His parents were only barely, partially literate.
They made “markings” in place of signing their names. Their son, Will, unlike his peers, couldn’t write Greek or Latin, or follow them to school in the nation’s capital. Most folks said the boy, who wished to be a writer, needed an editor. His father, John, a maker and seller of gloves, and a Catholic, wisely posed as an Elizabethan Protestant. He had the paintings and icons of the local Catholic Church taken down. And then gradually had the Church destroyed. Covertly, he signed a Roman Catholic “Spiritual Testament,” and hid it in the rafters of the family home. This meant the family was Catholic at a time when being a Catholic priest was a capital crime, and all active Catholics were under suspicion.
It was during the severe rule of Queen Elizabeth, a time of “national paranoia, public persecutions, and sudden, murderous changes of ideology.” Like his father, mother, and his sisters, the son, William Shakespeare, too, was a circumspect Catholic. This followed his father’s surreptitious religious inclinations even though John Shaekespeare was well-known as the alderman and bailiff of the town, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Yet around 1577, John Shakespeare began to miss town meetings. Soon he was recklessly selling and mortgaging all the properties in his wife’s inheritance. Although he lived well after Will became rich and famous, John never recovered the land or his social position. What happened, various writers have speculated, was some compound of bad financial choices and luck, Catholic recalcitrance, and drink. Whatever the cause, John Shakespeare’s descent, and sense of social loss must have tormented young Will.
There is no abundance of information — as there is for many of his contemporaries — revealing even a hint to what made Will such an unparalleled genius. We futilely examine the words of his contemporary and friend, fellow dramatist Ben Jonson, for evidence of the roots of Will’s genius. In the first complete edition of Shakespeare’s works, dramatist Jonson comments minimally about his friend. The book begins with an engraved image of Shakespeare. It is a good likeness, says Jonson — the engraver fought with nature itself for supremacy. But here we see only Shakespeare’s face. The portrait unfortunately cannot capture that busy inventive and revolutionary mind. The talented artist cannot draw Shakespeare’s “wit”, and “since he cannot, ‘reader, look / Not on his picture, but his book” writes Jonson.
But Jonson had no inkling of the immense — and extraordinarily powerful — reach his friend’s influential genius would have. Even the laudatory Jonson would be stunned by the continuous, and lavish, growth of the demand for an understanding of the development of Will’s genius.
History since then, has lavishly demonstrated how little — and often tangled — information exists regarding the roots of Shakespeare’s unique, wide-reaching authoritorial genius.
“Genius” may be difficult to accurately pin-point, to even define the Shakespearian revolution with comfortable universal precision. For that leads us into a verbal avalanche of wide-reaching change.
There is a difference between one who has mastered an art, a skill or a science, and someone who moves such things to a totally different level. Someone who revolutionizes such a world-wide swath, leaving everything it touches permanently altered deals with a difference not only in degree but in kind.. Shakespeare is a writer who grew immensely over a fairly short period of time. He was someone unafraid to experiment and fail. The result: He changed the English language forever. He added some 3,000 words to the English language and created a landslide of new phrases.
And, of course, he changed the composition — and impact — of drama, poetry and literature in general...forever. Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges declared that Shakespeare was “everything and nothing.” Of course you have to know the work of both authors to get what he was saying. A teasing invitation to refresh your Borges...and your Shakespeare.