Theatre and empire

Great Britain on the London stages under James VI and I

Tristan Marshall

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781526151728
  9780719057489
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526134745
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Art
• Index: History

Theatre and empire looks at the genesis of British national identity in the reign of King James VI and I. While devolution is currently decentralising Britain, this book examines how the idea of a united kingdom was created in the first place. It does this by studying two things: the political language of the King's project to replace England, Scotland and Wales with a single kingdom of Great Britain; and cultural representations of empire on the public and private stages.

The book argues that between 1603 and 1625 a group of playwrights celebrated a new national consciousness in works as diverse as Middleton's Hengist, King of Kent, Rowley's The Birth of Merlin and Shakespeare's Cymbeline. Specifically Jacobean interdisciplinary studies are few compared with Elizabethan and Caroline works, but the book attempts to redress the balance by offering a fresh appraisal of James Stuart's reign. Looking at both established and little-known plays and playwrights, Theatre and empire rewrites our understanding of the political and cultural context of the Jacobean stage.

Chapter 1

A Jacobean empire

There is almost no nation but hangs upon the beck and nod of one man, obeys one man, is ruled by one man: therefore in this respect at least the state of things in our time is... like that of Rome under the emperors. And the more like their history is to ours, the more things we may find to study in it that we can apply to our uses.¹

Diuine testimonies shew, that the honour of a king consisteth in the multitude of subiects, and certainely the state of the Jewes was farre more glorious, by the conquests of Dauid, and under the ample raigne of Solomon, then euer before or after.²

When the speaker of the House of Commons, Sir Edward Phelips, welcomed King James VI of Scotland to the English throne he spoke of how God ‘in his divine distribution of Kings and Kingdoms ... hath magnified and invested Your sacred Person, in the imperial throne of this most victorious and happy Nation’.³ James’s arrival had staved off the spectre of domestic conflict over the succession and the country breathed a sigh of relief that the king and his family would ensure England’s Protestant religion for another generation. Yet Phelips’s words prompt us to look at one particular idea, one which was to challenge both parliament and public alike when the Scot came to proclaim his desire to be King of Great Britain. Whether Phelips used the word ‘imperial’ in the same sense as that used in England in the aftermath of Henry VIII’s break with Rome, or with some new meaning in the light of the accession of the Scottish king, provokes us to ask what exactly the early Jacobean period meant by ‘empire’.

The significance of the term lies not only in the fact that the period under James Stuart saw the first permanent settlement in the New World and the plantation of Ulster, but because it also bears a direct influence on the sense of a Jacobean national identity. The early Jacobean period saw the coalescing of sixteenth-century ideas of empire into a new form. This transition period had a momentum of its own, derived from the accession of a Scottish monarch whose uniting of the kingdoms resulted in a spate of popular drama discoursing on the ancient entity of Great Britain. It was a matter very much in the public eye and, given that a play’s subject matter had to be relevant for its audience, the move to plays with a British – rather than English – identity suggests that the historical construct of Great Britain was by no means on the decline in 1603–14. At the dawn of the Stuart age, the theatre described a vision of the British past as well as its future, drawing not only on the recent years of expansion into Ireland and Virginia, but on semi-mythical history too.

In her study of imperial thought and imagery during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Astraea, Frances Yates showed how the Virgin Queen was associated with the idea of the return of the ‘Golden Age’, quoting from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in explanation of this particular myth and illustrating how the queen became an emphatically imperial virgin.⁴ Like the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and Charles IX of France, Elizabeth took on much of the imagery of imperial rule as a just virgin ruling a chosen people. In 1603 the virgin died, but the imperial aspect of the monarch of England’s rule did not.

The most significant hurdle facing the historian seeking to understand imperial thinking in the Jacobean period is that the term was used in more than the single sense in which we generally use it now. On the one hand we have the concept of imperium, the internal empire of the preamble to the 1533 Act in Restraint of Appeals, and on the other empire in our modern sense, that of colonisation and overseas expansion. The two can be and regularly are confused. Discussing from the imperial perspective the arrival of a Scot on the English throne, Jenny Wormald wrote that ‘James could be neither British king nor British emperor, for the empire of England had closed in on itself. In one sense she was indeed correct – James would never have agreed to the Elizabethan form of imperial thinking, the one dating from the reign of Edward VI which sought the reduction of Scotland to colonial status under the English throne. This ignores, however, the other equally topical meanings of the term.⁵ At the death of Elizabeth, the literary conceit of the ‘British Empire’ changed. One form of imperial thought in England indeed ‘closed in on itself, that which promoted Scottish integration into England, but there were to be new forms of discussion on Britain’s imperial destiny to replace it.

Wormald’s assertion that ‘the kingdom of England restated Henry VIII’s definition of “empire” as a kingdom free from outside influence or interference, not this time to resist the mighty claims of the Papacy, but to deal with a little domestic matter, the infiltration of the Scots’, is useful in two respects. It illustrates that there was change in the perception of empire, as well as highlighting the nature of the split between the idea of the internal empire – the relationship of the Scots within an imperial Britain – and the external empire, defending British interests from overseas powers. She continues, however: ‘In 1600, Sir Thomas Wilson listed the claimants to the “absolute Imperiall Monarchy” of England. That, not the title Emperor of the Whole Island of Britain which graced the accession medal of the Scottish claimant, was what mattered’. This chapter will suggest that this was not in fact so.

DEFINITIONS

While the term ‘empire’ is used in the early seventeenth century as referring primarily to the internal sovereign national state and only later with the connotations of overseas colonising, I shall differentiate between the two meanings by referring to the former definition as imperium, allowing for the latter use the term empire. The Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes between the two as (1) ‘A country of which the sovereign owes no allegiance to any foreign superior’ and (2) ‘The extensive territory (especially an aggregate of many separate states) under the sway of an emperor or supreme ruler’. Thus John Russell in his A Treatise of the Happie and Blissed Unioun talks of the ‘tua imperiall crounes of Scotland and Ingland’, recognising the sovereignty and integrity of the two realms, largely in the face of any English thoughts of Scotland becoming a colonial possession.⁶

Much of the confusion over James’s intentions for the re-creation of the imperium of Great Britain is in fact caused by the oversimplification of the idea of empire. Under Elizabeth, the term ‘Britain’ was used as a patriotic extension of the term ‘England’, much in the same way today that the English tend to think of the two words as being synonymous. It is in this context that John of Gaunt’s moving speech in Shakespeare’s Richard II (written in 1595) is best understood:

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise:
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war;
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands;
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.

(Richard II, II.i.40–50)

Most significantly he is made to associate ‘This scepter’d isle’, implying the island of Britain, with ‘this England’.⁷ With the arrival on the English throne of a king who proposed to re-establish the Kingdom of Great Britain proper, those who backed a strong English national assertiveness over the Scots could no longer make the same association as before through referring to ‘Britain’. Quite simply, the goalposts had shifted, as advocates of a British dimension to politics under James were now those who backed rapprochement with Scotland.

The basis for imperial thought, and what may be called the ‘imperial theme’, throughout this study lies within a corpus of ideas, insular in nature, largely though not exclusively dependent on Protestantism and increasingly militant. It was a thinking influenced by the Reformation’s split with Rome and English fears of European Catholicism, especially following Mary’s attempts to turn England’s destiny back to Rome. The reign of the unmarried Elizabeth saw the Armada attempts of 1588, 1596 and 1597 which led to a myth not of victory but of deliverance, while the desire to secure England at home from the dangers of a Franco-Spanish alliance led to a royal approval of privateering against Spanish shipping in both the Old and the New World.⁸

British Protestantism remained a defensive religion in the early part of the seventeenth century, concerned primarily with defending the ‘beleaguered isle’ from European Catholicism, both physically and in scholarly debate. Ussher published the first of his works towards a large ecclesiastical history, the Gravissimae Quaestionis De Ecclesiarum Christianarum ... Successione et Statu Historia Explicatio in 1613, aiming to prove that the historical origins of British Christianity were independent of Rome, while Sir Robert Cotton collected the antiquaries’ papers on the antiquity of the English church and bound them with other material as ‘The State of the Church of Great Britain from y^e First Plantation of Religion’.⁹

Sermons advocating the Virginia Company’s project, however, frequently placed conversion of the natives as one of the highest priorities for the settlers. William Crashaw, for example, wrote that ‘out of our humanitie and conscience, we will giue them... 1. Ciuilitie for their bodies 2. Christianitie for their soules’.¹⁰ Faced with Jesuit successes in converting souls to Catholicism in the Americas, English Protestantism fought back with rhetoric which, however genuinely it might have been felt by the preachers, was to be forgotten quickly by the majority of settlers.¹¹ They faced more important concerns in their dealings with the natives, and the scornful attitude of the Powhatans to the suggestion that they should convert to the newcomers’ religion, the religion of those whose god had not told them how to feed themselves, pushed conversion off the agenda in the first years of settlement.¹² The theory of this religious mission re...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 A Jacobean empire
• 2 1603–10: ‘Britaine is now, Britaine was of yore’
• 3 1611–13: ‘The true Panthæon of Great Britaine’
• 4 1614–25: Brute, force and ignorance?
• Afterword
• Select Bibliography
• Index