Chapter Tuso

The Early Yeqrs,1564-lSBs

WILLIAM SHAKESPEAREWAS born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a s population of between three and five million - much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague beganto take a continuous,heavy toll. Now the number of living Britons was actually in retreat. The previous decade had seen a fall in population nationally of about 6 per cent. In London as many as a quarter of the citizenry may have perro ished. But plague was only the beginning of England'sdeathly woes.The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles,rickets, scunry,two types of smallpox (confluent and haemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery,and a vast, amorphous array of fluxes and rs fevers - tertian fever, quartian fever, puerperal fever, ship's fever, quotidian fever, spotted fever - as well as 'frenzies', 'foul evils' and other peculiar maladies of vague and numerous t1pe. These wr; of course, no respectersof rank. QueenElizabethherselfwas nearly carried offby was smallpox in 1562,two yearsbefore William Shakespeare born. 20 Even comparatively minor conditions - a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth - could quicHy turn lethal. Almost as dangerous as the ailments were the treatments meted out. Victims were purged with gusto and bled till they fainted - hardly the sort of handling that would help a weakenedconstitution. In such an age it 2i was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents. Many of the exotic-sounding diseasesof Shakespeare's time are known to us by other names (their ship's fever is our typhus, for in-

stance),but some were mysteriouslyspecificto the age. One such was the'English sweat',which had only recently abated after severalmur.loderous outbreaks. It was called 'the scourge without dread' becauseit was so startlingly swift: victims often sickened and died on the same day. Fortunately many survived, and gradually the population acquired a collective Immunity that drove the diseaseto extinction by the $Sos. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mer;s cifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigour. But no sooner had theseperils vanishedthan another virulent fever, called'the new sickness', swept through the country, killing tens of thousands in a series of outbreaks between 1556 and 1559. Worse, these coincided with calamitous, starving harvests in 1555 and 1556. It was a literally ro dreadful age. Plague,however, remained the darkest scourge.Just under three months after William's birth, the burials section of the parish register of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford bears the ominous words Hic in'Here begins plague',besidethe name of a boy named Oli cepitpesh's, /i ver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564was a vicious one. At least two hundred people died in Stratford, about ten times the normal rate. Even in non-plague years, 16 per cent of infants perished in England; in this lost year, nearly two-thirds did. One neighbour of the Shakespeares greatest achievement four children. In a senseWilliam Shakespeare's soin life wasn't writing Hamlet or the sonnets but just surviving his first year. We don't know quite when he was born. Much ingenuity has been expendedon deducing from one or two certainties and some slender probabilities the date on which he came into the world. By tradition, it ssis agreed to be z3 April, St George'sDay. This is the national day of England, and coincidentally also the date on which Shakespearedied fifty-two years later, giving it a certain irresistible symmetry, but the only actual fact we have concerning the period of his birth is that he was baptized on z6 April. The convention of the time - a consequence co ofthe high rates of mortality - was to baptize children swiftly, no later than the first Sunday or holy day following birth, unless there was a was born on 23 April - a compelling reason to delay. If Shakespeare Sunday in rb64 - then the obvious choice for christening would have been two days later on St Mark's Day, z5 April. However,some people rs thought St Mark's Day was unluclry and so, it is argued - perhapsjust a

touch hopefully - that the christening was postponed an additional day, to z6 April. We are luclry to know as much as we do. Shakespeare was born just at the time when records were first kept with some fidelity. 70 Although all parishes in England had been ordered more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1b38, to maintain registers of births, deaths and weddings, not all complied. (Many suspected that the state's sudden interest in information-gathering was a prelude to some unwelcome new tax.) Stratford didn't begin keeping records until as zslateas 1558 - in time to include Will, but notAnne Hathaway,his older-by-eight-yearswife. One consideration makes arguments about birth dates rather academic anyway. Shakespearewas born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian,which wasn't created until r58e, when Shakespeare s, was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 29 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May. Because Gregoriancalenthe dar was of foreign design and commemorated a Pope (Gregory XIII), it was rejected in Britain until L7Er,so for most of Shakespeare's life, and 13Syears beyond, dates in Britain and the rest of Europe were considaserably at variance - a matter that has bedevilled historians ever since. The principal background event of the sixteenth century was England's change from a Catholic society to a Protestant one - though the course was hardly smooth. England swung from Protestantism under Edward VI to Catholicism under Mary Tudor and back to Protestantcoism again under Elizabeth. With each change of regime, officials who were too obdurate or dilatory to flee faced painful reprisals, as when Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and colleagues were burned at the stake in Oxford after the Catholic Mary came to the throne in r55g. The event was graphically commemoratedin a book by csJohn Foxe formally called Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perilhus Days, touching Matters of the Church but familia known then and ever since as Foxes Book of Martyrs - a book that would provide succour to anti-Catholic passions during the time of Shakespeare'slife. It was also a great comfort to Elizabeth, as later editions raacarried an extra chapter on The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England', praising her brave guardianship of Protestantism during her half-sister's misguided reign (though in fact Elizabeth was anything but bravely Protestant during Mary's reign).

Though it was an ageof huge religious turmoil, and although many r0rwere martlned, on the whole the transition to a Protestant society proceededreasonablysmoothly, without civil war or wide-scale slaughter. In the forty-five years of Elizabeth's reign, fewer than two hundred Catholicswere executed.This compareswith eight thousand Protestant Huguenots killed in Paris alone during the St Bartholomew's Day mas,r0 sacre in 1572, and the unknown thousands who died elsewhere in France. That slaughter had a deeply traumatizing effect in England Christopher Marlowe graphically depicted it in The Mqssacre at Paris and put slaughter scenesin two other plays - and left two generations of Protestant Britons at once jittery for their skins and ferociously patrrs riotic.

Elizabeth thirtyyears was ; n"al""r, queen just overfive for "J years thetime of WilliamShakespeare's andshewouldreign at birth,
for thirty-nine more, though never easily. In Catholic eyes she was an rzooutlaw and a bastard. She would be bitterly attacked by successive Popes,who would first excommunicate her and then openly invite her assassination.Moreover, for most of her reign a Catholic substitute was conspicuously standing by: her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Because of the dangers to Elizabeth's life, every precaution was taken to prer2r serye her. She was not permitted to be alone out of doors and was closely guarded within. She was urged to be wary of any presents of clothing designed to be wom against her 'body bare' for fear that they might be deviously contaminated with plague. Even the chair in which she normally sat was suspectedat one point of having been dusted \,vith lra infectious agents. When it was rumoured that an Italian poisoner had joined her court, she had all her Italian servants dismissed.Eventually, trusting no one completely, she slept with an old sword beside her bed. Even while Elizabeth survived, the issue of her succession remained a national preoccupation throughout her reign - and thus r.rsthrough a good part of William Shakespeare's life. As Frank Kermode has noted, a quarter of Shakespeare'splays would be built around questions of royal succession- though speculating about Elizabeth's successorwas very>>much against the law. A Puritan Parliamentarian named Peter Wentworth languished for ten years in the Tower of lonuo don simply for having raised the matter in an essay.

Elizabeth was a fairly relaxed Protestant. She favoured many customary Catholic rites (there would be no evensongin English churches now without her) and demandedlittle more than a token attachment to Anglicanism throughout much of her reign. The interest of the Crown rr'r was not so much to direct people's religious beliefs as simply to be assured of their fealty. It is telling that Catholic priests when caught illegally preaching were normally charged not with heresy but with treason. Elizabeth was happy enough to stay \^'ith Catholic families on her progressesaround the country so long as their devotion to her as monrsaarch was not in doubt. So being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism,was another matter, aswe shall see. Catholics who did not wish to attend Anglican servicescould pay a fine. These non-attenders were known as recusants (from'a Latin word rssfor refusing), and there were a great many of them - an estimated fifty thousand in r58o. Fines for recusancywere only re pence until r58r, and in any case were only sporadically imposed, but then they were raised abruptly - and, for most people, crushingly - to tzo a month. Remarkably some two hundred citizens had both the wealth and the lra piety to sustain such penalties,which proved an unexpectedsource of revenueto the Crown, raising a very useful 45,ooo just at the time of the SpanishArmada. Most of the Queen's subjects,however, were what was known as 'church Papists' or 'cold statute Protestants' - prepared to support rrs Protestantism so long as required, but happy and perhaps even quietly eagerto becomeCatholicsagainif circumstances altered. Protestantism had its dangers, too. Puritans (a word coined with scornful intent in the year of Shakespeare's birth) and Separatists of various stripes also suffered persecution - not so much because of rzotheir beliefs or styles of worship as becauseof their habit of being wilfully disobedient to authority and dangerously outspoken. When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the*Queen'smooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alengon, his right hand was cut off. Holding up his bloody rzsstump and doffing his hat to the crowd, Stubbsshouted'God savethe
' It was an unlikely courtship. The Queenwas old enough to be his mother - she was nearly forty, he just eighteen - and the Duke moreover was short and famously ugly (his champions suggested hopefully that he could be made to look better if he grew a beard). It was only the Duke's death in rg84 that finally put an end to the possibility of marriage.

Queen!', fell over in a faint, and was carted off to prison for eighteen months.
from: Bill BRYSON,Shakespeare;Londonetc: HarperPerennial2008, p 22-29

Plays by William ShakesPeare

to Note: The following task requires access the Lrternet. plaF and the datesuhen they were I-.On the next pageyou wilt find the titles of someof Shakespearc's order andfind outwhatfupe of plays writien-but o1l*i*rdup.puttheminthe conectchronological they were: comeilies,histories, tragediesot ronlances If you fotlow steps2 to 5,fitling in the grid won't take you long. 2. Visit this website: e edu http :/ / daphne.palomar. / ShakesPare layoutbelout: You shoulil get the homepage

Canon 3. Click the button The Shakespeare tou uill find a grid with the dates when the plays a)ereuritten. are 4. Then aisit the websitehttptttwvrw.ulen.cour/Shakespe which looks like this:

When you click on plars on the menu on the lefr, you wilt find atl of Shakespeare's plays listed tntder the categories of Comedies. Histories, Tragedies and-&gmances.

Plays by Willian ShakesPeare

Plays (selection) The Comedy of Errors Harnlet Henry V King Lear Macbeth Measure for Measure The Merchant of Venice A Midsumner Nighfls Dream Mudr Ado About Nothing Othello Richard m Romeo and Juliet The Teurpest TweUth Night The Winer's Tale

Dates (in chronologicd otder) 1590 L592 L594 L595 1596 -L599 1599

r.500
1501 7604 1,604 1605 1505 1610 1611

Comedies

Histories

Thagedies

Romances