Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan Read Free Book Online

generations and influenced a local council in Elizabeth's day
helped to form the mind of Shakespeare. In his early years religious
troubles faded, and Stratford was not wholly torn from its past. The
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council had seen the town through sorrow. In London the Crown wanted
settlement, stability, a tactical delay with Spain (before a war
Elizabeth could ill afford); merchants had got round the Antwerp
embargo and would have Hamburg as an outlet -- cloth was being sold
abroad. Stratford after its plague was fairly happy, and John
Shakespeare was close to achieving high honour.
    For his documents and dignity, John had a ring-seal with the initials
IS, to press in wax. Mary had a delicate seal, showing a running
horse. 16 Mary's pretty seal was typical of her time when simple but finely
shaped intaglios, rings, and necklaces were much liked, along with
bright colours in dress and decoration. At Wilmcote she had known
painted cloths, which kept out the draughts. Their tempera tints on
wide strips of canvas, for walls, showed biblical or mythological scenes
adorned with mottoes or 'sentences' ( Shakespeare recalls in The Rape of Lucrece :
'Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw | Shall by a painted cloth
be kept in awe' -- lines 244-5). Arden's house had eleven of such
wall-cloths, including one in an upstairs bedroom worth 26 s. 6 d. (a good sum in 1556, the value of nine of his swine). 17 Their mottoes were no more subtle than the Elizabethan posies
(which Hamlet mocks) engraved on the flat inner surfaces of rings: 'MY
HEART AND 1, UNTIL I DYE' or 'NOT TWO, BUT ONE, TILL LIFE BE GONE'.
But the brevity, age, and universality of mottoes appealed to a people
who liked old, well-rubbed, pithy truth as much as wit and invention.
In Stratford's mainly oral culture, wisdom was stored up in
commonplaces, which are one early basis of the art of a poet who could
give audiences, at last, a maxim such as 'The readiness is all.'
    The life in flowers and trees, gardens, orchards, and fields at all
seasons appealed to Mary's son, and no poet has responded with more
pleasure to nature. Yet the town was flat, and a boy's eyes might take
in nothing more amazing at first than cowslips, burnet, and clover, or
a river in flood, caterpillar swarms, or a 'curious-knotted garden'.
The devotion of the mature Shakespeare appears with odd intensity in
his making so much of banal nature, 'thistles, kecksies, burrs', or
the domestic garden, or nature's excess or waste. It is as if in his
early youth the drama of diurnal nature had been intense enough. A
small boy could not travel far, and orchards and gardens between Gild
Pits
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and the Woolshop perhaps had to satisfy him on many a day; later the
shire's variety drew him strongly. What this boy saw and felt in early
years was affected by his experience of Mary -- who for thirty months
had had him as her only child to adore, though she soon had others.
Gilbert Shakespeare was baptized at Holy Trinity on 13 October 1566 --
and may have been named after the glover Gilbert Bradley who became a
capital burgess in 1565.
    When
Gilbert was very small, William was in his fifth year, and well
cherished. One of his greatest gifts was his understanding of feeling,
and that was surely nourished by Mary. Heroines in his comedies would
be notable for their stability and their resourceful minds, and be as
affecting and vulnerable even when, like Julia or Rosalind, they had
wit and capability. He was to respond easily to an Ovidian love ethic,
and give a subtle and persuasive sense of how women feel and think. He
must have studied Mary well, and she, after pleasing her father, was
not likely to be hard with a son; he was not blighted by too many
rules.
    Richard Mulcaster, who taught
the poet Spenser, wrote of the need to make a Tudor boy 'most able'.
Music is a 'glasse', says that teacher, 'wherein to behold both the
beawtie of concord, and the blots of