English Renaissance Drama : An Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time 9781847600202, 9781847600714

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English Renaissance Drama C. W. R. D. Moseley an Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time

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Published in 2007 by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-020-2

English Renaissance Drama an Introduction to Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time

C. W. R. D. Moseley

HEB ☼ Humanities-Ebooks, LLP

A Note on the Author Dr Moseley is Fellow and Tutor of Hughes Hall, Cambridge, and Director of Studies in English both for that College and also for St Edmund’s College. He lectures and teaches in Classics and in Mediaeval and Renaissance literature in the English Faculty of the University of Cambridge, and is the author of many books and articles, not all in his specialist fields. For many years he was Programme Director of the University of Cambridge International Summer Schools in Shakespeare and in English Literature, and is Director of the University of Cambridge Institute of Continuing Education’s Advanced Diploma in Shakespeare Studies, and University Moderator of its Diploma in Theatre and Theatre History. He has lectured frequently in the United States. He is a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, a Fellow of the English Association, and is also a member of the Society for Nautical Research and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He has travelled widely in the Arctic, and is a member of the Arctic Club

Introduction Shakespeare and his contemporaries were not writing ‘literature’. They were writing plays, and plays were a pretty low-status form of writing, hardly worth committing to print. True, by the year Shakespeare died his not uncritical friend, colleague and competitor, Ben Jonson, was trying to change all that. In 1616 Jonson dared to print his The Works of Ben Jonson – a title challenging comparison with the Opera of the poetic giants of the Latin past – and did it in the smart, expensive folio format, the format usually reserved for works of high seriousness: and he got a good deal of unkind ribbing from literary men not only for daring to do all this, as a writer in the workaday medium of English, 1 but also, especially, for including in that book something as downmarket as his plays. For most of Shakespeare’s life the writer was only one, and not always the most important one, among many people who made a play: sometimes the writer was called simply a ‘play patcher’, someone who cobbled a play together for the actors out of odd old ends; sometimes there were several authors co-operating in a script2 – a far more helpful word – and neither Shakespeare nor Jonson thought it beneath them, for substantial periods (perhaps most) of their lives, so to work. And they were working to earn a living in a world that owed nobody anything. Our attitudes to theatre, to writers, and to reading are unimaginably different to those of that time. It is imperative before we go any further that we try to recapture some of that vanished mindset. If we do not, we shall consistently misunderstand both what those players and writers were trying to do, and how their work might have been watched – as well as how it operated in its society. For it did so operate: nobody but a fool writes for posterity, and these men wrote to make a living – quite a good one, in many cases – out of the tastes and enthusiasms and concerns of their contemporaries. It will be as well to bear in mind the crucial importance of that 1

2

The development of English vocabulary, syntax and resourcefulness, in prose and verse, to the point where it would equal or surpass the Classical languages is a conscious and often openly stated aim of many writers. Jonson, Chapman and Marston all wrote together on the comedy Eastward Ho!, and you can hardly see the joins. Peele almost certainly wrote the first act of Titus Andronicus – which is included in the canon of Shakespeare’s works.

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audience, and to try to discover something of what the experience of going to the theatre in Shakespeare’s time was like. But before we go further, let me outline the aims and concerns of this book. Nearly all students come to the plays, and the literature, of the last third of the reign of Elizabeth – say from 1585–1603 – and from the reign of James I – say up to 1625 – through Shakespeare: often through one play. That is about the worst possible way to do it, though people do have a remarkable capacity of surviving, and even flourishing, afterwards. For Shakespeare’s work has over four centuries acquired overtones and values, and a cultural authority, which it never possessed in its time, and it makes a very poor lens through which to view the rest of the period’s writing. Moreover, Shakespeare is in many ways, simply because of what he did, fundamentally untypical of his period, even though he is most certainly a man of the late Renaissance in the peculiar form it took in England – and we do him a great disservice if we ever pretend otherwise. There is a vast gulf between ‘Shakespeare’, where the word denotes a cultural locus of ideas and values of great complexity, affecting notions of Englishness, of education, of morality, of art, of the very language we speak, and William, son of John Shakespeare, born probably in 1564 at Stratford, where he died in 1616, a man variously referred to as an ‘upstart crow’, 1 ‘our Roscius’, ‘sweet Mr Shakespeare’ and known as a poet, a writer of more or less successful plays, and a very shrewd buyer of real estate. If we could only come to Shakespeare through the reading of his contemporaries, not only would we recognise his genius, the nature of his originality, more clearly, but we would also recognise the excellence of those men whom he knew, with whom he competed, and drank, and did business. We would still read and enjoy them even if Shakespeare had never existed. The first job of this book, then, is to attempt to provide something of that context of the working life of a dramatist writing against time to earn a living. This will entail, necessarily, consideration of a number of factors: 1. Where English drama came from, so to speak – that must affect what an audience expects it is going to get; 2. The expectations and tastes, values and concerns of their audiences – audiences bought the theatrical experience, and if they did not, the company had no dinner; 1

It was the dying playwright Greene who referred jealously to Shakespeare the newcomer – without a university education, too! – as an ‘upstart crow, beautified with our feathers’. Roscius was a famous Roman actor.

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3. The nature and resources of the physical spaces in which plays might be staged; 4. The way the companies worked, and the effects of such a group of people working together for a long time on how things could be written; 5. Concepts of character; 6. The different sorts of plays, and how they might be recognised and received.

We also have to recognise the provisionality of our knowledge about the past, the unconscious myopia of our own mindset. Our statements and opinions, whosesoever they are (including those of people who write books), should always be followed by a sort of unspoken question mark. As T. S. Eliot remarked, in every statement we make about the past there is an unquantifiable amount of error, simply because we cannot un-be four centuries. This short book cannot replace, or remove the need for, serious committed study and exploration in the period. A vast amount of material is easily available, and among primary sources for our study of the period are not only the large numbers of plays in print, and many on line, but also the very useful Records of Early English Drama. Contemporary accounts of theatre and theatre-going are less common than one would wish, perhaps because so many people went that a visit was hardly worth remarking. Among the most interesting, though their witness is often annoyingly oblique, are Thomas Dekker 1 , Simon Forman2 , Henslowe’s Diary3 , Johannes De Witt 4 , Thomas Platter5 , Baron Waldstein6 . There are plenty of source books, like Tanya Pollard’s excellent Shakespeare’s Theater (2004), anthologising contemporary 1

2

3

4

5

6

The Gull’s Hornbook (1609) describes behaviour in the theatres. Possibly it exaggerates for comic effect. Dr Simon Forman attended productions of four of Shakespeare's plays. Extracts from his diary are available at shakespeare.about.com/b/a/197345.htm Philip Henslowe, entrepreneur, moneylender, investor in playhouses, bearpits and brothels, and father-in-law of the great actor Edward Alleyn, who was famous for the skill with which he delivered the ‘mighty lines’ of Christopher Marlowe, kept an invaluable diary in the 1590s. It contains much important material about the plays that were performed, their takings, and the stock in trade of the companies. See edition by R. A. Foakes, Henslowe’s Diary, second edition, Cambridge University Press. In 1596 a Dutch traveller and student, Johannes de Witt, saw a play at the Swan Theatre and sketched the inside of the Swan. Thomas Platter was a Swiss traveller who came to London in 1599. there is an extract from his diary, which gives a pungent whiff of London life at http://www.evergreen.loyola.edu/~ cmitchell/platter.htm. Waldstein, a Czech, come to London in 1600. His diary has been translated by G. W. Groos (London 1982)

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writing about theatre – in that case, mainly negative and theoretical. And finally there are the Cambridge Companions to English Renaissance Drama and to Shakespeare. Finally, a warning. I am deliberately stressing the competitive, topical cooperative context, and in which the plays were created because too often it is simply ignored. It is actually a lot of fun to think in this way. But you could lose sight of the uncomfortable fact that a lot of Elizabethan plays are very fine works of art, and stand reading and re-reading as does the very best poetry. They sometimes have a structural coherence and patterning with seems to belie the idea of their having many makers. In fact it does not, anymore than do the coherence of a cathedral, where we know hundreds of hands worked, or many voices and instruments coming together in musical symphony. Lukas Erne (Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist, Cambridge, 2003) maintains strongly that Shakespeare (and by implication the company of which he was a sharer) intended the plays for readers as well as audiences. (One might note in passing that to read a play in a printed text was itself a relatively new thing, which raises all sorts of questions of its own, in Shakespeare’s last years.) Ben Jonson certainly seems to have had his eye on that option. But here, as all too rarely, one can have one’s cake and eat it, for the intensely co-operative creation of a performance neither excludes the single reader later, nor does the text s/he reads deny the multitude of cooperative interpretations that may later be made of it. Furthermore, a ‘play patcher’ of genius, as we may, perhaps, assume Shakespeare for example to have been, may write very well indeed even when under the intense pressure and constraints of working in that theatrical environment for that discriminating and unforgiving market. The plays can be judged as art too: and perhaps we must allow far more for the idea of ‘Genius’ – it was far more difficult writing in the conditions I have outlined than in a tidy study where you can invent your own worlds, and then, only then, find someone to body them forth on the stage. The more we think about the constraints of the context, the higher we shall find ourselves rating those who worked and wrote in it. The time we shall concentrate on is one of the most uncomfortable in English history. The period of the growth and high noon of English Renaissance drama is from, say, from 1576 to 1642. In 1576 the entrepreneur Burbage built The Theatre, the first purpose built permanent building in England designed for the playing of a plays if we discount John Brayne’s Red Bull1 of 1567, which was simply a modified 1

Brayne was Burbage’s father in law. The Red Bull was outside the jurisdiction of the City magistrates in Stepney.

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inn court yard. In 1642 Parliament imposed what it said would be a temporary ban on the public theatres throughout the land – and put the companies who depended on them out of work. Within that period the years 1585–1615 – roughly the years in which we have knowledge of Shakespeare’s theatrical life, and of Ben Jonson’s most innovative drama – may be seen as a high point. Certainly, the overwhelmingly majority of Renaissance plays a cultured, even fairly specialist, English speaker today would know would come from between those narrower dates. This period coincides with one of the tensest, most worried and unhappy periods of English life, from what has been called the Nasty Nineties (by Patrick Collinson and Katherine Duncan Jones among others) to the first rumblings of that clash between Parliament and Crown which would culminate in 1642 in the kinstrife of the Civil War. It was period of war. England was at war with Spain, and feared invasion several times – the panic caused by rumours of the arrival of the third Armada (see chronology below) in 1599 had everyone able-bodied under arms when they ought to have been getting in the sparse harvest. The Privy Council1 nearly panicked itself into sinking block ships in the Thames to stop an invading force. England was at war in Ireland, desperately trying to contain the serious threat to her control posed by the very able O’Neill, earl of Tyrone. Civil War was a real fear, not least because the Queen had no clear heir, and refused to let the matter be discussed. Moreover, Pope Pius V in the Bull Regnans in excelsis of 1570 had delegitimated Elizabeth and released all her Catholic subjects from their allegiance to her in what must surely be one of the most politically inept pronouncements ever to come from Rome. Overnight, this turned the up to 40% of her subjects who were secretly or openly Catholic into potential traitors. Her cousin Mary of Scotland, her eventual successor’s mother, had been the focus of Catholic plots, real or imaginary, and had had to be executed in 1587. There were seriously advanced claims for the restoration of a Plantagenet heir, since the Tudor title to the throne was very dicey: that heir was, by descent, the Infanta of Spain, the Archduchess Isabella. As Francis Bacon, a rising star in her later years, and to be James’s Lord Chancellor, put it, in one of those books which one is grateful he never finished: [many said] after Queen Elizabeth's decease there must follow in England nothing but confusions, interreigns, and perturbations of estate, likely far to exceed the ancient calamities of the civil wars between the houses of Lancaster 1

The close circle of just about a dozen advisers and ministers around the monarch, who with the Prince were the supreme executive (as opposed to leglislative) authority.

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and York, by how much more the dissensions were like to be more mortal and bloody when foreign competition should be added to domestical, and divisions for religion to matter of title to the crown. (As it happens, James’ succession was beautifully handled, and he was welcomed to London with much rejoicing: the Londoners had lit bonfires in the streets when news of the old unpopular queen’s death broke, but within a few years James and his Scottish hangers-on were nearly as unpopular as she had been.) Command of the war in Ireland had been fatal to Elizabeth’s last favourite, the glamorous but hotheaded Earl of Essex, whom many would have like to see succeed her – he had royal blood, indeed. But his abortive rebellion led only to his ignominious trial – where Bacon, once his protégé, was prosecutor – and execution. The Irish war had drained the treasury, and the settlement of it by Mountjoy, burning and starving the Irish into surrendering and their leaders into exile, horrified even many who applied that settlement. But James, wiser than many in his Parliaments would have had him be, made peace with Spain in 1606, and kept his realms out of a European war, to be sure: but that looks more secure in hindsight than it did at the time. This was, too, a period of poor harvests, food riots, inflation, recurrent plague – and the aftermath of a revolution in the patterns of worship and devotion which had affected and still affected every single person in the land, when loyalties and affections and duties might be agonisingly split. It was period of religious strife and friction, and just over the water, in France, many had seen in the Wars of Religion an awful foretaste of what they feared might happen between Catholic and Protestant in a very divided England. Those wars were an anticipation of the terrible Europe-wide conflict of the Thirty Years’ War which erupted in 1618. Nobody knew what was coming, and as always most were walking backwards into the future, regretting the time past and fearing that to come. But all guessed that, even if the real possibility of civil war might be avoided (which in the end it was not), what was to come was not only still unsure, but might also be pretty nasty. Tennyson’s ‘spacious time of great Elizabeth’, the myth of that happy sunlit merrie England, is just that: myth. But, at the same time, this was is a period of great innovation and some hope for the future, and such contradictions and complications are evident in, mirrored by, the plays and the issues they raise in the oblique but penetrating way that art does. When you have something as popular, in all senses, as the drama of the period I shall call, for convenience, ‘Jacobethan’, it must have engaged with contemporary issues and concerns, and be in a profound sense ‘political’ – to do with the polity

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and its values and management. You can relocate the problems of the present, which are too sensitive or too dangerous to discuss openly, into a fiction, a narrative, a history of the past. That does not make that narrative an allegory, but it does suggest a perspective in both directions. The topicality of a lot of Jacobethan plays is now lost to us, when the issues over which people fought and killed and for which they died have gone cold: they were not cold then. A change of monarch, as with the accession of James in 1603, can alter the whole tenor of things, for a pressing concern, with a new royal family on the throne for the first time in 60 years, and an assured succession, will no longer be who will inherit England, as it had been for so long. And the tastes, concerns and interests of the court will filter down to the public theatres. The taste for what I call post-tragic plays – plays which explore what happens next, if people get a second chance – like Pericles, or Winter’s Tale, or Tempest – fed directly on the hopefulness of the new political climate, when James hoped to secure a European peace through the marriages of his children. But that is a long story.

1. The roots of English drama The film Shakespeare in Love was a huge box office success, and its picture of the physical conditions and dynamics of the theatre was based on good, up to date research. Just so, nearly sixty years earlier, Laurence Olivier’s film of Henry V began in a Globe Theatre, and used some features of acting style, consonant with the best inferences from research then. Nobody is going to go far wrong if they start their exploration of the physical basis of the remarkable cultural phenomenon of English Renaissance drama with those visual images. But the reality, in so far as we can perceive it, is more complicated, and I think more interesting. Those who have the chance should try to visit the New Globe, built in the 1990s on London’s South Bank near the site of the original Globes, for that building, though not without its controversial aspects, has got scholarly and archaeological – not necessarily uncontroversial – warrant for every feature. It can give a sharp awareness of the sort of material setting for plays and the consequent physical constraints on them – which were, after all, not a book, or a text, but a felt, heard, seen and (given the diet and personal hygiene of those days) smelt communal experience, shared with other people you could see – not, as in a modern theatre, masked by, isolated in, darkness. That makes a huge difference, for you interact with those watching – and are not only very close to, but get eye contact with, the actors. Initially, I want to concentrate the discussion on the ‘public’ rather than the ‘private’ theatres – terms the significance of which will be clear later. What is however common to audiences, and plays, in both, is the sort of expectation an audience might have of what a play was, and how it worked, and with that we shall begin. Recent scholarship has rightly stressed that the roots of Elizabethan drama lie in the cycles of mystery plays, and the later Morality plays, that were such a feature of town life in the later Middle Ages in northern Europe. On the Continent these continued to be a regular part of the yearly programme until long after our period, and the best painting (by van Alsloot) of a pageant cart with a Nativity play being performed comes from Brussels in 1618. In England, because of their implicit and often emphatic Catholic ideology, the Privy Council, dominated by aggressive and

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doctrinaire Protestants1 in the last years of Henry VIII and in the Protestant reigns of Edward VI and later Elizabeth, attempted the total suppression of these plays. That suppression was in many places in England resisted with varying degrees of success. For example, in Coventry the cycle plays, covering the drama of Man’s fall, Redemption and Salvation from Creation through to the Last Judgment – the history of the future – were being performed well into the 1570s – that is, into the early teens of young Shakespeare, who lived just down the road in Stratford. There is evidence of many more towns having ‘le play’ (as the records of tiny Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, call it) than there are surviving texts – and in the Beverley (Yorkshire) records we can glimpse people being auditioned for the parts. There are records of performances of more or less complete cycles in Kendal, in Chester, in Norwich until even later, and some evidence that the memory of these plays was vivid and first hand in the areas of the country further from easy government control as late as 1644. The fact is that the religious plays formed the theatrical language of Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s generation: we moderns often do not even notice it. The cycle of Mystery plays, usually performed in midsummer around the feast, or ‘holi-day’ of Corpus Christi, were a communal effort, in which the various organisations, guilds and fraternities making up the community took both responsibility and pride. Moreover, the plays often were the occasion not only for expenditure, but also for the collection from the crowd of substantial amounts of money for the purposes of the church or community. The nearest they had to stages was, in some cases, the pageant cart – we might call it a float – often very elaborate and frequently with three levels which at need could signify Heaven, Earth, and Hell. Scenery there was, to all intents and purpose, none: though props might be elaborate and spectacular. Mostly the drama took place with amateur actors drawn from the community, whom you would recognise as your neighbours, in the everyday space of the street: the whole world was the stage on which the drama of salvation was enacted. When permanent theatres come to be built (and why they were is an interesting question), that symbolism is carried over seamlessly. They can’t help drawing on this inheritance – and it is interesting, as we shall see, to look at the names people call these buildings. 1

The earthquake of the Reformation, which split Europe into (Roman) Catholic and Protestant camps, is an extremely complicated business, and no summary can be adequate. Protestants, as they were called, followed the theologies of Luther, Calvin, or Zwingli, whom Rome regarded as heretics, especially in the acceptance of the Bible as the sole source of revelation, in justification by faith alone, and in the universal priesthood of all the believers.

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The cycle plays’ narrative was fundamentally religious, the morality plays’ tools allegorical. In both there was a mix of the comic and anarchic, the serious and holy – they are interdependent, inextricably mixed, as they are in life itself. The narrative is very stylised, and – as it had to be with amateur actors – it had to rely year after year on fixed ways of performing roles, of doing things, on a recognisable and familiar iconography. With an audience gathering, shifting, reforming and talking in a street this formulaic pattern is crucial, and the inheritance from it lasts a very long time. Think of a play where you have a scene in the castle of Hell. There is a banging on the barred gate. The porter is drunk, and in his cups he jokes about who he thinks that is – ‘Oh, it’s old so and so – we’ve been expecting him for years’. (Good, clean fun that plays with the names and characters of people even in the very audience.) Then the door is burst open, and in comes – who? Most people would answer ‘MacDuff’, assuming the play to be Macbeth (1606). It could be, but in fact it is the Play of the Harrowing of Hell, where Christ breaks down the gates of Hell and frees those held unjustly. That memory will completely alter the way you can read or see Macbeth. One can cite other examples: the silent suffering Lavinia in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (1592?) reminds of the suffering Christ, the Man of Sorrows, whose picture was in every church in the land before – and in some cases after – the Reformation, and whose Passion was the heart of the cycle plays. Lear with the dead Cordelia in his arms in King Lear (1605) deafeningly echoes the pietà of the Virgin with the dead Christ. Falstaff in King Henry VI Part One (1597), playing King Henry in II.iv, or with Doll on his knee in Part 2 II.iv, visually is a very clear echo of the iconography of the Deadly Sins of Sloth and Lechery respectively. Our attitude to him must correspondingly be affected. One consequence of this must be for us to recognise in all Renaissance English drama a readiness to see individuals against a type, to think symbolically and allegorically: we are dealing with a non/naturalistic, but very vivid, drama. We should accept that stock characters, like the familiar machiavel, can be very potent ways of releasing ideas and allow a considerable variation to be played on them. The cycle plays, whose story, with all its mixture of intense importance – relevance!– and grim humour and often broad comedy, was repeated year after year, provided a ritual space where a community explored its own identity, myths and values, and allowed, within the ritual structure of the year, and within the prevailing structures of order, an area of Bakhtinian ‘carneval’ – an area of licensed disorder, topsyturvydom. That attitude to and expectation of drama did not die overnight: it is part of the expectation of plays Shakespeare’s contemporaries took for granted.

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Once we have clearly established that that is the matrix in which the imaginations of the audiences were formed – and dramatists are often members of audiences – one can then acknowledge the importance of other influences: the Latin tragedies of Seneca, a gloomy, very stylised, but gripping homage to the Greek tragedy lost throughout the middle ages and which only a few educated Elizabethans would know; the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, much studied and performed in the schools and universities, which will be discussed later; and the commedia dell’arte tradition, itself deriving from Plautus’ ‘clever servant’ comedies, which Italian troupes brought to France (establishing themselves in Paris in the Théâtre des Italiens) and occasionally to England – the mark of these is to be seen in Jonson’s comedies, and in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and Taming of the Shrew. But all of these different traditions of theatre converge in forming an expectation that a new play would be very alert, sometimes ironically, to its predecessors, borrow their dramatic languages, and often play variations on their recognised themes – just as soap opera, or the Western, has done for our generations. Shakespeare’s and his contemporaries’ customers differed from us in another way. Renaissances audiences (Lat. audire = to hear) were just that: you went not to see a play but to hear it. ‘Spectator’ is first recorded in English in 1586, and its first use of drama is after 1600. We must posit an audience of very skilled listeners alert to the slightest nuances of versification, of prose style, of rhetoric and of tone: much as today audiences are skilled in listening to a concert of serious music. It is also important that we recognise the primacy of words rather than vision in Elizabethan culture: there are good ideological reasons for this. For the Protestant reformers set their faces against the wealth of painted, carved and glazed representations of the saints and martyrs with which pre-Reformation churches were filled, to the exclusion, they thought, of the attention due to the holy Word of God in the Bible. It is a small step from that to accusations of idolatry in breach of the Second Commandment of Exodus XX; and in a culture where many believed that literally indeed the Devil roamed about as a roaring lion, seeking whom he might devour, and appearing in the likeness of an angel of light, there was a distrust, even fear, of visual illusion. That is one reason why in plays of the period players quite often stress that they are players, not the people they pretend to be. For most members of the audience, plays did not tell a new story – and anyway, on the second visit you knew it already. You did not go – we do not go – to know what happened in a play: you went to see what burden it could be made to carry. A good example is the history play – and there are far more plays we might loosely

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call ‘history plays’ than any other in the entire corpus of English renaissance drama. You knew the story: but historical themes allowed you all silently to confront the questions it would be too dangerous to open up publicly, for you relocated the problems of the present into the narrative of the past. This complex inheritance is the bedrock on which the plays we are considering are built. Sometimes that foundation is almost openly acknowledged, as it is in the procession of the Seven Sins in Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, or when Shakespeare’s Falstaff is made to refer to the dagger of lath of the Vice in the old morality; sometimes it is much more covert. But it is never absent, and affects the way things could be seen even when the world of the mediaeval cycle drama has gone for ever.

2. The new theatres In what follows, the discussion must concentrate on London. That is where the most serious innovations happened, and it is where most of our material and evidence originates. But it is important to keep in mind that there was a theatrical culture outside London as well, and we shall come to this later. Collection of money during open air performances in the street, like at a Punch a Judy show, is often chancy: people suddenly find they are not watching after all, and drift away as the box comes round. It was John Brayne who conceived the idea of turning the yard of the Red Bull Inn in Stepney into a dedicated playing space, where people could not enter until they had passed the – box office. That strategy was the basis for the new building of the new public commercial theatres which made so many fortunes and attracted so much opprobrium in the next sixty years. John Brayne’s brother in law James Burbage (father of Richard and Cuthbert) recognised an opportunity. James, a joiner by trade, and later an actor, leased in 1576 some land in Shoreditch from Giles Allen and erected on it the first purpose-built permanent commercial theatre. (Finsbury Fields and Shoreditch were then well outside the built up area of London, and outside the jurisdiction of the City magistrates, who were consistently opposed to the public theatres.) He called it by a name that has completely lost its importance for us. ‘The Theatre’ was a provocative name. It is a relatively new word in English, first being used in 1548, but without any connotation of plays and acting. That is the sense it acquired because of James’ enterprise. For the word he chose meant to contemporaries something much more like ‘encyclopaedia’, or ‘overview’. The Greek word means ‘seeing place’; in Renaissance book titles like that of Abraham Ortelius’ great atlas Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1546?) it means a comprehensive view. So James’ name suggested, in fact, that as in the News of the World ‘All Human Life is There’. Quite a claim; and it picks up the already clichéd idea that ‘all the world’s a stage’ – and by reciprocal implication, the stage is the world. It is very interesting to find that the archaeological evidence suggests from what has been recovered since 1988–9 that the very shape of the buildings of the Rose and the Globe, the ground plan, was mathematically determined to figure the proportions of the universe itself. The motto of the Globe, rebuilt in Southwark from the timbers of the demolished Theatre in

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1599, was ‘totus mundus agit histrionem’ roughly, ‘all the world plays the actor’ – a quotation from the twelfth century political philosopher John of Salisbury. Its flag seemed to have been Atlas supporting the great globe itself. It seems as if theatre buildings themselves were a palpable symbol of, or at least claim to, high seriousness – but a high seriousness, that, like the real world in its inevitable progress to apocalypse, could include the anarchic and subversive within its walls. The whole building can become a metaphor: the stage, like the pageant carts of the mystery plays, can be a world between the canopy/heaven, and the ‘cellarage’/hell, and the men on it play out their lives in the eye of eternity. Where the plot is a known one – as in a history play – the audience can hardly escape the idea that their vision of events is similar to that of Divine Providence. The possibility of the theatre as moral metaphor is demonstrated also by the very titles of books of emblems1 , moral pictures plus verses, intended to help one to live a virtuous life: the collection by the Dutchman Jan van der Noodt was Englished (perhaps partly by Spenser) in 1569 as A Theatre for Worldlings, while a man from Stratford, Thomas Combe, whom Shakespeare may well have known translated Guillaume de la Perrière's collection as The Theatre of Fine Devices (1593, 1614). (Emblematic pictures which symbolise in fairly standard ways abstract moral ideas clearly affect staging and performance, as we shall see.) The implications of this theatre/world metaphor extend further. For the moral judgment demanded by the watching of a play bounces back on the audience, for they too are actors and their very language never allows them to forget the fact. Sir Walter Ralegh puts it succinctly in a short poem that exploits this commonest of conceits with a wry perception of when the playing has to stop: What is our life? A play of passion, And what our mirth but music of division? Our mothers' wombs the tiring houses be, Where we are drest for this short comedy. Heav'n the judicious sharp spectator is, Who sits and marks who here doth act amiss. The graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus playing post we to our latest rest, And then we die, in earnest, not in jest. 1

See my introductory Anthology, A Century of Emblems (Scolar/ Ashgate, 1989) and Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem books and Renaissance Culture, (Longman 1994)

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(This issue is clearly integral to the concept of character – though that may well be changing – we need to assume in the period.) Elizabethans talked of going to the playhouse, not the theatre – if they said ‘The Theatre’, they were going to Finsbury Fields. ‘Playhouse’ also gives us an important clue to attitudes. ‘The Playhouse’ suggests ideas of playing, of ‘pretending’, like children ‘play at’ something, of ‘in play’ – i.e. semantically, it suggests playing with that which is not real and known not to be so. It cuts right against our ideas of theatrical illusion, and makes quite anachronistic Coleridge’s wonderful phrase about the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’. Burbage’s Theatre was very successful indeed, and several other theatres sprang up in imitation in the next decade or so. The men who had interests in these commercial theatres were often involved in other enterprises to do with what we could call entertainment, like bull- and bear-baiting, cockfighting, and the management or at least leasing of brothels. Several died very rich; not all playwrights and actors did. But this convergence of interests did nothing to help the reputation of the playhouses in the eyes of the moralists, who had other reasons to distrust them as well, and it would have been very easy for the company to have provided the bear Harry Hunks for the most famous stage direction in Shakespeare, ‘Exit pursued by a bear’. 1 The new theatres were used for other things besides plays: for exhibition bouts of fencing, for example, with the old English broadsword that in the nineties was superseded, for gentlemen at least, by the new point weapon, the Italianate rapier. Indeed, the most famous player of clown parts of his generation, Richard Tarleton, was a Master of Fence: you won that title by defeating twelve other masters in twenty four hours. In the seventeenth century the English community at Gdansk had a theatre, which we know was used for such exhibition bouts. Audiences watching a stage fight were connoisseurs, and what the Royal Shakespeare Company puts on would not have passed muster with them. Several important theatres were in Southwark. Nearly all the public theatres were outside the territorial limits of the jurisdiction of the magistrates of the City of London, who were consistently hostile to plays, playing and theatres, and petitioned the Privy Council frequently for the playhouses to be closed down. Southwark, on the South Bank of the Thames, was connected to the City by London Bridge, with its houses and shops, like the Ponte Vecchio in Venice, and its gatehouse at the south 1

For an introductory discussion of bear baiting, go to: http://www.crhs.rsb.qc.ca/teachers/Ivan_Andrea/shakespeare/bear_baiting_2.htm

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end, surmounted by the rotting severed heads of people executed under the draconian treason laws.1 By 1600 Southwark had about 10 per cent of London's total population of around 200,000, and it was the second largest urban area in England. The difficulty of controlling this area – you can see a close up of it in the Visscher engraving (see note 1) – divided as it was between several landholders and several legal jurisdictions, of which the largest was that of the Bishop of Winchester, made it the natural place for all sorts of noisome trades, like tanneries, soapboiling works, bleaching grounds – all pretty smelly. (Our ancestors lived in a very smelly world – smoke and sewage were the dominant smells of towns.) Tanneries used rotting oak bark and dog excrement to pickle the already smelly raw hides; the smoke from soapboiling was mainly coal smoke, and bleaching used not only sunlight but also sour milk, which can smell appalling. One interesting thing that came out of the excavations a few years back at the Rose Theatre was the discovery that the ash from the soap boiling, and the hazel shells from the nuts that were crushed for oil to make the soap, were used by the ton as a very effective and nearly waterproof flooring for the yard, laid slightly sloping to allow draining of rain and other less innocent liquids into the drain. But as well as its industry, Southwark was noted for all sorts of pleasures. It had one of the most famous of inns, the Tabard, whence Chaucer’s pilgrims set off for Canterbury, and which stood till the 1830s. It was on the edge of a pleasant semirural pattern of lanes and gardens, and it was noted for bear and bull baiting, and for its brothels. Ironically, the ground landlord of many of the brothels was the Bishopric of Winchester – hence the cant term for a prostitute ‘a Winchester goose’. In 1583 Southwark was cited as a place for ‘unchaste interludes and bargains of incontinence’. Modern street names, like Maiden Lane and Cardinal’s Cap Alley, just by the new Globe, record the ironic attitude to the pleasures there offered. Naturally, already a place for popular pleasure, it was where the theatres would gravitate: The Rose was built here in 1587, and the Globe in 1599, outside the very hostile control of the City magistrates – as all public theatres, for their own good, had to be. 2

1

2

Do look, before you read further, at the beautiful engraving of London by Claus Visscher, which appeared about 1616. It’s not as reliable in detail as some others, but it is a lovely piece of work: you can see it, and enlarged sections of it, at http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/tlondon.htm. A very useful map of the location of the theatres, with detailed notes on each, is at http://www.william-shakespeare.info/william-shakespeare-visiting-new-globe-theatre-london.htm.

3. Attitudes to theatre and players. I mentioned above that there was a good deal of ideological unease about plays, particularly from the more radical – we might say, glibly, ‘fundamentalist’ – Protestants, who came to be called Puritans. This unease, this fear of devilish deception and illusion, often went hand in hand with the disquiet felt by those in authority – they were quite often, as in the case of the officials of the City of London, the same people. Authority too often infects people with the desire to stop other people doing things, especially enjoying themselves, and one of the elements in the opposition to the cycle plays, and to the later public commercial theatres, was that people watching plays were (originally in the literal sense) on holiday, and thus not working. In a century that saw the rapid commodification of labour and the growth of capital, to have idle hands was not only bad economics, but also a temptation of the Devil, who made work for idle hands to do. Moreover, there was a good deal of official uneasiness about the unpredictable nature of popular assemblies and gatherings – you can see just this unease mimicked in the attitude of the tribunes in the first scene of Julius Caesar to the holidaying Romans – and the way in which a crowd could be swayed by emotion and persuasion – the arts of rhetoric that players, and preachers indeed, used. Once again, look at the way Antony whips up the crowd into a murderous gang in his funeral speech over Caesar’s body. Officialdom, recognising these dangers, sought to license and control the only two mass media that Elizabethan and Jacobean England possessed, the pulpit and the play. It in the end suppressed what was left of the mystery cycle plays, and it insisted on the licensing of plays by the Master of the Revels and by local magistrates before they could be performed. Furthermore, everybody recognised, and officialdom feared, the subversiveness implicit in acting. For the players bought the cast-off clothes of great ones, and in an age when sumptuary laws1 were rigidly enforced, how you dressed was what you 1

Laws were passed – the earliest examples are in the fourteenth century – limiting the wearing of certain fabrics, or gold and silver, to people of a certain rank. The height of hats was an index of your social standing. So, if the rules were kept (which they were not always) walking down a street you could tell whether this woman was a citizen’s wife or a gentleman’s, whether this man was a tradesman or a parson, this other man a duke or a mere baron.

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were. So a poor player, strutting on the stage, while legally no more than a common vagrant and so subject to savage legal penalties, was indistinguishable in his dress and even speech from the great lord, or even the Prince. So how do you tell the real prince from the pretend one, especially if they speak in the same way? And if the Player is a King, is the King only a Player? Take the clothes away and we are all bare forked animals – this is the devastating insight at which Lear arrives when he takes off his clothes in his storm on the heath. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great was a deeply shocking, outrageous play, because it showed a (historical) Scythian shepherd talking like a prince, defeating and humiliating real historical princes, and being punished not by an outraged Providence reasserting a natural order of things but simply by dying of illness. And that Scythian shepherd was, in fact, only a poor player: so what is real and fixed –‘natural’? Add to this the further subversive and unsettling issue of all the female parts being played by males, who, in the case of Juliet, or the Duchess of Malfi, are by the genius of the dramatist and (one supposes) the actor given a totally convincing feminine sensibility and sexuality. Is gender, a fundamental layer in the hierarchy of that society, a construct of clothes and language? So what about the absolute prohibition in Deuteronomy XXII.5 against cross dressing? Flat disobedience to the Word of God indeed. Here is an extract from a very long sermon preached, with official approval, at the most important pulpit in England, that outside St Paul’s in the City of London, which could command an audience of 3–4000 people: Look but upon the common plays in London, and see, the multitude that flocketh to them and followeth them. Behold the sumptuous theatre houses, a continual monument of London's prodigality and folly. But I understand they are now forbidden because of the plague. I like the policy well if it hold still, for a disease is but lodged or patched up that is not cured in the cause, and the cause of plagues is sin, if you look to it well: and the cause of sin are plays: therefore the cause of plague are plays. (Thomas White, A Sermon Preached at Pawle’s Crosse, 1578)

And for an even more sweeping condemnation of plays as morally corrupting, one need only look briefly at Philip Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses (1583). The climax of this almost hysterical moral disapproval is reached in the William Prynne’s extraordinary Histriomastix of 1642, the year Parliament closed all the theatres. My hyperlink quotes only part of the title page of this book of over 1000 pages. But – there always is a but – we ought to recognise that though we are right to

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stress the uneasiness about theatre, serious and well argued defences of the theatre and acting were indeed mounted (for example, the one by Heywood). And plays are fun: people, including great people, enjoy them. The Queen does. So one can remove some favoured players from the reach of the vagrancy laws by making them technically one’s servants, whose public playing, it can be pretended, is merely rehearsal for performances on high days and holidays at Court or in a great noble’s house. So we have [the Earl of] Pembroke’s Men, the Lord Admiral’s Men, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Prince Henry’s Men, and so on – and eventually, after 1603, the King’s Men, for James too loved plays and entertainments. And there is not only altruism and the prospect of enjoyment behind this, for magnates quickly recognised the usefulness of the public theatre as a means of influencing popular opinion – exactly the flip side of the fear other great ones felt. James’ extension of his patronage to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men may well come from his recognition of the usefulness of drama and theatre to the construction of the myths of power and rule he hoped to persuade his new people to share. So both in context and in the actual things it might discuss, theatre is inevitably in a broad sense political. A coded discussion can indeed be continued from play to play, and in a culture where many people saw many plays, where different companies have different agendas, plays can easily reply to plays – and often do. And Theatre really was one of the big success stories – a mass medium, it was hugely popular, and made a lot of players and writers rich; Edward Alleyn died vastly wealthy, and Shakespeare bought the flashiest bit of real estate in Stratford on the proceeds. It attracted lots of bright young men of small fortune (trained in playing in the universities and schools, because it was good for budding clerics and administrators to learn how to sway an audience and use the rhetorics of language and body which I shall discuss later). These were young men on the make – they were nicknamed the University Wits: nowadays they would try to go into the media. There were fortunes to be made by some – but it was not quite the most prestigious thing to be doing, and you would be better if you could get a job as secretary to some great man.

4. Audiences and expectations Many colleges, schools, and Inns of Court1 might put up a temporary theatre for a special occasion, often, it seems, using the façade of the screens passage in the Great Hall2 . For most of our period after 1576, there were two types of permanent theatre: the public theatres and private theatres. Private theatres were very exclusive and expensive. James Burbage bought a house in Blackfriars, a select district near the Court at Whitehall, which he converted to use as a private theatre. But there was such an outcry from the local residents that his company could not so use it until 1608. By then they had become the King’s Men. Attending a public theatre performance might cost anywhere from one to three pence; admission to a private theatre could range from up to two shillings and four pence – a week’s wage and more for a working man. Everyone in the private theatres got a seat, and the more you paid, the more comfortable it was. Going to the private theatre was a way to show off: you could afford the expensive admission. And the private theatres, roofed from the weather, and using primitive forms of stage lighting, as did the Blackfriars eventually, could offer more sophisticated visual effects, that we take for granted as part of the pleasure of theatre. In Hamlet Hamlet refers to ‘a nest of little eyases’, one of the Children’s theatre companies that around 1600 were serious competition for Shakespeare’s and other companies – though some have argued that that did not stop Shakespeare writing for a children’s company if it suited him, and have suggested Love’s Labours Lost was one such script. John Lyly’s delightful Campaspe almost certainly was. We can glimpse what a performance in one of the private theatres might have been like from the diary of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin Pomerania, 1602, who went to the Blackfriars when it was let to the Children of Paul’s. 1

2

The Inns of Court were the colleges for Lawyers in London, where young men could be trained in the law: they were the third great intellectual centre of England after the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge – where, incidentally, Roman Catholics could not take a degree. There were several Inns – Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn, Sergeant’s Inn, Clifford’s Inn, for example – and some still survive. The Great Hall of a College, as formerly of a manor house, where everyone ate, was in the same rectangular building as the kitchen. Between the two was a wooden screen, with doors in it, and usually a gallery over.

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We went to the play at the Children's Theatre, the plot of which is about a chaste widow; it was the story of a royal widow of England. Now the origin of this Children's Theatre is as follows: the Queen maintains a number of young boys who are required to apply themselves zealously "to the art of singing and to learn various musical instruments, and to carry on their studies at the same time. These boys have their special preceptors in all the various arts, and in particular very good music teachers. Now in order that they may acquire courtly manners, they are required to act a play once a week, for which purpose the Queen has erected a special theatre for them and has provided them with an abundance of rich costumes… there is always a large audience, including many respectable women, because useful themes and much good doctrine, as we were informed by others, are presented there. All their performances are acted by artificial light, which produces a fine effect. For a whole hour beforehand a delightful performance of instrumental music is given on organs, lutes, bandoras, mandolins, viols and flutes; on this occasion a boy cum voce tremula [with a tremolo voice] sang sweetly to the accompaniment of a bass-viol.

While in the private theatres shows took place in the early evening, in the public theatres plays took place in the afternoon: a Flag raised in the morning over the theatre – visible from the City of London – indicated that there would be a performance. A white flag signalled a comedy, a purple flag a history, and a black flag a tragedy. A trumpet blown just before two o’clock from the little structure called the Hut on the top of the roof announced that the play was about to begin. No artificial lighting, no interval; and during the show people were certainly talking and moving around, not silently watching and paying full attention as modern audience expect to do. There is an account by Dr Thomas Platter, a native of Basel, who visited London in 1599. On 21 September 21, after dinner, about two o'clock, I and my party crossed the water, and there in the house with the thatched roof witnessed an excellent performance of the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius Caesar – [this was probably Shakespeare’s new play] – with a cast of some fifteen people; when the play was over, they danced very marvellously and gracefully together as is their wont, two dressed as men and two as women. The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that

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everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive. For whoever cares to stand below only pays one English penny, but if he wishes to sit he enters by another door and pays another penny, while if he desires to sit in the most comfortable seats, which are cushioned, where he not only sees everything well, but can also be seen, then he pays yet another English penny at another door. And during the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment. The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed; for it is the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer them then for sale for a small sum to the actors.

The drawing of the Swan theatre below (the theatre closed after the politically disastrous Isle of Dogs) was made by Jan de Witt, a Dutch visitor, at the end of the 1590s, and is the only sketch we have of what an Elizabethan theatre looked like. Platter might have said something about odd features we can see in this picture, like the ‘Lords’ rooms’, which seem to have been above the stage. Or how the ‘Gallants’ – that is, young men of fashion and money – would pay to sit on the very stage: the whole point about such practices, bizarre to us, is that in the Lord’s rooms you might not see much but you could be seen; and the gallant on his stool at the side of the stage, and often backchatting with the actors, was making a very public statement about himself. Such conduct may be being alluded to in the Christopher Sly parts of The Taming of the Shrew. Moreover – a point that would hardly occur to us – the stage seems to have been on the south west of the enclosed space, and so the actors would have played in the afternoon shade while many of the audience would have been sitting or standing in the full sun. It’s only when you realise that the sun bleaches vegetable dyes very fast, and that dyed clothing was valuable, that you understand why the most expensive seats were not facing the stage, but at the side of it or even behind and

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above it – in the shade, and from where you could be seen by the maximum number of people. Who were the audience? Firstly, one must recognise the numbers involved. The Theatre, when rebuilt as the Globe in 1599 1 , could take up to 3000 (cf. the present London Coliseum’s 2000), and there were even up to 500 in the more select and much more expensive private theatres – their clientèle by definition rich, or at least appearing so. This gives us some interesting statistics. With several theatres playing at once, on most afternoons of the week, and making money, the number of people attending must have been very large indeed – in fact, if we posit a five day playing week, the opportunity is there for at least 15000 person/attendances – which is a significant proportion of the total population of London. Obviously, the composition of that large number changed daily and seasonally: the upshot is that few people in London and Westminster could be ignorant of what was going on in the public theatres. And one reason so many theatres sprung up was that there was demand – though not all of them survived economically. As Platter points out, ‘…daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators.’ Certainly, in the public theatres, there was a cross section of society. Thomas Dekker in 1609 describes the ‘the place [as] so free in entertainment, allowing a stool as well to the farmer's son as to your Templar [lawyer]; that your stinkard has the selfsame liberty to be there in his tobacco-fumes, which your sweet courtier hath: and that your carman and tinker claim as strong a voice in their suffrage, and sit to give judgment on the play's life and death, as well as the proudest Momus [critic].’ This was one of the few major places of mixing in a very ranked society – apprentices through to nobles went to the play. It was the one place where some boundaries came down. There were even some women, some respectable citizens’ wives, some whores. The crowds were a good place for pickpockets and other petty criminals. Moreover, the theatres were competing for audiences in a very competitive market. Audiences were often loyal to particular theatres, which often as a result had a dominant flavour. Some catered more for court and gentry – though inevitably there was some mixing; some theatres and their companies catered more for citizen/tradesmen audiences, with plays like Dekker’s Shoemaker’s Holiday, or Beaumont and Fletcher’s Knight of the Burning Pestle, or Jonson’s Everyman in his 1

There is a fine and very entertaining account of the events surrounding this in J. Shapiro, 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare (London 2005)

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Humour, or the collaborative Eastward Ho! – plays often set in London, and dealing with the issues that would appeal to a mercantile community – money, status, and marrying the boss’s daughter. London tradesmen and their apprentices made up a large part of the audiences, and we can get many glimpses of audience behaviour. First, from a hostile standpoint: In our assemblies at plays in London, you shall see such heaving, and shoving, such itching and shouldering to sit by women: such care for their garments, that they be nor trod on: such eyes to their laps, that no chips light in them: such pillows to their backs, that they take no hurt… such giving them pippins to pass the time… such tickling, such toying, such smiling, such winking, and such manning them home, when the sports are ended, that it is a right comedy to mark their behaviour, to watch their conceits… For they that lack customers all the week, either because their haunt is unknown or the constables and officers of their parish watch them so narrowly that they dare not quetch, to celebrate the sabbath flock to theatres, and there keep a general market of bawdry. Not that any filthiness in deed is committed within the compass of that ground, as was done in Rome, but that every wanton and his paramour, every man and his mistress, every John and his Joan, every knave and his quean, are there first acquainted and cheapen the merchandize in that place, which they pay for elsewhere as they can agree. (Stephen Gosson, The Schoole of Abuse, 1579)

They were certainly rowdy on occasion, and we know that they made their likes and dislikes very loudly known. Interestingly, in Shakespeare, references to an audience are nearly always hostile: the most well known is Hamlet’s contemptuous reference to the audience in the yard as looking like the sort of open-mouthed fish called groundlings, but many playwrights – Shakespeare and Jonson among them – refer to the superficiality of judgment to which audiences are prone, and Henry V’s Chorus almost oilily flatters the audience into making allowances for the plays that they are watching – seeking cooperation: ‘piece out our imperfections with your thoughts’ (my emphasis). Audiences expected, too, to have food and drink while they were watching: and so people moved among the crowd selling fruit, or wafers (biscuits), or beer or wine. With all those tightly packed people, the smell must have been fairly powerful, especially on a hot afternoon, and given the place of onions, leeks and garlic in English diets at that time one can understand the gibes about the stench of the

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audiences in several plays. Nor were there any toilets or rest room: if you wanted to urinate, you just stood against the nearest wall – if a lady, you called for a bowl to put under your skirts. The only deodorant was a little sachet of sweet smelling herbs you could wear under your armpits, and it cannot have been very effective. Thomas Dekker’s The Gull’s Hornbook – in other words, ‘how to be a fool and be conned’ – of 1609 has a long passage describing the behaviour of what must have been a very visible minority of playgoers: those gallants who sat on the stage to see and to be seen. But what was in the head of the apprentice or tradesman or gallant in his boat making his way to the theatre? (The river was always full of small boats ferrying passengers and goods from one bank to the other or along the river.) We have already noted what he might have expected of the locality. But he would remember what ‘surrounded’ drama. Theatres were used for other things, like displays of skill at arms; at the end of a tragedy, there was the conventional dance – rather like the comedy that followed tragedy in Greece of a dance – as Thomas Platter’s description quoted earlier reminds us. The jig, often scabrous, scatological or just bawdy, was what many people turned up for – as Hamlet jibes about Polonius, ‘He’s for a jig, or a tale of bawdry’. Often the clown – a star in his own right, and like Richard Tarleton with a huge personal following – might hijack the performance, and was often expected to provide a tailpiece – in more senses than one. Tarleton was noted for his obscenity. The clown wore a special large codpiece, with a huge phallus – think of the implications of that for Bottom and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the clown porter of Macbeth: this is the devil’s iconography, and reminds us that though the drama of this time may look familiar, like what we are used to, there are whole layers of reference we completely miss. We shall need shortly to consider in more detail the issues of acting conventions. But first it is helpful to think about the nature of the acting space, generalising as far as we reliably can about what will certainly have varied to some degree from theatre to theatre.

5. The Acting Space: Limitations and resources All accounts of the public theatres, including the contract for the Fortune1 (note it is called the Fortune) Theatre which Philip Henslowe was building in 1600, suggest an area (the yard) for standing, open to the elements, surrounded by tiers of galleries with seats. The space of the yard was largely taken up by a huge thrust stage about 5 feet off the ground, backed by the façade of the tiring house. It seems to be have usual for the area immediately in front of the façade to be recognised as the locus – i.e. a place definable in space or time, like the garden in the Spanish Tragedy, the Capitol in Rome, Prospero’s cell – and the open thrust as the plataea, an indeterminate, atemporal area spatially very close to the audience – indeed, among them. This offers a neat symbolism. For example, Richard III at the beginning of his play, or Barabas at the beginning of The Jew of Malta, can achieve an intimacy with the audience, a conspiracy with them (however ironic) and focus their view of what is happening towards the centre of the stage: they act as a sort of choric commentary, or indeed offer a clown-like intimacy. As they move through their plays to the centre, into space and time and constrained roles, they lose that freedom, and are in their turn observed, measured, judged. Edmund in King Lear, or Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy – even Hamlet! – follow exactly the same trajectory. The tiring house was of at least two stories, and may in some cases have had three or even four. It was somewhere for the actors to change and to store props and costumes, and from it at least two and possibly three doors opened onto the stage. These doors are important. The central position, where there is one, is the ‘authority’ entry and exit: the side doors, through which opposing armies with ‘alarums and excursions’ enter and exit, or quarrelling servants in Romeo and Juliet, offer disorder, instability.) Thus it is crucial that at the end of Love’s Labours Lost the two parties go off through different doors: there is a play to follow before any resolution (and we seem to have lost it). It is equally crucial, and undeterminable from the printed text, whether Isabella goes out through the central door with the Duke in Measure for Measure, or not. If she does, she has agreed to his proposal. If not, not. 1

There is a picture of the Fortune (1600) and a copy of the contract for its building at http://www.william-shakespeare.info/the-fortune-theatre-picture.htm

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Above these doors most stages seem to have had a balcony, which de Witt's drawing shows running across the whole width. This was used extensively; it is the battlements of Flint Castle in Richard II, the walls of Harfleur in Henry V, Cleopatra's monument in Antony and Cleopatra, Juliet's balcony in Verona. Controversy still surrounds whether it did or did not thrust out to cover an ‘inner stage’, curtained off from the main one and used for ‘discovery’ scenes like Ferdinand and Miranda playing chess in The Tempest, or Hermione's statue in Winter's Tale, or Falstaff asleep behind the arras in 1 Henry IV. One can see the value of such a device – it would be ideal for Henry IV's bedroom in 2 Henry IV, or Richard II's prison – and it is possible that later in our period as audiences demanded more complex and stunning effects, stages were modified to include this useful facility. Classical theatres had a means of ‘revealing what had been hidden’ in the ekkyklema – the Greek word means ‘wheeled out thing’; but this employed large central doors in the scaenae frons and perhaps a wheeled trolley. But the only evidence for it is extrapolated from the texts of Greek plays; no contemporary description or illustration indicates one. There is the huge problem in the Renaissance theatre, too, that action tucked away under a balcony would have been impossible to see and difficult to hear if you were expensively sitting high up or at the side. Discovery scenes could be managed if the doors of the façade were wide enough to be swung back to reveal a space, and if curtains could be hung over the opening so formed. The de Witt drawing of the Swan pictured earlier in this book shows double doors which could do this, and there is an engraving of a ‘Theatre of the World’ (another example of that symbolism!) in Robert Fludd's Ars Memoriae (Oppenheim, 1623) which shows two open arches and one obviously functional set of double doors. The space need not have been very large, and the evidence in the plays suggests that what was presented in it was often more in the nature of a tableau than a continuation of the main action; indeed, the focus of our interest is often what the characters in the play make of what they are looking at – as, perhaps, in the way we (and Hamlet) watch Claudius watching a play (which may in turn make us think about ourselves watching a play – our conscience is a quarry too). The problem once again is our ingrained assumption that one of the summits of the playwright's and producer's skill will be the illusion of realistic action – verisimilitude; and we assume that Juliet's tomb, for example, would not work on stage without the nearest equivalent we can imagine to the ‘fade’ technique. But this seems just not to have been the way our forebears saw things; in 2 Henry VI III.ii the King tells Warwick to

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go and see the corpse of his murdered uncle, Humphrey of Gloucester: ‘Enter his chamber, view his breathless corpse,/And comment then upon his sudden death.’ A few lines later the Folio text records what is probably a prompter's note ‘Bed put forth’ and then ‘Warwick draws the curtaine, and shews Duke Humphrey in his bed’. The action is not realistic – Warwick has only moved a couple of yards, and the discovery is made by drawing a curtain on a stage rather than entering a room in a palace. But what is there is naturalism of response, often achieved by highly conventional and coded means. From the Tiring House façade, at what must have been a high level, projected a canopy. Sometimes, as in the Swan, it was supported on what were obviously elaborate and massive pillars; sometimes, as the contract for the Hope in 1614 suggests, and as C. Walter Hodges claims for the second Globe, it was cantilevered out without any. It was often called the ‘heavens’; and there is a lot of evidence to suggest that its underside was painted elaborately with the signs of the zodiac and the circles of the planets. When Othello swears vengeance on the supposedly unchaste Desdemona (III.iii.467f) by ‘yond marble heaven’ his hand is raised to point to the thing all the audience could see – the painted (= marbled) representation of the delicate and harmonious machine of the universe held together by love. The moment is utterly convincing; but it should be realised the actor is made implicitly to refer to his role-playing in a theatre; he is covered not by the sky of Cyprus but by a painted canopy. The canopy is therefore not just a convenient way of keeping the actors' expensive clothes dry (the audience in the yard did not really matter); it is part of the props of the theatre and an important component in its symbolic economy which we must take into account. The canopy supported the hut, from which those three trumpets sounded at the beginning of performances. The hut also housed the machinery for sound effects like thunder (half-tree trunks hollowed, with cannon balls to roll down them), and cannon for battle effects. (It was the stopple from one of these that lodged in the thatch of the first Globe in 1613 during a performance of Henry VIII and burnt the place to the ground; everyone got out without injury, except for one man whose breeches went on fire. He put them out with a bottle of beer.) It also housed machinery which to us seems not only clumsy but tasteless: winches for letting heavenly visitors down onto the stage. Ariel in The Tempest may have literally flown by this means; the portent of three suns appears in 3 Henry VI, and were clearly lowered from the canopy so that all could see them; Jupiter is lowered on his eagle in Cymbeline. It is clear here that the symbolic effect is wanted rather than anything

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within the narrow confines of ‘realism’; the king of the gods and the most beneficent of the planets descends visibly from and through heaven to reassure – Jovially! – the suffering Postumus that all will be well. It is very obvious that the canopy was much more than a shelter from the rain and sun, and was part of a symbolic structure which as a whole had implications and associations that differ sharply from our ideas about the theatre. But despite such devices, the resources for illusion of the open stage were limited indeed: But pardon, gentles all, The flat unraised spirits that hath dared On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth So great an object. Can this cock-pit hold The vasty fields of France? Or may we cram Within this wooden O 1 the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt? … Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts: Into a thousand parts divide one man, And make imaginary puissance. Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them, Printing their proud hoofs i' th' receiving earth; For 'tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings, Carry them here and there, jumping o'er times, Turning th'accomplishment of many years Into an hourglass … Henry V Prol. 8ff.

The Prologue states the obvious; no one would seriously go to the theatre to see the conflict of kingdoms, but to be made by the play to imagine them. Illusion is – selfreferentially – impossible. So when, on a bright sunny afternoon, perhaps, in 1606, Macbeth says ‘Light thickens, and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’, what we are experiencing is scenery – scenery and setting conveyed entirely through language within a believable context of spoken interchanges in the play. The weakness of the building directly demands the strength of the language, and the peculiar richness and imaginative power of the dramatic languages of writers in this 1

E. H. Gombrich pointed out in a letter to the Times Literary Supplement that the word should be pronounced ‘nought’, not ‘o’, to get the mathematical and quantitative joke

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period is, I think, in some measure a consequence of this necessity. The obvious point must be borne in mind, of course, that when ‘Jacobethan’ dramatists talk of the need for the audience's imaginative cooperation they were in no way complaining; they could not perceive a lack in the theatre since they had no knowledge of what later became possible, and all they were doing was writing a play in the most effective and economical way. Other resources we take for granted are also lacking. Though a curtained stage may have been an innovation used in the theatres that began to be built in the 1600s –Walter Ralegh's poem (he was executed in 1618) suggests so – the normal could have none. The chattering audience had to be quieted not by lowering of lights and a raising of a curtain, but by voices and a presence that demanded attention. The massive punctuation mark between scenes a later dramatist can use is not available; what goes onto the stage must come off as visibly.1 The symbolic stage has to be castle, jousting field, garden, prison, palace, open country and London street in one play alone. Again, what people are actually given to say has to do the job for us, and the movement from one scene to another makes not only for rapidity of action – and Elizabethan actors went, it seems, through their performances at almost rap speed – but also forces that we compare and contrast adjacent scenes. I shall say more of that later, for this juxtaposition is a very important element in the design of Renaissance plays and a significant contributor to meaning. Yet there were real resources we easily ignore. Despite the lack of scenery – the word is not recorded in English in its modern sense until the 1770s – it seems that the audience's anticipation of the type of play they were to watch and the sort of response they were being asked for could be primed. One obvious one is the classification of a play by its title or advertisement – as we can discern through Polonius's use of this idea in Hamlet. 2 Another is in the playhouse itself: the trestles 1

2

The division into Acts and in many cases scenes which we, working from printed texts, take for granted, meeting them as we do in printed copies, seem to be a later development – in Shakespeare's case, the Acts were the mostly the creation of the Folio editors of 1623. Act divisions are always imperceptible unless mechanically marked by intervals, dumbshows or intermezzi, or curtains, and the effect of rapid continuous presentation of the drama is to make hay with the supposed ‘classic’ five-act structure imposed by the editors. It allows the play to break down in our minds into ‘movements’ or groups of scenes. When plays as a matter of course come to be played in indoor theatres with artificial light, Act division become essential, to alow for the trimming of the candle wicks. ‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, or poem unlimited’ (Hamlet, II.2. 400). Polonius is about to introduce a group of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, playing the Lord Chamberlain’s Men on tour. This is likely to be a puff for what the company does well.

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of the stage were usually concealed by drapes, and their colour was apparently changed to reflect the type of play: The stage is hung with black; and I perceive The auditors prepared for tragedy (Induction of A Warning for Fair Women, Anon, c. 1590)

Or What time the world, clad in a mourning robe, A stage made for a woful tragedy … (Wm Browne, Britannia's Pastorals, I.v (1613)

This practice was clearly commonplace, and other colours were probably used for other types of play. Even if they were not, the absence of black would tell the audience what the play was not. What in fact we are here touching on is a most important concept, to which this book will return many times. Using coloured drapes as a signal is an example of that non-verbal language, that area of common assumption, which we call convention. Convention is simply an area of agreement between an artist and his audience, where the terms of the discussion are taken for granted, and the focus of interest lies in what will be made with those terms. Anyone who does not share that common ground, and relies only on the spoken or written words, is highly likely to get things awry. In our own day, we have conventions every bit as complex as those of earlier periods; to take one example only, the Western film as a genre tends to employ a certain type of plot, with certain set features: the shoot-out as climax, the ritualisation of conflict, a moral frame where the good guys usually win over impossible odds. The convention may even extend to details, started by John Ford, like giving the villains black hats. Of course, once the language is established, a director can play with it, even invert it, in the sure knowledge that his audience's acceptance of the norm allows him this freedom to play variations on it. Convention, properly used, is a liberating rather than restricting thing. But to learn the convention one does not run to critical works on Film; one watches films. It is exactly thus with the drama, poetry, painting and music of periods other than our own; the shared language can in considerable part be recovered by alert experience of many works, which is how it was developed and used in the first place.

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In the context of the resources of the building, we need to be aware of two areas where convention is important. (Obviously it will be important in acting style and language as well, and I shall return to that issue later). The acceptance of the symbolic force of the theatre building affects both the way a play is written and the way it is watched. It follows that positioning on stage (or over or under it) can, if so relevant, convey meaning in a non-verbal way. Richard II's descent from the balcony – the walls of Flint Castle – to meet his adversary maps symbolically his abdication of his role as king, on a higher plane than his subjects. It is at that moment that he is ‘unkinged’, in a way that denies the very fabric of the hierarchical universe (this hyperlink is important, if that phrase ‘hierarchical universe’ is unfamiliar to you), even though the actual abdication is later. Movement through theatrical space may therefore be full of meaning lost to us, and where there is no clear evidence from the verbal text about positioning on stage, we can be sure that the author and his actors knew very well that they could not just stand anywhere, for it would all signify. The second, closely connected, area draws in another art. It was a Renaissance cliché that ‘poetry was a speaking picture and picture a silent poem’ – indeed, so close are the terms that Titian writes of his some of his paintings as ‘poems’ and Sir Philip Sidney composes parts of his Arcadia in our minds exactly as if they were paintings. The drama is a combination of the two; composed to be experienced through the ear, it is, literally, a picture, and can employ the conventions of picture, such as we see commonly in Renaissance painting. But it is a picture that has come to life, and speaks and moves through time: so it employs the conventions of poetry too. There are moments – when Richard II is holding the mirror, or Falstaff is aping Henry IV, when the action on stage freezes momentarily into symbolic visual pattern, even into a reminiscence of emblem pictures. There are others when our memories suddenly recall an exactly similar visual structure and are forced to look close to the heart of the play by ‘looking on this picture, and on this’, as Hamlet urged his mother. One such moment is when we recognise that Henry Bolingroke giving judgment (Richard II IV.i.115ff) is in a visual structure identical to the first scene of the play. Comparison in detail of those two scenes takes hours; but the visual pictures say it all in a split second. What we have here is something not far removed from the technique of the diptych or triptych painting, where the panels are complete in themselves but mean much much more in juxtaposition, relation and comparison to the others.

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Or the recollection may be of a visual commonplace – to use the technical word, topos – outside the play entirely, well enough known to be confidently referred to by the author. A good example of this is in The Tempest, where the young lovers Miranda and Ferdinand are ‘discovered’ playing chess. The game of chess had for a long time been a common symbol of the ‘love-battle’ where victory and defeat are both sweet, played according to elaborate rules. Ferdinand and Miranda are thus signalled visually to be noble, restrained, in control of their passions – and very much in love. (An example of the ironic use of this convention is in Middleton's Women beware Women, which is set in a brothel.) Or think of Richard II's play with the mirror of self-knowledge, an attribute of personified Prudence. Visual commonplaces could be used in many ways on and off stage; painting the Queen with her hair loose – a conventional signal that the lady was a virgin – and holding a few ears of corn links her firmly with the iconography of Astraea, whose attributes as Virgo Spicifera – i.e. the constellation Virgo, which is where Astraea on her retreat from the earth is supposed to have ended up – are loose hair and the ears of corn that symbolise the peace and plenty she will bring to earth. I cannot stress too strongly the value for the student of looking at the visual art of the period as a way into the signs of the drama and as a control on our reading of it1 .

1

There are various aids the student can use short of buying an art gallery. Handbooks, like J. Hall's Dictionary of Subjects and Symbols in Art (London, 1974), G. Ferguson, Signs and Symbols in Christian art (Oxford 1954) are a great help; so are contemporary handbooks of symbol and mythology, happily now available in reprints, like Cesare Ripa's Iconologia, Alciati's Emblematum Liber, or Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes. The discussions in E. H. Gombrich's Norm and Form (London, 1978) and Symbolic Images (London, 1972) are invaluable. See also my A Century of Emblemes, Curiously Culled and Delicately Displayed (London, 1988)

6. Props Elizabeth's ears of corn in her portrait are a prop. What props were available? In contrast to the spareness of the stage and lack of scenery, props seem to have been elaborate and certainly plentiful. But we must again bear in mind props will still be used conventionally and symbolically, even if those same props might be used differently by us. Philip Henslowe was manager and major shareholder in the Admiral's Men, another theatrical company that was a rival to the Lord Chamberlain's (later King's) Men. The actor Edward Alleyn became his son-in-law – a good move, for old Henslowe knew how to look after the pennies. He kept a meticulous account of his financial transactions, of who was in his debt, of what he and his company possessed, of what each performance made. His diary is an invaluable source for theatrical history, and from it we can get a pretty good idea of the props held in stock, and how elaborate they were, particularly the portable ones. Henslowe's list is confirmed from court accounts kept by the Office of the Revels, and so can be seen as pretty typical. It is a matter of some surprise how elaborate, indeed lavish, the props were. While Henslowe's men were playing at the Rose Theatre, we find they had tombs, chariots (including one to serve as the chariot of the sun, which must have been pretty spectacular), mossy banks, trees – which, as the actors climb them in Dekker's Old Fortunatus, are unlikely to have been merely the columns of the canopy – ‘houses’ made of lath and canvas, weapons, a crown, tables, chairs, stool, furry horsehair robes for ‘wild men’ (like Caliban), thrones, a Hell Mouth, detached heads – Macbeth, for example, will need one later. Internal evidence from the plays suggest other things as well that do not appear in this list: the putting out of Gloucester's eyes in King Lear requires an object actually to be palmed and then dropped – a gooseberry, in season? It also demands that his eyes be smeared with blood – a small bladder of pig's blood held in Cornwall's sleeve? In Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, Hieronimo bites his own tongue out, and something bloody must be spat onto the floor. This sort of vivid detail in the fundamental unrealism of the stage is not a new thing, for in late mediaeval plays, highly stylised as they were,

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there is the same sort of detailed realism. In a play of the Nativity, the midwife who attended the Blessed Virgin had a withered hand. Touching the infant Christ made it whole, and a manuscript illustration shows the withered hand hanging from the midwife's arm by a string. The illusion had been created by means of a glove. The use of props like these clearly suggests that dramatists and actors, recognising as they did that their backdrop was symbolic and their context dependent on the audience’s cooperative imagination, were nevertheless delighted to get naturalism of detailed, often violent, effect. And when you do not have to describe violent action, as is the convention in Classical Tragedy, but can actually show it, you can use your words to react to it. The lavishness of props suggests they were seen as really valuable tools, and the importance attached to them may explain the remarkable number of procession and court scenes in Elizabethan drama. In this type of scene, not only would the stage be full of people, wearing the fine clothes that, bought second hand from the fashionable nobility, were so valuable (and powerful) a property, but the scene, whether static as in court or mobile as in procession, could communicate a good deal of meaning – indeed, could be allegorical exactly as processions and tableaux in Court masques could be allegorical. The use of properties of one sort or another in this sort of context is almost inescapable, and is a most valuable way of creating a symbolic spectacle. For beside their practical function, properties too had their symbolic importance – the Hell Mouth in Henslowe's list cannot have been realistic in any but the most debased sense, but it was certainly symbolic – and a direct echo of the cycle of mystery plays. (Is it not demanded to be used at the end of Marlowe’s Dr Faustus? And does not that bring that play closer to the Morality plays than to the ‘Tragedy’ as which we too glibly see it?) The throne of Denmark on which Claudius sits in Hamlet I.ii is already a symbol of ordered rule – any throne is; but it is developed interestingly by a play on words. ‘State’ can mean both state in our sense, and also the actual throne on which a king sits. So Marcellus' remark at the end of I.iv – ‘Something is rotten in the state of Denmark’ - reminds us of Claudius' own unwittingly self-referential hint in his first speech in I.ii: ‘...thinking by our late dear brother's death/Our state to be disjoint and out of frame’ – his hidden image of a rickety chair is suddenly seen to be very much to the point; a rotten wooden throne is metaphor of the rottenness of the polity he has usurped by sitting on that throne. As thrones are pretty heavy things, and take some lugging on and off stage, it may well have stayed on stage throughout the performance, with poetically devastating effect: the physical symbol of rottenness in the whole fabric of a kingdom focuses

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all the detailed demonstrations of that rottenness going on round it. In the last scene, it would be physically and visibly cleansed by the killing of Claudius while he sits on it. The closeness of the audience meant the effects achieved by the use of props had to be pretty good. Hence the paradox of the attitudes to acting; an actor is symbolic, he acts a role, but contemporary accounts praise good actors for doing this and, at the same time, for ‘acting to the life’. Interestingly, Mrs Quickly in 1 Henry IV II.iv praises Falstaff for acting like an actor!

7. ‘A Play toward’: the companies, actors and acting In 1559, the first year of her reign, Elizabeth issued – or rather, her Privy Council persuaded the young queen to issue – a proclamation requiring all players to be licensed. The informal troupes of travelling players were replaced by new touring companies with patrons from among the Queen’s trusted courtiers – it is important to remember, though, that men did move around between these different companies as opportunity offered. In 1583, seven years after Burbage built The Theatre, the Queen extended her own patronage to a company, the Queen’s Men, who played regularly in London as well as touring through England. In 1594, they were subsumed into the Admiral’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. They shared a virtual monopoly over theatre performances in London. That commanding position encouraged them to invest in permanent playhouses in London. They could put on many more plays, and they could afford to buy the expensive second hand costumes from the nobility. More plays meant they required the services of writers like Shakespeare and Jonson, Kyd and Marlowe, and the very prolific Henry Chettle, to satisfy those audiences with their insatiable desire for novelty. The Admiral’s Men A company known as Lord Howard’s Men was formed in 1576 by Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham and 2nd Baron Howard of Effingham. After he became Lord High Admiral in 1585, it was known as the Admiral’s Men. The company was reorganised in 1594, with Philip Henslowe as manager, and Edward Alleyn as principal actor. In 1603, they came under the patronage of Prince Henry and were known as the Prince’s Men. In 1613, following the Prince’s death, Frederick of the Rhine, the Elector Palatine, became their patron and they became the Palatine’s Men. The company ceased to play in 1626, after James I died. The Admiral’s Men played at the Rose, and later at the Fortune which Henslowe had built to rival the rebuilt and popular Globe.

English Renaissance Drama Lord Strange’s Men Ferdinando Stanley, Lord Strange (heir to the Earl of Derby) had his own company of players in the 1570s. Lord Strange’s Men played at court in 1591– 1592. In 1592 they moved to the Rose and stayed there until 1593. Edward Alleyn and Richard Burbage briefly belonged to Lord Strange’s Men, and Shakespeare is also likely to have played with the company. In 1593, Lord Strange became 5th Earl of Derby and his players were then known as Derby’s Men. They retained this title under his successor, surviving until 1620 although they did not play in London after 1602. (Lord Derby, in fact, had a full scale theatre at his house near Liverpool, and it survived in use as a corn exchange until 1908.)

Pembroke’s Men Henry Herbert, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, became patron to a company of players in 1591 or 1592. Richard Burbage and Shakespeare briefly may have belonged to Pembroke’s Men, who apparently also played at The Theatre. (Pembroke’s Men have been linked to the earliest performances of Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part 3). The company broke up in 1593, although a troupe of travelling players continued to perform under the Earl’s patronage until his death in 1601.

The Lord Chamberlain’s Men/ The King’s Men Henry Carey, 1st Lord Hunsdon, became Lord Chamberlain in 1585. He was Elizabeth’s cousin, his mother being Anne Boleyn’s sister. His company of players became known as the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. The company was reorganised in 1594, with both Richard Burbage and William Shakespeare among the players. When Henry Carey died in 1596, his son George became 2nd Lord Hunsdon and their patron. The players were known as Lord Hunsdon’s Men until George Carey himself became Lord Chamberlain in 1597. They kept the name Lord Chamberlain’s Men until the accession of James I in 1603, when James became their patron, as the King’s Men. Most of Shakespeare’s plays were created for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. Between 1594 and 1603, they mostly played in London at The Theatre, and then at the Globe. The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, like the Admiral’s Men, played regularly at Court, especially at command performances during the twelve days of Christmas, in Shrovetide, and at other festivals and State occasions like weddings and festivities for important visitors.

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They continued to play at the Globe. From 1609, they also played at their smart indoor playhouse at Blackfriars (near Court), which the Burbages had bought nearly ten years earlier but had been unable to use for their own performances because of the protests of the local residents. The company ceased to exist after the closure of the playhouses in 1642.

Plays of this period are, obviously, not texts like books: print cannot record or prescribe half of what goes on in theatre. But neither are they quite like scripts we might give an actor now, where the author has decided on a final version of his work, ‘a play by X’. For there is evidence that even a script was substantially fluid, frequently altered, expanded or cut, even for each performance. Look how the Player King, of the players who are introduced to the Court by Denmark’s Lord Chamberlain(!), readily accepts from Hamlet an interpolated speech. One might compare how in the 1780s in Vienna, operatic arias written by someone else were added to operas – the regular practice of composers like Mozart, Salieri, Cimarosa and librettists like Metastasio. The several companies of actors were in it not for art or posterity, but for the money. The Lord Chamberlain’s men were unusual, because when they demolished The Theatre and rebuilt it as the Globe1 , Burbage was so strapped for cash he had to raise it from his colleagues, who became ‘sharers’ – at the huge sum of £70 each! – in the company, and the shareholders (for the very first time) actually owned the building in which they played. Those companies operated in a tight commercial world, in a very small society, where everyone who was anybody knew everyone else who was anybody, in great rivalry with other companies. They were in competition for audiences. There was no separation easy or clear between the world of theatre, law, and the Court, since people moved easily between them. Theatre was part of game of power and influence, manipulating opinion, as we have seen – and occasionally it could be dangerous (Isle of Dogs, Eastward Ho!, Richard II)2 . In such a company of permanent members you had fixed, limited, casting possibilities – you had got to use the talent you had. You had no women, only boys to play the 1

2

On this theatrical context and the events surrounding this move, see J. Shapiro, 1599: A year in the life of William Shakespeare (London 2005), and Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, third edition, 1992 ) The parallel was often drawn in the 1590s between Elizabeth and Richard II in the years immediately preceding his deposition. ‘I am Richard II, know ye not that?’ the Queen remarked to William Lambarde in 1597. Shakespeare’s play was never printed during the Queen’s lifetime with the deposition scene. On the eve of his abortive rising, the Earl of Essex in 1600 paid the large sum of £5 to the Lord Chamberlain’s men to put on a performance of a play called Richard II.

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female parts. Some of those apprentices were as young as seven, just learning the trade: by definition they will not be that good. This leads to an interesting speculation. Certain possibilities are closed off. You have no problem with comic mature women’s parts – in Shakespeare, Juliet’s Nurse, Mistress Page, Mistress Ford, Mistress Overdone or Mistress Quickly (pronounced ‘quick lie’) – for the clowns in drag can do that. But how many big parts can you write for mature, powerful women, capable of grand rhetorical passion, if you are writing for boy apprentices with shorter breath length? It is noticeable how in the work of Shakespeare, for example, these bunch in periods – Constance, Joan, Tamora, Margaret, Juliet; Cleopatra, Goneril, Lady Macbeth – and in the years around 1600, when there clearly were two talented boys, you get them out of women’s clothes and into boy’s as soon as you can (Rosalind, Viola, Portia – a boy playing a woman playing a man). And using apprentices does impose certain constraints. It was a risk not worth taking to leave an apprentice alone on stage: they were trainees only, after all, in front of a pretty tough audience. Oddly enough, this convention is best illustrated by a very rare example of its opposite. That remarkable boy who played Juliet, who is daringly given the first lines in English drama publicly to express feminine sexual longing and passion, is left alone: and draws attention to the fact: ‘My dismal scene I needs must act alone’ (IV.3)’ Did it raise a cheer? Perhaps; but that boy, for whom that role was written, was good enough not only to do that, but, like Cleopatra later (whose very lines remind us the part is played by a boy actor1 ), was good enough to be given the theatrical accolade of the second death, the climax of the tragedy. That boy might well have become a star. ‘Stars’ had a big following, and were real ‘draws’ – as Alleyn and Burbage were. The clowns were too. Will Kempe seems to have had a habit of hogging scenes, and trading on his popularity by adlibbing when on stage. (There might even have been considerable relief when he left the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1599.) The clown who then joined the company, Robert Armin, was himself a playwright and had a considerable following, and a distinctive rather lugubrious style. (Compare the difference between, say Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing, or Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, parts played by Kempe, and Armin’s roles of Feste in Twelfth Night and the Fool in King Lear.) His nickname was ‘Touch’, and the first play Shakespeare wrote for the company after his arrival has a clown called Touchstone. A writer had to give such people, who 1

‘…I shall see / Some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness / I’th’ posture of a whore’ (Antony and Cleopatra, V.2.219)

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were economic assets even if you might not like them, something playing to their strength – e.g. Edward Alleyn’s capacity to deliver the ‘mighty lines’ of Marlowe spectacularly well suggests a whole style and manner to a writer. Dramatists working with these companies, therefore, ¾ did not expect their text to be sacrosanct ¾ would readily cooperate with another writer, or ‘patch’ an old play ¾ knew what talent was available, by whom the lines they were writing would be spoken, often before they began to write ¾ had to play to known strengths, and avoid weaknesses ¾ knew that their freedom was in some measure at least restricted.

Furthermore, we must allow for the ‘corporate input’. The actors as individuals could make contributions during and after the writing, or even actually in performance. (At its lowest level, they knew what would work – ‘I can’t say that, Will’, or, ‘Ben, you know how good I am at love scenes’.) But we know that parts were added to, ad libbed in performance: the text of Richard III clearly records some of the ‘gagging’ of the murderers; Hamlet complains about the way clowns (stars like Tarleton – who was noted for the comic obscenity of his jigs – or indeed Kempe) were given a lot of latitude, and spoke ‘more than was set down for them’ even to the extent of hijacking a scene. There is also, quite clearly, writing which picks up the physical characteristics of the actor, playing games with the audience. The very small boy who played Maria in Twelfth Night is a ‘giant’; the tall thin boy is the ‘painted maypole’ Helena in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If we read, with several editors, ‘fat’ for ‘hot’ – an easy mistake in Elizabethan script – then Richard Burbage’s weight problem might be openly referred to as Hamlet fights the duel with Laertes. The tradition of John Hemming’s stammer is fascinating if he played the epileptic Julius Caesar in 1599, and it becomes even more interesting when we think of Hamlet in the next year or so: Hamlet, to Polonius: My lord, you played once i’th’university, you say? Polonius: That did I, my lord, and was accounted a good actor. Hamlet: What did you enact? Polonius: I did enact Julius Caesar. I was killed i’th’ Capitol, Brutus killed me.

The actor who played Caesar now plays Polonius, and says that to Burbage who played Brutus who now plays Hamlet… the joke, for audiences, is delicious, and it gives us an idea of how all four characters might have been played, as well as how

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regular audiences could be expected to refer and remember from one play to another. This self-reference, this self-conscious metatheatricality, which underlines the fictive nature of what we are watching and draws attention to the way actors are acting a part, is everywhere: another example would be the joke in Hamlet where Hamlet (Burbage) gives instruction on acting to the ‘Lord Chamberlain’s Men’, the actors in Elsinore who are in fact his own colleagues: ‘the best actors in the world’, as Shakespeare makes Polonius call them. Even the reference to the clowns hijacking the scene may allude to the fact that Will Kempe had just left the company.1 Think also what the visual memory of an audience of ‘regulars’ does. To stay with Shakespeare: if Richard II was played by the same actor as Hal/Henry V in the Richard II – Henry V sequence, visual memory offers a very pointed thematic parallel: the first play in the sequence shows a young king making a hash of things, unsuccessful in foreign war and domestic management, finally deposed and separated from his wife, whom he symbolically links with his kingdom. In the last play in the sequence, the same actor plays a young king successful at home and abroad, and at the end of the play united with a young wife, whom he links expressly with the France he has won for his kingdom. This gives an ironic depth no text can record. Then again, Burbage played both Subtle, a fake magus, in Ben Jonson’s TheAlchemist and, then a few months later, Prospero, a real one, in Shakespeare’s TheTempest. The parallel is acute, and teasing, and leads one to consider deeper levels on which those two plays may be seen in important but irresolvable dialogue about matters of great weight. But now assume we’ve got a play script, and the people to play it: how do we make it work? The first job is to get approval from the authorities. The fair copy has to be inspected by the Master of the Revels, and he may request changes. Sometimes the censorship exercised by the Office, under Edward Tilney or George Buck, could be very slack, sometimes strict; most of the time it was between the two. What mattered to the companies was having an ‘Allowed Book’, with the Master’s signature on it: that was their licence to perform that play. These books were the most valuable things a company had, and when the first Globe burnt down it was the ‘books’ they 1

Go to http://www.bl.uk/treasures/shakespeare/players.html for brief notes on some of the major, or longest lasting, members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. For a fuller discussion, see Martin Rivington Holmes, Shakespeare and His Players (New York, Scribner 1972). Bear in mind that men might move backwards and forwards between companies, just as writers did. The ones who stayed put were the ones who had bought a financial stake in the business, the sharers.

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tried to save, rather than all those expensive costumes. But of course that does not mean that in any actual performance they would do all the script, or stick absolutely rigidly to it. The demand for new plays was insatiable. Far far more were written and performed than have survived or even than we know of. In that world of companies competing for a share of a volatile and finite audience, the pressure to get a new play onto the stage was great. There was certainly no time to write out several complete copies so that every actor could read it. What happened was that a ‘plot’ – a scene by scene summary of ‘what happens’ – would be hung up in the tiring house, and each actor would be given scrolls – rolls of paper, rotuli, hence the actor’s ‘rôle’ – from which to learn their parts and their two-word cues. We can see these ‘cue scripts’ being handed out in the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The actors learned their own lines, they knew the plot – but the first time they can have heard the whole play is when they went on stage for the first performance. And that is why there are so few explicit stage directions in the early printed texts, and why we find stage directions embedded in the dialogue: ‘What man, ne’er pull thy hat upon thy brows’, says Malcolm to MacDuff (IV,3.208) as a cue to the actor to assume the conventional attitude of grief. For there was hardly any time for rehearsal, with no such thing as runs, and with five different plays on each week, and a yearly repertoire of perhaps 50 to 60. You would have had only about two hours in the morning before an afternoon performance to run over any tricky bits. This meant you not only had to trust your colleagues implicitly, but that all actors had to have an idea on which all could rely about blocking. It seems, too, as if certain actors specialised in certain types of role, for, in addition to other evidence, in several printed texts speech prefixes are not names but roles: ‘king’, ‘queen’, ‘clown’ and so on. Where to be on stage in a given role in a given type of scene would be part of an apprentice’s training, and had to be stuck to if chaos was not to happen. One major consequence of this is obvious: all big court scenes, for example, are going to look similar – there is only one way of doing it, and court scenes ought to look like a court rather than a visit to the family solicitors. Thus, to stay with Shakespeare, the big scenes of Richard II, King Lear, Hamlet, Julius Caesar would offer not only a similarity of appearance which sets the coordinates –‘this is where we are’ – and forces attention on the words, but also allows visual puns and echoes. The fact that in I.ii Hamlet has no place in Claudius’ hierarchical court, and that he is dressed in black and comments aside to the audience tells us when we first see the play that he is the man who will destroy this

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order; and his position in this big scene is not unlike that of other disturbers in Jacobethan tragedy – Aaron in Titus Andronicus, Vindice in The Revenger’s Tragedy. The ‘trial’ scenes in Richard II bring Bolingbroke and Richard into ominous thematic parallel. Again, the Court/Boar’s Head scenes in Henry IV underline the tension and parallel between the two ‘realms’ of Westminster and Eastcheap – and, in passing note: What does Falstaff sit on? Henry had to have a throne… The link between Falstaff and the Lord of Misrule is made explicit if we posit this capacity for visual parallel and pun, and that says a great deal about the nature of Henry IV’s rule of England. The bloated body of Falstaff, a ‘vile trunk of humours’, is the body politic of England Henry’s usurpation has caused. We would find Jacobethan acting styles very odd. We have already glanced at the convention of a jig at end of a tragedy, but that is only a part of the strangeness. In schools and at the universities drama was part of the curriculum, because it taught boys how to declaim: that is, speak clearly and with authority. From persuasion by the spoken word grew authority and, simply, power: it still does. So boys had to learn declamatory and rhetorical skills. They also had to learn a whole language of gesture and of the body, for precise signification could be conveyed in this way. An apprentice actor’s training would consist to a great extent of mastering these forgotten arts, and fortunately there are books which preserve in illustrated form for us exactly what gestures and body language meant. As the subtitle of John Bulwer’s book of 1642 (see the hyperlink above under acting styles) reminds us, these techniques close the gap between different areas of public utterance – e.g. sermon, forensic speech and theatre. Furthermore, this heightened, even to us bombastic, mode of delivery is in the context of ideas quite different to ours about acting, illusion, reality and the self. It is quite clear that you are watching a performance, a man playing a role rather like a musician plays an instrument. In some early Quarto texts of plays – the cheap things one might slip into a pocket – some lines are printed in brackets, or in quotes, or in capitals. Often these are apothegmatic, pithy, ‘wise’. Some authorities argue that they fossilise the stage practice of direct address to the audience, of coming to the edge of the stage, of stepping out of your role, so to speak, making your ‘point’, as these lines are called, taking a round of applause, and then stepping back into the role you are delivering. Quite clearly, this makes impossible any application of our (post-Stanislavsky) concepts of the actor ‘becoming’ the person he is playing, or anything like our idea of illusion – though other sorts may be possible. We are never really allowed to forget in a Jacobethan play that we are watching actors: that this is

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not ‘real’: exactly how Hamlet asks us to watch and listen to the Player King, where we know it is an act, but it can generate real feeling even while we know that. It is at this point that we have to glance briefly at the idea of character. It’s easy to forget that character in drama is part of a whole design, or pattern, especially when we read plays as if they were proto-novels: character can’t be an end in itself, and indeed, it is not even an important end in narrative. As Aristotle 1 pointed out, you could have tragedy without character, but you cannot have tragedy without plot. And the concept of character as we use the term is, actually, a very recent development. Character in fiction, self-evidently, reflects ideas of the self held for real in everyday life. Fiction may modify those ideas in time – nature imitating art! – but it has to start with them. As baseline to mediaeval and early modern ideas of the self we do well to keep in mind the idea of the Four Humours (fluids): melancholy or black bile, phlegm, choler and blood, whose balance made up the individual ‘temperament’2 . These humours are fundamental to the Galenic system of medicine, which was dominant in our period and for a long time later, and in turn connect with the Aristotelian classification division of matter into the Four Elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. On all human life the planets exert an influence: literally, for they rain down on the earth an actual substance called influence (= ‘that which flows onto’) which, combined in different proportions, has all sorts of effects. Including illness: for what do you call an inexplicable and sudden epidemic with no obvious cause before you have a germ theory of disease, except ‘la influenza delle stelle’? It is also axiomatic that in a Creation ordered hierarchically, man, made a little lower than the angels, stands on the boundary between the spiritual and material realms. He has three souls: a vegetable soul, which he shares with everything that has life and being, including cabbages. He then has a sensible soul, which he shares with those creatures that can feel (sense), the animals. But he is distinguished from the animals by having a Rational or Reasonable Soul, which allows him to think, to know, and this faculty of perception he shares with those above him in the cosmological hierarchy, the angels. A man who refuses his rationality becomes no better than a beast. (‘A brute, that wants discourse of reason, would have mourned longer’; ‘I dare do all that many become a man; who dares do more, is none’ – 1

2

Aristotle’s discussion of tragedy in his Poetics is required reading, eventually, for all serious students. Even if (as is true) Aristotle was responding to Plato, ever since everyone has had to respond to Aristotle. Our word ‘temperature’ as it relates to illness is a corruption of ‘dis-temperature’, the state where the four elements are not evenly mixed, and illness results.

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Hamlet’s and Macbeth’s lines now assume their proper significance as acknowledging free will (see below), and Macbeth’s point us towards the discussion of free will in Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man [ this oration is Bookmarked]. Clearly, Renaissance people could not think of the self as we do. So when they wrote plays and poems they did not suddenly invent post-Romantic, post Freudian, post-Marxist characterisation. As a rough basis, it is worth remembering that while we moderns tend to work out from the Self to the social role, while for an earlier age, when life was lived much more publicly, it is almost exactly the other way round: from the social role or roles – for in one life men play many parts – in to the individual. Yet precisely because the work of Jacobean dramatists has been so much part of our ongoing culture, and is in any case so rich and original, when we come to it, we take it for granted the same sort of self is being represented there as we are used to now. Yet the term ‘psychology’ is not even invented until the middle of the eighteenth century. The introductory pages of renaissance plays, on the far from universal occasions when they bother to list characters, always speak of Dramatis Personae. That is, literally, the masks: by extension, the pretended persons of the drama. If we were being very hard nosed we could argue, with some force, that masks are precisely what the players are putting on: I doubt whether, in the conditions of the Jacobethan theatre, where aids to illusion were few, any member of the audience ever forgot they were watching, for example, Burbage or Alleyn play a role. (Isn’t that precisely the point made by the Chorus to Henry V? Don’t mistake what you see for ‘the real thing’: use it to trigger your imagination.) And the well documented practice of doubling also cuts against any idea of realistic illusion, for it is certain that the mechanicals – great hulking clowns – doubled as the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Steven Greenblatt’s groundbreaking book 1 drew attention some decades ago to early modern ideas of ‘Self-fashioning’: that is, a deliberate making of oneself into the appropriate social and (loosely) political roles, with the attendant values, behaviour, even dress. In mediaeval fiction and life it is clear there was a decorum, expectations of, a script for, being a knight, a peasant, a lover, a priest, which entailed a morality of action and behaviour, of the language and body language it is appropriate to use, even clothes you could wear. We should constantly recall the 1

Renaissance Self fashioning from More to Shakespeare (New York, 1980).

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public nature of living, of life as a ‘performance’, with decorous rhetoric for the person, role, occasion. A very late example might be Andrew Marvell’s account in his An Horatian ode upon Cromwell’s return from Ireland of the execution of Charles I in 1649 He nothing common did or mean Upon that memorable scene.

The King is playing his last part, only in degree different from the well documented accounts of – well, scripts – for deathbed scenes, or the script a condemned criminal was supposed to perform before execution. (Note the theatricality, the performance aspect, the ritual, of real executions: even the word ‘scaffold’ doubles in a theatrical sense.) Ralegh’s poem, quoted earlier, underlines this public idea of the self. How can writers represent this? How can readers, and audiences, construct it? In Troilus and Criseyde, one of the greatest poems of the middle ages, very well known to Shakespeare and his contemporaries, Chaucer tells us very little about his main characters. Of what they looked like, even of what else they did, we are left completely ignorant; but we know and have expectations of the decorum and ethics of their social roles – Knight, Lover, Lady, etc. Moreover, we hear them speak a lot, at great length, and very artificially, about the precise implications of situations they are in – exactly like arias in opera. In the extreme artificiality of opera, which is invented in the very period we are talking about, we can see the issue clearly. Ladies dying of TB do not sing for ten minutes before they finally snuff it, nor do husbands who think they have been cuckolded immediately break into a rondo delivered to a directly addressed and ironic audience – but they do in opera. Young men in bed with their lady for the first time do not give university level supervisions on free will or destiny. But in poems they do. (And what was Criseyde doing meanwhile?) Claudio in Much Ado about Nothing sees Hero first with ‘a soldier’s eye’ (I.2.281) and then, later, when it is appropriate, adopts the rhetoric and behaviour of the lover. Is he in love? I very much doubt it – he asks first about her fortune: ‘Hath Leonato any son [who would inherit] my lord?’ (I.2.277). But you cannot tell, any more than you can for certain with Beatrice and Benedick whether they are ‘in love’, or just playing another game with a language that makes a reality. Claudio has got a social role to play that everyone understands. Most of the characters in Elizabethan drama, including Shakespeare’s early plays, start from that premise, where the expectations of role define individual character in drama. The idea is changing over this very period, but even Shakespeare never quite loses it.

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Where do we get the word Character, and the modern usage of it, from? Theophrastus (c.370BC–285BC) wrote a books of Characters (a Greek word) composed of thirty short word pictures of ‘typical’ figures – the loquacious man, the mean, etc – descending from Aristotle’s typonomy of human characteristics given in his Ethics. Theophrastus was read in the Renaissance quite a lot, and was edited and translated by Isaac Casaubon in 1628; there are several books of ‘characters’ in imitation of his in the period. Put these two ideas together, the idea of types, and the public nature of character as role defined. That gives you a normative basis on which you can play variations. ‘Stock figures’ can be very useful in fiction, both as a basis for variation, and as interpretative templates. Look at how these stock figures operate in the Morality plays, which were overtly diagnostic (and vivid) of the moral reality behind the detail of everyday life. The stock figures of the comic tempter or devil, or Vice, who thinks he is in control but gets his comeuppance in the end; or look at how they operate in the Commedia dell’arte, with its plots descending from Roman comedy of young lovers, a restrictive elder generation, boastful soldiers, clever servants, and a theme of ‘love triumphs in the end’. Characters like the Miles Gloriosus,(‘boastful soldier’) Vice, Thraso, Senex Amans (‘old man in love’), Pantaloon are essential elements in Renaissance Comedy, and can been see in Molière, and Ben Jonson, but also in Shakespeare’s Parolles and Ancient Pistol. Indeed, to take just Shakespeare, the echoes of patterns of Morality or commedia dell’arte are everywhere: ¾ Clever servants, lovers, and happy ending in Comedy of Errors; ¾ Reversal of Old Father restricting young lovers in The Taming of the Shrew – a play full of variations on the old plot, including the clever servant – and compare Ben Jonson’s Face in The Alchemist or Mosca in Volpone; ¾ There is even some similarity in Romeo and Juliet: Juliet’s Father and his attitude to his daughter – a terribly ironic echo. Even the Friar’s clever trick with the herbs reminds us of the clever servant; ¾ In 2 Henry IV and Henry V Pistol is recognisably and hilariously the miles gloriosus; ¾ Shakespeare’s variations on Morality characters in Falstaff – a Vice in I Henry IV, a Senex Amans when he is with Doll Tearsheet in 2 Henry IV; ¾ Richard III as a Vice – as he himself explicitly says, III.1.83; ¾ And note how Ben Jonson kept to them in his comedy, where to name is to know – with Volpone, Face, Subtle, etc. In Jonson it would be idle to claim that his characters ‘develop’: they cannot.

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But between the 1560s and the 1620s it is demonstrable that ideas of self are changing, and it is one of those chicken and egg situations. Some influential factors may be: ¾ Richer society has more commodious, roomier buildings, which offer more privacy – even if by our standards that is still very little. ¾ Protestantism and spiritual insight: no longer is salvation seemingly dependent on good works as outward acts, but inward grace is the means of salvation. So the individual seeks a relationship with God without the necessary mediation of priest, and this encourages introspection, a search (in fear) for signs of grace in soul. Self-examination becomes a part of both Protestant and Counter Reformation spirituality, and this clearly leads to a change in the language. For ‘self’-compounds, words like ‘self-examination’ become demonstrably much more common in the period – many are invented at this time; just look at the citations in the Oxford English Dictionary. ¾ Worries about Predestination versus Free Will, and the Calvinist Doctrine of Election. ¾ Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1496)(see bookmark) has been called the ‘manifesto of the Renaissance’. It asserts Man’s importance in the fabric of creation and man’s freedom to choose what he will be, saint or devil. There is an awareness of individuality, responsibility, of choice. This develops a paradoxical tension, at the heart of Hamlet’s, or Macbeth’s, metaphysical worries, between freedom and the idea of Predestination/ Fate.

All these factors clearly affect ideas of the self, and may be at the root of an idea of developing, dynamic character – partly as a result of choice. It is interesting to check this theory by looking at some examples over time from dramas. Again I use Shakespeare, because his work is likely to be most familiar to newcomers to this field of enquiry, but it would be perfectly possible to deploy this argument with other playwrights. Comparison of some plays, which critics have long accepted as closely related, is revealing: ¾ Think of his ‘outcast kings’: Henry VI (1593-ish ) is a plaster saint with no individuality distinct from his disastrous role, but is reincarnated as Richard II, who changes from a mere tyrant to someone much more self-aware of himself vis à vis his rôle (1595). Then compare Richard’s descendant Lear, who embarks on a voyage into responsibility and self quite distinct from rôle (1604–5).

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¾ Think of his use of the Vice/machiavel figure, which Marlowe found useful and fascinating in Barabas (Jew of Malta). However vibrant and fun he may be in Richard III, Richard remains a type. But his descendant has a wholly new reality and depth in Macbeth (1606), where the type does not explain the man

So it may well be that ideas of acting are changing in step with changing ideas of the self – perhaps, indeed, partly as a result of drama as well as of other things. Language is again a clue: we start to get praise not of actor like an actor, but of acting ‘to the life’, of – a new word – ‘personating’1 (first use recorded in 1591), which seems to suggest the creation of a positive value for illusion, rather than the ‘actor as orator’. Or, again a new word, to ‘passionate’ (verb), which means ‘to excite or imbue with passion, to express or perform with passion’ (1566). ‘Passions’ then denoted the emotional extremes, which could be expressed through rhetorical codes – you express extreme stress through aposopoiesis2 , for example. One major symptom of all this is change in nature of soliloquy. In plays at the beginning of our period, ‘soliloquy’ is much more like operatic aria, performed in full awareness of an audience, developing a series of rhetorical tropes on the base theme – what is called ‘variation’. But by the later plays of Shakespeare, say, we are much more prepared to accept the idea of a self conscious of itself distinct from a rôle, and much more close to the modern idea of soliloquy as a way of mapping what goes on inside a character’s head. Compare the overheard internality of Macbeth, say, with Richard III’s bravura, conspiratorial rhetoric, compare Hamlet’s ‘To be not to be’ with Richard II’s series of rhetorical conceits in his prison: ‘I have been study how I may compare…’ (V.5.1). To whom is this being said? It presupposes an audience. And now the show is on the road, don’t discount the audience. In Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday, or in the very popular (and bawdily titled) TheKnight of the Burning Pestle [pizzle], the play scripts backchat with the audience, who actually intervene and redirect the supposed progress of the play. There certainly was interaction and backchat – you can see in Shakespeare a wry reminiscence of what a court performance might have been like to experience as an actor when Theseus and his court make fun of the mechanicals’ play in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It could well be that that engagement with an audience might not only affect the way a script 1 2

cf A. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage, p. 99. Breaking off, as if under stress of feeling, before you had finished what you were saying

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was played, but also lead directly to modification of the script. There is some evidence 1 to suggest that the second performance would be a version revised, if necessary, in the light of audience response. For our concept of textual integrity, of an authorial ‘true reading’, is not really applicable. It was invented in sixteenth century humanist scholarship for ancient authors, where the recovery of ‘what X really wrote before the manuscripts got corrupted’ really is of the essence, but only slowly applied to vernacular ones – let alone playwrights, who were very low status indeed for most of Shakespeare’ working life. It is clear that Thomas Middleton wrote bits to include in Macbeth; Hamlet does so for The Murder of Gonzago2 in Hamlet; there are authorial revisions of King Lear, Othello, of Henry V, of Henry IV, of Webster’s The White Devil. Sometimes in a history play like Henry IV, the character named Oldcastle, who is politically very sensitive indeed, and who had a living and influential descendant, might need discreet sanitizing into the more neutral Falstaff. Sometimes there is editing according to circumstance, or the constraints of a touring version, when fewer actors might be available. Writers, indeed, are among the many makers of a Renaissance play. Our concept of the ‘author’ is still some time in the future, even though this period sees a major step towards it. It is precisely during Shakespeare’s and Jonson’s working lifetime that we see the decisive moves towards regard the script as text – as, in fact, literature: Jonson’s Folio Works of 1616, and the copycat publication in 1623 by Heminge and Condell, two of the King’s Men who recognised new commercial possibilities, of the First Folio of the works of ‘Mr WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’ – his name is in huge type – mark this move where the author takes his place on the shelves as a book. But the plays continue, and still continue, a now separate life in the hurly-burly of the theatre, constantly reinterpreted, adapted, cut, changed, as the needs of the moment demand.

1

2

Tiffany Stern, ‘”A Small Beer Health unto his Second Day”; Playwrights, Prologues and First performances in Early Modern Theatre’, Studies in Philology, 101, pp 172-99. see also her Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page (London, 2004) The Murder of Gonzago is being toured, and Hamlet adds ‘The Mousetrap’.

8. Kinds of plays ‘The best actors in the world for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral comical, historical pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historicalpastoral, scene individable, or poem unlimited. Seneca cannot be too heavy or Plautus too light…’ (Hamlet, 2.2.400)

Is this funny? Most directors and actors now play Polonius’ catalogue for laughs, as they do that very long speech of the Archbishop in Henry V on the Salic Law. But I am not sure it is quite that simple. In the latter case, Elizabethans would have listened intently to a speech on legitimate succession to the throne through the female line where the only possible successors to 67 year old Elizabeth were through the female line: such things suddenly matter a lot. Similarly, Polonius might be sneered at by Hamlet (who is not actually a very nice chap), and we might join in the sneer, but there might be sense in what he is saying. He is not a fool: fools are not respected counsellors of successive kings. Unless that catalogue of types of play had some real reference to how the audience and actors thought, any joke would fall quite flat. Writers in our period were very alert to genre. Different genres gave you different opportunities, suggested different areas of interest and response, demanded different sorts of rhetoric. Fish and chips and sole véronique are both delicious, but they are not interchangeable. They are appropriate to different occasions, offer different pleasures, appeal even to different tastes (or the same taste at different times). Yet they are both fish dishes. Plays can generically differ in the same sort of way. What follows is an attempt swiftly to sketch the main generic divisions. I shall not go into the hybrids, where different genres are deliberately mingled. And before we dismiss Polonius’ most extraordinary hyphenation –‘tragical-comical-historicalpastoral’ – it’s worth noticing that the first three acts of A Winter’s Tale are undoubtedly tragic in form and rhetoric, and have close links to Othello; Act 4 moves us to the pastoral world of Bohemia, complete with disguised princess as shepherdess, before resolutely moving in to the comedic end, where people achieve a new resolution and self knowledge. All that is missing is a bit of history.

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History There are a number of ways of writing about, representing, history, but before we can discuss them we need to summarise the two main models of the past open to Renaissance and mediaeval men and women. The pagan, Classical, model of the past saw history as endlessly cyclic: beginning, growth, maturity, decay, collapse to new beginning. Its best summary is in the late Antique concept of Fortune, with her wheel. This model stresses the impermanence and changeability of the world in which humans find themselves, and underlines the grim comedy of humans thinking they can control the future in anything, from politics to love. It therefore encourages a stress on the ironies of human motivation, of human politics, of the temporariness of all worldly pleasure and goods, and allows a recognition that one of the major engines driving human politics in that frame of inexorable changefulness is human sexual passion. The loves of Paris and Helen, of Guinevere and Lancelot, of Antony and Cleopatra change the very world, but in ways they cannot anticipate. Against this set a model of time that has a beginning and will have an end, a linear scheme on which the present moment has an inescapable place. The Jewish model of linear time, from Eden to Apocalypse, is taken over and hugely developed by the Church, which by definition is the ‘Chosen gathering’(ekklesia) which will inhabit the new heaven and the new earth when the old heaven and the old earth shall have passed away. The most important philosopher of late Antiquity, St Augustine, provided in his City of God a model that later centuries, right down to the present, have not been able to escape: time will one day have a stop, and everything is working towards that end. For the Church, this model means that the only real plot is the working out of Providence’s design; the only history that matters is the history of the Church and its saints: which explains in part why the commonest form of mediaeval narrative writing is Lives of the Saints, or Vitae Sanctorum – a comprehensive example of the genre, Jacopo da Voragine’s Golden Legend, of about 1290, is available on the Web. This imposes a teleology (Greek telos, ‘end’) on events, where only the ending makes it all make sense. (Most Renaissance plays also are teleological structures.) It also means that all events are in the eye of Providence, which is working its purpose out as year succeeds to year. The Whig view of History, or the Marxist, are de-theologised variants of this

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model. The cheerful and mindless notion of ‘progress’ to which politicians and others too often appeal is another worn out relic of this. It is very easy to see how this model of history, this providential pattern, is the bedrock of the cycle plays from which Elizabethan drama grew. Indeed, one of the earliest of true history plays, John Bale’s King Johan (1534), draws on the language of allegorical and biblical drama still current. It dramatises – for purposes openly topical and political – the real events of John’s defiance of and eventual defeat by a corrupt Papacy, but does so in a framework of allegorical characters straight out of a Morality Play: Widow England, Nobility, Clergy, and so on. It sets a number of important coordinates for later history plays, where it is never wise to forget that characters with historical names may well have an semi-allegorical function as well. An extreme example is where Macbeth – his tragedy is a history play too, as we shall see – is armed for his last fight by Seaton, pronounced ‘Satan’, and Antony, at the end of his, is unarmed by his servant Eros. Obviously, these two models of history are talking about different insights into the human condition, and they are often in dialogue with each other in the same piece of writing. Both impinge on historical writing of whatever kind, and the Jacobethan history plays exploit both the concentration on the ironies of human choice in Fortune, and, since the audience know the outcome, can raise issues of providential design in a world of apparent chance and choice. It is also worth noting that of the plays of which we know in the period, by far the largest proportion can be classed as ‘histories’ of one kind or another. But this is also the century of Machiavelli. His The Prince began to circulate in 1513, and was read avidly by the very people who professed to be scandalised by its amoral treatment of power: the Prince’s only interest is to stay Prince, and any – but any – means are justified according to that end. Machiavelli’s book drew on his own researches in ancient history; and at just this time the ancient historians who are gaining more and more attention, and the homage of imitation, are Suetonius and Tacitus. This model of historiography discounts any grand philosophical or theological scheme, abandons any teleological meaning, and simply concentrates on people, on what people do, and on the minutiae of what motivates people to behave as they did. It is rare to find anyone squeaky clean in these entertaining historians: which is perhaps why they are entertaining. This mode of writing history was very fashionable in the renaissance, and had a great influence on, for example, St Thomas More’s Life of Richard III which, by an indirect route, became the major source for Shakespeare’s play.

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These historical models all matter in our period, and you will find them operating in various combinations – for they can be ironically combined, as well as used straight – in all sorts of writing. The simplest sort – though far from without interest – of historical writing once you get beyond the simple record of day by day happenings in no sort of order of importance is chronicle. Chronicle plays, of which there are many in our period, tend to narrate a period of political crisis, but do not focus the play round any one figure: several are equally important, though one may give his name to the play because that is how you recognise the epoch: e.g. The Chronicle History of King XX. History as an intellectual discipline seeks pattern in disorder, looks for and selects lines of force in the confused record of what happened, and offers a view where the exploration of cause and reaction is central. Plays which one might put in this bracket offer more than narrative, in that they will explore the shape and pattern of events: and they will order events into rank by importance and relevance, so some will not get documented at all. Tragedy The final form of historical writing is tragedy. Tragedy, said Aristotle, in the Poetics, a book lost for centuries and only rediscovered in the late fifteenth century, is ‘more philosophical than history’. Philosophy is, literally, the love of wisdom: seeking to find the real meaning, nature and value of things. Tragedy, which must concentrate on an individual who really matters, whose fall is terrible yet just, with huge consequences for the calm and order of whole states, is a form which in Greek society existed in a religious context: it was part and parcel of that exploration of the relationship between men and the Gods, the Things That Are, which is the heart of religion. In the narrative of tragedy, the contemplation of an individual’s fall as a result of his own actions, we can grapple with the most intractable problems of philosophy, especially that fundamental issue of free will versus destiny. Do we have freedom of will and action, or are we simply automata, programmed into various roles by the gods, Destiny, God or our genes? That question is as relevant now as it ever was. The logical discourse of Philosophy always comes up against the dilemma that if there is free will, there cannot be destiny or providence; if the latter exists, there cannot be free will. But in narrative – the story of Oedipus, say – we can glimpse the possibility that free will might be the very mechanism by which Destiny works… an awkward and disturbing thought. (Art can show us things that

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Philosophy cannot.) An age like the Jacobethan, where questions of predestination and free will are in everyone’s – literally, everyone’s – consciousness because of the religious divides that affected everyone, cannot help being interested, in its drama, in Tragedy. For the middle ages and early renaissance, ‘tragedy’ is the rise of great ones on Fortune’s wheel, whence they fell inexorably, sometimes through no fault committed by themselves. ‘Moralistic’ rather than ‘moral’ is the word that one wants to use. It can be an Awful Warning: The Mirror for Magistrates1 ( is a series of ‘tragedies’ of great ones in recent English history, well known to and quarried by Jacobethan dramatists, which was deliberately put out as a deterrent to overambitious subjects who might get ideas above their station. It cannot be stressed too strongly that the Wheel of Fortune model of Tragedy is never abandoned by the dramatists of the English renaissance, even when other concepts of tragedy, which tackle the intractable questions of motivation, choice, human dignity and selfknowledge, are beginning to be explored. The position of Latin in English culture gave the first century Seneca – philosopher, slave-owner, dramatist and tutor to the Emperor Nero – a huge influence. His tragedies were studied and sometimes performed in the schools and universities, and from them men acquired a taste for the high rhetoric, the grand manner, which they would try to emulate in their English dramatic utterance, and for the shapely plots, often divided into five acts with an ongoing and universally pessimistic commentary by the chorus. Seneca had moved beyond the 4-part structure used in Classical Tragedy, but it was regarded as peculiarly satisfying and shapely: 1) the protasis, where the characters and issues are introduced; 2) epitasis, where the plot thickens, and 3) catastasis, where the action is heightened before 4) the final catastrophe or final dénouement. (Act divisions in a printed text are irrelevant in any experience of watching, of course, unless – as in some plays by Seneca and plays influenced by him - there is an entr’acte commentary or dumbshow.) 2 There are English plays, set in English history, which take over very successfully 1

2

It was planned under Henry VIII as a continuation of Lydgate’s poem, Fall of Princes. The first edition, with work by many hands, was in 1559, with 20 ‘tragedies’; another enlarged edition appeared in 1563. Further expanded editions appeared in 1574, 1575, 1578, 1587 and 1609. All the dramatists quarried it shamelessly. The dumbshow, not uncommon as a prologue, is a piece of mimed theatre, sometimes accompanied by music and even dancing, which has a bearing on or comments on the action in the main plot. See Dieter Mehl, The Elizabethan Dumbshow (London 1965).

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the stately form and patterned structure of Seneca’s drama. Gorboduc, by Sackville and Norton, is a far better play than its constant citation as an ‘early tragedy’ in ‘Histories of English Literature’ would suggest, and was greatly, and justly, admired for its dignity and formal beauty by Philip Sidney. There are also translations for the English stage of some of Seneca’s plays: Jasper Heywood’s Thyestes, for example, was a considerable success and helped to form the taste that would welcome Peele and Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus (though Shakespeare is much bloodier even than Seneca.) The motif in nearly all Seneca’s plays is Revenge: the terrible exaction of punishment for crime committed, an exaction which destroys the destroyer. Revenge tragedy In the period of the great fashion for tragedy, roughly from 1585 to 1610, revenge tragedy is by far the commonest type. The issue of revenge itself presents an acute moral dilemma. On the one hand, a concern, perfectly proper, for justice demands that a wrong be punished; on the other, to what extent should one take the role of avenger oneself? The Bible, which has quite a lot to say about justice and vengeance, is quite clear on this point: ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord’. Which, briefly interpreted, means ‘keeps your hands off.’ It is a promise – ‘I will repay’ – and a prohibition – ‘vengeance is mine’. Christian Patience, the willingness to suffer wrong and wait for the working out of the Divine plan, is a hard command, that few can manage to obey – though one play, The Atheist’s Tragedy by Tourneur, dramatises exactly that structure, and the fulfilling of God’s vengeance by chance. More often, the wronged – Vindice, Hieronymo – are not patient. So from this can come the great irony that those who refuse God’s command become his tool – but have damned themselves in the process, have become as bad as that on which they were taking vengeance. Moreover, the vice-gerent of God on earth is the State, in the person of the Prince, who mediates the justice of heaven to his realm. What happens if the State itself is the criminal who has committed the wrong? This is exactly the predicament in which Hamlet finds himself, or Vindice: he to whom he ought to be able to appeal to give ear unto his cause is himself the murderer. But in his office he is, according to good Tudor and Stuart theory, sacrosanct. This issue interested Jacobethan audiences precisely because it impinged on areas constantly if covertly discussed: the problematical line of division between the individual and the State, on the relation of the man – a fallible sinner holding the

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immortal, God-given office of ruler – to that office. It also touches the question of how far the State – and early modern states of their nature were centralising – might tolerate, or not, private revenge or private pursuit of justice. As soon as one recognises that ‘honour’ demands a man take vengeance to defend that honour – of self, of family – and that it is ‘honour’ that binds a man to his prince, one can be aware of just how many pressing concerns could be figured in these plays. And over all arches the terrible question of why it is that men and women damn themselves, by their choices: It is our blood [passion] to err, thought hell gaped loud: Ladies know Lucifer fell, yet still are proud. (Tourneur?/ Middleton, The Revenger’s Tragedy 1.iii.73–4)

A finite theatre-going public and a huge number of plays means many people were consuming, so to speak, a lot of drama. Playwrights can therefore rely on references to other plays being picked up. In the case of revenge tragedies there does seem to be, for the period of their fashion, a lot of cross-referencing and indeed ‘replying’ to earlier plays. Kyd’s fine The Spanish Tragedy is the great original, itself deriving from some Senecan ideas, which sets the mould and to which everyone in the end refers: and it was an old warhorse, revived again and again. But Hamlet, while it replies to The Spanish Tragedy and to the now lost Hamlet that preceded it, is in turn replied to by The Revenger’s Tragedy; and Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois is in dialogue, so to speak, with Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy. So the issue of revenge, as well as being a political and philosophical problem, is also a literary fashion, where there is a great deal of inter-play self-reference going on. And it is being written for an audience whom the playwright/company expect to know the score and to have strong visual and verbal memories. Pastoral Pastoral1 as a mode has its roots in Classical poetry, especially that of Vergil. Nobody ever took seriously the idea of a perpetual spring where shepherds sat around all day making love and poems, and the sheep looked after themselves. 1

See William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (London 1935); Helen Cooper, Pastoral, Mediaeval to Renaissance (Woodbridge 2000). See also L. A. Montrose, ‘Of Gentlemen and Shepherds: the politics of Elizabethan Pastoral form’ English Literary History 50 (1983) pp.415-61.

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Partly because of its deliberate echoes of the Golden Age, demanding comparison with the mucky present, the pastoral in poetry could be used as a lens through which to examine, obliquely, refracted, the issues of now. Thus Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics often address not only big and permanent human issues like life, death, love, fame, and what is art for, but also the issues raised by Augustus’ settlement after the century of the Roman civil wars. Thus pastoral can be an intensely political mode, precisely because it pretends not to be. The spread of the taste for pastoral in the sixteenth century owes a good deal to the popular anthologies of poetry, like Tottel’s Miscellany (1557), and England's Helicon, (1600). These anthologies of courtly poetry, playing the sophisticated game, spread courtly taste beyond the court. It was popular especially because in a time often of tension it mediated class differences, mystified conflict, and offered comforting fictions, as William Empson said, that hold out a possibility of resolution. (And fantasies of community appealed to the privileged few.) Pastoral drama of the Renaissance can do many of these jobs. A particularly good example, and a very influential one in England, was Giovanni Battista Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido –‘The Faithful Shepherd’, which was repeatedly translated into English and even Latin for performance at Cambridge. The setting of a scene, or a whole play, in the country rather than at court implies a dialogue between them, a testing of values: exactly as we see the issues of court relocated in As You Like It, or the sheepshearing scene in A Winter’s Tale allows the confrontation of issues of nature and nurture, and the way in which children are trapped by, but may be able to resolve, the actions of their parents. Pastoral drama often has love as a major concern—a romance between country folk, or between an urban man and a country girl, or a romance between two urban people who, for some reason or another find themselves temporarily in the country. Because pastoral drama is removed from the city or the palace, the characters can explore life in a setting where their social roles can be set aside. They can explore possibilities not available in their usual world, where they are known – hence disguise is often a feature – have social responsibilities, have to observe codes of behaviour (e.g., in clothes). The vogue for this type of comedy is considerable especially after 1600: a fine example is Fletcher’s Faithful Sherpherdess (not later than 1610). Pastoral settings, where we are miles away from any naturalism, allow the inclusion of the supernatural with ease: woodland spirits, magic, fairies, coincidences. Anything can happen. And dramatically there is a lot of opportunity for music, and song, even dance. Shakespeare’s first comedy, Comedy of Errors, is a

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brilliant take on Plautus’ Menaechmi – a long way from pastoral. Later, in As You Like It, his company can deploy the full resources of pastoral, but it needs stressing that in so doing a position was being marked out in the ideological quarrels of the time over what was the ‘right’ sort of comedy: companies (and playwrights) were competing with each other about the ‘proper’ form for comedy in a culture that had come of age. On the one hand, the ‘romantics’; on the other, those – like Jonson – who argued constantly from Classical precedent, with a Classical education, who preferred the models offered by Athenian New Comedy1 and Roman Comedy, because it could be argued to educate the public through satire. It also showed, with its witty variations on a theme, the continuing vitality of classical models of drama. Comedy Jacobethan comedy draws, like every other form of popular drama in the period, on the inheritance from the later middle ages. It uses many of the same sorts of comedy as the Morality plays, where abstract concepts of (for example) the Sins are bodied forth in vivid, snorting personifications who think they have the committed sympathy of the audience in their anarchic antics. But the audience knows that they will in the end come to no good… the rug will be pulled from under their feet. It is salutary to remember that in mediaeval art the Devil, the father of lies and vices, is very terrible, but also blackly comic: he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. He cannot win. And tempters are not tempters unless they are attractive. Exactly that perspective frames the delectable comic figures of Oldcastle/ Falstaff (‘old white-bearded Satan’), or Ambidexter in Preston’s King Cambyses (1563). It also operates, oddly enough in a play which as well as being a tragedy has elements of black comedy, Richard III: Richard is self-declaredly a Vice. The naming of characters is often a reminder that they have this ancient ancestry. Malvolio, however topical an echo of Sir William Knollys (Comptroller of the Royal Household) he might be, is also ‘I wish evil’; Benvolio, in Romeo and Juliet, is his opposite. Feste, in Twelfth Night, has a name entirely appropriate to a play whose title recalls the ‘Feast of fools’. And in Jonson and other playwrights, to name is to know: Volpone = the fox, emblem of cunning, and Face, in The Alchemist, is just as much and as little as his name implies. Such comedy can also draw on the 1

For a rapid survey of this development of (surprisingly enough) Athenian Old Comedy, go to http://www.ablemedia.com/ctcweb/netshots/genrecm.htm.

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moralising beast fable which descends from Aesop. Just so Jonson draws on it in Volpone. That semi-allegorical cast of mind is in no sort of conflict with vividness or subtlety. It simply implies that the meaning on the surface is never the only one. Grafted on to this ancient tradition, however, are other things. Many of the playwrights had decent educations, and an important part of renaissance education was both reading and acting of the Latin comedies of Plautus and Terence. Roman comedy’s origins are somewhat obscure, and we need not go into that now. What is important is the great influence and popularity of Titus Maccus Plautus, (254–184 BC), and Terence (185–159 BC). Of Plautus’ 130 plays, 20 are extant, adapted from Athenian ‘New Comedy’ – the writers we know most about are Menander, Diphilus, Philemon. His settings and characters and characters are Greek, and there is no political or topical satire. His comedy is adapted to Roman taste: the conduct of women and slaves – Plautus and Terence were both slaves – is depicted, elements from Roman life are introduced, and the stock in trade is the sentimental comedy (Captivi), domestic comedy (Trinummus), love comedy (Rudens), burlesque of serious tragedy and mythology (Amphitryo), and the farce of Miles Gloriosus. Key elements in all these plots are the clever slave, young lovers, recognitions (e.g of lost children, of noble or free birth). Other stock figures are fathers gullible or libertine, braggart soldiers, greedy pimps. Plautus and Terence had been adapted in middle ages (by the nun Hrotsvitha in the tenth century for example), and in sixteenth century England there was a good deal of learned, university interest, but not only that: Henry VIII had two Plautus plays performed at entertainments for French ambassador in 1526. Plautus was acted by boys of St Paul's School before Cardinal Wolsey. Elizabethans were not only familiar with these plays, but imitated them is some detail: for example Ralph Roister Doister, by Nicholas Udall (who was a schoolmaster), John Lyly’s Mother Bombie, Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, and in Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour the incomparable Bobadil is the epitome of the ‘boastful soldier’. The position is a little more complicated still. By 1600 we can discern two distinct traditions of comedy, what we may call City Comedy and Court Comedy. Though there was certainly no hard and fast division, different companies and houses seem to have favoured the one more than the other, perhaps out of deference to their regular audience. ‘City comedy’ was used a lot by Dekker, Jonson, Richard Brome, Cartwright and others. Plays like Eastward Ho!, Volpone, Epicene, Barholomew Fair, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, The Shoemaker’s Holiday are good examples. They often focus

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on the money/ commodity nexus, on status or property interest. Heroes are urban and mercantile, and marriage is often a fortune in disguise. Characters remains static, however engaging and interesting, and often names are summaries of their nature. If there are references to high chivalry or mythology, they are usually parodic. Many of these plays mirror a new capitalist world, and offer a reflection, often openly of London, which is satiric and subversive. Their urban setting is aggressively ‘here and NOW’ – for example, in Jonson’s Alchemist clear clues are given to a quite specific date for the day of these extraordinary happenings: we know when the play was first performed, and not only is it set in the area in which Jonson lived, Blackfriars, but the date is just a little into the future. A subset of this type of comedy is that of Jonson. Jonson saw, like many educated persons of his time, the function of comedy as sanative – to expose by laughter the follies and vices of men, to trigger moral and aesthetic outrage at the spectacle of human vice and folly. He wrote succinctly and cogently about his ‘Comedy of Humours’. Now, in medical theory, the balance in the human body of the four fluids, Humours, determined health or sickness, but also nature and predilections. Now over that nobody has control, like the hand of cards one is dealt. But how you play those cards is up to you, and so is what you make of your temperament: you have free will. Each person is indeed ruled by one dominant passion, and to surrender to that is an abdication of Reason – therefore beastly, according to the idea I discussed earlier of the souls of man – and defies God’s rational design. It therefore deserves castigation. Jonson’s characters like Marlowe’s are obsessed, almost heroically, with SELF. ‘Court comedy’, by contrast, – the sort of thing represented by As You Like it, Love’s Labours Lost, Twelfth Night, Lyly’s Campaspe, Endymion and so on – is often set in a ‘pastoral’ world, and, like pastoral poetry, can explore value and ideals in the test tube of the no-place, or never never land. It often uses the trajectory of moving people out from a court setting to a place of testing and ambiguity – Illyria in Twelfth Night, the Arden of As You Like It, the wood in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the island of The Tempest, the academy of the King of Navarre in Love’s Labours Lost – whence they return changed and sometimes chastened to the normal. Marriage often features in the resolution, but these are marriages where love (whatever it might be) is an issue rather than simply property. This sort of comedy addresses also problems about human knowledge, the danger of the illusions we construct for ourselves, the importance of a world of fictions. The setting is often, as in narrative romance, in no Time/ no Place.

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If Jonsonian comedy’s purpose and genesis is sanative and satiric, by contrast, Shakespeare’s is a comedy of ‘knowing’ – ‘Noting’ 1 – how to be – yet it is striking that it ends up unstable and temporary, because it engages with the ambiguities of people in a state of becoming. Jonson’s or Dekker’s characters cannot change; the whole point of the comedy of Shakespeare is that they have to, if only to know who they are.

1

Much Ado about Noting: the pun is possible in Elizabethan English, since ‘nothing’ and ‘noting’ sounded the same.

9. Epilogue People thought about theatre very differently then to the way we do now, but that does not mean they did not enjoy it, find it immensely pleasurable. They were certainly more alert to words and the ironies and subtleties of words and their patterns than we are, but they did not approach the play as scholars: it was to amuse, and might well provoke thought, possibly even instruct, but if it did not amuse, the competition from bear baiting and bull baiting, often in pits owned by the same entrepreneurs as the theatres, would win. It may well have handled obliquely many of the big sensitive issues of the day – as theatre can now: but many of Elizabethan and Jacobean plays were frankly rubbish, written at great speed, with no time to blot, for a very fickle market. And never forget it was less about culture than about money: even what we most admire in what has survived was written to make a living, to separate those playgoers from their penny or their sixpence. And, with sermon, it was the only important mass medium of the time. Nor was it simply a London phenomenon: we know of at least one other permanent theatre, near Liverpool, under the patronage of the Stanleys, and we know of provincial companies whose members came regularly to London to buy for their own use copies of those plays that had made it into print. Lord Howard’s Men, who might be a provincial company distinct from the Admiral’s Men, played a Julius Caesar in 1599. The London companies regularly toured the provinces, playing in guildhalls and inn yards and great houses, even having something that amounted to a circuit. The visit of the players to Elsinore in Hamlet may wittily refer to the fact that the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were forced to tour the provinces quite regularly, especially when the theatres were closed by the magistrates because of plague. 1 (In that particular instance, it may refer to the fact that they were under something of a cloud 1

Bubonic plague was endemic, and there were good years and bad years. When the deaths in a week reached a certain level, the magistrates had the right to close places of public resort like the theatres. So a hot and unhealthy summer could be a strain on a company’s resources, deprived of their London house and forced to tour the provinces. Jonson’s Alchemist is set in a time of plague, when all those who can have left the city; and it was written, and produced (in Oxford), in just such a time.

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with the Privy Council, and keeping their heads down, because a very short time earlier Essex, on the eve of his fatal rebellion, had paid them to put on a performance of a highly sensitive play about Richard II, a king with whose situation Elizabeth explicitly saw parallels for herself, and who was deposed by a glamorous military man). So the new culture of secular popular drama spread rapidly from the capital to the provinces, a major means of new ideas getting about, and it may well have been that capacity to engage and modify public opinion and imagination, quite as much as the ostensible moral disapproval, that led the Long Parliament of the Puritan Revolution, the most repressive and coercive government England has had till the present one started to run it close, to implement a total ban – which it said would be temporary – in 1642. The eighteen years to 1660, when the King came to his own again, inevitably and irrevocably broke a long dramatic tradition, and when theatre starts again it is a very different thing: it is now polite, a pastime of the urban well to do. There were great gains, but also, great losses.

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Further Reading Bentley, Gerald E., The Profession of Player in Shakespeare’s Time, 1590–1642 (Princeton NJ: University Press, 1984). Bevington, D., Engle, L., Maus, K. E., and Rasmussen, E., eds, English Renaissance Drama: A Norton Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton and Co, 2002). Braunmuller, A. R., and Hattaway, The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama, 2nd Edition, Cambridge Companions to Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Bucholz, Robert, Early Modern England 1485–1714: A Narrative History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Chambers, E. K., The Elizabethan stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, repr. 1967). Dessen, Alan C., Essays on Dramatic Technique (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1981). Gurr, Andrew, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Gurr, Andrew, and Ichikawa Mariko, Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Kinney, Arthur F., Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 2003). Kinney, Arthur F., Companion to Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture, 2003). Kastan, David Scott and Stallybrass, Peter, eds, Staging the Renaissance (London, Routledge, 1992. Pollard, Tanya, Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003). Thomson, Peter, Shakespeare’s Theatre (London: Routledge, 1992).

Appendix 1: Some dramatists working in the period 1585–1625 Francis Beaumont (1584/5–1616) The son of a judge, he was educated at Oxford and the Inner Temple – one of the Inns of Court. He achieved some reputation as a poet when still young, and admired Jonson greatly. (Jonson was more guarded: he said to Drummond of Hawthornden that ‘Beaumont loved too much himself and his own verses’.) But Beaumont quickly became a prominent figure in the London theatre. Ironically, the play (his first) by which he is best-known today, The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1606–7), flopped in the private theatre where it was first performed. It described a struggle between some child actors, who had been satirising fashionable ‘City’ Comedy — the sort of thing where the apprentice becomes Lord Mayor and marries his boss’ daughter — and a grocer and his wife who jump out of the audience to demand they play a chivalric romance with their apprentice Ralph as hero. Both ‘plays’ are staged with much hilarious conflict. His future collaborator, John Fletcher, had similar luck with his Italianate pastoral tragicomedy, The Faithful Shepherdess (1608–10), influential though that later became. The two men joined forces in one of those literary partnerships where it is impossible to separate the work of one man from that of the other, and had a lot of success. Dryden said that the secret of their success was that (unlike Shakespeare) ‘they understood and imitated the conversation of gentlemen better; whose wild debaucheries, and quickness of wit in repartee, no poet before them could paint as they have done’ (Essays of John Dryden, 1.81). The career of this partnership gives a good insight into the collaborative nature of much theatrical writing and work. At first Beaumont and Fletcher wrote for the ‘private’ Children’s Companies, and then c.1608–1610 they began their association with the King’s Men at the Globe Theatre. Their first folio of 1647, Comedies and Tragedies written by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Gentlemen, obviously designed to rival the folios of Shakespeare and Jonson, had thirty-four plays and a masque; in the second folio, eighteen more plays were added (1679). The title

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implies that these plays are all collaborations by them both, while this is in fact true of only nine. Fletcher wrote some sixteen alone; two or three with Shakespeare, perhaps eleven with Philip Massinger, and ten or so with as many as eight other writers involved. Beaumont on his own wrote just one, and a masque. Recommended: The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1606–7) Philaster, or Love Lies a Bleeding (1608–10) The Maid’s Tragedy (1610) A King and No King (1610–11).

George Chapman (ca. 1559–May 12, 1634) He was educated at Oxford, but did not take a degree. A considerable classical scholar, he shows how attractive many of his day found Stoic philosophy, and his learning shows in the obscure poems The Shadow of Night (1593) and Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595). By the late 1590s he was a successful playwright, working for Henslowe and later for the Children of the Chapel Royal. He wrote several comedies, now almost forgotten: An Humorous Day’s Mirth (1597), All Fools (1599), Monsieur d’Olive (1606), The Gentleman Usher (1606) and May Day (1611). His tragedies were based on recent French history, and he offended the French ambassador at least once: Bussy D’Ambois (1607), The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron (1608), The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1613) and The Tragedy of Chabot (printed 1639). He collaborated with Jonson and Marston on Eastward Ho! (1605), which contained satirical references to the Scots which landed all of them in jail. Rollo Duke of Normandy he wrote with Fletcher, Jonson and Massinger. He also wrote an epic poem (1596) on Sir Walter Ralegh’s Guiana voyage, a continuation of Marlowe’s unfinished Hero and Leander (1598), and Euthymiae Raptus; or the Tears of Peace (1609). From 1598 he published his translation of the Homer’s Iliad in instalments. In 1616 the complete Iliad and Odyssey appeared as The Whole Works of Homer, the first complete English translation. Henry Chettle (1564?-1607?) Chettle became a member of the Stationers’ (= printers and booksellers) Company in 1584, but we know little of his career as a printer, and despite the amount he wrote,

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his career as an author is also obscure. In 1597 Francis Meres in Palladis Tamia mentions Chettle as one of the ‘best for comedy’, and between then and 1603 he wrote or collaborated in some forty-nine pieces. He certainly moved in theatrical/literary circles, and Henslowe advanced money to him more often than to anyone else – once to get him out of a debtor’s prison. Henslowe lists payments to him for 36 plays between 1598–1603, and he may been involved in as many as 50, although only a dozen seem to be by him alone. Of the thirteen plays usually attributed to Chettle’s sole authorship only one was printed, The Tragedy of Hoffmann: or a Revenge for a Father (played 1602; printed 1631). It may have been a rival to Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The titles of plays in which he had a hand shows how aware he was of fashion, and his career is a good example of the way in which the theatre’s demands provided a living of sorts for men of mediocre talent, great industry, and willingness to turns their hands to anything. Thomas Dekker (c. 1572-1632) The first work of Dekker’s we have is Old Fortunatus (around 1596), although plays connected with his name were being performed by 1594. Between 1596 and 1602, 20 plays were attributed to him, and it has been suggested he was involved in up to 28 others. He collaborated with many, including Middleton, Massinger and Webster. It was in this period that he produced his most famous work, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, or the Gentle Craft. Like most City Comedies, it reflects the lives and fanciful aspirations of ordinary Londoners. Dekker also wrote a lot of very interesting pamphlets and poems: The Wonderfull Yeare (1603), about the plague; The Belman of London (1608), about roguery and crime, including ‘thieves’ cant’, the special language used by the criminal (or criminalised) Underworld; and The Guls Horne-Booke (1609), which I quote above to illustrate behaviour in the London theatres. Recommended:

The Shoemaker’s Holiday

John Fletcher (1579–1625) Educated (probably) at Marlowe’s college, Corpus Christi, Cambridge (MA, 1598), but the next eight years are a blank until he writes his first play, with Beaumont: The Woman Hater (1606). From then until his death in 1625, he wrote or had a hand in over fifty plays. He and Beaumont both seem to have been part of Jonson’s circle at

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the Mermaid Tavern. Fletcher’s first plays, for example The Woman Hater and Cupid’s Revenge (1607/8) were mostly for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, but about the time when the King’s Men established the Blackfriars as their second playing space, Beaumont and Fletcher seem to have worked with them, and none of Fletcher’s plays after 1614 seems to have been written for any other company. Fletcher’s first solo play, The Faithful Shepherdess (1607–8), was a flop, but it was used both by Shakespeare in The Tempest and by Milton in Comus, and later the plays he wrote on his own enjoyed something of a reputation among the discerning readers — interestingly. In 1612–13, he collaborated on three plays for the King’s Men with William Shakespeare — Cardenio, Henry VIII (All is True), and The Two Noble Kinsmen. (He had earlier collaborated on Pericles.) His Cardenio does not survive. These plays were in the vanguard of the new genre of ‘romantic tragicomedy’ which would dominate the stage up to and beyond the Revolution. After 1613 Fletcher seems to have taken Shakespeare’s role as chief playwright for the King’s Men. See also: Beaumont.

Robert Greene (?1560–1592) We know quite a lot about Greene: his fiction often tells us of his own life. He was educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, graduating B.A. in 1578, then travelled in Spain and Italy, before taking his M.A. in 1581. He wrote a lot of romances, tracts, songs, and plays. He died in 1592, destitute. Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay (c. 1589) is a vivid and witty comedy, perhaps conceived as a foil to Marlowe‘s tragedy of Doctor Faustus: some of its scenes seem to parody that play, and stress is laid on the superiority of the English magician Roger Bacon to the German. Jasper Heywood (1535–1598) Heywood translated into English three plays of Seneca, Troas (1559), Thyestes (1560) and Hercules Furens (1561), all highly influential. Recommended:

Thyestes

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Thomas Heywood (died c. 1650), Possibly educated at Cambridge, by 1598 he was a player with the Admiral’s Men, presumably as a ‘sharer’, as Henslowe recorded no wages in his Diary. He was also a member of other companies, of Lord Southampton’s, of Lord Derby’s and of Lord Worcester’s Players (afterwards the Queen’s Servants). He claimed to have had ‘an entire hand or at least a main finger in two hundred and twenty plays’. Only 23 survive: he wrote for the stage, and did not like his works being printed. Probably his best play, A Woman kilde with kindnesse (acted 1603; printed 1607), is a comédie larmoyante (sentimental comedy), and The English Traveller (1633) is also a very good domestic tragedy. The two parts of King Edward the Fourth (printed 1600), and If you know not me, you know nobodie; Or, The Troubles of Queene Elizabeth (1605 and 1606) are chronicle histories. Besides plays the most significant things he wrote were: 1. Troia Britannica, or Great Britain's Troy (1609), a poem in seventeen cantos ‘intermixed with many pleasant poetical tales’ and ‘concluding with an universal chronicle from the creation until the present time’. (It is important to remember that the popular account of English history still had Britain’s origins in Troy, and the British royal line as the successor to and descendant of the Trojan.) 2. An Apology for Actors, containing three brief treatises (1612); written in reply to unremitting Puritan attacks on the theatre.

Ben Jonson (1572-1637) His father died a month before Ben’s birth, and his mother two years later married a master bricklayer. He went to Westminster School, where the historian William Camden was Master, and some think he then went to Cambridge despite his assertion that he himself said that he did not go to university, but was apprenticed to a trade. He soon had had enough of the trade, probably bricklaying, and went to the Netherlands as a soldier. By summer 1597, Jonson was engaged with the Admiral’s Men, and had begun to write for them. Meres in Palladis Tamia (1598) calls him one of ‘the best for tragedy’. (No early tragedies survive.) In 1597 his collaboration with Nashe in writing The Isle of Dogs got them both into prison. In 1598, Jonson had his first great success, Every Man in His Humour (Shakespeare was in the first cast). Next

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year came Every Man out of his Humour. But before 1598 was out, Jonson was back in prison, for he had killed Gabriel Spenser, an actor of Henslowe’s company in a fight. In prison Jonson converted to Roman Catholicism, and adhered to it for twelve years. He escaped hanging by pleading ‘Benefit of Clergy’ — the ability to read verse one of the first Psalm in Latin — but forfeited his property and was branded on his left thumb. Neither duel nor conversion seems to have affected Jonson’s reputation, as he was soon working for Henslowe again. In 1601, Henslowe paid him to revise Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. In 1603, Jonson joined other poets and playwrights in welcoming the new King. Jonson quickly adapted himself to the royal demand for masques and entertainments. But trouble with the authorities continued. In 1603 he was examined by the Privy Council about Sejanus, a play about corruption in Imperial Rome which seemed to reflect on James. In 1605 he was imprisoned, with Marston and Chapman, for poking fun at the King’s Scottish countrymen in Eastward Ho!. With the success of his masques, like The Satyr (1603) and the Masque of Blackness (1605), Jonson wrote less material for the public theatres and more for the court. By 1616 he had produced nearly all his finest plays: the tragedy of Catiline (1611), the comedies Volpone (1605), Epicoene, or the Silent Woman (1609), the incomparable The Alchemist (1610), Bartholomew Fair (1614) and The Devil is an Ass (1616). He also produced several masques, usually in uneasy connection with Inigo Jones. There are many legends about Jonson’s rivalry and friendship with Shakespeare, some of which may be true. Most of our information comes from Jonson’s conversation with Drummond of Hawthornden in which he scoffs at a nonsensical line in Julius Caesar, and at the setting of The Winter’s Tale on the seacoast of Bohemia. Other legends tell of Jonson and Shakespeare arguing in the Mermaid Tavern, with Shakespeare running rings around the more learned but ponderous Jonson. But they are legends. However, there must have been a complex friendship between the men, as Jonson wrote a prefatory poem — the finest panegyric in the language — for the First Folio of Shakespeare’s plays (1623) in which he praised his now dead rival, and referred to him as the ‘swan of Avon’ — explicitly linking him with the ‘Swans’ of Dirce, Maeonia and Mantua — Pindar, Vergil and Homer — and thus making a huge claim for him as the maker of English, and the National Poet. Highly Recommended: Volpone

Every Man in His Humour The Alchemist

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Thomas Kyd (1558–94) The son of a scrivener, Kyd was educated at the Merchant Taylors’ School under the great headmaster Mulcaster. He may have followed his father’s profession for a time. He had some knowledge of French, Italian, Spanish, and Latin. His Spanish Tragedy (c. 1587–1590) set a real fashion for popular tragedy around 1590. Kyd was connected with the Countess of Pembroke’s circle, where developing a literary tragedy was discussed, and he translated from Robert Garnier, called the ‘French Seneca’, The Tragedy of Cornelia, printed in 1594 – the only extant play to bear Kyd’s name on the title-page. Soliman and Perseda is usually assigned to him on the basis of style; it has the same plot as the play produced by Hieronimo in The Spanish Tragedy. Some have claimed he wrote Arden of Feversham. He also seems to have written a now lost version of Hamlet, and some have argued he is in large part the author of the King Leir, which is problematically related to Shakespeare’s play. He seems to have been successful — Nashe, and Greene in his Groatsworth of Wit, shows resentment at dramatists, without classical training, who were more successful than ‘University Wits’ like themselves. He got into trouble in 1593, and was found in possession of papers considered atheistic. He got off, claiming (plausibly) that the papers had been left among his things by Marlowe in 1591, when the two men, in the service of an unidentified lord, had used the same room. Kyd died in 1594. The Spanish Tragedy was extraordinarily popular, running into many editions. It was imitated, often revived, was often alluded to, especially by way of parody and satire, and finally made its way to Germany. Senecan tragedy is a major influence on the plot, for which no source has been found — for example in the chorus, the ghost, the sententious and balanced speeches, the declamation, and the treatment of character. The style differs from Marlowe’s, with its ‘high astounding terms’, in the elaborateness of conceit and on fondness for rhetorical devices of repetition and balance. Highly recommended: see it if you can. John Lyly (c. 1553-1606) Educated at Magdalen Colege, Oxford, he proceeded BA in 1573 and MA in 1575. After Oxford, where he was reputed ‘a noted wit’, Lyly seems to have attached himself to Lord Burghley. But neither from Burghley nor the Queen did Lyly ever receive any substantial patronage.

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His literary career began with the enormously fashionable and influential ‘novel’ Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1579). In the same year he possibly saw his hopes of advancement dashed when Edmund Tilney was made Master of the Revels, an office which he himself wanted. Euphues and his England appeared in 1580, and, like the first part, was immediately popular. For a time he was the most successful and fashionable of writers, called the author of ‘a new English’’, which everyone tried to imitate in polite speech. But after Euphues Lyly abandoned prose fiction, and devoted himself to play-writing, probably still with an eye to the Mastership of Revels. Eight of his plays were probably acted before the queen by the Children of the Chapel Royal and the Children of Paul’s between 1584 and 1589, one or two of them being repeated at the Blackfriars Theatre. The Court liked the brisk dialogue, classical colour and clever topical allusions. In 1632 Edmund Blount published ‘Six Court Comedies’: .

Endymion (1591) Alexander and Campaspe (1584) Mother Bombie (1594)

Sappho and Phao (1584) Midas (1592) Gallathea (1592)

To these we should add The Woman in the Moone (Lyly’s earliest play, to judge from a passage in the prologue), and Love’s Metamorphosis, first printed in 1601. Recommended: Campaspe

Mother Bombie

Christopher Marlowe (1564–93) After the King’s School, Canterbury, and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, Marlowe seems to have swum in some very mucky waters indeed. Was he a spy? Was he a Catholic? or an atheist? He certainly died in very odd circumstances, and ‘informations’ were certainly laid against him. Charles Nicoll’s excellent book, The Reckoning: The Murder Of Christopher Marlowe, is a riveting and scholarly account of Marlowe’s end which puts a lot of these ideas in context. Marlowe was a fine and scholarly poet, and seems by contrast to have tossed off his plays to make a quick bit of money. The brief Dido Queen of Carthage seems to be Marlowe’s first extant dramatic work, and may have been written at Cambridge with Nashe: based very closely on Aeneid, Book IV, it nevertheless frames the tragic narrative in an outrageous, even pederastic, bit of celestial machinery. The first play

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performed on the London stage was Tamburlaine (1587). This was the first English play to make effective dramatic use of blank verse. It was a huge success, and Tamburlaine Part II soon followed. The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, based on the recent German Faustbuch, was the first dramatic version of the legend of a scholar’s pact with the devil. The Jew of Malta had ‘Machiavelli’ himself deliver the prologue. Edward the Second dramatized the dethronement and humiliating murder of that king by his barons and his French queen (the possibility that Elizabeth might be dethroned by pro-Catholic forces was real enough at the time). The Massacre at Paris dealt with the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, an event that English Protestants frequently invoked as the blackest example of Catholic treachery. Marlowe’s plays were enormously successful, thanks in part, no doubt, to the talent of Edward Alleyn (Alleyn was unusually tall, and had a mighty voice.) The roles of Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas were probably written especially for him. Marlowe’s plays were the foundation of the repertoire of the Admiral’s men throughout the 1590s. Recommended: Dr Faustus

Tamburlaine The Jew of Malta

See also: Charles Nicoll, The Reckoning: the Murder of Christopher Marlowe (London, 1992)

John Marston (1576–1634) A lawyer’s son, Marston graduated BA at Oxford in 1594, and then went to the Middle Temple. He early acquired some reputation as a satirist, with two poems in 1598 in imitation of Ovid and Juvenal, Pigmalion’s Image and Certaine Satyres, followed by The Scourge of Villanie in 1598. His satires are highly misanthropic, and it has been argued that The Scourge of Villanie, which the Bishop of London had publicly burned in 1599, may have contributed to Shakespeare’s writing for Thersites in Troilus and Cressida, Iago in Othello, and the speeches for the mad Lear. In September 1599, Marston began to work for Henslowe as a playwright. In 1600, he wrote Jack Drum’s Entertainment and Antonio and Mellida, and in 1601 Antonio’s Revenge. In 1601, he collaborated on Robert Chester’s Love’s Martyr. So by 1601 he was well known, if not always liked, in literary circles. The pessimism and misanthropy in his writing was one thing other authors commented on. The

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Return from Parnassus, satirical plays published in 1601 and 1602, attacked Marston’s writings as ‘a lift of the leg and pissing against the world’. Marston and Ben Jonson collaborated, and quarrelled, with one another. Jonson’s recollection of Marston suggests he found him an excellent writer and a difficult person. In the ‘war of the theatres’ of 1600–1602, the two men satirized each other on stage. Jonson has Marston in Clove and Orange in Every Man out of his Humour and as Hedon in Cynthia’s Revels, and Marston pilloried Jonson as Brabant Senior in Jack Drum’s Entertainment. However, they were reconciled, and Marston wrote a prefatory poem for Jonson’s Sejanus in 1605 and dedicated The Malcontent to him. In 1603, after he became a shareholder in the Children’s company playing at Blackfriars, (known for putting on plays that tested the bounds of the law), he wrote The Malcontent (1603), and The Dutch Courtesan in 1604–5. In 1605, he collaborated with Chapman and Jonson on Eastward Ho! After 1607, Marston left the world of theatre, and eventually became a priest, and Vicar of Christchurch in Hampshire. Recommended: Antonio’s Revenge (1600) Parasitaster, or The Fawn (1604) Eastward Ho! (1604–5)

The Malcontent (1603–4) The Dutch Courtesan (1605)

Thomas Middleton (1580–1627) Educated at Christ’s Hospital and then The Queen’s College, Oxford, and then practised law. Middleton worked in several genres, including tragedy, history and city comedy. His best-known plays are the excellent tragedies The Changeling (written with William Rowley) and Women Beware Women and the satiric city comedy A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. It is also probable that he wrote the Revenger’s Tragedy, once attributed to Cyril Tourneur, and he collaborated with Shakespeare on the witches’ scenes in Macbeth. Middleton’s plays are cynical but often very funny. Middleton has few heroes; almost everyone is selfish and greedy. A Chaste Maid in Cheapside shows a London populated entirely by sinners and in the tragedies Women Beware Women and The Revenger’s Tragedy amoral courtiers endlessly plot, with a final climactic bloodbath. Middleton’s few good people have very small roles, and are too perfect to be true.

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Middleton was deeply Calvinist, and his drama seems to reflect that belief that rigidly divides humanity into the damned and the elect. Recommended: The Revenger’s Tragedy

The Changeling

George Peele (1558?–1598) Peele was educated at Christ’s Hospital, and Oxford (BA 1577, MA 1579). While still a young man he was asked to write for various pageants celebrating the visits of great persons, and was noted as a translator of Greek. For example in 1585 he wrote the Device of the Pageant borne before Woolston Dixie (Lord Mayor of London); in 1591 he devised the pageant for another Lord Mayor, Sir William Webbe, the Descensus Astraeae, celebrating Elizabeth as Astraea. His pastoral comedy The Araygnement of Paris was presented by the Children of the Chapel Royal before the Queen, perhaps in 1581: it cleverly flatters the Queen. His chronicle history, The Famous Chronicle of King Edward the First, sirnamed Edward Longshankes, with his returne from the holy land. Also the life of Lleuellen, rebell in Wales. Lastly, the sinking of Queen Elinor, who suncke at Charingcrosse, and rose again at Pottershith, now named Queenehith, (1593) not only enjoys one of the longest titles for a play, but is an advance on the old chronicle plays, and Shakdepaee may well have taken some hints from it. On stylistic grounds, some scholars plausibly argue that Peele wrote the first act of the fine (and extremely popular) tragedy Titus Andronicus, attributed to Shakespeare. Such collaboration is common. Peele certainly had a taste for spectacular bloodiness — as in The Battell of Alcazar, with the death of Captaine Stukeley (acted 1588–1589), which is probably his. The Old Wives Tale, (printed 1595), was followed by The Love of King David and fair Bethsabe (written ca. 1588, printed 1599): a play from Biblical sources. It has been seen as political satire, Elizabeth and Leicester being David and Bathsheba with Mary of Scotland as Absalom. Recommended:

The Battle of Alcazar

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William Shakespeare (1564–1616) Recent biographies by Park Honan, (1998), Katherine Duncan Jones (Ungentle Shakespeare, 2002), and the excellent Shakespeare’s Lives by Stanley Schoenbaum. (1991) are helpful guides through the obscurity and myth that surrounds Shakespeare’s life and career. See also Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare (2005) for a vastly entertaining and learned account of many things we do not know and might be tempted to suspect about Shakespeare. It is worth saying that he did not have that much of a reputation as a playwright when he died. Not many people mention him during his lifetime, other playwrights w ere more prolific, and the prefatory verse to the First Folio (except Jonson’s) are by second rank writers of no particular distinction. In his age, he was just one among many… But he made enough money from his writing to buy the flashiest house in Stratford. Cyril Tourneur (c. 1575–1626) Tourneur had some career as a soldier and minor functionary, wrote a few obscure poems, and one remarkable (if uneven) play, The Atheists Tragedie; or, The Honest Mans Revenge (1611). (The Revenger’s Tragedy, formerly attributed to him, is almost certainly Middleton’s.) John Webster (c. 1580-1625) The son of a cartmaker in Smithfield, London, Webster probably went to Mechant Taylors School, before going on to the law at the Middle Temple. By 1602 he was working with teams of playwrights on history plays: these included Caesar’s Fall (written with Drayton, Dekker, Middleton and Munday), and (with Dekker) Christmas Comes but Once a Year (1602). With Dekker he also wrote Sir Thomas Wyatt (printed 1607). He worked with Dekker again on two city comedies, Westward Ho! (1603) and Northward Ho! (1604). In 1604, he adapted Marston’s The Malcontent for the King’s Men. Despite a talent as a comic writer, Webster is best known for his two macabre tragedies based on recent events in Italy. Even more than John Ford, whose ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore is pretty bleak, Webster’s tragedies present a horrific vision of

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mankind. The clever White Devil (1612), built round the scandals surrounding Vittoria Corambona, murdered when she was 28, offers a very grim view of human motivation indeed: it flopped badly when staged at the Red Bull, which specializing in pretty escapist drama for a fairly downmarket audience. The Duchess of Malfi, first performed by the King’s Men in 1613 at the smaller, more classy Blackfriars, was much more successful. Webster wrote one more play on his own: The Devil’s Lawcase (1618–19), a tragi-comedy. Later plays were city comedies: Anything for a Quiet Life (c.1621), with Middleton; a Cure for a Cuckold (c.1624), with Rowley. His last known play is Appius and Virginia, probably written with Heywood in 1627. Recommended: Duchess of Malfi

The White Devil

War of the theatres The so-called ‘War of the Theatres’, indicates the depth of animosity that could be felt in literary life and the competition between the theatres for audiences. Taking place around 1600, it involved Jonson on one side, and his rivals Marston and Dekker on the other. In Histriomastix, Marston had satirised Jonson’s pride through the character Chrisoganus. Jonson replied with Poetaster, where the character who stands for Marston is portrayed vomiting the bombastic and ridiculous words he has ingested. Dekker in turn wrote Satiromastix, which mocks Jonson as arrogant, overbearing and hypocritical.

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Appendix 2: An Outline Chronology of Political Events (with dates of some important plays on historical themes) This complex period, the time of Elizabeth and the first decade or so of the reign of James is, as I said above, a time of manifold worries, in which people felt that all around them were powder kegs of religious and civil strife waiting to explode. And indeed, they were right, in at least one case literally so. It is worth trying to recognise what might have been the deep-seated, sometimes half forgotten worries, that made up the mental map, the ground bass of the mind; the things about which everybody – everybody - had an opinion and to which nobody could be neutral. I would summarise these as: ¾ The Reformation, a long crisis in Church and State ¾ Apocalypse soon? Quite simply, as I said in my introduction, the feeling that the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgement might be very soon – even on Wednesday next… ¾ The succession – until James succeeded ¾ a catalogue of plots, invasions, rebellions and Armada(s) – another Armada was feared as late as 1613. ¾ Constant background of WAR, often along religious fault-lines, between catholic and Protestant in Holland, Central Europe, France, Scotland; fear of Civil War in England. 1553

July Aug Nov

1554

Jan Feb May July

Death of Edward VI. Lady Jane Grey proclaimed Queen. Mary enters London as Queen. Trial for treason of Jane Grey, Guildford Dudley, Archbishop Cranmer. Wyatt’s rebellion, protesting against Mary’s marriage to Philip II of Spain. Jane Grey executed. Elizabeth sent to Tower, suspected of complicity in Wyatt’s rebellion. Mary marries Philip.

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1555 1556 1558

1559

Nov April March April Oct Nov 17 Jan April May July Dec

1560 1561 1562

1563

1565 1567

Jan Mar Sept Oct Jan Dec Sept Nov July Aug

1568

May Nov

1569

Oct Nov

86

Re-establishment of Roman Catholicism. Mary and Elizabeth reconciled. Cranmer burned. Loss of Calais Mary Queen of Scots marries the Dauphin of France peace between France, Spain and England. Accession of Elizabeth Acts of Supremacy and Uniformity. Negotiations for Spanish marriage Robert Dudley Master of the Horse. Protestant revolt in Scotland Mary of Scots assumes title of Queen of England on her husband’s accession to throne of France. Elizabeth aids the Scots revolt. Peace with Scotland (treaty of Edinburgh), recognising Elizabeth’s right to throne. Mary refuses to ratify it. Mary returns to Scotland. Rebellion of O’Neill of Tyrone in Ireland ended temporarily. Massacre of Huguenots leads to first French War of Religion. Treaty of Hampton Court with French Huguenots. English expedition to France. Parliament presses Elizabeth to marry End of Council of Trent. Dudley created earl of Leicester. Pope Pius IV promulgates Professio fidei: Council of Trent’s works now dogma. Mary of Scotland marries Darnley. July: Mary abdicates in favour of her son, the infant James VI. Duke of Alva arrive in Netherlands to suppress Dutch RevoltÆ reign of Terror. Mary takes refuge in England. Mary’s guilt in Darnley’s murder established before English Parliament by production of the Casket Letters The Catholic Duke of Norfolk imprisoned for attempting to marry Mary Rebellion of the Northern Earls, to restore the Old Religion (re-

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1570 1570

Jan Feb

1571

April Jan May

1572

1573 1576 1577

Sept Oct April May July August

Feb Nov Mar

1578 1579

Sept Jan Aug

1580

Apr July

1581

July Oct

87

issue of Homilies) Civil War in Scotland. Defeat of the Northern Earls. Pius V issues Regnans in excelsis, absolving Elizabeth’s subjects from their allegiance, which leads to severe anti-Catholic legislation in England. Dutch revolt: the Sea Beggars attacks Spanish supply routes. Negotiations for marriage of Elizabeth to Henry of Anjou (abandoned 1572 in favour of a match with his younger brother of Alençon.) Ridolfi’s plot, to rescue Mary, depose Elizabeth, and restore Catholicism, discussed with Spanish Governor in Netherlands, Alva. Rifdolfi’s plot fails. Norfolk sent to Tower (exec. June 1572). Defeat of Turks by Don John of Austria at Lepanto. Dutch Revolt becomes full-scale war of Independence. Parliament demands execution of Mary. English troops aiding the Dutch. Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Day in France leads to Fourth war of Religion (ends 1573). Huguenot refugees in England. Turks gain Cyprus. Puritan reforms of Church narrowly defeated in Parliament. Spanish sack of Antwerp. Outbreak of 6th war of Religion in France. Elizabeth threatened by invasion of Don John of Austria (to marry Mary). Leicester marries Lettice Knollys secretly. Union of Utrecht founds the Dutch republic. Visit of Anjou (formerly Alençon) to Elizabeth. Opposition from Puritans (especially Sidneys and Dudleys) to alliance with a Catholic power. 7th War of Religion in France. Robert Parsons and Edmund Campion land in England to begin Jesuit Mission of Conversion. Campion executed. Negotiations for Elizabeth’s marriage to Anjou: Puritan horror

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1583 1583 1584

Jan Oct Dec April July October

1585 Aug 1586

1587

June July July Oct Apr Aug

1588 May

1589 1590 1590–1? 1591 Aug

88

voiced through John Stubbs. Anjou sacks Antwerp. Somerville plot to kill Elizabeth Throgmorton Plot for a Spanish invasion of England. (Spanish Ambassador, Mendoza, expelled in January 1584) Death of Anjou. assassination of William of Orange. Revelation of the Catholic Enterprise against England, to depose Elizabeth and put Mary on the throne. Growing tension with Spain; growing tensions in France again between Catholic League and Henri of Navarre. Eliz. takes Netherlands under her protection. Expeditionary force sent Sept. Leicester in command in December Mary recognises Philip II as her heir. James VI receives annual pension from England under Treaty of Amity. Revelation of Babington Plot and implication of Mary. Mary tried, executed Feb. 1587. Drake’s attack on Cadiz. Sixtus V proclaims Catholic Crusade against England, and deposes Elizabeth. Continuing war in France. First (Great) Armada sails (defeated August). Continuing rivalry between Cecils and Leicester, puritan / Protestant v Anglican controversy expressed in the Marprelate tracts; Essex involved; his position at court becomes that of leader of Puritan party (marries Sidney’s widow, Walsingham’s daughter) – Elizabeth displeased. Court split; pamphlet war. England starts to aid Henri of Navarre. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Spenser’s Faerie Queene 1–3 Henry VI? Essex sent to help Henri, now Henri IV. Richard III? Titus Andronicus. Troublesome raigne of King John (anon).

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1592 1593

Feb May

1594

Aug 1595 1595

1596

Feb Apr July Jun

1597

Jul Oct

1598

Apr May July

1599

Mar Sept Oct

1600 1601

Jan Jun Jan

89

Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Parliament passes act restraining Puritans. treason trials, and executions of Barrow and Penry. Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical polity 1–IV. Parsons’ Conference about the next succession. Marlowe’s Edward II. Shakeapeare’s Rape of Lucrece. O’Neill of Tyrone and O’Donnell revolt, and appeal to Spain for aid. Tyrone’s rebellion. Richard II. Execution of Jesuit Robert Southwell, Shakespeare’s cousin. Philip II agrees to aid Irish rebels. Spanish landing in Cornwall. England, France and Netherlands sign alliance against Spain. Essex and Howard of Effingham sack Cadiz, hindering the second armada. King John? Spenser’s Faerie Queene, 4–5. Essex and Ralegh take Fayal in the Azores (the Islands Voyage). Armada sails, but is scattered by storms. 1 Henry IV . Edict of Nantes, settling the Wars of Religion. Peace between France and Spain. Tyrone destroys English army of Henry Bagnal. 2 Henry IV Essex appointed Lord Lieutenant in Ireland. Essex signs truce with Tyrone; defiantly returns to London. Arrested. Mountjoy sent to Ireland. Final Armada collected, but scattered by storms. Julius Caesar; Henry V Tyrone resumes his rebellion. Essex tried, and deprived of his offices Essex revolts. Executed Feb.

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Oct

1602 1603

1604 1605 1606 1607 1608 1610

1611 1612 1612–3

Mar Apr

90

Elizabeth’s "Golden Speech" to Parliament, surveying the history of her reign. Hamlet (a play about succession). Mountjoy overcomes Tyrone; violent suppression of revolt. Troilus and Cressida. death of Elizabeth, accession of James. 800 clergy present James with the Millenary Petition, urging radical reform in the Established Church. The Main plot for the deposition of James and accession of Arbella Stuart; Raleigh arrested on irregular charge of complicity, and held in prison. James’s first parliament; rumblings of discontent – unpopular peace with Spain. Guy Fawkes’ plot. Macbeth. Severer penalties against Catholics. King Lear, Coriolanus? Visit of Christian of Denmark, James’s brother in law. Antony and Cleopatra. Rebellion in Ireland; Beginning of scheme for Plantation of Ulster. Marriage of Arbella Stuart to William Seymour, earl of Somerset, the Suffolk claimant to the throne Prince Henry created Prince of Wales. Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale Negotiations for marriage of Elizabeth Stuart to Elector Palatine (marriage 1613) The Tempest Death of Prince Henry. Henry VIII.

Appendix 3: Hyperlinked Materials The following pages contain materials already hyperlinked to the text but included here for reference.

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Allegory Allegory is a form of extended metaphor, in which objects, persons, and actions in a narrative, are equated with the meanings that lie outside the narrative itself. The underlying meaning has moral, social, religious, or political significance, and characters are often personifications of abstract ideas as Charity, Greed, or Envy, Truth, Good Counsel, England, Nobility, Clergy. Thus an allegory is a story with two meanings, a literal meaning and a symbolic meaning. Examples:

Spenser, Faerie Queen Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress Orwell, Animal Farm

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Alleyn Edward Alleyn (1566-1626) as an actor was rivalled only by Richard Burbage. He was with Worcester’s Men in 1583, and joined the Admiral’s Men at the Rose around 1587. He was first to play such characters as Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, Faustus, and Barabas in The Jew of Malta.. His performances were praised by many, including Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson. In 1592, Alleyn married Joan Woodward, the step-daughter of his friend and employer Philip Henslowe, owner-manager of the Rose Theatre. Retiring from acting in 1597 to be Henslowe’s partner. In 1600, they built the Fortune Theatre north of the city to compete with the Globe. When this new home for the Admiral’s Men opened, Alleyn returned to acting. He retired finally in 1604, when he and Henslowe received a joint patent as Master of the Royal Game of Bears, Bulls and Mastiff Dogs - baiting, in fact. . (They ran the Bear Garden for bear-baiting from as early as 1594.) This business of entertainment was so profitable, that in 1605, Alleyn bought the Manor of Dulwich for £35,000 from the financially strapped Sir Francis Calton. Alleyn began building The College of God’s Gift there in 1613, at a cost of £10,000. Dulwich College, as it is now known, was formally constituted in 1619

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Armin, Robert (1563–1615) Armin, apprenticed to a goldsmith, seems to have completed his apprenticeship, for in 1604 he was Freeman of the Goldsmiths’ Company. His nicknames/stage roles ‘Tutch’ and ‘Touchstone’ may allude to his profession. Armin is included with other writers in Thomas Nashe’s Strange Letter (1592) and Gabriel Harvey’s Pierce’s Supererogation (1593). By the mid-1590s Armin was with Lord Chandos’s Men, a company touring in the west Midlands, Yorkshire, and East Anglia. In 1599 Armin had a sound enough reputation as a clown to succeed Will Kempe in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He is named eighth in the 1603 patent relicensing the company as the King’s Men, and was still a member in 1610. Kemp’s speciality had been robust physical comedy and crowd-pleasing improvisation: he usually played men with small intelligence but a lot of commonsense. He was noted for his jigs (athletic, sometimes almost obscene, song and dance routines). The physically much slighter Armin was more ‘melancholy’, self-conscious about his own cleverness, and developed a line in repartee and clever playing with language and the delivery of double entendre which Shakespeare and others like Jonson exploited. He certainly played Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale and Drugger in the Alchemist.

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Astraea In Ovid’s Metamorphoses I, at the end of the Golden Age of peace and justice the immortals leave the earth, and the last to go is the virgin Astraea, goddess of justice. She becomes the constellation Virgo, the constellation of Harvest, Virgo spicifera, bearer of corn, and sometimes depicted with a cornucopia. But the legend went that in the last days, before the end of the world, the golden age would return, and Astraea would once more dwell on earth. (It is this hope to which Vergil’s fourth Eclogue refers.) Many in Elizabeth’s time and country who saw the Apocalypse as imminent, and the first Armada as the first battle of Armageddon. Elizabeth, head of the reformed Church that saw itself as fighting the Whore of Babylon, servant of Antichrist, of Roman Catholicism, was openly identified by several of her prelates with the Virgin foretold in the Book of Revelation who would oppose Antichrist: and the common courtly identification of her with Astraea, as in the poems of Sir John Davies, is not pure hyperbole but as a metaphor by which contemporary political hopes and fears might be understood.   The Rainbow Portrait of Elizabeth is a good example of this myth making. It is at Hatfield House, and was probably painted about 1600 for Robert Cecil: Elizabeth was 57, bald and almost toothless. But the Prince, the Queen, had two Bodies, one clothed in this muddy vesture of decay, mortal, the other, not visible to mortal sight, eternal and beautiful. It is that second body that is portrayed in the Astraea mode. the portrait is part of a programme of construction of political mythology, and is closely linked, so Sir Roy Strong argues, to a companion poetic text, Sir John Davies’ Hymns to Astraea. The painting, like Davies’ poems, is emblematic, not representational. It is witty, allusive, coded,—and meaning has to be projected onto it by viewer who knows his mythology. The portrait, the poem and the compliments are part of a programme of construction of political mythology. The Astraea vogue was at its height after the first Armada of 1588, and climaxes in the 1590s.

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Richard Burbage: (1571–1619). Richard was the younger son of James Burbage. He was The Lord Chamberlain’s Men’s chief lead actor, and a great box office draw. Richard Burbage was the first to play Shakespeare’s Richard III, Othello, Romeo, Hamlet, Henry V, and Lear. He excelled in tragedy, performing in works by John Webster and Thomas Kyd as well as his close associate and friend William Shakespeare, who remembered in his will.His acting style was for its time revolutionary (see my discussion later). It might be most nearly compared with the ‘Method’ actors of the twentieth century in that he tried to assume the identity of his character (‘personate’) and maintained it, not only through the delivery of the lines but also in the space in between.

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Carnival ‘Carnival’ has come down in the world. The word implies a celebration of the flesh (Latin, caro, carnis), and the carnivals that exist today are mild compared to the unbridled lusting, bingeing, and general physical mayhem that occurred each year in pre-Reformation Europe. Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World is a wonderful discussion of the phenomenon and offers a persuasive interpretative model to scholars. His starting point is the French Renaissance author François Rabelais. Within the scatological writing of Rabelais – for example a monastery called Thélème (Greek for ‘desire’) where the signal for dinner is when a monk beats a nun’s bare bottom – there exists, he claims, the necessary evidence to discover the history of folk humour, as well as the actual practices of the Renaissance carnival. (Paintings like those of the Bruegel family and Hieronymus Bosch offer good evidence too.) The Renaissance carnival culture involves the ‘temporary suspension of all hierarchic distinctions and barriers among men … and of the prohibitions of usual life’ (p15). Those who took part in the carnival immersed themselves in eating, drinking and the pursuits of the flesh that often follow those activities – and, by convention, no questions asked afterwards when everyone sobered up. Bakhtin divides the carnivalesque into three forms: ritual spectacles, comic verbal compositions, and various genres of abusive language. Although Bakhtin separates the forms of the carnivalesque, they are often connected within the carnival.

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Censorship There was ‘Censorship’ at all levels: even apprentices could boo and jeer, and you took notice of what they did not approve, for money depended on it. But more seriously, magistrates could complain about plays to the Privy Council which could and did ban them. Some caution was necessary, even as the result of coming under the patronage of some great person.   In December 1581 Edmund Tilney was made Master of the Revels – a Court office, which meant he could ban or authorise as he saw fit ‘all plays in the realm of England’. Although all scripts were suppsoed to be submitted to his office for approval, not all plays were, and not all were performed in the form he approved. Plays on religion and politics were officially banned, and the Bishops’ Order of 1599 banning history writing made history plays pretty sensitive. Moreover, printers had to submit plays they bought from the Companies to the Stationers’ Company and to the ecclesiastical censors for approval.   There was a lot of muddle and consistency, laxity and severity, mixed together, and censorship was erratic and arbitrary. (The manuscript of The Second Maid’s Tragedy (Anon) has survived with the censor’s annotations on it.) For example The Fawn, by Marston for a Children’s company, mocked James 1, yet was patronised by Queen Anne. With Sejanus, Jonson was accused of Popery and Treason and the version printed was altered in consequence. Eastward Ho! in 1605 was a scandal – yet it was licensed and printed! Samuel Daniel’s Philotas (1605) got into trouble even though he was a licenser of the Children of the Revels. And, indeed, George Chapman wrote to Sir George Buck (Tilney’s successor) in a defiant tone, which seems to suggest the censor should be defending writers, not penalizing them.   There are several places where one can glimpse censorship operating in Shakespeare’s plays, especially the histories: 1) the passage on O’Neill in Q[uarto] of 2 Henry 6 is toned down in F[olio]; 2) In Richard III, Buckingham’s appeal to Richard (III.6.115ff.) in Q is not in F; 3) In Henry IV, the character named Oldcastle originally is renamed Falstaff 4) the two versions of Henry V that we have, F and Q, are vastly different, and Q (a very different play indeed in every way) may have been rushed out to deflect the censor’s wrath; 5) the oily buttering up of James I in Macbeth may be to curry favour – as well as to deflect attention from the more disturbing and problematic issues in that play;

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6) Augustine Phillips, a sharer in the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was called in 11 days after Essex’s rebellion to explain why they put that performance of Richard II on. And Qq 1,2,3, of 1597 do not have the abdication scene, while Q4 has ‘new additions.

See: Janet Clare, ‘Art made tongue-tied by authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999)



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Character books Sir Thomas Overbury’s Characters had reached its sixth edition by 1616, the year after he was murdered in the Tower by Frances Howard, Countess of Essex, and (perhaps) her lover, Robert Ker, Lord Rochester, James I’s Scottish favourite. The fashion continued: in 1628 John Earle published his Microcosmography, from which I quote two essays: XXIII. A Player He knows the right use of the world, wherein he comes to play a part and so away. His life is not idle, for it is all action, and no man need be more wary in his doings, for the eyes of all men are upon him. His profession has in it a kind of contradiction, for none is more disliked, and yet none more applauded; and he has the misfortune of some scholar, too much wit makes him a fool. He is like our painting gentlewomen, seldom in his own face, seldomer in his clothes; and he pleases, the better he counterfeits, except only when he is disguised with straw for gold lace. He does not only personate on the stage, but sometimes in the street, for he is masked still in the habit of a gentleman. His parts find him oaths and good words, which he keeps for his use and discourse, and makes shew with them of a fashionable companion. He is tragical on the stage, but rampant in the tiring-house, and swears oaths there which he never conned. The waiting women spectators are over-ears in love with him, and ladies send for him to act in their chambers. Your inns-of-court men were undone but for him, he is their chief guest and employment, and the sole business that makes them afternoon’s-men. The poet only is his tyrant, and he is bound to make his friend’s friend drunk at his charge. Shrove-Tuesday he fears as much as the banns, and Lent is more damage to him than the butcher. He was never so much discredited as in one act, and that was of parliament, which gives hostlers privilege before him, for which he abhors it more than a corrupt judge. But to give him his due, one well-furnished actor has enough in him for five common gentlemen, and, if he have a good body, for resolution he shall challenge any Cato, for it has been his practice to die bravely. LXVIII. A Mere Gull Citizen Is one much about the same model and pitch of brain that the clown is, only of somewhat a more polite and finical ignorance, and as sillily scorns him as he is

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sillily admired by him. The quality of the city hath afforded him some better dress of clothes and language, which he uses to the best advantage, and is so much the more ridiculous. His chief education is the visits of his shop, where if courtiers and fine ladies resort, he is infected with so much more eloquence, and if he catch one word extraordinary, wears it forever. You shall hear him mince a compliment sometimes that was never made for him; and no man pays dearer for good words,—for he is oft paid with them. He is suited rather fine than in the fashion, and has still something to distinguish him from a gentleman, though his doublet cost more; especially on Sundays, bridegroom-like, where he carries the state of a very solemn man, and keeps his pew as his shop; and it is a great part of his devotion to feast the minister. But his chiefest guest is a customer, which is the greatest relation he acknowledges, especially if you be an honest gentleman, that is trust him to cozen you enough. His friendships are a kind of gossiping friendships, and those commonly within the circle of his trade, wherein he is careful principally to avoid two things, that is poor men and suretyships. He is a man will spend his sixpence with a great deal of imputation, and no man makes more of a pint of wine than he. He is one bears a pretty kind of foolish love to scholars, and to Cambridge especially for Sturbridge fair’s sake; and of these all are truants to him that are not preachers, and of these the loudest the best; and he is much ravished with the noise of a rolling tongue. He loves to hear discourses out of his element, and the less he understands the better pleased, which he expresses in a smile and some fond protestation. One that does nothing without his chuck, that is his wife, with whom he is billing still in conspiracy, and the wantoner she is, the more power she has over him; and she never stoops so low after him, but is the only woman goes better of a widow than a maid. In the education of his child no man fearfuller, and the danger he fears is a harsh school-master, to whom he is alledging still the weakness of the boy, and pays a fine extraordinary for his mercy. The first whipping rids him to the university, and from thence rids him again for fear of starving, and the best he makes of him is some gull in plush. He is one loves to hear the famous acts of citizens, whereof the gilding of the cross he counts the glory of this age, and the four prentices of London above all the nine worthies. He intitles himself to all the merits of his company, whether schools, hospitals, or exhibitions, in which he is joint benefactor, though four hundred years ago, and upbraids them far more than those that gave them: yet with all this folly he has wit enough to get wealth, and in that a sufficienter man than he that is wiser.

Children’s companies The choir boys of the Chapel Royal at Windsor were performing occasional plays by 1516, and the choristers of St. Paul’s Cathedral by 1525. These groups, who came to be known as the Children of the Chapel Royal and the Children of Paul’s, often took part in pageants at court during the reign of Henry VIII. Later in the reign of Elizabeth I these groups began to form into professional companies. In 1576, Richard Farrant, then Master of the Children of the Chapel, purchased a lease on rooms at Blackfriars, intending to convert them for indoor performance. This first Blackfriars theatre was closed in 1584 because the plays were too politically daring. Meanwhile, the Children of Paul’s, or St. Paul’s Boys, were having great success of their own, presenting plays by John Lyly, and giving the professional men’s companies a run for their money.

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Coleridge, ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ Coleridge: Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in Biographia Literaria (1817), Chapter XIV, uses this wonderful but sometimes misleading phrase in his description of how The Lyrical Ballads came to be written. The whole passage is worth quoting: ‘During the first year that Mr. Wordsworth and I were neighbours, our conversations turned frequently on the two cardinal points of poetry, the power of exciting the sympathy of the reader by a faithful adherence to the truth of nature, and the power of giving the interest of novelty by the modifying colours of imagination. The sudden charm, which accidents of light and shade, which moon-light or sun-set diffused over a known and familiar landscape, appeared to represent the practicability of combining both. These are the poetry of nature. The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, the incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural; and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life; the characters and incidents were to be such, as will be found in every village and its vicinity, where there is a meditative and feeling mind to seek after them, or to notice them, when they present themselves. In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith. Mr. Wordsworth on the other hand was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of every day, and to excite a feeling analogous to the supernatural, by awakening the mind’s attention from the lethargy of custom, and directing it to the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us; an inexhaustible treasure, but for which in consequence of the film of familiarity and selfish solicitude we have eyes, yet see not, ears that hear not, and hearts that neither feel nor understand.’

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Convention Convention: all societies, all art forms, operate on conventions. They are essential to understanding. In terms of art, poetry, music and drama, convention may be defined as an area of agreement between audience and author where the terms of the discussion are taken for granted, and the focus of interest lies in what will be made with those terms. And they can be used negatively or positively, and are equally powerful in either direction. What in fact we are here touching on is a most important concept, to which this book will return many times. The use of coloured drapes on the stage, or flags on the tower, as a signal is an example of that non-verbal language, that area of common assumption, of convention. Anyone who does not share that common ground, and relies only on the spoken or written words, is highly likely to get things awry. In our own day, we have conventions every bit as complex as those of earlier periods; to take one example only, the Western film as a genre tends to employ a certain type of plot, with certain set features: the shoot-out as climax, the ritualisation of conflict, a moral frame where the good guys usually win over impossible odds. For example, imagine a scene: a bar with a man quietly drinking. Suddenly the swing doors are kicked open and everyone turns round. You know exactly what is going to happen, and who has come in. But if the newcomer comes in and sits down and asks for a nice cup of tea, the convention has still been used – negatively. The convention may even extend to details like giving the villains black hats. Of course, once the language is established, a director can play with it, even invert it, in the sure knowledge that his audience’s acceptance of the norm allows him this freedom to play variations on it. Convention, properly used, is a liberating rather than restricting thing. But to learn the convention one does not run to critical works on Film; one watches films. It is exactly thus with the drama, poetry, painting and music of periods other than our own; the shared language can in considerable part be recovered by alert experience of many works, which is how it was developed and used in the first place. But sometimes one needs a short theoretical discussion, even classification, to get started, much as we would look at a map to understand the country we have to traverse.

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Corpus Christi This feast is celebrated in the Latin Church on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday to solemnly commemorate the institution of the Holy Eucharist. There were many more ‘holi-days’ before the Reformation, yet even in Elizabethan England there was at least one a month, and sometimes several days together, usually round the great days in the religious calendar. In pre-Reformation Europe, when most saints’ day counted as a feast, there was about half the year as holiday. What a loss!

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Deadly Sins Pride, Anger, Lechery, Envy, Gluttony, Avarice, Sloth. Any of these can destroy the soul and the self, but the root of them all is Pride, the putting of oneself first. This classification of vices was used in Christian teaching to educate and protect people from the instincts and temptations which beset us fallen human beings. Beginning in the early 14th-century, the popularity of the 7 deadly sins with artists of the time engrained them in human culture around the world. Each deadly sin is opposed by one of the corresponding Seven Holy Virtues: 1) Chastity – Embracing of moral wholesomeness and achieving purity of thought through education and betterment. Opposes lust; 2) Abstinence, a constant mindfulness of others and one’s surroundings; practicing self-control, abstention, and moderation. Opposes gluttony; 3) Diligence, a zealous and careful nature in one’s actions and work. Opposes sloth; 4) Liberality, a willingness to give, or nobility of thought or actions. Opposes avarice; 5) Patience, forbearance and endurance through moderation, or resolving conflicts peacefully. Opposes anger; 6) Charity – friendship, and sympathy without prejudice. Opposes envy; 7) Humility – modest behavior, selflessness, and the giving of respect. Opposes pride.

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Devil’s iconography The grotesqueness of the Devil in mediaeval art needs no stress; it signifies the perversion of the God-given life into evil. But the Devil or Vice on the Morality or Mystery stage was also conventionally clothed, and often wore a huge phallus. The implication is how sin can turn God’s creature man, made as Psalm 8 puts it, ‘a little lower than the angels, to crown him with glory and worship’ into something bestial. Just so the devil, as you can see from Paradise Lost, which every civilised person ought to know, steadily moves from the Light Bearer – which is what the name ‘Lucifer’ means – to a mere snake through the exercise of all the seven Deadly Sins (see previous page). see also: Morality Plays (below) Miracle or Mystery Plays (below)

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Emblem pictures The small form of the emblem became extremely fashionable in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and, like the equally fashionable small forms of the medal, the epigram or the sonnet, delighted in compressing much into little. Its strict form had three parts: a pithy motto or quotation (the inscriptio), an often enigmatical picture, and verses below (the subscription), and the complex meaning is contained in no one but in the way they react with each other. The emblems provided a common field of reference, a sort of shorthand that could be used in all sorts of areas from plays to poems to pageants to painting to interior decoration. Shylock’s holding the knife and a pair of scales with which to weigh Antonio’s flesh in Merchant of Venice IV.1.240ff emphatically (and parodically) reminds us of the emblematic figure of Justice - and just as she is blind, the point is made non-verbally that Shylock’s seeking of so literal a justice is evidence of a spiritual blindness. A lot of early emblem books and handbooks of symbol are available in inexpensive reprints. See for example Cesarae Ripa’s Iconologia, Alciato’s Emblematum Liber, or Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes. The discussions in E. H. Gombrich’s Norm and Form (London, 1978) and Symbolic Images (London, 1972) are invaluable. See also my A Century of Emblemes, Curiously Culled and Delicately Displayed (London, 1988)

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Essex The Earl of Essex, Robert Devereux, (1566–1601) was the last of Queen Elizabeth’s favourites. On his father’s death in 1576, Lord Burghley became his guardian and his mother married the Earl of Leicester, whom some think Elizabeth at one point nearly married. At Court, where he arrived in Elizabeth’s fifty-fourth year (1586), the Queen indulged in many flirtations with him, but also in many quarrels, in the course of which his hot temper and jealousy always allowed her to get the better. But she had genuine affection for him, probably more of a maternal than an amatory character: she was always anxious when hotheaded Essex went to the wars, which he often did (sometimes against her express command) and in which he always behaved himself with conspicuous daring if not with the prudence becoming a general. Essex was always calling for open war with Spain and for an efficient army, but was also perpetually quarrelling with his rivals at Court or in camp – now with Raleigh, now with Blount, now with the Cecils; and his idea of a quarrel was to fight a duel to the death if possible. (Which uses up a lot of courtiers…) In 1591, he commanded, with more valour than discretion, a small English force sent to France to help Henry IV against the Catholic League. Whenever he was abroad, he was always complaining of the way his rivals, especially Burghley’s son Robert Cecil, were undermining his influence at home. All Essex’s enemies were delighted – not many others were – when he teased the Queen into giving him command of the great expedition to Ireland in 1599. Ireland was the grave of his brilliant father’s reputation – and of many more people. He had to face the worst rebellion yet known in the island, with the certainty that Spanish help was near. Once in Ireland, he made a pretty mess of things. Instead of driving at the Earl of Tyrone’s power base in Ulster, he made a useless progress through Munster; and, when at last he turned northwards, Tyrone trapped him into a parley in which he concluded a wholly unauthorized truce and undertook to present Tyrone’s demands to the English government. The Queen was furious and Essex made matters worse by deserting his army and hurrying to England.

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He was under semi-arrest for nine months. In June 1600, he was brought to trial before a special court. No sentence was passed beyond dismissal from his offices and imprisonment in his own house, and he was set at liberty in August. However, he had lost the favour of the Queen for good, and this disgrace was one he could not stomach. He knew that Cecil and other courtiers were his sworn enemies and he now entertained the absurd idea of using force. Essex intrigued with James VI of Scotland to induce him to support a rising, and he begged Lord Mountjoy, who had succeeded to his command in Ireland, to land troops in Wales. Essex was a bad head for any rebellion, though, and the London mob, with whom he really was popular, was not so foolish as to rise in his support. Essex was beheaded on 25th February 1601. Vain and rash, lacking any statesmanship, Essex’s birth gave him a position of authority for which he was wholly unfitted. But he did possess qualities which endeared him even to those with whom he quarrelled: frankness, warm affection and generosity and, in war, the courage of a hero of Romance. Some thought – perhaps Essex thought – that in him was an answer to England’s woes, a Bolingbroke to Elizabeth’s Richard. His idea of nobility, the glamour of the fighting man, was much more attractive that the patient, detailed, managing and intriguing of really able men like Burghley and his son Robert Cecil. The fundamental clash between the parties was a clash between two ideologies, between what the French called noblesse de robe and noblesse d’epée: on the one hand, a myth of military glory and chivalry such as, Essexians and romantics argued, had made England great in the past – the ‘England of Henry V’; on the other, a modern emphasis on government, law, accounts, record keeping and money. The future lay there, and Essex did not to his cost realise it.



Fludd Fludd’s evidence is problematical. His theatre may in fact be no more than the sort of magical or artificial memory theatre many Renaissance men were interested in, from the earliest Venetian one of Giulio Camillo (see www.hatii.arts. gla.ac.uk/research/theatre/index.htm) right through the XVIth Century. There is no space here to go into this in detail; briefly one could use the form of the theatre (and real ones were built to do this) to pigeonhole information in a way that allowed its retrieval and combination – a sort of early memory bank plus computer. (The theatre could be an imagined one, of course.) One remembered one’s wife’s birthday was on April 1 (New Style) by imagining her sitting on the first row down on the fourth bank of seats, for example. But it is worth pointing out that Fludd would not have sanctioned this engraving of even an imaginary or ideal theatre had it not borne some relationship to the real thing; it had to be recognisable as a theatre like those in common use or it would not work as a memory system. The Art of Memory was apparently invented by Simonides of Cos (according to Cicero). Simonides had been able to identify the remains of guests at a banquet by their seating places around a table, after a roof had fallen in upon them and obliterated them beyond recognition. In the Classical use of the art, abstract images of a somewhat bizarre (and therefore memorable) nature were conceived that would be linked to parts of a speech and then to a well-known architectural feature of the hall in which the speech was to take place. By scanning the variety of statuary, friezes, articulated columns, or whatever, within the hall, the rhetorician skilled in the art could remember all the aspects of his speech (cf Cicero, De Oratore). The hall would provide the order and a frame of reference which could be used over and over again for a complex constellation of constantly changing ideas. The Classical art of memory evolved in the Middle Ages into an Aristotelian form, in which the construction of a memory image could heighten human perception and therefore help the acceptance of the moral lesson being communicated. On Memory systems and their connection with theatre, see Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (reprinted 2001).

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Folio Paper was made by hand in single sheets in a mould. Unfolded, that was a broadsheet – and the size was not constant, but varied from maker to maker with the size of the mould. (Hence old names for paper sizes like Demy, Foolscap, Royal, Crown, Elephant.) Folded once, it made four folio pages. Folded twice, it was quarto (a quarter the size of the broadsheet) and gave eight pages. Folded three times, octavo, is gave sixteen pages, and so on down to duodecimo and 16mo. Roughly speaking, broadsheet was too big to handle comfortably – it was about the size of a poster. Folio was the top of the range, smart format; and the smaller the format, on the whole, the cheaper – you had less work to do in the actual printing in the press, if you think about it.

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Fortune The obvious unpredictability, changefulness, and impermanence of worldly life and affairs was allegorised by late Antiquity as the goddess Fortune. She is a common figure in mediaeval art, and is usually represented as a queen, blindfolded, sometimes standing on a turning ball, turning a wheel on which human figures rise and fall.

Engraving by Hans Sebald Behaim, 1541

The finest discussion of Fortune and her relation to the order of the world is in Book 2 of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, written about 524AD. This book was very well known – deservedly – for over a thousand years: it was translated by Alfred the Great, Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth, as well as a host of less august figures. Shakespeare cannot have been ignorant of Boethius’ discussion. In Book II of the Consolation, Boethius talks about Stoic philosophy. On the one hand, the tumult and emptiness of the world is shown through the allegory of Fortune; on the other, the necessity of fortitude and self-reliance for the wise man is demonstrated. Fortune’s fickleness is part of her very nature, and if she were not so, she would not be Fortune. She is made to defend herself; however much, she says, she gave men, they would never be satisfied, and she gives only of her own and has a perfect right to

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take back what is her own. Change is necessary to life itself. Lady Philosophy, thus having shown that happiness cannot be dependent on fortune, states the first prerequisite of

happiness; to possess peace of soul and to be master of oneself amid the changes of Fortune; to recognize true and false ‘felicity’. She then discusses the specific gifts of fortune – riches, fame, dignity are all useless. But Fortune, says Philosophy, can teach men through adversity and show them who their true friends are. At the end of the book Philosophy states that there is something far greater than Fortune and her gifts, and in the last poem of the book first speaks of the ‘bond of love’ that binds the universe together. Reading Boethius is highly recommended.

Free Will The intricate model of a hierarchical universe (q.v.) would seem to leave little room for free will and moral choice, what with Fortune’s great power, ‘the influences of these planets high’, the magico medical effects of natural objects, the inertia as well as the authority of hierarchies, and so on. But in fact this is one of the biggest issues discussed in the mediaeval period; it is a central concern in, for example, Chaucer. In making man, God gave him a selfhood. That selfhood would never find its true being and its true rest until it found them in a loving relationship with its Creator, but to be a self at all it had to be free to choose not to love God. Love that is not freely given, where the giver is not free not to love, is not love at all: it is slavery. In Paradise Lost (IX), Milton makes Adam try to dissuade Eve from leaving him to work alone; Adam has the right and power to force her to stay, but recognizes that the use of authority and destruction of Eve’s freedom will destroy the very thing he desires: ‘Thy stay, not free, absents thee more’. So with man: knowing that man would disobey, God yet had to give him freedom if any relationship between them were ever to be possible. So from free will came the Fall. Man’s peculiar position in the Chain of Being – matter conjoined with spirit, at the frontier of two modes of existence - meant that all the world that was given into his charge fell with him all the links below were affected. In man himself, reason, the mark of God in his mind, was dimmed and he no longer saw clearly. He could no longer converse with God as a man with his friend in the cool of the evening; his mind and spirit were darkened. Because of the Fall man can never of himself, by his own efforts, do anything that is not in some way unsatisfactory, corrupt, ambiguous; indeed as Kant, a much later thinker, recognized, there is something radically wrong with human nature in even the very best people which makes them powerless, in the last analysis, to help themselves. The myth of the Fall has a profound moral truth. But the rescue operation that culminated in the first Easter showed that God’s grace and love was still there to be accepted and taken up if a man was humble enough to do so; his free will was not taken away. The courtesy of God is infinite; and the love that moves the sun and other stars, that is the ultimate reality in the universe, can be embraced or rejected by each person’s free choice. This understanding of Man’s plight emphasizes the necessity, the in¬escapability, of moral effort and choice in the whole of human life. Subject to Fortune as we may be, our response is still free. We may accept and be constructive, or rail and curse. Our stars may govern our condition, but they merely deal us a hand which we play as we choose. None of us has the same hand, and some hands are worse than others; it is still the playing that matters. See also predestination and free will

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Gestures and body language A seminal discussion of Elizabethan acting styles is in B. L. Joseph, Elizabethan Acting (Oxford, 1951). Critics have argued that styles of acting may be inferred from the way plays are constructed: Clifford Leech, for example, argued that for Marlowe there was only one manner, depending primarily on the set speech and secondly on the choric use of comedy. The realistic – in props and even the depiction of emotion – might jostle with the stylised. (Alan Downer argued this well in ‘Prolegomenon to a Study of Elizabethan Acting’, Maske und Cothurn, X (1964) 625–36). But over the period of our study, when everything else is changing so fast, there must have been changes, of emphasis at least. As Andrew Gurr has pointed out, from about 1600 the convincing portrayal of ‘character’ becomes important enough to require the use of a new term in the language of acting: ‘personating’ (the coinage is Marston’s). No longer is the delivery and modulation of the voice the only thing to be admired. (Andrew Gurr first advanced this argument in Studies in Philology, LXIII (1964) 144–5.) Nevertheless, stylized gesture remained important. John Bulwer (1606–56) wrote five books on the semiotics of the human body, with most attention given to gesture. Gesture was an important element in rhetorical theory. In Chirologia, or the Natural Language of the Hand whereunto is added Chironomia, or the Art of Manual Rhetoric (1642; reprinted New York: AMS Press, 1975); he has page after page of detailed woodcuts showing how precisely meaning can be conveyed by gesture. (He also wrote a book to help deaf and dumb people.) I reproduce here three plates:

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Hierarchical court Elizabethans knew what a court looked like: there was only one way to do it. This engraving of Elizabeth in the High Court of Parliament in Robert Glover, Nobilitas politica vel ciuilis was printed by William Jaggard in 1608 – the printer later responsible for the First Folio of Shakespeare’s works.

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Hierarchical universe The model of the universe used by the mediaevals, and only just beginning to be radically altered in the ‘Jacobethan’ period, was derived from the work of the second-century scientist, Ptolemy. Ptolemy broke with earlier Greek models of the universe (some of which were sun-centred) because they did not square with observations of the movements of the planets (which sometimes seem to go backwards) and the constellations. He put the earth at the centre, and his system brilliantly accounted for more of the observed facts than any other. He postulated a series of concentric spheres revolving round a stationary and spherical world. The idea that medieval and Renaissance men believed in a flat earth is a nineteenth-century slander). This world is composed of earth, water, air and fire – the four elements of which, according to Aristotle, all matter was made. This was enclosed by the invisible sphere of fire immediately below the sphere of the visibly changing moon. All this region – the ‘sublunary’ world, the realm of Fortune (q.v.) – was subject to change and decay. But above this mutable region, outside the sphere of the moon, lay spheres occupied by the planets (‘wandering stars’, in Greek), each, according to Plato’s Timaeus, uttering a single musical note, which made perfect harmony with the others. Music and maths go together: maths, pattern and proportion was seen by the ancients as the key to the created universe, and they were probably right. The mathematical relationships between the moving spheres expressed themselves, therefore, as musical tones and notes – the music of the spheres, or musica mundana – which, however, could not be heard on earth because it expressed perfection, and all below the sphere of the moon was by definition imperfect and subject to the changes resulting from the instability of the mixtures of the opposing elements. (Lorenzo says to Jessica, Merchant of Venice, V. 1. 63 ‘Whilst this muddy vesture of decay/Doth grossly close it in, we may not hear it.’)   The Spheres are in the order (outwards from the earth) Moon, Mercury, Venus, the sun (or Sol), Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. (Uranus was only discovered in 1781 – by Herschel – Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930.) Beyond Saturn moved the sphere of the fixed stars – what we see as constellations – and then the Primum Mobile, or ‘first movable’ sphere, which was directly acted upon by the Will of the First Mover, setting it in motion. continued ►

  There is a crucial difference between our own model – ours is only a provisional model too – and this. We unconsciously assume a universe that is to all intents and purposes infinite, utterly beyond what our minds can grasp; our ancestors’ universe was finite. Its size was vast – Ptolemy calculates that in comparison with the distance between the centre and the sphere of the fixed stars the earth has no more dimension than a mathematical point – but it is basically a comfortable universe; man even has companions in it, beings of a spir­itual nature who, like him, have various functions and tasks. The Greeks called them daemons; later Jewish thinkers identified these with angels (the word means ‘messengers’) and by the early Middle Ages it was commonplace that the universe was full of invisible friends – and foes. Furthermore, for the mediaeval mind the physical universe with the earth at its centre was not reality in itself, but an imperfect reflection of an absolute, divine reality beyond direct human experience. The spiritual realm of the angels bridges these two worlds. But the physical environment was also metaphorical of the spiritual, and the wise mind might hope to study the natural world and cosmology and be enlightened by spiritual truth.   This late Antique model was influenced by Platonic and neo-Platonic thought, not least Plato’s one dialogue that survived into the mediaeval period, the Timaeus. Its details were elaborated in the light of Christian understand­ing of the moral and spiritual nature of creation; and the revised version lasted in the West for over a thousand years. This model is, fundamentally, a hierarchy, and we need to examine that idea more closely.   St Augustine, who died in 430 as the barbarians were breaking down the gates of his city, indelibly marked Western thought down to the present. We must look at those of his ideas that affect the way people saw the universe. The key concept is rooted in Plato (and his followers like Plotinus); Augustine calls it ordo, which is usually translated as ‘order’, but could equally well mean ‘rank’, ‘station’ – even ‘hierarchy’ or ‘degree’. Everything in the universe has its being through the love of God in a particular place, in a particular relationship to other things, with a particular purpose to fulfil – to change the metaphor to one familiar in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, it is as if everything had a place on a ladder or chain reaching up to God. God is the originator of everything, loving it into existence. Love literally makes the world go round. continued ►

  God’s universe is designed to give the dignity of agents to a large number of his creatures: all have a job to do for Him, and He works through them. Virtue – whether we are talking about a stone or an angel – consists, basically, in discharging the obligations of your ordo, in fulfilling them by being what God wanted. Thus a stone makes, by just being, a very good stone; it will make a very poor tree – if the mind can perform such a somersault – and different stones will be suitable for different purposes. A man is not an animal, and is unvirtuous if he loses his humanity to the point where he behaves as one; and men themselves are different, so that he who has been called by God to be a ruler has obligations, responsibilities and pleasures that are not open to one who is a hewer of wood and drawer of water ‑ who has his own. The angels likewise have their virtuous place in the hierarchy, as do the circling spheres of Heaven; if they do not stay in their places in the great and complex dance, chaos is come again.   Augustine’s concept of hierarchy is vastly and intricately elaborated in the Middle Ages. The Ptolemaic system itself becomes a metaphor; it remains, as it always was, a physical description of the universe, but it also comes to express a moral and spiritual relationship and status. The further from the centre a creature is placed, the nearer physically and by nature of its being it is to the beatific Vision of God. At the pit of the spherical universe, lie those who have rejected the God who created them and on whom they are still utterly dependent: the devil and all his angels. Here is where the universe nearly turns itself inside out, into contradiction, non-being, for this is as far away as they can get from the searing uncreated light of the love of God that forces them to know as they are known. In rejecting it, they damn themselves and bolt the doors of Hell behind them on the inside.   Above this pit is the world, a place of moral choice and endeavour, where men are capable of falling into gross sin but also of glimpsing the unspeakable joy of the love of God. Above the world, beyond the corrupting reach of the Fall of Man, in the spheres of the planets, are angels, in their Nine Orders, each with their own job to do. Some are guardians of the individual spheres, some attend the Throne of Light. All of them give back according to their capacity the love that loved them into being.

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  Attempts were made to explain how the pagan gods might fit into this system. Around 500, Fulgentius of Ruspe tried (sloppily) to explain them symbolically. They were, he suggested, angels appointed to look after par­ticular areas of the universe – some, for example, looking after the spheres of the planets whom, because of the great power they wielded, men had worshipped as gods. Thus the gods of Olympus may turn into servants of the Most High. Apparently contradictory ideas of the gods of Olympus could comfortably he held at the same time: (E.g. Chaucer: in Troilus and Criseyde Venus is both cosmic principle of love (III.1 – 49) and yet the group of gods to which she belongs are ‘rascaille’ in V.1849ff.). So Venus the ‘wel willy planet’ looks after integration, procreation, sexual love and plenty, Mars as planet after separation, strife and struggle, and so on. Saturn, deposed as king of the gods by Jupiter, as planet retains his power as bringer of old age and disease that afflict all. But notice that, although Jupiter has a high place, the king of the planets is now Phoebus Apollo, god of the sun, of the mind and wisdom, the physical image of the divine Love and Wisdom that, according to the Wisdom of Solomon (xi.21) in the Apocrypha of the Bible, ‘ordered all things in measure and number and weight’. The planets circle the earth in their unending, ordered dance, and trans­mitting to it according to their natures the powers God has given them. This ‘influence’ (whence our term for the originally inexplicable disease, influenza) is a physical substance passing down to earth and causing the metal appropriate to its planet of origin to grow. Influence causes effects on human beings, their societies, their animals and so on. (This idea lies at the root of astrology and is part of mediaeval and renaissance medical theory.)   So this chain of being, where everything affects everything else, is a complex ecological web. The Chain links macrocosm and microcosm:: the best summary (and one used for an urgent political and moral purpose) I know is in John Gower’s Prologue to Confessio Amantis.

Histriomastix (a book of 1004 octavo pages) Extract from the title page of Prynne’s Histriomastix, London, 1633: HISTRIOMASTIX

THE

PLAYERS SCOVRGE

OR,

ACTORS TRAGEDIE, Divided into Two Parts

Wherein it is largely evidenced, by divers

Arguments, by the concurring Authorities and Resolotions of sundry texts of Scripture, of the whole Primiive Church, both under the Law and Gospell, of 55 Synodes and Councels; of 71 Fathers and Christian Writers, before the yeare of our Lord 1200; of above 150 foreigne and domestique Protestant and Popish Authors since; of 40 Heathen Philosophers, Historians, poets, of many Heathen, many Christian Nations, Repubiques, Emperors, Princes, Magistrates; of sundry Apostolicall, Canonicall, Imperiall Constitutions; and of our owne English Statutes, Magistrates, Vniversities, Writers, Preachers,

That Popular Stage- Playes (The very Pompes of the Divell

which we renounce in Baptisme, if we believe the Fathers)are Sinfull, heathenish, lewde, ungodly Spectacles, and most pernicious Corruptions; condemned in all ages, as intolerable Mischiefs to Churches, to Republickes, tpo the manners, mindes and soules of men, And that the Profession of Play-poet, of Stage-players; together with the penning , acting and frequenting of stage-playes, are unlawfull, infamous and misbeseeming Christains. All pretences to the contrary are likewise here fully answered; and the unlawfulness of acting, and beholding Academicall Enterludes, briefly discussed; besides sundry other particulars concerning Dancing, Dicing, Health-drinking, &c. of which the Table will informe you

_______________________________________________________________ By WILLIAM PRYNNE an Vtter –Barrister of Lincolnes Inne _______________________________________________________________ (to return to the main text please use the green button

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The Isle of Dogs by Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson, was performed in 1597, probably by the Pembroke’s Men at the Swan Theatre in Paris Gardens in Southwark. A satirical comedy, it was reported to the authorities for being a ‘lewd plaie’ full of seditious and ‘sclanderous matter’. Nashe was later to call it ‘an imperfit Embrion of my idle houres’ and admitted only to writing the introduction and first act, with Jonson finishing it. Richard Topcliffe, head of Queen Elizabeth’s spy network, quickly had writs for arrest issued by the Privy Council. Three of the principal players (Gabriel Spenser, Robert Shaa, and Ben Jonson) were arrested and sent to the Marshalsea Prison. Nashe’s home was raided and his papers seized but he himself escaped. He later wrote that he had given birth to a monster – ‘it was no sooner borne but I was glad to runne from it’.

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Juxtaposition Juxtaposition, simply putting things next to each other where comparison and ironic counterpoint is inevitable, is a very important way of signifying important ideas and constructing meaning in mediaeval and Renaissance art, drama and architecture. When Hamlet asks his mother to look at the portraits of her two husbands, first of Old Hamlet, then of Claudius, he is relying on the implicit comparison side by side of the two to make the point about Claudius being a ‘king of shreds and patches’. Botticelli, to get more technical, designed the painting we know as Primavera to face the one we know as the Birth of Venus as you opened a door into a room in the Medici palazzo. Primavera was on your right, Birth of Venus on your left, and facing you was the painting we know as Pallas and the Centaur, where the Goddess of art and wisdom and reason tames the creature who symbolises our animal instincts. Thus you physically moved past those two complementary paintings about Love, Desire and Spring-like Youth towards the achievement of maturer wisdom by mastery of instinct. Another example: in I Henry IV King Henry on his throne in council is followed in the next scene by Falstaff acting King Henry in the Boar’s Head. The implication is obvious – the disordered ‘realm’, ruled by appetite, of Falstaff is contrasted with the supposedly more rational realm of the usurper, Henry: but which is the truer picture of England?

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Will Kempe and Robert Armin Will Kempe had been a big draw with audience for much of the 90s. His speciality had been robust physical comedy, agile dancing, and crowd-pleasing improvisation: he usually played men with small intelligence but a lot of commonsense, and the part of Dogberry in Much Ado about Nothing was almost certainly written for him. He was noted for his jigs (athletic, sometimes almost obscene, song and dance routines). The physically much slighter Robert Armin who filled his place a few months after he left the Lord Chamberlain;’s men in 1599 was more ‘melancholy’, self-conscious about his own cleverness, and developed a line in repartee and clever playing with language and the delivery of double entendre which Shakespeare and others like Jonson exploited. Armin certainly played Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale and Drugger in the Alchemist.

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King Cambyses Preston’s play – A Lamentable Tragedy, Mixed full of Pleasant Mirth, Containing the Life of Cambyses, King of Persia – was very popular, though many, as taste changed, came to laugh at its pompous and often overstated writing. It was still well known enough for Falstaff/Oldcastle to be able to make a joke about its hyperbolical, ranting style when he is to play the part of king Henry in the charade at the Boars Head: ‘Give me a cup of sack, to make mine eyes look red; for I must speak in passion, and I will do it in King Cambyses’ vein’ (1 Henry IV, II. iv). I suspect that the mechanicals’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe in Midsummer Night’s Dream, with its offer of ‘tragical mirth’ and ‘lamentable comedy’, also alludes to it.

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Machiavel and the Vice The Morality plays, which continued to be played until well into Elizabeth’s reign, thus forming the theatrical language of the generation of Shakespeare, often used allegorical characterisation – characters whose names indicated their representation of abstract ideas – like Nobility, Clergy, Widow England, Magnificence, etc – even the seven deadly sins. One of the most important is the blackly comic and intensely attractive figures of the Vice: this is the villain, an evil character at root, but immensely attractive, witty, amusing – and tempting. And if tempters are not attractive, they are not tempters. This Vice descends from the tempter, the Devil, in the Mystery plays, who is a bundle of laughs very often, but underneath sinister – and comic, in that he does not know (but we do) that he is sawing off the branch on which he is sitting. Add to this the popular image of Niccolò Machiavelli, the Florentine philosopher who wrote Il Principe in 1513. This book described the way politicians behaved – not as they ought to, but as they did: the first job of a ruler is to stay a ruler, and any means are acceptable to that end. Shock and horror was the official open reaction: but everyone who was anyone had a copy of the book and read it under the bedclothes. Machiavelli’s name became a noun, the machiavel, and a type of dramatic figure regularly encountered in renaissance drama. Often young, witty, clever, learned, attractive, and utterly amoral – and often dressed in scholar’s black – they are the disturbers, the villains of the piece. They borrow a lot of the features, sometimes, from the clown/Vice. From this base of expectation and convention, shared with the audience, dramatists could go on to erect their particular superstructure: Aaron, Richard III, Barabas, Mortimer, Vindice, Edmund, Iago – and so on. Try seeing Hamlet against this background.

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Niccolò Machiavelli Born 1469 in Florence, he died in 1527. We know little of his early life: he was well educated, as is indicated by his familiarity with Aristotle, Herodotus, Livy and Virgil.   Italy was then divided between four city-states, each threatened by foreign states. Florence was ruled by the Medici whose dominance was temporarily interrupted by Savonarola’s reform movement in 1494. Machiavelli’s public career came about with the ascendancy of Savonarola in 1492, whose follower he became. Savonarola was burnt in 1498; Machiavelli was appointed head of the second chancery with the new republic. He came into contact not only with officials of foreign governments, but also with powerful people, including Cesare Borgia. These first-hand contacts with leading political figures along with his own historical research ultimately afforded him the insights that shaped his later works.   When the Medici returned, in 1512, with the aid of the Spanish, Machiavelli was imprisoned and tortured. Afterwards, Machiavelli retired outside Florence. It was then that he began work on The Prince (1513), eventually printed in 1532 after his death.   The Prince seems to argue that rulers should retain absolute power over those they rule. To maintain this absolute dominance all means can be employed to achieve their ends. Machiavelli uses Cesare Borgia as a key example. Scholars have long debated whether Machiavelli really does, as he seems, advocate tyranny and deceit, and indeed letters from Machiavelli discovered in 1810 indicated that he intended the work to help him win the favour of the Medici. He also added that his advocacy that rulers use an ‘ends justifying the means’ approach to government was based on what he saw as the only way that Italy could rid itself of foreign invaders.   Machiavelli’s work became synonymous with a course of conduct, a whole life, dictated by expediency, ignoring all ethical and religious constraints. Likewise, the phrase ‘it is better to be feared than loved’ has, justly or not, identified Machiavelli with a heartless cynicism.

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Magus Magia is the art of understanding and manipulating the seen and unseen universe by a knowledge of the secret harmonies and correspondences, musical and mathematical, that linked the whole web of Creation from the planets in their courses, raining down their ‘influence’ on earth, to the meanest herb that grows. It requires commerce with the unseen spirits of the universe, including the angels, the ministers of God Himself. Its goal is power, but a power to be used selflessly.   Magia, or theurgia must be sharply distinguished from Goetia, which we should call Black Magic. This seeks power too, but for selfish ends and by summoning up, and cooperation with, the powers of darkness. Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, based on a real person, Johann Faust, is an example of a magus who is tempted and falls into the practice of Goetia.   Renaissance people took the high art of magia entirely seriously. There would have been no suspension of disbelief for a Renaissance audience watching The Tempest: they believed that there might be people like Prospero in the offing, in the courts of the great: Dr John Dee, who is one of the models for Prospero, had an enormous reputation, was consulted by Queen Elizabeth, the Sidney circle, invited to Prague by the Emperor Rudolf, and nearly poached from Elizabeth by Ivan the Terrible. Much earlier, the great Florentine scholar Marsilio Ficino, or the German Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, familiarly known as Paracelsus, were magi; and their work has affected the world we live in. Serious magical endeavour and serious scientific endeavour are twins of the same birth: and that distinction between science and magic would have been conceptually impossible in Shakespeare’s lifetime.   The endeavour of the religious mystic had been to subdue the self to reality, by prayer and self-discipline and knowledge. For the Renaissance, the problem was how to subdue reality to man’s wishes, to ‘the effecting of all things

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possible’ (Bacon). The magus sought the technique of doing so by studying arcane lore, by understanding of the secret musical and mathematical harmonies and correspondences that linked all creation, by self-discipline that made him worthy to help along the work of the spirits and Angels, and of God. He was seeking to resume the power over material and spiritual nature lost at Adam’s Fall: and if he won this power, moreover, it was dangerous: it could make him angel or devil – cf. Pico della Mirandola, Oration on the Dignity of Man [Bookmarked]. Its possession, therefore, must be accompanied by a corresponding growth in the holiness and wisdom of the magus’ mind – and we see exactly this stress in the Florentine scholar and magus Marsilio Ficino. On the other hand, he whom we should call the scientist – Francis Bacon, for example – sought the same goal of power, but not by the same means; his search came to be for techniques derived by induction from observation of the way matter behaved. Yet its end, though just as practical, was much more limited. While the magus might in the end seek wisdom and renounce power – seek, in other works, disinterested knowledge – Francis Bacon condemns such an attitude as using ‘as a mistress for pleasure what ought to be a spouse for fruit.’ (Advancement of Learning (1605), I, p. 60 in Works, ed. Ellis and Spedding). For Bacon and the empirical scientists who have descended from him, the world is just something to be manipulated.



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Masque Masque develops in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, and was very popular as a court entertainment. A simple plot or moralistic debate between allegorised characters is elaborately presented by masked actors, with much use of stage devices, music, song and especially dance – contemporaries spoke of masques being ‘danced’, not ‘acted’. The masque is acted before a courtly or aristocratic gathering, with some of the roles performed by noblemen and women who, after the final dance, mingle with their peers in the audience. Many masques included an anti-masque, often to cacophonous music, usually comic and grotesque. For these roles professional players (e.g., at the court of James I, The King’s Men) were engaged.   The money spent on costumes and properties for the ever more popular masque rapidly grew. The developing technology of theatre architecture in Continental Europe improved the potentialities of the masque as spectacle. Perspective paintings and angled wings, described in Sebastiano Serlio’s Regole generali di architetturra (1545, translated into English in 1611), and the use of various mechanical devices, maintained the sophistication of visual delight. By the 1590’s, the masque seems to have established its classic form in England; a flimsy plot using an opening dialogue, a procession and dance of masquers, a general dance involving the audience and return of the masquers to the stage, often to present an elaborate compliment to the monarch or the most noble person present. Gaudy costumes and the most spectacular sets possible seem to have provided the major source of delight.   Ben Jonson’s preface to Hymenaei, danced on 5th January 1606, contains the fullest theoretical justification of masque. This piece was for the marriage of the Earl of Essex to Frances Howard, and Union is the theme, carried beyond the Robert Devereux & Frances Howard union, to the union of England and Scotland, the union of King James and kingdom, the ‘cosmic union wrought by the power of love’. The complex interrelationships are shown in speech, song, costume, carved and painted figures, visual symbol and allusion, ordering of spectacle etc. Jonson argues:

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‘It is a noble and just advantage that the things subjected to understanding have of those which are subjected to sense, that the one sort are but momentary, and merely taking; the other impressing, and lasting... royal princes and greatest persons (who are commonly the personators of these actions) not only studious of riches and magnificence in the outward celebration or show ... but curious after the most high and hearty inventions to furnish the inward parts ... which should always lay hold on more removed mysteries.’

Jonson’s masques frequently suggest that moral reform results from the leadership of monarchs and courtiers whose natural virtues have been perfected by humanistic education, religion, moral self-education – and Art. The ‘royal princes and great persons might be changed by watching, or taking part in, or being drawn into, actions where allegorical personages and roles mingled with the everyday. The generally neo-Platonic outlook of the period, an outlook that maintains that the everyday and the particular express the Ideal and the unchanging archetypes, made it easy for Jonson, Jones, Daniel and others to maintain that the long term objectives of the masque were the political education of the court and the establishment of a fundamental harmony of monarch and people. This purpose, in the end, failed utterly: but it was not a foolish purpose, for people are affected by what they watch, they are affected by the parts they play, the lines they learn, the dances in whose patterns they move. ‘Masques were major political events, often inordinately costly, where the court displayed not only to itself but also to foreign ambassadors and diplomats who eagerly sought invitations…’ (Court Masques p.ix, ed. D. Lindley, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995)

Miracle or Mystery plays The Miracle or Mystery plays were the cycle of plays put on by the trade guilds in most towns of any size, once a year, usually around midsummer. They had grown up over many years, and recounted the history of mankind from the fall of the Angels through to the Last Judgment, which most people in Shakespeare’s generation expected before too long. They embodied a good deal of religious doctrine, which the Protestant reformers of the sixteenth century came to regard as heretical, and so tried to stamp the plays out. That religious reason for hostility was a nice colour for the other fact that the authorities can’t be too sure how people will behave when they are on holiday – they are nearly outside control – and people on holiday are not working: the attempt at suppression coincides with the first great period of the enlargement of capital and the commodification of labour. So from the time of Henry VIII onwards in England the Privy Council tried to stamp out the old plays and the festivals at which they happened. In some areas they were successful very quickly; in others they were resisted. The Chester cycle, for example, continued without much change until a nervous mayor thought he had better ask permission of the Privy Council – refused, of course. The Coventry cycle was being played well into Shakespeare’s teens; the last complete Corpus Christi cycle we know of was played at Kendal in 1586, and parts of the cycles were being played in protestant Norwich after 1600 and in the Yorkshire dales in the 1610s. On the Continent, there was little change: one of our best illustrations of a nativity section of the cycle in performance on a pageant cart – a sort of mobile stage – is from Brussels in 1618.

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Morality Plays Morality Plays develop from Miracle Plays, and were popular in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. A Morality was a play demonstrating a moral truth or lesson by means of the speech and action of characters which are personified abstractions – figures representing vices and virtues, qualities of the human mind, or abstract conceptions in general.   Miracle Plays and Moralities existed throughout Europe. The aim of both was religious. In the Miracle Play the subject-matter is derives from Bible narrative, Lives of Saints, the Apocryphal Gospels, and pious legends, a certain historical or traditional foundation underlies the plot, and the object was to reinforce truths of the Catholic faith. In the Morality the matter was allegorical rather than historical, and its object was ethical; the cultivation of Christian character, the application of Christian doctrine to conduct. In Everyman, the finest of the Moralities, this is clear: a man is brought face to face with the imperative facts of the Christian faith.   While to us Moralities might seem dull, contemporaries seem to have enjoyed them, to judge from the number of printed editions. Clearly, the substitution in the moralities of abstract ideas (Love, Friendship, etc.) for human personalities of the Bible or legendary narrative, would tend to produce a less real effect if acted carelessly, or if the audience did not thoroughly comprehend, or was out of sympathy with, the meaning of the play. But the allegorical abstract ideas were presented as human beings, and in many Moralities the characters were not all abstract qualities – there were angels and devils, priests, doctors, and, especially in English plays, the fool, under various names, chiefly that of the Vice. They could be vigorous and vivid.   Four plot types dominate the earlier Moralities, sometimes alone, sometimes combined: the Debate of the Heavenly Graces; the Coming of Death; the Conflict of Vices and Virtues; and the Debate of the Soul and the Body. In England the earliest extant complete Morality play is the Castell of Perseverance (early fifteenth century). This traces the spiritual history of Humanum Genus [= Mankind] from birth to his appearance at the Judgment Seat of God, personifying the foes who beset his pathway, the Guardian Angel who helps him resist them, and the sacrament of Confession and Penance which strengthen him. continued ►



  Around 1500 a new kind of Morality developed. As performances began to take place indoors rather than outside as hitherto, in the hall of a prince or noble, and as they came to be done by professional actors, compression became necessary both in time and in the number of characters. The aims also became more secular. The result was the Interlude, a sort of briefer Morality. They were plays in dialogue between two or more performers, often as a dramatic diversion in the pause or interlude in a feast or other entertainment. The Moral Interlude deals only with portions of a man’s life; and the ethical teaching is mainly limited to warnings against certain sins (especially those of youth) and in others to exhortations to learning and study. (Examples: Hickscorner; John Rastell’s The Interlude of the Four Elements) This type of play was often used for propaganda, especially Protestant against Catholic. Some major writers developed the form to great effect, and influenced later Elizabethan drama – for example John Skelton’s Magnyfycence; John Heywood’s The Four P’s, The Pardner and the Frere.   In the 1560s Preston’s Cambyses, ‘a lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth’, intermingled historical characters like the King of Persia with personified abstractions from the moralities like Shame, Diligence, Cruelty and Murder. Preston also personified the members of the body politic: the Commons and the Council. Shakespeare knew the play: in the first part of Henry IV, Falstaff threatens to portray Prince Hal’s father ‘in King Cambyses’ vein’ Shakespeare also knew that the crowd-pleaser in the piece was the Vice, Ambidexter, who is (as his name implies) a double dealer: not unlike Falstaff.

Nasty nineties Conditions were worsening at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. There was a lot of anxiety, of social tension (which may be reflected in Julius Caesar, and echoed in Bates and Williams in Henry V), there were bad harvests, which some linked to the infertility and barrenness of the Queen. There was starvation, inflation, and ecclesiastical unrest as well.   There were wars in the Netherlands, wars against Spain. The second and third Armadas (1591, 1599) sustained a constant sense of threat. There was panic mobilisation in Summer 1599, leaving the harvest at risk, and Privy Council almost had its way to sink ships to block the Thames.   In France, there was religious war. In Ireland, Tyrone’s rebellion was a very serious and nearly successful challenge to English suzerainty and settlement. There were fears that war might escalate, and involve Spanish invasion. There are many Plays representing current wars and battles, with real people represented, and after 1600 there is a lot more scepticism about glory and war. (Consider Troilus and Cressida and Coriolanus) The morality of war was very much the material of sermons, and books about the godly man’s duty to Prince and country.   Furthermore, the nineties saw the deaths of the old guard, the people Elizabeth had relied on for years: Leicester in 1588, Mildmay in 1589, Walsingham and the Earl of Warwick in 1590, Hatton in 1591. The great Burleigh himself died in August 1598. The new elite, the new court, was factious, and the bad temperedness of Court was well-known. Above all, there was the uncertainty of the succession to Elizabeth, and a lot of debate about the right type of government or polity. Discussion of the succession was forbidden.   1599–1603 were especially fearful, tense years.

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Poetic giants of the Latin past Renaissance Education was based on a command of Latin, which educated people (mainly male) started at a very early age. Most serious discussions, in art, literature, philosophy, law, theology were conducted on a Europe-wide basis in Latin until well into the eighteenth century. The great poets and writers of Rome – Vergil, Horace, Livy, Ovid, for example – were central to the curriculum, and formed the taste and standards, common frame of reference of the Renaissance. To emulate and surpass ‘all that Glorious Greece and haughty Rome brought forth’, as Ben Jonson put it in his poem on Shakespeare in the First Folio (1623) of Shakespeare’s Works, was the ambition of a Christian society newly confident that it had learned as much as it could from the great pagans of the past.

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Predestination and Free will Four extracts from the Thirty Nine ARTICLES OF RELIGION of the Church of England: IX. Of Original or Birth-sin. ORIGINAL Sin standeth not in the following of Adam, (as the Pelagians do vainly talk;) but it is the fault and corruption of the Nature of every man, that naturally is ingendered of the offspring of Adam; whereby man is very far gone from original righteousness, and is of his own nature inclined to evil, so that the flesh lusteth always contrary to the spirit; and therefore in every person born into this world, it deserveth God’s wrath and damnation. And this infection of nature doth remain, yea in them that are regenerated; whereby the lust of the flesh, called in the Greek, phronema sarkos, which some do expound the wisdom, some sensuality, some the affection, some the desire, of the flesh, is not subject to the Law of God. And although there is no condemnation for them that believe and are baptized, yet the Apostle doth confess, that concupiscence and lust hath of itself the nature of sin.

X. Of Free-Will. THE condition of Man after the fall of Adam is such, that he cannot turn and prepare himself, by his own natural strength and good works, to faith, and calling upon God: Wherefore we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God, without the grace of God by Christ preventing us, that we may have a good will, and working with us, when we have that good will.

XI. Of the Justification of Man. WE are accounted righteous before God, only for the merit of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ by Faith, and not for our own works or deservings: Wherefore, that we are justified by Faith only is a most wholesome Doctrine, and very full of comfort, as more largely is expressed in the Homily of Justification.

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XVII. Of Predestination and Election. Predestination to Life is the everlasting purpose of God, whereby (before the foundations of the world were laid) he hath constantly decreed by his counsel secret to us, to deliver from curse and damnation those whom he hath chosen in Christ out of man-kind, and to bring them by Christ to everlasting salvation, as vessels made to honour. Wherefore, they which be endued with so excellent a benefit of God be called according to God’s purpose by his Spirit working in due season: they through Grace obey the calling: they be justified freely: they be made sons of God by adoption: they be made like the image of his only-begotten Son Jesus Christ: they walk religiously in good works, and at length, by God’s mercy, they attain to everlasting felicity.   As the godly consideration of Predestination, and our Election in Christ, is full of sweet, pleasant and unspeakable comfort to godly persons, and such as feel in themselves the working of the Spirit of Christ, mortifying the works of the flesh, and their earthly members, and drawing up their mind to high and heavenly things, as well because it doth greatly establish and confirm their faith of eternal Salvation to be enjoyed through Christ, as because it doth fervently kindle their love towards God: So, for curious and carnal persons, lacking the Spirit of Christ, to have continually before their eyes the sentence of God’s Predestination, is a most dangerous down-fall, whereby the Devil doth thrust them either into desperation, or into wretchlessness of most unclean living, no less perilous than desperation.   Furthermore, we must receive God’s promises in such wise, as they be generally set forth to us in Holy Scripture: and, in our doings, that Will of God is to be followed, which we have expressly declared unto us in the Word of God.



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Rhetoric The aims of Rhetorica were stated by ancient writers like Cicero and Horace to be to please, to move, to persuade – sometimes to please, to move, to teach. It is the second of the ‘Seven Liberal (= necessary to a free person) Arts’ which since Antiquity had been the basis of education. They divided into the trivium (hence our word ‘trivial’, because this is where you started): Grammar (i.e. literature), Rhetoric (the arts of using words to best advantage), and Dialectic (the science of argument) and when you had mastered that you went on to the more serious mathematical arts of the quadrivium – Arithmetic (= number theory), Music, Geometry, and Astronomy. Then and only then were you ready to tackle the Queen of the Sciences, Theology or Philosophy.   The art of using words to best advantage recognises, first, three levels of style depending on one’s subject and audience: the high style for serious and high matters, the middle style for everyday, and the low style for comedy, jokes, and the workplace. Theoreticians since antiquity recognised that different patterns of words had different effects, and recognised over 200 distinct figures or colours of rhetoric, each with a purpose to achieve a psychological effect on an audience. Teaching this skill was an important part of renaissance education, for out of persuasion through words grows power. (It still does.) Many more people than we realise would have had a detailed technical knowledge of the art, and would recognise in a poem or a speech ‘a very fine epanalepsis’, as the commentator on Spenser’s Shepherd’s Calendar, (1579), ‘E.K’, points out. Thus an audience would hear a play in ways quite different to ours: rather like an audience of pianists listening to someone play the piano. Some of the figures (figures in brackets refer to Shakespeare’s sonnets) anadiplosis (Greek = doubling): last word of clause 1 opens clause 2   ‘hate me when thou wilt if ever, now   Now, while the world…’ (90) Anaphora (= taking back to): same word begins a sequence of clauses   ‘Some glory in their birth, some in their skills   Some in their wealth…’ (91) antanaclasis (= referring against): same word, but with two different meanings (a strict definition of pun ): ‘But thou art all my art…’ (78)

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antimetabole ( = exchange) (sometimes called chiasmus): two words or phrases repeated in reversed order ‘music to hear, why hear’st thou music sadly ?’ (8) asyndeton ( = unbound): Words heaped up without conjunction intervening ‘in the blazon of sweet beauty’s best of hand, of foot, of lip, or eye, or brow’ (106) auxesis ( = Increase): words arranged to form a climax ‘Since brass nor stone nor earth nor boundless sea but sad mortality...’ (65) epanalepsis ( = taking up again) same word begins clause 1 and ends clause 2 ‘Kind is my love today, tomorrow kind.’ (105) epistrophe ( = a turning towards): same word ends a sequence of phrases ) ‘I am that I am…’ (121) Cf St Paul ‘I spake as a child, I thought as a child...’ 1 Cor 13 epizeuxis: same word repeated, without pause ‘thou whose shadow shadows doth make bright…’ (45) gradatio (an extended form of anadiplosis through 3 or more phrases) cf St Paul: ‘whom he did predestinate them he also called; and whom he called them he also Justified; and when he Justified them he also glorified…’ (Romans, viii. 30) parison ( = according to equal): similar structure in sequence of clauses ‘and gilded Honour shamefully misplac’d and maiden Virtue rudely strumpeted... (66) Paronomasia (= naming alongside): same word, with same sound but different sense ‘and captive Good attending captain ill.’ (66) Ploce ( = weaving): same word repeated inside repeated phrases ‘Sweets with sweets war not, joy delights in joy’ (8) Polyptoton ( = many endings): word repeated, or different form, but from same root ‘love is not love which alters when it alteration finds’ ( 116) Syllepsis ( = taking together): one word written, but 2 senses suggested ‘But why thy odour matcheth not thy show the soil is this that thou dost common grow.’ (69) Zeugma ( = yoking): same verb used to serve 2 objects ‘Since saucy jacks so happy are in this, give them thy fingers, me thy lips to kiss.’ (128)

Some Latin Rhetorical Terms: Adnominatio: repetition of a word root with different endings; when similar sounding words refer to different things (cf. pun) Amplificatio: elaborating an idea by saying it several times in different ways

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Anacoluthon: passing to a new grammatical construction before the first is complete Commutatio: reversal of the order of the first half of the sentence in the second: ‘eat to live, not live to eat’. Often used with contentio; cf. Chiasmus. Compar: rhythmical, syllabic and syntactical balance of halves of lines or of sentences against each other Complexio: a sequence of clauses or sentences where the same word or words begin them and similar words end them Conduplicatio: an emphatic repetition of a word or phrase under stress of emotion or to create feeling in the audience Contentio: strong, often patterned contrast Conversio: ending clauses with the same word Correctio: cancelling what has just been said in description and replacing it with something more suitable Descriptio: systematic enumeration of the appearance or qualities of a person or thing Diminutio: the modesty convention; winning the audience’s sympathy by disclaiming competence or excellence Diversio: a short turning aside from the main line of the narrative Effictio: the expression in words of someone’s bodily appearance Exclamatio: apostrophe; elaborate exclamatory address, or sudden stopping of discourse to address some person or thing, present or absent, personified or not Exemplum: a short story or reference used to illustrate a point Expolitio: repetition under a different guise; speaking of the same thing but not in the same way Frequentatio: drawing together for climactic purposes of all the different ideas in a passage Gradatio: anadiplosis; beginning the succeeding clause or line with the last word of the previous one Hypallage: transferred epithet Interpretatio: repeating an idea by using not the same word but a near ­synonym ‘parent’ to replace ‘father’, for example. Occupatio: a refusal to describe or go into details, for whatever reason Parataxis: literally, ‘laying side by side; the use of a series of coordinate clauses rather than the subordination of one to the other (which is hypotaxis) Ratiocinatio: elaborate way of structuring an argument in speech or soliloquy by arguing with oneself, posing objections and ideas, and meeting them Repetitio: beginning clauses or lines with the same word

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Sententia: a proverb or quotation or citation of another author to support an argument Significacio: the ‘deep’ or hidden meaning of a symbol, thing, or story Similiter cadens: balancing of words with similar endings at ends of phrases Traductio: repetition of key words in different places for emphasis Transitio: when one recapitulates briefly what one has said, and outlines what one is going on to next See: H. Peacham Garden of Eloquence 1577 (anthologised in W. R. Espy, the Garden of Eloquence, (New York, 1986) Aristotle Rhetoric III. 9 Cicero, ad Herennium IV G. Puttenham Art of English Poesy, 1589 Geoffroi de Vinsauf, Poetria Nova, trans. Margaret F. Nims (Toronto 1967) See also: various works by B. Vickers, of which especially Rhetoric Revalued, (Binghamton, N.Y.: Center for Medieval & Early Renaissance Studies, 1982)

Roman comedy These plays employed pretty standard plots and stock characters: Maccus the fool, Dossenus the hunchback, Papus the greybeard, and the plays were originally amateur, but from the 3rd century BC at Rome usually professionally acted. The most important writers are Plautus and Terence, both much studied, and acted, in schools and universities in the Renaissance. There was a lot of learned, university interest: and Henry VIII had two of Plautus’ comedies performed – in Latin – at an entertainment for French ambassador in 1526. Key elements in plots were the clever slave, the young lovers, and lots of unexpected recognitions (e.g of lost children, of noble or free birth). Other stock figures were awkward fathers, who were gullible or libertine, braggart soldiers, and greedy pimps. The influence on Udall’s Ralph Roister Doister, Lyly’s Mother Bombie, Jonson’s Every Man in His Humour and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors is immense. The Commedia dell’arte (which allowed for a lot of improvisation by actors in stock roles in a more or less fixed outline of plot) is a later development.

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The Stage is the World Sir Walter Ralegh’s poem says it all, really. He was beheaded in 1618: What is our life? A play of passion, Our mirth the music of division, Our mother’s wombs the tiring-houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks still who doth act amiss. Our graves that hide us from the setting sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we, playing, to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest, that’s no jest. The world as a stage or theatre (as I have just defined that word) is a cliché: see also Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors, and many other texts. One might compare the elevated viewpoint in (e.g). Breugel’s paintings: the world is seen as a vast stage or amphitheatre in which human life is an absurd spectacle. The concept of Theatrum Mundi (theatre of the world) was inherited from Antiquity: cf. Ortelius’ Theatrum Orbis Terrarum (1570), and books like Thomas Combe’s Theatre of Fine Devices, and Jan van der Noot’s Theatre for Worldlings. Compare too Erasmus’ Folly in The Praise of Folly: ‘Good God, what a theatre! How strange are the actions of fools … a thousand Democrituses would not be sufficient for laughing at them, and even then there would be work for more than one Democritus, to laugh at those who are laughing’

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Stanislavsky and ‘The Method’ Born in Moscow in 1863, Constantin Sergeyevich Stanislavsky had a huge effect on ideas of acting in the twentieth century. He argued that if the theatre was going to be meaningful it needed to move beyond the external representation that acting had so far stressed. He created an approach that stressed the psychological and emotional aspects of acting. The Stanislavsky System, or ‘the Method’, held that an actor’s main job was to be believed (rather than recognized or understood).   Stanislavsky’s Method first employed ideas such as ‘emotional memory’. In getting ready for playing a role involving fear, the actor should recall something frightening, and attempt to act the part in the emotional space of that fear. In what was in effect a break from previous modes of acting that held that the actor’s job was to ‘become’ the character, Stanislavsky believed that an actor should make the character become him or herself, with an immediacy of direct emotional experience. Stanislavsky’s System is a method for producing realistic characters. Using ‘The System’, an actor is required deeply to analyse his or her character’s motivations. The actor must discover the character’s Objective in each scene, and Super Objective for the entire play. One way of doing this was using Stanislavsky’s ‘magic if’. Actors were required to ask many questions of their characters and themselves. For example, one of the first questions they have to ask is, ‘What if I were in the same situation as my character?’

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Stubbes Stubbes’ Anatomy of Abuses: an extract: … mark the flocking and running to Theaters and Curtains [the two theatres near the modern Liverpool Street Station], daily and hourly, night and day, time and tide, to see plays and interludes, where such wanton gestures, such bawdy speeches, such laughing and fleering, such kissing and bussing, such clipping and culling, such winking and glancing of wanton eyes, and the like is used, as is wonderful to behold. Then these goodly pageants being ended, every mate sorts to his mate, every one brings another homeward of their way, very friendly, and in their secret conclaves (covertly) they play sodomites, or worse. And these be the fruits of plays and interludes, for the most part. And whereas, you say, there are good examples to be learnt in them: truly so there are; if you will learn falsehood; if you will learn cozenage; if you will learn to deceive; if you will learn to play the hypocrite, to cog, to lie and falsify; if you will learn, to jest, laugh and fleer, to grin, to nod and mow; if you will learn to play the Vice, to swear, tear and blaspheme both heaven and earth; if you will learn to become lewd, unclean, and to devirginate maids, to deflower honest wives; if you will learn to murder, flay, kill, pick, to steal, rob and rove; if you will learn to rebel against princes, to commit treasons, to consume treasures, to practise idleness, to sing and talk of bawdy love and venery; if you will learn to deride, scoff, mock and flout, to flatter and smooth; if you will learn to play the whore-master, the glutton, drunkard, or incestuous person; if you will learn to become proud, haughty and arrogant; and finally, if you will learn to contemn God and all His laws, to care neither for Heaven nor Hell, and to commit all kinds of sin and mischief, you need to go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.

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To see and be seen: from Dekker, The Gull’s Hornbook It is fit that he, whom the most tailors’ bills do make room for, when he comes should not be basely … cased up in a corner … let our gallant … presently advance himself up to the throne of the stage. I mean not into the lords’ room, which is now but the stage’s suburbs – no, those boxes, by the iniquity of custom, conspiracy of wailing-women and gentlemen-ushers that there sweat together, and the covetousness of sharers, are contemptibly thrust into the rear; and much new satin is there damned, by being smothered to death in darkness – but on the very rushes where the comedy is to dance, yea, and under the state of Cambyses himself, must our feathered ostrich, like a piece of ordnance, be planted valiantly, because impudently, beating down the mews and hisses of the opposed rascality.   For do but cast up a reckoning; what large comings-in, are pursed up by sitting on the stage? First a conspicuous eminence is gotten, by which means the best and most essential parts of a gallant (good clothes, a proportionable leg, white hand, the Persian lock and a tolerable beard) are perfectly revealed.   By sitting on the stage you have a signed patent to engross the whole commodity of censure, may lawfully presume to be a guider, and stand at the helm to steer the passage of scenes; yet no man shall once offer to hinder you from obtaining the title of an insolent overweening coxcomb.   By sitting on the stage you may, without travelling for it, at the very next door ask whose play it is… If you know not the author, you may rail against him, and peradventure so behave yourself, that you may enforce the author to know you.   By sitting on the stage, if you be a knight, you may happily get you a mistress; if a mere Fleet-street gentleman, a wife…   By sitting on the stage you may, with small cost, purchase the dear acquaintance of the boys; have a good stool for sixpence; at any time know what particular part any of the infants present; get your match lighted… Neither are you to be hunted from thence, though the scarecrows in the yard hoot at you, hiss at you, spit at you, yea throw dirt even in your teeth: ‘tis most gentlemanlike patience to endure all this and to laugh at the silly animals. But if the rabble with a full throat cry: ‘Away with the fool!’ you were worse than a madman to tarry by it; for the gentleman and the fool should never sit on the stage together.   Present not yourself on the stage, especially at a new play, until the quaking Prologue hath by rubbing got colour into his cheeks, and is ready to give the trumpets their cue that he is upon point to enter; for then it is time, as though you were one of the properties, or that you dropped out of the hangings, to creep from behind the arras, with your tripos or three-footed stool in one hand… ; for, if you should bestow your person upon the vulgar, when the belly of the house is but half full, your apparel is quite eaten up, the fashion lost…

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It crown shall you with rich commendation to laugh aloud in the midst of the most serious and saddest scene of the terrible tragedy; and to let that clapper, your tongue, be tossed so high that all the house may ring of it. Your lords use it; knights are apes to the lords, and do so too; your inn-a-court man is zany to the knights, and (many very scurvily) comes likewise limping after it. Be thou a beagle to them all, and never lie snuffing till you have scented them: for by talking and laughing, like a ploughman in a morris, you heap Pelion upon Ossa, glory upon glory. As first, all the eyes in the galleries will leave walking after the players, and only follow you; the simplest dolt in the house snatches up your name, and, when he meets you in the streets, or that you fall into his hands in the middle of a watch, his word shall be taken for you: he’ll cry ‘He’s such a gallant’, and you pass. Secondly, you publish your temperance to the world, in that you seem not to resort thither to taste vain pleasures with a hungry appetite, but only as a gentleman to spend a foolish hour or two, because you can do nothing else. Thirdly, you mightily disrelish the audience, and disgrace the author: marry, you [may]… enforce the poet to take pity of your weakness, and by some dedicated sonnet to bring you into a better paradise, only to stop your mouth.   Before the play begins, fall to cards; you may win or lose, as fencers do in a proze [match], and beat one another by confederacy, yet share the money when you meet at supper, Notwithstanding, to gull the ragamuffins that stand aloof gaping at you, throw the cards, having first torn four or five of them, round about the stage, just upon the third sound, as though you had lost. …   Now, sir; if the writer be a fellow that hath hath epigrammed you, or hath had a flirt at your mistress, or hath brought either your feather, or your red beard, your little legs, etc., on the stage; you shall disgrace him wors[t] … if, in the middle of his play, be it pastoral or comedy, moral or tragedy, you rise with screwed and discontented face from your stool to be gone No matter whether the scenes be good, or no; the better they are, the worse do you distaste them. And, being on your feet, sneak not away like a coward; but salute all your gentle acquaintance, that are spread either on the rushes, or on stools about you; and draw what troop you can from the stage after you.

(A Prince’s) Two Bodies The concept of these two bodies originates in the development in the early mediaeval period, in the light of discussion stemming from St Augustine’s The City of God, of a theology of kingship. It began to operate in England seriously in 1272 with the succession of Edward I, when England moved from, effectively, an elective monarchy to a hereditary throne. It is accompanied by a development of a ritual surrounding kingship (especially at coronation) which overtly borrows from religious ceremonial, and the mediaeval coronation rite is very similar to the ordination of a priest. The mysticism inherent in the idea of this second, political, body was partly a way to win support for primogeniture (the succession of the first born) – the body politic exists due to its being imbued with divine right – and any man who rules must be as a ruler above the simple concerns of the flesh, and rebellion against him is intolerable, as well as impossible. ‘The King can do no wrong’ is not a statement about the man, but about the man-in-the-office. Just so, the personal unworthiness of a priest does not invalidate the sacraments he dispenses. Edmund Plowden (1517–1584), a Catholic jurist who was ‘singularly well learned in the laws of England’, as William Camden characterised him), described this view of the crown: ‘For the King has in him two bodies, viz, a body natural, and a body politic. His body natural (if it be considered in itself) is a body moral, subject to all infirmities that come by nature or accident, to the imbecility of infancy or old age, and to the like defects that happen to the bodies of other people. But his body politic is a body that cannot be seen or handled, consisting of policy and government, and constituted for the direction of the people, and the management of the public weal, and this body is utterly void of infancy, and old age, and other natural defects and imbecilities, which the body natural is subject to, and for this cause, what the king does in his body politic cannot be invalidated or frustrated by any disability in his natural body’. (Les Comentaries ou Reportes de Edmunde Plowden,1571)

See: Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology, (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, repr. 1997) (to return to the main text please use the green button

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University Wits The commercial theatre, suddenly making a lot of money and with an insatiable demand for new plays, offered well-educated young men without visible means of support, or who wanted to avoid careers in the church or the law, a chance of making something of a living – just like the media today. Popular drama was radically transformed by these graduates who chose to write for the public stage, taking over native traditions – as Greene put it, ‘spen[ding] their wits in making playes’. They brought new coherence in structure, and real wit and poetic power to the language. Collectively known as the ‘University Wits’, though they did not always work together, and indeed quarrelled a lot, the most important were John Lyly, Thomas Lodge (c.1558–1625), Christopher Marlowe, Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele. They were distinctly sniffy about Johnny-come-latelies like Shakespeare, who came from outside the magic triangle of Oxford, Cambridge and the Inns of Court.

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Versification This is a very large topic, and there is not room here to go into it. What we can say is that a listening culture is much more alert to patterns of sound than a reading one, and thus will be aware of a structure developing while you are actually listening to it than we are – you would knowing you are going to get a 14 line sonnet, for example, as soon as Romeo and Juliet have spoken their first four lines when they meet for the first time. It is also a convention in the sixteenth century that the highest and most serious utterance is in verse.   The usual medium for English Renaissance drama is the blank verse line developed by Shakespeare and his contemporaries: unrhymed iambic pentameter – that is, five divisions (‘feet’) in each line, usually of iambs – a weak syllable followed by a stressed one – but capable of great variation for stress and emphasis. See: W. K. Wimsatt, Versification (1972); J. McAuley, Versification: A Short Introduction (1983); P. Kiparsky and G. Youmans, ed., Rhythm and Meter (1989)

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very small society: London held about 100,000 people, England as a whole about 2.5 million. We should recognise that in a town of 100,000, everyone who was anyone knew everyone else who was anyone. Writers all knew each other, and there was a very extensive network into which one slots, which has profound effects on how one write. The young Milton could have heard the learned Dr John Donne preach at St Paul’s before he went up to Cambridge, in which small university of only a few hundred scholars he must have met some of the best philosophical minds of his day, and he was there when George Herbert was Public Orator. One going down, he was drawn into the circle of Anne, countess of Derby, widow of Ferdinando Lord Strange, who had been patron of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in the 1590s, when Shakespeare was already with them, and in her circle had been Samuel Daniel and Edmund Spenser, and she was linked also to John Harington and his sister Lucy Countess of Bedford. In this context in-jokes, in-references, are to be expected. It would be extraordinary if they were not there.

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What is our life? What is our life? A play of passion, And what our mirth but music of division? Our mothers’ wombs the tiring houses be, Where we are drest for this short comedy. Heav’n the judicious sharp spectator is, Who sits and marks who here doth act amiss. The graves that hide us from the searching sun Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus playing post we to our latest rest, And then we die, in earnest, not in jest.

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Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1463–1494) was one of the most learned Florentines of his generation, and intimate with may of the greatest minds of his day, including the great Marsilio Ficino, the Neoplatonist philosopher. His stress in this Oration on the Dignity of Man on Man’s crucial place in the ladder of Creation, and his free will to fashion himself, is fundamental to Renaissance thinking about the self. Most esteemed Fathers, I have read in the ancient writings of the Arabians that Abdala the Saracen on being asked what, on this stage, so to say, of the world, seemed to him most evocative of wonder, replied that there was nothing to be seen more marvelous than man. And that celebrated exclamation of Hermes Trismegistus, ‘What a great miracle is man, Asclepius’ confirms this opinion. And still, as I reflected upon the basis assigned for these estimations, I was not fully persuaded by the diverse reasons advanced for the pre-eminence of human nature; that man is the intermediary between creatures, that he is the familiar of the gods above him as he is the lord of the beings beneath him; that, by the acuteness of his senses, the inquiry of his reason and the light of his intelligence, he is the interpreter of nature, set midway between the timeless unchanging and the flux of time; the living union (as the Persians say), the very marriage hymn of the world, and, by David’s testimony but little lower than the angels. These reasons are all, without question, of great weight; nevertheless, they do not touch the principal reasons, those, that is to say, which justify man’s unique right for such unbounded admiration. Why, I asked, should we not admire the angels themselves and the beatific choirs more? At long last, however, I feel that I have come to some understanding of why man is the most fortunate of living things and, consequently, deserving of all admiration; of what may be the condition in the hierarchy of beings assigned to him, which draws upon him the envy, not of the brutes alone, but of the astral beings and of the very intelligences which dwell beyond the confines of the world. A thing surpassing belief and smiting the soul with wonder. Still, how could it be otherwise? For it is on this ground that man is, with complete justice, considered and called a great miracle and a being worthy of all admiration. Hear then, oh Fathers, precisely what this condition of man is; and in the name of your humanity, grant me your benign audition as I pursue this theme. God the Father, the Mightiest Architect, had already raised, according to the precepts of His hidden wisdom, this world we see, the cosmic dwelling of divin-

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ity, a temple most august. He had already adorned the supercelestial region with Intelligences, infused the heavenly globes with the life of immortal souls and set the fermenting dung-heap of the inferior world teeming with every form of animal life. But when this work was done, the Divine Artificer still longed for some creature which might comprehend the meaning of so vast an achievement, which might be moved with love at its beauty and smitten with awe at its grandeur. When, consequently, all else had been completed (as both Moses and Timaeus testify), in the very last place, He bethought Himself of bringing forth man. Truth was, however, that there remained no archetype according to which He might fashion a new offspring, nor in His treasure-houses the wherewithal to endow a new son with a fitting inheritance, nor any place, among the seats of the universe, where this new creature might dispose himself to contemplate the world. All space was already filled; all things had been distributed in the highest, the middle and the lowest orders. Still, it was not in the nature of the power of the Father to fail in this last creative élan; nor was it in the nature of that supreme Wisdom to hesitate through lack of counsel in so crucial a matter; nor, finally, in the nature of His beneficent love to compel the creature destined to praise the divine generosity in all other things to find it wanting in himself. At last, the Supreme Maker decreed that this creature, to whom He could give nothing wholly his own, should have a share in the particular endowment of every other creature. Taking man, therefore, this creature of indeterminate image, He set him in the middle of the world and thus spoke to him: ‘We have given you, O Adam, no visage proper to yourself, nor endowment properly your own, in order that whatever place, whatever form, whatever gifts you may, with premeditation, select, these same you may have and possess through your own judgement and decision. The nature of all other creatures is defined and restricted within laws which We have laid down; you, by contrast, impeded by no such restrictions, may, by your own free will, to whose custody We have assigned you, trace for yourself the lineaments of your own nature. I have placed you at the very center of the world, so that from that vantage point you may with greater ease glance round about you on all that the world contains. We have made you a creature neither of heaven nor of earth, neither mortal nor immortal, in order that you may, as the free and proud shaper of your own being, fashion yourself in the form you may prefer. It will be in your power to descend to the lower, brutish forms of life; you will be able, through your own decision, to rise again to the superior orders whose life is divine.’ Oh unsurpassed generosity of God the Father, Oh wondrous and unsurpassable felicity of man, to whom it is granted to have what he chooses, to be what he wills

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to be! The brutes, from the moment of their birth, bring with them, as Lucilius says, ‘from their mother’s womb’ all that they will ever possess. The highest spiritual beings were, from the very moment of creation, or soon thereafter, fixed in the mode of being which would be theirs through measureless eternities. But upon man, at the moment of his creation, God bestowed seeds pregnant with all possibilities, the germs of every form of life. Whichever of these a man shall cultivate, the same will mature and bear fruit in him. If vegetative, he will become a plant; if sensual, he will become brutish; if rational, he will reveal himself a heavenly being; if intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, dissatisfied with the lot of all creatures, he should recollect himself into the center of his own unity, he will there become one spirit with God, in the solitary darkness of the Father, Who is set above all things, himself transcend all creatures. Who then will not look with awe upon this our chameleon, or who, at least, will look with greater admiration on any other being? This creature, man, whom Asclepius the Athenian, by reason of this very mutability, this nature capable of transforming itself, quite rightly said was symbolized in the mysteries by the figure of Proteus. This is the source of those metamorphoses, or transformations, so celebrated among the Hebrews and among the Pythagoreans; for even the esoteric theology of the Hebrews at times transforms the holy Enoch into that angel of divinity which is sometimes called malakh-ha-shekhinah [the Great Angel] and at other times transforms other personages into divinities of other names; while the Pythagoreans transform men guilty of crimes into brutes or even, if we are to believe Empedocles, into plants; and Mohammed, imitating them, was known frequently to say that the man who deserts the divine law becomes a brute. And he was right; for it is not the bark that makes the tree, but its insensitive and unresponsive nature; nor the hide which makes the beast of burden, but its brute and sensual soul; nor the orbicular form which makes the heavens, but their harmonious order. Finally, it is not freedom from a body, but its spiritual intelligence, which makes the angel. If you see a man dedicated to his stomach, crawling on the ground, you see a plant and not a man; or if you see a man bedazzled by the empty forms of the imagination, as by the wiles of Calypso, and through their alluring solicitations made a slave to his own senses, you see a brute and not a man. If, however, you see a philosopher, judging and distinguishing all things according to the rule of reason, him shall you hold in veneration, for he is a creature of heaven and not of earth; if, finally, a pure contemplator, unmindful of the body, wholly withdrawn into the inner chambers of the mind, here indeed is neither a creature of earth nor a heavenly creature, but some higher divinity, clothed in human flesh.

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Who then will not look with wonder upon man, upon man who, not without reason in the sacred Mosaic and Christian writings, is designated sometimes by the term ‘all flesh’’ and sometimes by the term ‘every creature,’ because he moulds, fashions and transforms himself into the likeness of all flesh and assumes the characteristic power of every form of life? This is why Evantes the Persian in his exposition of the Chaldean theology, writes that man has no inborn and proper semblance, but many which are extraneous and adventitious: whence the Chaldean saying: ‘Enosh hu shinnujim vekammah tebhaoth haj’ – ‘man is a living creature of varied, multiform and ever-changing nature.’ But what is the purpose of all this? That we may understand – since we have been born into this condition of being what we choose to be – that we ought to be sure above all else that it may never be said against us that, born to a high position, we failed to appreciate it, but fell instead to the estate of brutes and uncomprehending beasts of burden; and that the saying of Aspah the Prophet, ‘You are all Gods and sons of the Most High,’ might rather be true; and finally that we may not, through abuse of the generosity of a most indulgent Father, pervert the free option which he has given us from a saving to a damning gift. Let a certain saving ambition invade our souls so that, impatient of mediocrity, we pant after the highest things and (since, if we will, we can) bend all our efforts to their attainment. Let us disdain things of earth, hold as little worth even the astral orders and, putting behind us all the things of this world, hasten to that court beyond the world, closest to the most exalted Godhead. There, as the sacred mysteries tell us, the Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones occupy the first places; but, unable to yield to them, and impatient of any second place, let us emulate their dignity and glory. And, if we will it, we shall be inferior to them in nothing. How must we proceed and what must we do to realize this ambition? Let us observe what they do, what kind of life they lead. For if we lead this kind of life (and we can) we shall attain their same estate. The Seraphim burns with the fire of charity; from the Cherubim flashes forth the splendor of intelligence; the Thrones stand firm with the firmness of justice. If, consequently, in the pursuit of the active life we govern inferior things by just criteria, we shall be established in the firm position of the Thrones. If, freeing ourselves from active care, we devote our time to contemplation, meditating upon the Creator in His work, and the work in its Creator, we shall be resplendent with the light of the Cherubim. If we burn with love for the Creator only, his consuming fire will quickly transform us into the flaming likeness of the Seraphim. Above the Throne, that is, above the just judge, God sits, judge of the ages. Above the Cherub, that is, the contemplative spirit, He spreads His

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wings, nourishing him, as it were, with an enveloping warmth. For the spirit of the Lord moves upon the waters, those waters which are above the heavens and which, according to Job, praise the Lord in pre-aurorial hymns. Whoever is a Seraph, that is a lover, is in God and God is in him; even, it may be said, God and he are one. Great is the power of the Thrones, which we attain by right judgement, highest of all the sublimity of the Seraphim which we attain by loving. But how can anyone judge or love what he does not know? Moses loved the God whom he had seen and as judge of his people he administered what he had previously seen in contemplation on the mountain. Therefore the Cherub is the intermediary and by his light equally prepares us for the fire of the Seraphim and the judgement of the Thrones. This is the bond which unites the highest minds, the Palladian order which presides over contemplative philosophy; this is then the bond which before all else we must emulate, embrace and comprehend, whence we may be rapt to the heights of love or descend, well instructed and prepared, to the duties of the practical life. But certainly it is worth the effort, if we are to form our life on the model of the Cherubim, to have familiarly before our eyes both its nature and its quality as well as the duties and the functions proper to it. Since it is not granted to us, flesh as we are and knowledgeable only the things of earth, to attain such knowledge by our own efforts, let us have recourse to the ancient Fathers. They can give us the fullest and most reliable testimony concerning these matters because they had an almost domestic and connatural knowledge of them. Let us ask the Apostle Paul, that vessel of election, in what activity he saw the armies of the Cherubim engaged when he was rapt into the third heaven. He will answer, according to the interpretation of Dionysius, that he saw them first being purified, then illuminated, and finally made perfect. We, therefore, imitating the life of the Cherubim here on earth, by refraining the impulses of our passions through moral science, by dissipating the darkness of reason by dialectic – thus washing away, so to speak, the filth of ignorance and vice – may likewise purify our souls, so that the passions may never run rampant, nor reason, lacking restraint, range beyond its natural limits. Then may we suffuse our purified souls with the light of natural philosophy, bringing it to final perfection by the knowledge of divine things. Lest we be satisfied to consult only those of our own faith and tradition, let us also have recourse to the patriarch, Jacob, whose likeness, carved on the throne of glory, shines out before us. This wisest of the Fathers who though sleeping in the lower world, still has his eyes fixed on the world above, will admonish us. He will admonish, however, in a figure, for all things appeared in figures to the men of those times: a ladder rises by many rungs from earth to the height of heaven and at its

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summit sits the Lord, while over its rungs the contemplative angels move, alternately ascending and descending. If this is what we, who wish to imitate the angelic life, must do in our turn, who, I ask, would dare set muddied feet or soiled hands to the ladder of the Lord? It is forbidden, as the mysteries teach, for the impure to touch what is pure. But what are these hands, these feet, of which we speak? The feet, to be sure, of the soul: that is, its most despicable portion by which the soul is held fast to earth as a root to the ground; I mean to say, it alimentary and nutritive faculty where lust ferments and voluptuous softness is fostered. And why may we not call ``the hand’’ that irascible power of the soul, which is the warrior of the appetitive faculty, fighting for it and foraging for it in the dust and the sun, seizing for it all things which, sleeping in the shade, it will devour? Let us bathe in moral philosophy as in a living stream, these hands, that is, the whole sensual part in which the lusts of the body have their seat and which, as the saying is, holds the soul by the scruff of the neck, let us be flung back from that ladder as profane and polluted intruders. Even this, however, will not be enough, if we wish to be the companions of the angels who traverse the ladder of Jacob, unless we are first instructed and rendered able to advance on that ladder duly, step by step, at no point to stray from it and to complete the alternate ascensions and descents. When we shall have been so prepared by the art of discourse or of reason, then, inspired by the spirit of the Cherubim, exercising philosophy through all the rungs of the ladder – that is, of nature – we shall penetrate being from its center to its surface and from its surface to its center. At one time we shall descend, dismembering with titanic force the ‘unity’ of the ‘many’, like the members of Osiris; at another time, we shall ascend, recollecting those same members, by the power of Phoebus, into their original unity. Finally, in the bosom of the Father, who reigns above the ladder, we shall find perfection and peace in the felicity of theological knowledge. Let us also inquire of the just Job, who made his covenant with the God of life even before he entered into life, what, above all else, the supreme God desires of those tens of thousands of beings which surround Him. He will answer, without a doubt: peace, just as it is written in the pages of Job: He establishes peace in the high reaches of heaven. And since the middle order interprets the admonitions of the higher to the lower orders, the words of Job the theologian may well be interpreted for us by Empedocles the philosopher. Empedocles teaches us that there is in our souls a dual nature; the one bears us upwards toward the heavenly regions; by the other we are dragged downward toward regions infernal, through friendship and discord, war and peace; so witness those verses in which he laments that, torn by strife and discord, like a madman, in flight from the gods, he is driven into the depths of

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the sea. For it is a patent thing, O Fathers, that many forces strive within us, in grave, intestine warfare, worse than the civil wars of states. Equally clear is it that, if we are to overcome this warfare, if we are to establish that peace which must establish us finally among the exalted of God, philosophy alone can compose and allay that strife. In the first place, if our man seeks only truce with his enemies, moral philosophy will restrain the unreasoning drives of the protean brute, the passionate violence and wrath of the lion within us. If, acting on wiser counsel, we should seek to secure an unbroken peace, moral philosophy will still be at hand to fulfill our desires abundantly; and having slain either beast, like sacrificed sows, it will establish an inviolable compact of peace between the flesh and the spirit. Dialectic will compose the disorders of reason torn by anxiety and uncertainty amid the conflicting hordes of words and captious reasonings. Natural philosophy will reduce the conflict of opinions and the endless debates which from every side vex, distract and lacerate the disturbed mind. It will compose this conflict, however, in such a manner as to remind us that nature, as Heraclitus wrote, is generated by war and for this reason is called by Homer, ‘strife’. Natural philosophy, therefore, cannot assure us a true and unshakable peace. To bestow such peace is rather the privilege and office of the queen of the sciences, most holy theology. Natural philosophy will at best point out the way to theology and even accompany us along the path, while theology, seeing us from afar hastening to draw close to her, will call out: ‘Come unto me you who are spent in labor and I will restore you; come to me and I will give you the peace which the world and nature cannot give’. Summoned in such consoling tones and invited with such kindness, like earthly Mercuries, we shall fly on winged feet to embrace that most blessed mother and there enjoy the peace we have longed for: that most holy peace, that indivisible union, that seamless friendship through which all souls will not only be at one in that one mind which is above every mind, but, in a manner which passes expression, will really be one, in the most profound depths of being. This is the friendship which the Pythagoreans say is the purpose of all philosophy. This is the peace which God established in the high places of the heaven and which the angels, descending to earth, announced to men of good will, so that men, ascending through this peace to heaven, might become angels. This is the peace which we would wish for our friends, for our age, for every house into which we enter and for our own soul, that through this peace it may become the dwelling of God; so that, too, when the soul, by means of moral philosophy and dialectic shall have purged herself of her uncleanness, adorned herself with the disciplines of philosophy as with the raiment of a prince’s court and crowned the pediments of her doors with the garlands of theology, the King of Glory

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may descend and, coming with the Father, take up his abode with her. If she prove worthy of so great a guest, she will, through his boundless clemency, arrayed in the golden vesture of the many sciences as in a nuptial gown, receive him, not as a guest merely, but as a spouse. And rather than be parted from him, she will prefer to leave her own people and her father’s house. Forgetful of her very self she will desire to die to herself in order to live in her spouse, in whose eyes the death of his saints is infinitely precious: I mean that death – if the very plenitude of life can be called death – whose meditation wise men have always held to be the special study of philosophy. Let us also cite Moses himself, who is but little removed from the living wellspring of the most holy and ineffable understanding by whose nectar the angels are inebriated. Let us listen to the venerable judge as he enunciates his laws to us who live in the desert solitude of the body: ‘Let those who, still unclean, have need of moral philosophy, dwell with the peoples outside the tabernacles, under the open sky, until, like the priests of Thessaly, they shall have cleansed themselves. Those who have already brought order into their lives may be received into the tabernacle, but still may not touch the sacred vessels. Let them rather first, as zealous levites, in the service of dialectic, minister to the holy offices of philosophy. When they shall themselves be admitted to those offices, they may, as priests of philosophy, contemplate the many-colored throne of the higher God, that is the courtly palace of the star-hung heavens, the heavenly candelabrum aflame with seven lights and elements which are the furry veils of this tabernacle; so that, finally, having been permitted to enter, through the merit of sublime theology, into the innermost chambers of the temple, with no veil of images interposing itself, we may enjoy the glory of divinity’. This is what Moses beyond a doubt commands us, admonishing, urging and exhorting us to prepare ourselves, while we may, by means of philosophy, a road to future heavenly glory. In fact, however, the dignity of the liberal arts, which I am about to discuss, and their value to us is attested not only by the Mosaic and Christian mysteries but also by the theologies of the most ancient times. What else is to be understood by the stages through which the initiates must pass in the mysteries of the Greeks? These initiates, after being purified by the arts which we might call expiatory, moral philosophy and dialectic, were granted admission to the mysteries. What could such admission mean but the interpretation of occult nature by means of philosophy? Only after they had been prepared in this way did they receive Epopteia, that is, the immediate vision of divine things by the light of theology. Who would not long to be admitted to such mysteries? Who would not desire, putting all human concerns

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behind him, holding the goods of fortune in contempt and little minding the goods of the body, thus to become, while still a denizen of earth, a guest at the table of the gods, and, drunk with the nectar of eternity, receive, while still a mortal, the gift of immortality? Who would not wish to be so inspired by those Socratic frenzies which Plato sings in the Phaedrus that, swiftly fleeing this place, that is, this world fixed in evil, by the oars, so to say, both of feet and wings, he might reach the heavenly Jerusalem by the swiftest course? Let us be driven, O Fathers, by those Socratic frenzies which lift us to such ecstasy that our intellects and our very selves are united to God. And we shall be moved by them in this way as previously we have done all that it lies in us to do. If, by moral philosophy, the power of our passions shall have been restrained by proper controls so that they achieve harmonious accord; and if, by dialectic, our reason shall have progressed by an ordered advance, then, smitten by the frenzy of the Muses, we shall hear the heavenly harmony with the inward ears of the spirit. Then the leader of the Muses, Bacchus, revealing to us in our moments of philosophy, through his mysteries, that is, the visible signs of nature, the invisible things of God, will make us drunk with the richness of the house of God; and there, if, like Moses, we shall prove entirely faithful, most sacred theology will supervene to inspire us with redoubled ecstasy. For, raised to the most eminent height of theology, whence we shall be able to measure with the rod of indivisible eternity all things that are and that have been; and, grasping the primordial beauty of things, like the seers of Phoebus, we shall become the winged lovers of theology. And at last, smitten by the ineffable love as by a sting, and, like the Seraphim, filled with the godhead, we shall be, no longer ourselves, but the very One who made us. The sacred names of Apollo, to anyone who penetrates their meanings and the mysteries they conceal, clearly show that God is a philosopher no less than a seer; but since Ammonius has amply treated this theme, there is no occasion for me to expound it anew. Nevertheless, O Fathers, we cannot fail to recall those three Delphic precepts which are so very necessary for everyone about to enter the most holy and august temple, not of the false, but of the true Apollo who illumines every soul as it enters this world. You will see that they exhort us to nothing else but to embrace with all our powers this tripartite philosophy which we are now discussing. As a matter of fact that aphorism: meden agan, this is: ‘Nothing in excess’, duly prescribes a measure and rule for all the virtues through the concept of the ‘Mean’ of which moral philosophy treats. In like manner, that other aphorism gnothi seauton, that is, ‘Know thyself’, invites and exhorts us to the study of the whole nature of which the nature of man is the connecting link and the ‘mixed potion’; for he who knows himself knows all things in himself, as Zoroaster first and after him Plato, in the Alcibiades,

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wrote. Finally, enlightened by this knowledge, through the aid of natural philosophy, being already close to God, employing the theological salutation ei, that is ‘Thou art’, we shall blissfully address the true Apollo on intimate terms. Let us also seek the opinion of Pythagoras, that wisest of men, known as a wise man precisely because he never thought himself worthy of that name. His first precept to us will be: ‘Never sit on a bushel’; never, that is, through slothful inaction to lose our power of reason, that faculty by which the mind examines, judges and measures all things; but rather unremittingly by the rule and exercise of dialectic, to direct it and keep it agile. Next he will warn us of two things to be avoided at all costs: Neither to make water facing the sun, nor to cut our nails while offering sacrifice. Only when, by moral philosophy, we shall have evacuated the weakening appetites of our too-abundant pleasures and pared away, like nail clippings, the sharp points of anger and wrath in our souls, shall we finally begin to take part in the sacred rites, that is, the mysteries of Bacchus of which we have spoken and to dedicate ourselves to that contemplation of which the Sun is rightly called the father and the guide. Finally, Pythagoras will command us to ‘Feed the cock’; that is, to nourish the divine part of our soul with the knowledge of divine things as with substantial food and heavenly ambrosia. This is the cock whose visage is the lion, that is, all earthly power, holds in fear and awe. This is the cock to whom, as we read in Job, all understanding was given. At this cock’s crowing, erring man returns to his senses. This is the cock which every day, in the morning twilight, with the stars of morning, raises a Te Deum to heaven. This is the cock which Socrates, at the hour of his death, when he hoped he was about to join the divinity of his spirit to the divinity of the higher world and when he was already beyond danger of any bodily illness, said that he owed to Asclepius, that is, the healer of souls. Let us also pass in review the records of the Chaldeans; there we shall see (if they are to be believed) that the road to happiness, for mortals, lies through these same arts. The Chaldean interpreters write that it was a saying of Zoroaster that the soul is a winged creature. When her wings fall from her, she is plunged into the body; but when they grow strong again, she flies back to the supernal regions. And when his disciples asked him how they might insure that their souls might be well plumed and hence swift in flight he replied: ‘Water them well with the waters of life.’ And when they persisted, asking whence they might obtain these waters of life, he answered (as he was wont) in a parable: ‘The Paradise of God is bathed and watered by four rivers; from these same sources you may draw the waters which will save you. The name of the river which flows from the north is Pischon which means, “the Right”. That which flows from the west is Gichon, that is, “Expiation”. The river

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flowing from the east is named Chiddekel, that is, “Light”, while that, finally, from the south is Perath, which may be understood as “Compassion”’. Consider carefully and with full attention, O Fathers, what these deliverances of Zoroaster might mean. Obviously, they can only mean that we should, by moral science, as by western waves, wash the uncleanness from our eyes; that, by dialectic, as by a reading taken by the northern star, our gaze must be aligned with the right. Then, that we should become accustomed to bear, in the contemplation of nature, the still feeble light of truth, like the first rays of the rising sun, so that finally we may, through theological piety and the most holy cult of God, become able, like the eagles of heaven, to bear the effulgent splendor of the noonday sun. These are, perhaps, those ‘morning, midday and evening thoughts’ which David first celebrated and on which St. Augustine later expatiated. This is the noonday light which inflames the Seraphim toward their goal and equally illuminates the Cherubim. This is the promised land toward which our ancient father Abraham was ever advancing; this the region where, as the teachings of the Cabalists and the Moors tell us, there is no place for unclean spirits. And if we may be permitted, even in the form of a riddle, to say anything publicly about the deeper mysteries: since the precipitous fall of man has left his mind in a vertiginous whirl and since according to Jeremiah, death has come in through the windows to infect our hearts and bowels with evil, let us call upon Raphael, the heavenly healer that by moral philosophy and dialectic, as with healing drugs, he may release us. When we shall have been restored to health, Gabriel, the strength of God, will abide in us. Leading us through the marvels of nature and pointing out to us everywhere the power and the goodness of God, he will deliver us finally to the care of the High Priest Michael. He, in turn, will adorn those who have successfully completed their service to philosophy with the priesthood of theology as with a crown of precious stones. These are the reasons, most reverend Fathers, which not only led, but even compelled me, to the study of philosophy. And I should not have undertaken to expound them, except to reply to those who are wont to condemn the study of philosophy, especially among men of high rank, but also among those of modest station. For the whole study of philosophy (such is the unhappy plight of our time) is occasion for contempt and contumely, rather than honor and glory. The deadly and monstrous persuasion has invaded practically all minds, that philosophy ought not to be studied at all or by very few people; as though it were a thing of little worth to have before our eyes and at our finger-tips, as matters we have searched out with greatest care, the causes of things, the ways of nature and the plan of the universe, God’s counsels and the mysteries of heaven and earth, unless by such knowledge on might procure

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some profit or favor for oneself. Thus we have reached the point, it is painful to recognize, where the only persons accounted wise are those who can reduce the pursuit of wisdom to a profitable traffic; and chaste Pallas, who dwells among men only by the generosity of the gods, is rejected, hooted, whistled at in scorn, with no one to love or befriend her unless, by prostituting herself, she is able to pay back into the strongbox of her lover the ill-procured price of her deflowered virginity. I address all these complaints, with the greatest regret and indignation, not against the princes of our times, but against the philosophers who believe and assert that philosophy should not be pursued because no monetary value or reward is assigned it, unmindful that by this sign they disqualify themselves as philosophers. Since their whole life is concentrated on gain and ambition, they never embrace the knowledge of the truth for its own sake. This much will I say for myself – and on this point I do not blush for praising myself – that I have never philosophized save for the sake of philosophy, nor have I ever desired or hoped to secure from my studies and my laborious researches any profit or fruit save cultivation of mind and knowledge of the truth – things I esteem more and more with the passage of time. I have also been so avid for this knowledge and so enamored of it that I have set aside all private and public concerns to devote myself completely to contemplation; and from it no calumny of jealous persons, nor any invective from enemies of wisdom has ever been able to detach me. Philosophy has taught me to rely on my own convictions rather than on the judgements of others and to concern myself less with whether I am well thought of than whether what I do or say is evil. I was not unaware, most revered Fathers, that this present disputation of mine would be as acceptable and as pleasing to you, who favor all the good arts and who have consented to grace it with your presence, as it would be irritating and offensive to many others. I am also aware that there is no dearth of those who have condemned my undertaking before this and continue to do so on a number of grounds. But this has always been the case: works which are well-intentioned and sincerely directed to virtue have always had no fewer – not to say more – detractors than those undertaken for questionable motives and for devious ends. Some persons disapprove the present type of disputation in general and this method of disputing in public about learned matters; they assert that they serve only the exhibition of talent and the display of opinion, rather than the increase of learning. Others do not disapprove this type of exercise, but resent the fact that at my age, a mere twenty-four years, I have dared to propose a disputation concerning the most subtle mysteries of Christian theology, the most debated points of philosophy and unfamiliar branches of learning; and that I have done so here, in this most renowned of cities, before a large assembly of very

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learned men, in the presence of the Apostolic Senate. Still others have ceded my right so to dispute, but have not conceded that I might dispute nine hundred theses, asserting that such a project is superfluous, over-ambitious and beyond my powers. I should have acceded to these objections willingly and immediately, if the philosophy which I profess had so counseled me. Nor should I now undertake to reply to them, as my philosophy urges me to do, if I believed that this disputation between us were undertaken for purposes of mere altercation and litigation. Therefore, let all intention of denigration and exasperation be purged from our minds and with it that malice which, as Plato writes, is never present in the angelic choirs. Let us amicably decide whether it be admissible for me to proceed with my disputation and whether I should venture so large a number of questions. I shall not, in the first place, have much to say against those who disapprove this type of public disputation. It is a crime, – if it be a crime – which I share with all you, most excellent doctors, who have engaged in such exercises on many occasions to the enhancement of your reputations, as well as with Plato and Aristotle and all the most esteemed philosophers of every age. These philosophers of the past all thought that nothing could profit them more in their search for wisdom than frequent participation in public disputation. Just as the powers of the body are made stronger through gymnastic, the powers of the mind grow in strength and vigor in this arena of learning. I am inclined to believe that the poets, when they sang of the arms of Pallas and the Hebrews, when they called the barzel, that is, the sword, the symbol of men of wisdom, could have meant nothing by these symbols but this type of contest, at once so necessary and so honorable for the acquisition of knowledge. This may also be the reason why the Chaldeans, at the birth of a man destined to be a philosopher, described a horoscope in which Mars confronted Mercury from three distinct angles. This is as much as to say that should these assemblies and these contests be abandoned, all philosophy would become sluggish and dormant. It is more difficult for me, however, to find a line of defence against those who tell me that I am unequal to the undertaking. If I say that I am equal to it, I shall appear to entertain an immodestly high opinion of myself. If I admit that I am unequal to it, while persisting in it, I shall certainly risk being called temerarious and imprudent. You see the difficulties into which I have fallen, the position in which I am placed. I cannot, without censure, promise something about myself, nor, without equal censure, fail in what I promise. Perhaps I can invoke that saying of Job: ‘The spirit is in all men’ or take consolation in what was said to Timothy: ‘Let no man despise your youth’. But to speak from my own conscience, I might say with greater truth that there is nothing singular about me. I admit that I am devoted to study and eager in

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the pursuit of the good arts. Nevertheless, I do not assume nor arrogate to myself the title learned. If, consequently, I have taken such a great burden on my shoulders, it is not because I am ignorant of my own weaknesses. Rather, it is because I understand that in this kind of learned contest the real victory lies in being vanquished. Even the weakest, consequently, ought not to shun them, but should seek them out, as well they may. For the one who is bested receives from his conqueror, not an injury but a benefit; he returns to his house richer than he left, that is, more learned and better armed for future contests. Inspired by such hope, though myself but a weak soldier, I have not been afraid to enter so dangerous a contest even against the very strongest and vigorous opponents. Whether, in doing so, I have acted foolishly or not might better be judged from the outcome of the contest than from my age. I must, in the third place, answer those who are scandalized by the large number of propositions and the variety of topics I have proposed for disputation, as though the burden, however great it may be, rested on their shoulders and not, as it does, on mine. Surely it is unbecoming and captious to want to set limits to another’s efforts and, as Cicero says, to desire mediocrity in those things in which the rule should be: the more the better. In undertaking so great a venture only one alternative confronted me: success or failure. If I should succeed, I do not see how it would be more praiseworthy to succeed in defending ten theses than in defending nine hundred. If I should fail, those who hate me will have grounds for disparagement, while those who love me will have an occasion to excuse me. In so large and important an undertaking it would seem that a young man who fails through weakness of talent or want of learning deserves indulgence rather than censure. For as the poet says, if powers fail, there shall be praise for daring; and in great undertaking, to have willed is enough. In our own day, many scholars, imitating Gorgias of Leontini, have been accustomed to dispute, not nine hundred questions merely, but the whole range of questions concerning all the arts and have been praised for it. Why should not I, then, without incurring criticism, be permitted to discuss a large number of questions indeed, but questions which are clear and determined in their scope? They reply, this is superfluous and ambitious. I protest that, in my case, no superfluity is involved, but that all is necessary. If they consider the method of my philosophy they will feel compelled, even against their inclinations, to recognize this necessity. All those who attach themselves to one or another of the philosophers, to Thomas, for instance or Scotus, who at present enjoy the widest following, can indeed test their doctrine in a discussion of a few questions. By contrast, I have so trained myself that, committed to the teachings of no one man, I have ranged through all the masters of philosophy,

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examined all their works, become acquainted with all schools. As a consequence, I have had to introduce all of them into the discussion lest, defending a doctrine peculiar to one, I might seem committed to it and thus to deprecate the rest. While a few of the theses proposed concern individual philosophers, it was inevitable that a great number should concern all of them together. Nor should anyone condemn me on the grounds that ‘wherever the storm blows me, there I remain as a guest’. For it was a rule among the ancients, in the case of all writers, never to leave unread any commentaries which might be available. Aristotle observed this rule so carefully that Plato called him: auagnooies, that is, ‘the reader’. It is certainly a mark of excessive narrowness of mind to enclose oneself within one Porch or Academy; nor can anyone reasonably attach himself to one school or philosopher, unless he has previously become familiar with them all. In addition, there is in each school some distinctive characteristic which it does not share with any other. To begin with the men of our own faith to whom philosophy came last, there is in Duns Scotus both vigour and distinction, in Thomas [Aquinas] solidity and sense of balance, in Egidius [of Rome], lucidity and precision, in Francis, depth and acuteness, in Albertus [Magnus] a sense of ultimate issues, all-embracing and grand, in Henry, as it has seemed to me, always an element of sublimity which inspires reverence. Among the Arabians, there is in Averroës something solid and unshaken, in Avempace, as in Al-Farabi, something serious and deeply meditated; in Avicenna, something divine and platonic. Among the Greeks philosophy was always brilliant and, among the earliest, even chaste: in Simplicius it is rich and abundant, in Themistius elegant and compendious, in Alexander, learned and self-consistent, in Theophrastus, worked out with great reflection, in Ammonius, smooth and pleasing. If you turn to the Platonists, to mention but a few, you will, in Porphyry, be delighted by the wealth of matter and by his preoccupation with many aspects of religion; in Iamblichus, you will be awed by his knowledge of occult philosophy and the mysteries of the barbarian peoples; in Plotinus, you will find it impossible to single out one thing for admiration, because he is admirable under every aspect. Platonists themselves, sweating over his pages, understand him only with the greatest difficulty when, in his oblique style, he teaches divinely about divine things and far more than humanly about things human. I shall pass over the more recent figures, Proclus, and those others who derive from him, Damacius, Olympiodorus and many more in whom that to theion, that is, that divine something which is the special mark of the Platonists, always shines out. It should be added that any school which attacks the more established truths and by clever slander ridicules the valid arguments of reason confirms, rather than weak

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ens, the truth itself, which, like embers, is fanned to life, rather than extinguished by stirring. These considerations have motivated me in my determination to bring to men’s attention the opinions of all schools rather than the doctrine of some one or other (as some might have preferred), for it seems to me that by the confrontation of many schools and the discussion of many philosophical systems that ‘effulgence of truth’ of which Plato writes in his letters might illuminate our minds more clearly, like the sun rising from the sea. What should have been our plight had only the philosophical thought of the Latin authors, that is, Albert, Thomas, Scotus, Egidius, Francis and Henry, been discussed, while that of the Greeks and the Arabs was passed over, since all the thought of the barbarian nations was inherited by the Greeks and from the Greeks came down to us? For this reason, our thinkers have always been satisfied, in the field of philosophy, to rest on the discoveries of foreigners and simply to perfect the work of others. What profit would have derived from discussing natural philosophy with the Peripatetics, if the Academy of the Platonists had not also participated in the exchange, for the doctrine of the latter, even when it touched on divine matters, has always (as St. Augustine bears witness) been esteemed the most elevated of all philosophies? And this in turn has been the reason why I have, for the first time after many centuries of neglect (and there is nothing invidious in my saying so) brought it forth again for public examination and discussion. And what would it have profited us if, having discussed the opinions of innumerable others, like asymboli, at the banquet of wise men, we should contribute nothing of our own, nothing conceived and elaborated in our own mind? Indeed, it is the characteristic of the impotent (as Seneca writes) to have their knowledge all written down in their note-books, as though the discoveries of those who preceded us had closed the path to our own efforts, as though the power of nature had become effete in us and could bring forth nothing which, if it could not demonstrate the truth, might at least point to it from afar. The farmer hates sterility in his field and the husband deplores it in his wife; even more then must the divine mind hate the sterile mind with which it is joined and associated, because it hopes from that source to have offspring of such a high nature. For these reasons, I have not been content to repeat well-worn doctrines, but have proposed for disputation many points of the early theology of Hermes Trismegistus, many theses drawn from the teachings of the Chaldeans and the Pythagoreans, from the occult mysteries of the Hebrews and, finally, a considerable number of propositions concerning both nature and God which we ourselves have discovered and worked out. In the first place, we have proposed a harmony between Plato and Aristotle, such as many before this time indeed believed to exist but which no one has satisfactorily

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established. Boethius, among Latin writers, promised to compose such a harmony, but he never carried his proposal to completion. St. Augustine also writes, in his Contra Academicos, that many others tried to prove the same thing, that is, that the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle were identical, and by the most subtle arguments. For example, John the Grammarian held that Aristotle differed from Plato only for those who did not grasp Plato’s thought; but he left it to posterity to proveit. We have, in addition, adduced a great number of passages in which Scotus and Thomas, and others in which Averroës and Avicenna, have heretofore been thought to disagree, but which I assert are in harmony with one another. In the second place, along with my own reflections on and developments of both the Aristotelian and the Platonic philosophies, I have adduced seventy-two theses in physics and metaphysics. If I am not mistaken (and this will become clearer in the course of the proposed disputation) anyone subscribing to these theses will be able to resolve any question proposed to him in natural philosophy or theology on a principle quite other than that taught us in the philosophy which is at present to be learned in the schools and is taught by the masters of the present generation. Nor ought anyone to be surprised, that in my early years, at a tender age at which I should hardly be permitted to read the writings of others (as some have insinuated) I should wish to propose a new philosophy. They ought rather to praise this new philosophy, if it is well defended, or reject it, if it is refuted. Finally, since it will be their task to judge my discoveries and my scholarship, they ought to look to the merit or demerit of these and not to the age of their author. I have, in addition, introduced a new method of philosophizing on the basis of numbers. This method is, in fact, very old, for it was cultivated by the ancient theologians, by Pythagoras, in the first place, but also by Aglaophamos, Philolaus and Plato, as well as by the earliest Platonists; however, like other illustrious achievements of the past, it has through lack of interest on the part of succeeding generations, fallen into such desuetude, that hardly any vestiges of it are to be found. Plato writes in Epinomis that among all the liberal arts and contemplative sciences, the science of number is supreme and most divine. And in another place, asking why man is the wisest of animals, he replies, because he knows how to count. Similarly, Aristotle, in his Problems repeats this opinion. Abumasar writes that it was a favorite saying of Avenzoar of Babylon that the man who knows how to count, knows everything else as well. These opinions are certainly devoid of any truth if by the art of number they intend that art in which today merchants excel all other men; Plato adds his testimony to this view, admonishing us emphatically not to confuse this divine arithmetic with the arithmetic of the merchants. When, consequently, after long nights of study

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I seemed to myself to have thoroughly penetrated this Arithmetic, which is thus so highly extolled, I promised myself that in order to test the matter, I would try to solve by means of this method of number seventy-four questions which are considered, by common consent, among the most important in physics and divinity. I have also proposed certain theses concerning magic, in which I have indicated that magic has two forms. One consists wholly in the operations and powers of demons, and consequently this appears to me, as God is my witness, an execrable and monstrous thing. The other proves, when thoroughly investigated, to be nothing else but the highest realization of natural philosophy. The Greeks noted both these forms. However, because they considered the first form wholly undeserving the name magic they called it goeteia, reserving the term mageia, to the second, and understanding by it the highest and most perfect wisdom. The term magus in the Persian tongue, according to Porphyry, means the same as ‘interpreter’ and ‘worshipper of the divine’ in our language. Moreover, Fathers, the disparity and dissimilarity between these arts is the greatest that can be imagined. Not the Christian religion alone, but all legal codes and every well-governed commonwealth execrates and condemns the first; the second, by contrast, is approved and embraced by all wise men and by all peoples solicitous of heavenly and divine things. The first is the most deceitful of arts; the second, a higher and holier philosophy. The former is vain and disappointing; the later, firm, solid and satisfying. The practitioner of the first always tries to conceal his addiction, because it always rebounds to shame and reproach, while the cultivation of the second, both in antiquity and at almost all periods, has been the source of the highest renown and glory in the field of learning. No philosopher of any worth, eager in pursuit of the good arts, was ever a student of the former, but to learn the latter, Pythagoras, Empedocles, Plato and Democritus crossed the seas. Returning to their homes, they, in turn, taught it to others and considered it a treasure to be closely guarded. The former, since it is supported by no true arguments, is defended by no writers of reputation; the latter, honored, as it were, in its illustrious progenitors, counts two principal authors: Zamolxis, who was imitated by Abaris the Hyperborean, and Zoroaster; not, indeed, the Zoroaster who may immediately come to your minds, but that other Zoroaster, the son of Oromasius. If we should ask Plato the nature of each of these forms of magic, he will respond in the Alcibiades that the magic of Zoroaster is nothing else than that science of divine things in which the kings of the Persians had their sons educated to that they might learn to rule their commonwealth on the pattern of the commonwealth of the universe. In the Charmides he will answer that the magic of Zamolxis is the medicine of the soul, because it brings temperance to the soul

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as medicine brings health to the body. Later Charondas, Damigeron, Apollonius, Osthanes and Dardanus continued in their footsteps, as did Homer, of whom we shall sometime prove, in a ‘poetic theology’ we propose to write, that he concealed this doctrine, symbolically, in the wanderings of his Ulysses, just as he did all other learned doctrines. They were also followed by Eudoxus and Hermippus, as well as by practically all those who studied the Pythagorean and Platonic mysteries. Of later philosophers, I find that three had ferreted it out: the Arabian, Al-Kindi, Roger Bacon, and William of Paris. Plotinus also gives signs that he was aware of it in the passage in which he shows that the magician is the minister of nature and not merely its artful imitator. This very wise man approves and maintains this magic, while so abhorring that other that once, when he was invited to to take part in rites of evil spirits, he said that they ought rather to come to him, than he to go to them; and he spoke well. Just as that first form of magic makes man a slave and pawn of evil powers, the latter makes him their lord and master. That first form of magic cannot justify any claim to profound contemplation of the deepest secrets of things and finally the knowledge of the whole of nature. This beneficent magic, in calling forth, as it were, from their hiding places into the light the powers which the largess of God has sown and planted in the world, does not itself work miracles, so much as sedulously serve nature as she works her wonders. Scrutinizing, with greater penetration, that harmony of the universe which the Greeks with greater aptness of terms called sympatheia and grasping the mutual affinity of things, she applies to each thing those inducements most suited to its nature. Thus it draws forth into public notice the miracles which lie hidden in the recesses of the world, in the womb of nature, in the storehouses and secret vaults of God, as though she herself were their artificer. As the farmer weds his elms to the vines, so the ‘magus’ unites earth to heaven, that is, the lower orders to the endowments and powers of the higher. Hence it is that this latter magic appears the more divine and salutary, as the former presents a monstrous and destructive visage. But the deepest reason for the difference is the fact that that first magic, delivering man over to the enemies of God, alienates him from God, while the second, beneficent magic, excites in him an admiration for the works of God which flowers naturally into charity, faith and hope. For nothing so surely impels us to the worship of God than the assiduous contemplation of His miracles and when, by means of this natural magic, we shall have examined these wonders more deeply, we shall more ardently be moved to love and worship Him in his works, until finally we shall be compelled to burst into song: ‘The heavens, all of the earth, is filled with the majesty of your glory’. But enough about magic. I have been led to say even this much because I know that there are many persons who condemn

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and hate it, because they do not understand it, just as dogs always bay at strangers. I come now to those matters which I have drawn from the ancient mysteries of the Hebrews and here adduce in confirmation of the inviolable Catholic faith. Lest these matters be thought, by those to whom they are unfamiliar, bubbles of the imagination and tales of charlatans, I want everyone to understand what they are and what their true character is; whence they are drawn and who are the illustrious writers who testifying to them; how mysterious they are, and divine and necessary to men of our faith for the propagation of our religion in the face of the persistent calumnies of the Hebrews. Not famous Hebrew teachers alone, but, from among those of our own persuasion, Esdras, Hilary and Origen all write that Moses, in addition to the law of the five books which he handed down to posterity, when on the mount, received from God a more secret and true explanation of the law. They also say that God commanded Moses to make the law known to the people, but not to write down its interpretation or to divulge it, but to communicate it only to Jesu Nave who, in turn, was to reveal it to succeeding high priests under a strict obligation of silence. It was enough to indicate, through simple historical narrative, the power of God, his wrath against the unjust, his mercy toward the good, his justice toward all and to educate the people, by divine and salutary commands, to live well and blessedly and to worship in the true religion. Openly to reveal to the people the hidden mysteries and the secret intentions of the highest divinity, which lay concealed under the hard shell of the law and the rough vesture of language, what else could this be but to throw holy things to dogs and to strew gems among swine? The decision, consequently, to keep such things hidden from the vulgar and to communicate them only to the initiate, among whom alone, as Paul says, wisdom speaks, was not a counsel of human prudence but a divine command. And the philosophers of antiquity scrupulously observed this caution. Pythagoras wrote nothing but a few trifles which he confided to his daughter Dama, on his deathbed. The Sphinxes, which are carved on the temples of the Egyptians, warned that the mystic doctrines must be kept inviolate from the profane multitude by means of riddles. Plato, writing certain things to Dionysius concerning the highest substances, explained that he had to write in riddles ``lest the letter fall into other hands and others come to know the things I have intended for you.’’ Aristotle used to say that the books of the Metaphysics in which he treats of divine matters were both published and unpublished. Is there any need for further instances? Origen asserts that Jesus Christ, the Teacher of Life, revealed many things to His disciples which they in turn were unwilling to commit to writing lest they become the common possession of the crowd. Dionysius the Areopagite gives powerful confirmation to this assertion when he writes that the more secret myster-

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ies were transmitted by the founders of our religion ek nou eis vouv dia mesov logov, that is, from mind to mind, without commitment to writing, through the medium of the spoken word alone. Because the true interpretation of the law given to Moses was, by God’s command, revealed in almost precisely this way, it was called ‘Cabala’, which in Hebrew means the same as our word ‘reception’. The precise point is, of course, that the doctrine was received by one man from another not through written documents but, as a hereditary right, through a regular succession of revelations. After Cyrus had delivered the Hebrews from the Babylonian captivity, and the Temple had been restored under Zorobabel, the Hebrews bethought themselves of restoring the Law. Esdras, who was head of the church [sic!] at the time, amended the book of Moses. He readily realized, moreover, that because of the exiles, the massacres, the flights and the captivity of the people of Israel, the practice established by the ancients of handing down the doctrines by word of mouth could not be maintained. Unless they were committed to writing, the heavenly teachings divinely handed down must inevitably perish, for the memory of them would not long endure. He decided, consequently, that all of the wise men still alive should be convened and that each should communicate to the convention all that he remembered about the mysteries of the Law. Their communications were then to be collected by scribes into seventy volumes (approximately the same number as there were members of the Sanhedrin). So that you need not accept my testimony alone, O Fathers, hear Esdras himself speaking: ‘After forty days had passed, the All-Highest spoke and said: The first things which you wrote publish openly so that the worthy and unworthy alike may read; but the last seventy books conserve so that you may hand them on to the wise men among your people, for in these reside the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom and the river of knowledge. And I did these things’. These are the very words of Esdras. These are the books of cabalistic wisdom. In these books, as Esdras unmistakably states, resides the springs of understanding, that is, the ineffable theology of the supersubstantial deity; the fountain of wisdom, that is, the precise metaphysical doctrine concerning intelligible and angelic forms; and the stream of wisdom, that is, the best established philosophy concerning nature. Pope Sixtus the Fourth, the immediate predecessor of our present pope, Innocent the Eight, under whose happy reign we are living, took all possible measures to ensure that these books would be translated into Latin for the public benefit of our faith and at the time of his death, three of them had already appeared. The Hebrews hold these same books in such reverence that no one under forty years of age is permitted even to touch them. I acquired these books at considerable expense and, reading them from beginning to end with the greatest attention and with unrelenting toil, I discovered in them (as

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being either an art or a science while the latter, filled as it is with mysteries, embraces the most profound contemplation of the deepest secrets of things and finally the knowledge of the whole of nature. This beneficent magic, in calling forth, as it were, from their hiding places into the light the powers which the largess of God has sown and planted in the world, does not itself work miracles, so much as sedulously serve nature as she works her wonders. Scrutinizing, with greater penetration, that harmony of the universe which the Greeks with greater aptness of terms called sympatheia and grasping the mutual affinity of things, she applies to each thing those inducements most suited to its nature. Thus it draws forth into public notice the miracles which lie hidden in the recesses of the world, in the womb of nature, in the storehouses and secret vaults of God, as though she herself were their artificer. As the farmer weds his elms to the vines, so the ‘magus’ unites earth to heaven, that is, the lower orders to the endowments and powers of the higher. Hence it is that this latter magic appears the more divine and salutary, as the former presents a monstrous and destructive visage. But the deepest reason for the difference is the fact that that first magic, delivering man over to the enemies of God, alienates him from God, while the second, beneficent magic, excites in him an admiration for the works of God which flowers naturally into charity, faith and hope. For nothing so surely impels us to the worship of God than the assiduous contemplation of His miracles and when, by means of this natural magic, we shall have examined these wonders more deeply, we shall more ardently be moved to love and worship Him in his works, until finally we shall be compelled to burst into song: ‘The heavens, all of the earth, is filled with the majesty of your glory’. But enough about magic. I have been led to say even this much because I know that there are many persons who condemn and hate it, because they do not understand it, just as dogs always bay at strangers. I come now to those matters which I have drawn from the ancient mysteries of the Hebrews and here adduce in confirmation of the inviolable Catholic faith. Lest these matters be thought, by those to whom they are unfamiliar, bubbles of the imagination and tales of charlatans, I want everyone to understand what they are and what their true character is; whence they are drawn and who are the illustrious writers who testifying to them; how mysterious they are, and divine and necessary to men of our faith for the propagation of our religion in the face of the persistent calumnies of the Hebrews. Not famous Hebrew teachers alone, but, from among those of our own persuasion, Esdras, Hilary and Origen all write that Moses, in addition to the law of the five books which he handed down to posterity, when on the mount, received from God a more secret and true explanation of the law. They also say that God commanded Moses to make the law known to the people, but not to write down its

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interpretation or to divulge it, but to communicate it only to Jesu Nave who, in turn, was to reveal it to succeeding high priests under a strict obligation of silence. It was enough to indicate, through simple historical narrative, the power of God, his wrath against the unjust, his mercy toward the good, his justice toward all and to educate the people, by divine and salutary commands, to live well and blessedly and to worship in the true religion. Openly to reveal to the people the hidden mysteries and the secret intentions of the highest divinity, which lay concealed under the hard shell of the law and the rough vesture of language, what else could this be but to throw holy things to dogs and to strew gems among swine? The decision, consequently, to keep such things hidden from the vulgar and to communicate them only to the initiate, among whom alone, as Paul says, wisdom speaks, was not a counsel of human prudence but a divine command. And the philosophers of antiquity scrupulously observed this caution. Pythagoras wrote nothing but a few trifles which he confided to his daughter Dama, on his deathbed. The Sphinxes, which are carved on the temples of the Egyptians, warned that the mystic doctrines must be kept inviolate from the profane multitude by means of riddles. Plato, writing certain things to Dionysius concerning the highest substances, explained that he had to write in riddles ``lest the letter fall into other hands and others come to know the things I have intended for you.’’ Aristotle used to say that the books of the Metaphysics in which he treats of divine matters were both published and unpublished. Is there any need for further instances? Origen asserts that Jesus Christ, the Teacher of Life, revealed many things to His disciples which they in turn were unwilling to commit to writing lest they become the common possession of the crowd. Dionysius the Areopagite gives powerful confirmation to this assertion when he writes that the more secret mysteries were transmitted by the founders of our religion ek nou eis vouv dia mesov logov, that is, from mind to mind, without commitment to writing, through the medium of the spoken word alone. Because the true interpretation of the law given to Moses was, by God’s command, revealed in almost precisely this way, it was called ‘Cabala’, which in Hebrew means the same as our word ‘reception’. The precise point is, of course, that the doctrine was received by one man from another not through written documents but, as a hereditary right, through a regular succession of revelations. After Cyrus had delivered the Hebrews from the Babylonian captivity, and the Temple had been restored under Zorobabel, the Hebrews bethought themselves of restoring the Law. Esdras, who was head of the church [sic!] at the time, amended the book of Moses. He readily realized, moreover, that because of the exiles, the massacres, the flights and the captivity of the people of Israel, the practice established by the ancients of handing down the doctrines by word of mouth could not be

continued ►

maintained. Unless they were committed to writing, the heavenly teachings divinely handed down must inevitably perish, for the memory of them would not long endure. He decided, consequently, that all of the wise men still alive should be convened and that each should communicate to the convention all that he remembered about the mysteries of the Law. Their communications were then to be collected by scribes into seventy volumes (approximately the same number as there were members of the Sanhedrin). So that you need not accept my testimony alone, O Fathers, hear Esdras himself speaking: ‘After forty days had passed, the All-Highest spoke and said: The first things which you wrote publish openly so that the worthy and unworthy alike may read; but the last seventy books conserve so that you may hand them on to the wise men among your people, for in these reside the spring of understanding, the fountain of wisdom and the river of knowledge. And I did these things’. These are the very words of Esdras. These are the books of cabalistic wisdom. In these books, as Esdras unmistakably states, resides the springs of understanding, that is, the ineffable theology of the supersubstantial deity; the fountain of wisdom, that is, the precise metaphysical doctrine concerning intelligible and angelic forms; and the stream of wisdom, that is, the best established philosophy concerning nature. Pope Sixtus the Fourth, the immediate predecessor of our present pope, Innocent the Eight, under whose happy reign we are living, took all possible measures to ensure that these books would be translated into Latin for the public benefit of our faith and at the time of his death, three of them had already appeared. The Hebrews hold these same books in such reverence that no one under forty years of age is permitted even to touch them. I acquired these books at considerable expense and, reading them from beginning to end with the greatest attention and with unrelenting toil, I discovered in them (as God is my witness) not so much the Mosaic as the Christian religion. There was to be found the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Word, the divinity of the Messiah; there one might also read of original sin, of its expiation by the Christ, of the heavenly Jerusalem, of the fall of the demons, of the orders of the angels, of the pains of purgatory and of hell. There I read the same things which we read every day in the pages of Paul and of Dionysius, Jerome and Augustine. In philosophical matters, it were as though one were listening to Pythagoras and Plato, whose doctrines bear so close an affinity to the Christian faith that our Augustine offered endless thanks to God that the books of the Platonists had fallen into his hands. In a word, there is no point of controversy between the Hebrews and ourselves on which the Hebrews cannot be confuted and convinced out the cabalistic writings, so that no corner is left for them to hide in. On this point I can cite a witness of the very greatest authority, the most learned Antonius Chronicus; on the occasion of a banquet in his

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house, at which I was also present, with his own ears he heard the Hebrew, Dactylus, a profound scholar of this lore, come round completely to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. To return, however, to our review of the chief points of my disputation: I have also adduced my conception of the manner in which the poems of Orpheus and Zoroaster ought to be interpreted. Orpheus is read by the Greeks in a text which is practically complete; Zoroaster is known to them in a corrupt text, while in Chaldea he is read in a form more nearly complete. Both are considered as the authors and fathers of ancient wisdom. I shall say nothing about Zoroaster who is mentioned so frequently by the Platonists and always with the greatest respect. Of Pythagoras, however, Iamblicus the Chaldean writes that he took the Orphic theology as the model on which he shaped and formed his own philosophy. For this precise reason the sayings of Pythagoras are called sacred, because, and to the degree that, they derive from the Orphic teachings. For from this source that occult doctrine of numbers and everything else that was great and sublime in Greek philosophy flowed as from its primitive source. Orpheus, however (and this was the case with all the ancient theologians) so wove the mysteries of his doctrines into the fabric of myths and so wrapped them about in veils of poetry, that one reading his hymns might well believe that there was nothing in them but fables and the veriest commonplaces. I have said this so that it might be known what labor was mine, what difficulty was involved, in drawing out the secret meanings of the occult philosophy from the deliberate tangles of riddles and the recesses of fable in which they were hidden; difficulty made all the greater by the fact that in a matter so weighty, abstruse and unexplored, I could count on no help from the work and efforts of other interpreters. And still like dogs they have come barking after me, saying that I have brought together an accumulation of trifles in order to make a great display by their sheer number. As though all did not concern ambiguous questions, subjects of sharpest controversy, over which the most important schools confront each other like gladiators. As though I had not brought to light many things quite unknown and unsuspected by these very men who now carp at me while styling themselves the leaders of philosophy. As a matter of fact, I am so completely free of the fault they attribute to me that I have tried to confine the discussion to fewer points than I might have raised. Had I wished, (as others are wont) to divide these questions into their constituent parts, and to dismember them, their number might well have increased to a point past counting. To say nothing of other matters, who is unaware that one of these nine hundred theses, that, namely, concerning the reconciliation of the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle might have been developed, without arousing any suspicion that I was affecting mere number, into six hundred

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or more by enumerating in due order those points on which others think that these philosophies differ and I, that they agree? For a certainty I shall speak out (though in a manner which is neither modest in itself nor conformable to my character), I shall speak out because those who envy me and detract me, force me to speak out. I have wanted to make clear in disputation, not only that I know a great many things, but also that I know a great many things which others do not know.   And now, reverend Fathers, in order that this claim may be vindicated by the fact, and in order that my address may no longer delay the satisfaction of your desire – for I see, reverend doctors, with the greatest pleasure that you are girded and ready for the contest – let us now, with the prayer that the outcome may be fortunate and favorable, as to the sound of trumpets, join battle. RETURN TO: START OF THIS HYPERLINK START OF ALL HYPERLINKS MAIN TEXT

Conceptual Index Acting, 23; as subversive, 23; Acting styles, 13, 49f. Actors, 13 ‘Allowed Book’, 47ff. Attitudes to theatre, 13f., 20ff., 69; Puritan attitudes, 23ff. Audience, 13; composition, 28; numbers 28, 29; Audiences, expectations of, 7; Chapter 8; influence, 56 Authorship, 6 Brothels, 21 Casting, 44ff. Censorship, 44f. Character, concept of 50ff.; see also ‘self’. Characters, naming of, 65. Children’s companies, 25 Civil war, fear of, 11 Clowns, 44f.; dress of, 30; popularity of, 30 Comedy, City, 66ff.; Court, 67; Roman, 66 Comedy, traditions of, 16 Commercial interests, 20 Companies, 24, 42ff., 69, touring, 69 Competition, 9 Contemporary witnesses, 8, 25ff. Conventions, 36 Costumes, 23f. Cross-reference between plays, 46ff. Discovery space, 32 Enjoyment, 21, 69 Fortune, 61f. Free will, 60f. Harrowing of Hell play, 15 Hierarchy, 37, 48, 50 History, models of, 58ff. Iconoclasm, 16f

Idolatry, 16f. Illusion, 33 King as Player, 23 Latin, regard for, 6, 61 Miracle plays elements in Renaissance drama, 15 Picture and drama, 37 Player as King, 23 Plays and playwrights, 6 Plays as scripts, 44, 46; adaptations and additions to, 44, 46; licensing of, 42; starting, 35; unease about, 13f., 20ff., 22; Playwrights, 46 Poetry and picture, 37 Political uncertainty, 10 ‘post-tragic’ drama, 12 Predestination, 60f. Props as symbols, 40ff. Props list, 39 ‘Puritan’ opposition, 23ff. Religious drama, 13ff. Repertory, 50 Revenge, 62f. Rhetoric and power, 23 Self fashioning, 50ff Self, ideas of, 52ff. Society, nature of, 37 Southwark, 21; industries in, 21; pleasures in, 21; brothels in, 21 Spectacle, 40 Spectators, 16 Stock figures, 53 Symbolism, 40 Teleology, 58f. ‘Theatre’, 18; attitudes to, 13f., 20ff., 69; Puritan attitudes, 23ff. Theatre, as investment, 20, 24; behaviour in, 27, 29; changes in, 54; cost of attending, 25; development of, 9, 10; private, 25; resources, 31ff.; structure, 31ff.; uses of, 20; visual elements in, 37 Universe, nature of, 37

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