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life in any sense that would now be recognised. It is suggestive, therefore, that Shakespeare has often been credited with the invention of private identity within his dramas. He was keenly aware of its absence in the town of his birth.
    It is generally assumed that the nature or atmosphere of the town did not alter in Shakespeare’s lifetime, and did not materially change until well into the nineteenth century, but this is incorrect. Changing agricultural methods brought their own problems and uncertainties; in particular the enclosure of common fields, and the intensive rearing of sheep, sent many labourers away from the land. There were more vagrants and landless workers in the streets of the town. In 1601 the overseers of Stratford remarked upon the presence of seven hundred poor people, and these would in large part comprise labourers coming from the surrounding countryside. The migration of the poor also increased underlying social tensions. Between 1590 and 1620 there was a rapid increase in “serious offences” tried at the county assize. 5
    The presence of the landless and unemployed exacerbated a problem that at the time seemed insoluble. How to prevent the poor from becoming ever more destitute? It was a period of rising prices. Sugar was 1
s
4
d
a pound in 1586, 2
s
2
d
in 1612. Barley was sold at 13
s
13
d
a quarter in 1574, but by the mid-1590s this price had risen to £1 6
s
8
d
. The increase of population also depressed the earnings of wage labourers. A mason was paid 1
s
1
d
a day in 1570 but thirty years later, after a time of steeply rising prices, he was earning only 1
s
. These conditions were rendered ever more severe with a succession of four bad harvests after 1594; in the latter half of 1596, and the first months of 1597, there were many Stratford deaths that seem directly related to malnutrition. It was a time of famine. The mutinous citizens of
Coriolanus
, “in hunger for Bread” (21), were not some historical fantasy.
    Yet as the poor were reduced to the level of subsistence, or worse, yeomen and landowners became steadily richer. The growing population, and the demand for wool in particular, favoured land speculation on a large scale. It was a means of making easy profit that Shakespeare himself enjoyed, and he can in fact be cited as a major beneficiary of the economic change that proved so disadvantageous to the labouring poor. He was not in the least sentimental about such matters, and arranged his finances with the same business-like acumen that he applied to his dramatic career. But he saw what was happening.
    The nature of the new secular economy was becoming increasingly clear, in any case, and many studies have been devoted to Shakespeare’s expression of the change from medieval to early modern England. What happens when old concepts of faith and authority are usurped, when old ties of patronage and obligation are sundered? It is the transition from Lear to Goneril and Regan, from Duncan to Macbeth. There also emerged a disparity between polite and popular traditions that grew ever more pronounced; Shakespeare was perhaps the last English dramatist to reconcile the two cultures.

CHAPTER 5

Tell Me This: Who Begot Thee?

    T here were two cultures
in a more particular sense: old and reformed. The English Reformation of religion was begun in fury and in greed; such violent origins beget violent deeds. It was only during the cautious and pragmatic reign of Elizabeth that a form of compromise or settlement was reached.
    As a result of his anger and impatience with the Pope, Henry VIII had proclaimed himself to be the head of the Church in England, despatching several churchmen to their deaths for daring to deny his supremacy. His more ardent advisers, moved by the prospect of enrichment as much as by religious fervour, suppressed the monasteries and confiscated the monastic lands. It was the single largest blow to the medieval inheritance of England. The king was also responsible for