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Mother's links with nobility...

Birth and death anniversary of William Shakespeare (23-04-1564 to 23-04-1616):

Gwen Herat

Shakespeare was the son of a glover but his mother, Mary Arden took great pride in having given birth to a highly successful playwright who in the future was going to be the genius of English literature and take the world by storm. Mary had eight children but only four survived her.

The Power of the Ardens

Mary had aristocratic connections. Her ancestors under the name of Turchill had fought well and lost little during the Norman conquest. They had changed their name to the great Midland forest of Arden when the Anglo-Saxon names became a badge of the conquest.

However, all the glory was a long way from the Tudoe Farmland at Wilcote which is three miles outside Stratford. The real wealth of the Ardens lay at Park Hall near Birmingham. These areas are often mentioned in his plays.

When her father died in 1556 Mary was only twenty one and the last of eight daughters to be married off. In his will Robert Arden left Mary a roof over her head, 60 acres of land and seventeen sterling pounds. His holdings included the Wilmcote quarry and the farm at Snitterfield where Shakespeare's father grew up. Probably, Mary Arden knew John Shakespeare from the annual Michaelmas feast given at her home for tenants.

This was a time of great slaughtering of poultry and one of the status symbols of Mary Arden's farmstead that housed a stone dovecote with pigeon holes for 657 birds.

The dovecote is still there but the 21st century sparrows dare go near it. Mary married John Shakespeare in 1557 and although he had no distant claims to aristrocacy, he was an established and successful tradesman with his own house and shop in Stratford. And he did not lack ambition either.

Immediately after their marriage and perhaps with a little help from Mary's seventeen pounds, John embarked on a municipal career which began with him being the ale-master for the borough that saw him end up as the high Bailiff of Stratford.

Successful

John's ambitions, did not end there when he became a successful alderman but his attention on the town's affairs and his general open carelessness caused him to neglect business. William was around thirteen when the tide of his father's affairs began to turn for the worse.

Mother Mary's land had to be mortgaged and this was her precious Wilmcote estate. Until 1596, that matters did not reach a climax by which time William Shakespeare had turned dramatist, producing plays like Merchant of Venice, Henry 1 and Henry 11.

William returned to Stratford and sorted out his father's affairs and used his influence in the small matter of a coat-of-arms.

This was a turning point on Mary Arden, wife of John Shakespeare, the gentleman. Today, the farmstead is well worth a visit. The house has a more lived-in feel, built of close timbered oak beams, much better than some of the other properties.

In this large cottage anything up to twenty servants would have slept downstairs, curled up by open fire. The tie-beams upstairs forced visitors to bend double on either side of the bedrooms that still have cubby holes in which Mary and her sisters would have been bundled up straight and tight and kept out of sunlight for six weeks of their lives.

As they grew up, the sisters relaxed and played in the lazy afternoons by the river Avon, feeding the black and white swans that have inspired William in his plays.

Obscurity

Following a short period of obscurity and now twenty years of age, William was enjoying a fair reputation with a well-know actors' company called the Lord Chamberlaine's who were known as the University Wits led by Nashe and his young company of humanists.

They had hardly recovered from Marlowe's sudden triumph when they faced a more dangerous rival who sprang from a different world. Marlowe was Master of Arts from Cambridge who arrogantly shattered the University wits who were now threatened from the world of actors and their accredited fine literature simply fell flat as William reshaped their works, adding them to the company's repertory.

So great was their danger that Greene advised his colleagues with Marlowe among them, to abandon playwright profession. So, when William returned to help his father whose business was not thriving and the wife he had rashly married, he was able to support their causes.

However, the young actor realised that the applause of the audiences could be won in other ways on the face of Kyd and Marlowe's intellect successes. A secondary education at a grammar school was simply not enough for the day. He well seemed ignorant of Masters and Bachelors of Arts of the two universities.

He had nothing behind him other than his natural genius that stunned the literary world of the day which in turn stunned his intellectual contemporaries.

Shakespeare had no theory of literature but injected it in no time as he wrote his plays. His talent was so flexible he was able to adapt itself to every genre and surface every note on which his plays were played, especially outdoor when he began his acting career with no proper stage.

There were some doubts about his early plays as they failed to appear in his First Folio. He probably retouched TITUS ANDRONICUS, a tragedy so full of vengeance which revealed an imagination more fertile than horros.

Its atrocious revenge and the horrible climax is something I had never read or seen anywhere and to imagine Shakespeare conceived such magnitude of horror, makes me wonder at times, 'is this really Shakespeare?'

He was blessed with an inexhaustible and almost excessive flow of words, never a repetition nor a scene involved twice over. How did he do it?

He was ambitious not only for the wits but for the court of wits as well. It was during this time that the University wits had given up on him. They were aware that he had a spectacular running start. But Shakespeare was different to them as he admitted openly that he was inspired by Lyly's witty dialogue and the triumphs of Kyd and Marlowe much to their embarrassment.

These were the writers who denounced and mocked him. Questioned his literary powers and his academics that never existed. Centuries later, as we celebrate this icon of literature, the world is indebted to the English language he polished, rephrased and put it on a pedestal as high as the heavens in stature.

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