The family house in Henley Street can even now be seen; it is much changed, but still recognisable. It was originally two (or perhaps three) houses, each with a garden and an orchard. It was on the northern side of Henley Street, at the edge of the town, with its narrow rooms looking directly on to the thoroughfare; there was very little privacy. At the back of the house, beyond the garden, was an area known as the “Guild Pits” that was essentially a stretch of waste ground with a ramshackle road threading within it.
The house itself was erected at the beginning of the sixteenth century in the usual mode of oak timber frame with wattle-and-daub, and with a roof of thatch. The ceilings of the interiors were lime-washed, and the walls decorated with painted cloths or patterned all over with the use of wood-blocks. Its timbers were much lighter in colour than the “mock-Tudor” beams now characteristically stained black or dark brown. The plaster work would have been of light beige. The whole effect was of brightness or, at least, of lightness. The stark black and white of restored Tudor interiors is wrong; Shakespeare’s contemporaries used much paler colours, and more subtly graded shades. The wooden furniture was of the standard household type, as already exemplified by Robert Arden’s inventory — chairs and plain tables and joint-stools (so called because the separate parts were joined together). The floors were of broken Wilmcote limestone, covered by rushes. If there were “carpets,” they were used as covers for the table. There may have been a wall-cupboard to display dishes or plate. In Romeo and Juliet a servant calls out, “Away with the ioyntstooles, remove the Courtcubbert [cupboard], looke to the plate” (579-80).
It was a commodious house with six separate chambers, the lower and upper storeys connected with a ladder rather than a stairway. The hall was the principal room of the house, next to the front door and the cross-passage; there was a large fireplace here, and the Shakespeare family sat for their meals in front of it. There was a kitchen at the back of the house with its usual complements of a hand-turned spit, brass skillets and leathern bottles. Beside the hall was the parlour, a combined sitting room and bedroom where the bed itself was displayed as a prize specimen of household furniture. The walls here were heavily patterned and decorated. Across from the hall, on the other side of the passage, was John Shakespeare’s workshop, where the labour of stitching and sewing was undertaken by him and his apprentices. It was also a shop trading with the outside world, with a casement opening on to the street, and as such had a different atmosphere from the rest of the house. From an early age Shakespeare knew all about the demands of the public. On the floor above there were three bedchambers. Shakespeare would have slept on a mattress of rush, stretched on cords between the wooden frame of the bed. In the attic rooms slept the servants and the apprentices. It was a large house for a tradesman and reinforces the note of affluence in all his father’s affairs.
It was also a noisy house, a wooden sound-box in which a conversation in one part of the house could clearly be heard in another. The creaking of timber, and the noise of footsteps, would have been a constant accompaniment to household tasks. From Shakespeare’s dramas, too, come the unmistakable impressions of childhood in Henley Street. There are images of stopped ovens and smoking lamps, of washing and scouring, of dusting and sweeping; there are many references to the preparation of food, to boiling and mincing and stewing and frying; there are allusions to badly prepared cakes and unsieved flour, to a rabbit being turned upon a spit and a pasty being “pinched.” There are many references to what was considered to be women’s work within the home, to knitting and to needlework. But there are also images of carpentering, of hooping and of joinery; these were the activities of the yard or of the outhouses at the back of John Shakespeare’s property. No other Elizabethan dramatist employs so many domestic allusions. Shakespeare maintained a unique connection with his past.
That is why the natural world seems to impinge so directly upon him. The house in Stratford, like most others in the vicinity, had a garden and an orchard. The image of the garden occurs to him in many different contexts, whether that of the body or of the state. An ill-weeded garden is an image of decay. He knows of grafting and pruning, of digging and dunging. In Romeo and Juliet there is an image of a trailing plant being pressed down to the ground so that it will put forth fresh roots. This is not a scene, perhaps, that would have readily occurred to an urban writer. In all he alludes to 108 different plants. In his orchards hang apples and plums, grapes and apricots.
The flowers of his plays are native to the soil from which he came; the primrose and the violet, the wallflower and the daffodil, the cowslip and the rose, sprang up wild all around him. He need only shut his eyes to see them again. He uses the local names for the flowers of the meadow, such as Ophelia’s crow-flowers and Lear’s cuckoo-flowers; he uses the Warwickshire word for the pansy, love-in-idleness. He employs the local names of bilberry for the whortleberry and honey-stalks for stalks of clover. In that same dialect, too, a dandelion is a “golden lad” before becoming a “chimney sweeper” when its spore is cast upon the breeze. Thus, in Cymbeline (2214-15),
Golden Lads and Girles all must,
As Chimney-Sweepers, come to dust.
The words of his childhood surround him once more when he contemplates meadows and gardens.
No poet besides Chaucer has celebrated with such sweetness the enchantment of birds, whether it be the lark ascending or the little grebe diving, the plucky wren or the serene swan. He mentions some sixty species in total. He knows, for example, that the martlet builds its nest on exposed walls. Of the singing birds he notices the thrush and the ousel or blackbird. More ominous are the owl and raven, the crow and the maggot-pie. He knows them all, and has observed their course across the sky. The spectacle of birds in flight entrances him. He cannot bear the thought of their being trapped, or caught, or snared. He loves free energy and movement, as if they were in some instinctive sympathy with his own nature.
CHAPTER 7
But This Is Worshipfull Society
There was a world beyond the house and garden of Henley Street. Stratford remained a deeply conservative and traditional society. At its centre was the small nuclear family, like that of the Shakespeares, which was closely knit and self-sustaining. Yet family was linked to family, and neighbour to neighbour, in organic fashion. A neighbour was more than the man, woman or child who lived in the same street. A neighbour was the one to whom you turned for support, in times of distress, and the one to whom you offered help in return. A neighbour was expected to be thrifty, hard-working and reliable.
Many inhabitants of Stratford were connected by marriage and kinship alliances so that the town itself might be viewed as an extended family. Friends were often known as “cousins” so that, for example, Shakespeare is noticed as “cousin Shakespeare” by those with whom he seems to have had no blood relationship. This also encouraged the ties of patronage and local community. In his capacity as mayor John Shakespeare was “father” to the town as well as to his more immediate progeny. The inheritance of place was a very powerful one. It encouraged a deep sense of settlement and of possession.