Shakespeare's Restless World Read online

  VIKING

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  First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-63811-8

  Contents

  Frontispiece Art

  Title Page

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION Inside the Wooden O

  CHAPTER ONE England Goes Global

  CHAPTER TWO Communion and Conscience

  CHAPTER THREE Snacking Through Shakespeare

  CHAPTER FOUR Life Without Elizabeth

  CHAPTER FIVE Swordplay and Swagger

  CHAPTER SIX Europe: Triumphs of the Past

  CHAPTER SEVEN Ireland: Failures in the Present

  CHAPTER EIGHT City Life, Urban Strife

  CHAPTER NINE New Science, Old Magic

  CHAPTER TEN Toil and Trouble

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Treason and Plots

  CHAPTER TWELVE Sex and the City

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN From London to Marrakesh

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Disguise and Deception

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN The Flag That Failed

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN A Time of Change, a Change of Time

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Plague and the Playhouse

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN London Becomes Rome

  CHAPTER NINETEEN The Theatres of Cruelty

  CHAPTER TWENTY Shakespeare Goes Global

  List of Lead Objects

  Bibliography

  References

  Picture Credits

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  INTRODUCTION

  Inside the Wooden O

  Can this cockpit hold

  The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram

  Within this wooden O the very casques

  That did affright the air at Agincourt?

  Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:

  Into a thousand parts divide one man,

  And make imaginary puissance.

  Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them

  Printing their proud hoofs i’ th’ receiving earth;

  For ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings…

  On a number of occasions Shakespeare speaks directly to his public. The author, in the guise of Prologue, Epilogue or Chorus, invites the audience to join him in a shared act of poetic creation: together they will for a few hours imagine and inhabit another world. ‘Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts’ the Chorus famously requests at the opening of Henry V. As Shakespeare’s publics entered the theatre – ‘the wooden O’ – what were their thoughts? What were the formative communal memories, assumptions and misconceptions that enabled them to ‘make imaginary puissance’? What fears and faith, what shared bits and pieces of history let them ‘deck our kings’? What, in short, was the mental scenery they carried with them, against which they would hear Henry V rally the English troops, watch a weaver become an ass, and see Julius Caesar die?

  We can travel into those private worlds through contemporary texts, the scholarly and literary publications of the day, as E. M. W. Tillyard memorably did in the late 1940s in The Elizabethan World Picture, and as other great scholars have done since. But works of literature and philosophy, science and religion, which allow us today to recover an entire cosmology, were not read by many at the time, and hardly at all by those in the cheaper seats. Economic and social historians bring us much closer to the daily concerns of this part of the audience, and recent literary historians have fruitfully begun to relocate Shakespeare in his town and in his time.

  The chapters that follow do not draw principally on literary resources; nor do the things in them make for a narrative history of England around 1600. They aim instead to take us immediately to a particular person or place, to a way of thinking and of acting which may be difficult to recover if we work only from texts, or look top-down at broader historical currents. They are a physical starting point for a three-way conversation between the objects themselves, the people who used or looked at them, and the words of the playwright which have become such an embedded part of our language and our lives.

  It is the strange potency of things that, once we have made them, they can change us. This is a truth the world’s great religions have always understood and exploited. Holy relics or sacred sites have the power to transport us in time, and to transform us. We feel that we can stand beside the prophets or the saints, share their humanity, inhabit – for a brief, intense moment – their world. This book is about twenty such journeys, through the charisma of things, to a past world. But its purpose is not to bring us close to any particular saint or hero, or indeed even to the figure at its centre, William Shakespeare himself. We know little about what Shakespeare did, and cannot hope to recover his thoughts or his faith with any degree of certainty. Shakespeare’s inner world remains exasperatingly opaque. The objects in this book allow us instead to share the experiences of Shakespeare’s public – the thousands of men and women who were in the theatres of Elizabethan and Jacobean London when his plays were first performed, and for whom he wrote them. What was their world?

  The main theatres of Shakespeare’s London

  The fact that ordinary men and women were in a theatre at all in the 1590s shows it was a world very different from the one their parents had inhabited. The commercial playhouse as we know it today was then a new development, an innovation in mass entertainment as radical as television in the 1960s. When Shakespeare was a boy, most theatrical productions would have taken place in the house of a nobleman or a royal palace, or in a large public room – like the Gildhall in Stratford. There would have been few spaces specifically designed for stage productions. The first purpose-built theatre in England opened in London in 1576, when Shakespeare was twelve years old. These new buildings were a new kind of business, operating on a new financial model. By the time Shakespeare’s career took off in the 1590s, the pattern of a commercial theatre with seats (or standing places) at all prices, and – crucially – catering for all classes of society, was well established. It, and its public, shaped his plays.

  As with television in the 1960s, the new theatres attracted some of the greatest writing talents of the day. It was the most lucrative route for young professional writers to follow, and they wrote with an eye to their audiences. Everybody who paid to see a play would hope to see people like themselves have a part in its story: consequently, and unlike the noble dramas of French classical theatre, English plays include all sorts – the porters and the gravediggers, the constables of the watch and the lads just hanging around in the street. They were in the audi
ence. They were on the stage.

  There was nothing quite like these theatres on the Continent. Yet the shape of these very English buildings carried echoes of another, distant world; for in constructing their new places of entertainment, the modern Londoners had in their minds the theatres of ancient Rome – indeed they called them by the ancient name ‘theatres’ in conscious emulation of the classical world. It was a building type that had hardly been constructed for over a thousand years, but it was known from the many survivals in France and Italy, described in travellers’ narratives and familiar from architectural engravings. In London, playhouses were built not in severe dressed stone after the high Roman fashion, but in wood and plaster. To go to the theatre is always to visit other worlds. Yet simply to enter one of these new-built open-air theatres was – in some measure at least – to assert your place in the classical tradition, to live for two hours among the stories, and sometimes among the heroes, of the ancient Mediterranean world. For an afternoon, you could be both an antique Roman and a modern English man or woman. This is the assumption behind the temporary triumphal arches of Chapter Eighteen. And since everybody then knew for a fact that Julius Caesar himself had built the Tower of London, it was not perhaps such a surprising assumption for Shakespeare’s Londoners as it would be today.

  It is the founding principle of all advertising that we can become the people we long to be if only we own the right things. This was as true in 1600 as it is today. For example, we know from texts and memoirs, and indeed from the settings of Shakespeare’s plays, how fervently many Elizabethans adulated and emulated contemporary Italy. But we grasp that adulation with a sharper intensity when we confront a stylish, expensive fork, proudly initialled A.N., which was dropped in the Rose Theatre and 300 years later found among the rubble.

  We know nothing of A.N.’s life, whether he was a smart young aristocrat or she a high-end whore, but we do, I think, know something about how A.N. wanted to be seen. What survives of A.N. is not, as Larkin would have it, love, but aspiration. For A.N., whoever he or she was, was clearly eager to be thought fashionable and elegant – and willing to pay a lot for it. And the home of elegance, of sharp clothes and smart behaviour, was not England, but Italy. Looking at that long-lost fork, as we shall in Chapter Three, we glimpse what its owner wanted to be – the very model of Milanese or Venetian good manners. Like the French cigarettes eagerly smoked by British undergraduates in the 1960s, the fork placed A.N. in a world of culture and sophistication that thousands of contemporaries longed to be part of. To go to Italy was the privilege of the few. But for as little as a penny, if Much Ado About Nothing was showing, you could be in Messina, in the company of young lords from Florence and Padua: a trip to the theatre was a day out in the land of A.N.’s dreams.

  The rapier lost one night on the foreshore of the Thames (Chapter Five), another swagger Italianate gadget, also spoke loudly of status and style, and like the fork brought with it a particular way of moving that, once learned, would be widely admired. If push came to shove, this high-class weaponry also brought with it a new, foreign set of fighting conventions, fatally embraced by the sword-carrying young of London, and put on stage in the Verona of Romeo and Juliet. Eating or brawling, objects like these showed you for the sophisticate you strove so hard to be.

  Such objects also break down completely the division we naturally make today between on- and off-stage, between the audience, the cast and the city. They bring the action of the plays first into the pit and then into the street. Rapiers just like the one lost in Chapter Five would have been used on stage by Hamlet and Laertes, and both the actors playing them would have been expert in handling them. They would also have been used on the very same stage in prize contests between professional swordsmen to keep up revenues when there was no play showing. Many in the audience would have been carrying similar weapons, and might well use them to defend themselves or pick a quarrel on the way home. A number of them would be arrested; some would be killed. Modern Italy, as much as ancient Rome, was a world that Shakespeare’s public wanted not just to visit but to appropriate, and acquiring these new things made it exhilaratingly graspable.

  There was another world to which the theatre or in this case, the Chorus, invited the public to travel. It was a world no less beguiling than contemporary Italy, although much harder to possess or to know. But then knowing medieval England was never really the point: it was a land to imagine, to be proud of, and to strive to match. The making of modern Elizabethan England went hand in hand with the invention of an earlier one. At a moment of national crisis, of Spanish threat and Irish war, plays focused on English history were the great hits of the 1590s, staples of the new commercial theatre, a key element in forging a new communal consciousness. They made Shakespeare’s reputation and his fortune.

  Could his theatre contain ‘the very casques that did affright the air at Agincourt’? No. The helmets at the Globe would be stage props. But that hardly mattered, because his audience could see the only casque that really counted for a penny at Westminster Abbey; and great numbers of them did. The price of entrance to the Abbey was the same as the price of a standing place in the pit at the Globe, and for that penny the Elizabethan visitor could see the monument to Henry V, Scourge of the French, and above, his helmet, and the sword with which he had led his troops to victory (Chapter Six).

  These were as real and as popular as Churchill’s wartime bunker today, as solid and reliable a foundation for a fantasy of historic national unity and continuing national triumph. To Shakespeare’s generation, the first for almost 500 years to inhabit an England with no possessions in France (Calais had been lost in 1558), and struggling with an interminable war in Ireland, Henry’s helmet and sword must have spoken as powerfully as Shakespeare’s verse. A newly Protestant England had few public objects it could invest with such exceptional collective meaning. Westminster Abbey, for centuries the shrine of saints, had become a shrine of kings.

  These are secular relics of a high order, all the more potent since religious relics had largely disappeared from public view as a result of the brutal destructions of the Reformation. The breach with Rome had also led to new notions of a Church of England, distinct from other parts of Christendom. For Shakespeare’s audience, to look at Henry’s funeral achievements in the Abbey and then to hear him address his men on stage was to experience the overlapping claims between the religion of the nation and the nation as religion. As we shall see in a number of chapters, this carefully contrived conflation of the spirit and the state both created a new national self and divided it.

  There were worlds which the theatre did not – dared not – enter. The world of the plague, central to the audience’s existence (or, for many of them, non-existence), is rarely and only marginally present in the plays. The neighbouring, yet infinitely distant, world of Ireland, a constant preoccupation of politicians, a threat to public security and a huge drain on public expenditure, is effectively invisible in Shakespeare’s texts. And the consuming, unspoken fear of what would happen to the country when the Queen died with no heir was for decades a subject banned by law – a topic that nobody could discuss without fear of imprisonment or worse.

  Here objects can do what textual criticism cannot. They bring into view anxieties not voiced by actors, but which the audience brought with them to the theatre – anxieties which shaped their response to the dynastic struggles and the foreign wars that they watched being enacted on stage. The most unsettling of all these fears was that the Queen would be murdered by England’s enemies. With a solid foundation in truth, as we shall see in Chapter Eleven, it was fear carefully nurtured by the authorities themselves. The anxiety that all around were secret agents, plotting in concealment the killing of the monarch and the overthrow of the state, must have sharpened the edge of Shakespeare’s many speeches about assassination and conspiracy. And Edward Oldcorne’s eye (Chapter Nineteen) is evidence that agents of a foreign power had indeed, just as people feared, successfully i
nfiltrated the country. It is easy for us to disparage such fears as paranoia. But the disguises in the pedlar’s trunk of Chapter Fourteen are proof that there really was a network of those believed to be disloyal to the Queen, moving, dissembling and concealed, through England.

  That shrivelled eye is also one of those objects which, like the fork and the rapier, link the theatre to the street. Oldcorne’s execution was a public spectacle, a crowd-pleasing scene in a theatre of cruelty which first drew, then horrified, mesmerized and entertained huge numbers. This relic makes Shakespeare’s use of the word ‘scaffold’ to mean a stage for mounting both plays and executions not just an inventive linguistic elision, but a recognition that the same public sought the same thrill in both events. Scenes of killing, dismemberment and decapitation were usual and were enjoyed in real life as in theatre. On London Bridge, theatre-goers walked past severed heads on pikes. No surprise to see them carried on to the stage.

  Oldcorne’s eye, far more compelling than any symbol, connects us directly to the religious division of the nation, and its human cost. It also brings us back to the power of relics to strengthen faith. For those who held to the old, Catholic faith, his eye, preserved and enclosed in precious metal, represented the courage of those willing to make the ultimate sacrifice for their beliefs. Its purpose was to honour Oldcorne, and to inspire and prepare others to follow his example. No text could plead so powerfully as this thing. We may all in some measure understand (share?) the Shakespearean public’s bloodlust, but few of us would assume as easily as they did that it was not just admirable, but to be expected, that a man would die for his faith – that many recently had, and that many more in this bitterly divided England soon would. This is a world far from our modern western mind, baffled by those consciously seeking martyrdom.

  When Shakespeare’s plays were published in the First Folio in 1623, they themselves became an object, which could eventually be replicated without limit all round the world. It is a pleasing closing of the circle that with the last object discussed in this book – the Robben Island Bible – the text of Shakespeare has itself become a relic, in this case a witness to the long struggle against apartheid. In a way none of the prisoners on Robben Island could have expected, our engagement with the passages they marked is changed by knowing that they read them in their captivity. The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, disguised as a holy Hindu book, has itself become an eloquent object.