Shakespeare

The fact that the drama flowed so fluently from his pen suggests that it was an emanation from his natural wit – which means, in turn, that it can be interpreted as a traditional English comedy. Here are all the ingredients of English humour – a continual bawdiness of intention, a salacious narrative, and a man farcically dressed in “drag” as Falstaff escapes detection by posing as the fat woman of Brentford. There is also a comic Frenchman and, in true native style, a sudden turn towards supernaturalism at the end. More importantly, perhaps, sexual desire is continually transformed into farce. It is the stuff of a thousand English comedies, and in this place the sexual innuendo and the blue joke find their locus classicus. Others have noticed how in the play the English language is twisted and turned in a hundred different ways, in the mouths of a Frenchman and a Welshman, but this is only another aspect of the variability and variety of Shakespeare’s style when he is writing at the height of his invention. Words themselves become farcical in a world where improbability and incongruity are the only standards. In one sense The Merry Wives of Windsor resembles the “citizens’ plays” that had become very popular, but it is governed by a more genial spirit. By setting it in a country town, outside London, Shakespeare avoids the kind of urban satire that Jonson and Dekker employed.

The comedy would have been a gift to his players, too, with the emphasis on mistaken identities and sudden changes of plot. If Kempe continued to play Falstaff, he would have proved a singular “hit” dressed up as the fat woman of Brentford; the spare Sinklo would have played Slender. It has often been supposed that Shakespeare borrowed his comic plots from Italian drama, but in the crossing they have suffered a sea-change. It is characteristic of the English imagination, of which he is the greatest exemplar, to incorporate and to alter foreign models.

Part VI. New place

Shakespearye Player: rough sketch for the proposed coat-of-arms.

CHAPTER 55 Therefore Am I of an Honourable House

In the early days of May 1597, Shakespeare purchased one of the largest houses in Stratford. It was called New Place and had been erected at the end of the fifteenth century by the most celebrated former resident of the town, Sir Hugh Clopton. Its ownership set the seal on Shakespeare’s standing in the place of his birth. Its frontage was some 60 feet, its depth some 70 feet, and it reached a height of 28 feet. Shakespeare’s new house was made of brick upon a stone foundation, gabled, and with bay windows on the eastern or garden side. The topographer, John Leland, had called it a “pretty house of brick and timber,”¹ and to the people of Stratford it was known as the “Great House.” As a boy Shakespeare had passed it every day, on his way to school, and it impressed itself on his imagination as a most desirable residence. It represented his childhood dream of prosperity. It was exactly the same spirit that persuaded Charles Dickens to buy Gad’s Hill Place in Kent; that house was for him, too, the measure of his childhood longing for success and notability. “If you work hard,” John Dickens had told his son, “you may one day own such a house.” These were perhaps also the words of John Shakespeare.

It was on the corner of Chapel Street and Chapel Lane, a commodious residence with its servants’ quarters at the front looking over Chapel Street; behind these was an enclosed courtyard and the main house. It was a prosperous, but not necessarily a quiet, neighbourhood. Chapel Street had many good houses, but Chapel Lane was squalid and malodorous; there were pigsties and common dunghills there, together with mud-walls and thatched barns. New Place itself stood immediately opposite the Falcon hostelry, and the local cheese market took place just outside the front door. Further down the street, on the other side of the lane, was the guild chapel and schoolroom where he had spent his early years. He had come back to the very site of his childhood.

He purchased the house and grounds for “sixty pounds in silver,” representing the first large investment he had ever made. In this he differed from his theatrical colleagues who tended to make their first investments in London property for themselves and their families. It is an indication that Shakespeare still readily and naturally identified himself with his native town; in London he remained, to use a Greek term, a resident alien. It may be doubted, however, whether he was really at home anywhere.