Dear Me.

   Another entry in the saga that is Shakespeare and his early life in Stratford-upon-Avon.  YAY!!!!!!!

Cheers

Murielle

Part One

Chapter 10:  What Sees Thou There?

In 1569 the theatre came to Stratford.  Under the protection of John Stratford, the mayor, the new players of London were allowed to perform in the guildhall and in the inn-yards of the town.  It was an important moment in Shakespeare's own history when the five year old boy was first able to witness the world of pageantry and seeming.  His father invited two sets of players to entertain the town, the Queen's Men and the Earl of Worcester's Men. There were dumb-shows, speeches and pageants with drums and trumpets.  There were duels and wrestling.  How much the young Shakespeare saw is an open question.  But there is testimony from an exact contemporary who had witnessed the players in Gloucester. He recalled that "at suche a play, my father tooke me with him and made mee stand between his legges, as he sate upon one of the benches, where we saw and heard very well."  It was a play of king and courtiers, of songs and transformations and coulourful costumes. This contemporary goes on to say that "this sight took such impression in me that when I came towards mans estate, it was as fresh in my memory as if I had seen it newly acted"
There were many opportunities for Shakespeare and his contemporaries to see the London players.  Ten groups of them came to Stratford over the next few years, as part of their touring "circuit".  In one year alone five companies passed through.  They generally made up of seven or eight, unlike the earlier players who numbered three men, a boy and a dog.  The young Shakespeare would have been able to watch the best of the London troupes, drinking in the poetry and the spectacle of the emerging stage.  The names of the plays in performance tell of the atmosphere of the period - A Marriage Between Wit and Wisdom, Cambises and other dramas.  The playwrights took their material from anything and everything - from histories to collections of romance.   It was a world of witty mysterious islands, of strange seas and caverns, of unvarnished evil and unearthly goodness. Shakespeare could watch these plays unfolding before him.  It is appropriate that the English drama was coming to slow maturity in the same period as Shakespeare himself; they were both children of their time, sharing a newly awakened sense of possible achievement.
There were other forms of dramatic entertainment in Stratford.  Whitsun "pastimes", for example, were still being devised in 1583 by Davy Jones, a relative of the Shakespeares by marriage.  There were mumming pays with plenty of ritual and symbolic actions.  Costumes and masks were worn; the characters were given names such as Big Head or Pickle Herring, while the action itself was concerned with slayings and miraculous healings.  In Return of the Native Thomas Hardy describes what must have been one of the last true mummers' plays, with a battle between St. George and a Turkish knight.
It is also likely that John Shakespeare took his son to Coventry, only twenty miles away, to witness the celebrated cycle of mystery plays performed in that city.  They were not formally discontinued until Shakespeare had reached his fifteenth year.  He heard the vulgar comedy of the "low" characters and the refined sentiments of their superiors.  He saw the characteristic and the refined sentiments of their superiors.  He saw the characteristic mingling of farce and spirituality, piety and pantomime.  He listened to the mixture of lyrical songs and pounding pentameter.  It has often been suggested that some of the power of Shakespeare's history plays is derived from his use of the elements of Christ's Passion that he would have witnessed in the mysteries; the whole notion of cyclical dramas, taking in so much of the history of the kingdom, seems a direct reflection of his earliest dramatic experiences.
Shakespeare himself refers to the "Death Mouth." the portal of Hell constructed for the mingled fascination and alarm of the populace.  The "Porter of Hell" who played a large part in the mystery plays, re-emerges as the Porter in Macbeth.  Critics have seen such parallels between the mystery plays and the plots of Lear, Othello, and Macbeth.  Shakespeare's was the last era of the medieval mysteries.Yet throughout the history of English culture we see continuity rather than closure.  Part of that continuity lies in the achievement of Shakespeare himself, who conveyed all the enchantment,   ambiguity, and passion of the old religious drama within the new forms of theatre.  One of Shakespeare's last plays, Pericles, reverts to the medieval pageant form of the miracles.  If he had not seen when he was a child, then he is indeed a miracle of reinvention.