SHAKESPEAREWAS ASTRATFORDPLAYWRIGHT

Myth

14Shakespeare is to Stratford-upon-Avon what Juliet is to Verona. Just asyou can visit Juliet’s balcony in Verona (see Myth 5), so you can visit thehouse in which Shakespeare was born, the houses in which his motherand grandmother were born, the school he probably attended, and thechurch in which he was baptized and buried. The difference is that Julietis a fictional character and her balcony a product of the Veronese touristindustry. (The tourist industry is not entirely self-serving; here it caters tothe desires of all those who wish a fictional character to have been real,the adult equivalent of children wanting their toys to come alive at night.)But Shakespeare really lived. He and his family have a tangible materialpresence in the parish and legal records of Stratford.

The medieval market town of Stratford (current population 25,000)has a thriving tourist trade thanks to its Renaissance playwright. Thereare six Shakespeare properties to visit plus a theater company dedicatedin name and practice to staging his works. It is ironic to think thatwhen an annual Shakespeare festival was first mooted in the nineteenthcentury, the initial response was an incredulous, ‘‘Who would want tovisit a small Warwickshire market town?’’1 Today the answer to thatquestion is: 3 million people each year.

Shakespeare left Stratford sometime in the late 1580s. How frequentlyhe returned to visit his wife and three children, whether he was able toattend the funeral of his son Hamnet in 1596 or that of his mother in 1608,is not documented. But he obviously continued to support his family;he was involved in Stratford investments or actions in 1598 (when hisStratford friend Richard Quiney wrote to him and visited him in London),in 1605 (when he bought a share in tithes) and 1611 (when he was one ofseventy citizens petitioning parliament for the improvement of the roads);

30 Great Myths About Shakespeare, First Edition. Laurie Maguire and Emma Smith.© 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Published 2013 by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

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he invested in Stratford property in 1597 (New Place) and 1602 (107acres in Old Town plus a cottage in Chapel Lane), retiring to Stratford (orcommuting from Stratford) sometime from 1608 onwards (in a Londoncourt case in 1612 he gave his address as Stratford-upon-Avon).

Stratford, its inhabitants, and its language make appearances in Shake-speare’s plays. One of his earliest plays, The Taming of the Shrew, openswith a drunken tinker, Christopher Sly, whose experiences are rooted inWarwickshire. In a dispute about his ancestry, he calls for support from aneighbor: ‘‘Ask Marian Hacket, the fat alewife of Wincot if she know menot’’ (Induction 2.20–1; Wincot is a village four miles outside Stratford).Later in his career, Shakespeare uses Warwickshire dialect. In Coriolanus(1608) a character admires the destructive capacities of Coriolanus’ son.She describes the cat-and-mouse game the young boy played with abutterfly, catching it and letting it go, before finally tearing it to pieceswith his teeth. ‘‘I warrant how he mammocked it’’ she says approvingly(1.3.67). ‘‘Mammock’’ is a Warwickshire noun meaning a torn remnant;Shakespeare converts it to a verb: to tear something to shreds.

The sixteenth century saw the expansion of the English language ashumanist scholars, translating and editing classical texts, imported Greekand Latin words to the English language (see Myth 21). Sir Thomas Moregave us Latin-derived words such as lunatic; Francis Bacon, a scientist,gave us skeleton and thermometer (both from Greek). Sir John Cheke,Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, was a lone voice of oppositionto this influx among his classically minded contemporaries. Shakespearesimply made up words (he uses nouns as verbs) and imported them fromWarwickshire. No one seems to have commented on this at the time andso his practice probably seemed reasonable during this period of linguisticinnovation. Thus, ‘‘language rose like a tide on all sides until the ghostof Sir John Cheke relinquished its Canute-like efforts.’’2

One of the most beautiful lyrics in Shakespeare is the funeral dirgefor Fidele in Cymbeline. This lyric lists items in the natural and politicalworlds that must fade and die, or, in the poem’s poetic euphemism,‘‘come to dust.’’ The poem begins:

Fear no more the heat o’th’sun,Nor the furious winter’s rages,Thou thy worldly task hast done,Home art gone, and ta’en thy wages.Golden lads and girls all must,As chimney-sweepers, come to dust.

(4.2.259–64)

‘‘Chimney-sweepers,’’ with its Victorian associations, seems a curiouslyinept image in the elegy; for a long time it perplexed editors. It was the

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twentieth century before researchers discovered that ‘‘chimney sweeper’’is Warwickshire dialect for ‘‘dandelion,’’ the weed whose mature flower(which resembles the chimney-sweeper’s brush) is a suitably fragile andevanescent symbol for this poem about transience.

In the same play Shakespeare pays tribute to a Stratford contemporaryand friend, Richard Field. The disguised Innogen, asked to name hermaster, improvises a French name, ‘‘Richard du Champ.’’ The translatedpun is multiply appropriate. Richard Field was a printer who specializedin foreign language books (see Myth 2). On many title pages he gave hisname and print shop in a translated or transliterated form appropriateto the language of the book he was printing: in Spanish, French, Latin,and (pseudo-)Welsh. Thus, we find ‘‘Ricardo Campello’’ in Spanish texts.Field was two years older than Shakespeare and was the London printerof Shakespeare’s first published works, the narrative poems Venus andAdonis (1593) and The Rape of Lucrece (1594). This book-ending ofShakespeare’s career with Field (as printer at the start and punningreference at the end) suggests that the men maintained a friendshipthroughout.

But if Shakespeare was and remained a Stratford man with Stratfordconnections (at home and within London) he also had a professional lifein London for two decades. What kind of affiliation did he have withthe city?

It is notable that Shakespeare was never asked to write a city pageant.City pageants were allegorical tableaux sponsored by livery companiesto celebrate the incoming Lord Mayor each year and, in 1604, the royalentry of the new king into London (James’ entry had been delayed becauseof the outbreak of plague in 1603). This was the moment for the city tocommission its heavyweight writers. George Peele, Ben Jonson, ThomasDekker, Thomas Middleton, and Thomas Heywood all contributed tocity pageants; Shakespeare never did (see Myth 17). The reasons forthis are far from clear. Birth outside London did not disqualify someone(Heywood hailed from Lincolnshire), nor did the lack of a universityeducation (Jonson did not attend university). Possibly membership of alivery company was an advantage (Jonson continued to pay his quarterlydues to the bricklayers’ company even when he was rising to successas a playwright), but not all pageant writers were freemen of a liverycompany. So Shakespeare did not, as far as we know, have the literarylinks with London through celebrating it in an annual pageant that manyof his contemporaries did.

Nor did he ally himself with the dominant comic genre of the late 1590sand early seventeenth century – city (London) comedy. City comedy is abranch of satire caricaturing the foibles and eccentricities of London’smiddle-class citizens; London is obviously an essential ingredient in this

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genre. The prologue to Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour (1598)proclaims: ‘‘Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known, / Nocountry’s mirth is better than our own.’’ William Haughton’s Englishmenfor my Money (1598) relies on the audience’s detailed knowledge ofLondon topography and landmarks. The plot concerns three daughterswho are wooed by three foreign and three London suitors; the Londonsuitors trick the foreigners by giving them directions which take them inthe opposite direction from that which they requested. Full of meaningfulgeographical references, the play is a veritable Elizabethan A–Z (a modernedition provides a map to enable non-Londoners to follow the plot). Theclosest Shakespeare came to writing in this satiric city genre is MerryWives of Windsor, a city comedy of c.1597 in which Falstaff is trickedby the merry wives of the title. But the play is set in Windsor – hardlythe typical city location of the genre. Shakespeare was not a Londonplaywright.

In another sense, of course, he was. All his plays were performedin London; arguably, they are all also set in London. He may call thecity Venice or Padua or Rome (republican or imperial) but the coloringis recognizably English. When shipwrecked in Illyria (modern Croatia),Twelfth Night’s Antonio recommends that Sebastian lodge ‘‘in the southsuburbs at the Elephant’’ (3.3.39). Southwark (London’s south suburbs)did indeed have an inn called the Elephant, at the end of Horseshoe Lane.This allusion may be more than just a local reference, constituting whatwe would now call ‘‘product placement’’: Antonio actually says ‘‘In thesouth suburbs, at the Elephant, / Is best to lodge’’ (3.3.39–40, our italics)and when Sebastian leaves him, Antonio reminds him: ‘‘To th’Elephant’’;Sebastian reassures him, ‘‘I do remember’’ (3.3.48). The reminiscences ofFalstaff and Justice Shallow in the English world of 2 Henry IV naturallyinclude London landmarks (the Inns of Court, Turnbull Street, the Tilt-yard) but they also include a known Southwark tavern (or brothel): ‘‘theWindmill in Saint George’s Field’’ (3.2.192). The penthouse (lean-to roofprojecting from a building) under which Borachio and Conrade conversein Much Ado About Nothing is both Italian and recognizably English,and they shelter for a familiar English reason: ‘‘it drizzles rain’’ (3.3.101).

Shakespeare lodged in London. For four years (between approximately1592 and 1596) his parish church was St Helen’s Bishopsgate (the churchis beautifully intact, having escaped both the Great Fire of London andthe Blitz, although it was partially damaged – and then restored – by anIRA bomb in 1992). Shakespeare performed on stage in London; herented rooms in Bishopsgate, in Southwark, and in St Giles Cripplegate;eventually he bought a house in London, just three years before he died,in 1613. But there are hardly any walking tours of Shakespeare’s London;no advertising of St Helen’s as Shakespeare’s church. Shakespeare has

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become for us a Stratford playwright, as Cole Porter’s lyrics to ‘‘Brushup Your Shakespeare’’ attest:

But the poet of them allWho will start ’em simply ravin’Is the poet people callThe bard of Stratford-on-Avon.

Part of the attraction of Stratford (see titles such as The Man FromStratford) is the romantic story of small-town boy makes good in the bigcity. It is Dick Whittington, a version of the rags-to-riches story. Someonewho went to Westminster School or was taught by William Camdenought to be successful, it is thought (this was Ben Jonson’s pedigree). (Ofcourse, that Shakespeare’s grammar-school education was equivalent istestimony to the pedagogical vision of the sixteenth-century humanists;see Myth 2.) But while it is true to say that Shakespeare was and remaineda Stratford man, we ought perhaps to separate Stratford man fromStratford playwright (‘‘the bard of Stratford-on-Avon’’). Shakespeare’splays are as neutral geographically (Stratford/London) as they are interms of religion (Protestant/Catholic) or politics (conservative/radical).

There is no doubt that Shakespeare the actor in London was the sameperson as the man from Stratford. In fact, as we saw in Myth 2, there isnothing in Shakespeare’s plays that cannot be attributed to an author whosimply had very close powers of observation. As we discuss in Myth 16,one of the reasons we have very little sense of Shakespeare’s personality(unlike that, say, of the flamboyant, iconoclastic, irascible Marlowe) isthat Shakespeare seems to have been the kind of person who sat in thecorner and watched people.

And he watched people in both Stratford and in London.

Notes

1 For a history of the town’s festival attempts from Garrick’s bicentenarycelebration onwards, see ‘The Borough of Stratford-upon-Avon: ShakespeareanFestivals and Theatres’, in A History of the County of Warwick, vol. 3:Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (1945), pp. 244–7; http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=57017 (accessed 10 July 2012).

2 George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Willcock and AliceWalker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936), p. xciii.