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Shakespeare’s life and world
From plague in the family to young love, Simon Callow explores Shakespeare's early life as the son of a glove-maker in Stafford-upon-Avon.
We have to lay our cards on the table when we speak of Shakespeare’s life: in reality, apart from a scrap or two here or there, we have nothing remotely like precise and revealing documentation of the man himself. We have the bare facts (some of which are, admittedly, a little imprecise); we also know a great deal about the lives of Shakespeare’s contempt-rares and neighbors. Between these two, the particular and the general, a vivid if incomplete picture of Shakespeare’s life – if not of his personality – emerges. We know, for example, who his parents were. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we know what Shakespeare's parents were: John Shakespeare was the son of a tenant farmer from Chesterfield, a couple of miles outside of the market town of Stafford-upon-Avon, to which he moved at the age of 20. He was a glove-maker and leather-worker, a specialist within the rag trade – an important business for the highly clothes-conscious Elizabethans, who lived under the exigent sumptuous laws that prescribed appropriate garments for each class. John Shakespeare seems to have prospered; before long he was working his way up through local government, starting as the town ale-taster (nice work if you can get it). When he was in his mid-twenties he married Mary Arden, whose father had been John’s landlord; the Arden's, a distinguished local family – famously Roman Catholic at a time when Catholic was not a good thing to be – were definitely a cut above the Shakespeare's socially. But John was a coming man, the business thriving and his activities extending in various directions, not all of them strictly legal.
From plague in the family to young love, Simon Callow explores Shakespeare's early life as the son of a glove-maker in Stafford-upon-Avon.
We have to lay our cards on the table when we speak of Shakespeare’s life: in reality, apart from a scrap or two here or there, we have nothing remotely like precise and revealing documentation of the man himself. We have the bare facts (some of which are, admittedly, a little imprecise); we also know a great deal about the lives of Shakespeare’s contempt-rares and neighbors. Between these two, the particular and the general, a vivid if incomplete picture of Shakespeare’s life – if not of his personality – emerges. We know, for example, who his parents were. Or perhaps it would be better to say that we know what Shakespeare's parents were: John Shakespeare was the son of a tenant farmer from Chesterfield, a couple of miles outside of the market town of Stafford-upon-Avon, to which he moved at the age of 20. He was a glove-maker and leather-worker, a specialist within the rag trade – an important business for the highly clothes-conscious Elizabethans, who lived under the exigent sumptuous laws that prescribed appropriate garments for each class. John Shakespeare seems to have prospered; before long he was working his way up through local government, starting as the town ale-taster (nice work if you can get it). When he was in his mid-twenties he married Mary Arden, whose father had been John’s landlord; the Arden's, a distinguished local family – famously Roman Catholic at a time when Catholic was not a good thing to be – were definitely a cut above the Shakespeare's socially. But John was a coming man, the business thriving and his activities extending in various directions, not all of them strictly legal.
The first child, Joan, died almost immediately, killed by the plague, to which the second similarly succumbed. So William was the first child to survive – a son, at that, and an heir. Shortly after his birth there was yet another savage visitation of the plague, but it passed the Shakespeare's by in their little house in Henley Street. We know nothing of how the Shakespeare's felt about all of this, but it is hard to believe that little William did not hold a special place in their affections. Much, no doubt, was expected of him. And his relationship with his mother might have been particularly intense: the staggeringly high rate of in-feint mortality had in no way accustomed them to loss or made them immune to grieving. They prized their children all the higher as a result of it and deeply mourned the ones they lost. ‘Never, never, / Must I behold my pretty Arthur more’, laments Lady Constance, heartrendingly, in King John.
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