Shakespeare: A Life by Park Honan Read Free Book Online Page A

dissension even in a politic body'. 18 If music helped one to know society it also changed moods at home and
lessened the divide between fathers and sons. Parents danced and
taught their children to dance, and many families had a tabor, lute,
or recorder. Shakespeare was not the only boy born into the middling
ranks to get a very expert, if informal, training in music's
fundamentals. Even in the Midlands one might know the sonorous drone
of a bagpipe. One could watch and hear morris-dancers at Whitsun, all
dressed in garish costumes with bells on ankles and a hobby horse (or a
horse's head in cloth or another light material) drawn over one
dancer's head. The disguises, with the strange rhythms of the morris,
appealed to many. This loud, outlandish ritual with its thwacking
sticks had in it an aspect of drama or emotive performance common to
all music, and a people in love with verbal rhythms fell easily under
music's spell. Elizabethans loved music, too, as an antidote to
boredom or low spirits; gloomy talk was disliked, though pessimism was
attractive when travelling players feigned it.
    -23-

In russet dresses, most often not of cotton but of coarse woollen
homespun, children were much loved, but without status -- as if they
were mere nits, gnats. A boy, however, before he was 6, could leave off
a russet dress. Till he did, he looked like a girl. Now he would wear a
jacket or jerkin over a doublet, and struggle into skinny, long,
knitted hose, though the hose often required mending and might be
saved if he wore common loose fustian slops, or shiny breeches pulled
in at the knee. He was then a small, unformed, man, eyeing his
father's world.
    William was to know
his father's ill luck and downfall. (Partly because he served on the
council, we have evidence of John Shakespeare's life and of the family
experience of his son in years ahead.) In the late 1560s, however,
John scaled the heights, and became head of the borough's council. He
was then at last Master Shakespeare, mayor or High Bailiff Stratford,
and he knew his advantages as a townsman well enough since he was able
to send his little son to school.
    -24-

3
JOHN SHAKESPEARES F0RTUNES
Paid for the foote stoole tha t M r bayliff standeth on ij d [2 d. ] (Borough accounts of Stratford-upon-Avon)
    In the bailiff's family
    In the late 1560s Stratford had only about a dozen streets, fewer than
240 households, and a populace (lately reduced by epidemic) of 1,200
people at most; yet relatively speaking the market town was not small.
A day's ride to the north, Birmingham with its lorimers (makers of
metal parts for bridles and saddles), nailers, and other metal craftsmen
was about the same size, and the red-walled, cloth-manufacturing city
of Coventry less than twenty miles from Stratford had only 7,000 or
8,000 people -- though it was one of the largest English towns. The
largest city outside London was Norwich, with fewer than 15,000
inhabitants. Liverpool had 900 or 1,000, Gloucester about 5,000,
Worcester no more than 7,000. A majority of the Queen's subjects lived
in tiny, scattered villages and hamlets of fifty or sixty people or
less.
    Certainly, a borough town of
some size and diversity of crafts gave one a chance to observe the
nation's practical life -- the real life of politics, trade, petty
crime, religion, passion, and fate. Among those who best understood
society and human aspirations in this age were Marlowe and
Shakespeare, both products of market towns and sons of craftsmen.
Christopher Marlowe grew up in a shoemaker's house in Canterbury, a
town of about 700 families. Shakespeare had advantages in belonging to a
mercantile governing class -- he was, after all, the eldest son in a
respectable bourgeois family which was one of the handful of families
that ran Stratford.
    -25-

John Shakespeare had become fairly affluent before rising to
prominence. Keeping the borough accounts for well over three years,