Peter Ackroyd - Shakespeare

The words and phrases of Shakespeare’s childhood are recalled in his writing. He uses “fap” to mean drunk, “third-borough” for constable, and “aroynt” for leave. There is also the matter of pronunciation. The sound of the language spoken by Shakespeare in his native county was nearer to Saxon than to Norman French, as if its original powers had not been dispelled by the culture of the conquerors. You would have heard the Saxon origins in words pronounced as “blewe” and “deawe,” “emonges” and “ouglie,” “togyther” and “woork.” Extra consonants were added to lend emphasis to certain words, in “chardge” and “mariadge,” “priviledge” and “pidgeon,” “sutch” and “druncke.” They appear, too, in “whote” and “womand,” “dogge” and “dinne,” “drumme” and “sinne.” The language of Shakespeare’s region was thicker and more resonant than that of London. Vowels were lengthened, too, in “hond” and “husbond,” “tyme” and “wyde,” “fairnesse” and “wantonesse.” A similar variousness and richness are found in “marrie” and “wittie,” “dutious” and “outragious,” “heretique” and “reumatique.”

This was the language that Shakespeare spoke as a child. It was immediately recognisable as a country accent, and he may have endeavoured to lose it on his arrival in London. His characters are, after all, engaged in a perpetual act of performance and re-invention. But there was then no “standard” English. He used his Stratford idiom in his writing, for example, although the fussiness of successive printers and editors has curbed and flattened his native sonority. Any standardisation or modernisation of Shakespeare’s language robs it of half its strength; a shadow is not as dim and veiled as a “shaddowwe,” a cuckoo does not sing like a “kuckow,” and music is not as enchanting as “musique.” In the old language we can still hear Shakespeare talking.

Shakespeare understood the country very well, with what Edgar in King Lear calls its “low fermes / Poore pelting villages, sheep-coates and milles” (1190-1), but his debt to the Stratford of his childhood is particular and profound. He knew the channels that drew off the Avon floods and the conies that come out of their burrows after the rain, the fragile mulberries and the “Tradesmen singing in their shops.” The fact that, all his life, he invested in the lands and properties of the immediate neighbourhood testifies to the hold Stratford exerted upon him. It was the site of his earliest ambitions and expectations and, as we shall see, he wished to restore the fortunes of the Shakespeares there through his personal achievement. He wanted to reassert his father’s name among his fellow townsmen. Stratford was also the permanent home of his family, and the place to which he returned at the end of his life. It remained the centre of his being.

In the late sixteenth century , children were customarily trained by means of strict discipline. A boy would take off his cap before addressing his elders and would wait upon his parents at table, standing rather than sitting during the meal. He rose early and recited the morning’s prayers; he washed his hands and face, combed his hair, and then went downstairs where he knelt for his parents’ blessing before breakfast. He would commonly address his father as “sir,” although “dad” does appear in one of Shakespeare’s plays. “Dad” is in fact the formal Welsh word for father, and therefore part of the border patois that Shakespeare knew very well.

Twentieth-century sociologists have emphasised the severity of the sixteenth-century household, where patriarchal authority was dominant and where repression or punishment was the most convenient means of dealing with children of either sex. There must be room for doubt in such a broad analysis, however, and Shakespeare’s plays themselves are often concerned with the failure of parental authority. The children can become “unruly” or “unbridled”; the rod of birch is “more mock’d than fear’d.” Shakespeare’s children are in any case observant and serious, sharp-eyed and often sharp-tongued; they demonstrate respect and obedience, but there is no hint of fear or subservience. In his drama, too, father and son are generally placed in amicable or idealised relationship. So we may prefer the testimony of the dramatist to the speculations of the sociologist.

If there is one aspect of a writer’s life that cannot be concealed, it is childhood. It arises unbidden and unannounced in a hundred different contexts. It cannot be denied or misrepresented without severe psychic disturbance on the surface of the writing. It is the very source of the writing itself, and must necessarily remain undefiled. It is of the utmost interest, then, that the children of Shakespeare’s plays are all equally precocious and acute, possessing great confidence in themselves. They are sometimes “wayward” and “impatient.” They are also oddly aware and articulate, talking to their elders without any sign of strain or inferiority. In Richard III one of the little princes, soon to be despatched to an unhappy end, is described (1580-1) by his malevolent uncle as

Bold, quicke, ingenious, forward, capable,

He is all the mothers, from the top to toe.

It has become customary to place the young Shakespeare in the conventional Elizabethan world of childhood, engaged in games such as penny-prick or shovel-board, harry-racket or barley-break; in his own plays Shakespeare mentions football and bowls, prisoner’s base and hide-and-seek, as well as the rural games of muss and dun in the mire. He even mentions chess, although he does not appear to know its rules. But it is likely that he was in certain respects an odd child. He was precocious, too, and observant; but he was one who stood apart.

There can be no doubt at all that he devoured books. Much of his early reading comes back in his drama. Has there ever been a great writer who did not spend a childhood in books? He alludes to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur , so beloved by Mistress Quickly, and the old English romances of Sir Degore and Sir Eglamour and Bevis of Southampton. Master Slender lends Alice Shortcake The Book of Riddels and Beatrice refers to The Hundred Merry Tales . Some of his earlier biographers concur that he possessed a copy of William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure and Richard Robinson’s translation of Gesta Romanorum , the legends of which form the staple of some of his plots. For similar reasons the young Shakespeare has been pictured turning the pages of Copland’s Kynge Appolyne of Thyre , Hawes’s Pass Tyme of Pleasure and Bochas’s The Tragedies of all such Princes as fell from theyr Estates . There were also the folk stories and the fairy tales of his neighbourhood, given so long a lease on life in his late plays.

Mary Arden’s own role in Henley Street was of course central. With the help of a servant she was obliged to wash and to wring, to make and to mend, to bake and to brew, to measure the malt and the corn, to tend to the garden and the dairy, to spin with her distaff, to clothe the children and to prepare the meals, to distil the wines and dye the cloths, to “dresse up thy dysshe bord, and set al thynges in good order within thy house.” 1As a girl growing up on the Arden farm she would have in addition been accustomed to milk the cows, to skim the milk, to make butter and cheese, to feed the pigs and the poultry, to winnow the corn and make hay. She would have been expected to be practical and capable.