Read Shakespeare: A Life for Free Online

on either the
21st, 22nd, or 23rd, but the day is still unknown. It is no more
likely that his birth-date was Sunday, 23, than Saturday, 22 April
1564.
    As a young woman who had known
the death of her infants Mary Shakespeare must have been apprehensive
that month. She perhaps lay on a bed supported by the same simple,
cross-cross system of ropes used in most Elizabethan homes, and heard
advice from servants or housewives in their stiff, practical white
bodices of 'durance' -- that stout cloth that appears in Stratford's
records typically as 'boddies of durance'. 9
    Christening was a festival with apostle-spoons and a white
chrisomcloth, basins, ewers, and towels at the parish church. And yet
the
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chances of a boy baptized in time of plague were not good. If a baby
died, the town's bell might be sounded, as when the clerk records a
'ringing of ye grete bell' for three small children. 10 A boy who survived would wear swaddling-clothes until he was ready for a little russetcoloured dress.
    Hic incepit pestis'
    In June plague broke out at Leicester, and soon after at Coventry. On
11 July, when the vicar wrote 'Hic incepit pestis' in his burials
register, the plague was at Stratford. It burst into the town's
centre, two houses from Ely Street where Thomas Deege lost an
apprentice and then his wife Joanna. (The transmitting flea settled on
black rats living in wattle-and-daub houses, in thatch or walls.)
Plague was then 300 yards from Henley Street. John Shakespeare, as an
officer of the council, did not leave town, and as a leading burgess
in the Stratford Corporation he was unlikely to allow his wife to
leave.
    At these times, fires were lit
in streets. Windows were sealed; doors admitted no visitors. William
in infancy probably knew a hot, airless house -- and yet work carried
on in the town. The fright of Henley Street neighbours would have been
evident, and the fear of a young mother -- with her first-born son to
protect -- must have been considerable. In any case, death came close
to the Woolshop. The terror of an epidemic was greater because people
knew it was infectious -- but no one could say why it crept into one
house and not another. What was clear, in August, was that the
infection had spread out from Deege the weaver's into High Street and
Ely Street and beyond; it had seemed to fly over the Avon, not
bothering with the bridge. Shakespeare's echoing in Timon of Athens of the belief that plague is caused by poison 'in the sick air' ( IV.
iii. 110-11) corresponds to his town's known experience.
    Nearly two-thirds of the dead in the summer and autumn were women. 'Comfort's in heaven', Shakespeare would write in Richard II ,
and 'nothing lives but crosses, cares, and grief' ( II. ii. 78-9) --
but the fact is that in a well-organized town, women gave comfort
nursing the sick. Plague bacilli of the bubonic variety are not
transmitted from one
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human being to another, but a related variety of plague, which could
have been present, is highly contagious. If one inhaled a few droplets
of sputum sneezed or coughed into the air by a victim of pneumonic
plague one's death was nearly certain. Victims of plague in its more
common variety, in which the bubonic bacilli reproduce quickly and
spread throughout the whole biological system, knew much pain. Some
did survive, after noting the buboes (or swellings) in armpit or neck,
and seeing on the skin 'God's tokens' of orange, reddish, or darker
spots. 11 At risk, the council met four times in crisis, and levied its own
members for funds to help the stricken. On 30 August burgesses and
aldermen met in the Gild garden -- on wooden benches -to avoid
contagion.
    By September, one out of
every fifteen people in the parish was infected. Entire households
began to perish. Working as acting chamberlain, John seems to have
called in clerical help from outside. Later in the autumn, fewer died,
but Dixon of the Swan lost two