CHAPTER 9
In the late sixteenth century, children were customarily trained by means of strict discipline. A boy would take off his cap before addressing his elders and would wait upon his parents at table, standing rather than sitting during the meal. He rose early and recited the morning’s prayers; he washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and then went downstairs where he knelt for his parents’ blessing before breakfast. He would commonly address his father as “sir,” although “dad” does appear in one of Shakespeare’s plays. “Dad” is in fact the formal Welsh word for father, and therefore part of the border patois that Shakespeare knew very well.
Twentieth-century sociologists have emphasised the severity of the sixteenth-century household, where patriarchal authority was dominant and where repression or punishment was the most convenient means of dealing with children of either sex. There must be room for doubt in such a broad analysis, however, and Shakespeare’s plays themselves are often concerned with the failure of parental authority. The children can become “unruly” or “unbridled”; the rod of birch is “more mock’d than fear’d.” Shakespeare’s children are in any case observant and serious, sharp-eyed and often sharp-tongued; they demonstrate respect and obedience, but there is no hint of fear or subservience. In his drama, too, father and son are generally placed in amicable or idealised relationship. So we may prefer the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist.
If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood. It arises unbidden and unannounced in a hundred different contexts. It cannot be denied or misrepresented without severe psychic disturbance on the surface of the writing. It is the very source of the writing itself, and must necessarily remain undefiled. It is of the utmost interest, then, that the children of Shakespeare’s plays are all equally precocious and acute, possessing great confidence in themselves. They are sometimes “wayward” and “impatient.” They are also oddly aware and articulate, talking to their elders without any sign of strain or inferiority. In Richard III one of the little princes, soon to be despatched to an unhappy end, is described (1580-1) by his malevolent uncle as
Bold, quicke, ingenious, forward, capable,
He is all the mothers, from the top to toe.
It has become customary to place the young Shakespeare in the conventional Elizabethan world of childhood, engaged in games such as penny-prick or shovel-board, harry-racket or barley-break; in his own plays Shakespeare mentions football and bowls, prisoner’s base and hide-and-seek, as well as the rural games of muss and dun in the mire. He even mentions chess, although he does not appear to know its rules. But it is likely that he was in certain respects an odd child. He was precocious, too, and observant; but he was one who stood apart.
There can be no doubt at all that he devoured books. Much of his early reading comes back in his drama. Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books? He alludes to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur, so beloved by Mistress Quickly, and the old English romances of Sir Degore and Sir Eglamour and Bevis of Southampton. Master Slender lends Alice Shortcake The Book of Riddels and Beatrice refers to The Hundred Merry Tales. Some of his earlier biographers concur that he possessed a copy of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and Richard Robinson’s translation of Gesta Romanorum, the legends of which form the staple of some of his plots. For similar reasons the young Shakespeare has been pictured turning the pages of Copland’s Kynge Appolyne of Thyre, Hawes’s Pass Tyme of Pleasure and Bochas’s The Tragedies of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates. There were also the folk stories and the fairy tales of his neighbourhood, given so long a lease on life in his late plays.
Mary Arden’s own role in Henley Street was of course central. With the help of a servant she was obliged to wash and to wring, to make and to mend, to bake and to brew, to measure the malt and the corn, to tend to the garden and the dairy, to spin with her distaff, to clothe the children and to prepare the meals, to distil the wines and dye the cloths, to “dresse up thy dysshe bord, and set al thynges in good order within thy house.”1 As a girl growing up on the Arden farm she would have in addition been accustomed to milk the cows, to skim the milk, to make butter and cheese, to feed the pigs and the poultry, to winnow the corn and make hay. She would have been expected to be practical and capable.
A brother was born in Shakespeare’s third year. Gilbert Shakespeare was baptised in the autumn of 1566, and nothing much more is ever heard of him. He died at the age of forty-five, having had an unremarkable life as a tradesman in Stratford; it was inevitable that he followed his father’s profession as a glover. He was in essence the dutiful son. But how much more formidable and threatening might he have seemed to the infant Shakespeare on his first appearance into the world? Other sons followed with the curiously coincidental names of two of Shakespeare’s villains, Richard and Edmund, and there were two daughters, Joan and Anne.
More than any other dramatist of his period Shakespeare is concerned with the family; the nature and continuity of the family are invested with the utmost resonance, and can become a metaphor for human society itself. In his plays violence erupts between brothers more frequently than between fathers and sons. The father may be weak or self-serving, but he is never the target of hostility or revenge.
Much attention has been paid instead to the nature of sibling rivalry in Shakespeare’s plays, more specifically to the pattern of the younger brother usurping the place of the older. Edmund replaces Edgar in his father’s affections, and Richard III mounts upon the bodies of his siblings. The Wars of the Roses, as recounted by Shakespeare, can be regarded as a war between brothers. Claudius murders his brother, and Antonio conspires against Prospero. There are other variations upon this sensitive subject. Shakespeare refers to the murder of Abel by his younger brother, Cain, on twenty-five separate occasions. There is also the pervasive presence of envy and jealousy, most aptly captured in the fear of betrayal manifested by characters as diverse as Leontes and Othello. It is one of Shakespeare’s great themes. The biographer should resist the comfortable position of an armchair psychologist, but the connections are at least suggestive. Rivalry between brothers emerges as effortlessly and instinctively in his drama as if it were a principle of composition.
The conditions in the Shakespeare household were of course wrapped in the vital tedium of daily life, beyond the purview of the dramatic imagination. There are, however, stray intimations of status and aspiration. In 1568, the year he became mayor or bailiff of Stratford, John Shakespeare applied for a coat of arms. It was natural, and practical, for a mayor to have a coat of arms for various memorials and banners. Now that he was appointed to high civic office he was able to seal his prominence by becoming a gentleman. Those known as gentlemen were “those whome their race and blood or at least their virtues doo make noble and knowne.”2 They comprised some 2 per cent of the population.
John Shakespeare wished to be enlisted in this “register of the Gentle and Noble”3 and, to qualify, he would need to demonstrate that he owned property and goods to the value of £250 and that he lived without the taint of manual labour; his wife was supposed to “dress well” and “to keep servants.”4 He presented a pattern for his coat of arms to the College of Heralds, and his application was duly noted. The formula for his arms contained a falcon, a shield and a spear embossed in gold and silver; the falcon is shaking its wings, and holds a spear of gold in its right talon. Hence we interpret “shake spear.” The motto accompanying the device is “Non Sanz Droict” or “Not Without Right.” It is a bold assertion of gentility. For unknown reasons, however, John Shakespeare did not proceed with his application. He may have been unwilling to pay the heralds’ large fees. Or he may have had only a passing interest in what seems essentially to have been a civic duty.
But then, twenty-eight years later, his son arranged it for him. William Shakespeare renewed his father’s application, with the original coat of arms, and succeeded. At last his father was a gentleman. But if it had been a long-cherished ambition, it may have been done partly to please his mother. He was upholding his mother’s claims to gentility.