Shakespeare

Of equal antiquity was the Guild of the Holy Cross, established in Stratford at the beginning of the thirteenth century. This was a society of lay people devoted to the festivals and institutions of their faith; it was a “friendly society” where, by payment of an annual subscription, its members would be assured of a fitting funeral. But it was also a communal society, with its own wardens and beadles who supervised the interests of the town as well as the benefactions of the church.

If Shakespeare knew one public building in Stratford thoroughly well, it was the chapel of this guild; it was erected beside the school where he was taught, and each weekday morning he attended prayers here. And then there were the bells. The little bell called the boy to school in the morning; the great bell tolled at dawn and dusk, and was “the surly sullen bell” of the sonnet that tolled at the time of dying and the time of burial. It eventually tolled for Shakespeare when he was laid in the Stratford ground.

CHAPTER 4 For Where Thou Art, There Is the World It Selfe

Shakespeare was born five years after the coronation of Elizabeth I, and much of his life was spent within the constraints and uncertainties of her highly individualistic reign. Her principal concern was always for the stability and solvency of the country (and of her own position), so that all the imperiousness and ingenuity of her character were dedicated to the avoidance of civil disturbance and external conflict. She feared disorder more than anything else, and fought only when it became absolutely necessary to do so. An unmarried queen also created an inherently unstable polity, especially when she created competing “favourites” at her court, but Elizabeth managed to thwart or divert a number of conspiracies against her throne. Her impatient and often indecisive rule lifted the horizons of the country. It was an age of exploration, of renewed commerce and of literature. In retrospect it has even been called the age of Shakespeare. There is no reason to assume, however, that Shakespeare himself either liked or admired her. As a child, of course, he was part of a quite different world.

Stratford lay on the north bank of the Avon. The river was the most familiar presence in a landscape filled with trees, with orchards and with gardens. When it was in flood, whether in summer or in winter, it could be heard in every street. When “Avon was up,” according to Leland, the people attempting a crossing “stood in jeopardy of life.” In the summer of 1588, for example, it rose 3 feet an hour continuously for eight hours. A prominent local gentleman, Sir Hugh Clopton, financed the building of the stone bridge that survives still. But the flooded river has another important memorial. No Elizabethan dramatist invokes the river more often than Shakespeare; and, of the fifty-nine separate references, twenty-six concern the river in flood.¹ The river was part of his imagination. There is a particular and peculiar image in The Rape of Lucrece, where an eddy of water is forced back by the current in the same direction from which it came; the phenomenon can be observed from the eighteenth arch of the stone bridge² at Stratford.

The bridge led by a walled causeway into Bridge Street, running through the middle of the town. It was part of a matrix of six or seven streets that supported 217 houses and two hundred families; the population of Stratford in the late sixteenth century has been estimated at approximately nineteen hundred. The streets themselves retained their medieval identity, as Sheep Street and Wood Street and Mill Lane still testify. Rother Street was named after the rother or local cattle that were sold there. Yet the majority of the houses were of relatively recent construction, having been erected in the fifteenth century by the close-timbered method. The timber was oak, felled in the adjacent forest, and the wooden frame was filled with the familiar wattle-and-daub. The foundations were of lias stone quarried in the neighbouring village of Wilmcote, from which Mary Arden came, and the roofs were of thatch. The windows were not glazed but were protected by thick wooden bars. These were natural and local dwellings in every sense.