Shakespeare and the Cruelest Month: Spring Imagery in: The New Yorker The Australian household I grew up in had very few books. Most of them were special offers from the newspaper publishers who employed my father: "Fifty Famous Australians," "The Complete Speeches of Sir Keith Murdoch," "The Wit and Wisdom of Sir Robert Menzies," that sort of thing. Being a nominally Catholic household, we didn't have a Bible, but we did have a Shakespeare. It was a fat, red, cloth-covered, cheapo Victorian edition, printed in double columns and minute characters, enlivened by the occasional steel engraving. I began reading it when I was about nine, simply because I was bored and lonely and had read everything else in the house. At first I understood very little, though enough to ask my father in a spirit of pure mischief what a "whore" was. "What are you reading?" he shouted. "Shakespeare," said I demurely. I went on reading the family Shakespeare for years, until the cadence of Shakespeare's lines had worn its way into my synapses and I spoke in iambic pentameter. When I got to the end of the last play, I simply started again. By the time we were doing "Scenes from Shakespeare" at school, I knew whole plays almost by heart, which endeared me to neither my fellow students nor my teachers. It never occurred to me to read about Shakespeare. If I was curious about something, about how Shakespeare felt about war, say, I simply read the plays again. The time came, however, when I had no choice but to read about Shakespeare because I had to draw up reading lists for my students. I was appalled. Appalled by the sheer perversity of what my distinguished colleagues chose to believe about Shakespeare. Part of what they believed was that Shakespeare abandoned his wife and children in 1585, or thereabouts, and then moved back into the marital home after twenty-six years or so of bachelor living in London. Odysseus was away from home for twenty years, and when he got back only his dog could recognize him. Poor old Enoch Arden was unrecognizable by man or beast after ten. Only an academic could believe that Shakespeare slid seamlessly back into a household he had pretended he didn't have for more than a quarter of a century. John Aubrey, who began compiling material for his "Brief Lives" in the sixteen-sixties and continued doing so throughout his life, is one of the earliest observers to write about Shakespeare. "He was wont to go to his native country once a year," Aubrey reports. Aubrey is an unreliable witness, to be sure, but when what he says is less remarkable than what is commonly believed, and not in the least titillating, we might perhaps entertain it as a possibility, rather than insisting on an impossibility. We know that Shakespeare had no permanent lodging in London, but moved from one rented address to another. We have disconnected documentary evidence of his residence in Shoreditch, Bishopsgate, Southwark, and Cripplegate. The one detailed account of his accommodation shows it to have been more like a student's room in college than the apartment of a successful theatrical entrepreneur. Every year the theatres were required to close for the entire penitential season of Lent. This was forty days, nearly six weeks, when no play could be performed. Why pay rent in London when you are paying to keep up a big house in Warwickshire? The journey from London to Stratford took three days, so quick visits were out of the question, but a six-week break made worthwhile the six-day journey there and back. Lent can begin as early as February 10th and end as late as April 25th; for the most part, it coincides with early spring. Was Shakespeare usually in Warwickshire in the early spring? "The Winter's Tale" is set in late summer, but when Perdita, decked like Flora peering "in April's front," laments that she has no flowers for her boy lover, she lists flowers of early spring: Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty: violets, dim, But sweeter than the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cytherea's breath: pale primroses That die unmarried, ere they can behold Bright Phoebus in his strength - a malady Most incident to maids: bold oxlips and The crown imperial: lilies of all kinds, The flower-de-luce being one. Act IV, Scene 4, lines 136-45 The exactness of this compressed account is wonderful. Daffodils do come before the swallows arrive, and take their chances with the often-cruel winds of March. Violets, primroses, oxlips, and fritillaries are all flowers of early spring. The name "flower-de-luce" was used for all kinds of irises, including the native Iris pseudacorus, another flower of early spring. Again, though the play is called "A Midsummer Night's Dream," the action seems to take place in early spring. Oxlips and violets are in bloom on the bank where Titania sleeps, along with woodbine, musk roses, and eglantine (Act II, Scene 1, lines 256-57). Puck would find it hard to "hang a pearl in every cowslip's ear" (Act II, Scene 1, line 15) in any other season. The cowslips tall [Titania's] pensioners be, In their gold coats spots you see, Those be rubies, fairy favours, In those freckles live their savours. Act II, Scene 1, lines 10-13 The freckles on a cowslip are not so conspicuous that they can be seen by a casual passerby, but Shakespeare and his characters know them well. In "Cymbeline," the wicked Iachimo can describe the mole on Imogen's breast as "cinque-spotted: like the crimson drops / I'th'bottom of a cowslip" (Act II, Scene 2, lines 40-41). Once again, the play seems set in early spring, as the wicked Queen orders "the violets, cowslips and the primroses" she has gathered to make her potions to be carried to her closet (Act I, Scene 5, line 92). Arviragus thinks he will deck Imogen's grave as long as summer lasts, but his mind is turning on the flowers of the spring: ...thou shalt not lack The flower that's like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azured harebell, like thy veins: no, nor The leaf of eglantine... (Act IV, Scene 2, lines 277-80) In "The Tempest," Ariel's favorite resting place is a cowslip's bell (Act V, Scene 1, line 94). Even butch Henry V thinks with nostalgia of the "even mead, that erst brought sweetly forth / The freckled cowslip, burnet and green clover" ("Henry V," Act V, Scene 2, lines 48-49). Shakespeare's favorite month would seem to be April, when "wheat is green, when hawthorn buds appear" ("A Midsummer Night's Dream," Act 1, Scene 1, line 188). No other month is mentioned half as often in his works as showery, windy, sometimes unforgettably exquisite April. O, how this spring of love resembleth The uncertain glory of an April day, Which now shows all the beauty of the sun, And by and by a cloud takes all away. "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," Act I, Scene 3, lines 85-88 It takes no great leap of imagination to see Shakespeare in Warwickshire in April, because there is so much of Warwickshire in April in Shakespeare. There is yet another obvious fact about Shakespeare that Shakespeare scholars refuse to accept. He wrote his plays alone. He was not a collaborator. More ink has been expended on laborious proofs that he collaborated on bits of "The Two Noble Kinsmen," and of "Henry VIII," and that somebody else wrote some of "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" than has ever been devoted to explaining the singularity of his sole authorship of all thirty-six plays in the First Folio. The writing of plays in the fifteen-nineties and the early seventeenth century was like the writing of scripts for TV soap operas and situation comedies today, though very much worse paid. Shakespeare was not part of that system, but outside it. To find space outside it, he needed to leave London. At home in Stratford, he would have been far from the distractions of the fastest-growing and already the largest metropolis in Europe. He would have had peace and quiet, as well as three good meals a day and his washing done. And when he needed to stretch his legs he could regale his imagination with the countryside, with Ceres's ...rich leas Of wheat, rye, barley, vetches, oats and peas; Thy turfy mountains, where live nibbling sheep, And flat meads thatched with stover, them to keep: Thy banks with pionèd and twillèd brims, Which spongy April at thy hest betrims To make cold nymphs chaste crowns; and thy broomgroves, Whose shadow the dismissèd bachelor loves, Being lass-lorn: thy poll-clipped vineyard... ("The Tempest," Act IV, Scene 1, lines 66-74) Nothing about this evidence is conclusive. A poet may recollect the early spring of his native countryside when he is far away. For him to do so as vividly as Shakespeare does, however, suggests that for him rural Warwickshire was not a place of irksome exile in the custody of an aging and unloved wife, but a place his soul longed after, and where it eventually found peace. Germaine Greer is an Australian author, academic, and social activist. She is Professor Emerita of English Literature and Comparative Studies at the University of Warwick. This essay, originally titled "Spring Imagery in Warwickshire," is excerpted from "Living With Shakespeare: Essays by Writers, Actors, and Directors." Copyright © 2013 by Germaine Greer. All rights reserved. Illustration by Ana Juan.