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　　Drawing on an exceptional combination of skills as literary

biographer, novelist, and chronicler of London history, Peter

Ackroyd surely re-creates the world that shaped Shakespeare--and

brings the playwright himself into unusually vivid focus. With

characteristic narrative panache, Ackroyd immerses us in

sixteenth-century Stratford and the rural landscape–the industry,

the animals, even the flowers–that would appear in Shakespeare’s

plays. He takes us through Shakespeare’s London neighborhood and

the fertile, competitive theater world where he worked as actor and

writer. He shows us Shakespeare as a businessman, and as a constant

reviser of his writing. In joining these intimate details with

profound intuitions about the playwright and his work, Ackroyd has

produced an altogether engaging masterpiece.

List of Illustrations

Author's note

Stratford-Upon-Avon

Ehe Wueen's Men

Vord Strange's Men

Ehe Earl of Pembrode's Men

Ehe Vord Ehamberlain's Men

Mew Place

Ehe Globe

Ehe King's Men

Blackfriars

Acknowledgements

Notes

Bibliograophy

Index

　　Peter Ackroyd was born in London in 1949. He achieved a Double

First at Cambridge and studied in America at Yale as a Mellon

Fellow. His first two publications were books of poetry; his first

biography was about Ezra Pound and his first novel about Oscar

Wilde. He is a successful novelist (drawing on history for most of

his settings) and has written biographies of T.S. Eliot, Dickens,

Blake and Thomas More. He has written and presented two TV series

for the BBC (Dickens and London) and is the author of

London: The Biography and Albion: The Origins of the English

Imagination.

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　　Chapter 1

　　There Was a Starre Daunst, and Under That Was I Borne

　　William Shakespeare is popularly supposed to have been born on 23

April 1564, or St. George's Day. The date may in fact have been 21

April or 22 April, but the coincidence of the national festival is

at least appropriate.

　　When he emerged from the womb into the world of time, with the

assistance of a midwife, an infant of the sixteenth century was

washed and then "swaddled" by being wrapped tightly in soft cloth.

Then he was carried downstairs in order to be presented to the

father. After this ritual greeting, he was taken back to the

birth-chamber, still warm and dark, where he was laid beside the

mother. She was meant to "draw to her all the diseases from the

child,"(1) before her infant was put in a cradle. A small portion

of butter and honey was usually placed in the baby's mouth. It was

the custom in Warwickshire to give the suckling child hare's brains

reduced to jelly.

　　The date of Shakespeare's christening, unlike that of his birth,

is exactly known: he was baptised in the Church of the Holy

Trinity, in Stratford, on Wednesday 26 April 1564. In the register

of that church, the parish clerk has written Guilelmus filius

Johannes Shakespere; he slipped in his Latin, and should have

written Johannis.

　　The infant Shakespeare was carried by his father from his

birthplace in Henley Street down the High Street and Church Street

into the church itself. The mother was never present at the

baptism. John Shakespeare and his newborn son would have been

accompanied by the godparents, who were otherwise known as

"god-sips" or "gossips." On this occasion the godfather was William

Smith, a haberdasher and neighbour in Henley Street. The name of

the infant was given before he was dipped in the font and the sign

of the cross marked upon his forehead. At the font the gossips were

exhorted to make sure that William Shakespeare heard sermons and

learned the creed as well as the Lord's Prayer "in the English

tongue." After the baptism a piece of white linen cloth was placed

on the head of the child, and remained there until the mother had

been "churched" or purified; it was called the "chrisom cloth" and,

if the infant died within a month, was used as a shroud. The

ceremony of the reformed Anglican faith, in the time of Elizabeth,

still favoured the presentation of apostle-spoons or christening

shirts to the infant, given by the gossips, and the consumption of

a christening cake in celebration. They were, after all,

celebrating the saving of young William Shakespeare for

eternity.

　　Of his earthly life there was much less certainty. In the

sixteenth century, the mortality of the newly born was high. Nine

per cent died within a week of birth, and a further 11 per cent

before they were a month old;(2) in the decade of Shakespeare's own

birth there were in Stratford 62.8 average annual baptisms and 42.8

average annual child burials.(3) You had to be tough, or from a

relatively prosperous family, to survive the odds. It is likely

that Shakespeare had both of these advantages.

　　Once the dangers of childhood had been surmounted, there was a

further difficulty. The average lifespan of an adult male was

forty-seven years. Since Shakespeare's parents were by this

standard long-lived, he may have hoped to emulate their example.

But he survived only six years beyond the average span. Something

had wearied him. Since in London the average life expectancy was

only thirty-five years in the more affluent parishes, and

twenty-five years in the poorer areas, it may have been the city

that killed him. But this roll-call of death had one necessary

consequence. Half of the population were under the age of twenty.

It was a youthful culture, with all the vigour and ambition of

early life. London itself was perpetually young.

　　The first test of Shakespeare's own vigour came only three months

after his birth. In the parish register of 11 July 1564, beside the

record of the burial of a weaver's young apprentice from the High

Street, was written: Hic incipit pestis. Here begins the plague. In

a period of six months some 237 residents of Stratford died, more

than a tenth of its population; a family of four expired on the

same side of Henley Street as the Shakespeares. But the

Shakespeares survived. Perhaps the mother and her newborn son

escaped to her old family home in the neighbouring hamlet of

Wilmcote, and stayed there until the peril had passed. Only those

who remained in the town succumbed to the infection.

　　The parents, if not the child, suffered fear and trembling. They

had already lost two daughters, both of whom had died in earliest

infancy, and the care devoted to their first-born son must have

been close and intense. Such children tend to be confident and

resilient in later life. They feel themselves to be in some sense

blessed and protected from the hardships of the world. It is

perhaps worth remarking that Shakespeare never contracted the

plague that often raged through London. But we can also see the

lineaments of that fortunate son in the character of the land from

which he came.

　　Chapter 2

　　Shee Is My Essence

　　Warwickshire was often described as primeval, and contours of

ancient time can indeed be glimpsed in the lie of this territory

and its now denuded hills. It has also been depicted as the heart

or the navel of England, with the clear implication that

Shakespeare himself embodies some central national worth. He is

central to the centre, the core or source of Englishness

itself.

　　The countryside around Stratford was divided into two swathes. To

the north lay the Forest of Arden, the remains of the ancient

forest that covered the Midlands; these tracts were known as the

Wealden. The notion of the forest may suggest uninterrupted

woodland, but that was not the case in the sixteenth century. The

Forest of Arden itself included sheep farms and farmsteads, meadows

and pastures, wastes and intermittent woods; in this area the

houses were not linked conveniently in lanes or streets but in the

words of an Elizabethan topographer, William Harrison, "stand

scattered abroad, each one dwelling in the midst of his own

occupying."(1) By the time Shakespeare wandered through Arden the

woods themselves were steadily being reduced by the demand for

timber in building new houses; it required between sixty and eighty

trees to erect a house. The forest was being stripped, too, for

mining and subsistence farming. In his survey of the region, for

his Theatre of the Empire of Great Britaine of 1611, John Speed

noticed "great and notable destruction of wood." There never has

been a sylvan paradise in England. It is always being

destroyed.

　　Yet the wood has always been a token of wildness and resistance.

In As You Like It and A Midsummer Night's Dream, in Cymbeline and

Titus Andronicus, it becomes a symbol of folklore and of ancient

memory. The great prehistoric forest of the Arden gave refuge to

the British tribes against the Roman invaders of their land; the

name of Arden itself derives from Celtic roots, meaning high wooded

valleys. It was the Celts who named the Ardennes in the region of

north-eastern France and Belgium. The same woods provided cover for

the Celtic people from the marauding Saxon tribes of the Hwiccas.

The legends of Guy of Warwick, imbibed by Shakespeare in his

infancy, tell of the knight's hermitic concealment in the forest.

His sword, used in his fight against the encroaching Danes, was

kept as a memorial in Warwick Castle.

　　So Arden was a place of concealment as well as of industry; it

was an area that outlaws and vagrants might enter with impunity.

That is why wood-dwellers were regarded with some disfavour by

those from more open habitations. Wood-dwellers were "people of

lewd lives and conversation";(2) they were "as ignorant of God or

any course of civil life as the very savages amongst the

infidels."(3) Thus the history of rebellion mingles with that of

savagery and possible insurrection. The history runs very deep, and

is inseparable from the land itself. When in As You Like It

Touchstone enters the wood, he declares that "I, now am I in Arden,

the more foole I" (761). Shakespeare's mother was Mary Arden. His

future wife, Anne Hathaway, dwelled in the outskirts of the forest.

His consciousness of the area was close and intense.

　　Beyond the Wealden, in the south of the county, lay the Fielden.

In Saxton's map of Warwickshire, issued in 1576, this region is

almost wholly devoid of trees except for those growing in groves

and small woods. The rest of the land had been changed to scrub and

pasture, with the arable territory sweeping across the hills. In

his Britannia William Camden described it as "plain champaign

country, and being rich in corn and green grass yieldeth a right

goodly and pleasant prospect." John Speed saw the view from the

same spot as Camden, on the summit of Edgehill, and noticed "the

medowing pastures with their green mantles so imbrodered with

flowers." It is the quintessential picture of rural England. It was

as much part of Shakespeare's vision as the forests beyond. It has

been surmised that the Fielden was rich and Protestant, while the

Wealden was poor and Catholic. This is the shorthand of popular

prejudice, but it suggests a context for that balancing of

oppositions that came so instinctively to Shakespeare.

　　The climate of Stratford was of a mild temper, protected by the

Welsh hills. There was much moisture in the land and in the air, as

the various streams running through Stratford itself would have

testified. The clouds from the south-west were known as "Severn

Jacks" and presaged rain. Only "the Tyrannous breathing of the

North," as Imogen remarks in Cymbeline, "Shakes all our buddes from

growing" (257-8).

　　But what, in the larger sense, has this landscape to do with

Shakespeare or Shakes...

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媒体评论

　　“Demystifies the man and the artist. . . . Expertly evokes the

townscape and landscape in and around Stratford, and the

corresponding mindscape that vividly merges the urban and the

rustic.” –

The New York Times

“William Shakespeare's London

comes to life with remarkable immediacy and clarity. . . .

Ackroyd's research is impressive.”–

San Francisco

Chronicle

“Ackroyd provides the sights and sounds (and smells)

of Stratford and London until you'd swear Shakespeare was right at

your elbow, sipping ale.”–

The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Captures the thrill of London and of a theater emerging, in a

‘hard and disenchanted age,’ to replace the church as the center of

communal spectacle.”–

The Wall Street Journal

“Creates a

tapestry of Elizabethan London so rich that you feel you've been

there.” –

Independent on Sunday

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