Shakespeare’s birthplace
Shakespeare’s birthplace is a wonderful Tudor survival and we are, of course, lucky to have it. But I can’t help but wonder if the emphasis on Shakespeare’s birth itself is taken a little too far in Henley Street – at the expense of other aspects of his life here.
Clearly it’s significant and interesting that he was born in this house, although the precise location of the birth-room is no more than tradition. But what is almost erased from the building as it currently presents itself is that Henley Street was Shakespeare’s Stratford home until a month after his 33rd birthday: much of his life happened here, and certainly much more than is conveyed by those first few choking cries of breath in April 1564. William brought Anne Hathaway back here in the last weeks of 1582 after their marriage; Anne was already three months pregnant with their first child Susanna. All three of his own children were born here; his only son, Hamnet, died here, aged 11 years and six months, in August 1596.
The Stratford antequarian Edgar Fripp – in his other life a vicar who roared through the sleepy Warwickshire lanes of the 1920s and ’30s on a motorbike, vestments flapping – had, in his 1928 Shakespeare’s Stratford, a plausible answer to the question – largely ignored by the birthplace – of where in the property the young married couple lived: the back of the house. ‘To this day [the back] makes an independent little residence. It has its separate kitchen, its separate staircase, and its private entrance; and from its upper story winds a small supplementary stairway into the ‘solar’ of the front house, affording space there for a additional bed-chamber.’ Fripp’s is a conjecture; Pevsner dismisses this part of the building with a single word: ‘over-restored’.
But then, today’s birth-room is a conjecture too.
In any event, with two families in the house, it must have been – well – lively. William’s youngest brother Edmond, later an actor himself, was only a few days past his third birthday when he became uncle to Susanna. With Shakespeare’s twins Hamnet and Judith being born in February 1585, there would have been four children aged under five in the house, plus a ten-year-old and two teenagers. Whatever else it was, it was a house full of life; Shakespeare would never have known it without pre-teen children, and almost always with at least two under-tens. There were two exceptions: the thirteen months between the death of his youngest sister Anne and the birth of Edmund, and again after the death of Hamnet.
Perhaps it is coincidence, but the family moved within a year of the latter.
Shuffling through the birthplace myself, then, what strikes me most is what’s absent. This is the home of a modestly prosperous family some 450 years past; unike the excellent exhibition next door, it seems disconnected from its subject. It is not like the great houses – the Blenheims, the Penshursts, the Wiltons, et al – which were always public spaces as much as private ones, places of community, social authority and display. The intimidation and awe you often feel when you visit those is wholly fitting: that is what you were meant to feel.
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The Guild Hall was the principal venue in Stratford for visiting troupes of players, who would perform beneath the room where Shakespeare and his fellow schoolboys laboured. But at many Elizabethan schools, performing plays formed part of the curriculum. It was true of prestigious schools such as Westminster, where Ben Jonson studied, Merchant Taylors in London, which Thomas Kyd attended, and King’s School in Canterbury where Christopher Marlowe was a pupil, but it was also true of many others, among them, more locally, Shrewsbury and Ludlow. Elizabeth herself was known to attend performances at Westminster.
Latin dramas were typical, although at Westminster at least, there were English dramas too. If the same were true of the school at Stratford, Shakespeare may well have also got his own first taste for acting in the Guild Hall. And even if there were no such school performances in Stratford, or Shakespeare played no part, it is hard to believe that he would not have seen any theatre in this space. There is no evidence, of course; but it certainly seems implausible that a man who would be part of the professional theatre for over 25 years might have contrived to miss all of the travelling players who came to Stratford during his years here.
Theatre, of one kind or another, was hard to miss, in fact. Outside the confines of the Guild Hall there were other players, too, some very much closer to home. Playing in early modern England was as much about participation as performance; it was only in Shakespeare’s lifetime that it became primarily a passive spectacle. The growth of professional companies such as those that Shakespeare would join was in part fueled by the forced decline of other dramas, which had formed part of the entertainments of the ritual year. ‘Of late time, in place of those stage plays, hath been used comedies, tragedies, interludes and histories, both true and feigned; for the acting whereof certain public places have been erected,’ writes Stow of London’s playhouses in 1598.
But that was later. Now, a few days before Susanna was born in late May 1583, Davy Jones, husband to Anne’s cousin Frances Hathaway, was paid 13s 4d, for staging, together with his company of players, a’pastyme at whitsontyde’, Whitsunday falling on the 20th that year, five days before Susanna, Shakespeare’s first child, was baptised. Traditionally, most villages and towns did not stage elaborate Whit Monday pageants. Most concentrated instead on Rogation week, which culminated in Ascension Day, ten days before the Pentecost – the feast which Whitsun marks – and on Corpus Christi, which was ten day later. However, the period was important in Stratford, since a three-day fair began in the town the following Sunday, Holy Trinity Eve.
Perhaps that explains the expense: thirteen shillings was not a small sum of money to be paid, and more than many touring companies could expect. It suggests, among other things, that the entertainment Jones offered was fairly elaborate. No doubt it was not on the scale of the pageants at Chester, which involved 24 different biblical themes and lasted for three days. But it would almost certainly have been staged around pageant wagons – ‘at Pentecost/… all our pageants of delight were played’, recalls Julia in Two Gentlemen of Verona – which would have started from either Holy Trinity or the Guild Chapel, weaving their way around the borough, a long procession behind them. Drummers probably led the way, alongside minstrels and other musicians; women followed after, strewing flowers of the season, the clove-scented pinks and oxlips, and other green things; ‘take your flowers’, laughs Perdita to Florizel in The Winter’s Tale, ‘I play as I have seen them do/ In Whitsun pastorals’.
The wagons bore representations of biblical characters – images, statues or impersonating players, probably masked; dramas were enacted, both wordless and scripted. Typical play subjects were, if not biblical then certainly Christian: those at Shrewsbury, for example, included the passion of Christ; the martyrdoms of Saints Feliciana and Sabina; St Catherine; and St Julian the Apostate. The story Julia remembers, however, is of Theseus and Ariadne – perhaps from Ovid’s Metamorphoses – and although there is no specific record of such a performance at Whitsun, it seems an implausible detail for Shakespeare to invent.
‘Whitsun ales’, meanwhile, were proverbial, which tells us much about the tone of the celebrations, and then there was the dancing, often wild and riotous, and seemingly unending. All England might be ‘busied with a Whitsun morris-dance’, said Henry V; these were not small, or indeed brief, affairs. Dances could last long into the evening; some lasted for days. Records of one such, at Ludlow in Whitsun week 1619, survive because its participants took the communion cloth from a nearby church to use as a morris flag on their two-day dance.
There is no reason to suppose that Shakespeare found such pleasures innately laughable.
NOTE: If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in my other posts on Shakespeare and the Elizabethan theatre.
I have been meaning for sometime to start collating articles and posts I link to on Twitter each week – not least with the excellent weekly breakfast round-ups provided on the wonderful Two Nerdy History Girls‘ website in mind as an inspiration. But time and tide being what they are, it has taken until now for me to act on the idea. And even now, I should confess, the task being rather more onerous than I expected, what follows is really a sample of the last three weeks’ links rather than a compendium of one.
Still, no matter: there are lots of great pieces here, some less serious than others, and I will do my best in future to make these posts more regular. They are presented, I should add, in no order whatsoever.
Middlemarch retold as a Facebook wall. And why not?
An unbeatably beautiful and fascinating scroll drawing of Elizabeth I’s funeral procession.
An insightful and thought-provoking post on faith and family among the late-Tudor West Country gentry – and the difficulties inherent in trying to make clear, unclouded judgements about such long-dead subtle passions.
A marvellous post on the favourite foods at Samuel Pepy‘s house.
I was brought up on Bob Dylan – my parents had both Bringing It All Back Home and Blood On The Tracks and a handful of singles – and, no doubt as a consequence, I’ve always had a romantic fascination for the Greenwich Village scene of the late Fifties and early Sixties. Last year I read Dave Van Ronk’s wonderful memoir – co-written with Elijah Wald – The Mayor of MacDougal Street, since which I have become a firm fan of the man. I will probably blog about him sometime, but in the meantime here are the superb lyrics to his wonderful song, The Last Call.
Charles Moore continues his interesting and surprising political journey towards some kind of progressive, democratic end.
The smallest statue in London. It’s very small. And very cute.
I’m a great admirer of The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates – his memoir The Beautiful Struggle, about growing up in the Baltimore projects, is a wonderful, profound and illuminating book – and his blog is always worth reading. This post delicately unpicks the complex, subtle realities behind notions of white – and class – privilege.
Can Google be trusted? No.
A great letter from Bill Hicks to a priest who complained to Channel Four about the blasphemous content of his act.
An absorbing interview with wonderful travel writer Trish Nicholson.
Stephen King in splenetic form demanding that the rich, such as himself, should have to pay more tax.
The very first appearances of some truly great comic strips.
Alex Massie, discussing the coalition government’s policies for growth, channels Waiting For Godot to brilliant effect. It’s worthy of Alan Coren, which is extremely high praise in my book.
Sarah Levene’s blog devoted the intersection of faith, insanity and terrorism in a historical context is a brilliant read.
A lovely post from Graeme Archer on sleep, sleeplessness, depression and contentment.
Are e-books fated to go the way of the CD-ROM?
A wonderful, moving piece about how Tori Amos inspired WCW wrestler Mick Foley to champion the cause of victims of domestic violence.
A delightful post from the always fascinating @daintyballerina on May Day customs in Tudor England. It contains one of my favourite quotes from John Stow, which will shortly be appearing in a post of my own.
The profound and moving story of a Methodist pastor who now finds herself an atheist – and the impact of that change on her family, friends and neighbours.
The Chadwyck-Healey catalogue getting testy.
Lynne Truss on journalism and the monstrous virtues of the sub-editor. (I have been, and sometimes still am, a sub-editor.)
Hopi Sen on why Ken Livingstone lost the London mayoral election. Sen writes about politics from the inside and he is always worth reading for his insight into political strategy as much as his grasp of policy. He’s also rather witty. I tend to think he downplays Livingstone’s personal flaws in this post – most obviously the anti-Jewish racism and the hypocritical tax arrangements – but his analysis is otherwise matchless.
The Economist reviews the argument against PhDs.
Artist Laurie Rosenwald charmingly chews over her decision to live in Sweden.
How did parents get children to sit still in long-exposure Victorian photographs? Turn themselves into furniture, that’s how.
Nick Cohen on the future of the free press – and the most disgraceful abuse of media power yet to be revealed.
The great WC Fields juggling – taken from The Old Fashioned Way. It’s a reminder that, as well as being a brilliant verbal comedian, Fields’ command of physical comedy was – and remains – matchless. And this is a great piece from Emma Simmonds on Fields’ compellingly strange masterpiece Never Give A Sucker An Even Break.
I post links to a lot of political articles and comment on Twitter, some of which stales quickly once the immediate moment is past. But Matthew Norman’s blistering dissection of David Cameron’s character is certainly an exception.
There are always plenty of intriguing and interesting posts on the Two Nerdy History Girls website. I particularly enjoyed this one featuring a gloriously outsized soup turreen.
Feminism, anti-racism and Islam: how the left is censoring radical critiques of reactionary practices.
Paracelsus, otherwise known as Philippus Theophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim. Or not, as the case may be.
Jonny Geller’s agent’s manifesto, arguing that too often author’s are treated as little more than an irrelevant nuisance by publishers.
A delightful demolition of self-appointed language vigilante, Simon Heffer.
Nancy Bilyeau, author of The Crown, on the excessive use of torture in Tudor England.
How bookshops should fight back against the tax-dodging Amazon.
The forthcoming exhibition dedicated to Prince Henry, the eldest son of James I, whose young death from typhoid aged 18, surely changed the course of English history – and not for the better.
The sublime Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman is duly and rightly praised.
A brilliant, must-read article from Kenan Malik on immigration, assimilation and multiculturalism.
A wonderful analysis of Hemingway’s astonishingly artful uses of simplicity and repetition.
A depressing but important piece from Norman Geras on anti-semitism and the left.
A superb piece by Susan Bordo in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the complex relationship both readers and writers of historical fiction have to develop with the underlying history.
Thoughtful review of Nick Cohen’s You Can’t Read This Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom by Michael Weiss in The New Criterion.
Stephen Brown reviews David Schiff’s The Ellington Century in the TLS. I’m a great Ellington fan and this sounds a fascinating book; but also – perhaps – something of a missed opportunity.
Fantasy writer Jim Chines practical exploration of the plausibility of both male and female genre cover-art poses.
The ongoing debate in the scientific and economic faculties about viable social model for vampire economies. That’s not a metaphor. Actual vampires. Proof, if it were needed, that scientists like their humour bone dry.
Kirsty Rolfe’s brilliant flowchart for her students on the citation of Shakespearean criticism.
Hilary Mantel’s top five Tudor reads. A fascinating list, which has added a couple more books to my to-read pile. It’s not something I had thought about before, but following an exchange on Twitter with Paul Lay of History Today, I may be compelled to compile my own list sometime too. Here, too, is Mantel discussing her extraordinary reinvention of Thomas Cromwell.
An instructive and insightful piece from Jane Rusbridge, author of The Devil’s Music and the forthcoming Rook, describing the work of a fiction editor from an author’s perspective.
A close study of one of John White’s maps of the eastern seaboard of the United States may reveal what happened to Ralegh’s famous “lost colony” in Roanoke. I will blog about this properly at some point, but this is a fantastic story which could help solve one of the great mysteries of European colonisation.
Jonathan Freedland on the strategic incoherence of Labour attacks on the coalition government.
Molly McArdle on Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I don’t know the book at all, but Molly’s description of her reaction to it is deeply touching.
A superbly detailed history of The Jerusalem Tavern in Clerkenwell, one of the best pubs in London – and not uncoincidentally, one of the smallest.
Really interesting post from artist John Coulthart on the inspirations of Maurice Sendak, who died this week. It is largely based on Sendak’s own words. Relatedly, I also linked to this delightfully illustrated letter from Sendak and a wonderful review of Sendak’s book of essays, Caldecott and Co.
One of the great lost videos of the eighties, surely. Scots pop singer and ardent nationalist, Jesse Rae – that’s him dressed in his stage gear as a medieval Scots clan warrior – who, if I remember correctly, hated the English so much he refused to travel south of the border.
David Hasselhoff raps with Pingu over a Eurodisco beat. Hard to improve on, I know. And impossible to follow.
Shakespeare’s Birthplace, Stratford upon Avon
I’m outside the As You Like It café on Henley Street in Stratford, two doors up from the entrance to Shakespeare’s birthplace, sitting with a cup of hot pale tea in my hands, its steam drifting listlessly upwards, fading into nowhere. Before me, uneaten, sits a slice of white half-warm toast buttered just too late to melt. The town is for the moment quiet; shops are opening or just open.
Down the street are the restored 19th-century gables, dark oak frame and plaster frontage, the colour of baked cream, of the buildings where, somewhere, Shakespeare was born a day or two before his baptism at Holy Trinity church on 26 April 1564. Soon the tourists will be gathering, some massed together in whorls and clusters, others strung unsteadily along the street. I’m not one of them, I tell myself.
But, of course, I am. I’ve unfolded a crisp new Ordnance Survey map; all roads seem to raise points of interest.
Henley Street is the epicentre of Shakespeare’s England; paths – unknown and known – radiate out from here through Stratford and then off beyond the town’s once elm-marked limits. In the late 16th century Henley Street itself rolled north-west past Bishopton towards the Saxon church of St Peter on bare risen land at Wootton Wawen. A pre-Christian burial mound lay in the churchyard behind; across the road to the south was Puck’s Dyke, the medieval name for the old earthworks by the ford on the river Alne. The village had not brought luck to its recent owners: the second and third Dukes of Buckingham were both executed for treason, in 1483 and 1521 respectively. Shakespeare would dramatise both: the former in Richard III and the latter in Henry VIII. (Another owner, Henry Grey, Duke of Suffolk, met an identical fate in 1554.)
The road north west from Stratford
Beyond Wootton Wawen, the road, treacherous in winter, snagged north to Henley-in-Arden, its long, wide high street sheltered to the east by a steep and tree-lined ridge on which once stood the de Montfort castle of Beaudesert, already abandoned and decayed to nearly nothing by the late 16th century. The de Montfort’s great deer chases, which swept in a wide arc around the north of the town, shaped from the old oak forest of Arden, had lately been disparked, its pales dismantled.
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Natalie Grueninger (follow her on Twitter), who runs the excellent On The Tudor Trail website, has just posted her interview with me about The Favourite, which will be out in paperback on 21 June. I really enjoyed answering Natalie’s questions and I hope that comes across in my responses. The interview can be read here.
To mark the 2012 anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, I have written a post exploring my interest in Shakespeare and trying to define what I am looking for when writing about him. It is necessarily more personal, in parts, than my other posts; forgive me if it seems indulgently so.
One of the great 20th Shakespearean scholars, Samuel Schoenbaum, relates an observation of Desmond McCarthy’s about Shakespearean biography. Trying to discern Shakespeare’s personality, McCarthy said, is like looking at a portrait set behind darkened glass in a gallery. At first the portrait seems flat and lifeless. But the more intently you regard it, the more the sitter’s features seem to come to life: eyes at first dull now spark and gleam; the solid brushstrokes around the jaw soften, melt to flesh; the mouth parts, as if exhaling a long-held breath. Only then do you realise that it is, in fact, your own face you are admiring, reflected in the glass.
McCarthy’s insight is one that frequently comes to mind when thinking – or reading – about Shakespeare. What, if anything, are we looking for besides a reflection of our own concerns or preoccupations? With Shakespeare, in particular, it is a problem made more pressing by the reticence of the biographical record – there are more blank spaces on the canvas for portraitists to fill with conjectures or inventions of their own – as much as by the impossibility of finding a definitive Shakesperean identity in the work as it survives. Shakespeare is too busy being everyone to project a sense of self. As the 20th-century American poet John Berryman wrote, while in the midst of researching a critical biography of Shakespeare that he would never complete: ‘Oh my God! Shakespeare. That multiform & encyclopedic bastard.’
Shakespeare haunts our culture. But I find myself increasingly drawn to exploring those things that haunted him: the ghosts of the cultural and ritual worlds that were already dying when he was young, and that he would help kill; the ghosts of English history, of old ballads and tales, of folk memory and folk lore, as he might himself have found them, haunting the English landscape.
We have long known about his readings in and borrowings from the chronicles of Holinshed and Hall, among much else; but increasingly I want to push further than that, to go beyond what Philip Sidney called the ‘bare Was’ of history towards a greater sense of how his reading and accumulation of story might have been informed by personal experience. That is, what images and associations might have been conjured up by, say, his reading about the siege of Rochester in Holinshed’s Chronicles when researching King John; or the Cotswolds when he wrote The Merry Wives of Windsor; or Bury St Edmonds when he wrote Henry VI, part 2; and so on.
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It was with a certain amount of trepidation that I approached Suzannah Lipscomb’s latest book. Was it really necessary? Did the world need another guide book to the historic buildings of England? Would she not be forced into tiresome iterations of ‘We can imagine…’ or ‘If one closes one’s eyes one can almost hear…’ and so on.
Well, so much for my judgement: I stand corrected. A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England is not only a first-class and fascinating guide to the most important of what survives of Tudor England, it also doubles as a deceptively thorough history of the period – and indeed a fine introduction to the complexities of life in sixteenth-century England.
Readers expecting a comprehensive guide to the buildings of Tudor England should look elsewhere: Lipscomb offers something else. Although on paper this may look a more limited work of reference, Lipscomb has used that limitation to create something far deeper and more worthwhile than any mere gazetteer could ever hope to provide.
In essence, A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England takes the reader on a journey through fifty English locations with strong associations to Tudor history. Most of course are buildings – churches, castles, houses and so on – but Lipscomb’s survey also encompasses, among other things, a ship, a park, a battlefield and a solitary tree. These entries are organised geographically by region and are interspersed here and there with sections on other more elusive aspects of Tudor life, covering everything from food and clothing to the purpose of royal progesses and the development of the theatre.
In her introduction, Lipscomb sets out the criteria governing her selection: that there must be something that is actually still worth seeing; that each site should have a story to tell about a significant person or event in Tudor history; that as wide an area of England should be covered as possible; and that the entries should taken together offer a balanced overview of Tudor history as a whole.
Written out like that, I think the difficulty of the task Lipscomb has undertaken becomes apparent. I’m not wholly sure it ought to be possible to tick all those boxes, never mind do it with such elegance and wit. Lipscomb is now an academic historian and a writer – her previous book, the excellent 1536: The Year That Changed Henry VIII, was published in 2009 – but she also worked as a curator at Hampton Court Palace for three years. That experience shines through in the text, since she has a superb eye for telling architectural detail and a subtle, evocative sensitivity to place: the cold winds at Ludlow, say, or the desolation of Pontefract Castle.
The book is aimed at the general reader, but Lipscomb is a clear and insightful writer and there is much for everyone to enjoy, from the judiciously chosen stories she recounts – the public triumphs and private tragedies of an extraordinary period of English history – to the vivid and revealing portraits she draws of the lead actors. Moreover, although of course all the figures one would expect to be here are covered, from Sir Thomas More to William Shakespeare, there are many less well known men and women with fascinating lives. I knew next to nothing of poor Mary Tudor, Henry VIII’s sister, for example, and certainly not of her year of five weddings; I loved the workmen at Hampton Court suddenly having to replace Anne Boleyn’s heraldic falcon with the panther of Jane Seymour, working under such pressure that they missed a few up in the roof.
Lipscomb is empathetic in her portrayals – the account of Mary I’s marriage to Philip of Spain at Winchester Cathedral, for instance, is gently moving. But her judgements are no less sharp for all that. I particularly liked Jane Seymour’s “cheerful, bovine tractability”, for instance.
Caveats? The only criticism I can really think of relates to my point about the book being an excellent introduction to the history of the period. There is a timeline of important dates tucked away in the introduction, but it is fairly cursory. A fuller timeline, cross-referenced as appropriate to the relevant buildings and chapters would, I think, be helpful to readers trying to piece 16th century England back together in their minds. But it is a minor quibble, perhaps even a graceless one given how much else here there is to enjoy.
To return to my initial question. Is this book necessary? Emphatically, yes. It is hard to think of a book that offers such a rich, pleasurable and illuminating guide to Tudor England. It should surely be essential reading for anyone traveling to any of the sites it covers, but it would be no less valuable as a companion for anyone simply setting out to explore the history of the period.
NOTE: This review first appeared last month on the excellent London Historian’s blog.
The Crown is the début novel by American journalist and writer Nancy Bilyeau. Set in the aftermath of the Pilgrimage of Grace – and in particular the reprisals that followed its suppression – and against the backdrop of the dissolution of monasteries, its central character is Joanna Stafford, a young novice at Dartford Priory in Kent.
Stafford comes from a noble family whose extensive connections include both those active in the 1536 northern uprising against Henry VIII’s assault on the established church and those who helped crush it. Her decision to enter the priory stems from her deeply private sense of faith, but also from a sense of emotional kinship with Henry’s discarded first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
Stafford is an interesting and complex lead character, highly intelligent and independent-minded but also to some extent surprisingly reticent – almost passive in her emotional and spiritual inner life; the explanation for her coolness and sense of detachment comes late in the book and is certainly psychologically satisfying, but still leaves much to be explored in future books.
Bilyeau deftly draws on the tensions and stresses inherent in the highly charged and lethally dangerous scenario to develop a page-turning plot that involves everything from torture in the Tower of London to the search for the mystical Anglo-Saxon object which gives the book its title – by way of rival claims to the throne at a time when Henry VIII was still without a son.
The England of the late 1530s is sharply, if sparingly evoked – for a book about a young woman in a closed religious institution Bilyeau has managed to conjure an impressively nimble and wide-ranging narrative – and she handles her large cast with enviable ease. Moreover, she reaches deep into English history in ways which illuminate vividly and inventively the crises of the period of which she writes and which also open up a sense of how Tudor England saw its place in history which is rarely explored.
Overall, then, The Crown is an exciting historical thriller, sure in its sense of time and place, which delivers both a cracking fast-paced story and a perceptive insight into the perilous, poisonously inter-penetrated world of politics and religion in late Henrician England.
Johannes De Witt's 1596 sketch of The Swan
It is usually said that Shakespeare re-emerges from ‘the lost years’ with Robert Greene’s flighted asides in Groatsworth of Wit, published in 1592 (and possibly the work of its editor, Henry Chettle), and which I quoted in an earlier post. Although it has sometimes been argued that Greene may not be having at Shakespeare here, for my part I find such thinking a little tenuous: while the allusion industry can overstrain itself, finding echoes and implying causalities of dubious merit, Shakespeare is clearly better suited than anyone else to be the butt of Greene’s jokes.
Allowing Greene, however, does not automatically imply – as it seems to – that Shakespeare was now a London man.
It is implausible to suggest that, as a man of the theatre, Shakespeare would not have come to London by 1591; the likelihood is that his first visit would have been much earlier, given that all the significant troupes played in the city regularly, as they did at most major English cities, together with many lesser troupes and bands of players besides.
The principal venues are well known: the Theatre and the Curtain, and the Place at Newington Butts. But there were other venues, too, most notably the inns: among them the Belle Sauvage and the Cross-Keys. It has been said, in fact, that even when in London the players remained on tour, rarely settling for long runs at specific venues, but continuing to play, less exclusively, at a range of venues across the city.
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Most biographies of Shakespeare have traditionally wafted the young man directly from Stratford to London, presuming that the capital’s dominance of the English theatre which Shakespeare would help establish in the 1590s – and which lasts to this day – also held true for the 1580s. But that is not necessarily so.
The truth is, we cannot know where, when or how Shakespeare entered the theatre, or whether it occurred by chance or circumstance or force of ambition; we cannot know whether it was a long-planned or a spur-of-the-moment decision, or merely something that he edged towards unwittingly. Such information, if it was documented at all, is almost certainly irrecoverable.
That should not surprise us much: I’m not persuaded that any information of that sort was likely to have been recorded, even for the most famous Elizabethan actors, Alleyn, Burbage, Tarlton, Kemp, et al, among whom Shakespeare certainly does not figure. However famous these men became – and Tarlton in particular is as close to a celebrity as an age before celebrity can get – it is only their brief years on England’s stages that left its mark on the historical record, and that but barely. All were born in obscurity, and most died so too.
Where anecdotes do exist about other Elizabethan actors’ early careers, they take a similar shape: the young man plucked from obscurity; a talent stumbled on with surprise. I have quoted elsewhere the 17th-century antiquarian Thomas Fuller’s claim that the great Tarlton was discovered by a servant of Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, while tending swine in his father’s field.
What the form of such stories tells us is, I think, a discomfort with the idea of an individual with ability being their own agent for change. Performing, the meme insists, is an essentially servile function – after all players, as social inferiors, were expected to step into the gutter, rather than ‘taking the wall’, when they met their betters in the street – and therefore talent cannot simply assert itself, it must be discovered, nurtured, patronised.
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It is hard to overstate the volume and variety of entertainers whom one might have encountered on England’s roads in the early 1500s. But then, it’s a phenomenon that we’re viewing through the filter of what occurred later, around the turn of the century and after, when theatrical and performance culture was forcibly narrowed, shaped into a metropolitan elite itself but also reordered to cater to a more elite, ‘sophisticated’ audience.
For my part, what surprises me most, perhaps, looking at the data, is the sheer number of patrons. A quick scan through the Records of Early English Drama (REED) index of patrons for Kent, say, reveals some 83 patrons of some sort over the course of the 16th century, of whom 50 supported troupes of players and 54 minstrels or other specifically named musicians, be they drummers, trumpeters, lutenists, pipers, or harpers.
These figures are, of course, no more than illustrative – the survival of any such information is arbitrary and the way in which clerks recorded such visits was prey to whim – but they do, I think, convey something of the rich texture of itinerant entertainment in the period. Kent, in fact, was in a particularly privileged position being so close to London while also benefiting from occasional visits from continental entertainers, among them, for example, the King of Poland’s bearwards, who were in Kent in 1521-2.
Bear-baiting was the other principal entertainment receiving patrons’ support: bearwards belonging to 21 different patrons are noted in the surviving county records . One bearward, John Sackerston, had a career that can be traced through four decades, from Shrewsbury in 1553-4 to Bristol in 1579-80, by which time he was in the service of the Earl of Derby. He was, it would seem, something of a legend; Sackerson, the famous bear at Paris Garden on the Bankside, close by the Globe, was named after him. ‘I have seen/Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him/By the chain’, boasts Slender in Merry Wives of Windsor.
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Sometime in the early 1600s, the Warwickshire antiquarian Sir Simon Archer transcribed a document dated St Matthew’s Day – 21 September – 1444 and signed by John Talbot, second earl of Shrewsbury (and the hero of 1 Henry VI). In it, Talbot confirmed the rights of all Shropshire minstrels to gather in Shrewsbury each year on the feast of St Peter in Chains, held on 1 August, also known as Lammas Day.
On that day, they were to elect a king to govern them for the year to come and then march through the town beneath torches and banners to mark his inauguration. The right apparently dated back to the reign of William the Conqueror when Roger de Montgomery, then earl of Shrewsbury, was stricken with leprosy. A dream had told Montgomery to make pilgrimage to the chapel of Araske – otherwise unknown – where a drop of wax from an eternal candle, lit by the virgin Mary at the birth of her son, would heal him. Despite days of prayer and devotion, the wax refused to fall. But on the thirteenth day, the earl’s minstrel went to pray, the candle descended for him, and the wax dripped, and Roger was made whole. The minstrels’ right was Roger’s gift of thanks.
I came across the story in one of the Records of Early English Drama (REED) volumes for Shropshire. It seemed to articulate for me something compellingly strange and distant about the pre-Reformation itinerant culture of minstrelsy: its proximity to power; its capacity for solemnity as well as joy; the rituals of torchlight, of candlelight and music, of the procession or pageant, fashioned into statements of group identity; the moral seriousness of the mock court and the way that order and organisation – even of something as inherently chaotic as minstrelsy – was expressed through a pseudo-feudal hierarchy, sublimating, perhaps even resolving, what seemed to me an apparent tension between liveried servitude and the liberty of travel.
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My review of Suzannah Lipscomb’s new book, A Visitor’s Companion to Tudor England has just gone on-line at London Historians.
UPDATE: I have just posted the review on this blog here.
Anne Boleyn (there are no authenticated contemporary portraits of Anne)
It is impossible to know what Elizabeth I thought or felt about the fact that her father, Henry VIII, had executed her mother, Anne Boleyn, on charges of adultery with, among others, Elizabeth’s uncle and Anne’s brother. It is entirely possible, given that she was not yet three when her mother died, that she had no real memory of Anne at all. But it is hard to conceive that such a family history would not be the cause of at least a little emotional unquiet.
There would of course have been many around Elizabeth who could have attested to her infant relationship with Anne Boleyn and described to her many maternal intimacies and acts of tenderness and care that we might imagine, from our own experiences as parents and children, but which we cannot recreate from the evidence that now survives.
In fact, the only meaningful description of Anne Boleyn together with her daughter that we have comes from a letter written to Elizabeth I after her accession in 1559.
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I blogged a couple of weeks ago about Sir Thomas Smith, late in life and in poor health, complaining about how difficult it was to work for Elizabeth I. (I also quoted his trenchant observation on the implications of the Ridolfi plot here.)
Smith is a fascinating example of those apparently minor figures in Tudor history who often don’t get the attention they deserve. Born on 23 December 1513, he was the son of a far from prosperous Saffron Waldon sheep-farmer. The relative poverty of his upbringing did not hold him back, however: his outstanding intellect took him to Cambridge University, where he was recognised as one of the leading students of his generation, and then to a career as an academic, an administrator, a privy councillor, and diplomat.
He is often said to have had an abrasive personality, but since he served the regimes of Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth I, albeit in different capacities and not without periods of disfavour, he cannot have been quite as unyieldingly unpleasant as one might think. He was a moderate Protestant with friends across the religious spectrum, and his academic interests ranged from history and linguistics through political theory to chemistry and maths. In later life he was a noted patron of learning, founding two scholarships at Queen’s College, Cambridge and warmly encouraging the likes of Gabriel Harvey, another prodigiously gifted Saffron Walden man of mean background.
Yesterday, however, I came across a fascinating article about his work as an economic theorist. His principal work in this field was The Discourse of the Commonweal, written in 1549 during a period of exile from the court and not published until 1581. It is only recently that the text has been definitively ascribed to him.
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I have written elsewhere – see for instance my post on the life of Thomas Kyd – on the way in which the more or less arbitrary survival of documentary evidence distorts our ideas about the shape and richness of Elizabethan culture.
And for us, looking back, the theatre of the period looks like a writers’ theatre. Even discounting Shakespeare, a world that gave us Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Kyd, Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton – never mind John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont, John Lyly, Robert Greene, Thomas Dekker, John Webster, et al – was clearly doing something right.
But again the nature of the surviving evidence has helped warp that picture. For contemporaries, in fact, it was very much an actors’ theatre. And while the best known tragedians, Richard Burbage and Edward Alleyn, are still familiar names to us by virtue of their associations with the great roles, the best illustration of that fact is nevertheless the career of the clown Richard Tarlton. All performance is ephemeral; comedy wholly so.
By the time Tarlton died of the plague in September 1588 – at a guess in his late thirties, since the earliest reference to him is in 1570 – he was something of a legend.
According to Thomas Fuller:
When Queen Elizabeth was serious, I dare not say sullen, and out of good humour, he could un-dumpish her at his pleasure. Her highest favourites would, in some cases, go to Tarlton before they would go to the queen, and he was their usher to prepare their advantageous access unto her. In a word, he told the queen more of her faults than most of her chaplains, and cured her melancholy better than all of her physicians.
Another anecdote, which seems to attest to Tarlton’s willingness to be ferociously provocative, has him performing at court in front of Elizabeth and interrupting the play to point at Sir Walter Ralegh and say, “See how the knave commands the queen!”
…for which he was corrected by a frown from the queen; yet he had the confidence to add that [Ralegh] was of too much and too intolerable a power; and going on with the same liberty, he reflected on the over-great power and riches of the Earl of Leicester, which was… universally applauded by all that were present.
Tarlton was a member of the Queen’s Men – the premier troupe of actors in the 1580s – from its inception in late March 1583 and was almost certainly its principal draw. Sir Philip Sidney – who I have always thought of as a rather humourless man – was godfather to Tarlton’s son, also named Philip.
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Thomas Howard, 4th Duke of Norfolk: the principal victim of the Ridolfi Plot
On May 16 1568 the catholic regnant Scottish queen Mary Stuart arrived in England. She had been deposed, marginalised and effectively disowned by the protestant establishment in Scotland, where her young son James VI, aged 13 in 1569, was now a minority king.
Mary was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret, and therefore had a strong claim to the crown of England, the strongest after Elizabeth’s in fact, and the stronger of the two for those who regarded Elizabeth’s dubious legitimacy as the child of Anne Boleyn sufficient to bar her from the throne. Mary made her ambitions quite clear by proudly quartering the English coat of arms with her own when she learned of Mary Tudor’s death in 1558. A later report has her joining a group discussing a portrait of Elizabeth. Was it a good likeness of the queen of England? “Nay, it is not like her, for I am the Queen of England,” Mary replied.
Mary’s arrival in England created a problem for Elizabeth’s government. As the Spanish ambassador astutely observed the following week:
They must be somewhat embarrassed… although these people are glad enough to have her in their hands, they have many things to consider. If they keep her as if in prison, it will probably scandalise all neighbouring princes, and if she remain free and able to communicate with her friends, great suspicions will be aroused.
The English chose scandal and prison; but the government also explored ways of peacefully restoring Mary to Scotland that would also bind her politically to England. One possible solution was for Mary to marry an English nobleman. Elizabeth, once apparently a supporter of such a strategy, now forbade it: it gave Mary too great a purchase on the English throne. Which was no doubt one of the attractions for Mary, and she found the ideal candidate, certainly in his own mind, in the shape of Thomas Howard, fourth Duke of Norfolk.
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Hollar's "Exact Surveigh" of 1667
I have lived in London most of my life, and one of the pleasures for me in researching and writing The Favourite, an exploration of the relationship between Elizabeth I and Walter Ralegh, is that so much of their story is also a London story. Or, more accurately, London is always there in the background, discreetly attracting my attention with its prodigies. I am forever tempted to go in search of it.
Of course, Ralegh’s London no longer exists, precious little of it having survived the Great Fire of 1666, although the Victorians also contributed along the way, destroying Ralegh’s Islington home, for instance.
But the extent of the fire’s devastation is still unsettling; eye-witness descriptions are reminiscent for the modern reader of footage of Hiroshima or Dresden. In the aftermath of the fire there was ‘Nothing but stones and rubbish… from one end of the City almost to the other’ wrote one Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, while a man from the bleak lunar hills of Westmoreland found himself gazing upon a ruined reflection of his home: ‘The houses are laid so flat to the ground that the City looks just like our fells, for there is nothing to be seen but heaps of stones’.
Despite having read such comments many times before, I was nevertheless stunned to sit in the library and look for the first time at Wenceslaus Hollar’s ‘before and after’ maps of London. Those of the City before the fire, in common with the maps and drawings of his predecessors like Visscher and Agas, are profligate with detail: they provide not merely a street plan but also a bird’s-eye view of the city from some notional perspective in the air.
Along each street you can see something of each house, even if often it is only the pitch of the gabled roof or the number of floors, windows flecked with ink; behind the houses are a patchwork of courtyards, paths and gardens studded with trees. It is impossible to know to what extent these kind of details are intended as accurate representations, as opposed to the merely illustrative or emblematic, but they are nonetheless vivid testimony to the profusion of buildings in Tudor and Stuart London, and to life lived, in a lovely Elizabethan word sadly fallen from the language, ‘pestered’ close together – meaning overcrowded, clogged, pressed against one another. That ‘pestered’ also seems to imply of pestilence and plague – despite being in fact derived from a different word-root – adds a poignant undertow to the image of these packed and compact lives.
On Hollar’s ‘Exact Surveigh’ of 1667, however, commissioned by Charles II, things are different. The area skirting the fire damage is, as before, cramped with detail. But the great heart of the map is mostly blank – shockingly so. Hollar gives us the skeletal streets through the City and the sites of the churches and a few other buildings; elsewhere, white space. At first sight, Hollar’s print inverts the implied convention that the centre of any map should be the point of most interest and complexity, with both fading the further you get towards the margins. This map focuses the eye on emptiness, the absence of information. The City, and its history, had been erased. It must have been the simplest and saddest map Hollar ever drew.
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Mary, Queen of Scots
I was not, truth be told, expecting to write much, if at all, about the world of espionage when I first set out to research The Favourite, my recent book about the relationship between Elizabeth I and Ralegh. After all, Ralegh’s protestant credentials in the fight against imperial Spain would appear, at first sight, unimpeachable. What could possibly connect his world with that of Babington?
As it happens, quite a lot. As I have tried to show in The Favourite, the young Ralegh was a much more ambivalent figure than traditional histories suggest. In particular, during his first years in London at Middle Temple in the mid-to-late 1570s, when he was scratching around half-heartedly on the far margins of the court along with many contemporaries, necessity demanding they pretend to a status they could barely afford, ever threatened by poverty and debt, his reputation extended little further than drunkeness: louche, reckless and wanton.
And many of Ralegh’s companions were, largely, Catholics and their fellow travellers, since he quickly became part of the circle around the Earl of Oxford, a group largely defined by a sour, sullen and reactionary opposition to the Elizabethan settlement. In one sense, this suggests a personal indifference on Ralegh’s part – which I suspect was also widespread – to the schism that separated the faiths, enjoying with his friends a fellowship defined by circumstance far more than ideology, and sharing a voluble, almost fashionable, disaffection rooted more in youth and under-employment than in the practical matters of revolt.
He sounds to me one with some of Babington’s ale-house seditionaries, such as Chidiock Tichbourne, who said sorrowfully on the scaffold, ‘Before this thing chanced, we lived together in most flourishing estate: of whom went report in the Strand, Fleet Street, and elsewhere about London but of Babington and Tichbourne? No threshold was of force to brave our entry. Thus we lived, and wanted nothing we could wish for: and God knows, what less in my head than matters of state?’
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Scene from an execution
On Tuesday 20th September 1586, seven Catholic men were bound to hurdles in the Tower of London – one of them, a priest named John Ballard, on a single sled, the others two-a-piece – and then dragged westward on their final slow journey through the city’s autumnal streets to a hastily erected scaffold in the open fields ‘at the upper end of Holborn, hard by the highway-side to St Giles’. The scaffold was probably situated somewhere a little to the north west of what is now Lincoln’s Inn Fields, then known as Cup Field. The crowd gathered there to watch them die numbered in thousands. The authorities had fenced off the site to stop horsemen blocking the view, and had also raised the gallows ‘mighty high’, so that everyone could see justice being done.
The names of the men were – Ballard aside – Anthony Babington, John Savage, Robert Barnwell, Chidiock Tichbourne, Charles Tilney, and Edward Abingdon. (Seven more conspirators and their accomplices would die the following day: Edward Jones, Thomas Salisbury, John Charnock, Robert Gage, John Travers, Jerome Bellamy and Henry Donne, elder brother of the poet.) Most of them were minor courtiers, well-connected, wealthy; it was said they wore fine silks on this, their last day.
Just a week before they had been tried at Westminster and found guilty of treason; six weeks before that, they had still been free men. But then had come intimations of arrest – one story is that Babington was alerted by catching sight of a message delivered to a dining companion named Scudamore and realising that Scudamore was, in fact, one of Walsingham’s men – followed by dispersal and desperate flight. Babington and four others took to what was then still wild woodland beyond the city at St John’s Wood.
The authorities searched the houses of some thirty known recusants around London. Almost all were outside the city walls in places such as Hoxton, Clerkenwell, Highgate, Enfield, Islington, Newington and Westminster. One conspirator, John Charnock, was captured on the road from Willesden, where he too had slept in the woods.
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