CHAPTER 9: LAUGHER AT THE SCAFFOLD
In Shakespeare and the Jews (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), James Shapiro argues that there was a significant, if clandestine, Jewish community in London in Shakespeare’s time. Though this claim is debatable, Shapiro provides ample evidence for a widespread Elizabethan and Jacobean interest in Jews. See also David S. Katz, The Jews in the History of England, 1485–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), and Laura H. Yungblut, Strangers Settled Here Amongst Us: Policies, Perceptions, and the Presence of Aliens in Elizabethan England (London: Routledge, 1996).
In “‘There Is a World Elsewhere’: William Shakespeare, Businessman,” in Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986, ed. Werner Habich, D. J. Palmer, and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 40–46, E. A. J. Honigmann analyzes Shakespeare’s own involvement in moneylending and other mercantile enterprises, as does William Ingram, “The Economics of Playing,” in A Companion to Shakespeare, ed. David Scott Kastan (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999) 313–27.
On the single surviving manuscript play that may contain scenes in Shakespeare’s handwriting, see Scott McMillin, The Elizabethan Theatre and “The Book of Sir Thomas More” (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), and T. H. Howard-Hill, ed., Shakespeare and Sir Thomas More: Essays on the Play and Its Shakespearian Interest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). The dating of Sir Thomas More and of Shakespeare’s own participation in the project is uncertain. The script may have been drafted by Anthony Munday and others in 1592–93 or 1595, at the time of the agitation against “strangers”; Shakespeare could have been involved from the beginning or could, as seems more likely, have made his additions as late as 1603 or 1604 during a further attempt to have it approved for performance.
Direct evidence of Shakespeare’s personal involvement with the community of “strangers” living in London dates from the early seventeenth century. In 1604, and probably for some time before, he was living in rented rooms on the corner of Mugwell and Silver Streets. His neighbors in the tenement were Christopher Mountjoy, a French Protestant, and his wife, Marie. Mountjoy had fled to England in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572 and had prospered as a manufacturer of ladies’ wigs and other headgear. In 1612 Shakespeare was deposed as a witness in a lawsuit between Mountjoy and his son-in-law Stephen Belott. The latter claimed that his father-in-law had pledged to give him sixty pounds on marrying and to leave him a legacy of two hundred pounds. Both parties to the suit agreed that in 1604 Shakespeare had helped, at the parents’ request, to persuade the young man to marry Mountjoy’s daughter and therefore knew the terms that had to be agreed upon. In his testimony Shakespeare spoke well both of the Mountjoys and of Belott, whom he had known, he said, “for the space of ten years or thereabouts,” but he declared under oath that he did not remember the precise financial terms of the marriage settlement. The documents from the lawsuit were unearthed in 1909; there is a good account of them in Samuel Schoenbaum’s Records and Images and in Park Honan’s Shakespeare: A Life.
CHAPTER 10: SPEAKING WITH THE DEAD
For the development of the Shakespearean soliloquy, see Wolfgang Clemen, Shakespeare’s Soliloquies, trans. C. S. Stokes (London: Methuen, 1987). On Shakespeare’s working and reworking of Hamlet and other plays, see John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). On the impact on Shakespeare of the death of Hamnet, see the sensitive psychoanalytic account by Richard P. Wheeler, “Death in the Family: The Loss of a Son and the Rise of Shakespearean Comedy,” in Shakespeare Quarterly 51 (2000): 127–53. In Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), I have written at length on the consequences for Shakespeare of the change in the relationship between the living and the dead. See also Roland M. Frye, The Renaissance Hamlet: Issues and Responses in 1600 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984). On the larger historical, cultural, and theological issues, see Theo Brown, The Fate of the Dead: A Study of Folk-Eschatology in the West Country after the Reformation (Ipswich, UK: D. S. Brewer, 1979); Clare Gittings, Death, Burial, and the Individual in Early Modern England (London: Croom Helm, 1984); Julian Litten, The English Way of Death: The Common Funeral since 1450 (London: R. Hale, 1991); Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death; and Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars.
CHAPTER 11: BEWITCHING THE KING
Alvin Kernan’s Shakespeare, the King’s Playwright: Theater in the Stuart Court, 1603–1613 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995) discusses Shakespeare’s relation to James.
On the relation of Macbeth to the Gunpowder Plot, see Henry Paul, The Royal Play of Macbeth (New York: Macmillan, 1950), and Garry Wills, Witches and Jesuits: Shakesepare’s Macbeth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). On the Gowrie conspiracy, see Louis Barbé, The Tragedy of Gowrie House (London: Alexander Gardner, 1887). Kramer and Sprenger’s Malleus maleficarum is available in an English translation and edition (1928; repr., New York: Dover, 1971) by Montague Summers, who also edited Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft (1930; repr., New York: Dover, 1972). Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1971), and Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), are particularly helpful on the place of the occult in the mentality of the period. In “Shakespeare Bewitched,” in New Historical Literary Study: Essays on Reproducing Texts, Representing History, ed. Jeffrey N. Cox and Larry J. Reynolds (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), 108–35, I discuss at greater length Shakespeare’s relation to witch hunting.
CHAPTER 12: THE TRIUMPH OF THE EVERYDAY
Bernard Beckerman, Shakespeare at the Globe (New York: Macmillan, 1962), and Irwin Smith, Shakespeare’s Blackfriars Playhouse: Its History and Its Design (New York: New York Universitiy Press, 1964), are both extremely useful introductions to Shakespeare’s principal theaters in the latter part of his career. On staging, Alan Dessen and Leslie Thomson’s A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) is illuminating, as is Dessen’s Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). The account of the burning of the Globe, from a letter, dated July 2, 1613, written by Sir Henry Wotton to his nephew Sir Edmund Bacon, is cited in Chambers, Elizabethan Stage, 4:419–20.
Index
The page references in this index correspond to the printed edition from which this ebook was created. To find a specific word or phrase from the index, please use the search feature of your ebook reader.
Aaron the Moor (char.), 34
ABC with the Cathechism, The, 25
actors, 166
Greene’s disdain for, 204–6, 213
Lancashire troupes of, 104–5
low social standing of, 74–75, 79, 204, 205–6
memory and improvisation among, 163, 295
“rolls” and, 294–95
skills and talents of, 73–74
theatrical apprenticeships and, 73
touring, 28–33, 40, 184, 188, 289, 365–66
as vagabonds, 77–78, 88
see also specific actors and companies
Acts and Monuments (Foxe), 91, 159
Adams, Joseph Quincy, 146
Addenbrooke, John, 363
Adonis (char.), 126, 241–45
Adriana (char.), 130
adultery:
in court life, 234
in sonnets, 143, 255
Aesop, 213
Agincourt, 223, 298, 309
Aglionby, Edward, 42–43
Aguecheek, Sir Andrew (char.), 70
Alba (Burton et al.), 332
Albany (char.), 127
Albion’s England, 311
Alchemist, The (Jonson), 167
alderman
John Shakespeare as, 60–61
jurisdiction of, 60, 165, 182
Aldgate, 164, 165
&n
bsp; Allen, Giles, 291–92
Allen, William, Cardinal, 110
Alleyn, Edward, 190–91, 198, 213, 273
All is True, see Henry VIII
All’s Well That Ends Well (Shakespeare), 123, 136, 221, 361
America, 73
Amleth (char.), 303, 305
Angelo (char.), 33, 110, 136
Anne, Lady (char.), 126
Anne of Denmark, Queen of England, 224, 331–32, 346–47, 349
Annesley, Cordell, 357
Annesley, Sir Brian, 357–58
Antigone (Sophocles), 200, 208
Antigonus (char.), 84
Antonio (Merchant of Venice, The) (char.), 82, 257, 271, 279, 281, 283, 285
Antonio (Tempest, The) (char.), 375
Antony (char.), 68, 143, 146–47, 248, 370
Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 170, 248, 296, 369, 370, 389
drunkenness in, 67–68
in First Folio, 18
Shakespeare’s greatest lovers in, 143, 146–47
sources of, 193, 295
archery, as public entertainment, 176
Arden, Edward, 59, 157–58, 160, 173
Arden, Mary, see Shakespeare, Mary
Arden, Mary (wife of Edward), 160
Arden, Robert, 58–59, 80, 101
Arden family, 58–59, 75, 85–86, 101, 119, 158, 160
Aretino, 208
Ariel (char.), 373
Arion, 46–47, 48–49, 53
Ariosto, 342
Aristotle, 297
Armado (char.), 123
Armin, Robert, 293
Arraignment of Paris, The (Peele), 202
Asbies (farm), 59, 61
Ascham, Roger, 24
Aspinall, Alexander, 55
Astrophil and Stella (Sidney), 129, 233, 235
As You Like It (Shakespeare), 40, 56–57, 176, 269, 290, 296
pastoral themes in, 55, 64, 120, 298
skepticism about love in, 134, 135
Aubrey, John, 54–55, 70, 88, 143, 209, 330
Aufidius (char.), 126
Austen, Jane, 133–34
Austin Friars, 165
Autolycus (char.), 371–72
Auvergne, Countess of (char.), 197
Bacon, Francis, 207, 254, 274
bailiffs, jurisdiction of, 60
Baldwin, William, 195
Bale, John, 90
Ball, Cutting, 205, 216
Ball, Em, 205, 216
bandore, 73–74
Bankside, 180, 200, 206, 236, 292
banns, 120–21
Banquo, 332–33, 335, 336, 339, 348
Banquo (char.), 138, 335–36, 349, 350
Barabas (char.), 258, 265–67, 270, 278, 282
Bardolph (char.), 223
Barnstaple, 365
Bartholomew Fair (Jonson), 167, 182
Barton-on-the-Heath, 61, 68–69
Bassanio (char.), 135, 271, 280
bass viol, 73–74
bastardy, 34, 123, 358, 384
Bath and Wells, bishops of, 164
Battle of Alcazar, The (Peele), 202, 215
bear baiting, 367
Elizabethan enjoyment of, 177–78
plays sharing venues with, 181–82
as public entertainment, 177–78, 179
suspension of, 237
Beatrice (char.), 134, 135, 180, 259, 290, 298
Bedford, Earl of, 114
Beeston, Christopher, 88
Beeston, William, 88
beggars, classification of, 88
Belch, Sir Toby (char.), 33, 40–41, 67, 70, 83
Belleforest, François de, 295–96, 304
Belott, Stephen, 405
Benedick (char.), 134, 135, 180, 259, 260, 290, 298
benefit of clergy, 171
Bertram (char.), 123
Bertram, Count (char.), 136
Bible, 90–91
Bishops’, 35
Hebrew, 260–61
New Testament, 91
Birmingham, 59
Bishopsgate, 165, 183, 362
Bishopton, 383
Black Friars, 165, 366
Blackfriars, 194, 293
Shakespeare’s house in, 379, 386
Blackfriars Theater, 366–68, 379
blank verse, 202
in Tamburlaine, 191
Blunt, Sir Walter (char.), 222
Boleyn, Anne (char.), 56
Bolingbroke (Henry IV) (char.), 33, 217, 300
Book of Common Prayer, 61, 90, 91, 100, 193
Book of Martyrs (Foxe), 91, 159
Borromeo, Carlo, Cardinal, 101
Bottom, Nick (char.), 34–36, 51–52
bowls, imagery of 176
box office, 185
Brabanzio (char.), 127
Bradley, William, 201
Brayne, John, 182–85, 291
Brazil, 201
Bretchgirdle, John, 18, 93, 95, 102
bridales, 41
Bridewell prison, public punishments at, 178
British Library, 263
Brooke, Ralph, 80
Bruno, Giordano, 193
Brutus (char.), 128, 301–2, 303, 308
Bryan, George, 105, 273
bubonic plague, 153, 256
Elizabethan beliefs about, 175
in London, 163, 272
in Stratford, 93
theater closings and, 236–37, 241, 272, 366
Bull, Eleanor, 267–68
bull baiting, 181–82
Elizabethan enjoyment of, 177–78
plays sharing venues with, 181–82
Burbage, James, 182–85, 291, 366–68
Burbage, Richard, 185, 198, 210, 213, 273, 291–92, 366, 368, 386
Burgess, Anthony, 125
Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, 228–29, 236, 242, 273–75, 308
Burton, Robert, 332
Cade, Jack (char.), 41–42, 167–71, 173, 196
Caesar, Julius (char.), 67–68, 147, 169, 302
Caliban (char.), 373
Calvin, John, 193
Cambridge University, 26, 27, 64, 89, 96, 115, 228, 311, 342
university wits at, 193, 202, 203, 206, 208, 219, 226, 257, 268
Camden, William, 277, 280
Campion, Edmund, 97, 101, 106–17, 118, 156, 388
“Campion’s Brag,” 106–7, 115
Canary Islands, 201
Canterbury, 163, 176
Canterbury, archbishop of, see Cranmer, Thomas
Cardenio (Shakespeare), 370, 373
Castle of Perseverance, The, 32
Catesby, Sir William, 101
Catherine (Henry V) (char.), 65–66
Catholics, Catholicism, 59, 93–117
alleged conspiracies of, 107, 160–61, 268, 274, 275, 336–37
beliefs about death, 312–17
Elizabeth seen as obstacle to restoration of, 92–93
John Shakespeare and, 101–3, 113, 118, 160, 315–17, 318, 320–21
Judaism and, 261
and Mary Shakespeare, 100–102, 118–19, 160, 315–16
persecution of, 100–102, 114–16, 157–62
priests, 92, 99, 100, 107, 108
priests hidden by, 103, 108, 157–58, 160
Catholics, Catholicism (continued),
Protestant destruction of rites and artifacts of, 89–90, 91
rebellion incited among, 99–100
religion tokens of, 100–101
remaining, 89–90
seen as taint, 25
Shakespeare and, 89, 104, 108–9, 113–16, 149, 158, 161–62, 317, 318–21, 377, 387–88
of Shakespeare’s schoolmaster, see Hunt, Simon; Jenkins, Thomas
traditional festivals and, 37–38
Cavendish, Thomas, 201–2
Cecil, Robert, 273–75
Celia (char.), 166
Cesario (char.), see Viola (char.)
Chapman, 233
Charing Cross, 167
Chark, William, 115
Char
lecote, 60, 93, 150–51, 153, 159
Charles, Prince, 333
Chaucer, Geoffrey, 176
Cheston, Joan, 344
Chettle, Henry, 212, 214–15, 226, 262
children, mortality rates of, 289
Children of the Chapel Royal, 293, 367
Chorus (Henry V) (char.), 309
Christianity:
in education, 26
Jews and, 260–61
witchcraft and, 345
see also Catholics, Catholicism; Protestants, Protestantism
Christmas, 39–40, 41
Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, The (Holinshed), 169, 195, 335–36
Church of England, 61–62, 100, 321
Cinna, 169
cittern, 73–74
Clapham, John, 229, 230
Claudio (char.), 135, 141, 180
Claudius (char.), 34, 137, 215, 303, 305, 307, 310
Cleopatra (char.), 143, 146–47, 170, 248, 369, 370, 389
Clink, 362
closet dramas, 11–12
clothing, social restrictions on, 76
Cobham, Sir John Oldcastle, Lord, 159, 229, 308
Cobham, William Brook, Lord, 288, 308
cockfighting, as public entertainment, 176, 369
Coke, Sir Edward, 337
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 248
College of Heralds, 75, 86
Shakespeare family application to, 76–81
Collins, Francis, 385
Combe, Thomas, 386
Combe, William, 76, 382–83
comedy, 180, 290, 296, 298
boundary between tragedy and, 34, 297
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