ABSTRACT
William Shakespeare lived in Stratford-upon-Avon for at least the first twenty-one years of his life, a time that was inevitably formative in many essential ways. Perhaps too we can sense in the performance of rusticity by Shakespeare and his acting company an intended counterexample to the courtesy books and plays that constituted a series of conduct manuals for those persons who aspired to perfect courtliness and urbanity. Shakespeare's fellow actors cannot have been unaware of his having hailed from Warwickshire, considerably northwest of London. The dialect of this region was represented on the London stage under the oversimplified rubric of "western" speech, such as one might suppose to be current also in Somersetshire, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, and Wiltshire. The island of The Tempest bears little outward resemblance to the rural world of Wales or the West-country sheepshearing of The Winter's Tale. The island is more the place of the dramatist's creative imagination, presided over by a dictatorial stage manager.
