The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty-Nine John Shakespeare when sober

When sober, John Shakespeare taught his son the spartan vices.

When a gentleman has had his arms and legs broken, he used to say, and two slow sword-thrusts through his belly, then, and not till then, he may say, 'Really, I don't feel well.'

Once when William was thirteen he fell and broke his arm when walking in the Forest of Arden. His father told him not to tell his mother because she had been looking peakish and the news might put her off her food.

Yet there was the occasional unexpected paternal gentleness in William Shakespeare's upbringing also. His father did not approve of children being wakened too abruptly, for instance, and he would wake his son by singing to him, softly at first, then getting louder and louder until he had called the boy back to the waking world.

Perhaps it was when he was sober that John Shakespeare took William to witness the Coventry plays. These mysteries were presented each Corpus Christi Day at Coventry by the trade guilds on waggons moving in procession through the streets from station to station. Father and son stood there in the street, watching one waggon after another as it rolled up, delivered its story, and then rolled away.

I think that the Coventry play which made the deepest impression upon our Shakespeare was the one acted by the Guild of Shearmen and Tailors, in which Herod of Jewry takes the leading role. Why so, sir? I will tell you why. Because in that play there is a stage direction which says that Herod is to leap off the pageant-waggon and into the crowd of spectators: 'Here Herod rages in the pageant, and in the street also.' We may well suppose that the vainglorious braggart was costumed in red cloak and red gloves and that to punctuate his anger he carried a big club stuffed with wool (don't forget that these were shearmen). Further, we might well suppose that he employed this club to belabour all who came within his range (don't forget that these were rude mechanicals). Is it beyond supposition, then, to imagine an enthusiastic actor bearing down with all the terror of this club upon the future dramatist?

Shakespeare never forgot the scene. Among the references to it in his plays I have noted the following:

What a Herod of Jewry is this! (Merry Wives, II, 1, 20.)

It out-herods Herod! (Hamlet, III, 2, 16.)

To whom Herod of Jewry may do homage (Antony and Cleopatra, I, 2, 28.)

Herod of Jewry dare not look upon you / But when you are well pleased (Ibid., Ill, 3, 3.)

Another scene in the same play that must have deeply affected the boy William is the slaughter of the children by Herod's soldiers, when the women fight with pot-ladles to repulse them. He refers to it in Henry V: As did the wives of Jewry at Herod's bloody-hunting slaughtermen (III, 3, 41.)

Was John Shakespeare sober when he summoned real actors to Stratford? Perhaps, madam. But we may doubt if he was sober when they left. Performances took place in the yard of one of the inns - either the Bear, or the Swan, or the Falcon. I have seen from the corporation records that it was during John Shakespeare's time as high bailiff that companies of London actors came to town for the first time - the Queen's Players, the best in the kingdom, and the Earl of Worcester's Players, not quite so good. (The first got nine shillings from Stratford by way of reward, the second only one shilling.)

Then, in 1577, the Earl of Leicester's Players came, under the direction of Mr James Burbage, complete with anchor on his thigh and other accoutrements. Don't get me wrong, gentle reader. Old Burbage was a perfectly sufficient actor in his day, though not a patch on his son Richard. The plays were all piss and wind in those early times, of course, compared with what was to come in the Nineties, and a lot of the early players won their reputations merely from an ability to strut and shout and point their codpieces in the general direction of the audience.

Still, no doubt little Willy was impressed. He may even have thought that his dreams were coming to town. Dressed in satin and lace, the players would enter Stratford by Clopton Bridge, advancing up Bridge Street. You can be sure there was a trumpeter. (In those days there were always trumpeters.) Picture that trumpeter, then, as the boy Shakespeare must have seen him: all in scarlet embroidered with gold, wheeling his horse about where Wood Street and Mere Street converge, whilst the drummer beside him beat his drum at the run.

The play was an anti-climax after that.

Sober or drunk, or somewhere in between, we can be sure that John Shakespeare showed the actors such courtesies as he could. And that both he and his son found their performances preferable to what otherwise passed for public entertainment in Stratford-upon-Avon - namely, the royal proclamations read and the sermons sometimes preached at the High Cross which stands at the north end of Bridge Street. (Stocks, pillory, and whipping-post are set near by so that the ears of those undergoing punishment might also be edified.)

I say that the play was an anti-climax after the drama of the procession, but that leaves out of account the fact that the least and crudest play has words in it, that plays indeed are made of words all through, and that language must already have been food and drink to the boy Shakespeare. Turn up the prologue to The Taming of the Shrew and you will see instantly how excited he would have been at the arrival of a troupe of travelling players. To read it is to be transported back to Stratford at the point where Leicester's servants must have turned his mind towards the theatre in its infancy. (Madam, I mean his infancy and the theatre's, for they shared a common period of nurture.) That prologue, by the by, brings us straight into the very neighbourhood where Shakespeare's mother was brought up. The characters are local men and women he knew well, and who are still remembered in Warwickshire: Marian Hacket, the fat ale-wife of Wincot, her servant Cicely, and the famous village drunkard, Christopher Sly. Sly describes himself as 'Old Sly's son of Burton Heath'. In fact, Burton Heath is Barton-on-the-Heath, the home of William's aunt Joan (one of those Lamberts I want to keep out of the story). For all I know, Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell were real people too. They sound as if they might have been. John Naps certainly was. You'll meet him in my next chapter.

I wonder what age William Shakespeare was when bored by bombast he conceived the great idea of one day there being a play that has a man in it who simply wanders on stage with his dog, and sits down on the ground, and takes off his shoes, and scratches his feet, and starts to tell us stories about the dog and his shoes and his troubles? 'This shoe is my father,' he says. 'No, this left shoe is my father,' he says. 'No, no, this left shoe is my mother,' he says. And it's all about as far away from out-herodding Herod as anyone could imagine.

Friends, no one before the late Mr Shakespeare put real true things like Launce and his dog on the stage. Forgive an old man his whimsey. Pickleherring likes to think that WS first entertained such dreams of the waking world with his father warm beside him in the press, perhaps at Coventry, perhaps at Stratford, but in whichever place with John Shakespeare sober.