As I walked out from Henley Street one morning… (part one)

Steps towards a psychogeography of Shakespeare's Stratford

The building on Henley Street known today as Shakespeare’s Birthplace is in some ways misnamed. It was his Stratford home until a month after his 33^rd birthday: much of his life happened here, and certainly much more than is conveyed by those first few choking cries of breath in April 1564. William brought Anne Hathaway back here in the last weeks of 1582 after their marriage; Anne was already three months pregnant with their first child Susanna. All three of his own children were born here; his only son, Hamnet, died here, aged 11 years and six months, in August 1596.

The Stratford antequarian Edgar Fripp – in his other life a vicar who roared through the sleepy Warwickshire lanes of the 1920s and ’30s on a motorbike, vestments flapping – had, in his 1928 Shakespeare’s Stratford, a plausible answer to the question of where in the property the young married couple lived: the back of the house. “To this day [the back] makes an independent little residence,” he wrote. “It has its separate kitchen, its separate staircase, and its private entrance; and from its upper story winds a small supplementary stairway into the ‘solar’ of the front house, affording space there for an additional bed-chamber.” Pevsner dismissed this part of the building with a single word: “over-restored”.

Whatever the structural arrangements, with two families the house must have been lively. William’s youngest brother Edmond, later an actor himself, was only a few days past his third birthday when he became uncle to Susanna. With Shakespeare’s twins Hamnet and Judith being born in February 1585, there would have been four children aged under five in the house, plus a ten-year-old and two teenagers. Shakespeare would never have known it without pre-teen children, and almost always with at least two under-tens. There were two exceptions: the thirteen months between the death of his youngest sister Anne and the birth of Edmund, and again after the death of Hamnet. Perhaps it is coincidence, but Shakespeare’s family moved within a year of the latter.

What is most striking about the birthplace today is the absence of what should bind such a domestic space together: intimacy, that sense of a familial home, anything that might capture the inconsequential daily stuff of life, the fleeting tempers and delights, the sorrows and dreams, the childhood toys, food cooling on the table, the froth of talk. It’s a foolish hope, and one which Stratford can hardly be blamed for leaving unfulfilled. And yet whenever I think of Shakespeare’s childhood, I think of a passage from The Terrors of the Night, Thomas Nashe’s strange disturbed “discourse of apparitions”, written in 1593. Nashe, born on the cold bleak Suffolk coast at Lowestoft in November 1567, pauses in his argument to remember how:

I have heard aged mumping beldams as they say warming their knees over a coal scratch over the argument very curiously, and they would bid young folks beware on what day they pared their nails, tell what luck everyone should have by the day of the week he was born on; show how many years a man should live by the number of wrinkles on his forehead, and stand descanting not a little of the difference in fortune when they are turned upward and when they are bent downward; ‘him that had a wart on his chin’, they would confidently ascertain he should ‘have no need of any of his kin’; marry, they would likewise distinguish between the standing of the wart on the right side and on the left. When I was a little child, I was a great auditor of theirs, and had all their witchcraft at my fingers’ ends, as perfect as good morrow and good-even.

Such autobiography is rare in the Elizabethans, particularly where childhood is concerned; but even now you can sense how the vivid force of the memory pressed itself on Nashe here as he wrote. What wisdoms, what songs and tales, you wonder – all those things that seemed too obvious and known to write down – did Shakespeare hear and absorb, as children do, unthinkingly before the family hearth at Henley Street, or out among his extended family at Wilmcote, Snitterfield, Ingon and elsewhere.

How then to recover something of the messy, jolting reality of daily experience, its comforts and surprises, to unearth a little more of the forgotten hobby-horses and fallen giants, the things of obvious, everyday life – which were, however, being changed beyond all measure over the course of Shakespeare’s lifetime? Some of these, of course, are things of the senses, and it’s important to remember how different the Elizabethan experience of life was, even in something as basic and human as smell, compared to our own. Our sense of it is dominated by notions of cleanliness and purity, of odorlessness as an ideal, behind which I suppose lies the antiseptic smart of puritan morality. Even the word ‘smell’ is often, perhaps usually, pejorative; it is the poor relation of the senses. When we think of smells in Tudor towns and cities, then, we tend to do so with distaste, focusing with almost a superior, near-pleasurable disgust on the open sewers, the blood and offal of the shambles and the street butchers.

It seems appropriate then that the first record of Shakespeare’s father John in Henley Street is a 1552 fine for building and maintaining a midden outside his house. But our revulsion means that we often overlook the inverse truth: the olfactory assault that Elizabethans endured was partnered by an exquisite sense of its potential delights. This is Francis Bacon setting out a hierarchy of scents in an ideal garden: roses “are fast flowers of their smells”, he writes, likewise bays, rosemary and sweet marjoram, but

that which above all others yields the sweetest smell in the air is the violet, especially the white double violet, which comes twice a year, about the middle of April and about Bartholomew-tide. Next to that is the musk-rose; then the strawberry leaves dying, with the most excellent cordial smell. Then the flower of the vines… Then sweetbriar; then wall-flowers, which are very delightful to be set under a parlour or lower chamber window. Then pinks and gilliflowers, especially the matted pink and clove gilliflowers. Then the flowers of the lime tree. Then the honeysuckles, so they are somewhat far off… those which perfume the air most delightfully, not passed by as the rest, but being trodden upon and crushed, are three – that is burnet, wild thyme, and water-mints.

It is a whole area of experience, perhaps even an aesthetic, we have mostly lost.

Then there were the flowers and plants – “whatsoever the season of the year afforded to be green” says the London antequarian John Stow – brought inside to perfume the chambers and other living spaces throughout the year, and not just for pleasure. “[H]ave in your windowes good store of rwe and herbe of grace,” a worried Edward Alleyn, on tour with Lord Strange’s players and writing from Shrewsbury, advised his wife back in plague-ridden London on 1 August 1592, “hoping in god thought the siknes beround about you yett by his mercy itt may escape your house.”

Even the flooring, reeds gathered from water-meadows and riversides in early autumn, offered up scents and other, more elusive, sensations. Shakespeare doesn’t say what a roomful of fresh-cut rushes might have smelled like; he seems more concerned with the texture underfoot, the hushed step. A couple of times he associates rush-strewn floors with wantonness: “She bids you on the wanton rushes lay you down / And rest your gentle head upon her lap,” reports Glendower to Mortimer in 1 Henry IV; “let wantons light of heart / Tickle the senseless rushes with their heels” says Romeo. I suspect the underlying idea is unruliness, the overlapping chaos of loose flooring kicked, scuffed and scraped all day, but there is a suggestion of the sensuality of the experience, too, the softness.

It wasn’t just rushes that carpeted the floors, either: roses and violets were cut and strewn, too, especially on the holy days of spring and summer. Nosegays scented the corners; sprays of herbs were dried to deck the rooms in winter. Weddings in particular brought armfuls of flowers into the house, wrote Michael Drayton: scents of lemon and apple with the white-flowered balm and the chamomile; mint and musk and maudlin, a delightful name for what is most likely sweet yarrow; germander, burnet and ‘cool’ fennel; ‘clear’ hyssop and costmary, sometimes used, like hops, to flavour ale; thyme and meadow-wort and the tansey’s tart pungent ferny leaves.

But not all uses were so pleasant. In Thomas Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, or the Mayor of Queenborough, one of the handful of plays of the period to feature travelling players, the eponymous mayor, expecting the arrival of Hengist and regretting the state of his house, asks a servant to “burn a little juniper in the hall-chimney:/Like a beast as I was I pissed out the fire last night”. It’s a small, vivid moment and, of course, a joke; but it tells you things about the past far more acutely than mere furniture.