Shakespeare by Peter Ackroyd Read Free Book Online

affluence and respectability. Shakespeare has left no record of her, but it has been surmised that her outlines can be glimpsed in a number of strong-minded mothers who appear in his dramas—Volumnia extolling Coriolanus’s achievements, the Countess reminding Bertram of his duty, the Duchess of York berating King Richard. It is also possible, and indeed plausible, that the high-spirited and intelligent young women of the comedies owe something to the memories of his mother.
    The family house in Henley Street can even now be seen; it is much changed, but still recognisable. It was originally two (or perhaps three)houses, each with a garden and an orchard. It was on the northern side of Henley Street, at the edge of the town, with its narrow rooms looking directly on to the thoroughfare; there was very little privacy. At the back of the house, beyond the garden, was an area known as the “Guild Pits” that was essentially a stretch of waste ground with a ramshackle road threading within it.
    The house itself was erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the usual mode of oak timber frame with wattle-and-daub, and with a roof of thatch. The ceilings of the interiors were lime-washed, and the walls decorated with painted cloths or patterned all over with the use of wood-blocks. Its timbers were much lighter in colour than the “mock-Tudor” beams now characteristically stained black or dark brown. The plaster work would have been of light beige. The whole effect was of brightness or, at least, of lightness. The stark black and white of restored Tudor interiors is wrong; Shakespeare’s contemporaries used much paler colours, and more subtly graded shades. The wooden furniture was of the standard household type, as already exemplified by Robert Arden’s inventory—chairs and plain tables and joint-stools (so called because the separate parts were joined together). The floors were of broken Wilmcote limestone, covered by rushes. If there were “carpets,” they were used as covers for the table. There may have been a wall-cupboard to display dishes or plate. In
Romeo and Juliet
a servant calls out, “Away with the ioyntstooles, remove the Courtcubbert [cupboard], looke to the plate” (579-80).
    It was a commodious house with six separate chambers, the lower and upper storeys connected with a ladder rather than a stairway. The hall was the principal room of the house, next to the front door and the cross-passage; there was a large fireplace here, and the Shakespeare family sat for their meals in front of it. There was a kitchen at the back of the house with its usual complements of a hand-turned spit, brass skillets and leathern bottles. Beside the hall was the parlour, a combined sitting room and bedroom where the bed itself was displayed as a prize specimen of household furniture. The walls here were heavily patterned and decorated. Across from the hall, on the other side of the passage, was John Shakespeare’s workshop, where the labour of stitching and sewing was undertaken by him and his apprentices. It was also a shop trading with the outside world, with a casement opening on to the street, and as such had a different atmosphere from the rest of the house. From an early age Shakespeare knew all about the demands of the public. On the floorabove there were three bedchambers. Shakespeare would have slept on a mattress of rush, stretched on cords between the wooden frame of the bed. In the attic rooms slept the servants and the apprentices. It was a large house for a tradesman and reinforces the note of affluence in all his father’s affairs.
    It was also a noisy house, a wooden sound-box in which a conversation in one part of the house could clearly be heard in another. The creaking of timber, and the noise of footsteps, would have been a constant accompaniment to household tasks. From Shakespeare’s dramas, too, come the unmistakable impressions of childhood in Henley Street. There are images of stopped