Shakespeare - The Awakening Years

Anthony Barrs

• Publisher: Dolman Scott Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781909204928
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Shakespeare Drama
• Index: Literature

There have been thousands of books written about William Shakespeare in the last four hundred years. But very few about his formative years in Stratford – upon – Avon in Warwickshire.His date of birth in 1564 is known from the parish records of The HolyTrinity Church in Stratford as are the births of his daughter Elizabeth in 1583, his twins Hamnet and Judith in 1585 and his burial in 1616. In the Worcester Cathedral Diocese records, there is an entry for a special licence in November 1582 for the marriage of William Shakespeare to Anne Whatley. This appears to be a mistake as it was amended to Anne Hathaway. It would appear from the inscription on Anne Hathaway's grave in the Holy Trinity Church that she was eight years older than William. Because of the dearth of any further documentation until the first reference to a play by him in London in 1592 the years until this date are referred to by academia as the Lost Years. Besides being a self-employed glover his father was a long-time servant of the town council, eventually becoming High Bailiff; so William would have been entitled to attend the King Edward VI grammar school where he would have been taught Latin and Rhetoric. His father ran into financial difficulties when he was about thirteen years of age when he would have had to leave school. The idea for this book came from reading E.A.J. Honigmann's book Shakespeare; 'The Lost Years' in which he makes a strong case for him spending time in Lancashire as a teacher; and Mark Eccles's book, Shakespeare in Warwickshire which is a mine of detailed information on Shakespeare's contemporaries in Stratford. It was the short step from reading these books, and many more, to imagining his life as a boy: through his teenage years, thinking about girls and wondering about his future. The healthy interest in sex he showsin his plays as an adult would no doubt have been stimulated by encounters in his teenage years. My story ends with his marriage to Anne Hathaway and his eventual escape to London.

Chapter One

The fates were kind to me when I came into this world. The year 1564, was a bad year for Stratford on Avon. God in his wrath visited the plague on the town -the Black Death. Over two hundred people died. Men, women and children. I was but three months old when my mother, who had buried two daughters before I was born, took me off to stay at her family farm in Wilmcote, in the country outside the town, until it was safe to return. My father, God bless him, had to stay in town. He still had to earn his living as a glove maker and he was also, of course, a senior burgess of the town. He had strict instructions from my mother to remember to feed her hogs and fowls while she was away. When she deemed it safe we returned home and she gave thanks to the Virgin Mary for saving us from the pestilence – she was born and brought up in the Catholic faith. Because of his growing ambition as a member of the town council father had to show his commitment to the new Protestant religion. We all had to accompany him to the Holy Trinity Church each Sunday, but in the home mother insisted on following the rites of her faith.

I was confused. If we were to believe in God it seemed to make sense to pray directly to him through Jesus his son, as we did at the church of the Holy Trinity rather than through his mother, The Virgin Mary. Grown ups have some strange ideas. I was nearly thirteen years of age and I grew up surrounded by farm animals so I knew about the birds and the bees. So, how could they believe Mary to have been a virgin? Was she carrying God’s child before she married Joseph? To be sure he would have needed some convincing of the supernatural cause of her large belly. And how would he explain his wife’s claim to their friends and neighbours? They lived in a small village after all!

I mulled over the mysteries of life and religion as I dozed in my bed in the dark – Father had doused the lanthorn on the landing as he had gone to his bed. I had tentatively tried to talk to my mother about the confusion in my mind, but I got a sharp answer. “Do not dare to question the Bible. Anyway you are too young to understand,” Always too young! But not too young to read the Bible to her every night, at her insistence, now that it was printed in English. She had gone through life listening to priests reading their own personal translations from the Latin. I had tried asking my dad what he made of it. “I have not got time to answer silly questions, ask your mother.” He was always too busy; he deferred all domestic matters to his wife. I wondered if all fathers were so unapproachable.

So, I resolved to talk to my friend Richard Tyler about it – he was as inquisitive as me - and ask him what he thought. His father was a butcher and a friend of my father. Knowing his turn of mind, though, I expected he would have some coarse interpretation.

“Are you out of bed yet, William?” Mother’s voice sounded up the stairs. “You will be late for school, and get Gilbert up, but don’t you dare wake the others. Say your prayers and get dressed.” The others being my sister Anne aged six and Richard aged four. My other sister, Joan was eight and was already up and helping mother with the breakfast. There were no school for girls in Stratford; the King’s New School was for boys only. Gilbert and I were allowed to attend because father was a member of the town council.

“Yes, mother,” I groaned, and snuggled deeper into the bed, I felt the warmth of Gilbert’s body and the rise and fall of his breathing. Little Richard on the other side of him was twitching in the throes of a dream. Gilbert was younger than me, but we went along to school together. He was in the class of the usher, the master’s assistant. He was even more reluctant than me at having to get up at six-o-clock in the morning to trudge, half asleep, through the wakening streets, to get to school for seven, just to spend the day till six-o-clock at night learning to write from his horn book, while I was learning Latin from the likes of Terence and Juvenal. We would soon be changing to summer school times; getting up at five to be in school for six.

Latin! What was the point of it? The only people now using it were lawyers and high churchmen. Now that the Bible was being printed in English every parish priest in the land had a copy from which to read the homilies. According to my father the court of Queen Elizabeth, which had conducted its business in Latin and Norman French since the Conquest, now used English almost exclusively in its day to day business. Even we had a copy of the Geneva Bible which father bought in London on one of his trips on the business of Stratford council. Neither he nor my mother could read, that’s how I came to the nightly reading of passages from the New Testament. Even though England, according to the edict of Queen Elizabeth, was now a Protestant country, my mother still insisted we live with the rituals of the old religion when we were at home, apart that is from my Bible readings! In the beginning, having to read to her every night was an unwelcome chore, but as I got more used to it I gradually began to look forward to it, the writing was so beautiful.

“Are you up yet William? ‘tis gone six. Is Gilbert up? Have you said your prayers?”

Mother, I murmured quietly, you know I hurt my foot playing football yesterday, can’t I miss school just for one day? A futile question, of course, it’s as well she couldn’t hear me; father would never countenance it anyway. Ever conscious of his own lack of learning, the education of his children was as the holy writ to him, his boys anyway. Though his term of High Bailiff of Stratford was ended he remained an Alderman and still had the privilege of sending his sons to the grammar school. I thought I had better get up before mother came and hauled us out of bed and treated us to the back of her hand.

“William…how many more times?” That was my father. His shouting could have roused the whole street. A cock crowed greeting the dawn.

“Coming Father.”

I hauled Gilbert out of bed and we struggled to get dressed in the faint dawn light creeping through the windows. Nathaniel, father’s apprentice, passed us on his way from his room in the attic. He gave us a rueful grimace.

It was a cold, damp, cloud clamped morning in early March, but our bellies were full of mother’s hot potage when we left the house, and we were well wrapped up under our black students’ gowns and caps as we made our way down Henley Street past the High Cross into High Street. In the years since I was first pulled along to school by my mother as a five year old, my face washed and my hair brushed, I had got used to every inch of the way. Away to the east, over the Clopton bridge across the Avon, the sun was struggling to break through the lowering clouds.

There was a clatter of footsteps behind us. Thomas Hornby the blacksmith‘s son was the same age as Gilbert. In the High Street the brothers Will and Tom Smith appeared. “Hello there Will, Gil.” Their father was a haberdasher.

Heads down, we plodded up the street together with me favouring my bruised foot – it wasn’t an excuse. People were emerging from their homes preparing to face their working day.

“Heard about Mary Webbe?” Will Smith asked, breaking the silence. “She’s quite poorly. I heard my mother talking with father last night. They expect she will die.”

Mary Webbe. I knew her. She would sometimes accompany her father on his stall on market day. She couldn’t be more than seven or eight. Why did so many children die? I had two sisters who died before I was born and another, Anne, who was just six, had always been sickly and was like to die. Thank goodness, my other sister, Joanie, was thriving.

“I wish I could die.” Will mumbled.

“Why, are you poorly?” asked Gilbert.

“No but I wish I was.”

“Take no notice of him, Gil,” I said. “I know what’s the matter with him, it’s our Latin day today; we have to read, write and speak nothing but Latin all day and Old Jenks will be walking round with his birch rod just looking for an excuse to use it.’

“Yeah… an I’ll be the first to feel it as usual,” moaned Will.

“Ain’t I glad we don’t have Latin days in my class.” said Gil, adding to the discomfort of Will who grunted, “Your time will come afore long. My father says he can’t see the point in Latin. In fact he can’t see why I ’ave to go to school at all.” His brother, Thomas, piped up behind us. “Mother says she don’t want to see ’er sons agrowin’ up to be haberdashers.”

Tom Hornby said, “My mother don’t want me to be a blacksmith.”

“How about you, Will? What do you want to be?” Will Smith asked.

“Me?” I grinned. “Well I think my mother wants me to grow up to be a gentleman like her Arden cousins in Park Hall.” Me a gentleman? The very thought made me shudder: this was where I belonged, among my friends, not in some gilded hall eating from golden platters!

Gil piped up. “Nobody’s asked me, ‘spect I’ll finish up a glover like our father.” And why not, it was an honourable trade. And Gil would make a very good glover. But it was not for me, I wanted to be a … good question, what did I want to be?

Old Jenks was our schoolmaster, Thomas Jenkins. He was not really old, he just looked older than his years. Father, who had a hand in his appointment, said he took his BA at Oxford in 1566 and his MA in 1570 so he would be about nearing forty. That was old to us! He too had a young daughter who had died, just the year before last, aged about five. Why did so many children die? I was reminded how lucky I was when I was born. That was the year the plague descended on Stratford on Avon. A great number of children died in the town. Mother firmly believed I was saved because she prayed day and night to the Virgin Mary, and that it was her prayers that protected my father as he went about his council work helping people in the town. I wondered, did the deaths in town happen because the families were praying to the wrong god!

Passing over the crossroads of Ely Street and Sheep Street the High Street was then called Chapel Street. On the left hand corner at the next crossroads with Chapel Lane was an imposing house with a large garden. New Place it was called, the biggest house in Stratford, built by Sir Hugh Clopton, who was also the builder of the bridge over the Avon. I wanted a house like that when I grew up. I dreamed of owning that house.

Opposite New Place on the corner across Chapel Lane was the Guild Chapel. The walls inside were painted with scenes from the Bible until father was ordered to get them painted over when he was the Bailiff. Next to the Chapel was the Guildhouse where the town council met. Our school occupied the upper floor.

The chapel bell was tolling seven as we got to the corner. A figure was coming up the lane and a voice called, “Hold hard there, Will.” It was Richard Tyler. His father had a butchers shop on the corner of Sheep Street down by the Bank Croft. We waited for him and climbed the stairs to school together.

The teaching of Latin and Logic were the main subjects taught in Stratford Grammar School and the Town Council could not have picked a better man to be Master. Any subject that did not help his pupils to improve their Latin was of little importance in Old Jenks’s eyes. He was a firm believer in our reading and acting plays from the Roman classics to further our understanding of the language.

He was already in the classroom when we got there, standing by the door as we entered, in his black cloak and skull cap. Black eyebrows and a short trimmed black beard streaked with grey: his black hair growing down to a pristine white ruff; a ruff which, with his short neck, made it appear that his head was balanced on a thick white platter. It was woe betide anybody who had not a clean and shining face and well brushed hair.

He flicked his birch at Dick Tyler’s bottom as he passed. “You have blood on your jerkin,boy!”

Dick glanced down then up at the master. “Sorry, sir,” he said awkwardly, “I was helping my father in the shop before I left for school.”

“Hrrumph!” he grunted, “you are to be commended for doing your filial duty to your father. Just be more careful how you present yourself here at school. Get to your place.” He cracked the birch on his desk and glared round. “The rest of you get to your places.”

There was the usual stench of tallow candles, recently dowsed, in sconces around the walls, as we hung up our cloaks and caps on the pegs provided and settled down.

After the prayers with which we started every day, the Master announced that we would begin to learn the play Pyramus and Thisby.

“But this time instead of just playing it in school, we will perform it in the Guildhouse before your families and an invited audience of the High Bailiff, aldermen and councillors!”

I remembered reading this play recently when studying a translation of Ovid He was not one for making jokes was Master Jenkins and he rarely relaxed his face in a smile. But his lips definitely twitched as he followed that announcement with. “It will of course be in Latin throughout.” We looked at each other in silent disbelief, bordering on horror. School plays were one thing, but before an audience would be something else. And in Latin…

He came from behind his desk, “Why so surprised?” he growled as he paced up and down. “The town council is paying me for your education. Should they not occasionally be able to see what value they are getting for their money?” At the same time, I thought, it would do his standing no harm if the play was a success. He continued, “few if any of your audience will understand Latin and will no doubt easily become bored sitting two hours or more, so I have condensed Plautus’s work to last about one hour. Even so your acting will have to be first rate and visually arresting to do the play justice. This week, while I am considering who shall play what part, you will study the play. Then I will make my decision after hearing you, one by one, read a passage of my choosing. He stabbed his finger at us while fixing us with his penetrating stare. “Make no mistake, I will not be fooled by anyone who deliberately tries to fail my test, or who wants to take part just to impress their folk in the audience. Open your books.”

He turned to me. “Shakespeare…a word.” I followed him as he went back to his desk. Quietly, out of earshot of the rest of the pupils he said. “Whoever I decide will play the other parts, you will play Pyramus.”

Oh no!…Me play Pyramus?…Why me? Pyramus was one of the main parts. Why had he singled me out? But of course I knew why. I was not keen on Latin and this was his way of trying to get me to show more interest. And, of course, my father used to be the Bailiff. As an...