So this is the sixth chapter. Wheee! This chapter covers Shakespeare's mother and her family as well as the house Shakespeare grew up. It was the happiest time of my life to see a genuine Tudor house and when I go back, I'm going to savour it even more!!!
Why do I like this man so much?
I guess you'll find out :).
Shakespeare: A Biography
by
Peter Ackroyd
Part One
Chapter Six: A Witty Mother, Witlesse Else Her Sonne
"It is an undoubted fact," Charles Dickens once wrote, that "all remarkable men have remarkable mothers." In the aspect of the mature William Shakespeare, then, we might see the outline of Mary Arden.
She could plausibly claim to be part of a family that extended beyond the Norman conquest. The Ardens had been "Lords of Warwick" and one family member with the name Turchillus de Eardene, was credited in the Doomsday Book with having vast extents of land. They were a strongly Catholic family who were eventually harried and prosecuted for their faith.
There is no proof that the Ardens of the village of Wilmcote were related to the wealthy landowners of Park Hall. The shared surname was probably enough. It seems likely that the Ardens whom Mary Arden was descended considered themselves to be connected, however distant a fashion, with other branches of the Ardens and with the grand families who were related to other Ardens-families such as the Sidneys and the Nevilles.
It is often suggested that male actors are prone, in their earliest years to identify with their mothers. The internalise her behaviour and adopt her values. This at least one explanation for the overriding concern for nobility and gentility in Shakespeare's subsequent drama. He was known for playing kingly roles and the aristocratic world is at the heart of his design. Could his mother have taught him this fastidiousness and disdain? In the quest for an alternative Shakespeare, it's been suggested that the dramatist was actually a well known aristocrat. So it is of the greatest irony is that Shakespeare may have considered himself to already be of noble stock. He might have been alluding to his parents' marriage at the beginning of The Taming of the Shrew (82-3):
Since once he plaide a Farmers eldest sonne
"Twas where you wood'd the Gentlewoman so well.
Mary Arden's father, Robert Arden, was an affluent farmer who owned two farmhouses and possessed more than 150 acres of land. He was the most prosperous farmer, and the largest landowners, in Wilmcote. The village itself was three miles from Stratford and close to the very edge of the forest from which the family got its name. The Ardens were nourished with a specific sense of belonging. She was the youngest of six sisters, and in an environment where there was a lot of competition for attention and affection.
They lived in a single story farmhouse, built at the beginning of the sixteenth century. Her father owned oxen and steer, chickens, horses, calves and colts, sheep, poultry and bees. There were hug quantities of barley and oats. Shakespeare's mother, like his father, was brought up as an intergral part of a working farm. Her father, Robert, was ancient farming stock with affectations of gentility.
When Mary Arden married John Shakespeare when she was seventeen or eighteen. Her husband was ten years older and a man on the rise in the community. When her father died, he bequeathed her "All my lande in Willmecote cawlid Asbyes and the crop apone the grounde sowne and tyllide as hitt is."
From this we may deduce that she was dependable and practical as no farmer would leave land to an incompetent daughter. She was also healthy and vigorous, having many children and living to the ripe old age of sixty-eight. We can also imagine her to be energetic, intelligent and quick-witted. It is not known whether she was lierate, but her mark upon a bond is well formed and even graceful. Her private seal was of a galloping horse, and emblem of agility and industry. The fact that she had a seal at all is a sign of affluence and respectability. Shakespeare left no record of his mother, but she can be glimpsed at in a number of strong-minded mothers who appear in his dramas.
The House on Henley Street
The family house in Henley Street can be seen even now, though it is much changed. It was originally two (or even three) houses, with a garden and orchard. It was on the northern part of Henley, on the edge of town.
The house itself was built in the early sixteenth century in the mode of an oak frame with a thatched roof. The ceiling was was lime-washed, with the walls decorated with painted cloths or patterned over and over with the use of wood blocks. The wooden furniture was of the standard household type, The floors were made of broken limestone and covered with rushes.
It had six separate chambers and the lower and upper storey's connected with a ladder rather than a stairway. The hall was the principal room of the house. It was located next to the front door, with a large fireplace where the family ate their meals. The kitchen was in the back of the house, with a hand turned spit, brass skillets and leathern bottles. Beside the hall was a combined sitting room and bedroom where the bed itself was displayed as a prized specimen of household furniture. Here the walls were heavily patterned and decorated. Across the hall was John Shakespeare's workshop, where the labour of stitching and and sewing were done. It was also the shop where trading with the outside world was done and had a different atmostphere from the rest of the house. On the floor above there were three bedchambers. Shakespeare would have slept on a matress of rush, stretched on cords between the wood frame of the bed. In the attic rooms slept the servants and apprentices. It was a large house for a tradesman and reinforced the note of affluence in all his father's affairs.
It was probably a noisy house in which conversation in one part of the house could be clearly heard in another. The creaking of timber and the sound of footsteps would have been a constant companion to household chores. In Shakespeare's dramas come the unmistakable impressions of a childhood in Henley Street. There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping. There are references to the preparation of food and what was considered women's work in the home, like knitting and needle work. There were also images of men's work. Of carpentry, hooping and joinery. No other Elizabethan dramatist employs so many domestic allusions. It is evident that Shakespeare had a unique connection with his past.
The house also had a garden and orchard. He knew of grafting and pruning and digging and dunging. In his plays he alludes to 108 different plants. In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes and apricots.
The flowers in his plays are native to the soil from which he came. The primrose and the violet, the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose spring up wild all around him. He only needed to shut his eyes to see them again. He used local names for the flowers of the meadow. He used the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness. The dandelion is a "golden lad" before becoming a "chimney sweeper" when it became white and fluffy.
No poet beside Chaucer has celebrated so sweetly the enchantment of birds. He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows that the marlet builds its nest on exposed walls. He notices the song of the thrush and blackbird. He knows the more ominous owl and ravel, the crow and the maggot-pie. The spectacle of birds in flight entranced him and he cannot bear the thought of them being trapped or snared. He loves their free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature.
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