England in the Age of Shakespeare

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253042330
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism of Shakespeare
• Index: Literature

How did it feel to hear Macbeth's witches chant of "double, double toil and trouble" at a time when magic and witchcraft were as real as anything science had to offer? How were justice and forgiveness understood by the audience who first watched King Lear; how were love and romance viewed by those who first saw Romeo and Juliet? In England in the Age of Shakespeare, Jeremy Black takes readers on a tour of life in the streets, homes, farms, churches, and palaces of the Bard's era. Panning from play to audience and back again, Black shows how Shakespeare's plays would have been experienced and interpreted by those who paid to see them. From the dangers of travel to the indignities of everyday life in teeming London, Black explores the jokes, political and economic references, and small asides that Shakespeare's audiences would have recognized. These moments of recognition often reflected the audience's own experiences of what it was to, as Hamlet says, "grunt and sweat under a weary life." Black's clear and sweeping approach seeks to reclaim Shakespeare from the ivory tower and make the plays' histories more accessible to the public for whom the plays were always intended.

ONE

THE IMAGINATION OF THE AGE

UNCERTAINTY HELD AT BAY: THAT was the experience of life and the molder of personality in early-modern England, the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Man in the state of nature was described by Thomas Hobbes in Leviathan (1651), his masterpiece (of political thought and much else), as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and this phrase describes much of Shakespeare’s world. The sudden pitfalls of life, notably the fatal accidents and the tragic illnesses that snuffed out life with brutal rapidity, could be explained not only by the harsh injustices of chance but also by the impact of evil and malevolence.

These elements were repeatedly seen in Shakespeare’s plays; indeed, they gave the plays much of their plot, their dynamic energy, and their atmosphere. Characters could be defined in terms of how they responded to chance, evil, and malevolence. In turn, evil and malevolence worked in part, notably in the tragedies, by exploiting character, as with Iago’s cloyingly seductive manipulation of Othello and the witches’ provocation of Macbeth and his wife, a provocation that is a seduction of another type.

All around them, contemporaries saw a battle between good and evil, a battle that was the cause of dread and fear—with jokes about it, as with the Porter’s speech in Macbeth, very much being “gallows humor.” Evil and malevolence, whatever their source and purpose, operated in and through the varied settings of life. The dark, both literally and metaphorically, was particularly important, as with the villainy in Much Ado About Nothing. This is a villainy dependent upon the misidentification that the dark makes far easier. The modern world can overcome darkness, with electric lighting and with global navigation systems. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s world, the dark was a pervading, spreading sphere; although, in the open-air theater in this period, when darkness falls in a play, the staging brings on more lights.

Darkness might not always be a token of menace, danger, and uncertainty. It could be a setting for romance and witty confusion. Moreover, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is set in and outside Athens, Oberon orders Puck to prevent Demetrius and Lysander from fighting:

overcast the night;

The starry welkin cover thou anon

With drooping fog as black as Acheron;¹

And lead these testy rivals so astray,

As one come not within another’s way. (III, ii)

The play demonstrates the vulnerability of humans to supernatural agencies, albeit to comic effect, as with Bottom being given the head of an ass (donkey). The humorous confusion of nighttime comic mischance is also seen in other plays, as in the highway robbery in Henry IV, Part I in which the Chamberlain tells Gadshill: “you are more beholding to the night than to fern-seed for your walking invisible” (II, i). The “seed” of the fern was believed to convey invisibility. However, alongside the romance of the evening in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and humorous confusion elsewhere in Shakespeare’s work there is nighttime horror, terror, and evil. In contrast, pastoral plays very much employ daytime settings.

Nighttime fear especially befell travelers, both literal and figurative, whether simply unable to see their route or to grasp the menaces that might face them. In King Lear, the Fool sees the dark as part of the moral blindness that has overcome Lear and his kingdom and become the dominant tone of the latter: “out went the candle,” and he observes, “we were left darkling” (I, iv). Lear, in turn, is reborn through his experience into a degree of clarity, but he cannot regain what he has lost.

More generally, the dark was a world outside human understanding, not to mention outside human control. Like All Hallows’ Eve (Halloween, October 31), when the dead walked on the earth, the dead king walks at night in Hamlet, but he fades away at daybreak, aware that his realm is that of nighttime: not just nighttime imaginings but also nighttime reality. The ghost of this king is a part of a wider struggle, between Christian good and spirits, that is outlined in the first scene of the play. Aware of this struggle, Hamlet is concerned about the danger of being misled. Marcellus sets the ghost’s response at daybreak in terms of a wider struggle between good and evil, observing:

It faded on the crowing of the cock.

Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes

Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,

The bird of dawning singeth all night long:

and then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;

The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,

No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm,

So hallow’d and so gracious is the time. (I, i)

Lady Macbeth calls on the assistance of darkness, crying:

Come, thick Night,

And pall thee in the dunnest smoke of Hell,

That my keen knife sees not the wound it makes,

Nor Heaven peep through the blanket of the dark,

To cry, “Hold, hold!” (I, v)

Macbeth’s evil and increased lack of self-control, each a product of diabolical forces working on his narcissism, is measured by his willingness to call on the dark to cover the murder of his erstwhile friend, now imagined rival, Banquo, when he declares:

Come, seeling Night,

Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day,

And, with thy bloody and invisible hand,

Cancel, and tear to pieces, that great bond

Which keeps me pale!—Light thickens; and the crow

Makes wing to th’ rooky wood;

Good things of Day begin to droop and drowse,

While Night’s black agents to their prey do rouse. (III, ii)

This was a world of nightmare; and the role of the dark in the life of the imagination was both aspect and product of a more generalized sense of fear, one that was in no way restricted to the dark, although focused there.² The witches brought onstage in Macbeth operate in the dark or in misty vapors. Caliban, the “born devil” of The Tempest, is a “thing of darkness” (IV, i; V, i). In this play, the (dead) witch Sycorax is a malign as well as mysterious counterpoint to Prospero’s white magic, a witch passing on her poison through her son, Caliban. His plans may be thwarted, but they are vicious and dangerous and provide much of the drama of the play.

The approach of playing Caliban as the victim of Western colonialism and of treating Prospero and Miranda as having selfish reasons to stigmatize him unfairly, and thus as unreasonable in their criticism, represents a different power relationship. This relationship also captures the idea of a monstrous “other,” although, in this case, one in which sympathy is directed to the supposed “monster.” Moreover, Caliban’s otherness has frequently been represented by his color.³ This contrast with the account of Caliban’s diabolical origins involves a very different reading of the play; however, it is one that makes more sense to some modern audiences.

In their malevolence and deceit,⁴ the devil and the witches were real for contemporaries, including playgoers, representing a directing and leading part of the potent and varied legions of evil. In All’s Well That Ends Well, the Clown refers to serving a great prince: “The black prince, sir, alias the prince of darkness, alias the devil . . . he is the prince of the world” (IV, v). Satan, limbo, and furies return as subjects of “talk” in that play (V, iii). In The Comedy of Errors, the courtesan is decried, inaccurately, as “the devil’s dam . . . she comes in the habit of a light wench” (IV, iii). In Othello, Iago rejoices in the birth of his plot, exulting that

Hell and night

Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light. (I, iii)

In practice, however, it is a plot based on the envy of one human for another. In The Tempest, the storm at sea that sinks the ship leads the desperate Ferdinand to exclaim as he leaps into the sea:

Hell is empty,

And all the devils are here. (I, ii)

Magic is certainly at play, although one that, it turns out, is not malign, because it is called forth by Prospero, who is presented as a generally positive figure, notably in the magical safety of both ship and crew.

References to hell are commonplace in Shakespeare’s plays, although not always menacing. Sir John Falstaff, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, refers to being thrown into the river Thames, “like a barrow of butcher’s offal,” offering an explanation, incidentally, of why the Thames downstream at London was so filthy—only for him to be saved because it was not “as deep as hell.” Indeed, “the shore was shelvy and shallow” (III, v). Mrs. Page, speaking of him, says: “The spirit of wantonness is, sure, scared out of him: if the devil have him not in fee-simple, with fine and recovery, he will never, I think, in the way of waste, attempt us again” (IV, ii).

There are many references in Shakespeare to the devil as a figure of malevolent deceit, but also to rather different ...