Roaring Boys by Judith Cook Read Free Book Online

the church, apart from its tower, were destroyed in wartime bombing.
    Mary Shakespeare’s son was born in April in the family home in Henley Street in the little market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. She had married her husband, also a John, in 1557. John Shakespeare was born in the village of Snitterfield, his father being a tenant farmer on the Asby estate which belonged to the Arden family. John, the first of his family to be apprenticed into leatherwork, had been sent to Stratford to serve his apprenticeship and, once eligible to call himself a master craftsman, he set up in his own right as a glover and tanner and later also as a trader in wool. We know he acquired his first Henley Street house some time in 1552 at an annual ground rent of sixpence, for he is recorded as being fined that year for making a dunghill in the street outside his door instead of under the trees at the end of it like everyone else. John Shakespeare did so well that a few years later he acquired the house next door and knocked the two together to make one substantial property. The second house also had the benefit of a garden at a ground rent of thirteen pence a year.
    Mary Shakespeare (née Arden) of Asby was an excellent match for any craftsman, and was very definitely well above John’s station in life. She was the daughter of his father’s landlord and came from a family who were said to have been great lords in Warwickshire before the Conquest. She was the eighth child and her father’s favourite, so much so that, almost unbelievably, when he died he left her not only money but the entire Asby estate and the home farm, now known as ‘Mary Arden’s House’. This she brought with her into her marriage, along with a hefty dowry. She too must have awaited the birth of her son with no little anxiety for her first baby, a daughter called Joan, had also died shortly after her birth just like little Mary Marlowe. Tradition has it that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, St George’s Day (also the date of his death), and that might well be the case for his baptism is duly recorded in the parish Register of Holy Trinity Church on the 26th.
    Both boys proved to be strong and healthy; had they not been, then the history of English literature in general and the theatre in particular would have been very different. When they reached the age of seven both left the dame schools where they had learned the alphabet, numbers and other basics from their horn books and went on to their respective local grammar schools. Both the King’s School in Canterbury and the Edward VI Grammar School in Stratford would have offered virtually the same curriculum in which the entire syllabus was based on Latin. In the Lower School they would have come into contact too with the Roman plays of Terence and Plautus. In the Upper School they were introduced to Ovid, alongside more Latin, some Greek, and Rhetoric. Although Holinshed’s
Chronicles
, so rich a source for Shakespeare, were published while he was still at school it is unlikely they were part of the syllabus, history generally being taught from the works of Plutarch or the earlier Hall’s
Chronicle
.
    It was at the age of thirteen that the boys’ lives diverged dramatically. Marlowe remained where he was at the King’s School in Canterbury until he was fifteen; then, after winning a scholarship designed for those destined to take Holy Orders, he went up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. It is difficult to imagine a less appropriate profession than that of the priesthood. Marlowe’s subsequent immediate career is relatively well known, in no small part due to the number of books which appeared on the four hundredth centenary of his death in 1993. His questing and adventurous mind soon ensured that he stood out among his contemporaries and quite early on he became the friend, possibly the lover, of Thomas Walsingham. Thomas, who would remain Marlowe’s patron until the latter’s death, was nephew to