The Reformation in
England and Shakespeare’s Early Years:
(notes
from Will in the World (2005) by Stephen Greenblatt)
To understand Shakespeare’s plays within the context of
his times, you must first acquaint yourself with the political tensions that
surrounded Queen Elizabeth’s rise to the throne and her consolidation of
power. Her political finesse and occasional ruthlessness enabled her to
survive the violent confrontation between Catholic and Protestant factions in
England and abroad. She maintained domestic peace and safeguarded the growth
of the economy throughout her long forty-five year reign. During the
Elizabethan Age, England first emerged as a world power.
The Reformation in
England:
In 1533 Henry VIII (1491-1547) declared himself
the Head of the Church of England, divorced his wife, Catherine of Aragon,
married Anne Boleyn and seized the wealth and property of Catholic
monasteries and pilgrimage sites.
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In 1547 Edward VI (1537-1553), son of Henry VIII
and Jane Seymour (his third wife), assumed the throne at the age of nine.
During his short reign the ruling elite (his
uncle, the Duke of Somerset and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cramner) moved decisively to embrace Protestant
doctrine and practice. Salvation could be achieved by faith alone, not
through the intercession of a priest, not through the Mass or the other rituals of the Catholic Church, nor through good works,
and Churches throughout England were ordered whitewashed: altarpieces,
statuary, and sacred frescos were destroyed. The rituals, pageants and
plays associated with holidays were forbidden. The Elevation of the Host
(the bread and wine) was outlawed. Instead, the clergy were instructed to
use the new English Bible (translated by William Tyndale) and the prayers
and services described in the new Book of Common Prayer (also by
Tyndale).
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In 1553 Mary Tudor (1516-1558) became Queen and
ruled England for the next five years. She was a Catholic, the daughter of
Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon, the granddaughter of Ferdinand and
Isabella of Spain. During her reign, Mary sought to reinstitute Catholicism
as the official religion throughout the realm. She executed Tyndale, Cramner and hundreds of others, hence her nickname
“Bloody Mary”. (See John Foxe’s Protestant
Book of Martyrs.) During her reign the conflict between Catholics and
Protestants threatened to plunge England into civil war, but Mary was a
sickly person and soon died without a child as heir.
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In 1558 Elizabeth Tudor (1533-1603) became Queen.
She was regarded by Catholics as the illegitimate daughter of Henry VIII
and Anne Boleyn, and she was a Protestant. Elizabeth demanded obedience and
conformity to the Church of England, but to calm religious passions, she
acknowledged that she could not compel purity of conviction. She said
that she had neither the desire nor the intention “to make windows into
men’s hearts and secret thoughts.” So English Catholics could continue
to practice their faith in private as long as they publicly declared their
loyalty to the nation and to the Queen.
In 1570 Pope Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth,
ordering her English subjects to rebel and, if possible, kill her. Fearful
of conspiracies to overthrow her government, Elizabeth ordered the violent
repression of Catholics. Not only were Catholic priests hunted,
particularly Jesuits, but it became treason (a capital crime) to harbor a
Catholic priest in your home.
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Elizabeth’s chief rival to the throne of England was her
Catholic cousin Mary Stuart (1542-1588), the daughter of King James
V of Scotland and the French princess Marie de Guise. Mary’s claim to the
English throne was as strong as her cousin’s. Mary wed the French dauphin
Francois who became king in 1558 (and then promptly died in 1560).
Catholics in England and on the continent looked to Mary as their best hope
for regaining power in England. When Mary wed with Lord Danley,
a descendant of Henry VII, her claim to the English throne became even stronger.
Their child was named James, and he would eventually become King of England
when Elizabeth died in 1603. No such luck for Mary. By 1568 Elizabeth
had made the decision to move against her. Elizabeth’s officers captured
and imprisoned Mary in Sheffield Castle where she would remain for the next
eighteen years. Elizabeth was reluctant to do away with her cousin, but
finally evidence was found that from prison Mary had participated in a
Catholic plot to overthrow the government, and Elizabeth had had enough.
Mary, Queen of Scots was beheaded on February 8th 1588.
Throughout her reign, Elizabeth overcame challenges to
her throne that came not only from within England but also from powerful
forces on the Continent. The most powerful state in Europe during the 16th
century was Spain, the richest jewel of the Holy Roman Empire, a
coalition of kingdoms ruled by Hapsburg princes which extended from Central
Europe to the Netherlands to Italy, Spain and beyond to the New World
provinces that had been settled and exploited by the conquistadores. (Hapsburg
Map) Precious metals from Mexico and Peru flowed into the Hapsburg’s
coffers enabling them to finance military expeditionary forces which in the
latter part of the 16th century fought to control the Netherlands’ rich
maritime cities of Brussels, Amsterdam, and Utrecht. Elizabeth feared the
involvement of England in an expensive and potentially disastrous foreign
war. At times during her reign she would send signals to the Spanish
indicating her willingness to consider marriage to a suitable Spanish
prince and perhaps even conversion to Catholicism. At other times she sent
soldiers and ships to aid fellow Protestants on the continent, and she
looked the other way when English raiders like Sir Francis Drake attacked
and pillaged Spanish trading vessels in the New World.
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When word spread throughout Europe that Elizabeth had
acquiesced in the execution of Mary Queen of Scots, the Spanish decided to
act. In 1588 they mounted a huge ground and sea force to invade
England, sail up the Thames and seize London. In the first of many famous
maritime victories in their march to empire, the English fought off the
Spanish Armada, which was then dispersed and destroyed by a North Sea
tempest. The defeat of the Spanish Armada signaled the arrival of England
on the stage of world power, but throughout the final years of Elizabeth’s
reign, rumors of a new Armada’s approach, seeking vengeance, would keep the
English anxious and vigilant.
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The
Impact of Elizabethan Politics on Shakespeare’s Early Life
The repercussions of these national conflicts were felt
throughout the kingdom, even in rural townships like Stratford-upon-Avon
and in the life of John Shakespeare’s family. During the 1560’s, John Shakespeare, a farrier (or glovemaker) by trade, was also an illicit ‘wool brogger’ and moneylender. He had been elected the head alderman
in town, a position equivalent to our town mayor today. In this
position his responsibilities included collecting taxes, issuing business
licenses, and the like. (He was also the town’s official beer taster.)
Although a commoner, John had married ‘up’. His wife, Mary Arden, belonged
to an old and storied family in the region. (The nearby Forest of Arden had
been named for them.) When the Reformation came to Stratford in the 1560’s
and 1570’s, it had fallen to John Shakespeare to oversee the ‘reparations’
or whitewashing of Stratford’s Guild Chapel. All the statues,
stained glass, and beautiful frescoes, one of the Virgin Mary and another
of Prince
George slaying the dragon, had to be destroyed. As a town official,
John Shakespeare persecuted Catholics, yet he remained a ‘closet
Catholic’, a ‘recusant’ at home. A written ‘spiritual testament’ to his
true faith was found hidden beneath the floorboards in his house. And John
Shakespeare made sure to give his eldest son the best education
available. He sent young Will, who had been born on St. George’s Day in
1564, to the King’s New School in Stratford where each of the
schoolmasters who instructed Will proved to have Catholic sympathies.
During the late 1570’s, when Shakespeare was just about
your age, it has been suggested by several of his biographers that Will may
have served as a tutor to a wealthy Lancashire family in Northern England,
a section of the country that had successfully resisted the Protestants’
campaign to force religious conformity. In the will of Alexander Hoghton, a “William Shakeshaft”
is mentioned as the recipient of several theatrical costumes. It is known
that Hoghton sponsored a company of players
which performed often at his home. After Hoghton’s
death this company would go on to become Lord Strange’s
Men and move to London. The company included Will Kempe,
Thomas Pope, John Heminges, and Augustine
Phillips-- the actors who would later form the core of the Lord
Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company in the mid-1590’s. (See
ANTHONY HOLDEN, Will
Shakeshaft and the cache in the rafters
The Independent 22 DECEMBER 1999)
Think about this historical coincidence: the market for
theatre performances began to grow quickly in the 1570’s and it exploded in
the late 1580’s. Could the growing popularity of theatre, with its pomp and
ceremony, its sorcerers and faeries, be related to the suppression of
Catholic ritual? In any event, Shakespeare was back in Stratford
by 1580 (age 16), and just two years later he was married and a
father. His wife was named Anne Hathaway. Anne was twenty-six years
old, and, unlike most Elizabethan women, she was an independent property
owner because she had been orphaned in her early twenties. A curious
document exists in the registry of the Bishop of Worcester dated November
28, 1582. It lists a bond of 40 pounds
(twice a schoolmaster’s yearly salary) to facilitate the wedding of
‘William Shagspere’ and ‘Anne Hathaway’. The
document is curious because on November 11th 1582 another marriage license
was issued in the neighboring town of Temple Grafton to “William Shaxpere and Anne Whatley.” (Could Shakespeare’s
marriage to Anne have been forced?) Six months later a daughter Susanna was
born to Anne and Will, then two years later in 1585, Anne bore twins, a boy
named Hamnet and a girl named Judith.
No documentary evidence has yet been uncovered which can
tell us about the next few years of Shakespeare’s life. The next mention of
Shakespeare is in a pamphlet published in London in 1592; a
playwright named Robert Greene lambasted a new, up and coming
writer/actor who had exploded on the London theatre scene:
"Yes, trust them not, for
there is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that, with his Tygers heart wrapt
in a Players hide, supposes he is as well able to bumbast
out a blanke verse as the best of you; and being
an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his owne
conceit the onely Shake-scene in a countrie." (Greene’s Groatsworth
of Wit)
How did Shakespeare, in six
short years, move from humble Stratford to an elite position in the highly
competitive London theatre market? He had become so popular that other playwrights
were libeling him in print, and Shakespeare even had the muscle to call on
noble friends to put pressure on Henry Chettle,
the publisher of Greene’s scurrilous pamphlet, to issue a formal apology
for the insult. What had happened to Shakespeare? How had this
transformation taken place? How could the son of a Stratford farrier have
achieved so much so quickly?
Well, the biographers have
many theories, but the truth remains a mystery. All we do know is that
sometime in the mid to late 1580’s Shakespeare left his wife and three
children to embark upon a theatre career. The legend has it that
Shakespeare got into trouble with a local nobleman, Sir Thomas Lucy, for
poaching deer on his private land and was forced to flee Stratford.
However, more recent scholarship suggests that the circumstances which
surrounded Shakespeare’s hasty departure from Stratford may have had more
to do with the politics of the time and the troubles into which his father
John had fallen.
In 1576 when Will was
twelve years old, John Shakespeare began to sell and mortgage property that
he had slowly acquired over his lifetime, and his financial distress
reached such an extreme that he stopped showing up at church (to avoid
creditors). In 1580 he was bound over to appear in court and
account for a debt, but Shakespeare’s father did not show up and was fined
20 pounds, a considerable sum. Will’s formal education ended that year,
and unlike other talented students from common families, he lost his chance
to attend university at Oxford or Cambridge.
What had gone wrong?
Shakespeare’s biographers have offered several theories. There had been a
crackdown on wool ‘brogging’, and John
Shakespeare surely lost an important source of income. Some writers suggest
that John may have descended into alcoholism, providing Will with one of
the models for the great drunken buffoon, Falstaff. Still others suggest
that John Shakespeare ran into trouble because of his secret adherence to
Catholicism, and the name of Sir Thomas Lucy enters the story. Lucy
served in Parliament as a representative for the Stratford region and made
a name for himself by promoting a bill condemning
secret Jesuits and seminary students. In 1583, a distant cousin of the
Shakespeare family named John Somerville had been overheard threatening the
Queen, quickly apprehended and then put to death. Lucy had singled
out other members of the Arden family for persecution. Years later,
Shakespeare still felt such antipathy for the man that he snuck a joke
about defacing Lucy’s coat of arms into his 1595 comedy, The Merry Wives
of Windsor. So, what could have provoked Shakespeare into leaving home
in 1586 to take his chances on a life in the theatre? Perhaps he was
forced to flee because his prospects for a future in Stratford had been
spoiled. His family’s business had been ruined and their hopes of rising to
noble status broken by religious scandal. (Greenblatt 59-69)
As we will discover,
Shakespeare’s plays explore controversial political issues with shrewd
insight, but we can never really get a bead on his own political
perspective. In a police state such as the one that existed in Elizabethan
England, avoiding overt political or religious commentary was an essential
survival skill, but Shakespeare also recognized that his audience yearned
to air and explore controversial issues, and even
the most powerful monarch cannot silence public opinion through censorship.
So, Shakespeare learned the essential art of ironic suggestion. He hardly
ever set his plays in the present, preferring ancient Rome, Renaissance
Italy, or England in past centuries, yet the action of these plays explore
vital and current political controversies. In his plays both sides of every
issue seem to receive equal emphasis. He may have learned from hard
experience the vital importance of this suggestive opacity. The surfaces of
his plays avoid controversy, but tantalizing insinuations lead sensitive
audience members to consider pressing topical issues. Yet Shakespeare
himself could always deny potentially dangerous interpretations of his
plays and get them past the censors. Shakespeare’s experience in Stratford
may have taught him the vital importance of keeping his own political
opinions strictly to himself.
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