Happy Shakespeare’s Birthday

In A Thousand Clowns, the character of Murray Burns has what he calls his own personal holiday. That day is Irving R. Feldman’s birthday, and he keeps it sacred because Mr Feldman “is proprietor of perhaps the most distinguished kosher delicatessen in this neighborhood and as such I hold the day of his birth in reverence.” Ever since seeing A Thousand Clowns for the first time, I’ve liked the idea of having a personal holiday. I’ve always intended mine to be Shakespeare’s birthday, but it hasn’t usually worked out that I could take the day off.

I bring this up because today is celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday.

I say, “celebrated,” because we don’t actually know the date of his birth. They didn’t keep those kinds of records back then, and even had they, the records in Stratford-upon-Avon from the Elizabethan era were lost in a fire a couple of hundred years ago. We do, however, have the records from the church, Holy Trinity Church. From these we know that he was baptized on April 26, 1564. In those days, babies were usually baptized within days of their birth, so that they would be covered in case of death, which happened quite a lot.

So, he may or may not have been born on April 23rd. However, since he died on April 23, 1616, society gives into the romance of coincidences and celebrates his birth and death on the same day. It’s economical when you really think about it. He was born in one house in Stratford and died in another a block or two away. He went a long way in between.

There are those who wish to believe that someone other than William Shakespeare of Stratford-upon-Avon wrote all those famous plays and poems, but they are wrong. Many of them are probably very nice people, good friends, and solid citizens, but they are wrong and decidedly wrong, and everything they think on the subject is predicated in a fallacy.

They like to refer to him as being illiterate, and yet we have several examples of his signature. Illiterates cannot sign their names, that’s part of what makes them illiterate. In fact, on his will, he signed “by me William Shakspeare” on the third page and the addition of those two tiny words dispels completely the idea that he was illiterate. Even a person who had mechanically learned to reproduce their own name (and I cannot think of a reason why someone in Elizabeth’s England would have developed such a practice) would not have inserted “by me.” As small as they are, it would have been beyond such a person.

He is called “uneducated” because there is no record of his having attended school. The reason for this, of course, is the fire that destroyed the attendance records of the King’s New School, where he almost certainly attended. There is no reason to suppose that he didn’t attend the King’s New School, since it was free and his father was one of the town’s leading citizens. There he would have studied heavily in Latin and come to know well the ancient authors whose works so often underpin the plays that followed, such as Plutarch and Ovid. A child of a town, such as Shakespeare, was much more likely to be familiar with “the whining school boy with his satchel” than any nobleman would have.

The thing that the so-called anti-Stratfordians never discuss, because they can’t, is Shakespeare’s treatment of common people and the amount of Warwickshire dialect and glover’s slang (his father made gloves) that appears throughout the plays and poems. They like to claim that no impudent commoner could have written about court life with such knowledge, but I find it much more astounding that an Earl could write

Lo! as a careful housewife runs to catch

One of her feather’d creatures broke away,

Sets down her babe and makes an swift dispatch

In pursuit of the thing she would have stay,

Whilst her neglected child holds her in chase,

Cries to catch her whose busy care is bent

To follow that which flies before her face,

Not prizing her poor infant’s discontent;

So runn’st thou after that which flies from thee,

Whilst I thy babe chase thee afar behind;

But if thou catch thy hope, turn back to me,

And play the mother’s part, kiss me, be kind:

So will I pray that thou mayst have thy ‘Will,’

If thou turn back, and my loud crying still.

Time-and-again, the imagery used is humble and every day. He speaks to us not from the manor house, but from the crowded streets and alleyways. Any fool can write a scene at court, and those scenes are notable for their full-blooded characters and fine oratory rather than their finely observed detail. Justice Shallow, though, he comes from life, as does Dogberry and Nick Bottom. And they are the sorts of characters only a commoner would have encountered.

I won’t go on, but I could. Shakespeare was born in Stratford and died in Stratford and wrote a bunch of plays and poems while he was on this Earth. And so we celebrate.