In his The Life and Times of William Shakespeare, Peter Levi wrote,
[H]istory and family connection do as much to throw light on Shakespeare as a poet as academic criticism has done, and maybe more. The problem is that England and Stratford and the Elizabethan age are all somehow part of his great mystery, and all three are potently mythical. Every generation has to make its own attempt to get at the truth, and we shall not succeed unless we allow for the enormous differences that separate Shakespeare from our own world. Even the theatre…is ours and not his, and therefore a barrier as well as a link.
I want to put Shakespeare’s poetry in the context of his life and times.
As part of this putting-in-context, Levi attempts to describe, among other things, places and settings, Straford-upon-Avon, relying on contemporary descriptions. This leads him, to what, I think, is a particularly vivid and colorful description of one of the many differences between that time and ours.
In Chapter One, ‘The Background’, Levi draws on Michael Drayton‘s descriptions of Warwickshire in his ‘epic poem Poly-Olbion‘, one ‘worth a glance, because people sometimes imagine that Shakespeare, as a lyric poet, exaggerated the natural qualities of the place.’ But Levi doubts ‘Drayton wrote under his influence, being a Warwickshire man himself and having all England to cover.’ He goes on to note his ‘shaggy , warm-hearted feelings’ about the land, as evinced in the Forest’s speech about herself:
We equally partake with woodland as with plain Alike with hill and dale; and every day maintain The sundry kinds of beasts upon our copious wastes, That men for profit bread, as well as those of chase. Here Arden of herself ceased any more to show; And with her sylvan joys the Muse along doth go When Phoebus lifts his head out of the Winter’s wave No sooner the Earth her flowery bosom brave, At such time as the year brings on the pleasant Spring, But Hunts-up the morn the feather’d Sylvans spring And in the lower grove, as on the rising knole, Upon the highest spray of every mounting pole, Those Quiristers are perched with many a speckled breast.Levi then goes on to note:
The verses about birdsong that follow are as clear and loud as the birds themselves. We must realize that it was ordinary for Drayton and Shakespeare to hear a dawn chorus of many hundreds of birds at once, and ordinary in summer to hear nightingales. Those were numerous in the elm avenues of Christ Church Meadow even in the late nineteenth century; as a young man thirty years ago, I have heard a deafening dawn chorus in the wooded Chilterns, on Shakespeare’s road to London.
When I read these pages, I was struck by how absent birdsong is in our cities, our modern lives, how it has been banished to ever more remote removes from our mornings. But sometimes, when I walk to work, as I have for the past six years, I walk past a colony of parrots–on which I intend to write a longer post someday–noisily and merrily raising a racket, and for a moment or two, I feel comforted, by this visible and loud reminder of the persistence and resilience of aviary sounds in our urban environs.
