Shakespeare’s World #

Shakespeare’s life spanned both Elizabethan and Jacobean England, a dynamic period of change, expansion, exploration and enlightenment, yet his view of the world (Weltanshaung) was quite different from ours.

For a general discussion of Shakespeare’s life see:

https://nebo-lit.com/drama/shakespeare-world/shakespeares-world.html

We are fortunate to have over 400 years of expert critical scholarship examining Shakespeare’s works. All have differing perspectives and personal views.

Stephen Greenblatt writing for the NYRB is a prominent New Historicist critic and Pulitzer winner, is a strong proponent of Shakespeare of Stratford’s authorship and actively opposes alternative theories.

In “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” he reconstructs the cultural context that could have shaped Shakespeare, showing plausible connections between his documented life and his works. Greenblatt refutes the idea that Shakespeare lacked the necessary education or experience, pointing to his robust grammar school education, extensive experiential learning as an actor, and exceptional genius. He views authorship theories as anti-intellectual, rejecting scholarly consensus and relying on conspiracy.

Greenblatt maintains that Shakespeare was in the play writing business, all of his life, of probing the passions of his characters and arousing the passions of his audiences. His skill in doing so is almost universally acknowledged to have been unrivaled, but the inner sources of this skill remain largely unknown.

Greenblatt feels that the play must have emerged in an unusually direct way from the playwright’s inner life, indeed that at moments the playwright was barely in control of his materials. I will attempt in what follows to trace Hamlet back to a personal experience of grief and to sketch a long-term aesthetic strategy that seems to have emerged from this experience.

Sometime in the spring or summer of 1596 Shakespeare must have received word that his only son Hamnet, eleven years old, was ill. Whether in London or on tour with his company he would at best have only been able to receive news intermittently from his family in Stratford, but at some point in the summer he presumably learned that Hamnet’s condition had worsened and that it was necessary to drop everything and hurry home. By the time the father reached Stratford the boy—whom, apart from brief visits, Shakespeare had in effect abandoned in his infancy—may already have died. On August 11, 1596, Hamnet was buried at Holy Trinity Church: the clerk duly noted in the burial register, “Hamnet filius William Shakspere.”

Shakespeare published no elegies and left no direct record of his paternal feelings. It is sometimes said that parents in Shakespeare’s time could not afford to invest too much love and hope in any one child. One out of three children died by the age of ten, and overall mortality rates were by our standards exceedingly high.

Death was a familiar spectacle; it took place at home, not out of sight. When Shakespeare was fourteen, his seven-year-old sister Anne died, and there must have been many other occasions for him to witness the death of children.

In the four years following Hamnet’s death, the playwright, as many have pointed out, wrote some of his sunniest comedies: The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado About Nothing, As You Like It. This fact is, for some, decisive evidence that the father’s grief must at most have been brief. But the plays of these years were by no means uniformly cheerful, and at moments they seem to reflect an experience of deep personal loss.

In King John, probably written in 1596 just after the boy was laid to rest, Shakespeare depicted a mother so frantic at the loss of her son that she is driven to thoughts of suicide. Observing her, a clerical bystander remarks that she is mad, but she insists that she is perfectly sane:

“I am not mad; I would to God I were!”

Reason, she says, and not madness, has put the thoughts of suicide in her head, for it is her reason that tenaciously keeps hold of the image of her child. When she is accused of perversely insisting on her grief, she replies with an eloquent simplicity that breaks free from the tangled plot:

The grieving Constance in King John laments:

Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts, Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form….

Writing a play about Hamlet, in or around 1600, may not have been Shakespeare’s own idea. At least one play, now lost, about the Danish prince who avenges his father’s murder had already been performed on the English stage, successfully enough to be casually alluded to by contemporary writers, as if everyone had seen it or at least knew about it.

Someone in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, with an eye on revenues, may simply have suggested to Shakespeare that the time might be ripe for a new, improved version of the Hamlet story. For that matter, with his high stakes in the company’s profits, Shakespeare was singularly alert to whatever attracted London crowds, and he had by now long experience of dusting off old plays and making them startlingly new. The likely author of the early play, Thomas Kyd, was no obstacle: he had died back in 1594, at the age of thirty-six, possibly broken by the torture inflicted upon him when he was interrogated about the charges of blasphemy and atheism brought against his roommate, Christopher Marlowe.

In any case, neither Shakespeare nor his contemporaries were squeamish about stealing from each other.

Shakespeare had certainly seen the earlier Hamlet play, probably on multiple occasions. When he set to work on his new tragedy, he likely had it by heart—or as much of it as he chose to remember. It is impossible to determine, in this case, whether he sat down with books open before him—as he clearly did, for example, in writing Antony and Cleopatra—or relied on his memory, but he had also certainly read one and probably more than one version of the old Danish tale of murder and revenge.

At the very least, to judge from the play he wrote, he carefully read the story as narrated in French by François de Belleforest, whose collection of tragic tales was a publishing phenomenon in the late sixteenth century. Belleforest had taken the Hamlet story from a chronicle of Denmark compiled in Latin in the late twelfth century by a Dane known as Saxo the Grammarian. And Saxo in turn was recycling written and oral legends that reached back for centuries before him. Here then, as so often throughout his career, Shakespeare was working with known materials—a well-established story, a familiar cast of characters, a set of predictable excitements.

Hamlet makes it clear that Shakespeare had been quietly, steadily developing a special technical skill. This development may have been entirely deliberate, the consequence of a clear, ongoing professional design, or it may have been more haphazard and opportunistic. The achievement was, in any case, gradual: not a sudden, once-and-for-all discovery or a grandiose invention, but the subtle refinement of a particular set of representational techniques. By the turn of the century Shakespeare was poised to make an epochal breakthrough.

He had perfected the means to represent inwardness.

The task of conveying an inner life is an immensely challenging one in drama, since what the audience sees and hears is always in some sense or other public utterance—the words that the characters say to one another or, in occasional asides and soliloquies, directly to the onlookers. Playwrights can pretend, of course, that the audience is overhearing a kind of internal monologue, but it is difficult to keep such monologues from sounding “stagey.”

Even in its earliest-known medieval telling, Hamlet’s saga was the story of the long interval between the first motion—the initial impulse or design—and the acting of the dreadful thing.

In Saxo the Grammarian’s account, the murder of Amleth’s father Horwendil (the equivalent of Shakespeare’s old King Hamlet) by his envious brother Feng (the equivalent of Claudius) was not a secret.

Glossing over “fratricide with a show of righteousness,” the assassin claimed that Horwendil had been cruelly abusing his gentle wife Gerutha. In reality, the ruthless Feng had simply seized both his brother’s kingdom and his wife. No one was prepared to challenge the usurper. The only potential challenger was Horwen- dil’s young son Amleth, for by the time-honored code of this pre-Christian society a son was strictly obliged to avenge his father’s murder.

Feng understood this code as well as anyone, so that it was reasonable to expect that he would quickly move to eliminate the future threat. If the boy did not instantly come up with a clever stratagem, his life would be exceedingly brief. In order to grow to adulthood—to survive long enough to be able to exact revenge—Amleth feigned madness, persuading his uncle that he could never pose a danger. Filthy and lethargic, he sat by the fire, aimlessly whittling away at small sticks and turning them into barbed hooks.

Though the wary Feng repeatedly used intermediaries (the precursors of Shakespeare’s Ophelia, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern) to try to discern some hidden sparks of intelligence behind his nephew’s apparent idiocy, Amleth cunningly avoided detection. He bided his time, slipped out of traps, and made secret plans. Mocked as a fool, treated with contempt and derision, he eventually succeeded in burning to death Feng’s entire retinue and in running his uncle through with a sword. He summoned an assembly of nobles, explained why he had done what he had done, and was enthusiastically acclaimed as the new king.

“Many could have been seen marvelling how he had concealed so subtle a plan over so long a space of time.”

Amleth thus spends years in the interim state that Brutus can barely endure for a few days. Shakespeare had developed the means to represent the psychological experience of such a condition—something that neither Saxo nor his followers even dreamed of being able to do. He saw that the Hamlet story, ripe for revision, would enable him to make a play about what it is like to live inwardly in the queasy interval between a murderous design and its fulfillment.

The problem, however, is that the theater is not particularly tolerant of long gestation periods: to represent the child Hamlet feigning idiocy for years in order to reach the age in which he could act would be exceedingly difficult to render dramatically exciting. The obvious solution, probably already reached in the lost play, is to start the action at the point in which Hamlet has come of age and is ready to undertake his act of revenge.

In Saxo the Grammarian’s Hamlet, as in the popular tale by Belleforest, no ghost appeared. There was no need for a ghost, for the murder was public knowledge, as was the son’s obligation to take revenge. But when he set out to write his version of the Hamlet story, either following Kyd’s lead or on his own, Shakespeare made the murder a secret. Everyone in Denmark believes that old Hamlet was fatally stung by a serpent. The ghost appears in order to tell the terrible truth:

“The serpent that did sting thy father’s life/Now wears his crown” (I.5.39–40).

Shakespeare’s play begins just before the ghost reveals the murder to Hamlet and ends just after Hamlet exacts his revenge. Hence the decisive changes in the plot—from a public killing known to everyone to a secret murder revealed to Hamlet alone by the ghost of the murdered man—enabled the playwright to focus almost the entire tragedy on the consciousness of the hero suspended between his “first motion” and “the acting of a dreadful thing.” But something in the plot has to account for this suspension. After all, Hamlet is no longer, in this revised version, a child who needs to play for time, and the murderer has no reason to suspect that Hamlet has or can ever acquire any inkling of his crime. Far from keeping his distance from his nephew (or setting subtle tests for him), Claudius refuses to let Hamlet return to university, genially calls him “our chiefest courtier, cousin, and son,” and declares that he is next in succession to the throne. Once the ghost of his father has disclosed the actual cause of death—“Murder most foul, as in the best it is,/But this most foul, strange, and unnatural”—Hamlet, who has full access to the unguarded Claudius, is in the perfect position to act immediately. And such instantaneous response is precisely what Hamlet himself anticipates:

Haste, haste me to know it, that with wings as swift
As meditation or the thought of love
May sweep to my revenge. (I.5.29–31)

The play should be over then by the end of the first act. But Hamlet emphatically does not sweep to his revenge. As soon as the ghost vanishes, he tells the sentries and his friend Horatio that he intends “to put an antic disposition on”—that is, to pretend to be mad. The behavior made perfect sense in the old version of the story, where it was a ruse to deflect suspicion and to buy time. The emblem of that time, and the proof of the avenger’s brilliant, long-term planning, were the wooden hooks that the boy Amleth, apparently deranged, endlessly whittled away on with his little knife. These were the means that, at the tale’s climax, Amleth used to secure a net over the sleeping courtiers, before he set the hall on fire. What had looked like mindless distraction turned out to be brilliantly strategic. But in Shakespeare Hamlet’s feigned madness is no longer coherently tactical. Shakespeare in effect wrecked the powerful and coherent plot that his sources conveniently provided him. And out of the wreckage he constructed what most modern audiences would regard as the best play that he had ever written.

Far from offering a cover, the antic disposition leads the murderer to set close watch upon Hamlet, to turn to his counselor Polonius for advice, to discuss the problem with Gertrude, to observe Ophelia carefully, to send for Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to spy upon their friend. Instead of leading the court to ignore him, Hamlet’s madness becomes the object of everyone’s endless speculation. And, strangely enough, the speculation sweeps Hamlet along with it:

“I have of late—but wherefore I know not—lost all my mirth.” “But wherefore I know not”—

Hamlet, entirely aware that he is speaking to court spies, does not breathe a word of his father’s ghost, but then it is not at all clear that the ghost is actually responsible for his profound depression. Already in the first scene in which he appears, before he has encountered the ghost, he is voicing to himself, as the innermost secret of his heart, virtually the identical disillusionment he discloses to the oily Rosencrantz and Guildenstern:

O God, O God,
How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable
Seem to me all the uses of this world!
Fie on’t, ah fie, fie! ‘Tis an unweeded garden
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely. (I.2.132–127)

His father’s death and his mother’s hasty remarriage, public events and not secret revelations, have driven him to thoughts of “self-slaughter.”

By excising the strategic rationale for Hamlet’s madness, Shakespeare made it the central focus of the entire tragedy. The play’s key moment of psychological revelation—the moment that virtually everyone remembers—is not the hero’s plotting of revenge, not even his repeated, passionate self-reproach for inaction, but rather his contemplation of suicide:

“To be or not to be; that is the question.”

This suicidal urge has nothing to do with the ghost—indeed Hamlet has so far forgotten the apparition as to speak of death as

“The undiscovered country from whose bourn/No traveller returns”—but rather with a soul-sickness brought on by one of the “thousand natural shocks/That flesh is heir to.”

Hamlet marks a sufficient break in Shakespeare’s career as to suggest some more personal cause for his daring transformation both of his sources and of his whole way of writing. A simple index of this transformation is the astonishing rush of new words, words that he had never used before in some twenty-one plays and in two long poems. There are, scholars have calculated, more than six hundred of these words, many of them not only new to Shakespeare but also—

compulsive, fanged, besmirch, intruding, overgrowth, pander, outbreak, unfledged, unimproved, unnerved, unpolluted, unweeded,

to name only a few—new to the written record of the English language. Something must have been at work in Shakespeare, something powerful enough to call forth this linguistic explosion. As audiences and readers have long instinctively understood, passionate grief, provoked by the death of a loved one, lies at the heart of Shakespeare’s tragedy. Even if the decision to redo the old tragedy of Hamlet had come to Shakespeare from strictly commercial considerations, the coincidence of the names—the writing again and again of the name of his dead son as he composed the play—may have reopened a deep wound, a wound that had never properly healed.

But, of course, in Hamlet it is the death not of a son but of a father that provokes the hero’s spiritual crisis. If the tragedy welled up from Shakespeare’s own life—if it can be traced back to the death of Hamnet and to the repeated writing of the name—something must have made the playwright link the loss of his child to the imagined loss of his father. I say “imagined” because Shakespeare’s father was buried in Holy Trinity churchyard on September 8, 1601: the handwriting may have been on the wall, but he was almost certainly still alive when the tragedy was written and may still have been alive when it was first performed. How might the father’s death have become bound up so closely in Shakespeare’s imagination with the son’s?

Shakespeare undoubtedly returned to Stratford in 1596 for his son’s funeral. The minister, as the regulations required, would have met the corpse at the entry to the churchyard and accompanied it to the grave. Shakespeare must have stood there and listened to the words of the prescribed Protestant burial service. While the earth was thrown onto the body—perhaps by the father himself, perhaps by friends—the minister intoned the words,

“Forasmuch as it hath pleased Almighty God of his great mercy to take upon himself the soul of our dear brother here departed, we therefore commit his body to the ground, earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust; in sure and certain hope of the Resurrection to eternal life.”

Did Shakespeare find this simple, eloquent service adequate or was he tormented with a sense that something was missing?

“What ceremony else?” cries Laertes, by the grave of his sister Ophelia; “What ceremony else?”

Ophelia’s funeral rites have been curtailed because she is suspected of the sin of suicide, and Laertes is both shallow and rash. But the question he repeatedly asks echoes throughout Hamlet, and it articulates a concern that extends beyond the boundaries of the play.

Within living memory, the whole relationship between the living and the dead had been changed. Perhaps in conservative Lancashire, where Shakespeare may have sojourned briefly as a young man, if not closer to home, he could have seen the remnants of the old Catholic practice: candles burning night and day, crosses everywhere, bells tolling constantly, close relatives wailing and crossing themselves, neighbors visiting the corpse and saying over it a Pater noster or a De profundis, alms and food distributed in memory of the dead, priests secretly paid to say Masses to ease the soul’s perilous passage through Purgatory.

All of this had come under attack for decades; everything had been scaled back, forced underground, or eliminated outright. Above all, it was now illegal to pray for the dead.

Belief in Purgatory may well have been abused—plenty of pious Catholics thought it was—but it attempted to address fears and longings that did not simply vanish when people were told by the officials of the church and the state that the dead were beyond all earthly contact. Ceremony was not the only or even the principal issue: what mattered was whether the dead could continue to speak to the living, at least for a short time, whether the living could help the dead, whether a reciprocal bond remained. When Shakespeare stood in the churchyard, watching the dirt fall on the body of his son, did he think that his relationship with Hamnet was gone without a trace?

Perhaps. But it is also possible that he found the service, with its deliberate refusal to address the dead child as a “thou,” its reduction of ritual, its narrowing of ceremony, its denial of any possibility of communication, painfully inadequate. And if he could make his peace with the Protestant understanding of these things, others close to him assuredly could not. His wife, Anne, must have stood at Hamnet’s grave, and so too Shakespeare’s parents, John and Mary. Indeed the grandparents had spent far more time with the boy than the father had, for while Shakespeare was in London, they were all living together in Stratford in the same house with their daughter-in-law and the three grandchildren. They had helped to raise Hamnet, and they must have tended Hamnet through his last illness.

And about his parents’ beliefs with regard to the afterlife—specifically, about his father’s beliefs—there is some evidence. This evidence, which points to Catholic connections and half-concealed Catholic beliefs, suggests that John Shakespeare would have wanted something done for Hamnet’s soul, something that he perhaps appealed urgently to his son to do or that he undertook to do on his own. The arguments, or pleading, or tears that may have accompanied such appeals are irrevocably lost. But it is possible to surmise what Shakespeare’s father (and, presumably, his mother, linked by birth to a staunchly Catholic Warwickshire family) would have thought necessary, proper, charitable, loving, and, in a single word, Christian.

Recusant Catholics, prevented from regular confession and communion, were often intensely fearful of a death that would prevent the ritual opportunity to settle the sinner’s accounts with God and to show appropriate, cleansing contrition. (This is precisely the death Hamlet’s father, murdered in his sleep, has suffered:

“No reck’ning made, but sent to my account/With all my imperfections on my head./O, horrible! O, horrible! most horrible!”

Any stains that remained after death would have to be burned away in purgatorial agony, unless the living took steps to alleviate the suffering and reduce the afterlife prison term. In 1596, at the funeral of Hamnet, the issue would almost certainly have surfaced. The boy’s soul needed the help of those who loved and cared for him. John Shakespeare may well have urged his prosperous son William to pay for masses for the dead child, just as he no doubt wanted masses to be said for his own soul. For his father was getting old and would soon be in need of the “satisfactory works” that could shorten the duration of his agony in the afterlife.

If this delicate subject was broached, did the playwright angrily shake his head no or instead quietly pay for clandestine masses for Hamnet’s soul? Did he tell his father that he could not give his son—or, looking ahead, that he would not give his father—what he craved? Did he say that he no longer believed in the whole story of the terrible prison house, poised between heaven and hell, where the sins done in life were burned and purged away?

Whatever he determined at the time, Shakespeare must have still been brooding in late 1600 and early 1601, when he sat down to write a tragedy whose doomed hero bore the name of his dead son. His thoughts may have been intensified by news that his elderly father was seriously ill back in Stratford, for the thought of his father’s death is deeply woven into the play. And the death of his son and the impending death of his father—a crisis of mourning and memory—could have caused a psychic disturbance that helps to explain the explosive power and inwardness of Hamlet.

All funerals invite those who stand by the grave to think about what, if anything, they believe in. But the funeral of one’s own child does more than this: it compels parents to ask questions of God and the universe. Shakespeare must have attended the regular services in his Protestant parish; otherwise his name would have turned up on lists of recusants. But did he believe what he heard and recited? His works suggest that he did have faith, of a sort, but it was not a faith securely bound either by the Catholic Church or by the Church of England. By the late 1590s, insofar as his faith could be situated in any institution at all, that institution was the theater, and not only in the sense that his profoundest energies and expectations were all focused there.

Shakespeare grasped that crucial death rituals in his culture had been gutted. He may have felt this with enormous pain at his son’s graveside. But he also believed that the theater—and his theatrical art in particular—could tap into the great reservoir of passionate feelings that, for him and for thousands of his contemporaries, no longer had a satisfactory outlet. The religious reformation was in effect offering him an extraordinary gift—the broken fragments of what had been a rich, complex edifice—and he knew how to accept and use this gift. He was hardly indifferent to the success he could achieve, but it was not a matter of profit alone. Shakespeare drew upon the confusion, pity, and dread of death in a world of damaged rituals—the world in which most of us continue to live—because he himself experienced those same emotions in 1596, at the funeral of his child, and later, in anticipation of his father’s death. He responded not with prayers but with the deepest expression of his being: Hamlet.

With Hamlet Shakespeare made a discovery by means of which he relaunched his entire career. The crucial breakthrough did not involve developing new themes or learning how to construct a shapelier plot; it had to do rather with an intense representation of inwardness called forth by a new technique of radical excision. He had rethought how to put a tragedy together—specifically, he had rethought the amount of causal explanation a tragic plot needed to function effectively and the amount of explicit psychological rationale a character needed to be strongly convincing. Shakespeare found that he could immeasurably deepen the effect of his plays—that he could provoke in the audience and himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response—if he took out a key explanatory element, thereby occluding the rationale, motivation, or ethical principle that accounted for the action to be unfolded. The principle was not the making of a riddle to be solved, but the creation of a strategic opacity. This opacity, Shakespeare found, released an enormous energy that had been at least partially blocked or contained by familiar, reassuring explanations.

(You could say much the same for John Donne who wrestles with his God in his Holy Sonnets.)

Shakespeare’s work had long been wryly skeptical of official explanations and excuses—the accounts, whether psychological or theological, of why people behave the way they do. His plays had suggested that the choices people make in love are almost entirely inexplicable and irrational—that is the conviction that generates the comedy in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the tragedy in Romeo and Juliet. But at least love was the clearly identifiable motive. With Hamlet, Shakespeare found that if he refused to provide himself or his audience with a familiar, comforting rationale that seems to make it all make sense, he could get to something immeasurably deeper.

The key is not simply the creation of opacity, for by itself that would only create a baffling or incoherent play. Rather, Shakespeare came increasingly to rely on the inward logic, the poetic coherence that his genius and his immensely hard work had long enabled him to confer on his plays. Tearing away the structure of superficial meanings, he fashioned an inner structure through the resonant echoing of key terms, the subtle development of images, the brilliant orchestration of scenes, the complex unfolding of ideas, the intertwining of parallel plots, the uncovering of psychological obsessions.

This conceptual breakthrough in Hamlet was technical—that is, it affected the practical choices Shakespeare made when he put plays together, starting with the enigma of the prince’s suicidal melancholy and assumed madness. But it was not only a new aesthetic strategy. The excision of motive must have arisen from something more than technical experimentation; coming in the wake of Hamnet’s death, it expressed

Shakespeare’s deepest perception of existence, his understanding of what could be said and what should remain unspoken, his preference for things untidy, damaged, and unresolved over things neatly arranged, well made, and settled. The opacity was shaped by his experience of the world and of his own inner life: his skepticism, his pain, his sense of broken rituals, his refusal of easy consolations.

Adapted from Stephen Greenblatt’s , “Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare,” The New York Review of Books,

Shakespeare often gives the best lines to his worst characters such as Polonius’ advice to Leartes regarding integrity or Iago (Othello) pontificating on the importance of “reputation”. Some people can “talk the talk”, but fail to “walk the talk” or demonstrate that theory and practice can be quite dissonant.

“This above all, to thine own self be true,
And it must follow, as the night the day,
Thou canst not then be false to any man”

Polonious, is Claudius’s main advisor and spy chief. He assures us that he will:

find where truth is hid.

Integrity is related to a sense of honour; that of your name or reputation. Shakespeare again addresses this issue in Othello when he has Iago tell Othello,

“Who steals my purse steals trash; …………
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.”

Sometimes a throw-away-line can convey profound sentiments as during the Ghost swearing scene Hamlet tells Horatio:

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

Is this Shakespeare having a swing at academics, that life has many imponderables not evident to intellectuals in their ivory towers?

Assassination Attempts #

There were at least four attempts to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, Somerville captured by guards who died by self strangulation in prison.

William Parry addressing the Queen while brandishing a knife, with Parry hanging from the gallows.

The Babington Plot ,in 1586, to assassinate Queen Elizabeth I, a Protestant, and put Mary, Queen of Scots, her Catholic cousin, on the English throne. It led to Mary’s execution, a result of a letter sent by Mary (who had been imprisoned for 19 years since 1568 in England at the behest of Elizabeth) in which she consented to the assassination of Elizabeth. The plot was thwarted by Walsingham with double agents Robert Poley and Gilbert Gifford.

The final one by Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, who used his charisma and charm to curry favour with the Queen who was 34 years his senior.

Essex’s competition for influence with the Queen, combined with his insatiable ambition, lead to a fall from grace that was as dramatic and rapid as his rise to favour. He was also arrogant, ambitious and temperamental.

Leading an army to quell the Irish, he failed to obey the Queen’s orders and so lost all his perks. Outraged he challenged the Queen.

He paid Shakespeare’s troupe to stage a performance of Richard II and next day lead a failed military charge.

Essex and some of his co-conspirators were executed for treason on 25 February 1601. Elizabeth was shocked and devastated by his betrayal.

Her advisors included Sir Francis Walsingham, (1532-1590) the principal secretary to Queen Elizabeth I creating a highly effective intelligence network. He successfully thwarted England’s foreign enemies and exposed domestic plotters who sought to unseat Elizabeth and return a Roman Catholic monarch to the throne. Anticipating methods that would become routine only centuries later in the world’s intelligence services, Walsingham employed double agents, covert propaganda and disinformation, code breaking, and agents provocateurs to advance English interests. His efforts culminated in the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, in 1587.

Catherine Medici had a fraught and complex relationship with Mary, Queen of Scots, but she defended her to Elizabeth I’s courtier Francis Walsingham, telling Walshingham she “knew very well how often people said things of a poor afflicted princess that did not always turn out to be true.”

The denouement of Mary and Elizabeth’s decades-long power struggle is easily recalled by even the most casual of observers: On February 8, 1587, the deposed Scottish queen knelt at an execution block, uttered a string of final prayers, and stretched out her arms to assent to the fall of the headsman’s axe. Three strikes later, the executioner severed Mary’s head from her body, at which point he held up his bloody prize and shouted, “God save the queen.” For now, at least, Elizabeth had emerged victorious.

It’s unsurprising that the tale of these two queens resonates with audiences some 400 years after the main players lived. As biographer Antonia Fraser explains, Mary’s story is one of “murder, sex, pathos, religion and unsuitable lovers.” Add in the Scottish queen’s rivalry with Elizabeth, as well as her untimely end, and she transforms into the archetypal tragic heroine.

Elizabeth became the model of tolerance; “we will not make windows of men’s souls”. Most Catholics simply went underground. The vast majority of the nobility remained covertly Catholic, while most of her advisors were “fairweather” Protestants. Most fireplaces harboured holes to hide Priests. Religion meant everything so the wisdom went: “Obey the Pope in religion; the Queen in politics”.

Achievements #

Under her reign England prospered into the “Golden Era” and by defeating the Spanish Armada in 1588 emerged as a powerful naval force – “They who rule the waves, can waive the rules”. Much of its ill gotten wealth came from pirating Spanish gold from South America, but soon England founded its own colonies and under its mercantilist policy became extremely wealthy and expansionist to the point where “the sun never set on the British Empire”. Elizabeth never married, leaving no heirs but was loved by all her subjects and by history.

Elizabeth made herself visible to her subjects, displaying her connection to the people and the magnificence of her power by progressing around the county with her entourage of 400 carriages and wagons, armed outriders, banners and buglers, 2400 horses and a court of about 350. The nobility lived in fear, because any visit by her to your estate could bankrupt you.

Magnificence costs money and Elizabeth did tax the people heavily. Royalty depends on a bureaucracy of comptrollers, treasurers, chaplains, clerks, stewards, private secretaries, lord servants, lord chamberlains, physicians, apothecaries, cooks, pages, and servants to the servants. In court Elizabeth had to make do with only 30 female attendants, many who became frisky and uncontrollable due to lack of duties. Her groom of the stool – literally the supervisor of regal bowel movements, became one of the most powerful, providing great access. Elizabeth’s godson is credited with inventing the first flush toilet. Proximity to power, is itself great power and groom of the stool evolved into one of the gatekeepers. By Charles II’s time, paid 5 thousand pounds per year.

Despite this expense, Elizabeth I is duly acknowledged as England’s most celebrated monarch. She is questionably famous for her inspiring speech to her soldiers as the Spanish Armada threatened: “I may have the body of weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king”.

Robert Cecil succeeded his father as Secretary of State and Lord Privy Seal, two of the highest offices in the land. He also inherited his father’s network of spies across Europe, set up to ward against Catholic plots to depose the Protestant monarch. Robert Cecil smoothed the succession of James VI of Scotland when he became King James I of England after Elizabeth’s death in 1603.

The Elizabethan Age was marked by stability, growth and prolific artistic creativity but her failure to provide an heir returned the Stuarts (Jacobean era) to the throne with their ideas of the Divine right of kings and absolute authority of monarchs. Shakespeare was profoundly affected by the transition of monarchs as many of his plays indicate. His concern is about legitimacy, orderly succession and husbandry.

Shakespeare and History #

Historical Accuracy

How should historians respond to creative works about history? Do historians have a public responsibility to apply their specialist knowledge to contest spurious claims about the past? Or should they simply respect creative licence, and let audiences have their fun?

Historical accuracy matters. But more important for historians should be whether creative works pass the test of authenticity: whether a creative work “rings true” to the historical context as a whole.

The Greatest writer in the history of the world was casual and careless with the facts. His plays are full of errors of fact, careless anachronisms, and little knowledge of geography. He has a clerk in Caesar’s Rome, a billiard table in Cleopatra’s Egypt, no Magna Carta in King John, no Reformation in Henry VIII and casts Joan of Arc as a wanton witch.

He has Hector, a 11th -century fighter, quote Aristotle – a 3rd century philosopher. Coriolanus of the 5th century quotes Cato from the 1st . He has never left England, speaks no French, little Italian yet sets many of his plays in exotic locations he is blissfully ignorant of, giving Bohemia a coastline, and send Valentino from Verona to Milan by sea and has Prospero sail out of Milan. Who cares?

While most of his histories are plagiarized verbatim from reliable source;, Roman history from Plutarch, English history from Holinshed, he is careless with detail and sometime outrageously biased as in Richard III.

Most playwrights share topics and compete with each other for the best version. Romeo and Juliet has many versions, but Shakespeare’s stands head and shoulders above the rest. Several playwrights come up with revenge tales like Hamlet, such as Christopher Marlowe (died 1593) or Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy (1592). Shakespeare’s Hamlet leads the field. Marlowe wrote about antisemitism in The Jew of Malta (1589) but The Merchant of Venice (1598) trumps it.

Shakespeare and the Monarchy #

London’s South Bank was the location for the Rose Theatre, the Curtain, the Theatre and the Globe. It was very fashionable to go to the theatre, with the nobility frequent visitors; indeed the Lord Chamberlain of England was the patron of Shakespeare’s own company of players. The poorer theatre goers would pay one penny to stand in the stalls in front of the stage, whilst wealthier patrons would pay up to half a crown to sit under cover.

Shakespeare and his fellow actors performed before the queen in December of 1594 and, early the following year, were paid 20 pounds for performing in comedies that the queen had enjoyed the previous Christmas. Towards the end of the 1590s, Queen Elizabeth had become very fond of The Lords Chamberlain’s Men and had them regularly performing at her court. However, scholars do not imagine that these performances were mingled with interpersonal warmth between the players and the queen. The performances strictly remained as performances, as they would have been described in the royal schedule. Shakespeare and his fellow actors are believed to have regularly undergone serious rehearsals because they were to perform in front of the queen.

Before the actors’ lines were finalized, the person in charge of the affair, called the Master of the Revels, would have cut out some parts of the dialogue to make sure the queen would not hear anything that would offend her royal tastes.

It is possible that every time The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed for the queen, they would have been introduced to her first. There is no surviving account that this happened. Still, Shakespeare’s group performed numerous times for such a long time that it is easy to hypothesize that the actors eventually became friendly with the members of the court.

There are no suggestions that Shakespeare and Elizabeth were friends. Scholars who maintain that they were not friends point out that the queen was a Protestant, while Shakespeare had Catholic leanings. Many scholars say that Shakespeare was very careful in depicting the monarchy in his plays.

There is evidence she had some influence on Shakespeare. She was the model in Midsummer Night’s Dream , she expressed concerns about Flalstaff’s impunity and he finally meets his come-uppance in Henry V. In 1594, the Queen’s Jewish physician was accused of trying to poison her and condemned to death. Did Shakespeare write The Merchant of Venice to reprove her?

Some scholars believe that in 1601, Elizabeth complained that one of Shakespeare’s plays was performed 40 times in houses and on the streets. This comment must not have been made in anger but only in annoyance because, in the following winter, The Lord Chamberlain’s Men performed six times at the queen’s court. It is even believed that before she died, she requested that A Midsummer Night’s Dream be performed.

Analysis of his plays by Clare Asquith in her book ‘Shadowplay’ leads her to speculate that Shakespeare was indeed a Catholic and furthermore a political subversive who embedded political messages in his works.

Queen Elizabeth I died in 1603 and was succeeded by James I. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s name was then changed to The King’s Men. Shakespeare and his fellow actors continued to perform at the royal court more often than they did at Queen Elizabeth’s.

Hamlet is seen by some as a veiled atempt at representing the overthrow of Catholism.

Macbeth appears to flatter the Scottish King, however its portrayal of tyranny was perhaps too subtle for him to pick up.

King Lear (1606) may be a warning to the new King James I about several issues; the false flattery of courtiers, breaking up kingdoms and whether or not a King is a king forever. All his historical plays explore the relationship of power and good governance.

Ancient wisdom #

Here is Helen Razer on recovered ancient wisdom. This is an opinion piece and so should prompt a thoughtful response, and not necessarily accepted as gospel truth.

Some of us look for a return to the idea of universal truth in art and this, in part, is why Shakespeare has survived for centuries.

Shakespeare was, of course, very good and we can still take authentic pleasure in his filth, his wit and his durable rhythms. But, his works can claim to give us no universal truth; other than those aesthetic ones he himself created. This doesn’t stop everyone, from directors to feminist scholars to earnest teachers of English, making the claim that Shakespeare is universal.

Like everyone, Shakespeare came to us within a sociohistoric context. Talent is not sufficient to deliver anyone from their time and it will not deliver access to those “fundamental” truths we have deluded ourselves we no longer need but chase with unprecedented passion. Still. People go on about how Macbeth is eternal and no fewer than 50 film directors have sought to prove this on screen; perhaps least notably, Australian Geoffrey Wright whose 2005 casting of the witches as sexy schoolgirls show us how a desperation to believe in a noble truth from outside ourselves — in this case, Shakespeare — accidentally reveals an obscene truth from inside ourselves. I.e. I think sexy schoolgirls have mystical powers.

Thomas Bowdler, now rightly reviled as a silly censor, was really just doing the same accidental strip-tease with his famous Family Shakespeare where he turned Ophelia from a vessel for suicidal feminine shame into someone who accidentally fell into a river. Shakespeare was not around to complain but, when his famous work Death of A Salesman was revived for a 50th anniversary production, Arthur Miller was and he did not hesitate to express his revulsion for the director, Robert Falls, who had made Willy Loman into a diagnosed depressive.

”Willy Loman is not a depressive, He is weighed down by life. There are social reasons for why he is where he is.” Miller said.

Falls had, in one sense, performed a reverse Bowldlerisation. Whereas Bowlder had made Ophelia emotionally functional, Falls had given Loman dysfunction. But, they were both “freeing” characters from their sociohistoric moorings in order to say something “universal”.

As Miller said before he died, Salesman was a document of a time. Loman is worn down by social expectation and labour just as Ophelia was extinguished by the impossible idea of the feminine. To suppose that either of these texts can offer us a universal truth about the human condition outside the circumstances of their creation is hooey.

In offering “trigger warnings”, as some English departments in American colleges now do, or in “modernising” Shakespeare as many directors are compelled to — if I had my way, every production of Shakespeare would be performed entirely by men dressed in doublet-and-hose — the contemporary interpreter is at odds with himself. The urge here is to make great works available and palatable to a more diverse audience and to agree, at a very basic and flawed level, that the human experience is social and historic and is not universal.

But, to achieve this by taking the n-word out of Huckleberry Finn or, as is often the case, the anti-Semitism out of Merchant of Venice, seems a bit upside-down. Of course, in the case of these two texts, there is an argument to be made that the authors were decrying and were not endorsing racism but even, and especially, if they were not, why spare Twain or Shakespeare the trouble of being seen as racists?

It is easy to understand the urge of professors to seduce their students from detachment with literature. But, it is not so easy to understand how a discussion of Merchant or Finn would be possible without addressing the racism that informs not only these texts by the eras in which they were produced. Universalising the human condition could itself be seen as the foundation of racism. By the Bowdlerisation of these texts, and former Globe theatre director Mark Rylance has admitted to taking the anti-Semitic references out of Merchant, we permit the idea of the “universal” Shakespeare.

Our era of self-examination leads us to hide our history. We feel we have addressed racism, sexism and other grave ills by redacting them from Shakespeare and other texts. And this approach to “universal” art that exceeds time and social conditions is as good as giving Willy Loman the keys to the car. Helen Razer