The Facts About Shakespeare | Page 2

The individual has had no such opportunity for fame in
England before or since. The nineteenth century, which saw the
industrial revolution, the triumphs of steam and electricity, and the
discoveries of natural science, is the only period that equalled the
Elizabethan in the rapidity of its changes in ideas and in the conditions
of living; and even that era of change offered relatively fewer new
impulses to individual greatness than the fifty years of Shakespeare's
life.
[Page Heading: Tudor England]
Shakespeare's England was an agricultural country of four or five
million inhabitants. It fed itself, except when poor harvests compelled
the importation of grain, and it supplemented agriculture by grazing,
fishing, and commerce, chiefly with the Netherlands, but growing in
many directions. The forests were becoming thin, but the houses were
still of timber; the roads were poor, the large towns mostly seaports.

The dialects spoken were various, but the speech of the midland
counties had become established in London, at the universities, and in
printed books, and was rapidly increasing its dominance. The
monasteries and religious orders were gone, but feudalism still held
sway, and the people were divided into classes,--the various ranks of
the nobility, the gentry, the yeomen, the burgesses, and the common
people. But changes from one class to another were numerous; for
many lords were losing their inheritances by extravagance, while many
business men were putting their profits into land. In spite of
persecutions, occasional insurrections, and the plague which devastated
the unsanitary towns, it was a time of peace and prosperity. The
coinage was reformed, roads were improved, taxes were not
burdensome, and life in the country was more comfortable and secure
than it had been. Books and education were spreading. Numerous
grammar schools taught Latin, the universities made provision for poor
students, and there were now many careers besides that of the church
open to the educated man.
Stratford, then a village of some two thousand inhabitants, somewhat
off the main route of traffic, was far more removed from the world than
most towns of similar size in this day of railways, newspapers, and the
telegraph. With the nearby country, it made up an independent
community that attended to its own affairs with great thoroughness.
The corporation, itself the outgrowth of a medieval religious guild,
regulated the affairs of every one with little regard for personal liberty.
It was especially severe on rebellious servants, idle apprentices,
shrewish women, the pigs that ran loose in the streets, and (after 1605)
persons guilty of profanity. Regular church attendance and fixed hours
of work were required. The corporation frequently punished with fines
(the poet's father on one occasion) those who did not clean the street
before their houses; and it was much occupied in regulating the
ale-houses, of which the village possessed some thirty. Like all towns
of this period, Stratford suffered frequently from fire and the plague.
Trade was dependent mainly on the weekly markets and semi-annual
fairs, and Stratford was by no means isolated, being not far from the
great market town of Coventry, near Kenilworth and Warwick, and
only eighty miles from London.

[Page Heading: Sports and Plays]
Shakespeare's England was merry England. At least, it was probably as
near to deserving that adjective as at any time before or since. There
was plenty of time for amusement. There were public bowling-greens
and archery butts in Stratford, though the corporation was very strict in
regard to the hours when these could be used. Every one enjoyed
hunting, hawking, cock-fighting, bull-baiting, dancing, until the
Puritans found such enjoyments immoral. The youthful Shakespeare
acquired an intimate knowledge of dogs and horses, hunting and
falconry, though this was a gentleman's sport. The highways were full
of ballad singers, beggars, acrobats, and wandering players. Play-acting
of one kind or another had long been common over most of rural
England. Miracle plays were given at Coventry up to 1580, and bands
of professional actors came to Stratford frequently, and on their first
recorded appearance received their permission to act from the bailiff,
John Shakespeare (1568-1569). There was many a Holofernes or
Bottom to marshal his pupils or fellow-mechanics for an amateur
performance; and Shakespeare may have seen the most famous of the
royal entertainments, that at Kenilworth in 1575, when Gascoigne
recited poetry, and Leicester, impersonating Deep Desire, addressed
Elizabeth from a bush, and a minstrel represented Arion on a dolphin's
back. The tradition may be right which declares that it was the trumpets
of the comedians that summoned Shakespeare to London.
In the main, life in the country was not so very different from what it is
now in the remoter places. Many a secluded English village, as recently
as fifty years ago, jogged on much as in the sixteenth century.
Opportunity then as now dwelt mostly in