Elizabeth accepted the title of the Supreme Governor of the Church rather than Supreme Head of the Church and, like her father, Henry VIII, she refused to be subjected to the authority of the Papacy. Through encouraging her image of the Virgin Queen, however, we can surmise that Elizabeth sought to capitalize on residual Catholic beliefs in order to assert her political control over the state and the Church. Through her coronation and anointing she retained her link with the king-priest historical association. Julia Briggs (1997: 223) notes that contemporary paintings of Elizabeth imitated those of the Virgin Mary crowned with the stars of heaven; that in 1600 in Dowland’s Second Book of Songs it was proposed that ‘Vivat Eliza’ should replace ‘Ave Maria’; and that ‘memorial poems described her ascent to heaven and coronation there’.
William Tyndale (1494?–1536), the translator of the New Testament and the Pentateuch, the opening books of the Old Testament, who was executed by Emperor Charles V acting as proxy for Henry VIII, upheld ironically a relationship between God and monarch:
‘The powers that be are ordained of God. Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God. They that shall resist shall receive unto themselves damnation…God…hath given laws unto all nations, and in all lands hath put kings, governors and rulers in His own stead to rule the world through them.’
Tyndale, W, 1528 (2000), The Obedience of a Christian Man. London: Penguin
Not everyone agreed with this doctrine. The Protestant John Ponet (c.1514–56), for example, in A Shorte Treatise on Politik Power (1556), made a case for justified opposition to what he considered to be secular rulers. Sensibly, he had gone into exile in 1553 on the accession of Mary I, where he died in 1556, the same year that his Protestant friend Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556), Archbishop of Canterbury, was burned at the stake for heresy by the Catholic Queen ‘Bloody Mary’. So writing or performing plays depicting the deposition of monarchs was, to put it mildly, a little dangerous to pull off.
On 6 February 1601 Shakespeare’s company accepted 40 silver pieces from Gilly Megrick, a friend of Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, to perform Richard II, in which the anointed king is deposed and killed. Two days later, Essex led his abortive rebellion against the Queen. Shakespeare, Burbage and the company were consequently in serious trouble. One of their number, Augustine Phillips, argued their way out of the problem. He maintained that they didn’t want to revive the play as some of the original cast were no longer available and, therefore, parts had to be learned quickly but nevertheless, it was a good sum of money being offered and they were a commercial theatre. Some critics have associated the Queen’s remark ‘I am Richard II. Know ye not that?’ with this performance but in fact she said this some six months later on another occasion.
Politically, the company, whether knowingly or not, was being asked to stage a deposition of a monarch who was God’s anointed, even though in Richard II there are speeches which uphold the basis of that authority, and even though the so-called ‘deposition scene’ (that was not usually performed) is framed in such a way that Richard effectively abdicates. That the monarch, God’s anointed deputy – even if guilty of wrongdoing – cannot be deposed is made explicit by John of Gaunt in Act 1, Scene 2, even though it is implied that King Richard has been involved in the death of Gaunt’s brother, Thomas of Woodstock, the first Duke of Gloucester. Gaunt tells the widowed Duchess:
God’s is the quarrel – for God’s substitute,
His deputy anointed is His sight,
Hath caus’d his [Woodstock’s] death; the which if wrongfully,
Let heaven revenge, for I may never lift
An angry arm against His minister.
(1.2.37–41)
Richard and kingship
In this play Richard is depicted as someone careless of the realities and obligations of kingship. In the famous passage 2.1.31f., the dying Gaunt mourns the fact that England ‘…this seat of Mars,/This other Eden, demi-paradise…This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England’ is being ‘leas’d out’, or mortgaged, by its monarch to pay for the King’s extravagances and expeditions. Gaunt can but plead to the King, who does not listen and who after Gaunt’s death confiscates his possessions and wealth to pay for the Irish wars, thus dispossessing Bolingbroke of his rightful inheritance.
This will become an issue when the banished Bolingbroke returns to reclaim his lands. With Bolingbroke there is no divine right but pragmatic argument and force, and his rebellion, initially justified by involving his rights of inheritance, signals the end of Richard’s particular ritualistic way of conducting affairs. At the beginning of the play Richard had shown his commitment to staged ceremony, as shown by the tournament, which he curtails by throwing his ‘warder’ down. Like Protestantism, Bolingbroke in this play is of a new order. The deposition of Richard is supposed by Bolingbroke to be of that new order, but becomes through Richard’s histrionics an expression of the tension between two opposing cultures, one of ceremony (Richard) and one of pragmatism (Bolingbroke/Northumberland).
TWO OPPOSING WORLDS
Richard’s mindset, as presented by the dramatist, is focused on ceremony and ritual as the nature of his authority. Bolingbroke’s is one that looks towards political realism and military force. So the play works by dramatizing two opposing worlds that appear to collide, with neither giving way to the other, just as, in the context of the Reformation, liturgical ritualistic Catholicism sought to resist the advance of text-based Protestant reform. The biblically, textually based assertions of Protestantism encapsulated in the play, therefore, are core elements of that political and religious struggle which was to lead to the execution of an anointed king, Charles I, in 1649.
Key idea
Richard II is a play of its age, reflecting some of the political and religious tensions building through Elizabeth’s reign and presaging a collision of two conflicting forms of belief and faith, which ultimately led to the radical questioning of the monarch’s authority and to the English Civil War.
On Richard’s return from Ireland to quell Bolingbroke’s rebellion, the King’s response (3.2.36f.) is to describe himself as ‘the searching eye of heaven’, the sun, which has been hidden and which will now illuminate the evils of Bolingbroke, embarrass him and make him ‘tremble at his sin’. It is a fantasy, since Bolingbroke’s antecedent materialism and opportunism constitute too great a force for Richard, who descends into a self-indulgent melancholy about the mortality of kings:
…– for within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear’d, and kill with looks;
…
…and, humour’d thus,
Comes at the last, and with a little pin
Bores thorough his castle wall, and farewell king!
(3.2. 160–65, 168–70)
This whole passage (3.2.144f.) portrays the King still in theatrical mode, expressing the material reality of death that he now believes will be his fate. The language is extravagant, self-indulgent and ritualistic. For the now self-obsessed Richard, this is what happens to great men and it is something he will have to accept; indeed, the concluding lines of the speech are self-gratifying in their defeat, as Richard now describes himself as a ‘subject’:
…– subjected thus,
How can you say to me, I am King?
(176–7)
The speech is indicative of his capacity for self-fashioning, even in a defeat, as Richard’s political status changes. It is presented histrionically as an imitation of Christ’s agony in the Garden of Gethsemane the night before his crucifixion, but here being assumed by God’s deputy on earth whose own sins have led to his downfall. Later in the deposition scene (Act 4, Scene 1), he is to call those around him ‘Judas’ (Christ’s betrayer, 4.1.170) and equa
te others with Pontius Pilate who sentenced Christ to death:
…yet you Pilates
Have here deliver’d me to my sour cross,
And water cannot wash away your sin.
(4.1.240–42)
You may note the contrast here between the washing away of the oils of coronation with Pontius Pilate’s abrogation of the responsibility for the sentencing of Christ. In an extravagant, self-dramatizing gesture, Richard equates the permanence of his anointment with the impossibility of the erasing of Bolingbroke’s ‘sin’. While all his self-analysis is being made in Act 4, Scene 1, Northumberland on behalf of Bolingbroke remains doggedly politically pragmatic, demanding that Richard read the articles of accusation and confess his ‘grievous crimes’ (4.1.223), because unless he does, ‘The commons will not then be satisfi’d’ (4.1.272). In this way, Shakespeare builds up levels of confrontation, all of which makes for good drama.
Spotlight
Richard insists upon his identity and derives some fortitude from the knowledge of what it is that supports that identity. Northumberland, by demanding Richard confess his crimes, forces the King back into Bolingbroke’s world. But Richard cannot easily enter such a world since his whole being is linked to the concept of ceremonial consecrated kingship. As Northumberland continues to use the term ‘My lord’, Richard turns on him:
No lord of thine, thou haught insulting man;
Nor no man’s lord. I have no name, no title;
No, not that name was given me at the font,
But ’tis usurp’d.
(4.1.254–7)
To take away his regal title is to sever him from his very identity. It is to separate the body mortal from the body politic, which can only be divided in death. It is, therefore, to kill the King, because, without his title, he has no name, no identity, no life.
In the preceding scene in which Richard, devoid of earthly help, is captured at Barkloughly Castle, Shakespeare stages the King high above the thrust stage, where he talks of ‘God omnipotent,…mustering in his clouds, on our behalf,/Armies of pestilence,…’ (3.3.85–7) to avenge his downfall. There, too, he enters into a mood of self-pity, histrionically dramatizing his fall from a position associated with his ceremonial apprehension of himself, to the lowly status when his ‘sovereign’s head’ will be trampled upon by his ‘subjects’ feet’:
…a little grave,
A little little grave, an obscure grave,
Or I’ll be buried in the king’s highway,
…where subjects’ feet
May hourly trample on their sovereign’s head;
(3.3.153–7)
By placing him up on high, Shakespeare is able to depict his descent into the court beneath, where Bolingbroke holds sway. It is as if he is coming from heaven down into hell, though the imagery used is classical:
Down, down I come, like glist’ring Phaeton,
Wanting the manage of unruly jades.
In the base court? Base court, where kings grow base,
To come at traitors’ calls, and do them grace!
(3.3.178–81)
In the trial scene he calls for a mirror to look at his usurped self, commenting, ‘How soon my sorrow hath destroy’d my face.’ To which Bolingbroke replies, being perfectly aware of Richard’s capacity for self-dramatization, ‘The shadow of your sorrow hath destroy’d/The shadow of your face.’ (4.1.291–3). For Bolingbroke, Richard’s world is one of illusion, of shadows, with no understanding of the reality of what he is, of what he has done. But Richard has already smashed the glass in which he sees that illusion.
Key idea
Subtle though the deposition scene (Act 4, Scene 1) is, even before 1599 it appears that the Elizabethan authorities possibly regarded it as too controversial to be staged or published, since the first edition of the play, the quarto of 1597, omits it.
Whether or not Shakespeare and his colleagues were implicitly supporting the Essex Rebellion is still a matter of debate. The historian Michael Wood notes that ‘it seems hard to avoid the conclusion that Shakespeare and his company were sympathetic to Essex, who we know had long loved the play’s “conceit”’ (Wood, M. [2005: 255]) but Jonathan Bate challenges a similar view by Greenblatt (2004) and others:
‘…how can the strategy of those who commissioned the performance have been to plant the idea of a successful rebellion in the minds of the London crowd when they had not themselves planned the rebellion? The trigger for Essex’s march into the streets came only after the show…[The authorities led by Cecil] in the subsequent investigations [give no indication that this was] how they regarded the performance.’
Bate, J. (2009: 255)
Clearly, with or without the deposition scene, Richard II had been a success on the Elizabethan stage. Historically, the deposition and death of Richard II eventually led to the death of Richard III and the assumption of the throne by Henry Tudor (Henry VII), Queen Elizabeth’s grandfather. Richard II’s deposition therefore triggered a course of events that eventually led to Elizabeth’s ascent to the throne, but it also signalled a threat to monarchy itself, which was to culminate in the execution of a monarch and the creation of a Commonwealth. Shakespeare, in creating this play, may have courted danger but theatrically he triumphed. Many still find it one of his most compelling plays.
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The English history plays 3, plus a comedy: 1 Henry IV (1596–7); 2 Henry IV (1597–8); Henry V (1599); and The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597–1601)
Our understanding of the Henry IV and Henry V plays is sometimes constrained by attempts to tie them down to one interpretation. While this allows us to gain valuable critical insights from reading, we are often in danger of succumbing to the realism and the directorial style of a particular performance. However, while we can choose between various critical readings, each live performance is different because every audience is different and because time moves on.
The Henry IV plays, for all their structural agility, have had a mixed reception. Some theatregoers love them – and Falstaff in particular. Others do not. Satisfaction with these plays depends so much on Falstaff and, indeed, the actor playing the role. For Queen Elizabeth I it is conjectured that she so enjoyed watching this fat Saturnalian rogue that she demanded that Shakespeare write another play in which Falstaff should appear ‘in love’. This is the reason for including a discussion of The Merry Wives of Windsor in this last chapter on the English history plays, although the anecdote is one of those myths about Shakespeare that may or may not be true.
‘One of the most persistent and provocative dialogues in the history of Western culture takes place between those who claim for art a universal, metaphysical basis and those who see it as culturally determined, the articulation of the artist’s response to a particular time and place. On one level it is clear that both positions must be correct. It seems quite obvious that a composer writes from and about a particular time and place and equally obvious that a composer’s power of expression and a listener’s empathy have a more complex system of roots.’
Gaines, J. R. (2005: 130), Evening in the Palace of Reason: Bach Meets Frederick the Great in the Age of Enlightenment. London: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins
The Henry IV plays
The Henry IV plays work through a dual plot structure, with the one plot, the story of King Henry IV’s reign, overlapping with the other through Prince Hal, in the parallel plot involving the Saturnalian character Falstaff, who is ‘King’ of the tavern world. In this we recall again William Empson’s dictum of correspondence discussed earlier (see Chapter 4), whereby the two plots feed off each other. The result is a structural harmony and balance as the two narratives interact with each other, alternating until the close of 2 Henry IV, when Prince Hal, who has cavorted with his tavern associates, becomes king and rejects Falstaff, banning him from the royal presence. The Saturnalian world has to fade away in the presence of the glorious new king – who is sometimes in performances dressed all in gold. Early in the succee
ding play, Henry V, we hear that Falstaff is dead. War is now afoot and Prince Hal’s former tavern companions go off to fight in France where one of them, Bardolph, is ordered to be hanged by the King for stealing a ‘pax’, which is the box in which consecrated wafers are kept for Holy Communion.
The creation of Falstaff for the Henry IV plays signals a different approach by the dramatist from the histories we have considered so far. In these plays Shakespeare goes well beyond creating short scenes that provide straightforward comic perspectives on serious issues raised in the plays, but rather presents two overlapping worlds: the court and politics on the one hand and the tavern and brothels on the other. The latter attempts comically to imitate the former and, in so doing, exposes issues of discontent and unease on the other.
We would be wrong to think of Falstaff merely as a comic character, a lovable rogue. He and his tavern world point in a different direction from the plays’ otherwise seemingly establishment concerns. Falstaff’s aim is survival within the context of his own world, which is threatened by the demands of the political establishment. Hal coldly uses the tavern world for his own purposes of personal amusement and escape from his father, although from Act 1, Scene 2 of 2 Henry IV he appears to have a strategy to ‘use’ his tavern friends for a political purpose. This is expressed in Hal’s direct address to the audience (1.2.190f.), which may feel a little odd, as if Shakespeare might be protecting himself by making it clear that all this bad behaviour by an heir to the throne was strategic. Falstaff plays along with the game until the end. He is an inventive opportunist since that’s what his survival is all about.
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