Radical Shakespeare

Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career

Chris Fitter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136575822
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de Shakespeare

This book argues that Shakespeare was permanently preoccupied with the brutality, corruption, and ultimate groundlessness of the political order of his state, and that the impact of original Tudor censorship, supplemented by the relatively depoliticizing aesthetic traditions of later centuries, have together obscured the consistent subversiveness of his work. Traditionally, Shakespeare's political attitudes have been construed either as primarily conservative, or as essays in richly imaginative ambiguation, irreducible to settled viewpoints. Fitter contends that government censorship forced superficial acquiescence upon Shakespeare in establishment ideologies — monarchic, aristocratic and patriarchal — that were enunciated through rhetorical set pieces, but that Shakespeare the dramatist learned from Shakespeare the actor a variety of creative methods for sabotaging those perspectives in performance in the public theatres. Using historical contextualizations and recuperation of original performance values, the book argues that Shakespeare emerged as a radical writer not in middle age with King Lear and Coriolanus — plays whose radicalism is becoming widely recognized — but from his outset, with Henry VI and Taming of the Shrew. Recognizing Shakespeare's allusiveness to 1590s controversies and dissident thought, and recovering the subtextual politics of Shakespeare's distinctive stagecraft reveals populist, at times even radical meaning and a substantially new, and astonishingly interventionist, Shakespeare.

1 Historical Foundations

The Black Nineties and the Tudor Richesse of Political Dissidence

Inequalities of wealth and status ensured that social relations were politicised at every level in early modern England, and a reconstruction of these political realities both undermines the recent comfortable historiographical consensus on orderliness and stability and emphasises the severity of the problem of government.¹

The largest category of popular disorder insurrections and riots which protested the administration of justice. This category includes symbolic acts such as rescuing prisoners from pillories and prisons, a riot at an execution, an assault upon constables, and violent demonstrations that directly challenged the authority of the mayor. Of the nine remaining instances of disorder during this period, four riots were directed against gentlemen and lawyers.²

Had these excesses [London riots] proceeded soley from the spirit of mischief and plunder, or even from the mere wantonness of youth and strength, the case would have been common enough; but they were often distinguished by a mixture of good though misguided feeling—by a wild notion of righting some imaginary wrong, of reaching some offence, of abating some nuisance untouched by law—which raised their authors above the level of vulgar rioters.³

(Orazio Busino, chaplain to the Venetian ambassador)

One of today’s best known images of William Shakespeare is the bust in Holy Trinity Church, Stratford. There Shakespeare sits, chubby and stolid, memorably described by Dover Wilson as resembling “a self-satisfied pork butcher”.⁴ A sketch of the bust made in 1634, however, by the reliably accurate engraver William Dugdale for his later Antiquities of Warwickshire Illustrated (1656) records a lean-faced man, with long, drooping whiskers. He holds neither quill nor book. The effigy that we know today has been transformed beyond recognition from the original. It has even been argued recently that the bust does not depict William Shakespeare at all. More probably it represents the poet’s father, who had held, unlike his son, several civic offices in Stratford, and was restored to the borough council by the time of his death in 1601. John Shakespeare had also been a substantial dealer in wool, which may explain why the original bust placed both hands upon a woolsack.⁵ Repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, ‘renovations’ and ‘beautifications’ then altered the image until the original, as Dugdale’s sketch reminds us, was altogether effaced by the self-impositions of subsequent periods. It will be the argument of this book that something not dissimilar has happened in literary criticism’s portraits of Shakespeare’s politics. Due to the distortive self-projections of subsequent cultural history, and a perhaps insufficient concern to recover the originary circumstances of representation, we have lost the political face of William Shakespeare. In the light, I suggest, of modern historical scholarship, much of Shakespeare’s original political profile may be recovered—and to rather startling effect.

Let me open with certain historical fundamentals, which are, in my view, usually insufficiently stressed when meditating the politics of the historically disfigured bard.

“EXPOSE THYSELF TO FEEL WHAT WRETCHES FEEL”: THE BLACK NINETIES⁶

Literary criticism seldom links Shakespearean drama to the currents of radical thought in Tudor and Stuart England. This owes partly to historians’ tendency to focus radicalism at its two most active points in that period: the eruptive years of the Reformation (mid-sixteenth century), and the successfully revolutionary decades of the Revolution and Republic (midseventeenth). The1590s are generally passed over, despite two attempted risings: Hacket’s Rebellion of 1591 (which we will discuss as central to the design of 2 Henry VI) and the Oxford Rising of 1596 (possibly hinted at, I have argued, in Richard II).⁷ That decade saw also the largest outbreak of rioting between Bosworth and 1642: the Apprentices’ Riot of 1595, when nearly two thousand Londoners took to the streets, tore down pillories, overwhelmed the watch, and tried to break into a prison (the Counter) in the first London food riots since the 1520s—events which I shall suggest were crucial to the original meaning of Romeo and Juliet. London subsequently established three Provost-Marshals—roving disciplinary officials empowered to apply on-the-spot martial law. One of them was ordered to patrol Southwark’s south bank: home to the Rose theatre, and the Swan, and later the Globe.⁸

Some historians speak thus of a “crisis of order … in the sixty years before the civil war.”⁹ Literary critics, however, are not uncommonly found defining the England in which Shakespeare began his career—Shakespeare appears to have arrived in London by the late 1580s—as one characterised by a post-Armada euphoria of national unity and admiration for the gallant queen. Such postulates overlook the bitter chasm between rich and poor, deepening in the century’s final decades, which victory over the Spanish could not long mask; indeed as Curtis Breight has powerfully demonstrated, symptomatically harsh governmental attitudes alienated England’s Armada mariners themselves.¹⁰ Even as they stood listening to Elizabeth’s Tilbury speech, the nations’ defenders were (in Susan Frye’s words), “unpaid and ill-equipped and even hungry”.¹¹ As soon as they were disbanded, they tried desperately to sell their armour—a recourse immediately criminalised, on pain of death. It is true that the city of London staged initial rejoicings: the triumphal bearing of captured Spanish banners about thoroughfares, the production of Armada medals, portraits and ballads, the gushing of ebullient sermons. But as Fernandez-Armesto—possibly the Armada’s most authoritative historian—remarks, “such officially sponsored junkets are, of course, no genuine guide to popular feeling … The boost to English morale, such as it was, is impossible to calibrate.”¹² In the very month that London’s Victory procession took place (November 1588), English soldiers were executed, in their camp at Ostend, for having mutinied over lack of pay.¹³ It remains, further, “a curious fact that disillusionment, recrimination, and mutual reproach were almost as rife on the English side after the Armada, amid celebrations of success, as on the Spanish side amid a consciousness of failure.” Though both countries faced the need to pay off large numbers of servicemen and treat the multitudes of the sick, the irony emerges of “the victorious English dying in the gutter; the defeated Spaniards going home to hospital beds and embroidered counterpanes.”¹⁴ The month of the Armada itself (August 1588) saw the Lord Admiral Howard inform the Privy Council that his fleet was so “grievously infected” by “a very plague” that “many of the ships have hardly enough men to weigh their anchors.” So poorly organised had provisioning been that, after many weeks afloat, “my Lord Admiral was driven to eat beans, and some to drink their own water [i.e., urine].” Any residue of patriotic loyalty in the fleet was corroded by the widespread conviction that the sailors had been poisoned through negligent government planning. “The mariners have a conceit,” wrote Howard, “and I think it true and so do all the captains here, that sour drink hath been a great cause of this infection amongst us; and, Sir, for my own part I know not which way to deal with the mariners to make them rest contented with sour beer, for nothing doth displease them more.”¹⁵

Worst of all, many Armada mariners were dying from malnutrition, because they were unpaid. The response, however, of Gloriana’s regime was to launch the decade of brutal crackdowns. When a crowd of 500 discharged soldiers assembled the following summer (1589: Shakespeare was then twenty-five years old) near the royal palace in Westminster to protest their non-payment, Provost-Marshals hauled out four and hanged them, while calling out 2,000 men from the city’s trained bands. Alarmed again in June 1591 by “unlawful great assemblies of multitudes of a popular sort of base condition” in London and by “wandering idle persons … some coloring their wandering by the name of soldiers returned from the war”, Elizabeth once more created a Provost-Marshal, given lethal authority “without delay to execute upon the gallows by order of martial law” vagabonds and anyone “unlawfully gathering themselves in companies”.¹⁶ Beier evokes them “Riding through the countryside with a clutch of deputies armed with pistols, carbines and staves”: a sight surely terrifying to the poor.¹⁷ Some lawyers and thinkers felt dismay at this authoritarian suspension of common law by diktat of central government: the Earl of Essex would note that “it does agree with her Majesty’s merciful and excellent government not to let her subjects die sans replique, as the Frenchman terms it, while her kingdom is free both from invasion and rebellion.”¹⁸ November, however, saw the follow-up proclamation that ex-military men found wandering without “sufficient passport for their dismission” should be imprisoned as deserters; vagrants posing as ex-servicemen were to be summarily executed.¹⁹ “This amounted”, comments Breight, “to carte blanche, or open season on the dispossessed”.²⁰ If, following the two greatest explosions of disorder in the summer of 1595, no further London riots followed, this may well owe, thinks Ian Archer, to “tightened control rather than restoration of social calm.”²¹

As such policy makes clear, to Elizabeth’s government the poor seemed as potentially alarming an enemy as the Spaniard. With the Armada on the high seas, the Privy Council had resolved against levying the nation’s 100,000 plebeian auxiliaries, trusting national defence only to the trained bands drawn from the prosperous classes—“hardly enough to confront the sort of field force of over 20,000 seasoned veterans which the Armada might have landed.”²² However, “the presence of large numbers in arms from the lower orders always alarmed the gentry”, for “a naked basis of force underlay social relations”.²³ Indeed, under the Tudors, “In many English towns, between one-quarter and one-third of the population were destitute because they did not receive regular wages.”²⁴ (In Shakespeare’s Stratford, the poor would make up a quarter of the population by the close of the 1590s, and class anger, for example against grain-hoarders, ran high: a Stratford weaver hoped “to see them hanged on gibbets at their own doors.”)²⁵ Unsurprisingly, Ralegh predicted that if the Spanish invaded, the poor would say “Let the rich fight for themselves.”²⁶ The decision of England’s authorities, however, suggested the greater fear that their own lower classes, once armed, might actually rise in revolt. The Council ordered the round-up of “vagabond rogues and other suspected persons”, along with the internment of Catholics, as potential recruits for the Spanish.²⁷ The government’s sense of class-enmity was reciprocated by many commoners. Henry Danyell, of Ash, in Kent, declared in the early 1590s that “the Spaniards … were better than the people of this land, and therefore he … had rather that they were here than the rich men of this country.”²⁸ A Canterbury artisan lamented in 1596 “If the Spaniards did inhabit here it would be better for us … [for] we could not live worse unless we were starved.”²⁹ Bartholomew Steere, seeking popular insurrection in 1596, taught that England “would never be well untill some of the gentlemen were knockt downe”, and that “the commons long sithens in Spaine did rise and kill all gentlemen … and sithens that time have lyved merrily there.”³⁰ “Kinge Philipp”, alleged one former soldier, “was a father to Ingland and did better love an Inglishe man than the quenes majestie did, for he would give them meete, drinke, and clothes.” Numbers of the poor, notes Jim Sharpe, felt Philip to be rightful king of England.³¹

The Elizabethan regime would remain haunted, we shall see, by fear of underclass rebellion throughout the 1590s. The period was deeply stressed by accelerating social polarisation. Although it “saw the erection of grander mansions by landowners and urban patricians and the rebuilding and refurnishing of the homes of the yeomanry and master craftsmen, it also saw a mushroom growth of bare cottages for the poor in country parishes and the emergence of squalid overcrowded pauper suburbs in the towns.”³² And while the income of the gentry, the yeomanry and the urban ‘middling sort’ expanded, a permanent proletariat, rural and urban, had emerged by the late sixteenth century, alongside fearfully impoverished small farmers and artisans—all three of which groups saw their income decline further. “By the end of the sixteenth century … the poor were no longer the destitute victims of misfortune or old age, but a substantial proportion of the population living in constant danger of destitution, many of them full-time wage labourers.”³³ It will be with the restive distress of the poorer commoners, and with Shakespeare’s engagement of the violently defensive political climate with which central and local government reacted, that this book will be most concerned.

For few decades in English history have seemed as liable as were the Black Nineties (as we might call them) to generate, in their escalating intensity of concentrated distress, revolutionary upheaval.³⁴ Overall, the sixteenth century may have experienced an inflation rate of some four ...