Shakespeare’s Times

The Reformation

The country Shakespeare was born into in 1564 was in recovery from the trauma of thirty years of acute social and spiritual division.  Henry VIII’s break with Rome a generation before, his renunciation of Catholicism and his enforced prohibition of long-treasured Catholic doctrines had been accompanied by an orgy of blood-letting in rarefied circles as two Queens were executed – first Anne Boleyn in 1536, then Catherine Howard in 1542 – on scarcely believable charges of adultery.

What followed was in many ways still more distressing, as the death first of Henry, then of his young son Edward VI, brought to the throne their antithesis, Queen Mary, a dogmatic Catholic determined to repair the breach with Rome and reverse the disruption of the last two decades with further bloodshed. The result was over three hundred Protestant martyrs burned at the stake.

For better or worse, Mary’s reign was a short one, and the accession of her flexibly Protestant younger sister Elizabeth bought time for healing.  Even so, the wounds must have been very deep.  Much of what most people had always believed – that the bread and wine were transformed into the body and blood of Christ, for example – was now denounced as superstition, and treasured rituals like the Latin mass were abandoned for conventions more accessible if less revered.  For the first time, the Bible was translated into the language of ordinary life, and every church in the kingdom was charged with keeping an English Bible and using it.

This cultural earthquake affected Shakespeare’s England in numerous ways.  In the first place, Catholicism implied loyalty to Rome at a time when England felt hemmed in by hostile forces on all sides, from southern Europe to north of the border, and loyalty to Catholicism might be mistaken for treachery.  It seems likely that Shakespeare’s own family harboured strong Catholic loyalties, his father especially.

Second, much that was valued in a strictly physical sense – murals depicting Biblical scenes in the local church for example, stained glass windows and other revered church artefacts – was painted over, destroyed or abandoned in the rush to engage with the new orthodoxy.  The world had been turned upside down under Henry and Edward, then the process reversed under Mary.  Now a third shake of the dice brought further adjustments, and if long-cherished beliefs were difficult to discard, they must be concealed.

This was dangerous territory, and in his plays, Shakespeare steers clear of the specific issues raised by these events.  Even in “Henry VIII” – one of his very late plays, written long after the late King’s youngest daughter Elizabeth has died – the focus is on in-fighting at court, and themes exploring religious doctrine are carefully avoided.  Yet the shadow of the wounds inflicted during the divisive mid-century theological battles falls across his plays in more opaque ways: “Away and mock the time with fairest show”, says Lady Macbeth to her husband in words that might have served as good advice in Tudor England.  “False face must hide what the false heart doth know”.

Moreover, the History plays, particularly the tetralogy that focuses on fifteenth-century England – “Henry VI” Parts 1, 2 and 3 and “Richard III” – describe a pre-Tudor kingdom in which conflict is endemic, and private vanities and ambitions at court divide families and bring bloodshed in ways that are against nature.  In “Henry VI Part 3”, for example, the King is confronted by the sight of a son that has killed his own father: “I, who at his hands received my life, him / Have by my hands of life bereaved him”.  Twenty lines later, to reinforce the point, enters a father bearing the body of his son: “O boy, thy father gave thee life too soon, / And hath bereft thee of thy life too late”.  Any temptation to return to this depth of division – on whatever pretext – must have been fairly easy to resist.

The Spanish Armada

Around one third of Shakespeare’s plays are set in Italy.  With the exception of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (c. 1590) – which, to be precise, is set in the Kingdom of Navarre – none is located in Spain.  But Italy, home of the Renaissance, of scientific exploration and artistic genius – of truth and beauty, one might say – was a natural magnet for idealism and open minds in Shakespeare’s day.  Spain, home of the Inquisition, of aggressive militarism and dogmatic religious imperialism, was less appealing.

Such judgements will have been reinforced by the Spanish Armada of 1588, an attempt to invade England which foundered on poor planning, inept seamanship and meteorological bad luck.  By the time the cumbersome Armada crept back to Spain, defeated (it was said) by “the Protestant wind”, around one third of its 130 ships had been lost, and the English fleet was emboldened to begin a campaign of harassment of Spanish ships both in Europe and in the New World whose consequences can be felt to this day.

These events naturally stirred patriotic spirits, reflected in the speech delivered by the Queen at Tilbury in the summer of 1588.  “I am come amongst you”, Elizabeth told her troops, “being resolved, in the midst and heat of battle, to live and die amongst you all; to lay down for my God, and for my kingdom, and my people, my honour and my blood, even in the dust”.  She adds that she would “think foul scorn that Parma or Spain … should dare to invade the borders of my realm” and she looks forward to “a famous victory over these enemies of my God, of my kingdom, and of my people”.

The emotional impact of the Queen’s rhetoric has a distinctly Shakespearean spirit.  It evokes the speech Shakespeare assigns to Henry V before Agincourt: “he today that sheds his blood with me / Shall be my brother,” declaims Henry, “And gentlemen in England now a-bed / Shall think themselves accursed they were not here, / And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks / That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day”.  The combination of sacrifice, bravery, patriotism and religion is a common property of the two speeches – though it is worth reflecting that Elizabeth’s speech was delivered to inspire the defence of the kingdom whereas Henry, strictly speaking, was engaged in an imperial (or anyway aggressive) adventure.

Nonetheless, the parallel is unmistakeable.  “Henry V” was written in around 1598, ten years after the Armada’s defeat, towards the end of a patriotic decade – one in which a burgeoning curiosity about English history spilled out onto the stage of the Globe and elsewhere.  The dates of Shakespeare’s plays are not always precise but there is a clear pattern to his output: around 1590, he wrote “Henry VI, Part 2” and “Henry VI, Part 3”.  Around 1591 “Henry VI, Part 1” was written.  Next came “Richard III”, probably written in 1592.  “Richard II” follows in around 1595, and “King John” around the same period.  Around 1596 comes “Henry IV, Part 1” and around a year later “Henry IV, Part 2”.  “Henry V” follows as the decade draws to a close. 

Two conclusions may be drawn from these dates.  First, Shakespeare goes back time and again to the well of English history in the aftermath of the victory over the Spanish Armada.  True, he steered away from recent events – the Reformation was off-limits – but eight plays in ten years paints a vivid picture of the effect of the Armada on his world view.  This is the second conclusion: there was a clear market for history in the 1590s – history not as we consume it in the modern world, from the internet or the t.v., but history graphically humanised, converted into narrative and enacted on the stage in flesh – and blood.

Evidently living in historical times – England had faced no real threat to her borders for five centuries, from 1066 to 1588 – evoked an appetite for English history that the theatre was well-placed to satisfy.  A comparison might be drawn between Shakespeare’s History plays on one side and the large number of war films, British and American, that were released after the end of World War Two.

The Succession

But throughout the 1590s a second cloud began to darken over the English state, blown in not from abroad but from closer to home: the question of the Succession.  Here again the history plays serve as a warning and a lesson, since one of their presiding themes is the importance of stability at the centre.  Much of the anxiety that underwrites many of Shakespeare’s plays – of various genres – arises from the question of power and how it may be transferred from one generation or authority to the next.

In the first half of the sixteenth century, English society had been preoccupied with the lessons of the previous century, the Wars of the Roses and the calamity visited on the state by the weakness and division of the governing class.  This is reflected in Shakespeare’s presentation of Henry VI – put simply, a good man but a bad king.  His fate is sealed when he is imprisoned and then murdered by the character who (a number of murders later) will become Richard III.

What is needed is a clear Line of Succession, and this is among the triggers, some three decades into the Tudor century, for the King’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon, his marriage to Anne Boleyn, the break with Rome, the English Reformation and the King’s marriage to Jane Seymour.  Anxieties about the succession are relieved with the birth of Prince Edward, later (and briefly) Edward VI.  Had he lived, the Succession would probably have been assured, but having been crowned at the age of nine, he was to die at age 15.

The Succession is once again thrown into question by the failure of the Privy Council to carry out the wishes of the late King and support the claims of his cousin Lady Jane Grey to the crown.  A great grand-daughter of Henry VII, she reigned for nine days before being imprisoned and executed by Henry’s oldest child, Mary the daughter of Catherine.  The new reign proved catastrophic in many ways as the Queen, a Roman Catholic like her mother, reversed what she could of her father’s reforms and martyred many of her doctrinal opponents.  Four hundred years later, she is remembered as “Bloody Mary”, and Foxe’s books of Protestant martyrs names and numbers 312 victims of the blood-letting. It is perhaps a blessing that Mary’s health was fragile and her reign brief.  Her sister would govern for 45 years, but once again a clear line of succession is elusive.

A clear line ensures that change at the centre can be conducted painlessly.  But in the second half of the sixteenth century, a painless Succession becomes increasingly unlikely as the years pass without the Virgin Queen taking a husband.  Discussion of the Succession among the Queen’s subjects was positively discouraged: John Stubbs, for example, writing about the Queen’s marriage as early as 1579, avoided execution but had a hand cut off and was imprisoned in the Tower of London for two years.

The London stage was no more likely to want to discuss this matter.  Nevertheless, even by a relatively conservative estimate, as many as half of Shakespeare’s plays are preoccupied to some extent with questions of the transfer of power.  Around ten of these plays were written in the years before the Queen’s death in 1603 – histories, largely, but also comedies like “Love’s Labour’s Lost” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” reflect in different ways on the death of the powerful or challenges to power.  Remarkably, this theme remains a frequent Shakespearean pre-occupation after the accession of James I.

Three familiar examples: in “Measure for Measure” (c 1604), Vincentio the Duke of Vienna temporarily steps down from power and abandons his throne to his deputy Angelo in order to establish how successfully the state will be run by his strict deputy.  The experiment is not a success and it becomes a matter of urgency that the status quo ante be restored if order and justice are to be maintained.

A second example: in “King Lear” the aged monarch divides his kingdom between two of his three daughters in the hope of enjoying an untroubled old age as the occasional guest of Goneril or Regan.  But the division of the kingdom brings divided loyalties and violent mismanagement of the country, resulting in the death of the King and of his third daughter Cordelia, as well as of the two daughters whose failures to govern justly wrought such havoc.

A third example: we first encounter Duncan in “Macbeth” in an unaccustomed moment of triumph and self-satisfaction.  He has been supported by his nobles and seen off the invasion of his country.  But beneath the veneer, his weakness and responsibility are self-evident: he placed “an absolute trust” in the Thane of Cawdor, but this was misplaced; now he places the same trust in Macbeth and again guesses wrong.  Meanwhile the appointment of his son Malcolm as Prince of Cumberland – that is, his named successor – seems like a shrewd move, but events suggest that had it been made earlier, bloodshed might have been avoided. 

There are numerous other examples: one of the chief themes in “Cymbeline” (1610) is the conflict between two potential heirs to the British throne, Imogen and Cloten; meanwhile “The Tempest” (c 1611) is preoccupied with questions of ambition and loyalty to the thrones of Milan and Naples.  By now many years have passed since the crisis of the succession to the Virgin Queen.  But Shakespeare returns to the familiar theme, exploring it from every angle.   In the event, of course, this was a dog that didn’t bark: though there were as many as twelve possible contenders for the throne in 1603, the succession to James I of England, the VI of Scotland, passed off smoothly.

The Gunpowder Plot

“The Phoenix and the Turtle” is a 68-line poem by Shakespeare, published in 1601, which appears to many critics to celebrate the lost love affair between the Virgin Queen and the Earl of Essex.  But despite superficial appearances, the story that seems to lie behind this poem serves as a reminder that the Queen, for all her power and popularity, was never quite able to feel fully secure.  Her affections for Essex came to a definitive conclusion when the Earl led an attempted coup against her, which foundered on the indifference of the people of London to the idea of usurping their monarch.  Essex was executed on Tower Green, the last person to be beheaded in the Tower of London.  It took three strokes of the axe to sever his head from his shoulders.

The death of the Queen (in 1603) and her relatively painless replacement with King James VI of Scotland – James I as he became – was a triumph for what might be called the English Establishment, which had maintained low-key contact with James in the years before the Queen’s death, determined that a smooth transfer of power would be achieved.  The result was that despite a number of plots against him, the familiar aphorism about monarchy that Shakespeare assigns to Henry IV – “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown” – was never in James’s case fully realised.

The closest shave was the Gunpowder Plot.  The story is well-known.  Preparations for James to open his first parliament in the autumn of 1605 came to an abrupt halt when three dozen barrels of gunpowder and a pile of wood were discovered by chance in the cellars of Parliament House.  The project had been to destroy the entire English / British governing class, the King, his wife, his sons and parliament.  Those responsible were rounded up and tortured till they confessed.  The executions began in January and continued till May.

In the following year, 1606, Shakespeare wrote two of his best-known plays, “King Lear” and “Macbeth”.  In the former, as we saw above, the King voluntarily steps down from the throne, dividing his kingdom between two daughters, in the process inflicting chaos on a realm that was once united and apparently well governed.  James Shapiro’s recent book “1606: The Year of Lear” makes a strong case for the proposition that in James’s mind the divided kingdom was the 17^th century island of Britain, with its separate English and Scottish parliaments, governments and legal systems.  The Act of Union (1707) was still a century away.

A further contemporary reference has gone under the radar but is worth exploring briefly.  The two daughters to whom the kingdom is entrusted are married to members of the nobility: Goneril, the elder, is married to the Duke of Albany, a character who later plays a constructive role in the play.  By contrast Regan, the second daughter, is married to the Duke of Cornwall, a violent and ruthless chancer who dies at the hands of a servant while blinding the faithful Gloucester.  Two contrasting characters.   Their titles were largely in Shakespeare’s hands, and they are a somewhat surprising choice, since at the time the play was being written, the real Duke of Cornwall was Henry, the King’s oldest son and the heir to the throne, while the real Duke of Albany was his second son, Charles – later to become Charles I.  Shakespeare invested a great deal of effort in choosing names and titles, so one wonders what his motives in this case might be.

Later in the year after the Gunpowder Plot, Shakespeare turned his attention to “Macbeth”.  Here famously the references are unambiguous: Banquo was an ancestor of James, and there is no more admirable character in Shakespeare. He knows next to nothing about Macbeth’s designs on the throne and remains steadfastly loyal to Duncan.  He is a victim of the tyrant but his son Fleance escapes to enact (we presume) the witches’ prophecy that Banquo will father a line of kings. 

The play condenses a number of ideologies, one of which, against witchcraft, is explored below.  Elsewhere, the play maintains at least three other propositions that might be broadly described as political. First, loyalty to the monarch is God’s law, and when His representative on earth is threatened, nature takes her revenge: “’Tis unnatural”, says the Old Man passing the time with Ross and reflecting on the recent murder of the King: “A falcon, towering in her pride of place, / Was by a mousing owl hawk’d at and kill’d”.  Ross agrees: the world has turned upside down when hawks are killed by owls, and he offers further evidence: Duncan’s horses, he reports, “Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, flung out, / Contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would make / War with mankind”.  The Old Man agrees: “’Tis said they eat each other” he adds.

Second, that disturbing the natural order and usurping the throne brings only chaos and bloodshed that prevails until order is restored.  The murder of the King (which takes place between 2.1 and 2.2) cannot be shown on the Jacobean stage but the defeat of Macbeth in 5.9 cannot not be shown.  The play ends on a note of understated triumph that God’s work has been done and equilibrium restored, the “dead butcher and his fiend-like queen” despatched to try their luck in the next world. In short, usurping the throne is a temporary state of affairs.

Finally the play proposes that no personal satisfaction comes from regicide or insurrection.  “Nought’s had, all’s spent” concedes a weary Lady Macbeth after they have seized the throne, “When our desire is got without content”.  Macbeth discovers the same anti-climax in Act Five: “I have lived long enough,” he concludes; “my way of life / Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf”.  There is almost the sense that he welcomes his own death – certainly he accepts it as inevitable, a kind of relief from the supreme pointlessness of what he has become.

How much “King Lear” and “Macbeth” owe to the pressures on the monarchy symbolised by the events of Autumn 1605 must be a moot point, but collectively these seminal texts say that the enemy of society is instability and that order comes from the top.  Events in England two generations later, when the monarchy, having been abolished, was seamlessly restored, suggest that Shakespeare’s understated politics may have extended well beyond his own times.

Witchcraft

Trials for witchcraft were a common feature of English (and Scottish) life in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.   There were many reasons for this but one trigger was a book called “Daemonologie”, composed as a Socratic dialogue (i.e., a philosophical conversation) by King James I and published in 1599.  Among other functions this book provides a justification for persecuting witches and punishing them.

There are numerous references to witchcraft in Shakespeare’s plays and poems, and most often the term is used loosely.  For example, when Othello is explaining to the senate how Desdemona fell in love with him, he recalls that “She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d, / And I lov’d her that she did pity them”.  And he adds, by way of explanation: “That is the only witchcraft I have us’d”, and it is clear that the word is employed here in a vivid but strictly inaccurate way.  Similarly, in “A Lover’s Complaint” (1601), when the unhappy young woman exclaims “what a hell of witchcraft lies / In the small orb of one particular tear!” she is observing how easily a lover can be deceived by shows of emotion.

One might say that in these cases the idea of witchcraft is used metaphorically, even rhetorically.  But “Macbeth” (1606) is different, because the witches there are intrinsic to what happens and in particular to what goes wrong.  First then it is worth observing some of the characteristics Shakespeare assigns to the witches in “Macbeth”. 

The witches know what will happen – and indeed they know what has already happened before more or less anyone else.  They are able to predict both that Macbeth will one day be King (“All hail Macbeth, thou shalt be king hereafter”), and that he has been promoted Thane of Cawdor.  Macbeth is bemused by this: “The Thane of Cawdor lives,” he observes; “why do you dress me / In borrow’d robes?” – a neat reference to the laws of Sumptuary, which dictate who can wear what.  But the general point is that the witches know before he does what is in store for Macbeth, and they are privy to knowledge that is known only to a handful of others.

The audience is reminded of Macbeth’s description of the witches in the letter to his wife: “they have more in them than mortal knowledge”.  These powers are not limited to what they know.  They are adept at deception too, confusing Macbeth into believing that it is they, not Duncan, who conferred promotion on his deserving head and “gave the thane of Cawdor to me”.  Banquo, cautious as befits an ancestor of King James, advises Macbeth to take care (“The instruments of darkness” he tells Macbeth “tell us truths, / … to betray’s / In deepest consequence”), and of course, he is right, and Macbeth is indeed betrayed.

The witches have physical properties too that give them the edge.  They can disappear, for example, leaving Banquo to muse that “The earth hath bubbles, as the water has”, and Macbeth agrees: “what seem’d corporal [i.e. physical] melted / As breath into the wind”. To modern eyes and ears these characteristics give the witches an exotic, thrilling quality, but to an audience that believed they were genuinely agents of the devil (“instruments of darkness”, Banquo calls them), the witches in “Macbeth” would have served as a persuasive warning.

Of what? That witches know more than we do (“Howe’er you come to know it”, as Macbeth arraigns them), and over that most unknowable province – the future – they can lay a special and confident claim. Second that they have physical properties and skills that defy reason and the recognisable world – for example on both the two occasions when Macbeth encounters them, they take their leave by simply vanishing. Third, that they bring evil where there was good and destruction where there was equilibrium, they are agents of evil and “damn’d all those that trust them” (as Macbeth observes, having trusted them).  Later he denounces them as “juggling fiends / That palter with us in a double sense” and calls for them to be “no more believed”, but it is too late for such caution because the damage they inspired is irreparable.

Shakespeare probably welcomed the arrival of James I in London.  The new King had a reputation for being “artistic” and was likely to favour the kind of people Shakespeare and his actor friends associated with.  If he looked forward optimistically to the new reign, he was right to, because he became the King’s favoured playwright, providing the entertainment on special occasions like the visit of the King’s brother-in-law from Denmark.  Reflecting on the messages conveyed in “Macbeth” it is possible to see that Shakespeare and the King had much to offer one another.