All the World’s a Stage: The Life of William Shakespeare - A Sketch Novel

By Miklós Rónaszegi

The familiar figure of Shakespeare, the world’s greatest dramatist, belongs to universal culture. Little is known of his life, more of his plays, yet countless analyses and explanations of them have been written by distinguished experts on literature and aesthetics. Rónaszegi has no wish to join the ranks of these scholars and has instead chosen an unusual format. In his own words, he has written ‘a sketch novel’, albeit one that is filled with erudition, perceptiveness, appraisal, and fascinating information. Every one of Shakespeare’s plays contains a reference to the theatre and acting, the most famous being the lines from As You Like It: ‘All the world’s a stage.’ But it
was not acting itself that inspired the playwright, nor was he absorbed in the minutiae of everyday theatrical life – Shakespeare’s great insight is that the whole of human life is nothing more than endless posturing and posing. One moment we are masking our personalities and concealing our intentions, while the next we are acting in character or responding to the expectations of those around us. We perform not to an audience but to ourselves and to one another. This, then, is the real secret that Rónaszegi uncovers, while modestly acknowledging in the course of his brilliant narrative that no one will ever be able to unravel the mystery of Shakespeare’s genius.

www.ronaszegimiklos.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Aug 16, 2023
• ISBN: 9798376276181

Book preview

William Shakespeare.

No one can make out his secrets, they are kept by time.

Consider the thousands of library shelves and the millions of books on them. How many of these are about him alone! How many scholars have for centuries assaulted the citadel of secrets!

All to no purpose. He is the prince of dramatists. The immortal among the gods. The drama has its giants – none greater than him has yet been born.

Thirty-seven plays, two narrative poems and a hundred and fifty-four sonnets keep the secrets.

He was a dramatist. Actor and dramatist. Anyone, therefore, that really wants to understand his works must not merely read them, but also see and hear them, because only the living word brings out their true beauty, only performance on stage reveals their profundity. From them we learn all manner of things about life and the human spirit – but about their creator, almost nothing.

We know terribly little about Shakespeare’s life. Even the fragmentary biography is constantly being reduced, because as the years go by and painstaking, strict research strips away data one by one – this is an error, that is a forgery, a third is mere hearsay – a good part of what remains is only ‘possible’, only ‘perhaps’ and ‘as yet unproven’.

Thus even painstaking research keeps the secrets.

The tomb too keeps them. What could do so better? The poet was buried in his native town of Stratford-upon-Avon – his remains lie in the church there. Above the tomb is a bust, and on the plinth four lines of verse can be seen:

Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare

To dig the dust enclosed here.

Blessed be the man that spares these stones,

And cursed be he that moves my bones.

The naive verse of a novice writer. It is scarcely credible that the poet of the sonnets wrote it.

Time has gone by, and nowadays no one believes in the power of curses any more – yet no one has come forward to move aside the stones of the grave.

Indeed, why should they? What can there be in the grave? Dust and ashes.

Yet we can never be satisfied. We never stop wanting to know about the writer, to reveal the man behind the works.

Because the greatest secret is the man.

So let imagination come to our aid! Reality and imagination. Let us set out the colourful mosaic of Shakespeare’s life in tessellae of facts certain and uncertain alike, and fill in the gaps with bright shards from historical events, lives of his contemporaries and trivia of the past.

Let us try to call the man to life!

What follows is not an academic work, because we ourselves shall frequently weave the plot – out of both proven facts and statements that seem misguided – as seems plausible. Nor is it a novel, because defective though the received biography may be it often gives way to imagination. This book is no more than a rough sketch taking shape before our eyes.

YOUTH

William Shakespeare, English actor and dramatist, was born on 23 April 1564 in the small town of Stratford-upon-Avon in central England. His father was a well-to-do landowner and businessman, a master glover. His mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of the prosperous farmer Robert Arden from nearby Wilmecote. At that time, Queen Elizabeth I ruled in England over five million subjects. She also ruled the souls of the faithful, as the head of the Anglican Church was not the pope of Rome but the ruler of the country.

It is an established custom to begin the biographies of the great with their childhood. Will the later calling be in evidence in the wailing infant? Did an old woman bend over its cradle and prophesy, and did its mother have a strange dream in which she saw her son surrounded by angels, his face radiant? Well now, for what infant do old women not foretell fame and glory, and what mother’s heart does not throb in anticipatory fashion at such times?

The infant that came into the world on 23 April 1564 in a room of the house in Henley St. was ‘the third child, but the eldest of the boys’.

A son at last! exclaimed the midwife. A son at last! Master John Shakespeare too must have exclaimed, because a boy-child was a guarantee that the upwardly mobile Shakespeare family would be continued and not become extinct with a succession of daughters.

The upwardly mobile Shakespeare family…

The story of the poet must be started with the story of his father. What do we know about him? Only that he was a man of increasing wealth, and that means a process. A tenant farmer in the Stratford region, he had previously traded in grain, wool and skins, then bought land, became a member of the Stratford guild of glovers, and finally married well.

And I would scarcely believe that he married for love, because in the countryside – like kings in their courts – people did not marry for love. That lived only in the imagination of poets and strolling players. What marriage meant in Stratford was simply that two families were looking to the further development of their affluence: the level of wealth, the size of the dowry and of the inheritance to be expected were everything… love would come later.

Marriage to Mary Arden must have done some good to John Shakespeare’s coffers. Her dowry consisted of fifty acres and a house, and because a good marriage also meant standing in society the up and coming burger of Stratford was elected first a beer-taster, and then, by the time that William was four or five years of age, first deputy mayor and eventually mayor.

At first, however, the greatest pleasure of all was that a boy-child had arrived in the Shakespeare house, where four apprentices cut out and sewed gloves in the shop that opened onto the street. And let it not be thought that these gloves were only for protection against the cold, or were mere fashion accessories. There was a custom, happily acquired by the bourgeoisie from those of higher rank: a pair of fine gloves made an excellent present, gladly accepted on the occasion of a marriage.

John Shakespeare was very pleased with this custom, and also with the splendid way that things were turning out. Since he had made a good marriage the town councillors held him in higher esteem, and since they did that he had more credit and more customers… and what was more there was the boy, who howled bitterly all day long in his cradle – but let him howl, let the ‘wa-wa’ sound forth, that was the way a baby should be, crying.

It was important that it was a boy, who would carry on the family name and its property…

We can imagine Master John Shakespeare as a man balding early, brisk of speech, rather unbending and stern, a typical ‘awkward peasant’. The puritan bourgeoisie of England that rose in rebellion a century later came from such stock. Mary Arden, by contrast, was perhaps a softly spoken, cheerful creature, the very model of the medieval wife, who, even among the better off, remained her husband’s loyal servant, the principal domestic in the house. And she was surely religious too, the church-going sort, her entire life and every thought permeated by the words of the psalms, the Bible stories and her interpretations of them.

And so the boy grew and had a golden life, spoiled until his other brothers were born. Even then, however, he found new playmates and wandered all day long in the big garden, in the orchard and beside the river Avon, where he shot at birds with his sling and imagined himself the biblical David slaying Goliath, or making off with his friends into the wooded hills of the region, there perhaps to dream of meeting the fairies or weird demons of folk-tale, and, of course, the famous figures of legend – the Green Knight, the knights of King Arthur’s round table, or even the renowned Robin Hood, the most marvellous outlaw that ever lived.

All this went through his head time and time again as the crowd of children threw pebbles or played ninepins – the ancestor of our skittles – in the depths of the garden. Will did not yet wander very far alone, because there were not only lovely fairy-tales but also stories of witches. Yes indeed, real live witches who stole small children, curdled cows’ milk, or came in the night to perch on their victims’ chests and suffocate them. Oh, those heart-stopping, nightmarish thoughts. If in the night he thought of witches or the devils of hell he would curl up tightly into a ball, pull the eiderdown right over him, and listen to the terrified beating of his heart until he went to sleep.

If, however, fear came over him in the light of day, in the empty room, he had nowhere to hide. Then he had not even the strength to run away. He would stand there petrified, perhaps by the sideboard, and stare fixedly at the big linen chest by the wall opposite, the top of which… seemed to open, and… the talecloth seemed to float out…

At such times a real escape would come if his mother or his old nurse opened the door and found him:

Oh, you naughty boy, after something to eat again! Don’t you know that the stomach is the devil’s temptation?! Oh, Mother of Christ, pray for him! The Redeemer suffered death on the cross for our sake, but this child… Oh, good God!

Then Will would run a long way, because even if he had not been reaching for the sideboard the suspicion could have earned him a box on the ear. The sideboard was in fact family’s second treasury, full of ‘temptations of the flesh’ such as pepper, cloves, ginger, nutmeg, figs, raisins, dates and almonds, with the wondrous tastes of faraway lands, and, of course, full of bottles of perry, cider, and strong beers. This last John the master glover drank with profound enthusiasm – not, surely, for sinful pleasure but by way of official duty.

Will therefore fled, but his terror did not subside. There were all sorts of things that alarmed the little boy in those early days… Oh, not only fairytales in which fairies, demons, wizards and witches seethed in frightening confusion. There were also true stories, on hearing which his heart came into his mouth.

When I was a little girl I once went to London, his nurse told the tale. "It’s ever such a big city. The river’s a hundred times bigger than the Avon, and on it there are ships as big as Holy Trinity church here in Stratford. Ah, I saw Anne Boleyn,[1] the mother of our queen, being executed. The executioner wore a great black hood, you could only see his wicked eyes gleaming, then he brought his sword down on the queen’s slender neck. And that lovely head rolled… well, they say that when it was placed in the coffin it still winked at the king."

Why should we not believe that such stories and the like were told on winter evenings in the rooms of country houses, when the flickering fire on the hearth cast people’s enlarged shadows on the walls?

And that Bloody Mary, she was a terrible queen! someone would go on, perhaps the gardener, perhaps Master John. At the end of Bridge St. in Stratford there was a burning at the stake. Perhaps you remember old father Peter, who died of a stroke at midsummer? His father was burnt. It was terrible to see the way the old man writhed and cried out as the flames ate into his flesh, he was a faithful Protestant and a very good man… Terrible it was…

Ah, it must have been terrible to witness, but to imagine it was even more horrible, because reality has bounds while the imagination has none. Imagination made executions, torturings and burnings so fearsome that the whole house seemed to resound with the screams of the long dead.

At such times little Will would listen, eyes staring, mouth trembling, and then suddenly would burst into tears and, to his father’s real annoyance, howl aloud.

"Be quiet, you wailing bagpipe! You’re no son of mine. Is a real Shakespeare, a Lanceshaker,[2] like this?"

He’s still a little boy, a little boy, Mary muttered, and suddenly did not know whether to console Will or to cuddle the smallest.

Don’t be afraid, you baby! the master laughed. If you trust in God, work honestly, have a house and land, you needn’t be afraid of anything.

But the child was still frightened. Why should he not be, there was so much to frighten little children in those days. He was often overcome by a strange palpitation, trembling and ashamed, because he was afraid that his friends would make fun of him for it. They used to threaten each other a lot, clenching their fists and holding them to one another’s faces:

Smell death! they shouted, and laughed aloud.

Will too would shout Smell death!, while swallowing hard to clear the lump that came to his throat.

According to the Stratford minute books, strolling players visited the town almost every year. They paid their respects to the mayor, requested permission and support, and if they obtained both they quickly erected their stage in some alehouse or in the courtyard of an inn. They performed morally uplifting plays for the edification of the peasantry and the young. In 1568 ‘The Queen’s Players’ received five shillings in support from the town. In 1573 the Earl of Leicester’s actors came to Stratford: the mayor paid them six shillings and eightpence.[3] Other companies performed too, of course, and all received more or less assistance.

John Shakespeare – for he is still the hero of the ‘novel’ – was by now mayor of Stratford, and as I see in my mind’s eye his face and figure, as I quote to myself his jerky, slightly pompous, rapid speech, I see in him a curious but understandable change. The face of the master glover is beaming with satisfaction. He has attained what he has long struggled for: over two decades he has amassed much wealth, his coffers are full; he has a house too, and is now thinking of attempting what the aristocracy and the big landowners have been doing for a good century: he will lease the best grazing in the area from Sir Thomas Lucy and there produce his own wool; previously he has only traded in it.

Naturally, there is no proof of all this. Nor of the fact that sinful self-satisfaction got the better of Master John, nor of what commercial enterprises he dreamed up. It is, however, all ‘conjecturable’ and ‘conceivable’, as it is conceivable that on all occasions he read out to the strolling players the stern injunction:

Every actor, man-at-arms and wandering ballad-singer that is not in the service of any nobleman of the kingdom, and wanders not being possessed of the permission of at least two magistrates, shall be regarded as a vagabond, ne’er-do-well and beggar and so judged.[4]

We know, Master Shakespeare, replied the actors. Please trust us, because, see, here is the licence which will prove who our patron is.

The mayor nodded graciously and ordered that the ‘Queen’s Company’ should receive eight shillings’ support if they performed to general satisfaction and the edification of faithful souls.

Naturally, not everyone was glad to welcome the actors. There were a good few among the councillors who saw in this threadbare, noisy crew the accomplices of the devil and the deceiving angels of sin. Many, therefore, did not look with favour on the mayor’s decision, although they understood that the Queen’s Players could not simply be sent packing.

And so the little town prepared for the show, as did the Shakespeare family, the head of which became most excited. The children danced around, talking all sorts of rubbish about what would happen, what would it be like, would the actors have pigs’ heads, and would there be any chasing on the edge of the platform again. Little Will too was excited like the rest, though it was the first time that he had understood what was happening – such a young child could scarcely remember the play of a year before.

The gently smiling master’s wife, however, was scandalised, as usual, and like the puritan councillors in the Town Hall she too persisted in saying that all actors were the works of the devil, and that all that blustered on the stage were a pack of thieves and beggars.

That’s enough, Master John gestured in dismissal. Whatever a pack of ne’er-do-wells they are… just remember, these people are in favour with great men, and are bearers of all manner of news. Are you aware that thirty thousand Dutch Protestants have fled over the Channel to escape the papist Spaniards? Great danger threatens over there. Let it not come here.

That’s what Your Honour said last year too, when the news was brought that the Queen of Scotland (God preserve her) had married Lord Darnley.

John Shakespeare shook his head in annoyance.

You mix everything up. Lord Darnley did not marry Queen Mary Stuart last year… if you remember, he was killed in the year of Our Lord 1567. Understand? Killed… once again you’re letting me down by mixing everything up as you always do.

Little Will said nothing. He looked at his father and mother wide-eyed. He knew very well that this was not a serious argument, and that his father was only cross because his mother was not informed on ‘the affairs of the world’ and always mixed up what to say to anyone. A lot of people came into the shop. One was a secret Catholic and worshipped some Roman Antichrist.[5] Another, on the other hand, considered Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth to be ruler of all faithful souls, while a third (although having sworn allegiance to the Anglican Church, and not paying the fine that burdened overt Catholics) was no admirer of the queen and declared that Her Majesty was inclined towards the papists and that no higher lord might govern Christ’s faithful people, only the community of the faithful. Those then were the Puritans, whom everyone mocked because they were dreadfully pious people, for ever talking a pack of nonsense… His father, however, was equally pleasant to all and could speak to each in his own language.

His mother, on the contrary, smiled all the time but wailed and complained in a manner that did not match that smile at all, which no one understood.

All that little Will saw was that customers and callers looked strangely at his mother. It was only later that he learned that Puritans and Anglicans alike thought that she was a covert papist. Papists and Puritans, however, thought that she was an informant for the Anglicans.

You’re letting me down, letting me down again, grumbled his father, and then, in order nevertheless to finish what he had been saying, he went on: It’s true that last year the Dutch tailors came over, but Her Majesty settled them in Norwich, and required each of them to engage an English manservant. The actors say that if cloth is going to be made here in future, the price of wool will go up. Hoho, you see, I guessed right!

That is, it would be good, when the time came, to lease that certain sheep-pasture, indeed, perhaps even to buy it along with another if he were now to mortgage some of his land and the house.

Little Will hardly understood any of this. All that still sounded in his ears was that actors were