CHAPTER 8
There are some human, beliefs that lie below the level of professed faith and orthodoxy. As a child Shakespeare learned of the witches who created storms and of the Welsh fairies who hid in foxgloves. “Queene Mab” of Romeo and Juliet is derived from the Celtic word, mab, meaning infant or little one. There is a Warwickshire term, “mab-led,” signifying madness. Shakespeare knew of the toad with the medicinal jewel in its head, and of the man in the moon who carried a bundle of thorns. In the Forest of Arden, as his mother might have told him, there were ghosts and goblins. “A sad Tale’s best for Winter,” says the unfortunate child Mamillius in The Winter’s Tale, “I haue one of Sprights and Goblins” (538-9). All his life Shakespeare had a very English sense of the supernatural and the marvellous, a predilection that goes hand in hand with a taste for horror and sensationalism in all of its forms. He brings ghosts into the history plays, and witches into Macbeth. The plots of the fairy stories can be glimpsed in his adult drama. Pericles is one of the old tales told round the hearth. In similar fashion ballads and folk tales charge the plot of The Taming of the Shrew. They were part of his Stratford inheritance.
The zealots of the reformed Church were not well disposed towards such idolatrous relics as maypoles and church ales, but local observances survived their displeasure. The bells rang out on Shrove Tuesday, and on the feast of St. Valentine the boys sang for apples; on Good Friday the labourers planted their potatoes and on the morning of Easter Day the young men went out to hunt hares. There were “whitsun lords” in Warwickshire as late as 1580, together with all the panoply of mumming and morris-dancing. The pageant of St. George and the Dragon, for example, was performed on the streets of Stratford every year. Shakespeare saw the sheep-shearing feasts at Snitterfield, and resurrected one of them in The Winter’s Tale. The May-games of his youth return in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This is not some saga of “merry England,” but the very fabric of life in a conservative and ritualised society immediately before the permanent changes induced by the reformation of religion.
The stray details of that enduring life emerge in a hundred different contexts. Real names of places and of people are enlisted in Shakespeare’s drama. His aunt lived in the hamlet of Barton-on-the-Heath, and it rises again as Burton-Heath in The Taming of the Shrew; Wilmcote becomes Win-cot. The names of William Fluellen and George Bardolph are found in a list of Stratford recusants, beside that of John Shakespeare. His father also engaged in business with two wool-dealers, George Vizer of Woodmancote (locally pronounced Woncote) and Perkes of Stinchcombe Hill, and they reappear in a line from Henry IV, Part Two. “I beseech you sir to countenance William Visor of Woncote against Clement Perkes a’ th hill” (2725-6). In the play Visor is described as an “arrant knave,” which may suggest some familial dispute with him.
The words and phrases of Shakespeare’s childhood are recalled in his writing. He uses “fap” to mean drunk, “third-borough” for constable, and “aroynt” for leave. There is also the matter of pronunciation. The sound of the language spoken by Shakespeare in his native county was nearer to Saxon than to Norman French, as if its original powers had not been dispelled by the culture of the conquerors. You would have heard the Saxon origins in words pronounced as “blewe” and “deawe,” “emonges” and “ouglie,” “togyther” and “woork.” Extra consonants were added to lend emphasis to certain words, in “chardge” and “mariadge,” “priviledge” and “pidgeon,” “sutch” and “druncke.” They appear, too, in “whote” and “womand,” “dogge” and “dinne,” “drumme” and “sinne.” The language of Shakespeare’s region was thicker and more resonant than that of London. Vowels were lengthened, too, in “hond” and “husbond,” “tyme” and “wyde,” “fairnesse” and “wantonesse.” A similar variousness and richness are found in “marrie” and “wittie,” “dutious” and “outragious,” “heretique” and “reumatique.”
This was the language that Shakespeare spoke as a child. It was immediately recognisable as a country accent, and he may have endeavoured to lose it on his arrival in London. His characters are, after all, engaged in a perpetual act of performance and re-invention. But there was then no “standard” English. He used his Stratford idiom in his writing, for example, although the fussiness of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened his native sonority. Any standardisation or modernisation of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength; a shadow is not as dim and veiled as a “shaddowwe,” a cuckoo does not sing like a “kuckow,” and music is not as enchanting as “musique.” In the old language we can still hear Shakespeare talking.
Shakespeare understood the country very well, with what Edgar in King Lear calls its “low fermes / Poore pelting villages, sheep-coates and milles” (1190-1), but his debt to the Stratford of his childhood is particular and profound. He knew the channels that drew off the Avon floods and the conies that come out of their burrows after the rain, the fragile mulberries and the “Tradesmen singing in their shops.” The fact that, all his life, he invested in the lands and properties of the immediate neighbourhood testifies to the hold Stratford exerted upon him. It was the site of his earliest ambitions and expectations and, as we shall see, he wished to restore the fortunes of the Shakespeares there through his personal achievement. He wanted to reassert his father’s name among his fellow townsmen. Stratford was also the permanent home of his family, and the place to which he returned at the end of his life. It remained the centre of his being.