Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War

Alfred Thomas

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781137438942
• eBook ISBN: 9781137438959
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism

Shakespeare, Dissent and the Cold War is the first book to read Shakespeare's drama through the lens of Cold War politics. The book uses the Cold War experience of dissenting artists in theatre and film to highlight the coded religio-political subtexts in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale.

1

Culture and Dissent in Shakespeare’s England and Cold War Europe

The myth of Elizabeth I’s reign as a golden age of moderation has proved to be peculiarly tenacious, surviving in the popular consciousness in TV shows and Hollywood movies that have drawn a sharp contrast between Elizabeth’s restraint and the religious fanaticism of her half-sister Mary. Only in the last few years has this Protestant master narrative begun to be questioned and revised in the light of historical and literary studies by Eamon Duffy, Christopher Haigh, Gerard Kilroy, and Alexandra Walsham. What such studies have revealed is that violence and intolerance were a common theme of the Tudor age, regardless of who sat on the throne. Where I differ from these studies is in emphasizing the political nature of religious intolerance and oppression in Shakespeare’s England. My own approach is closer to Ethan Shagan’s recent work on early modern moderation.¹ Contrary to the traditional assumption that the via media of the Elizabethan Church of England represented moderation in the modern sense, Shagan has persuasively argued that “the self-proclaimed moderation of the Church of England in its ethical, internal sense—a restrained and reasonable Church virtuously limited in its Reformation and thus a via media between Roman Catholicism and the Radical Reformation—was utterly dependent upon the Church of England’s external moderation of its subjects through state power and coercive restraint” (Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 112).

This external regulation of the internal—the assumption that the state could not only tell people what to obey but also what to believe—was the coercive legacy of the Henrician reformation (Shagan, The Rule of Moderation, 108). As Greg Walker has pointed out with reference to the Supremacy of Henry VIII, “From 1533 onwards he demanded not merely his subjects’ outward obedience, but also their inward approval for all that he did.”² It was this absolute break with tradition that English dissenters like Thomas More and John Fisher found so devastating. So great was the King’s assumed spiritual droit de seigneur, he even extended it to those dissenters beyond his realm, instructing Sir Thomas Wyatt, his ambassador to the imperial court of Charles V, to request the Emperor to rebuke those preachers in Spain who had been denouncing his religious policies as heretical. Wyatt earned a stern rebuke from Charles: “I will tell you, monsieur l’ambassador, kings be not kings of tongues, and if men give cause to be spoken off, there is no remedy” (quoted from Walker, Writing under Tyranny, 24).

As Richard Rex has pointed out, Henry VIII’s usurpation of papal authority was entirely unprecedented in European history. In previous schisms it was the popes who acted first by excommunicating kings and placing kingdoms under interdict, not the other way round.³ A key exponent of this ecclesiastical power was Thomas Becket, archbishop of Canterbury, who was murdered by four knights of Henry II in December 1170. Becket’s cult at Canterbury became the target of Henry VIII’s reprisals against the Church: his shrine was demolished, its treasures confiscated, and all images of the offending saint effaced. As a result of Henry’s assumption of the headship of the English Church, far more power was concentrated in the hands of the monarch than ever before. The definition of treason was expanded to encompass a much broader range of offences, including supporting the Pope’s attempts to contest the King’s second marriage. These provisions were included in the First Succession Act which passed in the spring session of Parliament in 1534.⁴ In the words of Sir Geoffrey Elton, “the statute brought hostile propaganda within the compass of the treason law and thus assisted the government’s determination to maintain its monopolistic hold on opinion” (Elton, Policy and Police, 277). The Second Succession Act (1536), which was created to protect the King’s new marriage to Jane Seymour and her heirs, expanded the definition of treason to speaking words (as opposed to writing them down) and refusal to take the Oath of Supremacy (Elton, Policy and Police, 277–78). The legal coup de grace was the Treason Act of 1534 which stipulated that it was treason to call the King, in writing or words, a heretic, schismatic, tyrant, infidel, or a usurper of the crown. These were the kind of words already being used by those who opposed the royal policies, and the clause was intended to make such offenders guilty of treason and not just misprision of treason (Elton, Policy and Police, 287).

Consequent upon the break with Rome, a climate of fear was created as a result of the use of attainder (an Act of Parliament to convict suspects rather than trial by jury). Between 1534 and 1547 the number of subjects attainted was 122 compared with a mere 2 in the preceding 25 years of King Henry’s reign. Between 1532 and 1540 alone there were a total of 308 executions for treason, the intention and effect being to terrorize the population into obedience to the Henrician reformation (Rex, Henry VIII, 25; Elton, Policy and Police, 389). This number included 178 men and women involved in the Lincolnshire rising and the Pilgrimage of Grace (Elton, Policy and Police, 389). Branded as rebels and traitors, these men and women were largely motivated by religious disaffection rather than political opposition to the regime, but that distinction did not save them from the gallows.

One of the most infamous of these executions by attainder was that of Elizabeth Barton, the so-called Nun of Kent, who had declaimed against the King’s marriage to Anne Boleyn and threatened the King with imminent death if he did not desist. Barton was popular among the common people; most shared her negative view of the King’s second marriage, and she was thus seen as a dangerous source of sedition. She was arrested in September 1533, forced to confess her treason, and hanged at Tyburn with five of her followers. Another famous victim of the King’s ruthlessness and vindictiveness was Sir Thomas More, former Chancellor of England, who was imprisoned in 1534 for refusing to agree to the Act of Succession because of a preamble which denied the spiritual authority of the Pope in England. Following a famous show trial in Westminster Hall, More was executed in 1535, to the consternation and scandal of all Europe. The reaction of European humanists to More’s death was not unlike the critical response of Western writers and intellectuals to the harsh treatment of dissidents in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc in the twentieth century. As we shall see in the next chapter, the smuggling of More’s manuscript De Tristitia Christi (On the Sadness of Christ) to Catholic Spain anticipated the illicit way Boris Pasternak’s Cold War novel Doctor Zhivago was sent to Italy for publication outside the Soviet Union.

In May 1536 Henry VIII’s second wife, Anne Boleyn, was arrested, convicted, and executed on trumped-up charges of adultery and treason along with several prominent members of the court. A powerful record of the shock created by the execution of Queen Anne and her alleged paramours is Sir Thomas Wyatt’s poem “Who lyst his welthe and eas retayne,” which describes how the poet—himself under arrest and confined to the bell tower as an accessory to the plot— peered through the grate of his cell window to witness the execution of the Queen’s alleged lovers on Tower Hill, all on a single day on May 17, 1536:

These bloody days have broken my heart.

My lust, my youth did then depart,

And blind desire of estate.

Who hastes to climb seeks to revert.

Of truth, circa Regna tonat.

The bell tower showed me such sight

That in my head sticks day and night.

There did I learn out of a grate,

For all favour, glory, or might,

That yet circa Regna tonat.⁵

The men executed that day were Henry Norris, the King’s close friend and Groom of the Stool, Francis Weston, William Brereton, and the musician Mark Smeaton of the privy chamber as well as Anne’s own brother, George, Viscount Rochford. Smeaton, the first to be detained, had been questioned by Cromwell in his house in Stepney on Sunday, April 30.⁶ Presumably to allay suspicion, the May Day jousts at Windsor went ahead with Henry, his unsuspecting wife and the court in attendance. When Sir Henry Norris’s charger began to play up, the King affably offered his own mount. At the end of the joust the King abruptly left the pageant and rode back to Whitehall to the consternation of his courtiers.

The Latin tag repeated at the end of each strophe of Wyatt’s poem (“around thrones he thunders”) is borrowed from Seneca’s tragedy Phaedra. As Greg Walker points out in his close analysis of the poem, the meaning of the tag is ambiguous, suggesting Jove, the God of Thunder, but also King Henry himself (Writing under Tyranny, 290–91). The tone of the poem is carefully ambiguous: it could be read both as a warning to others not to defy the Jove-like King or as a tacit criticism of the King’s tyrannical assumption of divine authority. Faced with a ruler no longer receptive to courtly advice in the medieval tradition of the speculum principis, Tudor writers like Wyatt ceased to “counsel the King, and created instead a new community of readers with a very different set of political concerns and priorities” (Walker, Writing under Tyranny, 306). Confronted with a ruler who demands inner as well as external conformity, the poet is forced to abandon public poetry for a more intimate lyric form in order to find a space of political resistance and defiance to the intrusive encroachments of the state. Poets like Wyatt resorted to “new, radically personalized forms of lyrical and narrative verse, and in the process initiated what contemporaries recognized as a revolution in English poetry” (Walker, Writing under Tyranny, 4).

The deployment of the personal lyric to explore the subject’s secret resistance to tyrannical rule anticipates the Russian tradition from Pushkin to Pasternak’s famous “Zhivago” poem “Hamlet,” which also uses a first-person lyric voice to articulate political dissent, as we shall explore in the next chapter. In fact, the alleged plot against the King was almost certainly fabricated by Henry and Thomas Cromwell to remove the Queen and her affinity and allow him to remarry. These tactics have no precedent in early modern Europe and anticipate the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century. Eric Ives has termed Anne’s overthrow a coup d’état, but coups are more redolent of attempts to topple regimes rather than eradicate family factions.

This violent legacy was passed on to Henry’s successors. In 1549, during the reign of Henry’s son, the boy-king Edward VI (r. 1547–53), the West Country rose up in rebellion against the enforced introduction of the new Protestant Prayer Book; but the insurrection was violently crushed and four thousand rebels slain. One of the rebellion’s most charismatic leaders, the Cornishman Robert Welshe, vicar of St Thomas’s church by Exbridge, was hanged from a gibbet erected on the tower of his own church. A chain was fastened around his waist to ensure a slow, painful death from exposure, and he was clothed in his popish vestments with prayer beads attached, a clear warning to his parishioners and other onlookers that loyalty to the old religion came at a high price.⁷

After Edward VI’s death in 1553, Henry VIII’s Catholic daughter Mary I (r. 1553–58) abandoned Henry’s title of Supreme Head of the Church of England and restored papal authority yet, ironically, continued her father’s practice of religious persecution by sending more than 280 Protestants to the stake within four years.⁸ Under Elizabeth I (r. 1558–1603) there was a shift of emphasis from inner to outward conformity; the Act of Uniformity of 1559 “focused attention on the outward behavior rather than the inner belief of the laity by making failure to attend church, as opposed to adherence to heterodox opinions, illegal.”⁹ But Elizabeth inherited not only a country still largely Catholic in religion but also a group of radical Protestant reformers who had returned to England from Europe following Queen Mary’s death in 1558. The principal challenge facing the new Queen was how to deal with opposition to the Anglican Church on both sides of the religious divide. Unfortunately, external circumstances made this already fraught situation even worse. In 1570 the Pope excommunicated Elizabeth in a last-minute attempt to support the Northern Rebellion of 1569. After the collapse of the rebellion, six hundred Catholic rebels were dispatched in hasty proceedings conducted under martial law, about one-tenth of the total; this was a major departure from earlier uprisings, such as the Pilgrimage of Grace, when only the ring-leaders were executed.¹⁰ On William Cecil’s orders some of the bodies were to “continue hanging for terror” (Kesselring, The Northern Rebellion, 120). The policy of executing people by quotas was entirely novel, a precursor of modern forms of tyranny.

From 1570 on, Elizabeth and her government became ever more determined to wipe out Catholic opposition to her state religion. Cuthbert Mayne, a Douai priest, was executed in 1577, and a second, John Nelson, in 1578. In 1580 the York High Commission used specially summoned local juries to report on Catholics; and hundreds of recusants were bound over on sureties to attend church and take communion. In 1581, the same year as the execution of the missionary priest Edmund Campion, a new anti-Catholic statute was drawn up to limit the influence of Catholic priests coming from abroad; the most punitive of these was an increased fine for recusants from 12 pence per missed service to 20 pounds per month, 40 or 50 times an artisan’s wage.¹¹ In 1585 legislation made it high treason to be a Catholic priest and declared those helping such priests to be guilty of felony or misprision of treason. Under Elizabeth, 63 Catholic laymen and women were martyred; and of the 649 missionary priests trained on the Continent and sent to England, 377 were imprisoned and 133, slightly more than 1 in 5, were executed.¹²

Officially illegal under English common law, torture was routinely employed in the Tudor and Jacobean periods. Elizabeth I’s chief enforcer Richard Topcliffe reported to the Queen directly rather than to the Privy Council and kept a private rack in his home far from official supervision or public scrutiny.¹³ According to Christopher Devlin, “the Elizabethan government was not the equivalent of the Nazi or the ‘Iron Curtain’ regimes of this century.”¹⁴ Devlin may be correct to insist that Elizabeth’s statecraft had a great deal in common with that of other European states, but so did the intolerance of the people she ruled. According to Alexandra Walsham, “the fact that Catholics and nonconformists were often persecuted at one step removed should not necessarily be regarded as evidence that the temperature of religious intolerance in England was significantly lower than that reached in sixteenth-century France or seventeenth-century Germany” (Walsham, Charitable Hatred, 119). In fact, by the end of the sixteenth century some European states had already guaranteed tolerance to their religious minorities: the Edict of Nantes (1589) granted limited freedom of conscience to the Huguenot population of France, while the Habsburg emperors Maximilian II and Rudolf II presided over a degree of religious toleration in Bohemia, Poland, and Hungary. As we shall see in Chapter 5, a form of religious convivencia lasted in Central Europe from the Peace of Augsburg (1555) until the outbreak of the Thirty Years War in 1618. By the end of the sixteenth century England was increasingly out of touch with its continental neighbors in its refusal to grant some measure of religious tolerance to its religious minorities. Shakespeare’s late plays, and the aspiration for forgiveness and tolerance that informs them, can be read therefore not as the nostalgia of an aging dramatist but as a mature artist’s appeal for religious toleration.

Notwithstanding the immense differences between Shakespeare’s England and the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, some of the measures conceived against religious dissenters in Shakespeare’s England foreshadow modern forms of oppression. Detention without trial was common; t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Culture and Dissent in Shakespeare’s England and Cold War Europe
• 2 “The Heart of My Mystery”: The Hidden Language of Dissent in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Grigori Kozintsev’s Film Gamlet
• 3 “A Dog’s Obeyed in Office”: Subverting Authority in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Grigori Kozintsev’s Korol’ Lir
• 4 “Faith, Here’s an Equivocator”: Language, Resistance, and the Limits of Authority in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Tom Stoppard’s Cahoot’s Macbeth
• 5 “In Fair Bohemia”: The Politics of Utopia in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Ingeborg Bachmann’s “Bohemia Lies on the Sea”
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index