his native sonority.

Shakespeare understood the country very well, with that Edgar in King Lear calls its "low fermmes/Poore pelting villages, sheep-coates and milles" (1190-1), but his debt to the Stratford of his childhood is particular and profound.  He knew the channels that he drew off the Avon flood and the conies that come out of their burrows after the rain,  The fact that, all his life, he invested in the lands and properties of the immediate neighbourhood testifies to the hold Stratford had on him.  It was the site of his earliest ambitions and expectations and he wished to restore the fortunes of the Shakespeare family, and the place he returned to at the end of his life.