Shakespeare

There are other domestic events to record. On 14 October 1607, in the parish church of Stratford, the son of Richard Tyler was baptised as “William”; it is possible that William Shakespeare was his godfather. Tyler, two years younger than Shakespeare, was a friend and neighbour of the dramatist. He was also no doubt at school with him. He was bequeathed a ring in the first draft of Shakespeare’s will. Richard Tyler was a prosperous yeoman and gentleman, living in Sheep Street, who had held civic office and had been elected as churchwarden. In an official document he is described as “a man of honest Conversacion amp; quiet amp; peacable Carryage amongst his neighbours amp; towards all people.”² Very little else is known about Tyler, but he may stand as representative of Shakespeare’s Stratford acquaintances. They were generally prosperous, some of them being tradesmen and some of them being, like Tyler, “gentlemen.” They were “honest” and “quiet” and “peacable,” very much the model of the English townsman of this period. And Shakespeare remained on affectionate terms with them all his life. It is hard not to suspect that they were comfortable and welcome company after the vivid and more excitable ambience of London. Shakespeare could relax with them, converse with them, drink with them, without the constant press of theatrical business. Four days after the baptism of little William Tyler in the parish church, Shakespeare’s nephew, Richard Hathaway, baker, was married at the same altar. If the laws of family life applied to the Shakespeares, then the dramatist would have been present for that occasion also.

These rituals were taking place in the immediate aftermath of great local disturbance. The “Midlands Rising” was punctuated by savage enclosure riots directed against the larger landowners. The problems were particularly acute in the Forest of Arden where the enclosers had “turn’d so much of woodland into tillage … that they produce corn to furnish other counties.” The ironworks in the region had also “destroyed prodigious quantities of wood,”³ and the old commons had been transformed into privately owned pasturage. No one denied that the land was the property of the landowner; the rioters were protesting against the overthrow of centuries of traditional usage. There was also anger and dismay at continuing food shortages, a dearth which in the popular mind was associated with the pace of enclosures.

The rising began on the eve of May Day and quickly spread throughout the Midland counties until it became a summer of insurrection. The king issued a royal proclamation deploring the fact that “many of the meanest sort of people have presumed lately to assemble themselves riotously in multitudes.”⁴ The rebellion was only halted after savagely repressive measures by the authorities; the military killed scores of protesters, and many of those captured were hanged, drawn and quartered. The problems were, almost literally, on Shakespeare’s doorstep and they entered at least one of his subsequent dramas.

In the winter season of this year, stretching from December 1607 to February 1608, the King’s Men staged thirteen plays at the court for the benefit of the royal family. The names of these plays have not been recorded, but it is a fair assumption that one of them was the drama entitled The Tragedie of Antony and Cleopatra. In Samuel Daniel’s verse drama Cleopatra, reissued in this year, there is a detailed and expressive description of the dying Antony being hoisted onto Cleopatra’s “monument.” This had not appeared in the earlier version of Daniel’s play, printed in 1594, and suggests that Daniel had witnessed a performance of Shakespeare’s scene in which, according to the stage-directions, “They heaue Antony aloft to Cleopatra.” It has all the marks of a visual, rather than a verbal, memory. Since the theatres were closed from July onwards by reason of the plague, the likelihood must be that Daniel saw the play at the Globe in the late spring or early summer of 1607. It was restaged that Christmas for the benefit of the sovereign.

It is possible, however, that the audiences of the time remained unmoved by Antony and Cleopatra. With the exception of the allusion by Samuel Daniel, there is no recorded comment on its production. It was not published in Shakespeare’s lifetime – and nor indeed was that other Roman drama, Coriolanus. If they had not been included in the Folio edition of Shakespeare’s works, there would be no surviving text.