A BALLAD FOR THE BARD

Aah… you’re still here! I know, the serene Avon holds you, shimmering silver and gold in the evening sun, like a river of molten mercury flowing past the graves and gardens at Trinity Chapel and the quaint little town of Stratford. You wonder how things might’ve been, 400 years ago, when the town’s favourite son, William Shakespeare was still a boy. He must’ve skipped along cobbled streets and grassy trails, swung along branches that reach across the river, chased sheep that dot the pastures, and then tired and weary, he must’ve sat by the river, dipped his feet in the Avon’s cool waters, looked up at the darkening sky and heard a nightingale pour her heart into the coming night. And that place and time steeped in magic and romance, you would imagine, must’ve stirred in the little poet’s warm beating heart the first lines of a sonnet…

Hardly, I’d say, for Stratford-upon-Avon in the time of Shakespeare was nothing like this sweet little town that it has grown up to be.

In fact Shakespeare lived in a time of a great deep and enduring stench! Streets were overflowing with garbage. Dead animals flung outside the immediate town precincts, would putrefy and melt, gory bit by gory bit, keeping the town gates protected, as much by moats and walls as it was by the encircling and overwhelming odour emanating from the cadavers. However, chances are, the people of Stratford-upon-Avon, including old Will, might scarcely have noticed that “the air smelt funny”. Nor would you if you endured a bath, not once a day or month but only about once a year… if you happened to be squeaky-clean sorts that is, and ended up dipping more than just the customary ankles and hands in the annual-bath tub.

During the reign of the Terrible Tudors (late 1400s till the early 1600s), England had developed a curious apathy for water. While in Canterbury, I’d heard of Thomas Becket, considered a saint not only for embracing death for the church but by some quirk of English logic, deemed saintly also because his unwashed clothes, which at the time of his death, were found to be teeming with lice.

Guides in Stratford tell you that most families ‘bathed’ once a year – a hurried dip in a tub, first by the master of the house, then the wife and children. Finally the servants, who were more likely to emerge dirtier than when they’d entered the by now thick reeking sludge, after wallowing in a year’s grit, grime, pus and fleas. Indeed, Henry VIII was known to have married more oft en than washed.

Imagine having to talk, kiss and make love to someone caked in a layer of dirt, sweat and squashed bugs… oh and did I happen to mention the usual score of sores and boils per head? Well it couldn’t have been too bad, since you or I wouldn’t have been any different in those times either. Who knows, maybe they even had a nice ‘morning-after’ ritual of scraping a dead dried bug off one’s back and placing it lovingly in the other’s hand… ‘a little something to remember me by… darling!’

Anyway, the real star of those times, it turns out, wasn’t Old Will but the plague. The plague nearly claimed young William and many times later in his life, the plague would swoop down like a giant black bird of death, leaving behind all who came under its shadow, dying or dead. The theatres would be closed on such occasions, perhaps giving William time to think, reflect and stoke his creative fires.

So it wasn’t romance and beauty but disease and squalor that dominated the world of the man Paul Johnson calls ‘the most creative man’ in the history of the world. So what inspired such greatness in him? Was it a spark of love then, as John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love would suggest, that set the bard’s creative embers afire? Well, whatever little we know of Shakespeare would suggest not, for his marriage to Anne Hathaway, (yes, it’s nearly the same name, but had the one of yore been anything like the one from our times, shouldn’t she have inspired Will to twin sonnets just as easily as she inspired him to twin children?) is strangely devoid of any record of passion or strife. The only words of love and devotion that Shakespeare’s known to have dedicated to a real person were addressed not to a lady of delicate charms but to a young lad, Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Whether William dedicated his soft and beautiful words and erotic poems to the Earl because he sought his patronage or more is open to conjecture, but what was it if not love that made him great?

It wasn’t his education surely, for besides spending time in grammar school, Will had precious little by way of formal education, especially compared to rivals like Christopher Marlowe who’d been to university. What then spurred his quill to such glory?

Shakespeare experts say that muse and magic aside, Will can still rise above his life and times and touch us even today with his words – words that no one knew or spoke before he did – because of his faith in that torrent of emotions and words that raged inside him, like a pair of amorous serpents, bound and meshed in love, and the freedom with which he set them free, without fear of censure or ridicule, coupled with his ability to reach out to the common folk, making them feel and see what he saw and felt. So there you have it – a life etched into the heart of time, and of generations, burnt in with unbridled passion, tempered with an empathetic word…

To be or not to be the genius he was born to be was never the question for Will,

And yet I surrender my gift s to needs, ‘tis I, weak of will….

A BALLAD BY THE BANKS

I had lost all track of time. Like awestruck Alice, I wandered through the maze in a wondrous bookland called Foyles and stood in front of an intense pair of eyes. I had trudged from Wellington Arch, past the Queen’s window under which bear-skin capped red coats marched to an imperial beat, through a forest of handycam toting tourists and past Green Park and on to Trafalgar Square, straight into a tidal wave of pigeons taking wing… left behind in their wake lay droppings, feathers, One-eyed Nelson and a rather stunned I. The lights of Soho soothed and said, “Come hither, tramp…’ and tramp I did till I knew I was lost”.

“Excuse me sir. Which way is Foyles – the book store…?” asked I of a green-eyed man who looked a fair bit like Hugh Jackman right after he’d been wrung dry – you know the type, handsome in a twisted sort of way. “Straight down and a long right”, said he with a wink. As I began to walk that way, the man called me back, put an arm around my shoulder and said, “Nah… I’m kidding… the Irishman in me shows up without warning. It’s there…” and he pointed straight up, across the road. I’d walked right past it and somehow missed it. I thanked Twisted Jack, crossed the road and that’s how I got to be here, staring into those mesmeric eyes.

They were staring at me from the cover of a book. The face wasn’t extraordinarily handsome. He wore an earring in one ear and was balding, but those eyes, like smouldering embers glowing through the ashes of time and space, told well told tales of tempests and shrews, twins and jews and kings and clowns… it was the face that the world has come to believe to be the face of English literature at its glorious best – the face of William Shakespeare.

The funny bit is that no one really can vouch and say for sure that the balding bearded man actually is William Shakespeare. The truth is that there are three rather different likenesses, one on canvas, another one a copper-plate engraving and the third, a statue erected in Trinity Church in Stratfordupon- Avon, where rest his stage-weary bones. Curiously, they all look like different people (the last one actually looked more like Vladimir Lenin than old Will, if you will). And every other picture of the man is drawn from one of, or good heavens, perhaps a combination, of these three distinct faces that go by the same name.

I was heading for Stratford the next day and picked up a couple of books to keep me company including Bill Bryson’s eminent rendition of Will’s ‘murky’ life of which he says, “There is nothing – not a scrap… that gives insight into Shakespeare’s feelings as a private person. We can only know what came out of his work, not what went into it.”

For one whose works are as well known as Shakespeare’s, surprisingly little is known about the man. His life in history is limited to three lines: a record of his birth, his marriage and his death, and three signatures on his will. The rest, including the way he actually looked, is all mere conjecture. Even some of his plays, according to some theorists, were written by Christopher Marlowe, or Queen Elizabeth herself, amongst other contenders, and attributed to William.

My trip to the town of Stratford-upon-Avon (which is why the name) where Shakespeare was born, where his family lived, and where he, it is said, returned from the London stage and died,I hoped would reveal more to me about the man who has left us a language and lore enriched beyond belief in the half a century and a bit that William spent on the planet.

But more about the man later. Stratford, even if William were never to have cried in a cradle here, is still a town you won’t regret driving through. The surrounding countryside and even the town itself, without the cars and tourists, is like a John Constable painting come to life. Gently undulating and a soothing hue of verdant green, its little streets meander from the farms where roam horses and sheep and long-horned cattle and converge into the centre of town. The skies that day were a rumbling grey, threatening but never committing to a downpour.

References to the town’s favourite son abound, on the names of inns and taverns, at the foot of stone figures immortalized in his plays that stare at us from every corner and on signs that point towards his birthplace, his wife’s cottage, his mother’s farm, his horse’s hay counter, his great grand son’s bed pans and so on… and yet, the red brick houses, and the church steeples that pierce the clouds, the smoky street-side cafes that promise warm and delicious delights, the mulberry trees that line the parks and streets and through it all glides the beautiful Avon, quietly and gently…

I will tell you about everything William in Stratford-upon-Avon next week but what you must know is that if your soul seeks peace, there are few places that compare to the aforementioned Trinity Church that rests by the river. The tour bus had dropped me off at the gates and I was told that this was the bard’s final resting place. Unlike the rest of Stratford, there were no tourists here. The gates, sufficiently weather beaten, to give them a sense of history opened to lime tree boulevard. On either side rose grave stones from centuries ago; moss and ivy clung to the edges, signs of life, on signs of death… don’t go inside the church just yet, but turn left and walk towards the river bank. There, on a bench, just sit down and sigh… look upon the green waters and the greener fields… let the sonnets of the song-birds waft into your heart on the whispers of the wind that carries them to you, just as much as they carry those silken notes to a pair of swans that nuzzle each other in the warm glow of an afternoon sun as it makes an unannounced appearance. Aaah…afternoons, as they were meant to be…

I know I’ll find you sitting right here next week, but do pick up one of William’s plays meanwhile… might help you see him better when we go looking for the real Will. Until then sigh on….