Shakespeare

This might have had a direct effect upon the Shakespeare household in one important sense. The dislike of the reformed religion meant that piety was transferred from the Church to the family. The children might now be obliged to attend the new forms of worship and listen to Elizabethan homilies. But the lessons of the old faith, and the rites of the once popular religion, might still be taught and practised in the home. It was the place of safety. Since Shakespeare’s eldest daughter, Susannah, remained a firm and prominent Catholic all of her life, can it be assumed that the Shakespeares themselves retained this familial tradition of inherited piety? It has been inferred that the community of Catholics was matriarchal in tendency, and that the woman’s “inferior legal and public identity afforded her a superior devotional status, a fuller membership of the Catholic Church.”⁵ Since the old faith is likely to have been transmitted through the women of the household, it throws an interesting light upon Shakespeare’s attitude towards his closest female relations.

CHAPTER 8 I Am a Kind of Burre, I Shal Sticke

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.