Shakespeare. Bill Bryson

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       Chapter Two The Early Years, 1564–1585

      WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE WAS born into a world that was short of people and struggled to keep those it had. In 1564 England had a population of between three and five million – much less than three hundred years earlier, when plague began to 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 perished.

      But plague was only the beginning of England’s deathly woes. The embattled populace also faced constant danger from tuberculosis, measles, rickets, scurvy, two types of smallpox (confluent and haemorrhagic), scrofula, dysentery, and a vast, amorphous array of fluxes and 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 type. These were, of course, no respecters of rank. Queen Elizabeth herself was nearly carried off by smallpox in 1562, two years before William Shakespeare was born.

      Even comparatively minor conditions – a kidney stone, an infected wound, a difficult childbirth – could quickly 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 weakened constitution. In such an age it was a rare child that knew all four of its grandparents.

      Many of the exotic-sounding diseases of Shakespeare’s time are known to us by other names (their ship’s fever is our typhus, for instance), but some were mysteriously specific to the age. One such was the ‘English sweat’, which had only recently abated after several murderous outbreaks. It was called ‘the scourge without dread’ because it 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 disease to extinction by the 1550s. Leprosy, one of the great dreads of the Middle Ages, had likewise mercifully abated in recent years, never to return with vigour. But no sooner had these perils vanished than 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 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 incepit pestis, ‘Here begins plague’, beside the name of a boy named Oliver Gunne. The outbreak of 1564 was 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 year, nearly two-thirds did. One neighbour of the Shakespeares lost four children. In a sense William Shakespeare’s greatest achievement in 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 expended on deducing from one or two certainties and some slender probabilities the date on which he came into the world. By tradition, it is agreed to be 23 April, St George’s Day. This is the national day of England, and coincidentally also the date on which Shakespeare died 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 26 April. The convention of the time – a consequence of the high rates of mortality – was to baptize children swiftly, no later than the first Sunday or holy day following birth, unless there was a compelling reason to delay. If Shakespeare was born on 23 April – a Sunday in 1564 – then the obvious choice for christening would have been two days later on St Mark’s Day, 25 April. However, some people thought St Mark’s Day was unlucky and so, it is argued – perhaps just a touch hopefully – that the christening was postponed an additional day, to 26 April.

      We are lucky to know as much as we do. Shakespeare was born just at the time when records were first kept with some fidelity. Although all parishes in England had been ordered more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1538, 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 late as 1558 – in time to include Will, but not Anne Hathaway, his older-by-eight-years wife.

      One consideration makes arguments about birth dates rather academic anyway. Shakespeare was born under the old Julian calendar, not the Gregorian, which wasn’t created until 1582, when Shakespeare was already old enough to marry. In consequence, what was 23 April to Shakespeare would to us today be 3 May. Because the Gregorian calendar was of foreign design and commemorated a Pope (Gregory XIII), it was rejected in Britain until 1751, so for most of Shakespeare’s life, and 135 years beyond, dates in Britain and the rest of Europe were considerably 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 Protestantism СКАЧАТЬ