Shakespeare

The whole imbroglio emphasises the increasing difficulty of John Shakespeare’s position, and no doubt the increasing anxiety of his family. The situation was compounded by the death in the spring of 1579 of Shakespeare’s sister. Anne Shakespeare was only eight years old. There is an item in the parish register concerning “the bell amp; paull for Mr. Shaxpers dawghter.” The sorrows of the Shakespeare family are not open to inspection.

CHAPTER 14 Of Such a Mery Nimble Stiring Spirit

Shakespeare himself was fifteen in that year, 1579, and entering that period of life when, according to the shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, there is nothing “but getting wenches with childe, wronging the Auncientry, stealing, fighting” (1313-14). He committed at least one of these offences, and is popularly supposed to have been guilty of two others. But we may prefer to see him as Goethe saw the young Hamlet, as “a good companion, pliant, courteous, discreet, and able to forget and forgive an injury.” If he was also “able to discern and value the good and the beautiful in the arts,”¹ then he reached the borders of manhood at an appropriate time. In this year were published North’s translations of Plutarch, from which he would later borrow, as well as the Euphues of John Lyly and The Shepheardes Calender of Edmund Spenser. New forms of prose, and new kinds of poetry, were all around him.

It is possible that his father paid the £5 necessary for his son to continue his schooling after the age of fourteen; only after that age, according to the conventional school curriculum, could he have acquired even the “lesse Greeke” of which Ben Jonson accused him. The age of fourteen, however, was that hard year when boys became apprentices. The young Shakespeare may have started working for his father in some capacity; this was the standard practice of those who were not apprenticed elsewhere. Nicholas Rowe states that after school his father “could give him no better education than his own employment”;² this surmise is confirmed by John Aubrey, who wrote that “when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade.”³ Rowe assumes that John Shakespeare was in poverty, however, and Aubrey assumes that he was a butcher. These assumptions are not correct.

It has also been suggested that the young Shakespeare worked as a lawyer’s clerk, or that he found employment as a schoolmaster in the country, or that he was called up for military service – a duty for which he would have been liable after the age of sixteen. It is perhaps significant that the only form of recruitment known to Shakespeare was that of impressments, and that there are many allusions in his plays to archery. But his extraordinary capacity for entry into imagined worlds has misled many scholars. His apparent knowledge of the technical terms of seamanship – even to the details of dry ship-biscuits – has, for example, convinced some that he served in the English navy. You can never overestimate his powers of assimilation and empathy.

In the absence of certainty, there have emerged many legends concerning Shakespeare’s early years. The most famous of these is his aptitude for poaching. The story concerns his encroachment upon the estate of a local dignitary, Sir Thomas Lucy, and is first mentioned in print by Rowe. Rowe himself gathered it from the actor, Thomas Betterton, who had travelled to Stratford in order to pick up any Shakespearian lore. “He had,” Rowe writes,

by a Misfortune common enough to young Fellows, fallen into ill Company; and amongst them, some that made a frequent practice of Deer-stealing, engag’d him with them more than once in robbing a Park that belong’d to Sir Thomas Lucy of Cherlecote, near Stratford. For this he was prosecuted by the Gentleman, as he thought, somewhat too severely; and in order to revenge that ill Usage, he made a Ballad upon him. And tho’ this, probably the first Essay of his Poetry, be lost, yet it is said to have been so very bitter, that it redoubled the Persecution against him to that degree, that he was oblig’d to leave his Business and Family in Warwickshire, for some time, and shelter himself in London.⁴