Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare
Here, and throughout his career, Shakespeare altogether scrapped the piety that marked the plays he saw in his youth. The underlying structure of those plays was religious. Hence they often climaxed in a moment of vision that signaled the protagonist’s redemption, a vision that pointed beyond the everyday and what was familiar to a truth that exceeded mortal understanding. In the words of St. Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians, words deeply familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries from endless repetitions in church, “The eye hath not seen, and the ear hath not heard, neither have entered into the heart of man” those things that God has prepared (1 Corinthians 2:9, from the Bishops’ Bible [1568], the version Shakespeare knew and used most often). “I have had a most rare vision,” Bottom begins, when he is returned to his human shape. And then, in a series of fits and starts, he tries to recount it:
I have had a dream past the wit of man to say what dream it was. Man is but an ass if he go about t’expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had—but man is but a patched fool if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen, man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was. (4.1.199–207).
This is the joke of a decisively secular dramatist, a writer who deftly turned the dream of the sacred into popular entertainment: “I will get Peter Quince to write a ballad of this dream. It shall be called ‘Bottom’s Dream,’ because it hath no bottom, and I will sing it in the latter end of a play” (4.1.207–10). The joke reaches out a long way—to the solemnities of the pulpit, to the plays that the professional playing companies took to the provinces when Shakespeare was a boy, to the amateur actors who performed cruder versions of these plays, and perhaps to the young, awkward Shakespeare himself, filled with visions his tongue could not conceive and eager to play all the parts.
There must have been many such moments in Will’s life at home. The very young boy could have amused his family and friends by imitating what he had seen on the raised platform of the Stratford town-hall stage or on the back of the traveling players’ cart. And as he grew older and more independent, his exposure to playacting was not restricted to Stratford: the touring companies crisscrossed the Midlands, performing in neighboring towns and manor houses. A stage-struck youth could have seen most of the great actors of the time performing within a day’s ride of his home.
Theatrical life in the region by no means depended solely upon the visits of professional troupes. Towns in the vicinity of Stratford, as in the rest of the country, had seasonal festivals, when the members of guilds and fraternities donned costumes and performed in traditional plays. For an afternoon, ordinary folk—carpenters and tinkers and flute makers and the like—paraded before their neighbors as kings and queens, madmen and demons. Coventry, eighteen miles away, was particularly vital; when he was young, Will could have been taken to see the Hock Tuesday play there. The second Tuesday after Easter, Hock Tuesday traditionally initiated the summer half of the rural year and was celebrated, in many places, by women tying up passersby with ropes and demanding money for charity. In Coventry the men and women had a special way of marking the festival: they staged a rowdy commemoration of an ancient English massacre of the Danes, an event in which Englishwomen were said to have displayed particular valor. The annual reenactment enjoyed considerable local fame and may have drawn, among its spectators, the Shakespeare family.
In late May or June, in the time of long, sweetly lingering twilights, they could also have seen one of the great annual Corpus Christi pageants, plays presenting the whole destiny of mankind from the creation and the Fall to the redemption. These so-called mystery cycles, among the great achievements of medieval drama, had survived into the later sixteenth century in Coventry and in several other cities in England. Associated originally with a grand procession to honor the Eucharist, the production of a mystery cycle was a major civic enterprise, involving large numbers of people and significant expenditure. At various places in the city, usually on specially built scaffolds or carts, a part of the cycle—the story of Noah, the angel of the Annunciation, the raising of Lazarus, Jesus on the Cross, the three Marys at the tomb, and so forth—was performed by pious (or simply exuberantly histrionic) townspeople. Particular guilds usually assumed the costs and the responsibility for the individual pieces of the cycle, at times with particular appropriateness: the shipwrights undertook Noah, the goldsmiths the Magi, the bakers the Last Supper, and the pinners (men who made pins and needles) the Crucifixion.
Protestant reformers were understandably hostile, for they wished to dismantle the traditional Catholic culture and rituals out of which these pageants arose, and they campaigned hard to put the performances to an end. But the plays were not strictly Catholic, and the civic pride and pleasure in them was intense, so they lingered, in the teeth of opposition, into the 1570s and ’80s. In 1579, when Will was fifteen, he and his family could still have seen them performed at Coventry. Something of their power—their way of constructing a shared community of spectators, their confidence that all things in the heavens and the earth can be represented onstage, their delicious blending of homeliness and exaltation—left its mark upon him.
These events were particularly spectacular instances of seasonal festivities that shaped Will’s sense of the year and conditioned his later understanding of the theater. Many of the traditional holidays had withered under attacks, both from those who thought the calendar offered working people too many occasions to play and from those who thought that particular customs were tinged with Catholicism or paganism. But the moralists and the religious reformers had not yet managed to discipline the festive year into relentless sobriety. “I came once to a place, riding on a journey homeward from London,” wrote the great Protestant bishop Hugh Latimer in 1549,
and I sent word over night into the town that I would preach there in the morning because it was holy day. . . . The church stood in my way, and I took my horse, and my company, and went thither. I thought I should have found a great company in the church, and when I came there, the church door was fast locked. I tarried there half an hour and more, at last the key was found, and one of the parish comes to me and says: “Sir, this is a busy day with us, we cannot hear you, it is Robin Hood’s Day. The parish are gone abroad to gather for Robin Hood. . . .” I was fain there to give place to Robin Hood.
A traditional May game probably kept the parish busy that day—on May Day people had long celebrated the legend of Robin Hood, with raucous, often bawdy rituals.
Thirty-four years later an irascible polemicist, Philip Stubbes, reiterated the complaint:
Against May, Whitsunday, or other time, all the young men and maids, old men and wives, run gadding overnight to the woods . . . where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes, and in the morning they return, bringing with them birch and branches of trees. . . . But the chiefest jewel they bring from thence is their Maypole, which they bring home with great veneration, as thus: they have twenty or forty yoke of oxen, every ox having a sweet nosegay of flowers placed on the tip of his horns; and these oxen draw home this Maypole (this stinking idol, rather) which is covered all over with flowers and herbs, bound round about with strings from the top to the bottom, and sometimes painted with variable colors, with two or three hundred men, women, and children following it with great devotion. And thus being reared up with handkerchiefs and flags hovering on the top, they strew the ground round about, bind green boughs about it, set up summer halls, bowers, and arbors hard by it. And then fall they to dance about it, like as the heathen people did at the dedication of the idols, whereof this is a perfect pattern, or rather the thing itself.
Stubbes was writing in 1583, when Will was nineteen. Even if Stubbes sullenly exaggerated the pervasiveness and vitality of the ancient folk customs—customs whose attractiveness comes across despite his pious horror—he was not making it up: traditional fest
ivities, though constantly under attack, endured throughout the late sixteenth century and beyond.
What might Will have participated in, growing up in Stratford and its surrounding countryside? Men and women and children, their faces flushed with pleasure, dancing around a Maypole, decked with ribbons and garlands. A coarse Robin Hood show, with a drunken Friar Tuck and a lascivious Maid Marion. A young woman garlanded with flowers as the Queen of the May. A young boy dressed as the bishop and paraded through the streets with mock gravity. A belching, farting Lord of Misrule who temporarily turned the world upside down. Topsy-turvy days when women pursued men and schoolboys locked the teachers out of the classroom. Torchlight processions featuring men dressed as fantastic animals, “wodewoses” (wild men), and giants. Leaping morris dancers—from their supposed Moorish origin—with bells around their knees and ankles, cavorting with dancers wearing the wickerwork contraption known as the Hobbyhorse. Bagpipers, drummers, and fools dressed in motley carrying baubles and pigs’ bladders. Drinking contests, eating contests, and singing contests at sheep-shearing and harvest-home festivals. Most interesting of all, perhaps, at Christmastime there was the mummers’ play, featuring a madman, his five sons—Pickle Herring, Blue Breeches, Pepper Breeches, Ginger Breeches, and Mr. Allspice—and a woman named Cicely (or, on occasion, Maid Marion). The madman first fights with the hobbyhorse and with a “wild worm,” that is, a dragon. The sons then decide to kill their father; interlocking their swords around his neck, they force him to kneel down and make his will, before dispatching him. One of the sons, Pickle Herring, stamps his feet upon the ground and brings the father back to life. The play—or perhaps, with its seasonal occasion, primordial rhythms, and indifference to realism, it should be called a ritual—lurches toward its end with the father and sons wooing Cicely together and then with grotesque sword dances and morris dances.
These folk customs, all firmly rooted in the Midlands, had a significant impact upon Shakespeare’s imagination, fashioning his sense of theater even more than the morality plays that the touring companies brought to the provinces. Folk culture is everywhere in his work, in the web of allusions and in the underlying structures. The lovers who meet in the Athenian woods in A Midsummer Night’s Dream are reminiscent of May Day lovers; the deposed Duke Senior in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It is likened to Robin Hood; the drunken Sir Toby and, still more, Falstaff are Lords of Misrule who turn the order of things topsy-turvy; and, as queen of the feast, the garlanded Perdita in The Winter’s Tale presides over a rustic sheep-shearing festival, complete with dancing swains and maidens and a sly, light-fingered peddler.
The author of The Winter’s Tale was not a folk artist, and he made it clear in many ways that he was not. A sheep-shearing festival performed on the stage of the Globe as part of a sophisticated tragicomedy was not in fact a sheep-shearing festival; it was an urban fantasy of rural life, informed by knowing touches of realism but also carefully distanced from its homely roots. Shakespeare was a master of this distancing; if he had a sympathetic understanding of country customs, he also had ways of showing that they were no longer his native element. The Athenian lovers are not in fact in the woods to celebrate the May; Duke Senior bears no real resemblance to Robin Hood; the queen of the sheep-shearing festival is not a shepherd’s daughter but the daughter of a king; and if an old, mad father becomes the object of murderous attack by his children, it is not in the grotesque comedy of the mummers’ play but in the sublime tragedy of King Lear. No one can stamp upon the ground and make Lear or his daughter Cordelia spring back to life. Sir Toby and Falstaff come closer to the actual way in which Lords of Misrule functioned—they do for a limited time overturn sobriety, dignity, and decorum—but Shakespeare went out of his way to depict them after their disorderly reign is over: “What, is it a time to jest and dally now?” Prince Hal shouts in a rage, throwing the bottle of sack at Falstaff (1 Henry IV, 5.3.54). “I hate a drunken rogue,” moans Sir Toby, beaten and hungover (Twelfth Night, 5.1.193–94).
But there was nothing defensive in the ways Shakespeare distanced himself, no stiff-necked insistence on his sophistication or learning, no self-conscious embrace of the urban or the courtly. He had deep roots in the country. Virtually all of his close relatives were farmers, and in his childhood he clearly spent a great deal of time in their orchards and market gardens, in the surrounding fields and woods, and in tiny rural hamlets with their traditional seasonal festivals and folk customs. When he was growing up, he seems to have taken in everything about this rustic world, and he did not subsequently seek to repudiate it or pass himself off as something other than what he was. The cultivated Elizabethan literary critic George Puttenham writes snobbishly of “boys or country fellows” who listened with delight to blind harpers and tavern minstrels singing old romances and who enjoyed the carols sung at Christmas dinners and at the old-fashioned wedding feasts known as bridales. Will was almost certainly one of those country fellows. He doesn’t seem to have been anxious about such pleasures, though he subsequently moved in circles that laughed at their rusticity. He simply took them with him to London, as his possession, to be used as much or as little as he liked.
Shakespeare was anything but indifferent to being counted as a gentleman. But his concern for his station in life, his longing for social success, and his fascination with the lives of aristocrats and monarchs did not entail the erasure of the world from which he came. (Perhaps he simply loved the world too much to give any of it up.) Instead, he used his boyhood experiences—as he used virtually all of his experiences—as an inexhaustible source of metaphor.
In one of his earliest history plays, 2 Henry VI (written around 1591), Shakespeare has the ambitious, conniving Duke of York explain that he has lured the headstrong Kentish peasant Jack Cade into rebellion. “In Ireland have I seen this stubborn Cade” fight against a troop of soldiers, York remarks,
And fought so long till that his thighs with darts
Were almost like a sharp-quilled porcupine;
And in the end, being rescued, I have seen
Him caper upright like a wild Morisco,
Shaking the bloody darts as he his bells.
(3.1.360, 362–66)
Shakespeare himself had in all likelihood not served in the wars and had never seen a soldier’s thighs pierced with arrows. He had probably only read about porcupines (though he may have glimpsed the one kept in a small menagerie near the Tower of London). But as a boy, he had also almost certainly seen his share of morris dancers—“wild Moriscos”—leaping about in a kind of ecstasy. From such sights he constructed his astonishing image of the unstoppable Cade. More important, from the accumulation of such sights and sounds and rituals he constructed his sense of the magic of the theater.
But it was not only these traditional folk rituals, with their illusory but compelling air of timelessness, that exercised a powerful imaginative influence upon him; a particular event in his neighborhood, widely noted at the time, seems to have strongly marked his vision of the theater. In the summer of 1575, when Will was eleven, the queen had gone to the Midlands on one of her royal progresses—journeys, accompanied by an enormous retinue, on which, bejeweled like a Byzantine icon, she displayed herself to her people, surveyed her realm, received tributes; and all but bankrupted her hosts. Elizabeth, who had already visited the area in 1566 and again in 1572, was the supreme mistress of these occasions, at once thrilling and terrifying those who encountered her. In 1572 she was greeted officially by the Recorder of Warwick, Edward Aglionby, a local dignitary whom the Shakespeares would probably have known. Aglionby was a learned and imposing figure, but in the presence of the queen he trembled. “Come hither, little Recorder,” the queen said, holding out her hand for him to kiss. “It was told me that you would be afraid to look upon me or to speak so boldly; but you were not so afraid as I was of you.” No one, least of all the “little Recorder” himself, would have believed that polite fiction from the daughter of Henry VIII.
The climax of the 1575 progress was a nineteen-day stay—from July 9 to 27—at Kenilworth, the castle of the queen’s favorite Robert Dudley, the Earl of Leicester. Kenilworth is located some twelve miles northeast of Stratford, which would have been caught up, like the entire region, in the feverish preparations for the visit. John Shakespeare, a Stratford alderman at the time, was too insignificant a figure to have got very close, in all likelihood, to the elaborate entertainments that were staged for the queen by the man she called her “eyes,” but it is certainly conceivable that he took his son Will to glimpse what they could of the spectacles: the grand arrival of the queen, greeted with speeches by Sibylla, Hercules, the Lady of the Lake, and (in Latin) an emblematic poet; fireworks; a dialogue between a Savage Man and Echo; a bearbaiting (a “sport” in which mastiffs attacked a bear chained to a stake); more fireworks; a display of acrobatics by an Italian; and an elaborate water pageant.
Leicester, whose hold on the queen’s favor had been slipping and who clearly regarded this as an occasion on which nothing should be omitted that might conceivably bring her pleasure, also arranged for a set of rustic shows. The shows were the equivalent of the mock-authentic cultural performances done in our own time for visiting dignitaries or wealthy tourists; they included a bridale and morris dance, a quintain (a sport of tilting at targets), and the traditional Coventry Hock Tuesday play. These folk entertainments were of the kind that had been attacked by moralists and strict reformers, as Leicester understood perfectly well. He also understood that the queen took pleasure in them, was hostile to their puritanical critics, and would be sympathetic to an appeal to allow them to continue.