The Late Mr Shakespeare

Chapter Thirty-Five About water

Water and all its ways pleased William Shakespeare. You might almost say he was enchanted by it.

I think the Avon proved his best and sweetest tutor, and that the boy Will learnt more about poetry and the workings of the minds of men from watching that river in its different moods than he was taught by all his schoolmasters put together.

In summer he sauntered by on the river banks, observing the green current gliding with white swans upon it. In winter he watched it rage, and must often afterwards have noticed meadows not yet dry, / With miry slime left on them as he reports in Titus Andronicus.

The Avon knows flooding, in fact, both in winter and summer. Sir Hugh Clopton built his bridge at Stratford, towards the end of the fifteenth century, because before it people were refusing to come to market in town when the river was up, for fear that they might drown, and their cattle with them. Even this solid stone structure could not always hold against the fury of the flood. In July of 1588 - during that wild, wet, and windy summer provided by God to assist England in the defeat of the Spanish Armada - the bridge was broken at both ends by the roaring tide, imprisoning in the middle three men who were in the act of crossing it.

Water in flood is an image you will find all over Shakespeare. Sometimes these images are simple, picturing an irresistible force which will suffer nothing to stop it, but engluts and swallows all in its way, as he says in Othello. At other times he makes of the flooding river an emblem of rebellion, as when Scroop in Richard II (Act III, Scene 2), speaking of the uprising, compares things to

an unseasonable stormy day

Which makes the silver rivers drown their shores,

As if the world were all dissolv'd to tears,

So high above his limits swells the rage

Of Bolingbroke.

I don't think you will find as many river similes in any other of the dramatists, either Elizabethan or modern. But then I never acted much in other men's plays. I did once take the walking-on part of Helen of Troy in Marlowe's Dr Faustus, though, and I heard old Alleyn in Tamburlaine at the Rose, and I can tell you that I doubt if there's a river image in the whole of Marlowe. The sea was more in his line - there's plenty of that. As for Ben Jonson, all his river stuff is most perfunctory and of a general nature; it shows no sign of any direct observation.

I imagine the mills on the Avon were Shakespeare's delight. There is a great mill at Barford, and another at Alveston, and two at Hampton Lucy. All these lie upstream from where he lived. Then there is Stratford mill, just below the church where he was baptised and now lies buried. And downstream there are mills at Luddington and Binton and Welford and Bidford. There are also two mills on the Stour, which runs into the Avon about two miles below Stratford. And on the fast-flowing Alne that runs by Henley-in-Arden there's a mill at every mile, just about. No doubt the boy Will found a fresh mill-pond to bathe in every week of the year. No doubt but he also carved toy boats and floated them down the mill-leats.

There's not a lot to suggest that Mr Shakespeare liked fishing. His references to the sport are all rather ordinary - Claudio saying Bait the hook well; this fish will bite, that sort of thing. I think he preferred to stand and stare at the waters, without disturbing them with his own ambition.

Swimming's a different matter. I know he could swim. As a boy I like to imagine him plunging into the angry waters of the Avon, as did Cassius once with Caesar in the Tiber. Only a practised swimmer could have written, as he does in the second scene of the first Act of the Scottish play:

Doubtful it stood;

As two spent swimmers, that do cling together

And choke their art.

I don't claim he could swim like a fish like Ariel. But I was with him one night by the Thames when he tore off his clothes. 'Be contented,' I told him. 'It's a naughty night to swim in.' He liked that well enough to put it straight into the storm scene in King Lear.