THE
NEW
YORK
TIMES
BESTSELLER
(WITH
A
NEW
AFTERWORD
“The
most
complexly
intelligent
and
sophisticated,
and
yet
the
most
keenly
enthusiastic,
study
of
the
life
and
work
taken
together
that
I
have
ever
read.”
—ADAM
GOPNIK,
The
New
Yorker
PULITZER
PRIZE
FINALIST
HOW
SHAKESPEARE
BECAME
SHAKESPEARE
STEPHEN
GREENBLATT
~
4
ret
:
ee
Praise
for
Will
in
the
World
New
York
Times
Bestseller
National
Book
Award
Finalist
National
Book
Critics
Circle
Award
Finalist
Los
Angeles
Times
Book
Prize
Finalist
Time
magazine’s
#1
Best
Nonfiction
Book
of
the
Year
a
New
York
Times
Top
Ten
Book
of
the
Year
an
Economist
Best
Book
of
the
Year
a
San
Francisco
Chronicle
Best
Book
of
the
Year
a
Christian
Science
Monitor
Best
Book
of
the
Year
a
Chicago
Tribune
Best
Book
of
the
Year
and
a
Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette
Best
Book
of
the
Year
“Greenblatt’s
book
is
startlingly
good—the
most
complexly
intel-
ligent
and
sophisticated,
and
yet
the
most
keenly
enthusiastic,
study
of
the
life
and
work
taken
together
that
I have
ever
read.
Greenblatt
knows
the
life
and
the
period
deeply
.
.
.
and
makes,
one
after
another,
exquisitely
sensitive
and
persuasive
connections
between
what
the
eloquent
poetry
says
and
what
the
fragmentary
~
life
suggests.”
—Adam
Gopnik,
‘The
New
Yorker
“At
last,
the
book
Shakespeare
has
deserved:
a
brilliant
book
written
by
a
virtual
eyewitness
who
understands
how
a
playwright
takes
the
stuff
of
his
life
and
his
world
and
makes
it
into
theater.”
?
—Charles
Mee,
author
of
Big
Love
“Delightful.
..
.
Greenblatt
knows
more
about
[Shakespeare]
than
Ben
Jonson
or
the
Dark
Lady
did.”
—John
Leonard,
Harper’
“Greenblatt
has
unusual
talents.
He
is
learned,
he
marshals
an
enor-
mous
amount
of
detail
in
the
book,
and
he
depicts
the
fabric
of
Elizabethan
life,
both
its
paranoia
and
festivities,
compellingly.
He
is a
‘aa
we
a
masterful
storyteller;
his
prose
is
elegant
and
subtle
..
.and
his
imag-
ination
is
rich
and
interesting
.
.
.
he
is
a
brilliant
critic.”
—Arthur
Kirsch,
Washington
Post
Book
World
“Insights
are
repeated
on
page
after
page
as
the
narrative
moves
_
seamlessly
between
details
in
the
plays
and
nuggets
of
information
about
Shakespeare’s
experience
and
environment.”
—Jonathan
Bate,
Boston
Sunday
Globe
“That
a
preeminent
scholar
can
write
such
an
engaging,
inventive
yet
subtle
page-turner
is
a
small
miracle—reflecting
the
great
miracle
of
Shakespeare
himself.”
—Robert
Pinsky,
former
Poet
Laureate
of
the
United
States
“Greenblatt
succinctly
and
vividly
conjures
up
the
Elizabethan
world.”
—DMichiko
Kakutani,
New
York
Times
“This
compulsively
readable
and
deeply
imaginative
book
represents
the
most
sympathetic
investigation
yet
made
into
he
ways
in
which’
Shakespeare’s
life
experiences
inform
his
writin
—Stanley
Wells,
general
editor,
The
Oxford
Shakespeare
“(Will
in
the
World|
moves
a
and
lucidly
through
scrupulously
|
marshaled
scraps
of
material.”
(fire
Sa
tre
Warner,
Los
A
ngeles
Times
“Stephen
Greenblatt’s
book
is
a
tour
de
force.
The
immediacy
and
forcefulness
of
his
prose
creates
an
Elizabethan
England
bristling
with
authenticity.
His
reading
of
Shakespeare’s
mind
is
both
star-
tling
and
stimulating,
strengthening
the
connections
between
life
and
art
in
a
way
that
all
creative.
people
instinctively
understand.
Indeed,
it
is
a
book
for
artists
and
ordinary
people
as
well
as
scholars
and
students.”
,
—Tina
Packer,
Founding
Artistic
Director,
Shakespeare
&
Company
~
Rr
“
“Despite
his
scholarship
and
sober
good
sense,
Greenblatt’s
book
is
full
of
longing,
a
love
letter
to
a
man
whom
we
will
never
get
to
know.
It’s
a
wonderful
piece
of
work.”
—Simon
Russell
Beale
“Readable
and
engaging.
...
One
of
the
most
persuasive
reconstruc-
tions
of
Shakespeare’s
life
and
career
I
have
encountered.”
—David
Walton,
Sz.
Petersburg
Times
“A
peerless
guide
to
Shakespeare.
...
The
incomparable
Greenblatt
puts
flesh
and
blood
and
bones
on
this
enigmatic
genius.
and
his
famous
plays.”
—Marvin
Hunt,
Raleigh
News
&
Observer
-
“One
of
the
world’s
best
interpreters
of
Shakespeare’s
plays,
Ste-
phen
Greenblatt
has
now
written
an
enthralling
biography
of
the
gloveseller’s
son
from
Stratford.
Greenblatt
helps
us
imagine
how
he
learned,
loved
and
lost
love,
took
risks
and
was
prudent,
acted,
fought
to
get
ahead,
and
especially
wrote
and
grew
in
his
writing.
In
;
this
portrait,
delivered
with
Greenblatt’s
insight
and
humor,
Shake-
speare’s
greatness
lies
in
his
ability
to
be
close
and
distant
to
all
his
_
creations.”
—Natalie
Zemon
Davis,
professor
emeritus,
.
Department
of
History,
University
of
Toronto
‘.
“One
of
the
most
important
Shakespeare
scholars
alive,
Greenblatt’s
classic
studies
.
.
.
have
redefined
not
only
Shakespeare
studies,
but
literary
studies
as
a
whole.
.
.
.
[Will
in
the
World]
offers
startling
new
insights.
...
Greenblatt
gives
his
reader
a
new
respect
for
what
remains
in
the
shadows,
and
a
renewed
awe
for
the
mind
that
saw,
and
created,
the
extraordinary
in
the
ordinary.”
*
__Deanne
Williams,
National
Post
“Greenblatt
...
has
given
us
a
clever
and
alive
book,
one
that
makes
us
return
to
Shakespeare’s
work
with
a
fresh
vision
and
one
that
finds
a
living
person
in
the
mass
of
dry
documents
and
the
heaps
of
conjecture.”
—Charles
Matthews,
San
Jose
Mercury
News
e
ALSO
BY
STEPHEN
GREENBLATT
ine
tee
Hamlet
in
Purgatory
Practicing
New
Historicism
(with
Catherine
Gallagher)
Marvelous
Possessions:
The
Wonder
of
the
New
World
Learning
to
Curse:
Essays
in
Early
Modern
Culture
Shakespearean
Negotiations:
The
Circulation
of
Social
Energy
in
Renaissance
England
Renaissance
Self-Fashioning:
From
More
to
Shakespeare
Sir
Walter
Ralegh:
The
Renaissance
Man
and
His
Roles
Three
Modern
Satirists:
Waugh,
Orwell,
and
Huxley
PDI
RED
IBY
sb
BEE
INGG
REE
IN
BAA
1
The
Norton
Anthology
of
English
Literature
(general
editor)
The
Norton
Shakespeare
(general
editor)
New
World
Encounters
Redrawing
the
Boundaries:
The
Transformation
of
English
and
American
Literary
Studies
Representing
the
English
Renaissance
Allegory
and
Representation
Will
in
the
World
POW
ets
HAT
S$:
Pa
ARE
BIEL
Agi)
Fae
St
At
KebnS
RskeAsRVE
Stephen
Greenblatt
W.
W.
NORTON
&
COMPANY
Independent
Publishers
Since
1923
New
York
-
London
Exe
eee
ee
bee
kc
Copyright
©
2004,
2016
by
Stephen
Greenblatt
All
rights
reserved
Printed
in
the
United
States
of
America
First
published
as
a
Norton
paperback
2005
For
information
about
permission
to
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selections
from
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book,
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to
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&
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Fifth
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York,
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Manufacturing
by
Quad
Graphics
Book
design
by
Judith
Stagnitto
The
Library
of
Congress
has
cataloged
an
earlier
edition
as
follows:
Greenblatt,
Stephen,
1943—
Will
in
the
world:
how
Shakespeare
became
Shakespeare
/
Stephen
Greenblatt.—1st
ed.
p.
cm.
Includes
bibliographical
references
(p.
)
and
index
ISBN
0-393-05057-2
(hardcover)
1.
Shakespeare,
William,
1564-1616.
2.
Dramatists,
English—
Early
modern,
1500-1700—Biography.
3.
Theater—England—History—16th
century.
4,
England—Intellectual
life—16th
century.
I.
Title.
PR2894.G74
2004
822.3'3—dc22
2004011512
ISBN
978-0-393-35260-3
pbk.
W.
W.
Norton
&
Company,
Inc.,
500
Fifth
Avenue,
New
York,
N.Y.
10110
Www.wwnorton.com
W. W.
Norton
&
Company,
Ltd.,
Castle
House,
75/76
Wells
Street,
London
W1T
3QT
wn
AS
Gy
3
OC
TO
JOSH
AND
AARON,
ONCE
AGAIN,
AND
NOW
TO
HARRY
Digitized
by
the
Internet
Archive
in
2022
with
funding
from
Kahle/Austin
Foundation
https://archive.org/details/willinworldhowshO000gree_u1w0
Contents
Preface
sl
Acknowledgments
15
A
Note
to
the
Reader
17
CHAPTER
1:
—
Primal
Scenes
23
CHAPTER
2:
The
Dream
of
Restoration
54
CHAPTER
3:
The
Great
Fear
87
CHAPTER
4:
Wooing,
Wedding,
and
Repenting
118
CHAPTER
5:
Crossing
the
Bridge
149
CHAPTER
6:
Life
in
the
Suburbs
175
CHAPTER
7:
Shakescene
199
CHAPTER
8:
Master-Mistress
226
CHAPTER
9:
Laughter
at
the
Scaffold
256
CHAPTER
10:
Speaking
with
the
Dead
288
CHAPTER
11:
Bewitching
the
King
g20
CHAPTER
12:
The
Triumph
of
the
Everyday
356
Afterword
chal
Bibliographical
Notes
ole
Index
417
Preface
A
YOUNG
MAN
from
a
small
provincial
town—a
man
without
independent
wealth,
without
powerful
family
connections,
and
without
a
university
education—moves
to
London
in
the
late
1580s
and,
in
a
remarkably
short
time,
becomes
the
greatest
playwright
not
of
his
age
alone
but
of
all
time.
His
works
appeal
to
the
learned
and
the
unlet-
tered,
to
urban
sophisticates
and
provincial
first-time
theatergoers.
He
makes
his
audiences
laugh
and
cry;
he
turns
politics
into
poetry;
he
reck-
lessly
mingles
vulgar
clowning
and
philosophical
subtlety.
He
grasps
with
equal
penetration
the
intimate
lives
of
kings
and
of
beggars;
he
seems
at
one
moment
to
have
studied
law,
at
another
theology,
at
another
ancient
history,
while
at
the
same
time
he
effortlessly
mimes
the
accents
of
coun-
try
bumpkins
and
takes
delight
in
old
wives’
tales.
How
is
an
achieve-
ment
of
this
magnitude
to
be
explained?
How
did
Shakespeare
become
Shakespeare?
Theater,
in
Shakespeare’s
time
as
in
our
own,
is
a
highly
social
art
form,
not
a
game
of
bloodless
abstractions.
There
was
a
type
of
drama
in
the
age
of
Elizabeth
and
James
that
did
not
show
its
face
in
public;
known
as
closet
dramas,
these
were
plays
never
meant
to
be
performed
or
HY
PREFACE
even
printed.
They
were
for
silent
reading
in
the
privacy
of
small,
prefer-
ably
windowless
rooms.
But
Shakespeare’s
plays
were
always
decisively
out
of
the
closet:
they
were,
and
are,
in
the
world
and
of
the
world.
Not
only
did
Shakespeare
write
and
act
for
a
cutthroat
commercial
entertain-
ment
industry;
he
also
wrote
scripts
that
were
intensely
alert
to
the
social
and
political
realities
of
their
times.
He
could
scarcely
have
done
other-
wise:
to
stay
afloat,
the
theater
company
in
which
he
was
a
shareholder
had
to
draw
some
1,500
to
2,000
paying
customers
a
day
into
the
round
wooden
walls
of
the
playhouse,
and
competition
from
rival
companies
was
fierce.
The
key
was
not
so
much
topicality—with
government
cen-
sorship
and
with
repertory
companies
often
successfully
recycling
the
same
scripts
for
years,
it
would
have
been
risky
to
be
too
topical—as
it
was
intensity
of
interest.
Shakespeare
had
to
engage
with
the
deepest
desires
and
fears
of
his
audience,
and
his
unusual
success
in
his
own
time
suggests
that
he
succeeded
brilliantly
in
doing
so.
Virtually
all
his
rival
playwrights
found
themselves
on
the
straight
road
to
starvation;
Shake-
speare,
by
contrast,
made
enough
money
to
buy
one
of
the
best
houses
in
the
hometown
to
which
he
retired
in
his
early
fifties,
a
self-made
man.
This
is
a
book,
then,
about
an
amazing
success
story
that
has
resisted
explanation:
it
aims
to
discover
the
actual
person
who
wrote
the
most
important
body
of
imaginative
literature
of
the
last
thousand
years.
Or
rather,
since
the
actual
person
is
a
matter
of
well-documented
public
record,
it
aims
to
tread
the
shadowy
paths
that
lead
from
the
life
he
lived
into
the
literature
he
created.
Apart
from
the
poems
and
plays
themselves,
the
surviving
traces
of
Shakespeare’s
life
are
abundant
but
thin.
Dogged
archival
labor
over
many
generations
has
turned
up
contemporary
allusions
to
him,
along
with
a
reasonable
number
of
the
playwright’s
property
transactions,
a
marriage
license
bond,
christening
records,
cast
lists
in
which
he
is
named
as
a
performer,
tax
bills,
petty
legal
affidavits,
payments
for
serv-
ices,
and
an
interesting
last
will
and
testament,
but
no
immediately
obvi-
ous
clues
to
unravel
the
great
mystery
of
such
immense
creative
power.
The
known
facts
have
been
rehearsed
again
and
again
for
several
centuries.
Already
in
the
nineteenth
century
there
were
fine,
richly
detailed,
and
well-documented
biographies,
and
each
year
brings
a
fresh
PREFACE
13
crop
of
them,
sometimes
enhanced
with
a
hard-won
crumb
or
two
of
new
archival
findings.
After
examining
even
the
best
of
them
and
patiently
sifting
through
most
of
the
available
traces,
readers
rarely
feel
closer
to
understanding
how
the
playwright’s
achievements
came
about.
If
anything,
Shakespeare
often
seems
a
drabber,
duller
person,
and
the
inward
springs
of
his
art
seem
more
obscure
than
ever.
Those
springs
would
be
difficult
enough
to
glimpse
if
biographers
could
draw
upon
letters
and
diaries,
contemporary
memoirs
and
interviews,
books
with
revealing
marginalia,
notes
and
first
drafts.
Nothing
of
the
kind
survives,
nothing
that
provides
a
clear
link
between
the
timeless
work
with
its
uni-
versal
appeal
and
a
particular
life
that
left
its
many
scratches
in
the
hum-
drum
bureaucratic
records
of
the
age.
The
work
is
so
astonishing,
so
luminous,
that
it
seems
to
have
come
from
a
god
and
not
a
mortal,
let
alone
a
mortal
of
provincial
origins
and
modest
education.
It
is
fitting,
of
course,
to
invoke
the
magic
of
an
immensely
strong
imagination,
a
human
endowment
that
does
not
depend
upon
an
“inter-
esting”
life.
Scholars
have
long
and
fruitfully
studied
the
transforming
work
of
that
imagination
on
the
books
that,
from
evidence
within
the
plays
themselves,
Shakespeare
must
certainly
have
read.
As
a
writer
he
rarely
started
with
a
blank
slate;
he
characteristically
took
materials
that
had
already
been
in
circulation
and
infused
them
with
his
supreme
cre-
ative
energies.
On
occasion,
the
reworking
is
so
precise
and
detailed
that
he
must
have
had
the
book
from
which
he
was
deftly
borrowing
directly
on
his
writing
table
as
his
quill
pen
raced
across
the
paper.
But
no
one
who
responds
intensely
to
Shakespeare’s
art
can
believe
that
the
plays
and
poems
came
exclusively
from
his
reading.
At
least
as
much
as
the
books
he
read,
the
central
problems
he
grappled
with
as
a
young
man—What
should
I
do
with
my
life?
In
what
can
I
have
faith?
Whom
do
I
love-—
served
throughout
his
career
to
shape
his
art.
One
of
the
prime
characteristics
of
Shakespeare’s
art
is
the
touch
of
the
real.
As
with
any
other
writer
whose
voice
has
long
ago
fallen
silent
and
whose
body
has
moldered
away,
all
that
is
left
are
words
on
a
page,
but
even
before
a
gifted
actor
makes
Shakespeare’s
words
come
alive,
those
words
contain
the
vivid
presence
of
actual,
lived
experience.
The
poet
who
noticed
that
the
hunted,
trembling
hare
was
“dew-bedabbled”
14
PREFACE
or
who
likened
his
stained
reputation
to
the
“dyer’s
hand,”
the
playwright
who
has
a
husband
tell
his
wife
that
there
is
a
purse
“in
the
desk
/
That’s
covered
o’er
with
Turkish
tapestry”
or
who
has
a
prince
remember
that
his
poor
companion
owns
only
two
pairs
of
silk
stockings,
one
of
them
peach-colored—this
artist
was
unusually
open
to
the
world
and
discov-
ered
the
means
to
allow
this
world
into
his
works.
To
understand
how
he
did
this
so
effectively,
it is
important
to
look
carefully
at
his
verbal
artistry—his
command
of
rhetoric,
his
uncanny
ventriloquism,
his
virtual
obsession
with
language.
To
understand
who
Shakespeare
was,
it
is
important
to
follow
the
verbal
traces
he
left
behind
back
into
the
life
he
lived
and
into
the
world
to
which
he
was
so
open.
And
to
understand
how
Shakespeare
used
his
imagination
to
transform
his
life
into
his
art,
it is
important
to
use
our
own
imagination.
Acknowledgments
IT
IS
A
TOKEN
of
the
special
delight
Shakespeare
bestows
on
everything
that
even
the
many
debts
I
have
incurred
in
writing
this
book
give
me
deep
pleasure
to
acknowledge.
My
remarkably
gifted
col-
leagues
and
students
at
Harvard
University
have
been
an
unfailing
source
of
intellectual
stimulation
and
challenge,
and
the
university's
fabled
resources—above
all,
its
celebrated
libraries
and
their
accomplished
staff—have
enabled
me
to
pursue
even
the
most
arcane
questions.
The
Mellon
Foundation
gave
me
the
precious
gift
of
time,
and
the
Wis-
senschaftskolleg
zu
Berlin
provided
the
perfect
setting
to
complete
the
writing
of
this
book.
I
am
grateful
for
the
opportunities
I
had
to
try
out
my
ideas
at
the
Shakespeare
Association
of
America,
the
Bath
Shake-
speare
Festival,
New
York
University,
the
Lionel
Trilling
Seminar
at
Columbia
University,
the
Leo
Lowenthal
Memorial
Conference,
Boston
College,
Wellesley
College,
Hendrix
College,
the
Einstein
Forum,
and,
on
multiple
occasions,
Marlboro
College
and
the
Marlboro
Music
Festival.
The
idea
of
Will
in
the
World
originated
years
ago
during
conversa-
tions
I
had
with
Marc
Norman,
who
was
then
in
the
early
stages
of
16
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
writing
a
film
script
about
Shakespeare’s
life.
The
script
was
the
germ
of
a
celebrated
movie,
Shakespeare
in
Love,
but
my
own
project
lay
dormant
until
my
wife,
Ramie
Targoff,
gave
me
the
sustained
encouragement,
intellectual
and
emotional,
to
pursue
it.
Crucial
advice
and
assistance
came
from
Jill
Kneerim,
and
my
friends
Homi
Bhabha,
Jeffrey
Knapp,
Joseph
Koerner,
Charles
Mee,
and
Robert
Pinsky
each
gave
me
more
of
their
time,
learning,
and
wisdom
than
I
can
ever
hope
to
repay.
I
have
benefited
too
from
the
help
and
probing
questions
of
many
other
friends,
including
Marcella
Anderson,
Leonard
Barkan,
Frank
Bidart,
Robert
Brustein,
Thomas
Laqueur,
Adam
Phillips,
Regula
Rapp,
Moshe
Safdie,
James
Shapiro,
Debora
Shuger,
and
the
late
Bernard
Williams.
Beatrice
Kitzinger,
Emily
Peterson,
Kate
Pilson,
Holger
Schott,
Gustavo
Secchi,
and
Phillip
Schwyzer
have
been
tireless
and
resourceful
assistants.
With
exemplary
patience
and
insight,
my
editor,
Alane
Mason,
continued
to
work
on
the
manuscript
of
my
book
through
the
course
of
her
pregnancy,
and,
by
something
of
a
miracle,
she
somehow
managed
to
finish
on
her
due
date.
My
deepest
and
most
richly
pleasurable
debts
are
closest
to
home:
to
my
wife
and
my
three
sons,
Josh,
Aaron,
and
Harry.
Only
the
youngest,
by
virtue
of
being
a
toddler,
has
been
spared
endless
conversations
about
Shakespeare
and
has
not
directly
contributed
his
ideas.
But
Harry,
who
came
into
the
world
104
years
after
the
birth
of
his
namesake,
my
father,
has
taught
me
how
breathtakingly
close
we
are
to
lives
that
at
first
sight
seem
so
far
away.
A
Note
to
the
Reader
AROUND
1598,
still
relatively
early
in
Shakespeare’s
career,
a
man
named
Adam
Dyrmonth,
about
whom
next
to
nothing
is
known,
set
out
to
list
the
contents
of
a
collection
of
speeches
and
letters
that
he
had
transcribed.
Evidently,
his
mind
began
to
wander,
because
he
began
to
scribble
idly.
Among
the
jottings
that
cover
the
page
are
the
words
“Rychard
the
second”
and
“Rychard
the
third,”
along
with
half-
remembered
quotations
from
Love's
Labour's
Lost
and
The
Rape
of
Lucrece.
Above
all,
the
scribbler
repeatedly
wrote
the
words
“William
Shake-
speare.”
He
wanted
to
know,
it
seems,
what
it
felt
like
to
write
that
par-
ticular
name
as
one’s
own.
Dyrmonth
might
have
been
the
first
to
be
driven
by
this
curiosity,
but
he
certainly
was
not
the
last.
As
Dyrmonth’s
scribblings
suggest,
Shakespeare
was
famous
in
his
own
lifetime.
Only
a
few
years
after
Shakespeare’s
death,
Ben
Jonson
cel-
ebrated
him
as
“the
wonder
of
our
Stage”
and
the
“Star
of
poets.”
But
at
the
time
such
literary
celebrity
did
not
ordinarily
lead
to
the
writing
of
biographies,
and
no
contemporary
seems
to
have
thought
it
worthwhile
to
collect
whatever
could
be
found
out
about
Shakespeare
while
his
memory
was
still
green.
As
it
happens,
more
is
known
about
him
than
18
A
NOTE
TO
THE
READER
about
most
professional
writers
of
the
time,
but
this
knowledge
is
largely
the
consequence
of
the
fact
that
England
in
the
late
sixteenth
and
early
seventeenth
century
was
already
a
record-keeping
society
and
that
many
of
the
records
survived,
to
be
subsequently
combed
over
by
eager
schol-
ars.
Even
with
this
relative
abundance
of
information,
there
are
huge
gaps
in
knowledge
that
make
any
biographical
study
of
Shakespeare
an
exercise
in
speculation.
What
matters
most
are
the
works,
most
of
which
(the
poems
excepted)
were
carefully
assembled
by
two
of
Shakespeare’s
longtime
associates
and
friends,
John
Heminges
and
Henry
Condell,
who
brought
out
the
First
Folio
in
1623,
seven
years
after
the
playwright’s
death.
Eighteen
of
the
thirty-six
plays
in
this
great
volume,
including
such
mas-
terpieces
as
Julius
Caesar,
Macbeth,
Antony
and
Cleopatra,
and
The
Tem-
pest,
had
not
appeared
in
print
before;
without
the
First
Folio
they
might
have
vanished
forever.
The
world
owes
Heminges
and
Condell
an
immense
debt.
But
beyond
noting
that
Shakespeare
wrote
with
great
facility—“what
he
thought,”
they
claimed,
“he
uttered
with
that
easiness
that
we
have
scarce
received
from
him
a
blot
in
his
papers”’—the
editors
had
little
or
no
interest
in
furthering
biography.
They
chose
to
arrange
the
contents
by
genre—Comedies,
Histories,
and
Tragedies—and
they
did
not
bother
to
note
when
and
in
what
order
Shakespeare
wrote
each
of
his
plays.
After
many
decades
of
ingenious
research,
scholars
have
reached
a
reasonably
stable
consensus,
but
even
this
time
line,
so
crucial
for
any
biography,
is
inevitably
somewhat
speculative.
So
too
are
many
of
the
details
of
the
life.
The
Stratford
vicar
John
Bretchgirdle
noted
in
the
parish
register
the
baptism
of
“Gulielmus
filius
Johannes
Shakspere”
on
April
26,
1564.
Though
anything
can
be
called
into
question,
that
much
seems
beyond
a
reasonable
doubt,
but
the
schol-
ars
who
subsequently
fixed
Shakespeare’s
date
of
birth
as
April
23—on
the
assumption
that
there
was
ordinarily
a
three-day
interval
at
the
time
between
birth
and
baptism—were
engaged
in
speculation.
One
further
and
potentially
more
consequential
example
will
give
readers
a
sense
of
the
scope
of
the
problem.
From
1571
to
1575
the
schoolmaster
in
the
Stratford
grammar
school
was
Simon
Hunt,
who
had
received
his
B.A.
from
Oxford
in
1568.
He
would
thus
have
been
A
NOTE
TO
THE
READER
19
William
Shakespeare’s
teacher
from
the
age
of
seven
to
eleven.
Around
July
1575,
Simon
Hunt
matriculated
at
the
University
of
Douai—the
Catholic
university
in
Flanders—and
became
a
Jesuit
in
1578.
This
would
seem
to
indicate
that
Shakespeare’s
early
teacher
was
a
Catholic,
a
detail
that
is
consistent
with
a
whole
pattern
of
experiences
in
his
youth.
But
there
is
no
hard-and-fast
proof
that
Shakespeare
attended
the
Strat-
ford
grammar
school—the
records
for
that
period
do
not
survive.
More-
over,
another
Simon
Hunt
died
in
Stratford
in
or
before
1598,
and
it is
at
least
possible
that
this
second
Simon
Hunt,
rather
than
the
one
who
became
a
Jesuit,
was
the
schoolmaster.
Shakespeare
almost
certainly
attended
the
school—where
else
would
he
have
acquired
his
educa-
tion?—and
the
coincidence
of
the
dates
and
the
larger
pattern
of
experi-
ences
make
it
highly
likely
that
the
schoolmaster
from
1571
to
1575
was
the
Catholic
Hunt.
But
in
these
details,
as
in
so
much
else
from
Shake-
speare’s
life,
there
is
no
absolute
certainty.
sexe
(i
re
oe
shut
ace
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Primal
Scenes
ET
US
IMAGINE
that
Shakespeare
found
himself
from
boy-
hood
fascinated
by
language,
obsessed
with
the
magic
of
words.
There
is
overwhelming
evidence
for
this
obsession
from
his
earliest
writings,
so
it is
a
very
safe
assumption
that
it
began
early,
perhaps
from
the
first
moment
his
mother
whispered
a
nurs-
ery
rhyme
in
his
ear:.
Pillycock,
pillycock,
sate
on
a
hill,
If
he’s
not
gone—he
sits
there
still.
(This
particular
nursery
rhyme
was
rattling
around
in
his
brain
years
later,
when
he
was
writing
King
Lear.
“Pillicock
sat
on
Pillicock-hill,”
chants
the
madman
Poor
Tom
[3.4.73].)
He
heard
things
in
the
sounds
of
words
that
others
did
not
hear;
he
made
connections
that
others
did
not
make;
and
he
was
flooded
with
a
pleasure
all
his
own.
This
was
a
love
and
a
pleasure
that
Elizabethan
England
could
arouse,
richly
satisfy,
and
reward,
for
the
culture
prized
ornate
eloquence,
cultivated
a
taste
for
lavish
prose
from
preachers
and
politicians,
and
24
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
expected
even
people
of
modest
accomplishments
and
sober
sensibilities
to
write
poems.
In
one
of
his
early
plays,
Love’
Labour’s
Lost,
Shakespeare
created
a
ridiculous
schoolteacher,
Holofernes,
whose
manner
is
a
parody
of
a
classroom
style
that
most
audience
members
must
have
found
imme-
diately
recognizable.
Holofernes
cannot
refer
to
an
apple
without
adding
that
it
hangs
“like
a
jewel
in
the
ear
of
caelo,
the
sky,
the
welkin,
the
heaven”
and
that
it
drops
“on
the
face
of
¢erra,
the
soil,
the
land,
the
earth”
(4.2.4-6).
He
is
the
comical
embodiment
of
a
curriculum
that
used,
as
one
of
its
key
textbooks,
Erasmus’s
On
Copiousness,
a
book
that
taught
students
150
different
ways
of
saying
(in
Latin,
of
course)
“Thank
you
for
your
let-
ter.”
If
Shakespeare
deftly
mocked
this
manic
word
game,
he
also
exuber-
antly
played
it
in
his
own
voice
and
his
own
language,
as
when
he
writes
in
sonnet
129
that
lust
“Is
perjured,
murd’rous,
bloody,
full
of
blame,
/
Sav-
age,
extreme,
rude,
cruel,
not
to
trust”
(lines
3-4).
Concealed
somewhere
behind
this
passionate
outburst
are
the
many
hours
a
young
boy
spent
in
school,
compiling
long
lists
of
Latin
synonyms.
“All
men,”
wrote
Queen
Elizabeth’s
tutor,
Roger
Ascham,
“covet
to
have
their
children
speak
Latin.”
The
queen
spoke
Latin—one
of
the
few
women
in
the
realm
to
have
had
access
to
that
accomplishment,
so
cru-
cial
for
international
relations—and
so
did her
diplomats,
counselors,
theologians,
clergymen,
physicians,
and
lawyers.
But
command
of
the
ancient
tongue
was
not
limited
to
those
who
actually
made
practical,
pro-
fessional
use
of
it.
“A//
men
covet
to
have
their
children
speak
Latin”:
in
the
sixteenth
century,
bricklayers,
wool
merchants,
glovers,
prosperous
yeomen—people
who
had
no
formal
education
and
could
not
read
or
write
English,
let
alone
Latin—wanted
their
sons
to
be
masters
of
the
ablative
absolute.
Latin
was
culture,
civility,
upward
mobility.
It
was
the
language
of
parental
ambition,
the
universal
currency
of
social
desire.
So
it
was
that
Will’s
father
and
mother
wanted
their
son
to
have
a
proper
classical
education.
John
Shakespeare
himself
seems
to
have
had
at
most
only
partial
literacy:
as
the
holder
of
important
civic
offices
in
Stratford-upon-Avon,
he
probably
knew
how
to
read,
but
throughout
his
life
he
only
signed
his
name
with
a
mark.
Judging
from
the
mark
she
made
on
legal
documents,
Mary
Shakespeare,
the
mother
of
England’s
greatest
writer,
also
could
not
write
her
name,
though
she
too
might
have
PRIMAL
SCENES
25
acquired
some
minimal
literacy.
But,
they
evidently
decided,
this
would
not
suffice
for
their
eldest
son.
The
child
no
doubt
began
with
a
“horn-
book”—a
wooden
tablet
with
the
letters
and
the
Paternoster
printed
ona
piece
of
parchment
covered
with
a
thin
sheet
of
transparent
horn—and
with
the
standard
primary
school
text,
The
ABC
with
the
Cathechism.
(In
The
Two
Gentlemen
of
Verona,
a
lover
sighs
“like
a
schoolboy
that
had
lost
his
ABC”[2.1.19-20].)
Thus
far
he
was
only
acquiring
what
his
father
and
possibly
even
his
mother
may
have
possessed.
But
probably
starting
at
age
seven,
he
was
sent
to
the
Stratford
free
grammar
school,
whose
central
educational
principle
was
total
immersion
in
Latin.
The
school
was
called
the
King’s
New
School,
but
it
was
not
new
and
it
had
not
been
founded
by
the
king
who
was
honored
in
its
name,
Eliz-
abeth’s
short-lived
half
brother
Edward
VI.
Like
so
many
other
Eliza-
bethan
institutions,
this
one
wore
a
mask
designed
to
hide
origins
tainted
with
Roman
Catholicism.
Built
by
the
town’s
Guild
of
the
Holy
Cross
in
the
early
fifteenth
century,
it
was
endowed
as
a
free
school
by
one
of
its
Catholic
chaplains
in
1482.
The
schoolhouse—which
survives
more
or
less
intact—was
a
single
large
room
above
the
guildhall,
reached
by
a
flight
of
external
stairs
that
were
at
one
time
roofed
with
tile.
There
may
have
been
partitions,
particularly
if
an
assistant
teacher
was
teaching
very
young
children
their
ABCs,
but
most
of
the
students—some
forty-two
boys,
ranging
in
age
from
seven
to
fourteen
or
fifteen—sat
on
hard
benches
facing
the
schoolmaster,
sitting
in
his
large
chair
at
the
head
of
the
room.
By
statute,
the
Stratford
schoolmaster
was
not
allowed
to
take
money
for
his
instruction
from
any
of
the
students.
He
was
to
teach
any
male
child
who
qualified—that
is,
anyone
who
had
learned
the
rudi-
ments
of
reading
and
writing—‘“be
their
parents
never
so
poor
and
the
boys
never
so
unapt.”
For
this
he
received
free
housing
and
an
annual
salary
of
twenty
pounds,
a
substantial
sum
at
the
high
end
of
what
Eliz-
abethan
schoolmasters
could
hope
to
make.
The
town
of
Stratford
was
serious
about
the
education
of
its
children:
after
the
free
grammar
school
there
were
special
scholarships
to
enable
promising
students
of
limited
means
to
attend
university.
This
was
not,
to
be
sure,
universal
free
edu-
cation.
Here
as
everywhere
else,
girls
were
excluded
from
both
grammar
26
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
school
and
university.
The
sons
of
the
very
poor—a
large
proportion
of
the
population—also
did
not
go
to
school,
for
they
were
expected
to
begin
work
at
a
young
age,
and,
besides,
though
there
was
no
fee,
there
were
some
expenses:
students
were
expected
to
bring
quills
for
pens,
a
knife
for
sharpening
the
quills,
candles
in
winter,
and—an
expensive
commodity—paper.
But
for
the
sons
of
families
of
some
means,
however
modest,
a
rigorous
education,
centered
on
the
classics,
was
accessible.
Though
the
Stratford
school
records
from
the
time
do
not
survive,
Will
almost
certainly
attended
this
school,
fulfilling
his
parents’
desire
that
he
learn
Latin.
In
the
summer
the
school
day
began
at
6
A.M.;
in
the
winter,
as
a
con-
cession
to
the
darkness
and
the
cold,
at
7.
At
11
came
recess
for
lunch—
Will
presumably
ran
home,
only
three
hundred
yards
or
so
away—and
then
instruction
began
again,
continuing
until
5:30
or
6.
Six
days
a
week;
twelve
months
a
year.
The
curriculum
made
few
concessions
to
the
range
of
human
interests:
no
English
history
or
literature;
no
biology,
chem-
istry,
or
physics;
no
economics
or
sociology;
only
a
smattering
of
arith-
metic.
There
was
instruction
in
the
articles
of
the
Christian
faith,
but
that
must
have
seemed
all
but
indistinguishable
from
the
instruction
in
Latin.
And
the
instruction
was
not
gentle:
rote
memorization,
relentless
drills,
endless
repetition,
daily
analysis
of
texts,
elaborate
exercises
in
imi-
tation
and
rhetorical
variation,
all
backed
up
by
the
threat
of
violence.
Everyone
understood
that
Latin
learning
was
inseparable
from
whipping.
One
educational
theorist
of
the
time
speculated
that
the
but-
tocks
were
created
in
order
to
facilitate
the
learning
of
Latin.
A
good
teacher
was
by
definition
a
strict
teacher;
pedagogical
reputations
were
made
by
the
vigor
of
the
beatings
administered.
The
practice
was
time-
honored
and
entrenched:
as
part
of
his
final
examination
at
Cambridge,
a
graduate
in
grammar
in
the
late
Middle
Ages
was
required
to
demon-
strate
his
pedagogical
fitness
by
flogging
a
dull
or
recalcitrant
boy.
Learn-
ing
Latin
in
this
period
was,
as
a
modern
scholar
has
put
it,
a
male
puberty
rite.
Even
for
an
exceptionally
apt
student,
that
puberty
rite
could
not
have
been
pleasant.
Still,
though
it
doubtless
inflicted
its
meas-
ure
of
both
boredom
and
pain,
the
King’s
New
School
clearly
aroused
and
fed
Will’s
inexhaustible
craving
for
language.
PRIMAL
SCENES
DY
There
was
another
aspect
of
the
very
long
school
day
that
must
have
given
Will
pleasure.
Virtually
all
schoolmasters
agreed
that
one
of
the
best
ways
to
instill
good
Latin
in
their
students
was
to
have
them
read
and
perform
ancient
plays,
especially
the
comedies
of
Terence
and
Plau-
tus.
Even
the
clergyman
John
Northbrooke,
a
killjoy
who
in
1577
pub-
lished
a
sour
attack
on
“dicing,
dancing,
vain
plays
or
interludes
with
other
idle
pastimes,”
conceded
that
school
performances
of
Latin
plays,
if
suitably
expurgated,
were
acceptable.
Northbrooke
stressed
nervously
that
the
plays
had
to
be
performed
in
the
original
language,
not
in
Eng-
lish,
that
the
students
should
not
wear
beautiful
costumes,
and,
above
all,
that
there
should
be
no
“vain
and
wanton
toys
of
love.”
For
the
great
dan-
ger
of
these
plays,
as
the
Oxford
scholar
John
Rainolds
noted,
was
that
the
plot
may
call
for
the
boy
who
is
playing
the
hero
to
kiss
the
boy
who
is
playing
the
heroine,
and
that
kiss
may
be
the
undoing
of
both
children.
For
the
kiss
of
a
beautiful
boy
is
like
the
kiss
of
“certain
spiders”:
“if
they
do
but
touch
men
only
with
their
mouth,
they
put
them
to
wonderful
pain
and
make
them
mad.”
In
fact
it is
almost
impossible
to
expurgate
Terence
and
Plautus:
take
out
the
disobedient
children
and
sly
servants,
the
parasites,
tricksters,
whores,
and
foolish
fathers,
the
feverish
pursuit
of
sex
and
money,
and
you
have
virtually
nothing
left.
Built
into
the
curriculum,
then,
was
a
kind
of
recurrent
theatrical
transgression,
a
comic
liberation
from
the
oppressive
heaviness
of
the
educational
system.
To
partake
fully
of
the
liberation,
all
you
needed,
as
a
student,
was
a
histrionic
gift
and
enough
Latin
to
get
the
point.
By
the
time
he
was
ten
or
eleven,
and
perhaps
ear-
lier,
Will
almost
certainly
had
both.
No
surviving
records
indicate
how
often
the
Stratford
teachers
during
Will’s
school
years
had
the
boys
perform
plays
or
which
plays
they
assigned.
Perhaps
there
was
a
time,
a
year
or
so
before
Will
left
school,
when
the
teacher—Oxford-educated
Thomas
Jenkins—decided
to
have
the
boys
perform
Plautus’s
frenetic
farce
about
identical
twins,
The
Two
Menaechmuses.
And
perhaps
on
this
occasion,
Jenkins,
recognizing
that
one
of
his
students
was
precociously
gifted
as
both
a
writer
and
an
actor,
assigned
Will
Shakespeare
a
leading
role.
There
is
hard
evidence
from
later
in
his
life
that
Shakespeare
loved
this
particular
play’s
combination
of
WS
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
logic
and
dizzying
confusion,
the
characters
constantly
just
missing
the
direct
encounter
and
the
explanation
that
would
resolve
the
mounting
chaos.
When
he
was
a
young
playwright
in
London
casting
about
for
the
plot
of
a
comedy,
he
simply
took
over
The
Two
Menaechmuses,
added
a
sec-
ond
set
of
twins
to
double
the
chaos,
and
wrote
The
Comedy
of
Errors.
The
comedy
was
a
great
success:
when
it
was
performed
at
one
of
London's
law
schools
the
students
rioted
trying
to
get
seats.
But
for
the
talented
school-
boy
in
the
King’s
New
School,
this
future
triumph
would
have
seemed
almost
as
implausible
as
the
zany
events
depicted
in
the
play.
In
Plautus’s
opening
scene,
Menaechmus
of
Epidamnum
squabbles
with
his
wife
and
then
goes
off
to
visit
his
mistress,
the
courtesan
Erotium
(women’s
parts
as
well
as
men’s
would
have
been
played
by
the
boys
in
Will’s
class).
Before
Menaechmus
knocks
at
her
door,
it
swings
‘open
and
Erotium
herself
appears,
ravishing
his
senses:
“Eapse
eccam
exit!”
(“Look,
she’s
coming
out
herself”).
And
then
in
this
moment
of
rapture—the
sun
is
bedimmed,
he
exclaims,
by
the
radiance
of
her
lovely
body—Erotium
greets
him:
“Anime
mi,
Menaechme,
salve!”
(“My
dar-
ling
Menaechmus,
welcome!”).
This
is
the
moment
that
anxious
moralists
like
Northbrooke
and
Rainolds
most
feared
and
hated:
the
kiss
of
the
spider
boy.
“Beautiful
boys
by
kissing,”
writes
Rainolds,
“do
sting
and
pour
secretly
in
a
kind
of
poison,
the
poison
of
incontinency.”
It
is
easy
to
laugh
at
this
hysteria,
but
perhaps
it
is
not
completely
absurd—on
some
such
occasion
as
this,
it
is
possible
that
the
adolescent
Shakespeare
felt
an
intense
excitement
in
which
theatrical
performance
and
sexual
arousal
were
braided
together.
Long
before
performances
in
school,
Will
may
already
have
discov-
ered
that
he
had
a
passion
for
playacting.
In
1569,
when
he
was
five,
his
father,
as
the
bailiff—that
is,
the
mayor—of
Stratford-upon-Avon,
ordered
that
payments
be
made
to
two
companies
of
professional
actors,
the
Queen’s
Men
and
the
Earl
of
Worcester’s
Men,
which
had
come
to
town
on
tour.
These
traveling
playing-companies
would
not
have
been
an
especially
impressive
sight:
some
six
to
a
dozen
“strowlers”
carrying
their
costumes
and
props
in
a
wagon,
compelled
by
circumstances,
as
one
con-
temporary
observer
wryly
put
it,
“to
travel
upon
the
hard
hoof
from
village
to
village
for
cheese
and
butter-milk.”
In
fact
the
usual
rewards
PRIMAL
SCENES
29
would
have
been
slightly
more
substantial—a
pound
or
two
in
cold
cash,
if
they
were
fortunate—but
not
so
great
as
to
make
the
players
turn
up
their
noses
at
whatever
free
cheese
and
buttermilk
they
could
cadge.
Yet
to
most
small
boys
it
would
all
have
been
unspeakably
thrilling.
The
arrival
in
provincial
towns
generally
followed
a
set
pattern.
With
a
flourish
of
trumpets
and
the
rattle
of
drums,
the
players
swaggered
down
the
street
in
their
colorful
liveries,
scarlet
cloaks,
and
crimson
vel-
vet
caps.
They
proceeded
to
the
house
of
the
mayor
and
presented
the
letters
of
recommendation,
with
wax
seals,
that
showed
that
they
were
not
vagabonds
and
that
a
powerful
patron
protected
them.
In
Stratford
in
1569
they
would
have
come
to
Henley
Street,
to
the
boy’s
own
house,
and
they
would
have
spoken
to
his
father
with
deference,
for
it
was
he
who
would
decide
whether
they
would
be
sent
packing
or
allowed
to
post
their
bills
announcing
the
performances.
The
first
performance
was
known
as
the
Mayor’s
Play,
and
it
was
usually
free
to
all
comers.
Stratford’s
bailiff
would
certainly
have
been
expected
to
attend
this,
for
it
was
his
privilege
to
determine
the
level
of
the
reward
to
be
paid
out
of
the
city
coffers;
he
would,
presumably,
have
been
received
with
great
respect
and
given
one
of
the
best
seats
in
the
guildhall,
where
a
special
stage
had
been
erected.
The
excitement
of
this
occasion
was
not
limited
to
small
boys:
municipal
records
in
Stratford
and
elsewhere
routinely
recorded
broken
windows
and
damage
to
chairs
and
benches
caused
by
mobs
of
unruly
spectators
jostling
for
a
good
view.
These
were
festive
events,
breaks
in
the
routines
of
everyday
life.
The
sense
of
release,
always
bordering
on
transgression,
was
why
some
stern
town
officials
occasionally
turned
the
players
away,
particularly
in
times
of
dearth,
sickness,
or
disorder,
and
why
the
players
were
not
permitted
to
perform
on
Sundays
or
during
Lent.
But
even
the
most
puritanical
mayors
and
aldermen
had
to
think
twice
about
annoying
the
aristocrats
whose
liveries
the
players
proudly
wore.
After
all,
at
the
end
of
each
per-
formance
in
these
country
towns,
the
players
would
kneel
down
solemnly
and
ask
everyone
present
to
pray
with
them
for
their
good
lord
and
mas-
ter—or,
in
the
case
of
the
Queen’s
Men,
for
the
great
Elizabeth
herself.
Hence,
even
when
they
were
forbidden
from
performing,
the
troupes
were
often
sent
off
with
a
gratuity,
bribed
in
effect
to
go
away.
30
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
John
Shakespeare,
the
records
indicate,
did
not
send
the
players
on
their
way.
He
permitted
them
to
play.
But
would
he
have
taken
his
five-
year-old
son
to
see
the
show?
Certainly
other
fathers
did.
In
his
old
age,
a
man
named
Willis,
born
the
same
year
as
Will,
recalled
a
play
(now
lost),
called
The
Cradle
of
Security,
that
he
saw
in
Gloucester—thirty-
eight
miles
from
Stratford—when
he
was
a
child.
On
arriving
in
town
the
players,
Willis
wrote,
followed
the
usual
routine:
they
presented
themselves
to
the
mayor,
informed
him
what
nobleman’s
servants
they
were,
and
requested
a
license
for
performing
in
public.
The
mayor
granted
the
license
and
appointed
the
company
to
give
their
first
per-
formance
before
the
aldermen
and
other
officials
of
the
town.
“At
such
a
play,”
Willis
remembered,
“my
father
took
me
with
him
and
made
me
stand
between
his
legs,
as
he
sat
upon
one
of
the
benches,
where
we
saw
and
heard
very
well.”
The
experience
was
a
remarkably
intense
one
for
Willis:
“This
sight
took
such
impression
in
me,”
he
wrote,
“that
when
I
came
towards
man’s
estate,
it
was
as
fresh
in
my
memory
as
if
I
had
seen
it
newly
acted.”
This
is
probably
as
close
as
it is
possible
to
get
to
Will’s
own
primal
scene
of
theatricality.
When
the
bailiff
walked
into
the
hall,
everyone
would
have
greeted
him
and
exchanged
words
with
him;
when
he
took
his
seat,
the
crowd
would
have
grown
quiet
in
the
expectation
that
some-
thing
exciting
and
pleasurable
was
about
to
happen.
His
son,
intelligent,
quick,
and
sensitive,
would
have
stood
between
his
father’s
legs.
For
the
first
time
in
his
life
William
Shakespeare
watched
a
play.
What
was
the
play
that
the
Queen’s
Men
brought
to
Stratford
in
1569?
Records
do
not
show,
and
perhaps
it
does
not
matter.
The
sheer
magic
of
playing—the
fashioning
of
an
imaginary
space,
the
artful
impersonations,
the
elaborate
costumes,
the
flood
of
heightened
lan-
guage—may
have
been
enough
to
capture
the
young
boy
forever.
There
was,
in
any
case,
more
than
one
occasion
for
the
spell
to
be
cast.
Troupes
came
repeatedly
to
Stratford—the
Earl
of
Leicester’s
Men
in
1573,
for
example,
when
Will
was
nine
years
old,
the
Earl
of
Warwick’s
Men
and
the
Earl
of
Worcester’s
Men
in
1575,
when
he
was
eleven—and
each
time
the
thrilling
effect,
initially
enhanced
by
the
child’s
sense
of
his
PRIMAL
SCENES
oa
father's
importance
and
power,
may
have
been
renewed
and
strength-
ened,
the
clever
devices
stored
away
as
treasured
memories.
For
his
part,
Shakespeare’s
contemporary
Willis
remembered
all
his
life
what
he
had
seen
at
Gloucester:
a
king
lured
away
from
his
sober,
pious
counselors
by
three
seductive
ladies.
“In
the
end
they
got
him
to
lie
down
in
a
cradle
upon
the
stage,”
he
recalled,
“where
these
three
ladies,
joining
in
a
sweet
song,
rocked
him
asleep,
that
he
snorted
again;
and
in
the
meantime
closely
conveyed
under
the
cloths
wherewithal
he
was
cov-
ered,
a
vizard,
like
a
swine’s
snout,
upon
his
face,
with
three
wire
chains
fastened
thereunto,
the
other
end
whereof
being
holden
severally
by
those
three
ladies;
who
fall
to
singing
again,
and
then
discovered
his
face,
that
the
spectators
might
see
how
they
had
transformed
him.”
The
spec-
tators
must
have
found
it
very
exciting.
Some
of
the
older
ones
probably
remembered
the
swinish
face
of
Henry
VIII,
and
all
in
the
audience
knew
that
it
was
only
under
special
circumstances
that
they
could
pub-
licly
share
the
thought
that
the
monarch
was
a
swine.
Young
Will
is
likely
to
have
seen
something
similar.
The
plays
in
repertory
in
the
1560s
and
’’70s
were
for
the
most
part
“morality
plays,”
or
“moral
interludes,”
secular
sermons
designed
to
show
the
terrible
conse-
quences
of
disobedience,
idleness,
or
dissipation.
Typically,
a
character—
an
embodied
abstraction
with
a
name
like
Mankind
or
Youth—turns
away
from
a
proper
guide
such
as
Honest
Recreation
or
Virtuous
Life
and
begins
to
spend
his
time
with
Ignorance,
All-for-Money,
or
Riot.
Huffa,
huffa!
Who
calleth
after
me?
I
am
Riot,
full
of
jollity.
My
heart
is
light
as
the
wind,
And
all
on
riot
is
my
mind.
(The
Interlude
of
Youth)
It
is
rapidly
downhill
from
here—Riot
introduces
Youth
to
his
friend
Pride;
Pride
introduces
him
to
his
glamorous
sister
Lechery;
Lechery
lures
him
to
the
tavern—and
it
looks
like
it
will
all
end
badly.
Sometimes
it
does
end
badly—in
the
play
Willis
saw,
the
king
who
is
transformed
BY
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
into
a
swine
is
later
carried
away
to
punishment
by
wicked
spirits—but
more
typically,
something
happens
to
awaken
the
hero’s
slumbering
con-
science
just
in
time.
In
The
Interlude
of
Youth,
Charity,
reminding
the
sin-
ner
of
Jesus’s
great
gift
to
him,
frees
him
from
the
influence
of
Riot
and
restores
him
to
the
company
of
Humility.
In
The
Castle
of
Perseverance,
Penance
touches
Mankind’s
heart
with
his
lance
and
saves
him
from
his
wicked
companions,
the
Seven
Deadly
Sins.
In
Wit
and
Science,
the
hero
Wit,
asleep
in
the
lap
of
Idleness,
is
transformed
into
a
fool,
complete
with
cap
and
bells,
but
he
is
saved
when
he
catches
sight
of
himself
in
a
mirror
and
realizes
that
he
looks
“like
a
very
ass!”
Only
after
he
is
sharply
whipped
by
Shame
and
taught
by
a
group
of
strict
schoolmasters—
Instruction,
Study,
and
Diligence—is
Wit
restored
to
his
proper
appear-
ance
and
able
to
celebrate
his
marriage
to
Lady
Science.
Relentlessly
didactic
and
often
clumsily
written,
morality
plays
came
to
seem
old-fashioned
and
crude—any
summary
of
them
will
make
them
sound
boring—but
they
were
in
vogue
for
a
long
period
of
time,
extend-
_
ing
into
Shakespeare’s
adolescence.
Their
blend
of
high-mindedness
and
exuberant
theatrical
energy
pleased
an
impressively
broad
range
of
spec-
tators,
from
the
unlettered
to
the
most
sophisticated.
If
these
plays
had
little
or
no
interest
in
psychological
particularity
or
social
texture,
they
often
had
the
canniness
of
folk
wisdom
along
with
a
strong
current
of
subversive
humor.
That
humor
could
take
the
form
of
a
swine-snouted
king,
but
it
more
often
centered
on
the
stock
character
known
generally
as
the
Vice.
This
jesting,
prattling
mischief-maker—bearing
in
different
interludes
names
such
as
Riot,
Iniquity,
Liberty,
Idleness,
Misrule,
Dou-
ble
Device,
and
even,
in
one
notable
instance,
Hickscorner—embodied
simultaneously
the
spirit
of
wickedness
and
the
spirit
of
fun.
The
audi-
ence
knew
that
he
would
in
the
end
be
defeated
and
driven,
with
blows
or
fireworks,
from
the
stage.
But
for
a
time
he
pranced
about,
scorning
the
hicks,
insulting
the
solemn
agents
of
order
and
piety,
playing
tricks
on
the
unsuspecting,
plotting
mischief,
and
luring
the
innocent
into
tav-
erns
and
whorehouses.
The
audience
loved
it.
When
Shakespeare
sat
down
to
write
for
the
London
stage,
he
drew
upon
those
rather
creaky
entertainments
that
must
have
delighted
him
as
a
child.
He
learned
from
them
to
give
many
of
his
characters
emblematic
PRIMAL
SCENES
SS)
names:
the
whores
Doll
Tearsheet
and
Jane
Nightwork
and
the
sergeants
Snare
and
Fang
in
2
Henry
IV,
the
drunken
Sir
Toby
Belch
and
the
puri-
tanical
Malvolio
(“ill
will”)
in
Twe/fth
Night.
On
rare
occasions
he
went
further
and
brought
personified
abstractions
directly
onto
his
stage—
Rumour,
in
a
robe
painted
full
of
tongues,
in
2
Henry
IV,
and
Time,
car-
rying
an
hourglass,
in
The
Winter's
Tale.
But
for
the
most
part
his
debt
to
the
morality
plays
was
more
indirect
and
subtle.
He
absorbed
their
impact
early,
and
they
helped
fashion
the
foundations,
largely
hidden
well
beneath
the
surface,
of
his
writing.
That
writing
builds
upon
two
crucial
expectations
the
morality
plays
instilled
in
their
audiences:
first,
the
expectation
that
drama
worth
seeing
would
get
at
something
central
to
human
destiny
and,
second,
that
it
should
reach
not
only
a
coterie
of
the
educated
elite
but
also
the
great
mass
of
ordinary
people.
Shakespeare
also
absorbed
specific
elements
of
his
stagecraft
from
the
moralities.
They
helped
him
understand
how
to
focus
theatrical
attention
on
his
characters’
psychological,
moral,
and
spiritual
life,
as
well
as
on
their
outward
behavior.
They
helped
him
fashion
physical
emblems
of
this
inner
life,
such
as
the
withered
arm
and
hunchback
that
mark
the
crookedness
of
Richard
III.
They
helped
him
grasp
how
to
construct
plays
around
the
struggle
for
the
soul
of
a
protagonist:
Prince
Hal
poised
between
his
sober,
anxious,
calculating
father
and
the
irresponsible,
seductive,
reckless
Falstaff;
the
deputy
Angelo,
in
Measure
for
Measure,
given
the
reins
of
power
and
put
to
the
test
by
his
master
the
duke;
Oth-
ello
torn
between
his
faith
in
the
celestial
Desdemona
and
the
obscene
suggestions
of
the
demonic
Iago.
And
above
all,
they
provided
him
with
a
source
for
a
theatrically
compelling
and
subversive
figure
of
wickedness.
The
Vice,
the
great
subversive
figure
of
the
moralities,
was
never
far
from
Shakespeare’s
creative
mind.
With
mingled
affection
and
wariness,
Hal
refers
to
Falstaff
as
“that
reverend
Vice,
that
grey
Iniquity”
(1
Henry
IV,
2.5.413);
the
mordantly
funny,
malevolent
Richard
III
likens
himself
to
“the
formal
Vice,
Iniquity”
(3.1.82);
and
Hamlet
describes
his
wily,
usurping
uncle
as
“a
vice
of
kings”
(3.4.88).
The
word
“vice”
does
not
have
to
be
directly
invoked
for
the
influence
to
be
apparent:
“Honest
Iago,”
for
example,
with
his
air
of
camaraderie,
his
sly
jokes,
and
his
frank
avowal
of
villainy,
is
heavily
indebted
to
this
figure.
It
is
no
accident
that
his
dia-
oF
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
bolical
plot
against
Othello
and
Desdemona
takes
the
form
of
a
practical
joke,
an
unbearably
cruel
version
of
the
tricks
played
by
the
Vice.
It
may
seem
strange
at
first
that
the
lovable
Falstaff
should
find
himself
in
the
company
of
cold-hearted
murderers
like
Claudius
and
Iago.
But
Shakespeare
learned
something
else
essential
to
his
art
from
the
morality
plays;
he
learned
that
the
boundary
between
comedy
and
tragedy
is
surprisingly
porous.
In
figures
such
as
Aaron
the
Moor
(the
black
villain
in
Titus
Andronicus),
Richard
III,
and
the
bastard
Edmund
in
King
Lear,
Shakespeare
conjures
up
a
particular
kind
of
thrill
he
must
have
first
had
as
a
child
watching
the
Vice
in
plays
like
The
Cradle
of
Security
and
The
Interlude
of
Youth:
the
thrill
of
fear
interwoven
with
transgressive
pleasure.
The
Vice,
wickedness
personified,
is
appropri-
ately
punished
at
the
end
of
the
play,
but
for
much
of
the
performance
he
manages
to
captivate
the
audience,
and
the
imagination
takes
a
per-
verse
holiday.
The
authors
of
the
morality
plays
thought
they
could
enhance
the
broad
impact
they
sought
to
achieve
by
stripping
their
characters
of
all
incidental
distinguishing
traits
to
get
to
their
essences.
They
thought
their
audiences
would
thereby
not
be
distracted
by
the
irrelevant
details
of
individual
identities.
Shakespeare
grasped
that
the
spectacle
of
human
destiny
was,
in
fact,
vastly
more
compelling
when
it
was
attached
not
to
generalized
abstractions
but
to
particular
named
people,
people
realized
with
an
unprecedented
intensity
of
individuation:
not
Youth
but
Prince
Hal,
not
Everyman
but
Othello.
To
achieve
this
intensity,
Shakespeare
had
as
much
to
free
himself
from
the old
morality
plays
as
to
adapt
them.
He
felt
free
to
discard
many
aspects
of
them
altogether
and
use
others
in
ways
their
authors
could
never
have
imagined.
At
times
he
greatly
intensified
the
fear:
Iago
is
immeasurably
more
disturbing—and
more
effective—than
Envy
or
Riot.
At
other
times
he
greatly
intensified
the
laughter:
the
Vice’s
trickery
and
delight
in
confusion
turns
up
in
Puck
in
4d
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream,
but
the
wickedness
has
been
entirely
leached
away,
leaving
only
the
mischie-
vousness.
So
too
if
the
ass’s
head
placed
on
Bottom
strikingly
recalls
the
swine’s
snout
placed
on
the
face
of
the
king,
the
heavy
weight
of
moral
PRIMAL
SCENES
BS
instruction
has
been
entirely
lifted.
Bottom,
to
be
sure,
is
asinine,
but
it
takes
no
magical
transformation
to
reveal
that
fact.
Indeed,
what
is
revealed
is
not
so
much
his
folly—he
does
not
have
one
moment
of
embarrassment
or
shame,
and
his
friends
do
not
laugh
at
him—as
his
intrepidity.
“This
is
to
make
an
ass
of
me,”
the
ass-headed
Bottom
stoutly
declares,
when
his
friends
have
all
run
away
in
terror
at
his
appearance,
“to
fright
me,
if
they
could;
but
I
will
not
stir
from
this
place,
do
what
they
can”
(3.1.106-8).
He
is
surprised
at
the
Fairy
Queen's
passionate
declaration
of
love,
but
he
takes
it
in
his
stride:
“Methinks,
mistress,
you
should
have
little
reason
for
that.
And
yet,
to
say
the
truth,
reason
and
love
keep
little
company
together
nowadays”
(3.1.126-28).
And
he
is
entirely
at
ease
in
his
new
body:
“Methinks
I
have
a
great
desire
to
a
bot-
tle
of
hay.
Good
hay,
sweet
hay,
hath
no
fellow”
(4.1.30-31).
When
the
ass’s
head
is
finally
taken
from
him,
he
does
not
experience
a
moral
awak-
ening;
rather,
as
Puck
puts
it,
he
merely
peeps
at
the
world
once
again
with
his
own
fool’s
eyes.
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
contempo-
raries
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
36
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
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:
“T
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
solemni-
ties
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
imitat-
ing
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
sum-
mer
half
of
the
rural
year
and
was
celebrated,
in
many
places,
by
women
tying
up
passersby
with
ropes
and
demanding
money
for
charity.
In
PRIMAL
SCENES
SH
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
par-
ticular
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
pag-
eants,
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
fam-
ily
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
rep-
resented
onstage,
their
delicious
blending
of
homeliness
and
exaltation—
left
its
mark
upon
him.
These
events
were
particularly
spectacular
instances
of
seasonal
fes-
tivities
that
shaped
Will’s
sense
of
the
year
and
conditioned
his
later
38
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
understanding
of
the
theater.
Many
of
the
traditional
holidays
had
with-
ered
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
disci-
pline
the
festive
year
into
relentless
sobriety.
“I
came
once
to
a
place,
rid-
ing
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,
reiter-
ated
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
cov-
PRIMAL
SCENES
39
ered
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
chil-
dren
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
cus-
toms—customs
whose
attractiveness
comes
across
despite
his
pious
hor-
ror—he
was
not
making
it
up:
traditional
festivities,
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
Mis-
rule
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
ani-
mals,
“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
40
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
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
signifi-
cant
impact
upon
Shakespeare’s
imagination,
fashioning
his
sense
of
the-
ater
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
4
Midsummer
Nights
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’
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’
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-shear-
ing
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
chil-
dren,
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
Fal-
PRIMAL
SCENES
41
staff
come
closer
to
the
actual
way
in
which
Lords
of
Misrule
func-
tioned—they
do
for
a
limited
time
overturn
sobriety,
dignity,
and
deco-
rum—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
(2
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
mar-
ket
gardens,
in
the
surrounding
fields
and
woods,
and
in
tiny
rural
ham-
lets
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
anx-
ious
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
gen-
tleman.
But
his
concern
for
his
station
in
life,
his
longing
for
social
suc-
cess,
and
his
fascination
with
the
lives
of
aristocrats
and
monarchs
did
not
entail
the
erasure
of
the
world
from
which
he
came.
(Perhaps
he
sim-
ply
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
42
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
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
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
imagina-
tive
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
occa-
sions,
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
PRIMAL
SCENES
43
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
dia-
logue
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.
Will
may
have
watched
these
pieces
of
his
own
local
culture
staged
for
the
grand
visitors.
He
would
at
the
very
least
have
heard
the
events
described
in
loving
detail,
and
he
is
also
likely
to
have
encountered
an
elaborate
written
description
of
them
in
a
marvelous
long
letter
by
a
minor
official—
“clerk
of
the
council
chamber
door”’—Robert
Langham,
or
Laneham.
The
letter,
inexpensively
printed
and
widely
circulated,
would
have
been
useful
reading
for
anyone
who
was
in
the
business
of
44
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
trying
to
entertain
the
queen—and
Shakespeare
was
shortly
to
go
into
that
business.
Langham’
letter
makes
clear
that
the
performance
of
the
Hock
Tues-
day
play
was
a
carefully
stage-managed
piece
of
cultural
politics.
Certain
“good-hearted
men
of
Coventry,”
led
by
a
mason
named
Captain
Cox,
had
learned
that
their
neighbor,
the
Earl
of
Leicester,
was
entertaining
the
queen.
Knowing
that
he
was
eager
to
make
his
sovereign
“gladsome
and
merry”
with
all
pleasant
recreations,
the
Coventry
artisans
petitioned
that
they
might
renew
their
old
show.
They
thought
that
the
queen
would
par-
ticularly
enjoy
the
commemoration
of
the
ancient
massacre
because
it
showed
“how
valiantly
our
English
women
for
love
of
their
country
behaved
themselves.”
This
appeal
to
the
queen’s
special
interest
was
part
of
a
defensive
strategy
that
Langham
conveniently
summarizes:
“The
thing,
said
they,
is
grounded
on
story,
and
for
pastime
wont
to
be
played
in
our
city
yearly,
without
ill
example
of
manners,
papistry,
or
any
superstition,
and
else
did
so
occupy
the
heads
of
a
number
that
likely
enough
would
have
had
worse
meditations.”
The
claims
here
turn
out
to
be
ones
that
would
be
repeated
again
and
again
throughout
Shakespeare’s
lifetime,
both
in
the
justification
of
particular
plays
and
in
defense
of
the
stage
in
general:
the
play
in
question
is
based
on
history
(“grounded
on
story”),
it is
a
tradi-
tional
form
of
entertainment,
it is
free
from
ideological
contamination
and
immorality,
and
it
is
a
distraction
from
potentially
dangerous
thoughts,
“worse
meditations.”
That
is,
members
of
the
audience
who
might
other-
wise
be
plotting
mischief—brooding
on
injustice,
for
example,
or
longing
for
the
old
religion,
or
hatching
rebellion—would
have
their
minds
safely
occupied
by
the
spectacle
of
the
ancient
massacre
of
the
Danes.
What
was
the
problem,
then?
Why
did
the
Hock
Tuesday
play,
which
had
“an
ancient
beginning
and
a
long
continuance,”
need
to
be
defended
at
all?
Because,
the
artisans
acknowledged,
it
had
been
“of
late
laid
down’
—
that
is,
banned.
The
men
scratched
their
heads
and
said
they
could
not
quite
understand
it:
“They
knew
no.cause
why.”
Then,
as
if
it
suddenly
occurred
to
them,
they
came
up
with
an
explanation:
“unless
it
were
by
the
zeal
of
certain
of
their
preachers,
men
very
commendable
for
behavior
and
learning,
and
sweet
in
their
sermons,
but
somewhat
too
sour
in
preaching
away
their
pastime.”
The
performance
at
Kenilworth,
then,
was
not
simply
PRIMAL
SCENES
45
a
way
of
amusing
the
queen;
or
rather,
in
any
attempt
to
amuse
the
queen
there
was
always
a
half-hidden
agenda.
Here
the
agenda
was
to
get
the
queen
to
pressure
the
local
clergy
to
halt
the
campaign
against
a
beloved
local
festivity:
“they
would
make
their
humble
petition
unto
her
highness
that
they
might
have
their
plays
up
again.”
Despite
the
careful
planning
for
the
Hock
Tuesday
performance—
the
show
took
place
directly
below
the
queen’s
window—the
occasion
was
botched.
Too
many
things
were
going
on
at
once—the
bridale
and
the
dancing
drew
away
the
queen’s
attention,
and
she
was
further
dis-
tracted
by
“the
great
throng
and
unruliness”
of
the
crowd
that
had
been
allowed
into
the
courtyard
(into
which
an
eleven-year-old
boy
may
have
made
his
way).
Elizabeth
managed
to
see
only
a
bit
of
the
play.
After
all
their
rehearsals
and
strategizing,
the
men
of
Coventry
must
have
been
crushed.
But
then,
unexpectedly,
all
was
saved—the
queen
commanded
that
the
performance
be
repeated
on
the
following
Tuesday.
It
was
a
suc-
cess:
“Her
Majesty
laughed
well.”
The
town
players,
rewarded
with
two
bucks
upon
which
to
feast
and
with
five
pieces
of
silver,
were
ecstatic:
“What,
rejoicing
upon
their
ample
reward,
and
what,
triumphing
upon
the
good
acceptance,
they
vaunted
their
play
was
never
so
dignified,
nor
ever
any
players
afore
so
beatified.”
And
in
the
Coventry
records
for
the
next
year
there
is
a
crucial
confirmation
of
their
triumph:
“Thomas
Nick-
lyn
Mayor...
.
This
year
the
said
mayor
caused
Hock.
Tuesday,
whereby
is
mentioned
an
overthrow
of
the
Danes
by
the
inhabitants
of
this
city,
to
be
again
set
up
and
showed
forth.”
“Her
Majesty
laughed
well.”
Said
to
have
cost
Leicester
the
staggering
sum
of
a
thousand
pounds
a
day,
the
Kenilworth
festivities
were
an
enor-
mous
machine
designed
to
produce
those
laughs—along
with
admiration,
wonder,
and
delight—from
the
remarkable,
unpredictable,
dangerous
woman
who
ruled
the
country.
The
spectacles
were
elaborate
and
arresting,
but
the
attention
of
the
Earl
of
Leicester—and
no
doubt
of
many
others
in
the
crowd—would
have
been
intensely
focused
on
a
single
person.
If
a
wide-eyed
young
boy
from
Stratford
did
see
her,
arrayed
in
one
of
her
famously
elaborate
dresses,
carried
in
a
litter
on
the
shoulders
of
guards
specially
picked
for
their
good
looks,
accompanied
by
her
gorgeously
arrayed
courtiers,
he
would
in
effect
have
witnessed
the
greatest
theatrical
46
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
spectacle
of
the
age.
As
the
queen
once
candidly
remarked
of
herself,
“We
princes
are
set
on
stages
in
the
sight
and
view
of
all
the
world.”
Shakespeare
continued
to
be
fascinated
throughout
his
entire
career
by
the
charismatic
power
of
royalty—the
excitement
awakened
in
crowds,
the
trembling
in
otherwise
strong
men,
the
sense
of
awesome
greatness.
Long
after
he
had
come
to
understand
the
dark
sides
of
this
power;
long
after
he
had
taken
in
the
pride,
cruelty,
and
ambition
that
it
aroused,
the
dangerous
plots
that
it
bred,
the
greed
and
violence
that
it
fostered
and
fed
upon,
Shakespeare
remained
in
touch
with
the
intoxi-
cating
pleasure
and
excitement
royalty
aroused.
At
the
close
of
his
cre-
ative
life,
in
the
play
originally
called
A//
Is
True
and
known
today
as
Henry
VIII,
he
still
drew
on
this
excitement,
imagining
the
birth
of
the
radiant
queen
whom
he
may
have
first
glimpsed
at
Kenilworth
in
1575.
For
there
was
a
first
time
that
he
glimpsed
her—if
not
at
Kenilworth,
then
somewhere
else,
in
a
procession
or
a
grand
entertainment
or
a
court
reception—and
his
imagination
was
certainly
fired
by
what
he
saw.
And
the
events
at
Kenilworth,
whether
young
Will
saw
them
for
himself
or
listened
to
eyewitness
accounts
of
them
or
simply
read
Langham’s
letter,
seem
to
have
left
traces
in
his
work.
In
the
single
most
extravagant
entertainment
Leicester
staged
for
the
queen
during
her
long
stay,
a
twenty-four-foot-long
mechanical
dolphin
rose
up
out
of
the
waters
of
the
lake
adjacent
to
the
castle.
On
the
back
of
the
dolphin—in
whose
belly
was
concealed
a
consort
of
wind
instru-
ments—sat
the
figure
of
Arion,
the
legendary
Greek
musician,
who
sang,
as
Langham
put
it,
“a
delectable
ditty”
to
the
queen.
“The
ditty
in
metre
so
aptly
endited
to
the
matter,”
Langham
recalled,
and
after
by
voice
so
deliciously
delivered;
the
song
by
a
skilful
artist
into
its
parts
so
sweetly
sorted;
each
part
in
its
instrument
so
clean
and
sharply
touched;
every
instrument
again
in
its
kind
so
excellently
tunable;
and
this
in
the
evening
of
the
day,
resounding
from
the
calm
waters,
where
presence
of
her
Majesty
and
longing
to
listen
had
utterly
damped
all
noise
and
din;
the
whole
harmony
conveyed
in
time,
tune,
and
temper
thus
incomparably
melodious.
With
what
pleasure
.
.
.
with
what
sharpness
of
conceit,
with
what
PRIMAL
SCENES
47
lively
delight
this
might
pierce
into
the
hearers’
hearts,
I
pray
you
imagine
yourself
as
you
may,
for
so
God
judge
me,
by
all
the
wit
and
cunning
I
have,
I
cannot
express,
I
promise
you.
Years
later,
Shakespeare
seems
to
have
remembered
this
luminous
spec-
tacle
in
Twe/fth
Night,
when
the
sea
captain
tries
to
reassure
Viola
that
her
brother
may
not
have
drowned
in
the
shipwreck:
“like
Arion
on
the
dolphin’s
back,”
he
tells
her,
“I
saw
him
hold
acquaintance
with
the
waves”
(1.2.14—15).
More
strikingly,
in.d
Midsummer
Night’s
Dream
(written
in
the
mid-
1590s,
when
Shakespeare
was
about
thirty),
the
playwright’s
imagination
drew
on
the
scene
at
Kenilworth
in
crafting
a
gorgeous
compliment
to
Elizabeth.
The
queen
probably
attended
one
of
the
early
performances
of
the
comedy—perhaps
the
earliest,
if,
as
many
scholars
think,
it
was
writ-
ten
for
an
aristocratic
wedding
that
she
graced
with
her
presence—and
the
company
obviously
felt
that
a
piece
of
flattery
was
called
for.
But
Shakespeare
did
not
simply
break
the
illusion
and
have
the
players
turn
to
address
the
queen.
Instead,
he
slipped
in
a
passage
of
prince-pleasing
mythology
that
takes
the
form
of
a
memory.
The
memory—of
an
occa-
sion
when
Cupid
took
aim
at
the
“fair
vestal
thronéd
by
the
west”
(2.1.158)—clearly
alludes
to
Leicester’s
attempt,
some
twenty
years
ear-
lier,
to
charm
the
queen.
“Thou
remembrest,”
the
Fairy
king
Oberon
asks
his
principal
assistant,
Puck,
Since
once
I
sat
upon
a
promontory
And
heard
a
mermaid
on
a
dolphin’s
back
Uttering
such
dulcet
and
harmonious
breath
That
the
rude
sea
grew
civil
at
her
song
And
certain
stars
shot
madly
from
their
spheres
To
hear
the
sea-maid’s
music?
(2.1.148-54)
It
is
worth
reading
the
last
three
lines
aloud
for
oneself
to
see
how
perfectly
they
serve
as
an
exquisite
instance
of
“dulcet
and
harmonious
breath.”
Eerily
beautiful,
they
conjure
up,
across
the
gap
in
time,
the
fire-
48
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
works
visible
from
afar—as
far
as
twenty
miles
away,
according
to
one
observer—along
with
a
fantastical
version
of
the
water
pageant.
The
speech
goes
on
to
bow
graciously
toward
the
aging
Elizabeth's
cult
of
vir-
ginity:
Cupid’s
arrow
missed
its
mark,
and
“the
imperial
vot’ress
passéd
on,
/
In
maiden
meditation,
fancy-free”
(2.1.163-64).
Having
delivered
this
exquisite
compliment
to
the
queen,
the
play
resumes
its
momentar-
ily
suspended
plot.
The
arrow
intended
for
the
fair
vestal,
Oberon
explains
to
Puck,
fell
instead
on
a
little
western
flower.
When
placed
on
the
eyelids
of
a
sleeping
man
or
woman,
the
juice
of
this
flower
will
make
the
person
dote
on
the
next
live
creature
that
he
or
she
sees.
It
is
this
device,
love
juice,
mistakenly
applied
to
the
wrong
eyelids,
that
occasions
the
wild
confusions
of
the
play.
The
glimpse
of
the
dolphin’s
back
is
only
an
isolated
moment
in
4
Midsummer
Nights
Dream,
a
decorative
flourish.
But
the
lines
about
the
mermaid’s
song,
though
irrelevant
to
the
plot,
speak
to
something
deeply
important
in
the
play
and
in
the
playwright’s
imagination.
The
memory
of
Kenilworth
served
to
evoke
the
power
that
song
has
to
create
hushed
order
and
to
excite
an
almost
frenzied
attention.
This
paradox—art
as
the
source
both
of
settled
calm
and
of
deep
disturbance—was
central
to
Shakespeare’s
entire
career.
As
a
dramatist
and
a
poet,
he
was
simultane-
ously
the
agent
of
civility
and
the
agent
of
subversion.
This
double
vision
in
him
might
well
reach
back
to
the
astonishing
spectacle,
mounted
close
to
his
home
when
he
was
eleven
years
old:
a
huge,
restive
sea
of
specta-
tors
quieted
by
the
queen's
presence,
with
everyone
straining
intently
to
listen
to
the
song
of
Arion,
the
primordial
poet.
What
Shakespeare
articulated
in
4
Midsummer
Night's
Dream
was
a
deep
cultural
fantasy
that
Leicester's
entertainments
extravagantly
tried
to
embody.
The
fantasy
was
of
a
world
of
magical
beauty,
shot
through
with
hidden
forces
and
producing
a
free-floating,
intense
erotic
energy
to
which
all
creatures,
save
one
alone—the
“fair
vestal
thronéd
by
the
west”—had
to
succumb.
Reality
could
never
have
approached
this
dream:
the
fireworks
were
hardly
stars
starting
from
their
spheres;
there
was
no
sea,
only
an
unruly
crowd
by
the
castle
lake;
the
fair
vestal
was
a
middle-aged
woman
with
rotting
teeth;
the
mechanical
dolphin
would
PRIMAL
SCENES
49
have
looked
no
better
than
expensive
floats
usually
look;
and
the
figure
on
the
dolphin’s
back
was
neither
Arion
nor
a
mermaid
but
a
singer
named
Harry
Goldingham.
As
an
unpublished
contemporary
account
of
the
festivities
relates,
the
singer
was
not
in
good
voice:
There
was
a
Spectacle
presented
to
Queen
Elizabeth
upon
the
water,
and
amongst
others,
Harry
Goldingham
was
to
represent
Arion
upon
the
Dolphin’s
back,
but
finding
his
voice
to
be
very
hoarse
and
unpleasant
when
he
came
to
perform
it,
he
tears
off
his
Disguise,
and
swears
he
was
none
of
Arion,
not
he,
but
even
honest
Harry
Goldingham;
which
blunt
discovery
pleased
the
Queen
better
than
if
it
had
gone
through
in
the
right
way.
The
queen’s
gracious
response
managed
to
salvage
the
enchantment
of
the
afternoon,
even
in
the
face
of
its
apparent
crumbling.
Something
similar
could
be
said
about
any
production
of
A
Midsummer
Night's
Dream:
the
spectators
do
not
see
fairies
flying
through
the
moonlit
woods
near
Athens;
they
see
a
troupe
of
all-too-human
actors
tramping
about
onstage.
But
the
risk
of
disillusionment
only
seems
to
enhance
the
experience
of
wonder.
Leicester
got
the
effect
he
wanted
by
means
of
an
enormous
capital
outlay.
Shakespeare
offered
a
vastly
less
expensive
magic:
the
players
in
4
Midsummer
Nights
Dream
entertain
the
wild
hope
that
they
might
be
rewarded
with
a
pension
of
sixpence
per
day
apiece.
For
the
playwright
relied
not
on
elaborate
machinery
but
on
language,
simply
the
most
beautiful
language
any
English
audience
had
ever
heard:
I
know
a
bank
where
the
wild
thyme
blows,
Where
oxlips
and
the
nodding
violet
grows,
Quite
overcanopied
with
luscious
woodbine,
With
sweet
musk-roses,
and
with
eglantine.
There
sleeps
Titania
sometime
of
the
night,
Lulled
in
these
flowers
with
dances
and
delight.
(2.1.249-54)
50
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
Shakespeare,
who
had
already
written
such
plays
as
The
Taming
of
the
Shrew
and
Richard
III,
was
capable
of
a
very
different
kind
of
dramatic
speech,
altogether
tougher
and
leaner,
but
in
4
Midsummer
Nights
Dream
he
gave
full
scope
to
what
is,
to
borrow
one
of
the
adjectives
he
uses
here,
luscious
poetry.
Among
Shakespeare’s
plays,
4
Midsummer
Night’
Dream
is
one
of
the
very
few
for
which
scholars
have
never
located
a
dominant
literary
source;
its
vision
of
moonlit,
fairy-haunted
woods
evidently
sprang
from
more
idiosyncratic
and
personal
imaginative
roots.
Shakespeare
was
able
to
tap
into
his
close-up
knowledge
of
“the
barky
fingers
of
the
elm”
or
“a
red-hipped
humble-bee
on
the
top
of
a
thistle”
(4.1.41,
11-12).
He
was
also,
if
this
account
of
his
childhood
is
correct,
able
to
tap
into
firsthand
experiences
of
the
swirling
delights
of
May
Day
and
Hock
Tuesday
and
into
memories
of
the
lavish,
visionary
entertainments
Leicester
staged
in
order
to
please
his
royal
guest.
If
Shakespeare’s
sense
of
the
transforming
power
of
theatrical
illu-
sions
may
be
traced
back
to
what
he
heard
about
or
saw
for
himself
in
1575
at
Kenilworth,
his
sense
of
the
coarse
reality
that
lies
beneath
the
illusions
may
very
well
go
back
to
the
same
festive
moment.
Virtually
the
whole
last
act
of
A
Midsummer
Nights
Dream
is
given
over
to
a
hilarious
parody
of
such
amateur
theatrical
entertainments,
which
are
ridiculed
for
their
plodding
ineptitude,
their
naiveté,
their
failure
to
sustain
a
convinc-
ing
illusion.
The
Hock
Tuesday
play,
performed
by
the
Coventry
artisans
for
the
queen
and
her
courtiers,
is
transmuted
into
“A
tedious
brief
scene
of
young
Pyramus
/
And
his
love
Thisbe:
very
tragical
mirth”
(5.1.56-57),
performed
by
the
Athenian
artisans
for
the
highborn
couples
joining
in
wedlock.
The
newlyweds,
and
the
audience
of
4
Midsummer
Night’
Dream,
take
pleasure
in
laughing
at
the
grotesque
absurdities
of
the
play
and
the
spectacular
incompetence
of
the
players,
“Hard-handed
men
that
work
in
Athens
here,
/
Which
never
laboured
in
their
minds
till
now”
(5.1.72-73).
One
of
the
blundering
artisans
in
4
Midsummer
Night’
Dream,
Snug
the
Joiner,
even
seems
to
mimic
Harry
Goldingham’s
“blunt
discovery”
of
his
actual
identity.
The
dim-witted
Snug,
cast
as
a
lion,
has
from
the
start
been
worried
about
the
role,
and
all
of
the
players
PRIMAL
SCENES
Sei
are
concerned
that
he
will
frighten
the
ladies.
Hence,
when
he
plays
his
part,
he
pulls
a
Harry
Goldingham:
You,
ladies,
you
whose
gentle
hearts
do
fear
The
smallest
monstrous
mouse
that
creeps
on
floor,
May
now
perchance
both
quake
and
tremble
here
When
lion
rough
in
wildest
rage
doth
roar.
Then
know
that
I
as
Snug
the
joiner
am
A
lion
fell...
(5.1.214-19)
Sure
enough,
the
comic
ineptitude
pleases
the
ruler.
“A
very
gentle
beast,”
says
Duke
Theseus,
“and
of
a
good
conscience”
(5.1.222).
The
perform-
ance
gets
what
these
performances
always
longed
to
get:
the
smile
of
the
great.
“Her
Majesty
laughed
well.”
A
Midsummer
Nights
Dream—written
some
twenty
years
after
the
Kenilworth
festivities—marks
the
adult
playwright’s
access
to
some
of
the
most
memorable
scenes
of
his
childhood,
and
at
the
same
time
it
marks
the
distance
he
had
traveled
from
home.
By
1595,
Shakespeare
clearly
grasped
that
his
career
was
built
on
a
triumph
of
the
professional
London
entertainment
industry
over
traditional
amateur
performances.
His
great
comedy
was
a
personal
celebration
of
escape
as
well
as
of
mas-
tery.
Escape
from
what?
From
tone-deaf
plays,
like
Thomas
Preston’s
4
Lamentable
Tragedy,
Mixed
Full
of
Pleasant
Mirth,
Containing
the
Life
of
Cambises,
King
of
Persia,
whose
lame
title
Shakespeare
parodied.
From
coarse
language
and
jog
trotting
meter
and
rant
pretending
to
be
passion.
From
amateur
actors
too
featherbrained
to
remember
their
lines,
too
awkward
to
perform
gracefully,
too
shy
to
perform
energetically,
or,
worst
of
all,
too
puffed
up
with
vanity
to
perform
anything
but
their
own
grotesque
egotism.
The
troupe
of
artisans
who
perform
“Pyramus
and
Thisbe”—the
weaver
Nick
Bottom,
the
bellows-mender
Francis
Flute,
the
tinker
Tom
Snout,
the
joiner
Snug,
the
tailor
Robin
Starveling,
and
their
director,
the
carpenter
Peter
Quince—are
collectively
an
anthology
of
theatrical
catastrophes.
by
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
The
laughter
in
act
5
of
A
Midsummer
Night's
Dream—and
it
is
one
of
the
most
enduringly
funny
scenes
Shakespeare
ever
wrote—is
built
on
a
sense
of
superiority
in
intelligence,
training,
cultivation,
and
skill.
The
audience
is
invited
to
join
the
charmed
circle
of
the
upper-class
mockers
onstage.
This
mockery
proclaimed
the
young
playwright’s
definitive
pas-
sage
from
naiveté
and
homespun
amateurism
to
sophisticated
taste
and
professional
skill.
But
the
laughter
that
the
scene
solicits
is
curiously
ten-
der
and
even
loving.
What
saves
the
scene
of
ridicule
from
becoming
too
painful,
what
keeps
it
delicious
in
fact,
is
the
self-possession
of
the
arti-
sans.
In
the
face
of
open
derision,
they
are
unflappable.
Shakespeare
achieved
a
double
effect.
On
the
one
hand,
he
mocked
the
amateurs,
who
fail
to
grasp
the
most
basic
theatrical
conventions,
by
which
they
are
to
stay
in
their
roles
and
pretend
they
cannot
see
or
hear
their
audience.
On
the
other
hand,
he
conferred
an
odd,
unexpected
dignity
upon
Bottom
and
his
fellows,
a
dignity
that
contrasts
favorably
with
the
sardonic
rude-
ness
of
the
aristocratic
spectators.
Even
as
he
called
attention
to
the
distance
between
himself
and
the
rustic
performers,
then,
Shakespeare
doubled
back
and
signaled
a
current
of
sympathy
and
solidarity.
As
when
borrowing
from
the
old
morality
plays
and
folk
culture,
he
understood
at
once
that
he
was
doing
some-
thing
quite
different
and
that
he
owed
a
debt.
The
professions
he
assigned
the
Athenian
artisans
were
not
chosen
at
random—Shake-
speare’s
London
theater
company
depended
on
joiners
and
weavers,
car-
penters
and
tailors—and
the
tragedy
they
perform,
of
star-crossed
lovers,
fatal
errors,
and
suicides,
is
one
in
which
the
playwright
himself
was
deeply
interested.
In
the
period
he
was
writing
the
“Pyramus
and
Thisbe”
parody,
Shakespeare
was
also
writing
the
strikingly
similar
Romeo
and
Juliet,
they
may
well
have
been
on
his
writing
table
at
the
same
time.
A
more
defensive
artist
would
have
scrubbed
harder
in
an
attempt
to
remove
these
marks
of
affinity,
but
Shakespeare’s
laughter
was
not
a
form
of
renunciation
or
concealment.
“This
is
the
silliest
stuff
that
ever
I
heard,”
Hippolyta
comments,
to
which
Theseus
replies,
“The
best
in
this
kind
are
but
shadows,
and
the
worst
are
no
worse
if
imagination
amend
them.”
“It
must
be
your
imagination,
then,
and
not
theirs,”
is
her
rejoin-
der
(5.1.207-10)—the
spectators’
imagination
and
not
the
players-—but
PRIMAL
SCENES
55
that
is
precisely
the
point:
the
difference
between
the
professional
actor
and
the
amateur
actor
is
not,
finally,
the
crucial
consideration.
They
both
rely
upon
the
imagination
of
the
spectators.
And,
as
if
to
clinch
the
argu-
ment,
a
moment
later,
at
the
preposterous
suicide
speech
of
Pyramus—
Approach,
ye
furies
fell.
O
fates,
come,
come,
Cut
thread
and
thrum,
Quail,
crush,
conclude,
and
quell
(5.1.273-76)
—Hippolyta
finds
herself
unaccountably
moved:
“Beshrew
my
heart,
but
I
pity
the
man”
(5.1.279).
When
in
A
Midsummer
Night’
Dream
the
thirty-year-old
Shake-
speare,
drawing
deeply
upon
his
own
experiences,
thought
about
his
profes-
sion,
he
split
the
theater
between
a
magical,
virtually
nonhuman
element,
which
he
associated
with
the
power
of
the
imagination
to
lift
itself
away
from
the
constraints
of
reality,
and
an
all-too-human
element,
which
he
associated
with
the
artisans’
trades
that
actually
made
the
material
struc-
tures—buildings,
platforms,
costumes,
musical
instruments,
and
the
like—
structures
that
gave
the
imagination
a
local
habitation
and
a
name.
He
understood,
and
he
wanted
the
audience
to
understand,
that
the
theater
had
to
have
both,
both
the
visionary
flight
and
the
solid,
ordinary
earthiness.
That
earthiness
was
a
constituent
part
of
his
creative
imagination.
He
never
forgot
the
provincial,
everyday
world
from
which
he
came
or
the
ordinary
face
behind
the
mask
of
Arion.
Gib
Ap
Pal
Ey
Ree2
The
Dream
of
Restoration
STRATFORD
LEGEND,
recorded
around
1680
by
the
eccentric,
gossipy
biographer
John
Aubrey,
held
that
Will
Shakespeare,
apprenticed
to
be
a
butcher
like
his
father,
occasionally
took
a
turn
at
slaughtering
the
animals:
“When
he
killed
a
calf;
he
would
do
it
in
a
high
style,
and
make
a
speech.”
The
inquisitive
Aubrey,
trying
to
find
out
how
young
Shakespeare
solved
the
problem
of
work
and
discovered
his
vocation,
wanted
to
know
what
hap-
pened
between
the
time
that
he
left
school,
presumably
at
some
point
in
the
late
1570s
or
early
1580s,
and
the
time,
in
the
early
1590s,
that
he
was
first
noted
as
a
professional
actor
and
playwright
in
London.
The
mystery
of
what
Shakespeare
was
up
to
in
what
scholars
have
dubbed
the
“Lost
Years’—the
years
when
he
dropped
from
sight
and
left
no
traces
in
the
documents
of
a
notably
record-keeping
society—has
generated
mountains
of
speculation.
Legends,
some
more
or
less
plausi-
ble,
began
to
emerge
about
seventy-five
years
after
his
death,
that
is,
when
those
who
could
possibly
have
known
him
personally
had
all
died
off
but
people
were
still
alive
who
could,
in
their
younger
years,
have
encountered
his
contemporaries
and
sought
out
information
about
him.
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
De)
Though
Aubrey’s
story
about
butchery
is
implausible—John
Shake-
speare
was
not
a
butcher
and
would
not
have
been
permitted
by
trade
regulation
to
slaughter
animals—it
is
a
safe
bet
that
from
boyhood
on
Will
had
helped
his
father
in
the
family
business,
the
making
and
sell-
ing
of
gloves
from
the
shop
that
occupied
part
of
the
family’s
handsome
double
house
on
Henley
Street.
No
doubt
he
wrote
poems
in
his
spare
moments,
but
his
family
would
hardly
have
toiled
to
subsidize
his
idleness.
Paper
was
expensive.
A
pack
of
paper
that,
neatly
folded
and
cut,
yielded
about
fifty
small
sheets
would
have
cost
at
least
fourpence,
or
the
equivalent
of
eight
pints
of
ale,
more
than
a
pound
of
raisins,
a
pound
of
mutton
and
a
pound
of
beef,
two
dozen
eggs,
or
two
loaves
of
bread.
Perhaps
young
Will
carved
his
verses,
like
Orlando
in
As
You
Like
It,
on
trees.
All
the
same,
he
would
have
been
expected
to
work.
Indeed,
there
is
an
odd
trace
of
the
kind
of
contribution
to
the
glove
trade
his
special
talents
as
a
poet
offered.
Alexander
Aspinall
came
to
Stratford
in
1582
to
be
master
at
the
King’s
New
School,
shortly
after
Will
had
finished
his
schooling
there
but
when
his
younger
brothers
presumably
were
in
attendance.
In
the
seventeenth
century,
someone
wrote
down
in
a
commonplace
book—a
notebook
in
which
it
was
customary
to
record
memorable
or
curious
things—verses
that
accompanied
a
pair
of
gloves
sent
by
Master
Aspinall
to
the
woman
he
was
then
courting:
The
gift
is
small,
the
will
is
all.
Alexander
Aspinall
The
gloves
were
presumably
bought
at
John
Shakespeare’s
shop,
for
the
posy
was
noted
as
a
trace
of
the
famous
poet:
“Shaxpaire
upon
a
pair
of
gloves
that
master
sent
to
his
mistress.”
Instead
of
making
a
career
writ-
ing
plays,
Will
could
have
stayed
at
home
and
eked
out
a
living
as
the
writer
of
personalized
jingles
into
which
he
slyly
inserted
his
own
name.
He
did
not,
in
fact,
leave
it
all
completely
behind:
gloves,
skins,
and
leather
show
up
frequently
in
the
plays,
in
ways
that
seem
to
reflect
an
easy
intimacy
with
the
trade.
Romeo
longs
to
be
a
glove
on
Juliet’s
hand,
so
that
he
could
touch
her
cheek.
The
peddler
in
The
Winter’
Tale
has
56
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
scented
gloves
in
his
pack
“as
sweet
as
damask
roses”
(4.4.216).
“Is
not
parchment,”
asks
Hamlet,
“made
of
sheepskins?”
“Ay,
my
lord,”
replies
Horatio,
“and
of
calf-skins
too”
(5.1.104-5).
The
officer
in
The
Comedy
of
Errors
wears
a
calf-skin
uniform—he
resembles
“a
bass
viol
in
a
case
of
leather”
(4.3.22);
Petruchio,
in
The
Taming
of
the
Shrew,
has
a
bridle
made
of
sheep’s
leather;
the
cobbler
in
Ju/ius
Caesar
resoles
shoes
made
of
neat’s
leather;
tinkers,
according
to
The
Winter's
Tale,
carry
sow-skin
bags.
When
Shakespeare
wanted
to
convey
the
fantastical
world
of
the
fairies
in
A
Midsummer
Nights
Dream,
he
played
with
miniaturized
versions
of
this
trade:
the
“enamelled
skin”
shed
by
snakes
is
“wide
enough
to
wrap
a
fairy
in,”
and
the
Fairy
Queen's
followers
war
with
bats
“for
their
leath-
ern
wings
/
To
make
my
small
elves
coats”
(2.1.255-56,
2.2.4-5).
For
Shakespeare,
leather
was
not
only
a
means
of
providing
vivid
detail
but
also
the
stuff
of
metaphor;
it
evidently
came
readily
to
mind
when
he
was
putting
together
his
world.
“A
sentence
is
but
a
cheverel
glove
to
a
good
wit,”
quips
the
clown
Feste
in
Twelfth
Night,
remarking
on
the
ease
with
which
language
can
been
twisted,
“how
quickly
the
wrong
side
may
be
turned
outward”
(3.1.10-12).
Young
Will,
assisting
his
father
in
the
glover’s
shop,
no
doubt
observed
the
qualities
of
good
“cheverel”—fine
kidskin
valued
for
its
elasticity
and
pliability—and
they
made
a
strong
impression
on
him:
“O,
here’s
a
wit
of
cheverel,”
Mercutio
teases
Romeo,
“that
stretches
from
an
inch
narrow
to
an
ell
broad
[big
stretch:
an
ell
was
forty-five
inches]”
(Romeo
and
Juliet,
2.3.72—73).
“Your
soft
cheveril
conscience,”
the
reluctant
Anne
Boleyn
is
told
in
Henry
VII,
would
receive
the
king’s
gifts,
“If
you
might
please
to
stretch
it”
(2:3.32=33).
John
Shakespeare
bought
and
sold
wool
as
well
as
leather.
Here
he
was
violating
the
laws
that
restricted
this
business
to
authorized
wool
merchants.
But
the
illegal
trade,
called
wool
brogging,
was
potentially
lucrative,
and
he
had
the
range
of
contracts
both
in
the
town
and
in
the
countryside
to
make
it
seem
worth
the
risk.
To
make
his
deals,
John
would
have
had
to
travel
to
sheep
pens
and
rural
markets,
and
he
is
likely
to
have
taken
his
eldest
son
with
him.
Here
too
Will’s
imagination
seems
to
have
borne
the
imprint
long
after.
We
are
constantly
“handling
our
ewes,”
says
the
shepherd
in
As
You
Like
It,
explaining
why
he
and
his
fel-
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
SH
lows
do
not
kiss
their
hands
in
the
manner
of
courtiers,
“and
their
fells,
you
know,
are
greasy”
(3.2.46-47).
And
when
the
rustic
in
The
Winter's
Tale
carefully
reckons
how
much
his
shearing
is
likely
to
bring,
he
uses
terms—“wether,”
meaning
a
castrated
ram;
“tod,”
meaning
twenty-eight
pounds
of
wool—that
Will
would
have
heard
as
a
child
at
his
father’s
side:
“Let
me
see.
Every
/
leven
wether
tods,
every
tod
yields
pound
and
odd
shilling.
Fifteen
hundred
shorn,
what
comes
the
wool
to?”
(4.3.30—-32).
When
in
the
nineteenth
century
the
wing
of
the
house
that
had
served
as
John
Shakespeare’s
shop
needed
a
new
floor,
fragments
of
wool
were
found
embedded
in
the
soil
beneath
the
floorboards.
Other
traces
of
the
shop
on
Henley
Street
and
the
surrounding
countryside
are
preserved
in
the
plays
and
poems.
A
legal
document,
dated
three
years
before
Will’s
birth
in
1564,
describes
his
father
as
an
“agricola,”
Latin
for
farmer.
Long
after
he
settled
in
Stratford,
John
Shakespeare
not
only
dealt
in
agricultural
commodities
but
also
contin-
ued
to
buy
and
lease
farmland
around
Stratford.
Will
must
have
been
out
in
the
country
with
his
father
and
his
mother
all
the
time.
(An
inhabitant
of
Elizabethan
Stratford,
a
town
with
only
some
two
thousand
inhabi-
tants,
was,
in
any
case,
only
a
short
stroll
away
from
the
surrounding
farms
and
woods.)
One
of
the
most
beautiful
and
appealing
aspects
of
his
imagination
is
the
ease,
delicacy,
and
precision
with
which
he
enters
into
the
lives
of
animals
and
describes
the
vagaries
of
the
weather,
the
details
of
flowers
and
herbs,
and
the
cycles
of
nature.
He
enters
deftly
as
well
into
the
business
cycles
of
nature.
“I
am
shepherd
to
another
man,”
says
Corin
in
As
You
Like
It,
explaining
to
his
visitors
why
he
cannot
offer
them
hospitality,
“And
do
not
shear
the
fleeces
that
I
graze.”
This
is
not
an
urban
fantasy
of
shepherds
piping melodies
on
oaten
flutes,
but
an
altogether
more
realistic
world.
“My
master
is
of
churlish
disposition,”
the
shepherd
adds.
Besides,
his
cot,
his
flocks,
and
bounds
of
feed
Are
now
on
sale,
and
at
our
sheepcote
now
By
reason
of
his
absence
there
is
nothing
That
you
will
feed
on.
(2.4.73-75,
78-81)
58
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
Though
he
had
intimate
knowledge
of
the
country—he
had
seen
the
inside
of
a
shepherd’s
“cot”
(cottage)
and
knew
that
the
grazing
rights,
the
“bounds
of
feed,”
would
have
been
sold
along
with
the
flocks—
William
Shakespeare
was
not
essentially
a
countryman,
nor,
despite
his
origins,
was
his
father.
Indeed,
the
son
was
powerfully
struck
less
by
his
father’s
rural
wisdom
than
by
his
moneylending,
for
which
he
was
twice
taken
to
court
in
1570,
and
by
his
property
transactions,
the
real-world
model
for
the
maps,
deeds,
and
conveyances
that
figure
so
frequently
in
the
plays.
The
core
biographical
records
of
the
poet’s
adult
life
are
real
estate
documents.
Biographers
have
often
lamented
the
plethora
of
these
documents
in
the
place
of
something
more
intimate,
but
Shakespeare’s
lifelong
interest
in
property
investments—so
unlike
that
of
his
fellow
playwrights—may
be
more
intimate
a
revelation
than
has
been
readily
understood
to
be.
Will’s
early
years,
in
any
case,
must
have
been
strongly
marked
by
his
father’s
impressive
entrepreneurial
energy
and
ambition.
John
Shake-
speare,
the
son
of
a
tenant
farmer
from
the
small
village
of
Snitterfield,
was
rising
in
the
world.
In
the
late
1550s
he
had
made
his
first
decisive
move
upward
by
wedding
Mary
Arden,
the
daughter
of
the
man
from
whom
his
father
had
rented
land.
The
Arden
name
was
itself
a
significant
piece
of
social
capital:
the
family
was
one
of
Warwickshire’s
most
distin-
guished,
tracing
its
lineage
back
to
the
Domesday
Book,
the
great
record
of
property
holdings
compiled
for
William
the
Conqueror
in
1086.
The
Arden
properties
occupy
four
long
columns
in
that
record,
and
the
great
expanse
of
forest
to
the
north
and
west
of
Stratford
was
still
in
Shake-
speare’s
time
known
as
the
Forest
of
Arden.
Mary’s
father,
Robert,
was
by
no
means
a
prominent
member
of
this
family;
he
was
simply
a
prosperous
farmer
who
kept
seven
cows,
eight
oxen
for
the
plough,
two
bullocks,
and
four
weaning
calves.
If
the
inven-
tory
made
at
the
time
of
his
death
is
any
indication,
the
household
had
no
table
knives,
forks,
or
crockery—domestic
signs
of
social
distinction
in
a
period
when
ordinary
folk
ate
with
their
fingers
from
wooden
plates—
and
owned
no
books.
In
the
Arden
household,
the
most
visible
marks
of
culture
were
“painted
cloths”
—the
low-cost
equivalent
of
tapestries,
typ-
ically
captioned
with
sententious
mottoes—of
which
the
inventory
lists
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
59
two
in
the
hall,
five
in
the
chamber,
and
four
in
the
bedroom.
(When
he
wrote
The
Rape
of
Lucrece,
Shakespeare
ironically
recalled
their
homely
lessons:
“Who
fears
a
sentence
or
an
old
man’s
saw
/
Shall
by
a
painted
cloth
be
kept
in
awe.”)
It
is
not
clear
that
anyone
in
the
household
could
read
the
mottoes
on
their
painted
cloths;
perhaps
they
simply
liked
the
effect
of
the
writing
on
the
walls.
In
a
world
that
took
kinship
seriously,
it
meant
something
to
be
related,
if
only
distantly,
to
such
a
distinguished
and
wealthy
man
as
Edward
Arden
of
Park
Hall,
the
great
house
near
Birmingham.
Arden
was
a
name
for
anyone
with
social
ambition
to
conjure
with,
and
a
name
was
by
no
means
all
the
riches
that
Mary’s
dowry
held.
Though
she
was
the
youngest
of
eight
daughters,
Mary
was
her
father’s
favorite.
When
he
died
in
1556—commending
his
soul,
like
a
good
Catholic,
“to
Almighty
God,
and
to
our
blessed
Lady
Saint
Mary,
and
to
all
the
holy
company
of
heaven”’—he
left
his
youngest
daughter
a
tidy
sum
of
money
and
his
most
valuable
property,
a
farm
called
Asbies
in
the
village
of
Wilmcote,
along
with
other
lands.
John
Shakespeare
married
well.
There
is
no
record
of
precisely
when
John
decided
to
leave
the
farm
in
Snitterfield
and
move
to
Stratford,
where
he
must
have
apprenticed
himself
to
a
glover,
but
his
neighbors
were
quick
to
recognize
his
virtues.
In
1556,
when
he
was
still
in
his
twenties,
he
was
elected
an
ale-taster
for
the
borough,
one
of
the
inspectors
of
bread
and
ale.
The
position
was
for
people
deemed
“able
and
discreet,”
who
would
not
“let
for
favor
or
for
hatred
but
do
even
right
and
punish
as
their
minds
and
consciences
would
serve.”
In
the
following
years
he
held
a
steady
succession
of
municipal
offices:
constable,
in
1558-59
(responsible
for
keeping
the
peace);
affeeror
(responsible
for
fixing
fines
not
set
by
statute);
chamber-
lain,
from
1561
to
1565
(responsible
for
the
property
of
the
corporation,
including
collecting
revenues
and
paying
debts
and
overseeing
building
repairs
and
alterations);
alderman,
in
1565;
bailiff,
in
1568-69;
and
chief
alderman,
in
1571.
This
is
the
record
of
an
impressively
solid
citizen
and
a
locally
dis-
tinguished
public
man,
someone
liked
and
trusted.
In
the
patriarchal
world
of
Tudor
Stratford
none
of
these
positions
was
taken
lightly.
The
constables
in
the
year
John
Shakespeare
served
struggled
to
maintain
60
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
order
at
a
time
of
intense
suspicion
and
the
risk
of
communal
violence
between
Catholics
and
Protestants.
The
aldermen
looked
into
the
lives
of
residents
who
were
said
to
be
living
“immorally”;
they
could
order
the
arrest
of
servants
who
had
left
their
masters
or
apprentices
who
ventured
out
of
doors
after
the
curfew
hour
of
9
P.M.;
they
decided
whether
a
wife
who
was
said
to
be
a
“scold”
should
be
tied
to
the
“cucking
stool”
and
ducked
in
the
waters
of
the
Avon.
And
the
Elizabethan
bailiff
had
pow-
ers
that
are
hardly
conveyed
by
our
notion
of
a
mayor:
no
one
could
receive
a
stranger
into
his
house
without
the
bailiff’s
permission.
Several
of
John
Shakespeare’s
offices
involved
regular
contact
with
the
magnates
of
the
region:
the
lord
of
the
manor,
the
Earl
of
Warwick,
whose
ances-
tors
had
held
Stratford
as
a
feudal
fiefdom
in
the
Middle
Ages;
wealthy
gentlemen
like
Sir
Thomas
Lucy,
who
entertained
the
queen
at
his
house
in
nearby
Charlecote;
the
influential
and
learned
bishop
of
Worcester,
Edwin
Sandys.
Stratford
was
not
directly
ruled
by
any
of
these
imposing
figures;
it
was
an
independent
town,
having
been
incorporated
as
a
royal
borough
in
1553.
But
the
big
men
exercised
considerable
power
as
well
as
prestige,
and
local
officials
would
have
had
to
possess
great
skills
of
tact
and
cunning
in
order
to
uphold
their
rights.
John
Shakespeare
must
have
been
good
at
the
task;
he
would
not
otherwise
have
been
entrusted
with
his
offices.
Then,
around
the
time
Will
reached
his
thirteenth
year,
things
began
to
turn
sour
for
his
buoyant,
successful
father.
One
of
the
fourteen
alder-
men
of
Stratford,
John
Shakespeare
had
been
marked
absent
from
coun-
cil
meetings
only
once
in
thirteen
years.
Abruptly,
beginning
in
1577,
he
ceased
to
attend
meetings.
He
must
have
had
very
good
friends
on
the
council,
for
they
repeatedly
exempted
him
from
fines,
reduced
his
assess-
ments,
and
kept
his
name
on
the
roster.
At
one
time
he
had
given
gener-
ously
to
the
poor,
but
now
his
situation
had
changed.
When
in
1578
the
corporation
voted
to
levy
every
alderman
fourpence
per
week
for
poor
relief,
“Mr
John
Shaxpeare”
among
the
sitting
aldermen
was
exempted.
The
exemption
was
an
exceptional
gesture
of
kindness—not
all
aldermen
in
financial
difficulties
were
treated
with
comparable
consideration.
It
was
repeated
when
he
was
given
an
extremely
low
assessment
for
the
expenses
of
equipping
the
town’s
constabulary:
four
men
with
bills,
three
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
61
men
with
pikes,
and
one
man
with
a
bow
and
arrow.
There
must
have
been
something
unusually
appealing
and
useful
about
the
man,
some-
thing
that
kept
his
colleagues
hoping
that
he
would
somehow
or
other
right
himself
and
return
to
public
affairs.
But
still
he
did
not
resume
attending
meetings,
and
still
he
seems
to
have
had
difficulty
paying
his
dues,
even
the
reduced
levies.
Finally,
in
1586,
after
years
of
nonatten-
dance,
Shakespeare’s
name
was
struck
from
the
roll;
he
had
by
that
time
ceased
to
be
a
person
who
counted
for
much
in
Stratford.
His
public
career
had
ended,
and
his
private
situation
had
clearly
deteriorated.
John
Shakespeare
needed
money.
He
needed
it
urgently
enough
by
November
1578
to
do
what
Elizabethan
families
dreaded
and
resisted
doing:
he
sold
and
mortgaged
property.
And
not
just
any
property:
in
a
few
years’
time
he
disposed
of
virtually
all
of
his
wife’s
inheritance.
Piece
by
piece,
in
exchange
for
ready
cash,
the
properties
she
brought
to
the
marriage
slipped
through
the
fingers
of
her
improvident
husband.
An
interest
in
land
in
Snitterfield,
where
his
father
had
farmed,
was
sold
for
four
pounds;
Asbies
was
let
for
a
nominal
rent,
presumably
in
exchange
for
a
payment
up
front;
and
in
1579
another
house
and
fifty-six
acres
at
Wilmcote
were
mortgaged
for
forty
pounds
to
his
wife’s
brother-in-law,
Edmund
Lambert,
of
Barton-on-the-Heath.
This
cash
evidently
van-
ished
quite
quickly.
When
the
borrowed
money
came
due
the
next
year,
John
was
unable
to
repay
it,
and
the
property
was
lost.
Years
later,
he
twice
sued
to
try
to
get
the
land
back,
claiming
that
he
had
in
fact
prof-
fered
payment,
but
the
courts
found
for
Lambert.
All
Will’s
mother,
Mary,
had
left
of
what
she
brought
to
the
marriage
was
the
Arden
name.
The
most
striking
glimpse
of
John
Shakespeare’s
financial
situation
is
provided
by
evidence
of
the
inquisitive
eyes
of
the
queen’s
officers.
The
government
was
anxious
to
enforce
religious
uniformity.
Though
the
queen
had
declared
that
she
did
not
want
to
rip
open
each
individual’s
soul
and
inquire
into
private
beliefs,
she
wanted
to
pressure
as
many
of
her
subjects
as
she
could
to
observe
at
least
the
outward
forms
of
official
Protestant
belief.
Once
a
month
at
a
minimum,
everyone
was
expected
to
attend
Sunday
services
of
the
Church
of
England,
services
in
which
the
Protestant
Book
of
Common
Prayer
would
be
used
and
in
which
the
ministers
would
deliver
one
of
the
homilies,
or
state-sponsored
sermons,
62
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
written
by
the
central
religious
authorities.
People
who
broke
the
law
requiring
regular
church
attendance
were
subject
to
fines
and
other
pun-
ishments.
The
fines
were
relatively
small
and
manageable
until
1581,
thereafter,
in
the
wake
of
a
systematic
crackdown
on
religious
dissidents,
they
became
astronomical.
In
the
autumn
of
1591
the
government
ordered
the
commissioners
of
every
shire
in
the
land
to
draw
up
a
list
of
those
who
did
not
come
monthly
to
church.
John
Shakespeare’s
name
turns
up
on
the
list
prepared
by
the
local
officials,
but
in
a
category
set
apart
by
a
note:
“We
suspect
these
nine
persons
next
ensuing
absent
themselves
for
fear
of
processes.”
Some
months
later
the
commissioners
filed
their
report
and
reiterated
the
explanation:
“It
is
said
that
these
last
nine
come
not
to
church
for
fear
of
process
for
debt.”
If
the
explanation
is
accurate
and
not
a
cover
for
reli-
gious
dissent,
then
the
onetime
bailiff
of
Stratford
and
justice
of
the
peace
was
staying
in
his
house
on
Sundays—and,
presumably,
many
other
days
as
well—to
avoid
arrest.
The
public
man
had
become
a
very
private
man.
By
1591,
when
John
Shakespeare
was
making
himself
scarce,
his
eld-
est
son
had
almost
certainly
flown
the
coop:
the
next
year
he
is
first
men-
tioned
as
a
London
playwright.
But
his
father’s
humiliating
position
was
only
the
latest
scene
in
a
drama
that
had
been
long
unfolding
and
that
must
have
shaped
Will’s
entire
adolescence.
As
he
came
of
age,
Will
would
have
been
keenly
aware
that
something
had
gone
seriously
wrong.
He
could
not
have
been
indifferent
to
what
he
saw;
his
father’s
standing
in
the
world
was
sinking
exactly
at
the
time
when
he,
the
oldest
son
and
heir,
was
about
to
emerge
as
an
adult.
What
was
the
cause
of
the
decline?
Then,
as
now,
there
were
business
cycles—the
last
decades
of
the
sixteenth
century
were
particularly
diffi-
cult
in
the
Midlands—and
in
hard
times
people
are
obviously
less
likely
to
purchase
luxury
goods
like
elegant
gloves.
But
many
prominent
mer-
chants
in
comparable
situations
weathered
hard
times
and
personal
dis-
asters.
Another
Stratford
chamberlain,
Abraham
Sturley,
lost
his
house
in
a
fire
that
swept
through
several
streets
of
the
town
on
September
22,
1594,
and
never
fully
recovered
financially,
but
he
managed
to
keep
his
eldest
son,
Henry,
at
Oxford
and
to
send
his
second
son,
Richard,
to
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
63
Oxford
the
next
year.
Another
prominent
Stratford
citizen,
William
Par-
sons,
lost
his
house
in
the
same
fire,
but
he
too
managed
to
send
his
son
to
Oxford
and
to
serve
as
alderman
and
magistrate.
John
Shakespeare’s
debts,
mortgages,
fines,
and
losses
and
his
sudden
and
precipitous
disap-
pearance
from
public
life
suggest
something
more
than
the
consequences
of
a
cyclical
downturn
in
the
glove
trade.
A
far
likelier
cause
was
a
sharp
government
crackdown
on
one
of
the
key
sources
of
his
income.
In
the
wake
of
wool
shortages
in
the
mid-
1570s,
the
authorities
decided
that
the
fault
lay
with
the
“broggers,”
men
like
John
Shakespeare,
who
had
already
been
twice
denounced
for
illegal
transactions.
In
October
of
1576
the
queen's
principal
advisers,
the
Privy
Council,
ordered
wool
traders
in
for
questioning;
in
November
they
tem-
porarily
suspended
all
wool
trading;
and
in
the
following
year
they
required
all
known
wool
broggers
to
post
bonds
of
one
hundred
pounds—
a
very
large
sum—as
a
surety
against
any
further
illegal
dealings.
This
was
all
terrible
news
for
John
Shakespeare.
Matters
were
made
worse
by
another
financial
blow.
In
1580
the
Crown
issued
a
long
list
of
names—over
two
hundred—and
demanded
that
everyone
listed
appear
on
a
specified
day
in
June
at
the
Queen’s
Bench
in
Westminster
to
be
bound
over
to
“keep
the
peace
towards
the
queen
and
her
subjects.”
John
Shakespeare’s
name
was
on
the
list.
“Bind-
ing
over’—roughly
equivalent
to
a
restraining
order—was
a
key
low-level
policing
and
crime-prevention
method
in
the
sixteenth
and
seventeenth
centuries.
Upon
someone’s
swearing
an
oath
that
he
feared
for
his
life
or
well-being
or
the
well-being
of
the
entire
community,
the
court
could
issue
an
order
requiring
the
suspected
malefactor
to
appear
in
order
to
guarantee
his
good
behavior
and
to
post
a
bond—a
surety—to
this
end.
The
surviving
records
do
not
reveal
who
swore
an
oath
against
John
Shakespeare
or
why.
Was
it
because
of
his
wool
brogging,
or
some
drunken
quarrel
for
which
he
had
been
denounced,
or
a
suspicion
that
he
held
the
wrong
religious
beliefs?
He
somehow
managed
to
find
four
guarantors
for
his
appearance,
and
he
agreed
reciprocally
to
serve
as
guar-
antor
for
one
of
them.
But
on
the
June
date
neither
John
nor
his
guaran-
tors
appeared—again
their
absence
has
never
been
explained—and
they
forfeited
their
money.
John
was
fined
twenty
pounds
for
himself
and
64
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
twenty
pounds
for
John
Audley,
the
Nottingham
hatmaker
for
whom
he
had
agreed
to
pledge.
In
the
wake
of
his
other
difficulties,
this
was
money
he
could
not
spare.
The
impact
upon
his
family
appears
to
have
been
severe.
Unlike
the
sons
of
Sturley
and
Parsons,
Will
conspicuously
did
not
go
to
Oxford,
nor
did
John
Shakespeare's
other
sons.
In
the
early
eighteenth
century
the
Shakespeare
biographer
and
editor
Nicholas
Rowe
wrote
that
John
Shakespeare
sent
his
eldest
son
to
the
Stratford
grammar
school,
where
he
learned
some
Latin,
“but
the
narrowness
of
his
Circumstances,
and
the
want
of
his
assistance
at
Home,
forc’d
his
Father
to
withdraw
him
from
thence,
and
unhappily
prevented
his
further
Proficiency
in
that
Language.”
Rowe
believed,
incorrectly,
that
John
Shakespeare
had
had
ten
children,
and
the
rest
of
the
account
may
be
equally
incorrect.
But
the
story
of
the
son’s
being
taken
out
of
school
in
order
to
help
at
home
would
certainly
be
consistent
with
the
documented
financial
straits
of
the
late
1570s.
At
a
certain
point
it
may
have
seemed
an
absurd
luxury
to
have
his
eldest
son
parsing
Latin
sentences.
“My
father
charged
you
in
his
will
to
give
me
good
education,”
Orlando
complains
to
his
wicked
brother
in
the
pastoral
comedy
As
You
Like
It.
“You
have
trained
me
like
a
peasant,
obscuring
and
hiding
from
me
all
gentleman-like
qualities”
(1.1.56-59).
A
good
education
marked
the
differ-
ence
between
a
gentleman
and
a
peasant.
And
yet
Shakespeare
did
not,
from
all
appearances,
harbor
any
regrets
about
failing
to
attend
Oxford
or
Cambridge;
he
did
not
show
signs
of
a
frustrated
vocation
as
a
scholar.
For
that
matter,
nothing
in
his
works
suggests
any
very
sentimental
feeling
about
school:
Jaques’
vision
in
the
same
comedy
of
“the
whining
schoolboy
with
his
satchel
/
And
shining
morning
face,
creeping
like
snail
/
Unwill-
ingly
to
school”
does
not
convey
nostalgia
for
a
lost
happiness
(2.7.144-46).
Nor
does
the
scene
of
Latin
instruction
in
The
Merry
Wives
of
Windsor,
a
scene
that
must
have
come
quite
close
to
Shakespeare’s
own
direct
memo-
ries
of
the
King’s
New
School.
“My
husband
says
my
son
profits
nothing
in
the
world
at
his
book,”
Mistress
Page
complains
to
the
Welsh
pedagogue
Sir
Hugh
Evans,
whereupon
Evans—in
the
Welsh
accent
that
struck
English
ears
as
funny—puts
little
William
through
his
paces:
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
OD
EVANS:
What
is
“/apis,”
William?
WILLIAM:
A
stone.
EVANS:
And
what
is
“a
stone,”
William?
WILLIAM:
A
pebble.
EVANS:
No,
it
is
“/apis.”
I
pray
you
remember
in
your
prain.
WILLIAM:
“Lapis.”
EVANS:
That
is
a
good
William.
(Ald
1256-32)
The
tedium
of
rote
learning
is
deftly
recalled,
as
is
the
punning—prefer-
ably,
obscene
punning—that
must
have
been
the
schoolboy
Shake-
speare’s
principal
psychic
relief
from
this
tedium.
This
language
lesson
manages
to
turn
the
genitive
into
the
genitals
and
to
make
us
hear
the
word
“whore”
in
the
Latin
for
“this”:
EVANS:
What
is
your
genitive
case
plural,
William?
WILLIAM:
Genitive
case?
EVANS:
Ay.
WILLIAM:
Genttivo:
“horum,
harum,
horum.”
MISTRESS
QUICKLY:
Vengeance
of
Jenny’s
case!
Fie
on
her!
Never
name
her,
child,
if
she
be
a
whore.
(4.1.49-54)
These
dirty
jokes
surfaced
in
abundance
whenever
Shakespeare
gave
a
thought
to
Latin
lessons
or
indeed
to
any
language
lessons
at
all.
“Com-
ment
appelez-vous
les
pieds
et
la
robe?”
asks
the
French
princess
in
Henry
V,
trying
to
learn
the
English
words
“feet”
and
“gown.”
Her
tutor’s
reply
discombobulates
her:
“De
foot,
madame,
et
de
cown.”
In
“foot”
she
and
the
audience
(or
at
least
the
members
of
the
audience
in
on
the
joke)
hear
the
French
word
/fourre,
“fuck,”
and
in
the
slightly
mangled
pronunciation
of
“sown”
she
hears
con,
“cunt.”
CATHERINE:
De
foot
et
de
cown?
O
Seigneur
Dieu!
Ils
sont
les
mots
de
son
mauvais,
corruptible,
gros,
et
impudique,
et
non
pour
les
66
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
dames
@’honneur
d’user.
[O
Lord
God!
Those
are
evil-sounding
words,
easily
misconstrued,
vulgar,
and
immodest,
and
not
for
respectable
ladies
to
use.
]
(3.4.44-49)
If
this
stuff
is
not,
in
truth,
infinitely
amusing,
it
still
can
generate
chuckles
after
four
hundred
years,
and
it
would
have
served
to
lighten
the
burden
of
an
exceedingly
long
school
day.
But
it is
certainly
not
the
glimpse
of
a
lost
vocation.
Ben
Jonson
wrote
scholarly
footnotes
to
his
Roman
plays
and
his
classicizing
masques;
Shakespeare
laughed
and
scribbled
obscenities.
The
end
of
his
formal
schooling
must
have
meant
more
time
for
Will
in
the
glove
trade,
getting
to
know
the
qualities
of
cheverel
and
deerskin.
All
the
Shakespeare
children
probably
helped
in
the
family
business.
But
after
the
late
1570s,
there
may
not
have
been
much
of
a
business
left
to
help
in.
Will's
younger
brother
Gilbert,
born
in
1566,
is
described
in
town
records
as
a
“haberdasher,”
and
Edmund,
born
in
1580,
followed
Will
to
London
and
became
an
actor.
No
records
survive
of
how
a
third
brother,
Richard,
born
in
1574,
spent
his
almost
forty
years
of
life.
He
too
probably
did
not
become
a
glover;
if
he
had
something
to
do
with
the
father’s
business,
and
certainly
if
he
had
been
a
success
at
it,
he
is
likely
to
have
left
a
trace.
It
often
happens,
Hamlet
tells
Horatio,
that
there
is
“some
vicious
mole
of
nature”
in
men
(1.4.18.8),
some
inborn
propensity
or
weakness,
that
ruins
what
would
otherwise
be
an
altogether
admirable
life.
The
par-
ticular
fault
on
which
Hamlet
focuses
his
brooding
attention
is
heavy
drinking,
a
Danish
national
custom,
he
says,
“More
honoured
in
the
breach
than
the
observance”
(1.4.18).
Other
nations
call
us
drunkards,
Hamlet
complains,
and
with
this
charge
sully
our
reputation:
and
indeed
it
takes
From
our
achievements,
though
performed
at
height,
The
pith
and
marrow
of
our
attribute.
;
(1.4.18.4-6)
Hamlet’s
extended
meditation
on
this
fault
makes
for
a
rather
strange
passage—extraordinarily
intense,
as
if
the
thoughts
were
forcing
them-
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
67
selves
into
speech,
but
at
the
same
time
oddly
irrelevant,
since
his
crafty,
calculating
uncle
and
his
confederates
are
not
elsewhere
in
the
tragedy
notably
depicted
as
drunkards.
One
of
the
texts
of
Hamlet
simply
cuts
the
lines,
as
if
they
represented
a
false
start,
an
idea
Shakespeare
decided
not
to
pursue.
Is
this
a
further
clue
to
the
cause
of
the
father’s
decline?
Did
the
man
who
served
in
1556
as
the
borough
ale-taster
drink
himself
into
deep
per-
sonal
trouble?
In
the
mid-seventeenth
century,
when
the
public
began
to
be
curious
about
the
life
of
their
greatest
playwright,
Thomas
Plume,
archdea-
con
of
Rochester,
jotted
down
something
he
had
been
told
about
the
Strat-
ford
glover,
“a
merry-cheeked
old
man”
whom
someone
had
seen
once
in
his
shop
and
questioned
about
his
celebrated
son.
“Will
was
a
good
Hon-
est
Fellow,”
the
father
is
said
to
have
replied
and
then
added,
as
if
he
had
been
challenged,
“but
[I]
durst
have
cracked
a
jest
with
him
at
any
time.”
The
anecdote
comes
too
late
to
be
reliable
as
an
eyewitness
account,
but
does
it
contain
a
trace
of
the
actual
person,
genial,
good-natured,
at
once
proud
of
his
son
and
a
touch
competitive
with
him,
and,
possibly,
“merry-
cheeked”
from
something
more
than
good
humor
or
advancing
age?
Throughout
his
career,
Shakespeare
kept
thinking
about
drunken-
ness.
He
registered
the
disgust
eloquently
voiced
by
Hamlet.
But
he
was
also
fascinated
by
the
delicious
foolishness,
the
exuberant
cracking
of
jests,
the
amiable
nonsense,
the
indifference
to
decorum,
the
flashes
of
insight,
the
magical
erasure
of
the
cares
of
the
world.
Even
when
he
depicts
the
potentially
disastrous
consequences
of
alcohol,
Shakespeare
never
adopts
the
tone
of
a
temperance
tract,
and
in
Twelfth
Night
the
drunk
and
disorderly
Sir
Toby
Belch
delivers
the
decisive
put-down
of
the
puritanical
Malvolio:
“Dost
thou
think
because
thou
art
virtuous
there
shall
be
no
more
cakes
and
ale?”
(2.3.103-4).
In
a
luminous
scene
in
one
of
the
greatest
of
the
tragedies,
Antony
and
Cleopatra,
the
rulers
of
the
world
become
soused,
join
hands,
and
dance
“the
Egyptian
baccha-
nals”
(2.7.98).
Even
grave,
calculating
Caesar
is
caught
up,
against
his
will,
in
the
muddle-headed
revelry:
“It’s
monstrous
labour
when
I
wash
my
brain,
/
An
it
grow
fouler.”
“Gentle
lords,
let’s
part,”
he
says,
looking
at
the
faces
of
those
about
him
and
feeling
his
own
flushed
face.
“You
see
we
have
burnt
our
cheeks”
(2.7.92-93,
116-17).
68
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
If
Caesar’s
cold
sobriety
marks
him
as
likely
to
prevail
in
the
struggle
for
power,
it
also
marks
him
as
far
less
appealing
than
the
riotous,
great-
spirited
Antony.
True
nobility
in
Antony
and
Cleopatra—nobility
not
of
blood
alone
but
of
character—has
an
affinity
with
excess,
a
perception
that
extends
to
many
of
Shakespeare’s
plays
and
carries
the
force
of
a
conclusion
drawn
from
life.
John
Shakespeare
may
have
never
seemed
more
like
a
nobleman
to
his
observant,
imaginative
child
than
when
he
was
in
his
cups,
his
cheeks
burning.
But
heavy
drinking
is
associated
in
the
plays
with
clowns,
buffoons,
and
losers
as
well
as
kings.
And
an
early
play,
The
Taming
of
the
Shrew,
brings
drunkenness
literally
close
to
home
in
the
figure
of
Christopher
Sly,
who
is
noisy,
impotently
belligerent,
and
entirely
unwilling
to
pay
for
the
glasses
he
has
broken.
When
the
tavern
hostess
calls
him
a
rogue
and
threatens
to
call
the
constable,
the
drunken
beggar
grandly
stands
on
his
family
honor—“The
Slys
are
no
rogues.
Look
in
the
Chronicles—we
came
in
with
Richard
Conqueror”
(Induction
1,
lines
3-4)—and
then
promptly
falls
asleep.
A
few
moments
later,
a
nobleman
decides
to
trick
the
beggar
into
thinking
he
is
a
lord,
and
the
baffled
Sly
clutches
at
a
more
homely
sense
of
his
identity:
“What,
would
you
make
me
mad?
Am
not
I
Christopher
Sly—old
Sly’s
son
of
Burton
Heath,
by
birth
a
pedlar,
by
education
a
cardmaker,
by
transmutation
a
bearherd,
and
now
by
pres-
ent
profession
a
tinker?
Ask
Marian
Hacket,
the
fat
ale-wife
of
Wincot,
if
she
know
me
not.”
(Induction
2,
lines
16-20).
Shakespeare
wrote
this
comedy
shortly
after
he
moved
to
London,
and
it
bears
vivid
traces
of
the
district
around
Stratford:
Barton-on-
the-Heath,
where
his
cousins
the
Lamberts
lived;
Wincot,
where
dwelled
a
Hacket
family
he
probably
knew;
perhaps
Sly
himself,
since
there
was
a
Stephen
Sly
living
in
Stratford.
It
must
have
amused
Shake-
speare,
in
a
quiet,
private
way,
to
introduce
these
familiar
details
onto
the
urban
stage
in
order
to
give
a
realistic
air
to
his
depiction
of
rustic
folly.
Perhaps,
like
his
comic
character,
he
too
felt
dazed
by
his
recent
trans-
mutation.
He
had
gone
from
a
provincial
nobody
to
a
professional
actor
and
playwright
in
the
great
city
of
London,
and
he
used
the
details
to
remind
himself
of
who
he
was—old
John
Shakespeare’s
son
of
Stratford.
The
character
of
Christopher
Sly
is
hardly
a
depiction
of
his
father—a
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
69
man
whose
accomplishments
and
social
standing
were
far
higher—but
perhaps
the
drunkenness,
the
family
pride,
the
mounting
debts,
and
the
unwillingness
or
inability
to
pay
seemed
as
reminiscent
of
home
as
the
familiar
place-names
Barton-on-the-Heath
and
Wincot.
Shakespeare’s
greatest
representation
of
drunkenness
is
Sir
John
Fal-
staff,
the
grotesquely
fat
knight
whose
reiterated
call
for
a
white
wine
imported
from
Spain
and
the
Canaries
serves
virtually
as
his
motto:
“Give
me
a
cup
of
sack.”
In
the
second
part
of
Henry
IV,
Falstaff
delivers
an
ecstatic
rhapsody
to
the
virtues
of
“sherry-sack’—that
is,
sack
from
Jerez,
in
Andalusia—a
mock-scientific
analysis
of
its
power
to
inflame
both
wit
and
courage:
A
good
sherry-sack
hath
a
two-fold
operation
in
it.
It
ascends
me
into
the
brain,
dries
me
there
all
the
foolish
and
dull
and
crudy
vapours
which
environ
it,
makes
it
apprehensive,
quick,
forgetive,
full
of
nimble,
fiery,
and
delectable
shapes,
which,
delivered
o’er
to
the
voice,
the
tongue,
which
is
the
birth,
becomes
excellent
wit.
The
second
property
of
your
excellent
sherry
is
the
warming
of
the
blood,
which,
before
cold
and
set-
tled,
left
the
liver
white
and
pale,
which
is
the
badge
of
pusilla-
nimity
and
cowardice.
But
the
sherry
warms
it,
and
makes
it
course
from
the
inwards
to
the
parts’
extremes;
it
illuminateth
the
face,
which,
as
a
beacon,
gives
warning
to
all
the
rest
of
this
little
kingdom,
man,
to
arm;
and
then
the
vital
commoners
and
inland
petty
spirits
muster
me
all
to
their
captain,
the
heart;
who,
great
and
puffed
up
with
his
retinue,
doth
any
deed
of
courage.
And
this
valour
comes
of
sherry.
(4.2.86-101)
Of
course,
the
playwright
could
have
heard
the
prototype
of
this
encomium
to
drink
in
the
alehouse
or
made
it
all
up
from
scratch.
But
in
the
context
of
the
trajectory
that
led
the
once
prosperous
bailiff
to
hide
in
his
house
from
creditors,
the
end
of
this
speech
is
striking:
“If
I
had
a
thousand
sons,
the
first
human
principle
I
would
teach
them
should
be
to
forswear
thin
potations,
and
to
addict
themselves
to
sack”
(4.2.109-11).
Perhaps
in
the
wake
of
the
family’s
financial
decline,
this
was
what
Will
took
to
70
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
be
his
father’s
first
principle,
the
legacy
the
crumbling
glover
had
decided
to
leave
him.
But
this
did
not
mean
that
Will
had
to
accept
the
legacy.
One
of
the
earliest
anecdotes
about
Shakespeare
reports
that
though
he
was
good
company,
he
was
not
a
“company
keeper”—he
“wouldn't
be
debauched,
and
if
invited
to,
writ:
he
was
in
pain.”
Aubrey
recorded
this
around
1680,
many
years
after
the
playwright’s
death,
but
it
is
peculiar
enough
as
a
rec-
ollection
to
suggest
that
it
might
be
authentic.
“He
was
in
pain.”
Stories
of
drinking
contests
with
village
boozers
or
drunken
flights
of
wit
at
the
Mermaid
Tavern
or
thousand-pound
gifts
from
enamored
aristocrats
are
far
more
the
stuff
of
legend
than
a
propensity
to
decline
invitations
with
a
polite
excuse
and
to
stay
at
home.
A
certain
steadiness,
in
any
case,
rings
true:
it
would
be
hard
otherwise
to
imagine
how
Shakespeare
could
have
done
what
he
did—learn
his
parts
and
perform
them
onstage,
help
to
manage
the
complex
business
affairs
of
the
playing
company,
buy
and
sell
country
real
estate
and
agricultural
commodities,
compose
exquisitely
crafted
sonnets
and
long
poems,
and
for
almost
two
decades
write
on
average
two
stupendous
plays
a
year.
Shakespeare
depicted
heavy
drinkers
from
close-up—he
noted
the
unsteadiness
of
their
legs,
the
broken
veins
in
their
nose
and
cheeks,
their
slurred
speech—and
he
did
so
with
an
unusual
current
of
understanding,
delight,
even
love.
But
his
sympathy
was
braided
together
with
other
ele-
ments,
including
the
overwhelming
sense
of
waste
that
Hamlet
articu-
lates.
He
saw
in
Sir
Toby
Belch
a
parasite
who
sponges
off
his
niece,
ruthlessly
gulls
his
supposed
friend
Sir
Andrew,
and
richly
deserves
the
thrashing
he
receives
at
the
hands
of
the
effeminate
boy
he
thought
he
could
bully.
He
saw
in
Falstaff
something
roughly
similar—a
gentleman
sinking
into
mire—but
darker
and
deeper:
a
debauched
genius;
a
fath-
omlessly
cynical,
almost
irresistible
confidence
man;
a
diseased,
cowardly,
seductive,
lovable
monster;
a
father
who
cannot
be
trusted.
The
drunken-
ness
that
in
both
cases
seems
linked
to
gaiety,
improvisational
wit,
and
noble
recklessness
is
unnervingly
disclosed
at
the
same
time
to
be
part
of
a
strategy
of
cunning,
calculation,
and
ruthless
exploitation
of
others.
Invariably,
a
failed
strategy:
the
grand
schemes,
the
imagined
riches,
the
fantasies
about
the
limitless
future—all
come
to
nothing,
withering
away
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
Wil
in
an
adult
son’s
contempt
for
the
symbolic
father
who
has
failed
him.
“God
save
thee,
my
sweet
boy!”
exclaims
Falstaff,
when
he
sees
Hal
in
tri-
umph
in
London.
“I
know
thee
not,
old
man,”
Hal
replies,
in
one
of
the
most
devastating
speeches
Shakespeare
ever
wrote.
Fall
to
thy
prayers.
How
ill
white
hairs
become
a
fool
and
jester!
I
have
long
dreamt
of
such
a
kind
of
man,
So
surfeit-swelled,
so
old,
and
so
profane;
But
being
awake,
I
do
despise
my
dream.
(2
Henry
IV,
5.5.41,
45-49)
These
are
words
written
deep
within
the
history
play,
words
spoken
by
the
newly
crowned
king
of
England
to
his
exceptionally
amusing,
excep-
tionally
dangerous
friend.
Yet
it is
difficult
to
register
the
overwhelming
power
and
pathos
of
the
relationship
between
Hal
and
Falstaff
without
sensing
some
unusually
intimate
and
personal
energy.
HOw
DID
THE
SON
of
the
failing
glover
make
it
into
the
the-
ater?
In
the
absence
of
any
documentary
traces,
the
principal
evi-
dence,
pored
over
for
clues
by
generations
of
ardent
admirers,
is
the
huge
body
of
work
that
Shakespeare
left
behind,
the
plays
and
poems
that
spark
the
interest
in
the
life
in
the
first
place
and
provide
tantalizing
hints
of
possible
occupations
he
might
have
followed.
The
strong
presence
of
legal
situations
and
terms
in
his
plays
and
poems—used,
for
the
most
part,
accurately,
and
infiltrating
scenes
where
one
would
least
expect
them—has
led
to
the
recurrent
speculation
that
he
worked
in
the
office
of
a
local
attorney,
someone
who
handled
minor
lawsuits,
title
searches,
and
the
like.
No
doubt
much
of
the
work
would
have
been
boring,
but
it
would
have
put
food
on
the
table
and
would
have
fed
his
appetite
for
new
words
and
fanciful
metaphors.
It
is
easy
to
imag-
ine
the
law
clerk,
engaged
in
the
humdrum
task
of
sealing
documents,
72
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
letting
his
imagination
wander—as
the
schoolboy
had
done
over
his
Latin
lessons—and
conjuring
up
erotic
visions.
A
few
years
later,
the
visions,
still
carrying
the
traces
of
their
modest
origin,
take
the
form
of
the
goddess
of
love
in
hot
pursuit
of
the
beautiful
young
huntsman.
“Pure
lips,
sweet
seals
in
my
soft
lips
imprinted,”
says
panting
Venus,
pleading
for
another
kiss,
What
bargains
may
I
make
still
to
be
sealing?
To
sell
myself
I
can
be
well
contented,
So
thou
wilt
buy,
and
pay,
and
use
good
dealing;
Which
purchase
if
thou
make,
for
fear
of
slips
Set
thy
seal
manual
on
my
wax-red
lips.
(Venus
and
Adonis,
lines
511-16)
The
image
of
the
imprint
in
wax
might,
in
this
account
of
Shakespeare’s
life,
represent
not
only
the
imagined
kiss
but
also
the
hard
impact
of
his
months
or
years
of
legal
work
on
the
poet’s
imagination.
Perhaps.
But
the
strong
presence
in
his
work
of
terms
from
the
leather
trade
seems
a
convincing
personal
trace
only
because
of
the
objec-
tive
likelihood
that
Will
worked
in
his
father’s
shop.
Once
we
get
away
from
the
near
certainty
of
this
experience,
we
run
into
Shakespeare’s
uncanny
ability
to
absorb
vocabulary
from
a
wide
range
of
pursuits
and
his
lightning
transformation
of
technical
terms
into
the
intimate
registers
of
thoughts
and
feelings.
It
is
true
that
the
absorption
is
not
uniform—
though
in
the
course
of
his
life
he
bought
and
sold
houses,
for
example,
he
picked
up
relatively
few
terms
from
architecture
and
the
building
trades—but
the
general
phenomenon
is
broad
enough
and
intense
enough
to
defy
using
language
as
a
clue
to
any
occupation
he
formally
pursued.
He
undoubtedly
took
in
legal
language
and
concepts,
but
he
also
was
remarkably
attuned
to
theological
and
medical
and
military
lan-
guage
and
concepts.
Was
he
directly
involved
in
all
of
these
professions
too?
A
young
man
without
prospects,
he
could
have
run
off
to
the
army
fighting
a
nasty
campaign
in
the
Netherlands—so
some,
impressed
by
his
theatrical
command
of
military
jargon,
have
speculated.
He
could,
from
his
evident
fascination
with
sea
voyages,
have
found
a
place
on
a
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
Hs
ship
bound
for
America—“To
seek
new
worlds,”
as
Sir
Walter
Ralegh
put
it,
“for
gold,
for
praise,
for
glory.”
But
the
actuarial
likelihood
of
his
making
it
back
home
from
such
adventures
was
exceedingly
small.
And
none
of
these
possible
professions
adequately
accounts
for
the
trajectory
that
led
from
Stratford
to
London.
Indeed,
each
seems
only
to
lead
away
from
the
place
that
most
matters
in
his
life,
the
theater.
The
most
obvious
access
to
the
theater
companies
for
a
talented
young
man
was
through
apprenticeship.
But
Will’s
marriage
license
places
him
securely
in
Stratford
in
November
1582,
at
the
age
of
eighteen,
and
the
baptismal
records
of
his
children
—Susanna,
christened
on
May
26,
1583,
and
the
twins
Hamnet
and
Judith,
christened
on
February
2,
1585—
strongly
suggest
that
he
still
lived
there
or
at
the
very
least
continued
to
make
regular
visits.
Apprentices
were
usually
taken
on
as
adolescents
and
were
not
allowed
to
marry
(let
alone
to
father
children
in
their
late
teens).
Still,
the
skills
that
theatrical
apprentices
acquired
provide
a
clue
to
some
of
the
things
that
the
young
Shakespeare
must
have
been
learning
to
do,
how-
ever
he
earned
his
living,
in
the
years
after
he
left
school.
The
last
will
and
testament
of
Augustine
Phillips,
one
of
Shake-
speare’s
fellow
actors,
business
partners,
and
friends
(he
left
his
“fellow”
Shakespeare
a
“thirty-shilling
piece
in
gold”)
provides
some
sense
of
these
skills:
“I
give
to
Samuel
Gilborne,
my
late
apprentice,
the
sum
of
forty
shillings,
and
my
mouse-coloured
velvet
hose,
and
a
white
taffety
doublet,
a
black
taffety
suit,
my
purple
cloak,
sword
and
dagger,
and
my
bass-viol.
I
give
to
James
Sands,
my
apprentice,
the
sum
of
forty
shillings,
and
a
cittern,
a
bandore,
and
a
lute,
to
be
paid
and
delivered
unto
him
at
the
expiration
of
his
term
of
years
in
his
indenture
of
apprenticeship.”
Money
was
only
part
of
the
bequest.
Both
the
former
apprentice
Gilborne
and
the
current
apprentice
Sands
also
received
valuable
tools
of
the
trade:
costumes,
weapons,
and
musical
instruments.
The
fact
that
James
Sands
had
to
wait
for
his
bequest
until
his
term
of
service
was
up
suggests
Phillips
had
his
company’s
interests
uppermost
in
mind:
he
did
not
want
the
young
actor,
inherited
money
and
musical
instruments
in
hand,
to
offer
his
services
to
a
rival
troupe.
The
terms
of
Phillips's
will
indicate
something
of
the
expectations
playing
companies
had
of
their
actors.
First,
actors
were
supposed
to
be
74
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
gifted
musicians,
able
to
play
at
least
the
impressive
range
of
string
instruments
that
Phillips
evidently
played—the
guitar-like
cittern,
the
mandolin-like
bandore
(from
which
we
get
the
word
“banjo”),
the
immensely
popular
lute,
and
the
bass
viol.
Second,
they
were
expected
to
be
able
to
fight—or
at
least
convincingly
to
mime
fighting—with
sword
and
dagger.
More
generally,
they
had
to
be
agile:
there
is
often
dancing,
as
well
as
fighting,
in
Elizabethan
drama,
and
all
performances
of
plays,
whether
tragic
or
comic,
ended
with
complex
dances.
(It
takes
some
adjustment
to
imagine
the
players
in
Hamlet
or
King
Lear
brushing
off
the
stage
blood
at
the
play’s
end,
joining
hands,
and
performing
a
set
of
elaborate
figures,
but
so
they
did.)
Third,
as
the
bequests
strongly
imply,
they
were
expected
to
wear
clothes
gracefully:
Phillips's
“mouse-coloured
velvet
hose”
were
no
doubt
designed
to
show
off
his
legs—in
this
period
of
long
dresses,
it
was
men’s
legs,
rather
than
women’s,
to
which
eyes
were
drawn.
The
musical
ability,
sword
fighting,
and
above
all
the
costly
clothing
of
velvet
and
silks
(for
taffeta
in
this
period
referred
to
a
kind
of
plain-
woven
silk)
together
point
to
what
was
probably
the
most
significant
aspect
of
the
Elizabethan
actor’s
training:
players
were
supposed
to
be
able
to
mime
convincingly
the
behavior
of
gentlemen
and
ladies.
That
is,
boys
and
men,
drawn
almost
entirely
from
the
98
percent
of
the
popula-
tion
that
were
not
“gentle,”
had
to
assume
the
manner
of
the
upper
2
per-
cent.
Not
all
the
parts
in
the
plays,
of
course,
were
of
the
gentry,
and
some
actors
no
doubt
specialized
in
lower-class
roles,
but
these
were
repertory
companies
in
which
most
of
the
actors
were
expected
to
play
a
range
of
social
types.
And
it
is
clear
from
the
budgets
of
the
playing
companies
that
they
were
willing
to
invest
a
great
deal
of
money
in
making
the
impersonation
of
the
gentry
convincing.
Their
single
largest
expense,
apart
from
the
physical
building
itself,
was
the
cost
of
costumes—the
gorgeous,
elaborate
clothes
that
audiences
expected
to
see
gracing
the
bodies
of
the
actors
playing
the
parts
of
lords
and
ladies.
There
is
a
paradox
here.
Actors
were
classified
officially
as
vagabonds;
they
practiced
a
trade
that
was
routinely
stigmatized
and
despised.
As
“masterless
men’—men
without
a
home
of
their
own
or
an
honest
job
or
an
attachment
to
someone
else’s
home—they
could
be
arrested,
whipped,
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
Te
put
in
the
stocks,
and
branded.
(This
is
why
they
described
themselves
legally
as
the
servants
of
aristocrats
or
as
guild
members.)
And
yet
the
heart
of
their
enterprise
was
a
representation
of
the
upper
classes
persua-
sive
enough
to
delight
a
discriminating
audience
that
included
real
gen-
tlemen
and
ladies.
Augustine
Phillips
was
bequeathing
to
his
apprentices
the
tools
of
a
trade
that
much
of
the
time
required
them
to
learn
how
to
look
and
act
like
their
betters.
Phillips
himself
evidently
wanted
to
carry
the
performance
outside
the
walls
of
the
playhouse:
he
simply
bought
a
coat
of
arms
to
which
he
had
no
claim
at
all,
an
act
for
which
he
was
sub-
sequently
attacked
by
an
official
of
the
College
of
Heralds
known
grandly
(after
the
badge
of
office
that
he
wore)
as
the
Red
Dragon
Pursuivant.
We
scarcely
know
for
ourselves,
let
alone
for
a
person
who
lived
four
hundred
years
ago,
how
someone
acquires
a
particular
vocational
desire.
Will's
love
of
language,
his
sensitivity
to
spectacle,
and
a
certain
erotic
thrill
in
make-believe
may
all
have
played
a
part
in
drawing
him
to
the
stage.
But,
in
the
light
of
Shakespeare’s
family
circumstances—a
mother
who
could
trace
her
family
to
the
important
Ardens
of
Park
Hall,
a
father
who
had
risen
in
the
world
only
to
sink
down
again—the
focus
of
Elizabethan
theatrical
impersonation
is
deeply
suggestive.
Will
may
have
been
attracted
to
the
trade
of
acting
in
part
because
it
so
centrally
involved
the
miming
of
the
lives
of
the
gentry.
As
a
practical
strategy,
this
was,
of
course,
absurd:
becoming
an
actor
or
even
a
playwright
was
probably
the
worst
imaginable
route
toward
social
advancement,
something
like
becoming
a
whore
in
order
to
become
a
great
lady.
But
as
the
legends
of
whores
who
become
great
ladies
suggest,
there
is
at
work
in
certain
professions
a
powerful
mimetic
magic.
Onstage
Shakespeare
could
be
the
person
that
his
mother
and
father
said
he
was
and
that
he
felt
himself
to
be.
Even
without
a
formal
theatrical
apprenticeship,
Will
must
have
acquired
much
of
what
he
needed
during
his
Stratford
adolescence.
Local
talent
abounded;
filled
with
linguistic
exuberance
and
rich
fantasy,
Will
could
have
studied
the
lute
with
one
of
his
accomplished
neighbors,
dancing
with
another,
swordsmanship
with
still
another.
Observing
his
reflection
in
a
glass
or
his
shadow
on
a
wall,
he
could
have
recited
grand-
sounding
speeches
and
practiced
courtly
gestures.
And
with
his
mother’s
link
to
the
Ardens
of
Park
Hall
and
his
father’s
faded
but
still
notable
dis-
76
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
tinction,
he
could
have
arrived
at
the
sense
that
he
could
confidently
carry
off
the
role
of
a
gentleman
and
fulfill
his
parents’
dreams.
John
Shakespeare
had
once
had
great
expectations,
a
vision
of
the
arrow
of
the
family’s
fortunes
that
his
accomplishments
would
propel
toward
a
glorious
future.
At
the
height
of
his
wealth
and
prestige—in
1575
or
76,
just
before
his
downward
slide
began—he
had
applied
to
the
College
of
Heralds
for
a
coat
of
arms,
an
expensive
process
a
person
undertook
not
only
to
confer
honor
on
himself
but
also
to
enhance
the
status
of
his
children
and
grandchildren.
To
be
granted
a
coat
of
arms—
not
to
buy
one
on
the
sly,
as
Phillips
tried
to
do,
but
to
obtain
one
offi-
cially—was
to
rise
above
playacting
to
the
thing
itself.
Elizabethan
society
was
intensely,
pervasively,
visibly
hierarchical:
men
above
women,
adults
above
children,
the
old
above
the
young,
the
rich
above
the
poor,
the
wellborn
above
the
vulgar.
Woe
betide
anyone
who
violated
the
rules,
forgetting
to
cede
place
to
someone
above
him
or
attempting
to
pass
through
a
door
before
his
betters
or
thoughtlessly
sit-
ting
somewhere
at
church
or
at
a
dinner
table
where
he
did
not
belong.
William
Combe,
the
squire
of
a
town
near
Stratford,
sent
a
person
named
Hicox
to
Warwick
Jail
and
refused
bail
because
he
“did
not
behave
himself
with
such
respect
in
his
presence
it
seemeth
he
looked
for.”
The
social
elite
lived
in
a
world
of
carefully
calibrated
gestures
of
respect.
They
demanded
constant,
endlessly
reiterated
signs
of
deference
from
those
below
them:
bowing,
kneeling,
doffing
hats,
cringing.
There
was
virtually
no
respect
for
labor;
on
the
contrary,
it
was
idleness
that
was
prized
and
honored.
Dress
was
the
opposite
of
democratizing—nothing
could
be
further
from
Shakespeare’s
world
than
a
culture
in
which
mag-
nates
and
workmen
often
wear
the
same
clothes.
It
wasn’t
simply
a
ques-
tion
of
money.
By
royal
proclamation,
silks
and
satins
were
officially
restricted
to
the
gentry.
Actors
were
exempted,
but
outside
of
the
play-
house
they
could
not
legally
wear
their
costumes.
In
general,
treatment
by
government
officials
and
by
the
courts
was
drastically
different
for
the
upper
classes
than
it
was
for
those
at
the
bottom.
Even
executions
were
distinct:
hanging
for
the
base,
beheading
for
the
elite.
To
pass
from
the
status
of
yeoman—the
term
used
to
describe
John
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
77.
Shakespeare,
even
after
he
had
left
the
land
and
established
himself
in
business—to
the
status
of
gentleman
was
a
major
step,
a
virtual
transfor-
mation
of
social
identity.
There
were
many
fine
gradations
in
Eliza-
bethan
society,
but
the
key
division
was
between
the
gentry
and
the
“common,”
or
“baser,”
sort.
The
division
was
routinely
mystified
as
a
mat-
ter
of
blood,
an
immutable,
inherited
characteristic.
But
at
the
same
time
it
was
possible
to
cross
the
boundary,
and
everyone
knew
the
ways
it
could
be
done.
“As
for
gentlemen,”
writes
one
canny
contemporary
observer,
Sir
Thomas
Smith,
they
be
made
good
cheap
in
England.
For
whosoever
studieth
the
laws
of
the
realm,
who
studieth
in
the
universities,
who
pro-
fesseth
the
liberal
sciences,
and,
to
be
short,
who
can
live
idly
and
without
manual
labor
and
will
bear
the
port,
charge,
and
counte-
nance
of
a
gentleman,
he
shall
be
called
master,
for
that
is
the
title
which
men
give
to
esquires
and
other
gentlemen.
.
.
.
And,
if
need
be,
a
King
of
Heralds
shall
also
give
him
for
money
arms
newly
made
and
invented,
the
title
whereof
shall
pretend
to
have
been
found
by
the
said
herald
in
the
perusing
of
old
registers.
“Who
studieth
in
the
universities”:
not
only
was
this
something
incon-
ceivable
for
the
yeoman
and
glover
John
Shakespeare,
but
it
was
also
something
he
conspicuously
failed
to
see
that
his
eldest
son
do.
But
all
was
not
lost.
The
key
requirement,
if
you
are
climbing
into
the
ranks
of
the
elite,
is
to
live
like
a
gentleman—that
is,
you
have
to
“live
idly”
and
to
maintain
a
certain
level
of
conspicuous
expenditure.
The
next
require-
ment
is
to
hide
the
ladder—that
is,
you
have
to
pretend
that
you
are
already
there.
You
do
so,
Smith
notes,
by
acquiring
a
coat
of
arms
from
an
institution,
the
College
of
Heralds,
which
was
in
the
peculiar
business
of
concealing
social
mobility
by
reinventing
the
past.
In
exchange
for
money,
the
herald
pretends
that
he
has
discovered
in
the
old
registers
what
he—or
the
applicant—is
in
fact
fabricating.
It
was
not
quite
as
simple
as
Smith’s
wry
account
suggests.
To
be
an
“armiger,”
someone
entitled
to
bear
a
heraldic
device,
one
had
to
meet
78
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
certain
requirements
overseen
by
a
bureaucracy
headed
by
the
Garter
King-of-Arms,
the
chief
of
the
College
of
Heralds.
In
John
Shakespeare’s
case,
it
was
civic
office
that
helped
to
confer
eligibility:
“If
any
person
be
advanced
into
an
office
or
dignity
of
public
administration,”
one
expert
on
these
matters
held,
“be
it
either
Ecclesiastical,
Martial,
or
Civil
.
.
.
the
Herald
must
not
refuse
to
devise
to
such
a
public
person,
upon
his
instant
request
and
willingness
to
bear
the
same
without
reproach,
a
coat
of
Arms.”
The
bailiff
of
Stratford
was
just
such
a
“public
person,”
and
accordingly,
when
he
submitted
a
sketch
for
his
arms
to
the
college,
John
Shakespeare
must
have
been
confident
that
his
application
would
be
granted.
But
though
you
could
not
legitimately
simply
buy
a
proper
coat
of
arms—one
that
you
and
your
descendants
could
proudly
bear
forever,
as
an
acknowledged
right—you
most
definitely
had
to
pay
for
it.
The
her-
alds’
fees
were
high.
When
his
financial
circumstances
worsened,
ascent
to
the
status
of
gentleman
must
have
seemed
a
hopeless
extravagance
or
per-
haps
a
mockery,
like
a
beggar
dreaming
of
a
crown.
John
Shakespeare’s
application
was
shelved
and
forgotten.
But
not,
it
seems,
by
his
oldest
son.
Decades
later,
in
October
1596,
the
process
was
renewed.
The
old
sketch—“Gould.
On
A
Bend
Sables,
a
Speare
of
the
first
steeled
argent.
And
for
his
Creast
or
Cognizance
a
fal-
con,
his
winges
displayed
Argent.
Standing
on
a
wrethe
of
his
Coullors.
Suppourting
a
Speare
Gould.
Steeled
as
aforesaid
sett
uppon
a
helmett
with
mantelles
&
tasselles’—was
pulled
off
the
shelf,
where
it
had
gathered
dust;
once
again
John
Shakespeare’s
claim
was
reviewed
and,
this
time
round,
approved.
Who
reinstituted
the
application,
provided
the
necessary
information,
and
paid
the
fees
to
the
notoriously
greedy,
arrogant,
and
iras-
cible
head
of
the
London
College
of
Heralds,
Sir
William
Dethick?
Not
the
elderly
glover
and
his
wife,
whose
financial
situation
had
not,
in
all
like-
lihood,
greatly
improved,
and
not,
with
any
likelihood,
the
provincial
hab-
erdasher
Gilbert,
the
apparent
nonentity
Richard,
the
unsuccessful
actor
Edmund,
or
the
unmarried
sister
Joan.
The
obvious
answer
is
William,
already
prospering
handsomely
in
the
London
theater.
Why
should
he
have
gone
to
the
trouble?
Most
obviously,
by
helping
his
father
complete
the
process,
the
playwright,
in
an
act
of
prudential,
self-interested
generosity,
was
conferring
gentle
status
on
himself
and
his
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
79
children.
Will
had
by
this
time
no
doubt
played
gentlemen
onstage,
and
he
could
carry
off
the
part
outside
the
playhouse
as
well,
but
he
and
oth-
ers
would
always
know
he
was
impersonating
someone
he
was
not.
He
now
had
the
means
to
acquire
legitimately,
through
the
offices
his
father
had
once
held,
a
role
he
had
only
played.
He
could
legally
wear
outside
of
the
theater
the
kinds
of
clothes
he
had
been
wearing
onstage.
For
a
man
singularly
alert
to
the
social
hierarchy—and
Shakespeare
spent
most
of
his
professional
life
imagining
the
lives
of
kings,
aristocracy,
and
gen-
try—the
prospect
of
this
privilege
must
have
seemed
sweet.
He
would
sign
his
last
will
and
testament
“William
Shakespeare,
of
Stratford
upon
Avon
in
the
county
of
Warwick,
gentleman.”
His
heirs
and
their
off-
spring
would
be
ever
further
from
the
glover’s
shop
and,
for
that
matter,
the
playhouse;
they
would
have
the
luxury
of
taking
their
gentility
for
granted
and
laying
claim
without
irony
to
the
motto
that
someone—
again,
in
all
probability,
Will
himself—had
devised
to
accompany
the
shield
and
crest:
Non
sanz
drotct.
“Not
without
right.”
Is
there
a
touch
of
defensiveness
in
that
motto,
a
slight
sense
that
the
claim
to
gentlemanly
status
might
raise
eyebrows?
If
so,
the
insecurity
would
not
belong
to
the
impecunious
glover
but
to
his
successful
playwright
son.
For
whatever
John
Shakespeare’s
prob-
lems—drink
or
foolish
loans
or
whatever—he
did
in
fact
legitimately
possess
the
social
standing,
through
the
offices
he
had
held
in
Stratford,
to
lay
claim
to
the
status
of
a
gentleman.
Not
so
his
son.
There
were
few
occupations
for
an
educated
man
more
stigmatized
socially
than
player.
That
Shakespeare
was
acutely
aware
of
the
stigma
can
be
surmised
from
the
sonnets,
where
he
writes
that,
like
the
dyer’s
hand,
he
has
been
stained
by
the
medium
he
has
worked
in.
It
was
with
such
a
conscious-
ness
of
social
shame—the
sense
of
what
it
means
to
go
up
and
down,
making
oneself
a
motley
to
the
view—that
he
may
have
come
up
with
the
family
motto,
half-defiant,
half-defensive.
The
clerk
who
wrote
down
the
words
on
the
draft
of
the
grant
of
arms
made
a
telling
mistake—either
unconsciously
or
with
sly
sarcasm—
that
he
had
to
strike
out:
he
twice
wrote
“Non,
Sanz
Droict.”
The
comma
in
effect
turns
the
motto
into
an
official
rejection:
“No;
without
justifica-
tion.”
The
correction
was
made,
the
motto
was
finally
written
correctly,
80
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
and
the
arms were
granted.
But
for
Will
the
insecurity—or
at
least
the
sense
of
incongruity—is
unlikely
to
have
vanished,
for
there
were
jokes
and
unpleasant
reminders.
Most
manifestations
of
social
policing—
raised
eyebrows,
wry
faces,
ironic
witticisms,
teasing—are
evanescent
and
hardly
outlast
a
day
or
two,
let
alone
four
hundred
years.
But
in
this
case,
perhaps
because
the
volume
of
insult
was
high,
perhaps
because
Will
was
sufficiently
a
public
figure,
traces
of
it
survive.
In
the
satiric
comedy
Every
Man
Out
of
his
Humour,
performed
at
the
newly
erected
Globe
by
the
Lord
Chamberlain’s
Men
in
1599,
Ben
Jonson
has
a
rustic
buffoon
named
Sogliardo
pay
thirty
pounds
for
a
ridiculous
coat
of
arms,
to
which
an
acquaintance
mockingly
proposes
the
humiliating
motto
“Not
Without
Mustard.”
As
a
member
of
the
Lord
Chamberlain’s
Men,
Will
would
have
listened
to
this
insult
again
and
again
in
rehearsal
and
in
per-
formance.
He
probably
laughed
uncomfortably
—how
else
does
someone
get
through
this
kind
of
teasing?
In
1602
his
discomfort
would
have
been
renewed
when
a
disgrun-
tled
genealogist,
the
York
herald
Ralph
Brooke,
filed
a
formal
complaint
against
the
Garter
King-of-Arms,
Sir
William
Dethick,
for
abusing
his
authority
by
elevating
base
people
to
a
status
they
did
not
merit.
Brooke
drew
up
a
list
of
twenty-three
such
cases.
“Shakespear
ye
Player”
was
the
fourth
name
on
the
list.
Shakespeare
was
a
witty
mocker
of
pretensions
and
must
have
known
that
he
would
be
exposing
himself
to
this
embarrassment.
He
may
have
felt
that
the
social
cachet
was
worth
wincing
for,
but
a
further
key
to
his
action
may
lie
in
the
specific
remarks
penned
on
the
drafts
that
Dethick
drew
up
in
granting
the
renewed
request
on
behalf
of
John
Shakespeare.
These
remarks
must
have
been
based
on
information
provided
by
the
person
pay-
ing
for
the
application,
information
that
could
then
be
verified,
if
the
offi-
cials
were
acting
responsibly,
by
the
College
of
Heralds.
There
is,
of
course,
no
reference
to
the
glover’s
shop
or
the
illegal
trade
in
wool
and
other
com-
modities.
Along
with
a
vague
reference
to
the
distinction
of
the
petitioner's
ancestor,
who
allegedly
did
“faithful
and
valiant
service”
to
King
Henry
VIL,
though
no
record
of
this
service
or
its
reward
has
emerged,
Dethick
notes
that
“the
said
John
hath
married
the
daughter
and
one
of
the
heirs
of
Robert
Arden
of
Wilmcote,”
that
he
had
served
as
a
justice
of
the
peace
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
81
and
the
bailiff
of
Stratford,
and
that
he
had
“lands
and
tenements
of
good
wealth
and
substance,”
worth
five
hundred
pounds.
By
1596
this
was
all
something
of
a
dream,
akin
to
Christoper
Sly’s
“we
came
in
with
Richard
Conqueror.”
John
Shakespeare
was
hardly
des-
titute—despite
his
losses,
he
still
had
possessions—but
he
had
ceased
to
be
what
the
application
claimed
he
was:
a
“man
of
good
substance.”
The
story
Will
likely
told
the
Garter
King-of-Arms—a
story
about
a
man
whose
ancestors
had
served
the
king,
a
man
who
had
married
an
heiress
bearing
a
distinguished
name,
a
man
who
had
risen
to
high
civic
office,
in
short
a
man
of
good
substance—erased
or
undid
the
man
who
mort-
gaged
away
his
wife’s
property,
who
could
not
leave
his
house
for
fear
of
arrest
for
debt,
and
whose
relations
with
his
fellow
townspeople
had
so
deteriorated
by
1582
that
in
that
year
he
petitioned
for
sureties
of
the
peace
against
four
men
“for fear
of
death
and
mutilation
of
his
limbs.”
In
this
application,
John
Shakespeare
had
not
only
been
restored
to
his
lost
position;
he
had
been
raised
to
a
position
he
never
quite
held.
The
dream
of
restoration
haunted
Shakespeare
throughout
his
life.
In
The
Comedy
of
Errors,
a
merchant
of
Syracuse,
in
search
of
his
lost
twins,
is
arrested
in
the
rival
city
of
Ephesus
and
is
threatened
with
death
if
he
can-
not
pay
a
heavy
fine.
At
the
end
of
a
zany
tangle
of
confused
identities,
in
which
one
of
his
sons
is
arrested
for
debt
by
a
leather-clad
officer
(of
the
type
that
used
to
accompany
the
bailiff
John
Shakespeare),
the
father
is
reunited
with
the
twins
and
with
their
mother,
the
beloved
wife
from
whom
he
had
been
separated
in
a
shipwreck
thirty-three
years
before.
The
merchant's
life
is
spared,
his
fine
is
forgiven,
the
son’s
debt
is
settled,
and
the
family
is
magically
restored.
In
The
Merchant
of
Venice,
a
wealthy
mer-
chant
loses
all
of
his
wealth
in
a
series
of
shipwrecks
and
is
about
to
be
carved
up
by
a
merciless
Jewish
creditor,
until,
through
a
clever
interpreta-
tion
of
the
law,
he
regains
everything
he
has
lost
and
acquires
the
creditor’s
money
as
well.
In
Twelfth
Night,
the
son
and
daughter
of
a
nobleman
are
separated
from
one
another
and
shipwrecked
on
the
coast
of
Illyria.
The
son
wanders
through
his
life
as
if
he
is
in
a
dream.
The
daughter
takes
a
new
name
and
pretends
she
is
a
young
man,
Cesario.
In
her
assumed
iden-
tity,
she has
suffered
a
steep
loss
in
social
standing—Cesario
is
a
servant—
but
even
in
her
disguise
she
clings
to
her
origins.
“What
is
your
parentage?”
82
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
asks
the
proud
countess,
and
the
servant
replies,
“Above
my
fortunes,
yet
my
state
is
well.
/
I
am
a
gentleman.”
The
countess
is
smitten:
I'll
be
sworn
thou
art.
Thy
tongue,
thy
face,
thy
limbs,
actions,
and
spirit
Do
give
thee
five-fold
blazon.
(1.5.247-49,
261-63)
“Five-fold
blazon”:
in
his
speech,
looks,
movements,
though
not
in
his
clothes
or
occupation,
Cesario
bears
a
gentleman's
coat
of
arms.
And
when
the
brother
and
sister
finally
encounter
one
another
by
chance,
they
lay
claim
to
their
displaced
identities:
SEBASTIAN:
What
countryman?
What
name?
What
parentage?
VIOLA:
Of
Messaline.
Sebastian
was
my
father.
(5.1.224-25)
Not
only
are
they
restored
to
their
proper
social
identities,
but
they
each
make
a
marriage
above
their
station,
the
young
woman
to
the
Duke
of
Illyria,
the
young
man
to
a
great
heiress.
In
none
of
these
cases
is
restoration
entirely
straightforward.
The
Syracusan
merchant
gets
back
a
family
that
had,
because
of
the
disastrous
shipwreck,
never
actually
lived
as
one.
The
Venetian
merchant,
who
despises
usury,
not
only
recoups
his
maritime
losses;
he
is
also
given
“in
use”
half
the
accumulated
wealth
of
the
Jewish
moneylender.
The
twin
brother
and
sister
are
not
so
much
restored
to
one
another
or
to
their
lost
identities
as
they
are
linked
through
their
new
spouses,
Viola
marrying
the
duke
who
has
long
been
madly
in
love
with
the
countess,
Sebastian’s
immensely
wealthy
bride.
And
the
social-climbing
success
is
strangely
shadowed
by
the
figure
of
the
countess’s
steward
Malvolio,
who
dreams
of
making
the
match
that
Sebastian
succeeds
in
making.
Malvolio
serves
as
the
shadow
side
of
Shakespeare’s
own
fascination
with
achieving
the
status
of
a
gentleman.
He
is,
says
the
waiting
gentle-
woman
Maria,
who
hates
him,
“an
affectioned
ass
that
cons
state
without
book
and
utters
it
by
great
swathes”—that
is,
he
memorizes
and
recites
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
83
the
dignified
and
high-flown
language
of
his
betters.
And
he
is
a
narcis-
sist:
“the
best
persuaded
of
himself,
so
crammed,
as
he
thinks,
with
excel-
lencies,
that
it
is
his
grounds
of
faith
that
all
that
look
on
him
love
him”
(2.4.132-35).
He
suffers
from
what
Shakespeare
in
the
sonnets
charac-
terizes
as
his
own
besetting
“Sin
of
self-love”:
“Methinks
no
face
so
gra-
cious
is
as
mine.
/
No
shape
so
true,
no
truth
of
such
account”
(62.1,
5-6).
Out
of
these
qualities,
Malvolio’s
enemies
will
work
their
revenge,
which
will
be
to
make
him
a
“common
recreation”
(2.3.121).
What
is
ridiculed
in
Malvolio,
then,
is
not
simply
ill
nature
or
puri-
tanical
severity
but
rather
the
dream
of
acting
the
part
of
a
gentleman.
And
the
ridicule
comes
very
close
to
describing
the
process
by
which
any
actor,
including
Shakespeare
himself,
must
have
learned
his
trade.
“He
has
been
yonder
i’
the
sun,”
Maria
tells
her
fellow
conspirators,
“practis-
ing
behaviour
to
his
own
shadow
this
half-hour”
(2.5.14-15).
When
he
comes
close
enough
to
be
overheard,
what
the
mockers
witness
is
some-
one
rehearsing
a
fantasy:
“To
be
Count
Malvolio!”
“Now
he’s
deeply
in,”
one
of
the
conspirators
whispers.
“Look
how
imagination
blows
him”
(2.5.30,
37-38).
The
audience
is
then
invited
to
watch
someone
enter
a
part—“deeply
in’—and
improvise
a
scene,
complete
with
costume,
props,
dialogue,
and
what
actors
call
a
backstory:
Having
been
three
months
married
to
her,
sitting
in
my
state...
Calling
my
officers
about
me,
in
my
branched
velvet
gown,
hav-
ing
come
from
a
day-bed
where
I
have
left
Olivia
sleeping
.
.
.
And
then
to
have
the
humour
of
state
and—after
a
demure
travel
of
regard,
telling
them
I
know
my
place,
as
I
would
they
should
do
theirs—to
ask
for
my
kinsman
Toby.
..
.
Seven
of
my
people
with
an
obedient
start
make
out
for
him.
I
frown
the
while,
and
perchance
wind
up
my
watch,
or
play
with
my
—
[touching
his
chain]
some
rich
jewel.
(2.5.39-54)
Malvolio
is
about
to
be
lured
into
the
trap
that
has
been
laid
for
him,
the
trap
that
will
lead
to
yellow
cross-garters,
inappropriate
smiling,
impris-
onment
as
a
madman,
and
cruel
humiliation.
One
of
the
greatest
comic
plots
in
all
of
Shakespeare,
it
draws
deeply
on
the
playwright’s
inner
life,
84
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
including
a
strong
current
of
ironic
laughter
at
the
whole
project—his
own
and
that
of
his
parents—of
laying
claim
to
a
higher
status.
Shakespeare
found
the
pleasures
and
ironies
of
restoration
inex-
haustibly
fascinating,
even
in
his
tragedies
and
tragicomedies.
At
the
cli-
max
of
King
Lear,
the
old
king’s
wicked
daughters
are
defeated,
and,
after
all
his
losses
and
his
atrocious
sufferings,
the
king
is
restored
to
“absolute
power”
(5.3.299).
But
it
is
too
late:
his
beloved
daughter
Cordelia
is
dead
in
his
arms,
and
he
dies
in
an
agony
of
despair
mixed
with
the
delusive
hope
that
she
might
still
be
alive.
A
similar
fate
befalls
Timon
of
Athens,
who
finds
when
he
has
lost
his
wealth
that
he
has
no
friends
and
goes
off
to
live
alone
in
the
woods.
Digging
in
the
earth
for
roots
to
eat,
he
finds
gold,
the
last
thing
he
desires,
and
once
again
becomes,
to
his
virtually
fatal
disgust,
an
immensely
wealthy
man.
And
in
The
Winter's
Tale,
King
Leontes,
after
sixteen
years,
recovers
the
wife
and
daughter
whom
his
paranoid
jealousy
had
seemed
to
destroy.
But
the
wide
gap
in
time
is
not
so
simply
erased:
his
wife,
Leontes
remarks,
“was
not
so
much
wrinkled,
nothing
/
So
agéd”
as
the
woman
he
has
recovered
(5.3.28-29),
and
other
victims
of
his
jealousy—his
only
son,
Prince
Mamillits,
and
his
faithful
counselor
Antigonus—do
not
miraculously
return
from
the
grave.
The
emotion
of
restoration
is
powerfully
present—the
sense
that
what
was
seemingly
irrevocably
lost
has
been
reclaimed
against
all
hope
and
expec-
tation—but
the
recovery
is
never
quite
what
it
seems:
the
past
that
is
recovered
turns
out
to
be
an
invention
or
a
delusion
or,
in
the
worst
case,
an
intensification
of
loss.
Near
the
very
end
of
his
career
Shakespeare
returned
one
more
time
to
this
plot
structure,
giving
it
in
almost
pure
form
in
The
Tempest:
a
ruler
is
thrust
from
his
dukedom,
cast
out
to
sea
in
a
leaky
boat
with
his
infant
daughter,
and
shipwrecked
on
a
strange
island;
years
later,
through
the
exercise
of
his
magic,
he
triumphs
over
his
enemies
and
recovers
his
lost
realm.
These
are
familiar,
highly
traditional
motifs,
and
yet
the
peculiar
intensity
with
which
Shakespeare
repeatedly
embraces
the
fantasy
of
the
recovery
of
a
lost
prosperity
or
title
or
identity
is
striking.
There
is
no
direct
relation
between
the
staging
of
various
forms
of
restoration
in
Will’s
plays
and
the
renewal
of
the
lapsed
application
for
the
status
of
gentleman.
Art
rarely
emerges
so
transparently
from
the
circum-
THE
DREAM
OF
RESTORATION
85
stances
of
life
and
would
be
far
less
compelling
if
it
did.
Shakespeare
was
in
the
business
of
reaching
thousands
of
people,
none
of
whom
had
any
rea-
son
to
be
interested
in
the
business
affairs
and
social
status
of
a
Stratford
glover.
But
there
were
many
ways
in
which
he
might
have
tried
to
reach
his
audience,
and
his
fascination
with
a
particular
set
of
stories—his
sense
that
these
might
work
and,
still
more,
that
he
might
have
it
in
him
to
work
with
them—does
not
seem
entirely
random.
Though
his
imagination
soared
to
faraway
places,
the
fantasies
that
excited
his
imagination
seem
often
to
have
had
their
roots
in
the
actual
circumstances
of
his
life
or
rather
in
the
expectations
and
longings
and
frustrations
generated
by
those
circum-
stances.
Hence,
in
settings
as
remote
as
the
mythical
Athens
of
4
Midsum-
mer
Nights
Dream
or
the
romantic
Bohemia
of
The
Winter’
Tale,
there
are
notes
that
take
us
back
to
the
young
man
who
grew
up
on
Henley
Street
in
Stratford
and
dreamed
that
he
was
a
gentleman.
Sometime
in
his
late
ado-
lescence,
the
young
man
awoke
to
find that
the
dream
had
fled,
along
with
his
mother’s
dowry
and
his
father’s
civic
stature.
But,
as
we
have
seen,
he
did
not
give
it
up,
either
in
his
life
or
in
his
art.
Again
and
again
in
his
plays,
an
unforeseen
catastrophe—one
of
his
favorite
manifestations
of
it
is
a
shipwreck—suddenly
turns
what
had
seemed
like
happy
progress,
prosperity,
smooth
sailing
into
disaster,
ter-
ror,
and
loss.
The
loss
is
obviously
and
immediately
material,
but
it
is
also
and
more
crushingly
a
loss
of
identity.
To
wind
up
on
an
unknown
shore,
without
one’s
friends,
habitual
associates,
familiar
network—this
catas-
trophe
is
often
epitomized
by
the
deliberate
alteration
or
disappearance
of
the
name
and,
with
it,
the
alteration
or
disappearance
of
social
status.
Shakespeare’s
characters
repeatedly
have
to
lay
claim
to
a
gentility
that
is
no
longer
immediately
apparent,
all
of
its
conventional
signs
having
been
swept
away
by
the
wild
waves.
In
Will’s
imagination
his
father’s
failure
might
have
seemed
a
ship-
wreck,
but
the
Shakespeares
had
no
secure
grasp
of
gentlemanly
status
to
begin
with.
The
family
was
at
best
only
just
about
to
become
gentle,
acquiring
the
coat
of
arms
for
which
his
father
had
applied.
It
is
possible,
of
course,
that
his
mother
had
filled
her
eldest
son
with
tales
of
the
Ardens
of
Park
Hall
or
even
of
Turchill
of
the
Forest
of
Arden,
the
lordly
ancestor
whose
lands
merited
four
columns
in
the
Domesday
Book.
In
86
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
that
case,
Will
could
have
dreamed
that
the
family
was
just
about
to
recover,
through
his
father’s
civic
offices,
the
status
that
had
at
one
time
belonged
by
birthright
to
the
Ardens.
This
dream
too
seems
to
have
stayed
with
him.
In
1599,
three
years
after
the
old
application
for
the
coat
of
arms
was
revived,
almost
certainly
at
his
instigation
and
expense,
Will
was
in
all
likelihood
the
person
behind
another
successful
application
to
the
College
of
Heralds,
this
time
for
the
right
to
add
(the
technical
term
is
“impale”)
the
Arden
arms
to
what
is
now
described
as
“the
Ancient
coat
of
Arms”
of
the
Shakespeares.
In
the
end
only
the
Shakespeare
arms
appeared
on
his
funeral
monument,
but
the
symbolic
statement
is
clear:
I
am
not
someone
who
can
be
treated
like
a
hired
servant
or
whipped
like
a
vagabond;
I
am
someone
who
does
not
merely
pretend
onstage
to
be
a
gen-
tleman;
I
am
a
true
gentleman,
entitled
to
bear
arms
both
by
virtue
of
my
father's
distinguished
service
to
the
queen
and
by
virtue
of
my
mother’s
dis-
tinguished
family.
And,
half-concealed,
another
symbolic
statement:
I
have
with
the
fruits
of
my
labor
and
my
imagination
returned
my
family
to
the
moment
before
things
began
to
fall
apart;
I
have
affirmed
the
distinction
of
my
mother’s
name
and
restored
my
father’s
honor;
I
have
laid
claim
to
my
lost
inheritance;
I
have
created
that
inheritance.
CHAAR
EE
Ras3
The
Great
Fear
VEN
IF
WILL
in
his
late
teens
or
early
twenties
had
decided
clearly
that
he
wanted
to
become
an
actor,
he
was
in
fact
not
likely
simply
to
have
headed
off
to
London
to
seek
his
fortune
onstage,
stopping
along
the
way
to
pick
up
a
few
pennies
for
food
and
lodging
by
singing
and
juggling.
A
person
uprooted
from
his
family
and
community
in
Elizabethan
England
was
generally
a
person
in
trouble.
This
was
a
society
deeply
suspicious
of
vagrancy.
(Shakespeare
would
later
make
much
in
his
works
of
the
tribulations
of
the
uprooted
and
unprotected.)
The
age
of
questing
knights
and
wandering
minstrels
was
over—if
indeed
it
ever
existed
except
as
a
fantasy.
Itinerant
friars
and
pil-
grims
had
certainly
existed,
and
within
living
memory,
but
the
religious
orders
had
been
dissolved
by
the
state
and
the
pilgrimage
sites
had
been
shut
down
and
smashed
by
zealous
reformers.
There
were
wanderers
on
the
roads,
but
they
were
exceedingly
vulnerable.
Unaccompanied,
unpro-
tected
women
could
be
attacked
and
raped
almost
with
impunity.
Unac-
companied
men
were
less
desperately
at
risk,
but
they
too
needed
all
the
protection
they
could
get.
Trades
that
required
travel
were
heavily
regu-
lated—every
peddler
and
tinker
was
required
to
have
a
license
from
two
88
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
justices
of
the
shire
in
which
he
resided,
and
anyone
not
so
licensed
could
be
officially
or
unofficially
victimized.
An
able-bodied
beggar
or
idle
vagrant
could
by
statute
be
seized
and
brought
before
the
local
justice
of
the
peace
for
interrogation
and
punishment.
Being
able
to
sing
and
dance,
juggle
or
recite
speeches
was
no
excuse:
among
those
who
were
to
be
classed
as
vagrants,
the
Vagabond
Act
of
1604,
continuing
earlier
statutes,
includes
players
of
interludes,
fencers,
bearwards,
minstrels,
begging
schol-
ars
and
sailors,
palmists,
fortune-tellers,
and
others.
If
the
vagrant
could
not
show
that
he
had
land
of
his
own
or
a
master
whom
he
was
serving,
he
was
tied
to
a
post
and
publicly
whipped.
Then
he
was
either
returned
to
his
place
of
birth—to
resume
the
work
he
was
born
to
do—or
put
to
labor
or
placed
in
the
stocks
until
someone
took
him
into
service.
A
very
small
number
of
people
lived
lives
of
privileged
idleness,
but
most
inhabited
a
society
of
scarcity
with
no
patience
for
anyone
who
did
not,
as
Shakespeare
put
it,
commit
his
body
to
painful
labor.
And
the
fruits
of
that
labor,
in
theory
at
least,
were
supposed
to
be
earned
by
peo-
ple
who
knew
and
kept
their
place.
Social
regulations
were
amazingly
harsh:
lest
the
whip
and
the
stocks
seem
too
lenient,
a
mid-sixteenth-
century
statute
ordered
that
vagabonds
were
to
be
branded
and
put
to
forced
labor
as
slaves.
Even
if
such
draconian
statutes
were
not
strictly
enforced—and
the
evidence
is
too
scanty
to
be
certain—this
clearly
was
not
a
culture
in
which
a
provincial
young
man
uncertain
of
his
future
and
in
need
of
an
income
to
feed
his
wife
and
three
small
children
would
ven-
ture
off
fancy-free
to
the
big
city
in
the
hope
that,
as
Dickens's
Mr.
Micawber
puts
it,
something
would
turn
up.
The
seventeenth-century
gossip
John
Aubrey
jotted
down
some-
thing
that
strongly
suggests
that
Will
did
not
immediately
find
a
place
in
a
theater
company
or
move
directly
from
Stratford
to
London
in
search
of
employment.
“He
had
been
in
his
younger
years,”
Aubrey
wrote,
“a
schoolmaster
in
the
country.”
Most
of
Aubrey’s
gossip
about
Shakespeare
needs
to
be
taken
with
a
grain
of
salt,
but
this
particular
item
has
more
authority
than
most,
for
he
noted
its
source
as
the
actor
William
Beeston.
Beeston
was
the
son
of
Shakespeare’s
former
colleague
in.
the
Lord
Chamberlain’s
company,
Christopher
Beeston.
This,
therefore,
is
a
piece
of
biographical
information
that
can
be
traced
directly
back
to
someone
THE
GREAT
FEAR
89
who
actually
knew
Shakespeare.
(They
acted
together,
records
show,
in
the
1598
production
of
Every
Man
in
His
Humour.)
No
one
has
been
able
to
establish
with
certainty
where
“in
the
country”
Shakespeare
was
a
teacher,
but
many
scholars
have
come
to
take
seriously
a
controversial
claim,
first
made
in
1937,
that
he
spent
a
period
of
time,
perhaps
two
years,
in
Lancashire,
employed
by
an
immensely
wealthy
Catholic
gen-
tleman,
Alexander
Hoghton,
and
then,
upon
Hoghton’s
death,
by
his
friend
Sir
Thomas
Hesketh,
of
nearby
Rufford.
The
vicious,
murky
world
of
Tudor
religious
conflict
will
help
to
explain
why
an
adolescent
boy,
fresh
from
school,
might
have
ventured
from
the
Midlands
of
England
to
the
north,
how
he
could
have
had
a
connection
with
a
powerful
Catholic
family
there,
and
why
that
family
would
have
bothered
to
employ
someone
like
him
rather
than
a
licensed
schoolmaster
with
an
Oxford
or
Cambridge
education.
Stratford
had
nominally
become
Protestant,
like
the
rest
of
the
king-
dom,
when
in
1533
Henry
VI[I—bent
on
getting
a
divorce
and
on
seiz-
ing
the
enormous
wealth
of
the
monasteries—had
himself
declared
“Supreme
Head
of
the
Church
in
England.”
Officially,
England
had
decisively
broken
away
from
Rome.
But
in
matters
of
religious
belief,
families
in
early-sixteenth-century
England
were
characteristically
frac-
tured,
and
many
individuals
were
similarly
fractured
inwardly.
It
would
have
been
an
unusual
extended
kin
group
that
did
not
have
at
least
some
of
its
members
holding
on
to
the old
faith,
an
unusual
convert
to
Protes-
tantism
who
did
not
feel
on
occasion
at
least
some
residual
Catholic
twinges,
and
an
unusual
lay
Catholic
who
did
not
feel
a
current
of
national
pride
and
loyalty
when
Henry
VIII
defied
papal
authority.
This
ambivalence
remained
true
even
during
the
reign
of
Henry’s
son,
Edward
VI,
from
1547
to
1553,
when
England’s
ruling
elite
moved
decisively
to
a
serious
embrace
of
Protestant
doctrine
and
practice.
But
significant
steps
were
taken
in
these
years
to
make
a
return
to
Catholicism,
even
in
imagination,
more
difficult.
Salvation,
the
leaders
of
the
new
English
church
said,
came
not
through
the
Mass
and
the
other
rituals
of
Roman
Catholicism,
but
through
faith
and
faith
alone.
Now
it
was
not
only
the
venerable
monas-
teries
and
the
celebrated
pilgrimage
sites
that
came
under
attack.
The
90
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
altarpieces,
statues,
crucifixes
and
frescoes
that
filled
the
churches
were
declared
to
be
idols,
designed
to
lure
the
people
into
ignorance
and
superstition.
They
were
defaced,
whitewashed
over,
or
smashed,
and
the
zealous
vandals
went
on
to
attack
other
time-honored
ways
of
acting
out
the
faith,
including
rituals,
pageants,
and
plays.
The
most
exalted
moment
in
the
Catholic
service
had
been
the
Ele-
vation
of
the
Host.
The
gorgeously
arrayed
priest,
his
back
to
the
con-
gregation
and
partly
concealed
behind
a
screen
surmounted
by
a
large
crucifix,
would
lift
up
the
consecrated
wafer.
At
that
moment,
a
bell
was
rung,
and
the
faithful
would
look
up
from
their
private
prayers
and
strain
to
see
the
piece
of
bread
that
had
miraculously
been
transformed
into
the
body
and
blood
of
God.
Protestant
polemicists
had
a
range
of
hostile
nicknames
for
the
Host—“Round
Robin,”
“Jack
in
the
Box,”
“Worms’
Meat,”
and
the
like—and
comparably
insulting
terms
for
the
Mass,
including
“the
Pope’s
Theater.”
The
Mass
was
an
impressive
performance,
they
conceded,
but
it
was
all
a
histrionic
fake,
a
tissue
of
lies
and
illusions.
The
theater
might
have
its
value—zealous
Protestants
like
John
Bale,
who
wrote
anti-Catholic
plays,
clearly
thought
so—but
it
had
no
business
infecting
worship.
There
was
no
miraculous
transformation
of
the
substance
of
the
bread,
as
the
Catholics
claimed,
only
a
solemn
act
of
commemoration,
which
should
be
conducted
not
at
an
altar
but
at
a
table.
Faith
should
rest
not
on
a
gaudy
spectacle
but
on
the
word
of
God,
not
on
alluring
images
but
on
texts.
The
only
certain
guide
was
Scripture.
It
was
a
scandal,
religious
reformers
repeatedly
complained,
that
the
Holy
Bible
had
been
deliber-
ately
kept
out
of
the
hands
of
lay
men
and
women
(English
translations
deemed
heretical
had
been
burned
in
great
bonfires
by
the
Catholic
authorities)
and
thereby
confined
to
a
Latin
translation
mumbled
by
priests.
In
the
1520s,
aided
by
the
printing
press,
Protestants
moved
to
make
an
English
version,
shaped
by
the
principles
of
the
Reformation,
widely
available
and
to
encourage
the
literacy
that
would
give
ordinary
people
access
to
what
they
called
the
plain,
unvarnished
truth.
They
moved
as
well
to
translate
the
liturgy
into
English
and
promulgate
the
Book
of
Common
Prayer,
so
that
all
believers
would
understand
the
serv-
ice
and
pray
in
unison
in
their
own
mother
tongue.
DTHENGREAT
FEAR
91
This
was
the
crucial
moment
in
the
development
of
the
English
lan-
guage,
the
moment
in
which
the
deepest
things,
the
things
upon
which
the
fate
of
the
soul
depended,
were
put
into
ordinary,
familiar,
everyday
words.
Two
men
above
all
others,
William
Tyndale
and
Thomas
Cran-
mer,
rose
to
the
task.
Without
them,
without
the
great
English
transla-
tion
of
the
New
Testament
and
the
sonorous,
deeply
resonant
Book
of
Common
Prayer,
it
is
difficult
to
imagine
William
Shakespeare.
The
achievement
did
not
come
lightly.
Too
radical
for
the
doctrinally
conservative
Henry
VIII,
Tyndale
was
driven
in
the
1520s
to
the
Conti-
nent,
where
eventually
he
was
captured
and
garroted
to
death
by
the
Catholic
authorities.
During
the
reign
of
Edward
VI,
Cranmer,
as
arch-
bishop
of
Canterbury,
led
the
Protestant
reforms,
but
when
the
sickly
Edward
died
in
1553
the
throne
passed
to
his
sister,
the
Catholic
Mary
Tudor.
Mary
moved
at
once
to
reverse
direction,
and
Cranmer,
along
with
other
leading
Protestants
who
had
not
managed
to
escape
to
Ger-
many
or
Geneva,
was
burned
at
the
stake
at
Oxford
in
1556.
The
mem-
ory
of
these
executions—which
formed
the
core
of
John
Foxe’s
great
Protestant
Book
of
Martyrs—haunted
the
later
sixteenth
century
and
sharpened
the
violently
anti-Roman
Catholic
sentiments
of
the
commit-
ted
reformers.
When
Mary
died
childless
in
1558,
the
wheel
turned
once
again:
the
twenty-five-year-old
Elizabeth
quickly
made
it
clear
that
she
would
return
the
country
to
the
religious
course
upon
which
it
had
embarked
under
the
reign
of
her
father
and,
still
more,
that
of
her
brother.
Though
cautious
about
unleashing
extreme
reforms,
the
queen
signaled
her
Protestant
views
at
a
procession
on
January
14,
1559,
the
day
before
her
coronation.
At
the
Little
Conduit
in
Cheapside,
she
took
the
English
Bible
proffered
to
her
by
an
allegorical
figure
of
Truth,
kissed
the
book,
held
it
aloft,
and
then
clasped
it
to
her
breast.
When
some
days
later
at
Westminster
Abbey
monks
bearing
incense,
holy
water,
and
candles
approached
to
offer
her
their
blessings,
she
dismissed
them
roughly:
“Away
with
those
torches,”
she
commanded,
“we
can
see
well
enough
by
daylight.”
In
the
months
that
followed,
altarpieces
and
statues
that
had
been
reerected
were
taken
down,
altars
were
again
transformed
into
sim-
ple
tables,
and
the
ancient
Catholic
liturgy
was
replaced
by
the
Book
of
92
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
Common
Prayer.
The
Catholic
priests
who
had
emerged
from
what
they
regarded
as
the
nightmare
years
under
Edward
VI
were
compelled
either
to
conform
to
the
Protestant
doctrine
or
to
vanish
once
again.
Either
they
fled
into
exile
abroad,
or,
more
dangerously,
they
took
on
disguises
and
hid
themselves
in
the
houses
of
Catholic
gentlemen.
At
first
repression
was
relatively
mild.
Queen
Elizabeth
made
it
clear
that
she
was
interested
more
in
obedience
and
conformity
than
in
purity
of
conviction.
Francis
Bacon
remarked
that
the
queen
did
not
seek
to
“make
windows
into
men’s
hearts
and
secret
thoughts.”
What
she
wanted
was
an
outward
act
of
adherence
to
her
authority
and
to
the
official
reli-
gious
settlement.
Specifically,
she
wanted
regular
attendance
at
the
state-
sanctioned
church
services,
whereupon
the
authorities
would
abstain
from
asking
such
questions
as,
Do
you
inwardly
long
for
the old
Catholic
sacraments?
Do
you
believe
in
the
existence
of
purgatory?
Do
you
think
that
priests
have
the
power
to
grant
absolution?
Do
you
think
that
if
a
mouse
eats
a
consecrated
communion
wafer,
it
has
eaten
the
body
and
blood
of
Christ?
Her
officials
generally
followed
suit,
if
sometimes
grudgingly,
until
the
moment
came
in
which
they
felt
that
the
Protestant
religious
settlement
was
in
danger.
That
moment
came
when
William
Shakespeare
was
six
years
old.
In
May
1570
a
well-to-do
Catholic,
John
Felton,
nailed
to
the
door
of
the
bishop
of
London's
house
a
papal
bull
excommunicating
Queen
Eliza-
beth.
The
pope,
Pius
V,
added
an
order
to
all
her
Catholic
subjects
“that
they
presume
not
to
obey
her,
or
her
monitions,
mandates,
and
laws,”
lest
they
too
be
excommunicated.
Felton
was
tortured,
convicted
of
treason,
and
executed.
English
Catholics
were
regarded
with
greatly
intensified
suspicion.
Why
should
the
pope—who
was
subsequently
beatified
and
made
a
saint—have
put
the
faithful
in
such
an
impossible
position?
Because
in
his
view
and
that
of
many
others,
Elizabeth
was
the
only
serious
obstacle
to
the
return
of
wayward
England
to
the
Catholic
faith.
He
was
confident
that
most
ordinary
English
men
and
women
retained
their
ancient
reli-
gious
loyalty,
and
his
agents
had
conducted
a
survey
in
1567
that
disclosed
that
fifty-two
of
the
English
peers
were
either
staunch
Catholics
or
well
disposed
to
the
Catholic
Church
and
only
fifteen
were
firmly
committed
THE
GREAT
FEAR
93
Protestants.
The
question
was
whether
this
religious
loyalty
could
be
turned
into
political
action,
and
the
pope
decided
that
it
could.
The
papal
bull
initiated
a
nightmarish
sequence
of
conspiracy
and
persecution,
plot
and
counterplot
that
continued
throughout
Elizabeth's
long
reign.
STRATFORD
EXPERIENCED
THE
SAME
sudden
shifts,
ten-
sions,
and
ambiguities
that
marked
much
of
the
realm
all
through
the
sixteenth
century.
The
monasteries
and
nunneries
in
the
area
had
been
sacked
in
the
1530s
and
’40s,
and
certain
local
families—among
them
the
Lucys
of
Charlecote—had
enriched
themselves
with
the
spoils.
Then
in
the
1550s,
when
John
Shakespeare
moved
to
Stratford,
the
sur-
rounding
area
was
dotted
with
pyres
on
which
local
Protestant
leaders—
Laurence
Saunders,
at
Coventry;
John
Hooper,
at
Gloucester;
Hugh
Latimer,
at
Oxford;
among
many
others—were
burned
to
death
by
the
resurgent
Catholics
under
Queen
Mary.
At
the
accession
of
Elizabeth,
Catholic
leaders
were
now
in
their
turn
in
serious
trouble,
though
in
the
first
years
of
her
reign
the
queen,
both
by
temperament
and
policy,
pre-
ferred
fines,
dismissal,
and
imprisonment
to
judicial
murder.
In
Stratford
the
Catholic
priest
Roger
Dyos,
who
had
baptized
the
Shakespeares’
first
child,
Joan,
was
dismissed,
replaced
by
the
staunchly
Protestant
John
Bretchgirdle.
It
was
Bretchgirdle
who
on
April
26,
1564,
christened
the
Shakespeares’
first
son,
“Gulielmus
filius
Johannes
Shakspere.”
Religious
upheaval
aside,
it
was
not
a
propitious
moment
to
enter
the
world:
by
July
the
town
was
ravaged
by
bubonic
plague,
killing
fully
a
sixth
of
the
pop-
ulation
before
the
winter.
Nearly
two-thirds
of
the
babies
born
that
year
in
Stratford
died
before
they
reached
their
first
birthday.
Perhaps
Mary
Shakespeare
packed
up
and
took
her
newborn
to
the
country
for
several
months,
away
from
the
pestiferous
streets.
For
parents
of
John
and
Mary
Shakespeare’s
generation,
the
world
into
which
they
brought
their
children
must
have
seemed
strange,
unset-
tling,
and
dangerous:
within
living
memory,
England
had
gone
from
a
highly
conservative
Roman
Catholicism—in
the
1520s
Henry
VIII
had
94
WILL
IN
THE
WORLD
fiercely
attacked
Luther
and
been
rewarded
by
the
pope
with
the
title
“Defender
of
the
Faith’—to
Catholicism
under
the
supreme
headship
of
the
king;
to
a
wary,
tentative
Protestantism;
to
a
more
radical
Protes-
tantism;
to
a
renewed
and
militant
Roman
Catholicism;
and
then,
with
Elizabeth,
to
Protestantism
once
again.
In
none
of
these
regimes
was
there
a
vision
of
religious
tolerance.
Each
shift
was
accompanied
by
waves
of
conspiracy
and
persecution,
rack
and
thumbscrew,
ax
and
fire.
Most
people
found
it
possible
to
keep
their
heads
down,
do
what
they
had
to
do
in
order
to
conform
to
the
official
line,
and
reconcile
their
conscience
to
the
shifts
in
doctrine
and
practice.
Accommodation
in
the
interests
of
survival
led
some
to
acquire
a
certain
skeptical
detachment
from
the
strong
claims
made
by
both
sides,
claims
made
in
the
name
of
love
and
yet
enforced
by
torture
and
execution.
But
for
those
who
believed
that
the
fate
of
their
eternal
souls
depended
upon
the
precise
form
of
worship—and
that,
after
all,
is
what
the
strong
claims
were
about—the
shifts
in
official
belief
and
regulated
practice
must
have
been
excruciating.
Local
communities
were
ruptured,
friendships
were
broken,
families
were
torn
asunder—parents
against
children,
wives
against
hus-
bands—and
inner
lives
tormented
with
pity
and
fear.
It
was
not
only
the
pious
who
found
it
difficult
to
keep
their
heads
down
(or,
more
precisely,
their
heads
on);
it
was
also
the
ambitious.
Major
figures—powerful
aristocrats,
important
magnates,
members
of
the
queen’s
Privy
Council—were
of
course
expected
to
stand
up
and
be
counted,
and
so
too
were
small-scale
civic
leaders
like
John
Shakespeare.
As
a
constable
in
1558-59,
he
had
to
keep
the
peace
between
Catholics
and
Protestants
in
the
tense
year
of
transition
from
the
reign
of
the
Catholic
Mary
to
that
of
the
Protestant
Elizabeth.
No
doubt
he
had
dif-
ficult
moments,
but
at
least
he
could
maintain,
if
he
wished,
an
air
of
studied
neutrality.
But
as
chamberlain,
alderman,
and
bailiff,
he
had
to
act
to
carry
out
the
policies
of
the
regime,
and
that
meant
something
more
than
keeping
the
peace.
:
A
few
months
before
Will’s
birth
and
in
the
years
that
followed,
Chamberlain
John
Shakespeare
oversaw
the
“reparations”
of
Stratford’s
fine
Guild
Chapel.
“Reparations”
here
was
a
euphemism.
What
it
meant
was
that
he
paid
the
workmen
who
went
in
with
buckets
of
whitewash
THE
GREAT
FEAR
95
and
ruined
the
medieval
paintings—St.
Helena
and
the
Finding
of
the
Cross,
St.
George
and
the
Dragon,
the
murder
of
St.
Thomas
a
Becket,
and,
above
the
arch,
the
Day
of
Judgment—that
covered
the
church
walls.
Their
task
was
not
quite
finished:
the
workmen
also
broke
up
the
altar,
putting
a
simple
table
in
its
place,
and
pulled
down
the
rood
loft—
a
gallery,
surmounted
by
a
cross,
that
separated
the
nave
from
the
choir
and
displayed
to
the
faithful
the
image
of
the
crucified
God.
Town
authorities
proceeded
to
sell
off
the
gorgeous
vestments
worn
by
the
Catholic
priests
who
had
once
celebrated
the
mystery
of
the
Mass.
It
is
worth
pausing
over
these
acts:
John
Shakespeare
did
not
directly
do
any
of
them,
and,
in
all
likelihood,
he
did
not
single-handedly
make
the
deci-
sion
to
have
them
done,
but
he
was
responsible
for
them,
answerable
both
administratively—in
the
form
of
signed
accounts
presented
on
Jan-
uary
10,
1564,
March
21,
1565,
and
February
15,
1566—and
morally.
What
were
the
changes
for
which
he
was
paying?
They
were
the
material
manifestations
of
the
reformed
religion,
calculated
acts
of
sym-
bolic
violence
against
the
traditional
Catholic
religious
observance,
ways
of
compelling
the
community
to
acknowledge
the
new
order
and
to
observe
its
practices.
Somewhere
within
the
actions
there
is
a
theology,
subtle
doctrinal
and
philosophical
arguments
by
relentlessly
sober
intel-
lectuals.
But
the
deeds
in
Stratford,
for
which
the
chamberlain
disbursed
the
payments,
were
not
subtle:
men
with
hammers,
awls,
and
grappling
hooks
violently
changed
the
appearance
of
the
church
and
the
form
of
worship
that
would
take
place
within
it.
Paymaster
for
the
ideological
vandals,
John
Shakespeare
acted
offi-
cially
as
a
committed
Protestant,
the
agent
of
the
Reformation
in
Strat-
ford.
On
the
town
council,
he
voted
to
dismiss
the
Catholic steward
Roger
Edgeworth
and
to
hire
the
Protestant
Bretchgirdle—an
unusually
well-educated
man,
with
a
library
that
contained
humanist
classics
as
well
as
theology—to
replace
the
Catholic
curate.
It
is
difficult
to
gauge
how
earnestly
John
Shakespeare
oversaw
these
actions.
He
could
have
regarded
them
with
the
enthusiasm
of
a
zealot,
and
yet
the
picture
as
a
whole
suggests
a
more
complicated
attitude.
The
same
town
council
that
hired
the
new
vicar
Bretchgirdle
also
hired
for
the
King’s
New
School
a
succession
of
impressively
learned
96
Willn
Ine
tHE
WORE
D
schoolmasters
who
had
surprisingly
strong
Catholic
connections.
The
schoolmasters
would
have
had
to
put
in
an
appearance
of
conformity
to
the
Anglican
church—for
such
appointments
would
have
been
officially
approved
by
the
staunchly
Protestant
Earl
of
Warwick
and
the
bishop
of
Winchester—but
each
evidently
harbored
loyalty
to
the
ancient
faith.
Judging
from
their
choices,
John
Shakespeare
and
his
colleagues
cannot