We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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spice I was, and poundinge was my due;
In fadinge breath my incense favoured best;
Death was my meane my kernell to renewe;
By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest.
Some thinges more perfit are in their decaye,
Like sparke that going out geeves clerest light:
Such was my happe, whose dolefull dying daye
Begane my joye and termed fortunes spight.
Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Saint;
Once Mary cald, my name now Martyr is;
From earthly raigne debarred by restrainte,
In liew wherof I raigne in heavenly blis.
My life, my griefe, my death, hath wrought my joye;
My freendes, my foyle, my foes, my weale procurd,
My speedie death hath scorned longe annoye,
And losse of life an endles life assurd.
My scaffolde was the bedd where ease I fownde;
The blocke a pillowe of eternall rest.
My headman cast mee in a blesfull sownde;
His axe cutt of my cares from combred brest.
Rue not my death, rejoyce at my repose;
It was no death to mee but to my woe,
The budd was opened to let owt the rose,
The cheynes unloosed to let the captive goe.
A Prince by birth, a prisoner by mishappe,
From crowne to crosse, from throne to thrall I fell.
Whether or not he was reading Southwell, the up-and-coming playwright and successful London actor William Shakespeare was also leaning with some political skill in the other direction. About this time he wrote the history play King John. It’s not one of his greater efforts, and it follows the ferociously anti-Catholic play of the same name by John Bale. Like Bale, Shakespeare uses the opportunity to get in a bit of patriotic anti-papal baiting:
Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name
So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous
To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.
Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England
And thus much more: that no Italian priest
Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;
But as we, under God, our supreme head,
So, under him, that great supremacy
Where we do reign we will alone uphold
Without th’assistance of a mortal hand.
Queen Elizabeth could hardly have put it better herself. We shouldn’t look to Shakespeare for reportage on the most dangerous politics of his day. However, he does give us something even more useful – the ultimate window into a world in which faith, and in particular the fate of the soul after death, occupied almost everybody. In Measure for Measure, a play which to my ear is unforgiving of the smug certainties of any religious believers, the hero, Claudio, believes that in order to protect his sister Isabella’s virtue he must reconcile himself to execution. A duke, Vincentio, urges him not to be frightened of death – as it were, the official line. Be ‘absolute for death’, he tells Claudio – death or life
Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:
If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing
That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,
Servile to all the skyey influences,
That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,
Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;
So far, so predictable. From pulpits up and down the country, preachers constantly urged their congregations to reconcile themselves to death. On scaffolds, and alongside the pyres prepared for religious martyrs, much the same conversation was going on. We know this from the endless sermons and tracts that have survived from the period; but how did ordinary English men and women feel in response? For that, we have to go to the greatest poet. Claudio, a living, breathing and terrified contemporary, is far from convinced, but to die, he tells himself, and go we know not where,
To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;
This sensible warm motion to become
A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit
To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside
In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;
To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,
And blown with restless violence round about
The pendent world; or to be worse than worst
Of those that lawless and incertain thought
Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!
The weariest and most loathed worldly life
That age, ache, penury and imprisonment
Can lay on nature is a paradise
To what we fear of death.
Paradise, purgatory or hell – the possibilities are simply too awesome and too terrifying for anyone but living saints or fanatics to face. And in the single most famous speech in the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet agrees with Claudio – the impossibility of knowing what comes after life terrifies all men. For Catholics, and indeed for many Protestants, the terrors of hell are so vivid, even after the paintings of damnation in the churches have been whitewashed over by the reformers, that they literally freeze action, in this case the possibilities of revenge or suicide. Daily life in early modern Britain could be, by our standards, almost intolerably harsh. Hunger, cold, danger, terrible illness and the constant threat of being expelled from the community were all regular ripples in the sea of troubles that was daily life. Just getting out, escaping, finally resting – what a wonderful prospect. Except, in a God-haunted world, it wasn’t.
To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there’s the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels