In Search of Shakespeare

by Michael Wood

  But in Shakespeare’s childhood, Coventry was still the proud centre of one great civic tradition. Every year its famous cycle of medieval plays was performed by the guilds, until in Shakespeare’s teens they were discontinued, denigrated as ‘papist superstition’ by an increasingly Puritanical town council (who ended up banning the maypole and even football). Judging by the numerous echoes in his plays, young Shakespeare certainly saw the mysteries; indeed John, as a traditionalist, may have taken the family every year. In the popular Hundred Merry Tales (a book that Shakespeare knew), a Warwickshire priest advises his parishioners to go to the mysteries in Coventry as a learning experience: he felt there was more to be learned from the drama than from the preacher in his pulpit.

  The Coventry mysteries were Christian folk drama, ten substantial mystery plays enacting New Testament tales, which were performed on wagons in conjunction with the annual Corpus Christi procession. They were a matter of considerable expenditure, civic pride and effort, and in their heyday they drew huge crowds. The seventeenth-century antiquarian William Dugdale reported that ‘the confluence of people from farr and neare to see that Shew was extraordinarily great, and yielded noe small advantage to this Cittye’. During her 1567 visit to Kenilworth, Elizabeth herself saw the smiths’ pageant of Christ’s trial before Herod.

  The mysteries were written by ordinary folk for ordinary folk. And their plots had everything: myth and history; love, passion and betrayal. They had bawdy and knockabout humour, and at the same time sublimity, terror and tremendous pathos. Their tales and symbols were known to all: simple parables that opened up the deepest human feelings. In the plays tragedy existed alongside low jesting – even sometimes in the same scene, as when the rude mechanicals make farting jokes as they work a bellows to cast the nails for Christ’s crucifixion. Here was earthy life even at the moment of cosmic anguish. It was a lesson Shakespeare never forgot.

  In later life the poet had a soft spot for old-fashioned things, and he clearly loved the mysteries – references to the cycle abound in his works. For example, when he has Judas greeting Christ with ‘All hail’, he is quoting not the New Testament but the Coventry mystery plays. The tale of Herod and the massacre of the innocents must have particularly affected him, as well it might any child. He mentions it in several plays; and when Hamlet famously complains about a ham actor tearing a passion to tatters he chooses Herod to underline his point (‘It out Herods Herod. Pray you avoid it’). This suggests that young William had seen the Coventry shearmen and tailors’ play, of which the Tudor text survives. What Hamlet was referring to was the scene in which Herod ‘rages in the street and on the pageant wagon’ (as the stage direction puts it) because the baby Jesus has slipped through his grasp. To appreciate its full flavour, the text has to be seen in its original language:

  HEROD: Owt! Owt! Owtt!

  Hath those fawls traturs done me this ded?

  I stampe! I stare! I look all abowtt!

  Myght I them take, I schuld them bren at a glede!

  I rent! I rawe! And now run I wode!

  A, thatt these velen trayturs hath mard this my mode!

  They schalbe hangid yf ma cum them to!

  Wonderful pantomime villainy over-egged by an amateur cast. But Shakespeare’s knowledge of these plays was not just a matter of jokes about acting style. He echoed and plundered them to powerful emotional effect in themes, images, words and staging, knowing that their old imaginal world was still there in the minds of so many of his audience.

  OPENING THE DOOR TO THE CLASSICAL WORLD

  One day in class, when Shakespeare was about nine, his schoolmaster Simon Hunt introduced him, in Latin, to the Roman poet Ovid. (We don’t know exactly what the curriculum was at Stratford, but this was the age boys started Ovid at Rotherham Grammar School in Yorkshire, for example; at Ashby de la Zouche in Nottinghamshire they began Ovid and Virgil in the third form, at the age of nine or ten; at Harrow it was Ovid in the third form and Virgil a little later.) The book was the Metamorphoses, the ‘book of changes’; the story of the gods and myths of the ancient world, and the principle of the universe – change itself:

  Of bodies changed to other forms I tell;

  You Gods, who have yourself wrought every change,

  Inspire my enterprise and lead my lay

  In one continuous song from nature’s first

  Remote beginnings to our modern times.

  Ere land and sea and the all-covering sky

  Were made, in the whole world the countenance

  Of nature was the same, all one, well named

  Chaos…

  Everyone knows the feeling of excitement on discovering a book that unlocks the imagination; it enables us to inhabit another world – of heightened language, thought and ideas. Great literature holds the seed of a kind of liberation that remains with us throughout life – all the more so if it is learned by heart. Shakespeare’s older contemporary, the French philosopher Michel Montaigne (here in John Florio’s translation), described his own discovery of this Roman poet: ‘the first taste or feeling I had of bookes, was of the pleasure I tooke in reading the fables of Ovids Metamorphosies; for being but seven or eight yeares old, I would steale and sequester my selfe from all other delights, only to reade them’.

  Ovid is one of the key poets in Western culture: elegant, witty, sexy, impassioned, a great storyteller, a teacher – and a delightful companion, too, in the confiding way he talks to the reader:

  The elements themselves do not endure;

  Examine how they change and learn from me ….

  Nothing retains its form; new shapes from old

  Nature, the great inventor, ceaselessly

  Contrives. In all creation, trust me,

  There is no death – no death, but only change

  And innovation; what we men call birth

  Is but a different new beginning; death

  Is but to cease to be the same ….

  This long poem on the Greek myths was probably Shakespeare’s best-loved book. He had other favourites – among vernacular poets he loved Chaucer and had a soft spot for old John Gower – but to Ovid he went back time and again. Here he read the stories of Jason and Medea, of Pyramus and Thisbe and of the siege of Troy with its great heroes Hector, Achilles and Ulysses. To a child it was perhaps the Tudor equivalent of The Chronicles of Narnia, The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter, but demanding a higher and deeper level of engagement, drawing as it does on an ancient tradition expressed in heightened poetic language – and a foreign language to boot. These were tales that unlocked a door to the incomparably rich universe of the classical world, and had the capacity to lift a child’s mind beyond the claustrophobic conformities of 1570s’ education.

  Shakespeare would have worked on the Latin text with Simon Hunt at school, of course, reading it aloud, parsing and explaining. But it is conceivable that his family (or his godfather?) might have bought him Arthur Golding’s recent translation. As a professional writer in London, he used Golding, but he also worked direct from the Latin text, which he presumably also possessed. (Interestingly enough, a sixteenth-century Latin Ovid survives in Oxford with an abbreviated signature on the title page which may just be his, and a seventeenth-century note that it was Shakespeare’s copy which had come through a Mr Hall – perhaps his son-in-law, Dr John Hall.) Shakespeare grew to know the Metamorphoses extremely well, and it is one of a small number of books that he used throughout his career – chief among them the Bible, Holinshed’s Historie of England, Cinthio’s Hundred Stories and Plutarch’s Lives – amid thousands of texts browsed, skimmed, plundered or read intensively. In his last play as a solo author, The Tempest, he transmutes Ovid’s fantastic description of Medea mixing her magic herbs into Prospero’s valediction, his renunciation of magic. This speech is often taken to be Shakespeare’s farewell to his art, and if it is, its source could not be more appropriate. Shakespeare the poet was obsessed by concealment, role-playing and illusion. Ovid too delights
in showing his readers their own image, playing with them, pointing out the intellectual reality that a text is just a text, and yet forcing us to believe in the parallel reality of the world created in the text. In Ovid, the supreme poet of illusion found a soulmate for life.

  HUMANIST ALLEGORY VERSUS PURITAN LITERALNESS

  But there was another dimension to the reading of a Tudor child that had nothing to do with literal comprehension. Ovid’s Metamorphoses is not just a book of good tales. And no more than with his experience of the mystery plays did Shakespeare’s reading of Ovid come down simply to stories, images and words mechanically borrowed. It was about ways of seeing. This was acknowledged directly by Golding on his title page in a kind of spiritual health warning to the reader. First published in Protestant England in 1567, the book was described as ‘A worke very pleasaunt and delectable’; nonetheless, said Golding, ‘with skill, heede, and judgement, this worke must be read, For else to the Reader it standes in small stead’. Shakespeare’s Ovid teacher, the Oxford graduate Hunt, had a background in old-fashioned humanism; and Renaissance Christian humanism was frankly pagan in colour. For university-educated humanists like Montaigne, or John Colet in England, the works of Ovid and Virgil were a kind of profane Bible. In other words, God’s eternal revelation had been given to the pagans, too. These were not just dry texts; in their great themes of mutability and the gods they offered an alternative mental world to the post-Reformation universe. The key is the relationship between literalness and allegory, as Erasmus says in his Handbook: ‘more profit is perhaps to be derived from reading pagan literature (poetica) with its allegorical content in mind than from the Scriptures taken merely literally’.

  Not surprisingly, Puritans and the stricter Protestants regarded ideas like these as dangerous and even heretical. Allegory was not acceptable; literalness was everything. Luther vehemently condemned those moralizers of Ovid ‘who would turn Apollo into Christ and Diana into the Virgin Mary’. In England Puritans would attempt to ban the pagan poets; and a Privy Council memo of April 1582 called for ‘the removing of such lascivious poetes as are commonly read and taught in grammar schools … as Ovid de arte amandi, or such lyke’

  The whole of Shakespeare’s writing career shows that he supported the humanist rather than the Puritan view of Ovid. In his late romances he would use this late medieval allegorical tradition and bring the pagan gods on stage: for example, in Pericles he uses Diana to evoke the Virgin Mary. The destruction of this medieval tradition would be a great blow to the richness of English literary culture, and Shakespeare’s plays were so successful in part because he drew on it, incorporated it into his work and handed it down to us.

  So the books that Shakespeare closely studied tell us more than simply what he read. At school he learned whole chunks of great literature off by heart; he got inside Latin well enough to be able to invent words from Latin stems; he also encountered heightened language, refinement of expression, the sound and rhythm of language, and respect for tradition. But most of all he absorbed tales and myths, and discovered allegory and the topography of another universe – one of the most exciting gifts for a young person’s imagination. His childhood reading experiences matched his experience of the outer world, and he would always observe life from multiple viewpoints. In the famous epigram of the ancient Greek satirist Archilochus, the fox knows many things, the hedgehog one big thing. Shakespeare learned early to be a fox.

  PROSPECTS: LIFE AFTER GRAMMAR SCHOOL

  So what were the prospects for the boy William? What could a bailiff’s son in 1570s’ Warwickshire have expected from life after school? By the time he was approaching his thirteenth birthday, in the normal course of events he might have expected his future life to be mapped out for him. In a Tudor town there were plenty of job opportunities for a former mayor’s son with a good Latin education. After all, his father, now in his late forties, had been a pillar of local society for twenty years and had money, status and influence. But over the winter of 1576, when Shakespeare was twelve, a dramatic change came over the family fortunes.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  JOHN SHAKESPEARE’S SECRET

  UNTIL THE MID-1570s John Shakespeare was still doing well and had bought more land and two more houses in Stratford. It was at this time that he applied to the College of Arms in London for a coat of arms, hoping to become a gentleman. For some reason it didn’t happen; whether they refused him, or whether he dropped the matter, is unknown. Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, for his fortunes were about to turn.

  Brogging, illegal dealing in wool, was a risky business: you worked on credit, so you had to trust your supplier. Broggers no doubt always lived with occasional bad debts, like the Marlborough clothier whom John pursued fruitlessly for payment over twenty years. The court case in 1572 had been a warning: John had laid out £210 to purchase wool in Westminster and in Snitterfield, only to be shopped by an informer for contravening the laws protecting the monopoly of the Staple of Wool Merchants. (Some of the government’s undercover army of informers were very nasty characters: James Langrake, who caught John, was later jailed for raping his maidservant and blackmailing his victims.) This time John got away with a fine because it was his first offence, and most likely he got off further charges by doing what people normally did – making a private settlement with the informer out of court.

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE WOOL TRADE

  Things were not good in England in that winter of 1576–7. The economy was in trouble, and disillusionment with Elizabeth’s rule was widespread. In the new year the Privy Council noted with alarm the seething state of the realm, ‘tending as it seemeth to some seed of rebellion’. And then came the first indication that all was not well in the Shakespeares’ affairs. On the corporation’s account day, 23 January, John failed to appear at the council meeting; nor, after thirteen years with only one absence, did he attend any other meeting in 1577. The next year the pattern continued. Soon the family started mortgaging off their property, and John appears to have run into debt.

  What triggered this financial slide is still unknown. But in the autumn of 1576 there was a growing crisis in the wool industry because the raw material was in short supply, and this led to a countrywide recession, especially in the Cotswolds. The following summer the Privy Council instructed the mayor of the Wool Staple to canvas ‘skilful clothiers’ about ‘the cause of the said dearth and how it may be remedied’. Their answer was the old refrain: the broggers were to blame. So in July the Privy Council issued orders to the shire authorities to clamp down on them. Obviously it didn’t work, because eventually, in September 1580, the government ordered the broggers to be ‘identified, and proceeded against in the law’ – they were to be run out of town once and for all. By then, however, John’s troubles were altogether more serious.

  A GRAND COMMISSION ECCLESIASTICAL

  Just when the broggers were being squeezed, the authorities initiated a witch-hunt against the followers of the Old Religion. In the first ten or fifteen years of Elizabeth’s reign there had been a degree of live and let live in religious observance. But now the war for hearts and minds entered a new phase. In April 1576 the queen appointed a Grand Commission to inquire into offences against her 1559 statutes of supremacy, which made the monarch, not the pope, supreme governor of the Church of England. The commission’s aim was to ‘order correct, reform and punish any persons wilfully and obstinately absenting themselves from church and service’. Fines against Catholics were to be levied by the churchwardens of each parish for the benefit of the poor; in serious cases heavier fines and imprisonment were to be imposed by the commissioners, with bonds or sureties taken for the appearance of offenders. Anyone who held civic office now had to take the oath of allegiance to the queen in matters of religion. The investigations were conducted throughout the second half of 1576, coinciding with John’s last appearance at a Stratford town council meeting.

  The next year the Privy Council appointed commissioners to recruit armed
forces from landowners, gentlemen and freeholders in each shire. This move was as much about political and religious control as about military assessment. In October the musters commissioners came to Stratford, among them Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, the anti-Catholic enforcer for the local area. At the same time an order was sent to all bishops to ‘certify the name of all persons in his diocese who refused to come to church, together with the values of their lands and goods’. A concerted effort was to be made to demand loyalty under the threat of fines and confiscation of land. But in south Warwickshire this proved hard to implement. The bishop of Worcester was unpopular, many of the landowners, burghers and clergy were sympathetic to their Catholic neighbours, and the lists of recusants remained incomplete.

  In January 1578 a levy was made in Stratford itself for the strengthening of the militia (to be used against possible uprisings, but also to enforce anti-Catholic measures). In this list John Shakespeare appears with a 3s 4d assessment – half that of the other aldermen. But he refused to pay. Among those reported for non-payment along with him were George Badger, one of the staunchest Catholics in town; Thomas Reynolds, another Catholic and the father of a friend of William’s; and Thomas Nashe, the father of another friend of the poet. Interestingly enough, however, the corporation excused John payment of the levy, and also his fine for non-attendance on election day in September 1578. In fact there is no record that he ever paid the fines imposed for his absence.