Let me take you on a walk around Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare’s birthplace . . .

If coming to London from Sydney was a great pilgrimage, then Stratford was the Holy Grail itself. I walked the town for days, hugging myself with delight, seeking out every possible Shakespeare relic and trying to picture the place four hundred years ago. I lived here, in this fine old half-timbered house in High Street, opposite Harvard House and close to New Place. It belonged to Denne Gilkes, the RSC’s legendary voice and singing teacher. She must have been in her late seventies then—a large lady with a fine big nose, stumping along with her stick, swathed in a woollen cape and wearing a big shapeless beanie. A couple of us rented rooms in this rambling fifteenth-century house with its low beams, uneven floors and mess of books, cats and manuscripts. I had a casement overlooking the High Street with a leaded window and a rush candle. I had an electric light too, but for obvious reasons I preferred the rush candle.

Anna followed me to England six months after I arrived and when we were married in 1965 we lived for a couple of years with our dear friends Mike and Hilary Smith in their guesthouse, The White House on the Warwick Road. Our first daughter, Hilary, was born there. Later, when I was given a three-year contract with the RSC, we bought a little house in Bull Street, not far from the Holy Trinity Church. It was a humble enough little Georgian workman’s cottage, but I had a lot of fun whitewashing it and getting it ready for the birth of our second daughter, Lucy. This was in Old Town, but if we head back towards the town centre we come to the Market Place, where John Shakespeare plied his trade.

Of course it’s changed a lot since Shakespeare walked these streets, but from the eighteenth century people started to realise the town’s potential as a tourist Mecca and were a little more wary of demolition and redevelopment than they might otherwise have been. The great actor David Garrick was largely responsible for creating the Stratford mystique that led to a campaign to raise money to preserve the Shakespeare family home in Henley Street.

A few doors up from the Shakespeares’ house was the White Lion Inn, now the home of the Birthplace Trust. Across the street and up a bit was the official muck heap. The streets had open drains, and a contemporary woodcut shows a man with his horse and cart shovelling up the muck and conveying it to the muck heap. But as if to underline the primitive hygiene of the town, the same woodcut shows a woman emptying her chamber pot from her upstairs window onto an outraged passerby, while another woman defecates on the street, much to the delight of a greedy pig. John Shakespeare was fined for having a dunghill outside his front door. In constant fear of the plague, the town council vigorously enforced laws governing hygiene, far more successfully than they could hope to do in London.

This is where John Shakespeare brought up his family and conducted his business as a wool merchant and glover. He was a canny and successful businessman—somewhat too canny it seems, because he was fined several times for crooked dealing. He served as a town councillor and rose to the rank of Bailiff, equivalent to Mayor. Stratford, a centre of the Cotswold wool trade, was a busy and significant market town, and John Shakespeare was a prosperous, respected and important citizen—though he was later to fall from grace.

There is no reason to suppose that John and his wife Mary were uneducated or illiterate. They managed their business affairs very efficiently. They signed documents with their ‘marks’ rather than signatures, but that was commonplace. According to Thomas More, sixty per cent of Tudor England was literate. Look at the artisans in Midsummer Night’s Dream: they are all given their scripts to learn, even Snug the joiner, who admits he is ‘slow of study’.

While he was in office, John Shakespeare enjoyed considerable pomp and ceremony. Every Sunday morning he was escorted with his family by sergeants bearing maces to the Holy Trinity Church to sit in the front pew. He was decked out in his red mayoral robes and wore his alderman’s ring, which seems to have impressed itself on young Will’s memory; in Romeo and Juliet Mercutio describes Queen Mab thus:

Mercutio: She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes

In shape no bigger than an agate-stone

On the fore-finger of an alderman . . .

We can walk from John Shakespeare’s house in Henley Street, with its fine little orchard garden out the back, down High Street to the Edward VI Grammar School, still operating and still looking very much as it did in Shakespeare’s day, with its half-timbered walls and long low-ceilinged classrooms with desks and benches inscribed with the initials of generations of schoolboys. As Bailiff, John Shakespeare enjoyed the perk of a free education for his sons at this prestigious school and no doubt took advantage of it for William, Gilbert, Richard and Edmund.

One of young William’s tutors was a Welshman, Thomas Jenkins. In The Merry Wives of Windsor there’s a very funny scene of a young scholar called William being given a lesson in Latin grammar by his Welsh tutor, Sir Hugh Evans. It is sometimes claimed that an aristocrat such as Edward de Vere, the 17th Earl of Oxford, was the real author of Shakespeare’s plays. It is inconceiveable that any aristocrat could have written such a scene. Shakespeare mimics his tutor’s accent to perfection.

The standard of teaching at Stratford’s grammar school was very high and the teachers were all Oxford graduates. Students attended classes six days a week from six a.m. to five p.m. They had to study Latin, Greek, grammar, rhetoric and rudimentary science. They had to be very well versed in Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Seneca, Plautus and Plutarch. Students were taught to take a classical source, embellish it, expand upon it or turn it into verse. (This remained Shakespeare’s working method as a playwright.) They had to be able to debate in Greek and Latin and perform plays in both languages.

While Stratford’s grammar school was undoubtedly one of the best—the headmaster was paid twenty pounds a year, double that of Eton’s headmaster—discipline was severe. The master always had his birch rod handy and if you displeased him, he would order some of your stronger classmates to hold you down while he pulled down your breeches and whipped your backside. It’s not hard to see why ‘the whining schoolboy with his satchel and shining morning face creeps like snail unwillingly to school’.

It is sometimes falsely assumed that girls did not go to school, but that is not so. Witness Helena and Hermia reminiscing over their school days. Girls did not go on to grammar school, but attended petty school with the boys. Every good Protestant girl had to be able to read the Bible and her prayer book.

The family fortunes declined when Shakespeare was in his early teens. John Shakespeare was probably a closet Catholic, loyal to the old religion. He was fined numerous times for not attending Protestant church services, though whether this was because of religious belief or to avoid his creditors is unclear. He lost his position on the town council and his business went downhill. Documents bearing his name and professing his Catholic faith were found hidden in the rafters of his Henley Street house when it was being restored in 1757. John’s neighbour, the wool draper George Badger, was deprived of his office as alderman and imprisoned for his Catholicism.

Right next door to the school is the ancient Guild Chapel, which bears on its walls faint impressions of medieval frescoes. It’s a pity they’re so faint because they look like a pretty lively depiction of the Last Judgment, complete with grinning devils and naked sinners being boiled in oil. About eighty per cent of English medieval religious art was destroyed during the Reformation, including stained-glass windows, missals, frescoes, statuary and paintings. John Shakespeare, as Bailiff, was ordered to paint over the frescoes in the Guild Chapel and destroy all the icons of ‘Popery’. This must have taxed his heart sorely and might explain why the frescoes still exist: instead of being obliterated they were simply whitewashed over, so that at some future date they could be restored.

Across the road from the Guild Chapel is the site that should be the greatest Shakespeare shrine of all—New Place, the great house Shakespeare purchased when he made his pile in London. But alas, all that’s left is the garden. The house itself was demolished by its cranky and spiteful owner, Reverend Francis Gastrell, in 1759. It is said that he was sick and tired of daytrippers coming to the door and asking to see over the house.

A sketch of New Place survives and shows a very impressive frontage with five gables. We don’t know what state the house was in when Shakespeare bought it in 1597 for sixty pounds. It must have been a bit run-down because he spent a good deal on its restoration. It had a prime address, two orchards, two barns and two large gardens. The orchards yielded apples, quinces, pears and cherries and an extensive vineyard. It was no doubt regarded as a grand residence and his purchase of it was an ostentatious statement—the prodigal had returned, a wealthy gentleman with his own coat of arms, to expunge the family’s disgrace.

The garden of New Place is one of the most delightful spots in Stratford with its lawns, its little knot garden, herb beds, covered walk and ancient mulberry tree. Legend has it that the man himself planted the original tree, and for a couple of hundred years afterwards bits were nicked off it and made into souvenirs. If all those knick-knacks came from the same mulberry tree, it must have been the size of Windsor Castle.

At the corner of High Street and Sheep Street stood the town stocks, just outside the house of Shakespeare’s friend Hamnet Sadler. Sadler and his wife Judith were godparents to Shakespeare’s twins, who bore their names.

Not far out of town in Wilmcote is the farmhouse of the family of Mary Arden, Shakespeare’s mother. We don’t know much about her, except that she could claim connections to gentry. The Ardens were one of the oldest and wealthiest families in the country—the enormous Forest of Arden had all been theirs. But Mary was only a distant relation and by the time of Will’s birth the mighty forest was shrinking rapidly, being turned over to pasture as its timber went to feed the ironworks in Birmingham.

Still, this was where Will spent most of his childhood—playing at Robin Hood, lions and tigers, letting his imagination run free and picking up that vast compendium of country lore that distinguishes him from other playwrights. No other author knows as much or makes as many references to the changing seasons, flowers and foliage, animals, birds and insects, rustic folk and their superstitions.

He relives a lot of his childhood in As You Like It, that wonderfully dreamy and luxuriant pastoral. Although his source material, Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge, is set in the Ardennes in France, Shakespeare quite logically relocates the story to his own Forest of Arden. He retains a few of the French characters but throws in a few English ones, as well as snakes, a lioness, shepherds and outlaws who ‘live like the old Robin Hood of England and pass the time fleetingly as they did the Golden world’. This is no real forest—it’s the forest of Shakespeare’s childhood memories, a nostalgic and idealised Neverland. But Shakespeare the sceptic, the realist, is always just around the corner. He knows that life can’t all be idle as a dream, so he lets winter intrude into this pastoral idyll and has the shepherds complain that they are being driven off their holdings. Life can’t be perfect.

Like John, Mary Arden’s family also had strong ties to the old faith. After the aborted Gunpowder Plot of 1605 there was a vengeful crackdown on Catholics throughout Warwickshire, a Catholic stronghold. Edward Arden, a distant relative, was executed for treason and his head stuck on Tower Bridge. Jesuits, including Edmund Campion, were similarly punished. Some of Shakespeare’s tutors at Stratford Grammar had Jesuit connections; Thomas Hunt became a Jesuit and went to Rome, while Thomas Cottam, brother of Shakespeare’s tutor John, was executed along with Edmund Campion.

Coming back into town we can visit the house of Thomas Quiney, who married Judith, Shakespeare’s younger daughter. Thomas turned out to be a bit of a blackguard, got another woman with child and was forced to do public penance. Shakespeare’s disapproval was severe.

And at the other end of town we step into Halls’ Croft, the handsome dwelling of Dr John Hall, who married Shakespeare’s elder daughter, Susanna. She helped him out in the dispensary which is still part of the house. Hall was known to be something of a Puritan, which would not have endeared him to his father-in-law, but he may have been moderate in his views as there are no recorded tensions between them. In any case, his diaries show that he treated Protestant and Catholic alike, without prejudice.

We can walk west from here for about a mile, along paths that would once have been through fields, until we come to the picturesque house known as Anne Hathaway’s cottage. It is a substantial twelve-room house with a thatched roof and one of those enormous walk-in fireplaces that are such a feature of medieval and Renaissance houses. I can’t think of anywhere cosier to be on a winter’s night than around this fireplace. You would nibble on nuts, apples and comfits, sip your pot of ale or warm wine, and in the flickering firelight listen to all the favourite old tales of family lore or scare each other with stories of witches, ghosts and goblins. In The Winter’s Tale little Mamillius says:

A sad tale’s best for Winter.

I have one of sprites and goblins . . .

I will tell it softly;

Yond crickets shall not hear it.

Nowhere is an English domestic winter better depicted than in this delightful song from Love’s Labour’s Lost and its image of crab-apples roasting over the fire:

When icicles hang on the wall,

And Dick the shepherd blows his nail,

And Tom bears logs into the hall,

And milk comes frozen home in pail;

When blood is nipped, and ways be foul,

Then nightly sings the staring owl:

Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

When all aloud the wind doth blow,

And coughing drowns the Parson’s saw,

And birds sit brooding in the snow,

And Marian’s nose looks red and raw;

When roasted crabs hiss in the bowl,

Then nightly sings the staring owl;

Tu-whit! Tu-whoo! A merry note,

While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

The images are so precise and so simple. We feel we know Tom, Dick and Marian—and of course poor greasy Joan scrubbing the pot!

Young Will Shakespeare must have sat by this fireplace on many a long winter evening during his courtship of Anne Hathaway. The Shakespeares and Hathaways had been friends for generations, so there could be no surprise in Will wooing Anne—except for their age difference: he was eighteen and she was twenty-four. And when they married she was six months pregnant.

It may have been a shotgun wedding or maybe it was all above board; the church service was a formality, and a plight-troth or hand-fasting ceremony some time earlier would have been seen as sufficiently binding. Whatever the circumstances, it seems to have been a love-match that lasted both their lifetimes. Shakespeare provided well for his family, made regular trips home from London to Stratford, and the children kept on coming.

Anne died on 6 August 1623, aged sixty-seven, just three months before the First Folio—containing thirty-six of Shakespeare’s plays—was published. She asked to be buried next to her husband, who had died seven years earlier, and the inscription on her tomb, written by her daughters Susanna and Judith, reads:

Oh Mother, you fed me with the milk from your breasts and you gave me life. Woe is me then that I have to return a tombstone for such gifts! How dearly I yearn for a good angel to remove this stone and release into the light your soul, the image of the body of Christ. But my prayers are to no avail. Come quickly, oh Christ; set free my mother from her prison tomb and let her rise to the stars.

Assuming the marriage was a happy one, it is hard to fathom why Shakespeare left Stratford for London so soon after his wedding. One local legend focuses on Charlecote Manor and its owner, the magistrate Sir Thomas Lucy. The story goes that young Will, caught poaching deer on the estate, later wrote scurrilous verses about Sir Thomas and had to skip town. The story falls apart with the revelation that there were no deer at Charlecote in the late sixteenth century.

The real reason has to be Shakespeare’s passion and ambition for the theatre; besides, he had to earn a living to support his growing family. By marrying at eighteen he had barred himself from university or being formally apprenticed to a trade.

Groups of travelling players, including Leicester’s, Strange’s, Berkeley’s and Oxford’s, had visited Stratford at least seventeen times during Shakespeare’s boyhood. It was a good gig—a wealthy and sizeable town. As Bailiff, John Shakespeare was entitled to free seats—the best in the house—for himself and his family. Performances were in the Guild Hall underneath the schoolroom that exists today, though John Shakespeare was entitled to have a private performance in his home as well.

In 1681 John Aubrey reported of Shakespeare: ‘I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father’s Trade, but when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style and make a speech.’ This has been misunderstood to mean John Shakespeare was a butcher, which he was not; he was a glover and wool merchant and young Will may well have helped him out. ‘Killing the calf’ was a popular fairground entertainment—a shadow play performed behind a cloth. The neighbour’s anecdote is our first record of Shakespeare as a performer.

Young Will may also have seen performances of the Mystery Plays in Coventry, though these were phased out during the Reformation. When Hamlet talks of a ham actor out-Heroding Herod, it sounds as if Shakespeare had witnessed it—how else would that image spring to mind?

There were other shows, too: every year Stratford hosted the Pageant of St George and the Dragon, attended by much rowdiness and celebration. We don’t know how much theatrical talent or enthusiasm the adolescent Shakespeare displayed, but if he had an inkling of it (and he surely had), there was plenty to encourage it: the stories and poetry he studied at school, the excitement of the political and religious upheavals that were rocking the country, and the regular visits of theatrical troupes from London—colourful, swaggering ‘pomping folk’, glamorous but slightly disreputable. Their performances in the Guild Hall must have been a highlight of the year in this country town. There is some evidence that during such a visit an actor died and had to be replaced. This may have been the occasion of Shakespeare’s recruitment to the Queen’s Men—the chance of a lifetime.

Now we come to the riverside, the Avon, flowing under the stone bridge built in 1490 by Sir Hugh Clopton, the man who built New Place. And next to it is a rather ugly red-brick building, often compared to a biscuit factory—the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It was opened in 1932 to replace the old theatre destroyed by fire. Part of the old theatre is left—Victorian Gothic and a good deal more charming than its replacement. When I was with the company this old wing was used as the rehearsal room. It has since been very successfully transformed into the Swan—a workable version of an indoor Jacobean playhouse. Combined with The Other Place, just up the road, this means the RSC has a good variety of auditoria in the town.

Let’s walk along the riverbank. The parklands either side of the river are unspoiled and I recall many a lazy Sunday when we’d hire a rowboat and drift up the Avon, picnicking by the river. Over on the right is the cute little Black Swan Hotel, better known as the Dirty Duck, favourite hangout for actors and celebrity-spotters. And next door to that is a row of quaint cottages frequently rented out to actors who are here for the season. One was occupied by Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh when they were here doing Titus Andronicus, and it was here that Ralph Richardson gave them one of his famous fireworks displays—inside the house, unfortunately. We pass by The Courtyard Theatre, which started out as a tin shed used for rehearsals and experimental pieces. It is now a temporary home for mainstage productions while the main house undergoes renovation and also a thriving hub of new works—an expansion of the RSC’s repertoire. The summer’s day is hot and hazy and you breathe in the scent of the wallflowers in the window boxes of the cottages. They are a deep tawny red flecked with old gold and remind me of Beefeaters’ livery.

We come at last to the lovely thirteenth-century Holy Trinity Church and walk along the flagstone path through the mossy graves and headstones. There is one gravestone under my feet that I always try to avoid looking at. It bears the name Lucy, who was probably a member of the family of Charlecote Manor. But I inevitably think of my daughter Lucy and the gravestone makes me sad.

There are a number of interesting monuments in the church and some delightfully bawdy medieval carvings on the seats of the choir stalls—robust images of everyday peasant life. But the monument we’ve come to see is Shakespeare’s tombstone and memorial. Every Shakespeare-lover will be familiar with the lines of blunt doggerel on the stone which is set inside the communion rail in front of the altar:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forbear

To dig the dust enclosed here

Blest be the man who spares these stones

And curst be he that moves my bones.

I’ve modernised the spelling but the words still have an odd, chilling, pre-Reformation ring to them. Did Shakespeare write them? He could certainly be as blunt and direct when he wanted to. Or were they inscribed by the sexton or parson? Unlikely—they sound too stern, too personal compared to the more elaborate, formulaic inscriptions on the other graves. Why was Shakespeare so insistent? His message does echo Hamlet’s disgust and horror as he watches the gravedigger chucking out bones and skulls to make room for Ophelia:

That skull had a tongue in it, and could sing once. How the knave jowls it to the ground, as if it were Cain’s jawbone, that did the first murder! . . . and now my lady Worm’s, chapless and knocked about the mazard with a sexton’s spade. Here’s fine revolution an we had the trick to see it. Did these bones cost no more the breeding but to play at loggets with ’em? Mine ache to think on it.

Every few years bones were dug up and graves made ready for new occupants. The bones and skulls were kept for a while in the charnel house next to Holy Trinity and Shakespeare as a child must have developed a horrified fascination with the fate of these bones, echoed so strongly in Hamlet years later. Juliet expresses a similar horror:

Or hide me nightly in a charnel-house, o’er-covered quite with dead men’s rattling bones, with reeky shanks and yellow chapless skulls . . .

Standing in the graveyard of Holy Trinity you cannot help but make those connections. You can picture that scene in Hamlet with the gravediggers at their work, tossing up bones and skulls and carting them off to the charnel house. And beside these graves runs the river where, during Shakespeare’s boyhood, a young woman named Kate Hamlet drowned herself. Willow trees line the riverbank. How often did young Will, passing through the graveyard, brood on that scene? ‘There is a willow grows aslant a brook that shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream.’

Next to Shakespeare’s gravestone are those of Anne, Susanna and Susanna’s husband. It is rather remarkable to see the family interred side by side and in such a place of honour, especially since actors were still regarded as disreputable. Obviously in Stratford Shakespeare’s status as a player was outweighed by his status as a poet, a gentleman and a man of property. He may have never performed in Stratford but his reputation as a poet is immortalised in the verses on his memorial set into the wall above the gravestone:

Stay passenger, why goest thou by so fast,

Read if thou canst, whom envious Death hath placed

Within this monument Shakespeare: with whome,

Quick nature died, whose name doth deck this tomb,

Far more than cost sith all that he hath writ

Leaves living art, but page, to serve his wit.

Well, Shakespeare certainly didn’t write that—the verse is clumsy—but the meaning is reasonably clear. More elegant is the epigram, in Latin, above it:

In Judgment a Nestor,

In genius a Socrates,

In art a Virgil:

The earth covers him,

The people mourn him,

Olympus has him.

The monument itself is a handsome structure of marble and Cotswold stone with pillars and cherubs surmounted by a skull and the Shakespeare coat of arms. The sculpture of Shakespeare himself is no great work of art and is a source of disappointment to those devotees who long for an edifying and noble portrait. This rather pedestrian sculpture is blank and expressionless, but close enough in likeness to the engraving by Martin Droeshout at the front of the First Folio. Obviously the Shakespeare family, who paid for this fairly expensive monument, must have been satisfied enough with the portrait to let it pass. The Droeshout engraving is no great work of art either, but Ben Jonson attests to its being a good likeness. Obviously no artist could capture in paint or plaster the spark of life, the genius, the personality of Shakespeare. So Jonson tactfully and quite rightly advises us to ‘look not on his picture, but his book’.

He was a countryman who worked in the city, a teller of English folktales who was equally well-versed in the mythology of ancient Greece and Rome. His mind and world were poised between Catholicism and Protestantism, old feudal ways and new bourgeois ambitions, rational thinking and visceral instinct, faith and scepticism.

Jonathan Bate, Soul of the Age