Shakespeare

A Beginner's Guide

Ros King

• Publisher: Oneworld Publications
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781780740485
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

Whether the fault of tedious teachers or hammy actors, Shakespeare is often seen as dry and impenetrable. In this fast-paced introduction, Ros King sets out to remind us of the sheer beauty and sophistication that can make Shakespeare's works a joy for any audience. Exploring his invention, wit, along with his uncanny characterisation, King argues archaic language should be no barrier to the modern reader. With summaries of The Bard's life and background, explanations of the plays' origins, and instructions on how to read his poetry, Shakespeare: A Beginner's Guide provides all the tools the general reader needs to embrace our greatest writer.

1

Who, and what, is Shakespeare?

‘I am I, howe’er I was begot’

(King John, 1.1.175)

On 26 April 1564 a christening took place in Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford-upon-Avon. The entry written in Latin in the parish baptismal records states: William, son of John Shakespeare. The boy’s birthday is not stated, but since christenings commonly took place within a few days of a child’s birth, and since this child would later come to be regarded as England’s national poet, the feast day of St George, England’s national saint, has seemed, to some, too convenient a date to miss. April 23rd has therefore been celebrated as William’s birthday ever since he became a national treasure in the later eighteenth century, although there is in fact no firm evidence for that date.

St George, the middle-eastern dragon-slayer of legend, is perhaps a surprising choice for English patron saint. In contrast, the story of William’s life and death – a classic tale of talent combined with hard work – has sometimes seemed too ordinary for a poet of such stature. By dint of a serviceable education mostly in Latin in the local grammar school, a gift both for human observation and for business, and a startlingly good ear, this boy from the ‘middling sort’ (the son of a glove maker, wool dealer, and small town official) became a notable success in both the commercial and court theatre of his time. Again, the school part of this story is an assumption since the records of enrolment for the King Edward VI grammar school at Stratford no longer exist, but the alderman’s son would have been entitled to a place, and the plays contain no more, and also no less knowledge of classical literature than that to which he would have been exposed as a pupil in a competent grammar school of the period.

This life trajectory is rather inspiring. But it threatens the very idea of the British class structure. Accordingly, since Victorian times, there has always been someone who will claim that William Shakespeare from Stratford was only the front man for some aristocrat who wished to hide a passion for popular theatre and writing: Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford; Francis, Lord Bacon; Christopher Marlowe; even Queen Elizabeth herself have been touted as candidates – despite the fact that all but Bacon were dead long before some of the sources for the later plays appeared, and Bacon’s acknowledged work bears no resemblance to the Shakespeare canon.

Shakespeare, the married man

The next set of dates in the records raises some equally doubtful matters. On 27 November 1582, the clerk to the court of the Bishop of Worcester recorded in Latin the grant of a special licence for a marriage between William Shaxpere and Anne Whateley of Temple Grafton. Along with a number of other names in the register, Anne’s was mistaken by the clerk who wrote the entry. He should have written the name Hathaway but his confusion probably occurred because that day he had been dealing with a legal case concerning one William Whateley. The next day, two close friends of the bride’s family stood surety for the sum of £40 in a marriage bond vouching for the legality of the proposed union between ‘William Shagspere’ and ‘Anne Hathwey’ of ‘Stratford’. Six months later a daughter was born to the couple; Susanna Shakespeare was christened on 26 May 1583. Anne was therefore already three months pregnant when she walked up the aisle.

Normally a marriage ceremony would take place after the calling of the banns – which asked for information regarding any impediment to the marriage – on three consecutive Sundays or holy days. Canon law, however, demanded that no banns could be called between Advent Sunday (which that year fell on 2 December) and the Octave of Epiphany (13 January). For whatever reason, William and Anne had clearly run out of time for a marriage before Christmas. The special licence was therefore necessary because of the time of year, and also because William was still a minor.

Judging by the age of sixty-seven given on Anne’s tombstone in 1623 – although tombstones are not always reliable – she was eight years older than her husband. Temple Grafton, where the incumbent was known to be an unreliable adherent to the old religion, and not allowed to solemnise marriages, has also caused problems. But we do not know where the marriage ceremony itself took place, and it is possible that Anne had been living in that hamlet at the time of the licence, just three and a half miles from the family home in Shottery.

These incomplete facts have caused endless salacious speculation: he married her because he had to; she was ‘on the shelf’; they weren’t happy; as soon as his twins Judith and Hamnet were born early in 1585, he left her and the screaming family in the country to go to live as an actor in London; and perhaps most famously, as supposed proof of all that, he left her in his will only the ‘second best’ bed.

Elizabethan marriage practice was not however identical with ours. It was perfectly acceptable for couples to have sex before marriage provided they were betrothed, or had gone through a simple exchange of vows before witnesses – per verba de praesenti. It was the betrothal that formed the legally binding agreement and which sorted out the financial arrangements between the families.

Shakespeare may also not have been as absent a father figure as has been supposed – at least not once he was established as a writer. The City authorities closed the London theatres whenever plague gave them the grounds for doing so. The acting companies would go on the road on these occasions, as they did in any case for two months every summer. Touring is not conducive to writing and Shakespeare may well have taken the opportunity to go home, both to write and to look after his property. He maintained myriad financial dealings in Stratford, including rights to tithes and rental income, and like his father, he was also engaged in lending money at interest, although unlike his father, he was never prosecuted for usury – lending money at more than ten per cent. But however he made his money, he was able to buy and refurbish New Place, the second-largest house in Stratford, as early as 1597, when he was just thirty-four. When in London, he seems to have preferred to live in rented rooms. The property he later bought in Blackfriars seems to have been an investment rather than a home.

Shakespeare’s will is remarkable for the care with which he bequeaths his estate to his family, aiming to keep it intact down the generations, although the lack of surviving grandchildren thwarted this ambition. Susanna, who was his executor, along with her husband, was also the residuary legatee. Judith had made what Shakespeare probably regarded as a risky match; her husband had been called before the local Stratford church bawdy courts for fornication. Shakespeare’s will therefore seems to have been altered in the light of her wedding to ensure that her portion would be safeguarded from any attempt by her husband to sell it. Until the Married Woman’s Property Act of 1882, married women had no legal control over their own fortunes; their property belonged to their husbands. William thus used his will to circumvent the law.

Anne, meanwhile, was provided for as a matter of course, taking the dowager’s right to live in the family home during her lifetime. In prestigious New Place, the second best bed would probably have been the bed that she and William had shared as husband and wife – the best bed being reserved to impress visitors. The will, as appropriate, is couched in formal and conventional legalese. But this bequest might suggest sentiment. And while it is always inadvisable to take literary texts as evidence for autobiography, Sonnet 145 does seem to play on her name:

Those lips that Love’s own hand did make,

Breathed forth the sound that said ‘I hate’

To me that languished for her sake;

But when she saw my woeful state

…

‘I hate’ she altered with an end

That followed it as gentle day

Doth follow night …

‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,

And saved my life, saying ‘not you’.

Hate away, Hathaway; ‘I hate not you’.

Apprentice, poacher, or schoolmaster in the country?

All these documentary facts about a middle-class Elizabethan life are open to varying interpretation, but details of Shakespeare’s early career and particularly the means whereby he gained entry to his profession as an actor and writer are even less certain.

His father, John Shakespeare, may have had financial difficulties that forced William to leave school early. He certainly did not go on to university, which otherwise he might have expected to do at the age of sixteen, and it is possible that he was briefly apprenticed in his father’s business. The old story that Shakespeare was forced to flee to London because he was caught poaching Sir Thomas Lucy’s deer in Charlecote (or perhaps Fulbroke) park near Stratford has never quite gone away, although it can have absolutely nothing to do with how he managed to break in to a career in the theatre and make a living as a dramatist.

The story told by the gossip writer John Aubrey that he had been a ‘schoolmaster in the country’, however, is rather more pertinent. There have been numerous dramatists whose day job was teaching, and the job of master in a school run along sixteenth-century humanist principles would have been a particularly helpful first career move. Teaching Latin would have enabled him to consolidate his own knowledge of the standard school texts, from Julius Caesar’s histories of the wars and politics of Rome, to the poetry of transformation and myth in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And his lack of a university degree would not be unusual for an assistant master.

The curriculum for Stratford grammar school from the period is no longer extant, but from the surviving curricula of other schools we can presume that as a pupil, and perhaps later as a teacher, Shakespeare would have engaged in the practice of double translation, first from Latin into English and then back into as accurate an imitation of the original Latin as possible. Imitation, however, can also be creative; the great humanist scholar Erasmus advocated in A Method of Study that boys should also be allowed to play games with the texts they read, noting that the great stories of classical myth are found in different forms, and that it might therefore be both instructive and entertaining for boys to be allowed to write variations on a given story.

Play performance, both in Latin and English, was a valued recreational activity in many schools when Shakespeare was young. Besides being fun, it trained boys in public speaking and developed their memories. A number of the plays or interludes that still survive from the mid-sixteenth century were written by the schoolmasters of the London choir schools, the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s, whose children also performed plays regularly at court, and some were published probably because printers expected to be able to sell copies to grammar schools up and down the land. As a schoolmaster himself, Shakespeare would have had the opportunity to write his own plays and direct his charges in them. It would have been an invaluable education for an aspiring dramatist. There is no proof of this, but it would explain how the boy from Stratford acquired the necessary literary and theatrical knowledge, and the opportunity to practice his writing. But it too does not explain how he made the transition to a professional theatrical career.

Shakespeare the actor

Of the many possibilities that have been suggested, there are two that are worth considering, the first of which is also connected to being a schoolmaster. In this scenario, with the help of John Cottom, the master of Stratford grammar school, he secured a job as a teacher in the Catholic household of Alexander Hoghton of Lea in Lancashire. Cottom came from nearby Tarnacre, and was the brother of a recusant Catholic priest, who would shortly be executed. Hoghton’s will, drawn up and proved in 1581, bequeaths his musical instruments and set of play clothes to his brother or, if he has no use for these, to his neighbour, Sir Thomas Hesketh, adding that he wishes Hesketh to be ‘friendly unto Fulke Gillom and William Shakeshafte, now dwelling with me’. Hesketh had close ties with Lord Strange, and if this Shakeshafte is Shakespeare, it might have given him the necessary contacts for a route into Strange’s company of actors in the early 1580s. But it is by no means certain. Shakeshafte was a fairly common name in Lancashire.

An alternative suggestion is that Shakespeare joined one of the numerous playing companies that passed through Stratford in the 1580s. One colourful suggestion is that he was taken up by the Queen’s Men when they visited Stratford in 1586–7; they were a man short because one actor, William Knell, had been killed in a street brawl in Thame in Oxfordshire. Did Shakespeare fill his place when they got to Stratford and leave on the road with them? Within the year, Knell’s widow, Rebecca, married John Hemmings (or Heminges), another actor in the company, who would become Shakespeare’s friend, executor, and one of the two actors responsible for the publication of his collected plays.

In the wording of the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds, all ‘fencers, bearwards, common players in interludes, minstrels, jugglers, pedlars, tinkers and petty chapmen’ had to have an aristocratic patron, or a licence from two justices of the peace in order to protect them from the charge of vagrancy as ‘rogues, vagabonds and sturdy beggars’. This system of patronage was mutually beneficial: the actors could travel and earn their living; their patrons enjoyed the kudos from having their servants advertise their name and prestige, and might also have the opportunity to bring them to court to entertain the queen.

The Queen’s Men came into being ten years after this act was passed, taking the best players from other acting companies to form a pre-eminent troop. A number were drawn from the company belonging to the Earl of Leicester – Elizabeth’s favourite – presumably with his great good will, and even connivance at the honour. Since Thomas Walsingham, the queen’s spymaster, took a surprisingly active interest in the company’s formation, it is possible that one ulterior motive was that it served the purpose of showing an aspect of the queen to her people in parts of the country to which she would never go in person. Conversely, while on their travels, they might also supply intelligence back to the court on political activity in the country.

The Queen’s Men’s repertoire was often rambunctious. Led by Richard Tarlton, the famous clown, loved and admired for his extemporising wit, they incorporated a physical style of performance, and stock comedy routines; printed versions of their playtexts may therefore not do them justice. They were also politically correct, as befitted their name and patron; their version of a King John play, The Troublesome Reign of King John (printed in 1591), is very much more overtly Protestant and partisan than Shakespeare’s version of the same story. There are other tantalising connections with Shakespeare’s work: their repertoire included a King Lear play, and The Taming of a Shrew (a play with a story similar to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, but set in Athens). Clearly they went down well in the country as they continued to tour, even as far as Scotland and the north of Ireland. But there are no records of them performing at court between Christmas 1591 and their final performance there on Twelfth Night 1594.

Whether or not Shakespeare was in Lancashire in his teens, or started his career with the Queen’s Men, a period connected in some way with Strange’s Men some time in the late 1580s and early 1590s is the most likely preparation for his later success. He is not mentioned in any surviving list of their players, but it is this company that supplies eight of the ten actors who in 1594 would form the new Chamberlain’s company. The first unequivocal mention of Shakespeare in theatrical records is at Easter the following year when he is named along with the actors William Kemp and Richard...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Why Shakespeare?
• 1. Who, and what, is Shakespeare?
• 2. Shakespeare and the theatre business
• 3. Shakespeare’s structures: plot, genre, and character
• 4. Reading, hearing, and seeing Shakespeare
• 5. Interpreting Shakespeare
• Further reading
• Index