We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr
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I have done the rest of my misleaders,
Not to come near our person by ten mile …
It is heartbreaking. Falstaff can’t believe it. By some reports Queen Elizabeth herself could not believe it, and wanted Falstaff back in another play. But for Shakespeare good kingship is the ultimate social good, which justifies even this biblical denial.
In his careful obsession with the dynasties of England, Shakespeare does more than anyone else to identify the country itself with those who have ruled it. When we speak of Victorian Britain, or the Edwardian period, we are playing unacknowledged, anti-chronological tribute to Shakespeare. To identify the entire nation through the behaviour of its ruler seems an odd thing, but for Shakespeare the character of the monarch is the character of the country itself. Nowhere is this more explicit than when the elderly John of Gaunt confronts the disastrous-seeming reign of King Richard II, vain, impetuous and hugely in debt.
Methinks I am a prophet new inspired
And thus expiring do foretell of him:
His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,
For violent fires soon burn out themselves;
Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;
He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;
With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,
This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,
This other Eden, demi-paradise,
This fortress built by Nature for herself
Against infection and the hand of war,
This happy breed of men, this little world,
This precious stone set in the silver sea,
Which serves it in the office of a wall,
Or as a moat defensive to a house,
Against the envy of less happier lands,
This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,
This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,
Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,
Renowned for their deeds as far from home,
For Christian service and true chivalry,
As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,
Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,
This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,
Dear for her reputation through the world,
Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,
Like to a tenement or pelting farm:
England, bound in with the triumphant sea
Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege
Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,
With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:
That England, that was wont to conquer others,
Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.
Shakespeare’s England, the defiant survivor over the long, bloody wars against the Catholic monarchies of the Continent, still the unreconciled enemy of Scots and Irish, was, however, about to come to some kind of end. The death of Elizabeth and the succession of King James VI of Scotland, son of the same Queen Mary she had had beheaded, provided a ‘Union of the Crowns’ whose consequences and perplexities still surround us to this day. Shakespeare, ever the temporiser, was quickly at work on dramas calculated to appeal to the new king, an intellectual fascinated by exploration and overseas trade, and haunted by the (to him) vivid threat of witchcraft. What didn’t Shakespeare foresee? The most obvious answer is religious civil war. Little more than thirty years after he died in retirement at Stratford in 1616, English Protestant revolutionaries would cut off the head of Charles I. Shakespeare knew very well the threat of puritan fanaticism. He saw friends, near family and fellow writers meet horrible ends on the scaffold for their determination to stick with the old religion. The world of the theatre in which, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he made his fortune and survived, rising to gentility, was always threatened by the chalky fingers and hysterical harangues of puritanical preachers. Occasionally, he turns directly back at them – the odious Angelo in Measure for Measure is the most obvious example. But even he could not have imagined what riot, disturbance and upending of the very principles of monarchy were brewing as he died.
5
Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities
William Shakespeare led a famously opaque life, leaving only scattered clues to his own existence. If he was a soldier, we’ve never heard about it. He wasn’t a magistrate, or a public preacher, or an active courtier. He lived privately, and he wrote and acted and amassed some money – and that’s about it. The same wasn’t true of many of the other great Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. Though some poets had always lived around the frills of power – Chaucer is an obvious example, and so are Dunbar and Wyatt – it’s really in this period that we see the most public poets of all, poets of action and engagement in public life. Sir Walter Raleigh, sea dog, explorer, courtier and finally the victim of royal politics, was also heavily engaged in the brutal and bloody English suppression of south-west Ireland. An even greater poet, Edmund Spenser, fought with Raleigh against the invading Spanish and Italian troops in Ireland, and tried to settle there. Both men were involved in a notorious massacre of papal soldiers who had surrendered at Smerwick; both believed that Catholic Ireland had to be suppressed by extreme force in order to secure Protestant England. In both cases the very notion of what it is to be British becomes hopelessly entangled with Tudor politics.
Edmund Spenser was regarded in his day as the most gloriously talented of British poets, Shakespeare excepted; and although he was London born, no English poet has been more closely associated with Ireland during one of its bloodiest periods. The so-called ‘Munster Plantation’ involved an attempt to settle Protestant gentry and farmers in what had been the domains of the powerful Desmond family, who led a spirited Catholic revolt against Tudor rule. Spenser was happy to take other people’s land, and apparently disdained the Gaelic culture of the island; he was eventually burned out of his family home at Kilcolman during the long-lasting 1590s rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and known as the Nine Years War. Spenser’s verse tells us directly little or nothing of the events that shaped his life: The Faerie Queene is a lengthy and complex allegory championing the reign of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty, through cod-medieval language and courtly imagery. It does contain, however, passages which are moodily resonant and which seem to capture the tones of Munster in these murderous times:
That darkesome cave they enter, where they find
That cursed man, low sitting on the ground,
Musing full sadly in his sullein mind;
His grieisie locks, long growen and unbound,
Disordred hong about his shoulders round,
And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne
Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound;
His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine,
Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dine.
His garment naught but many ragged clouts,
With thornes together pind