by Will Durant
The bard had a better press in Germany, where no native playwright contested the prize. It was Germany’s first great dramatist, Gotthold Lessing, who in 1759 informed his countrymen that Shakespeare was superior to all other poets, ancient or modern; and Herder supported him. August von Schlegel, Ludwig Tieck, and other leaders of the Romantic school raised the Shakespearean banner, and Goethe contributed an enthusiastic discussion of Hamlet in Wilhelm Meister (1796).106 Shakespeare became popular on the German stage; and for a time German scholarship snatched the lead from England in the clarification of Shakespeare’s life and plays.
For those brought up in the aura of Shakespeare an objective estimate or comparison is impossible. Only one who knows the language, the religion, the art, the customs, and the philosophy of the Periclean Greeks will feel the unequaled dignity of the Dionysian tragic drama, the stark simplicity and inexorable logic of its structure, its proud self-restraint in word and deed, the moving commentary of its choral chants, the high enterprise of seeing man in the perspective of his cosmic place and destiny. Only one who knows the French language and character, and the background of the grand siècle, can feel, in the plays of Corneille and Racine, not merely the majesty and music of their verse, but as well the heroic effort of reason to overspread emotion and impulse, the stoic adherence to difficult classic norms, the concentration of the drama into a few tense hours summarizing and deciding lives. Only one who knows English in its Elizabethan fullness, who can ride with gusto the Elizabethan winds of rhetoric, lyric, and vituperation, who puts no bounds to the theater’s mirroring of nature and release of imagination, can bring to Shakespeare’s plays their merited acceptance with open arms and heart; but such a man will tremble with delight at the splendor of their speech, and he will be moved to the depths of his spirit to follow and fathom their thought. These are the three epochal gifts of the world’s drama, and we must, despite our limitations, welcome them all to our deepening, thanking our heritage for Greek wisdom, French beauty, and Elizabethan life.
(But, of course, Shakespeare is supreme.)
* * *
I. Cf. Two Gentlemen of Verona, V, ii, 3,6; Merry Wives of Windsor, II, i.
II. Ben Jonson pounced upon this in his talks with Drummond at Hawthornden.21 Shakespeare took it from a novel by Robert Greene—a university graduate. Under Ottokar II (r. 1253–78) Bohemia extended her rule to the Adriatic shores.22
III. “There is no reason to reject this report.”—Sir E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, I, 89.
CHAPTER V
Mary Queen of Scots
1542–87
I. THE FAIRY QUEEN
WITHIN the interlocking dramas of the Scottish Reformation and Elizabethan politics the tragedy of Mary Stuart moved with all the fascination of beauty, passionate love, religious and political conflict, murder, revolution, and heroic death. Her ancestry almost assured a violent end. She was the daughter of the Stuart James V of Scotland and of Mary of Guise, Lorraine, and France; she was the granddaughter of Margaret Tudor, who was the daughter of Henry VII of England; she was therefore niece, loosely called cousin, of “Bloody Mary” and Elizabeth; by common consent she was the legitimate heir to the English crown if Elizabeth should die without issue; and for those who—like all Catholics (and, at one time, Henry VIII)—considered Elizabeth a bastard and therefore ineligible to rule, Mary Stuart, and not Elizabeth Tudor, should have succeeded to the throne of England in 1558. To make tragedy certain, Mary, on becoming Queen of France (1559), allowed her followers and her state papers to call her Queen of England. It had long been a vain pretense of French kings to be also kings of England, and of English kings to be also kings of France; but in this case the pretense came close to a generally acknowledged claim. Elizabeth could not be sure of her crown as long as Mary lived. Only common sense could have saved the situation, and sovereigns rarely stoop so low.
Mary was offered kingdoms within a year of her birth. Within a week of her birth her father’s death made her Queen of Scots. Henry VIII, hoping to unite Scotland as an appanage to England, proposed that the infant be betrothed to his son Edward, be sent to England, and be there brought up, presumably as a Protestant, to be Edward’s Queen. Her Catholic mother accepted, instead, the offer of Henry II of France (1548) to give her in marriage to his son the Dauphin. To guard her against being kidnaped into England, Mary, aged six, was hurried off to France. She remained there thirteen years, was educated with the royal children, and became completely French in spirit, being already half French in blood. As she matured into youth she developed all the charms of young womanhood in beauty of features and form, sprightliness of mind, and merry grace of ways and speech. She sang sweetly, played the lute well, talked Latin, and wrote poetry that poets affected to praise. Courtiers throbbed to “the snow of her pure face” (Brantôme),1 “the gold of her curled and plaited hair” (Ronsard),2 the slender elegance of her hands, the fullness of her bust; and even the grave and sober L’Hôpital thought that such loveliness must be the vesture of a god.3 She became the most attractive and accomplished figure at the most polished court in Europe. When, aged sixteen, she married the Dauphin (April 24, 1558), and still more when, aged seventeen, she became through his accession Queen of France, all the hopes of a fanciful dream seemed to have come true.
But Francis II died (December 5, 1560) after two years of rule. Mary, a widow at eighteen, thought of retiring to an estate in Touraine, for she loved France. But meanwhile Scotland had gone Protestant; it was in danger of being lost to France as an ally. The French government held it to be Mary’s duty to go to Edinburgh and lead her native land back to the French alliance and the Catholic faith. Unwillingly, Mary reconciled herself to leaving the comforts and brilliance of French civilization for life in a Scotland which she could barely remember, and which she pictured as a land of barbarism and cold. She wrote to the leading Scottish nobles, affirming her fidelity to Scotland; she did not tell them that in her marriage contract she had deeded Scotland to the kings of France if she died without issue. The nobles, Protestant as well as Catholic, were charmed; the Scottish Parliament invited her to come and possess her throne. She asked Elizabeth for a safe-conduct through England; it was refused. On August 14, 1561, Mary sailed from Calais, bidding France a tearful farewell, and gazing at the receding coast till nothing remained but the sea.
Five days later she disembarked at Leith, the port of Edinburgh, and discovered Scotland.
II. SCOTLAND, 1560–61
It was a nation of ancient roots and rooted ways: bound by the rough highlands of the north to a feudal regime of almost independent nobles organizing and exploiting a half-primitive culture of hunting, herding, and tenant tillage; favored in the south by lovely lowlands fertile with rain but darkened by long winters and crippling cold; a people struggling to create a moral and civilized order out of illiteracy, illegitimacy, corruption, lawlessness, and violence; riddled with superstition, and sending witches to the stake; seeking in a tense religious faith some hope of a less arduous life. To offset the divisive power of the barons, the kings had supported the Catholic clergy, and had dowered these with wealth leading to venality, lethargy, and concubines.4 The nobles itched for the riches of the Church; they debased the clergy by filling ecclesiastical offices with their worldly sons; they declared for the Reformation and made the Scottish Parliament, which they controlled, the master alike of Church and state.
External danger was the strongest incentive to internal unity. England felt unsafe in an island shared with her by untamed Scots; time and again she sought, by diplomacy, marriage, or war, to bring Scotland under English rule. Fearful of absorption, Scotland allied herself with a France traditionally hostile to England. Cecil advised Elizabeth to support the Protestant nobles against their Catholic Queen; so Scotland would be divided and would cease to be a peril to England or a support to France. Moreover, the Protestant leaders, if successful, might reject Mary, enthrone a Protestant noble, and make all Scotland Protestant;
privately Cecil dreamed of uniting such a Scotland to England by persuading Elizabeth to marry such a king.5 When France sent a force into Scotland to suppress the Protestants, Elizabeth dispatched an army to protect them and drive out the French. Beaten in the field, the French representatives in Scotland signed at Edinburgh (July 6, 1560) a fateful treaty requiring not only that the French should leave Scotland but that Mary should cease to claim the throne of England. On the advice of her husband, Francis II, Mary refused to ratify the treaty. Elizabeth took note.
The religious situation was equally confused. The Scottish “Reformation Parliament” of 1560 officially abolished Catholicism, and established Calvinist Protestantism, as the religion of the state; but these acts did not receive from Mary the royal ratification then required to make parliamentary decrees the law of the land. Catholic priests still held most of the Scottish benefices; half the nobles were “papists,” and John Hamilton, of royal blood, still came to Parliament as the Catholic primate of Scotland. In Edinburgh, however, and in St. Andrews, Perth, Stirling, and Aberdeen, a large proportion of the middle classes had been won to Calvinism by devoted preachers under the lead of John Knox.
In the year before Mary’s coming Knox and his aides drew up a Book of Discipline defining their doctrine and purposes. Religion was to mean Protestantism; “the godly” were to mean Calvinists alone; “idolatry” was to include “the Mass, invocation of saints, adoration of images, and the keeping … of the same,” and “the obstinate maintainers and teachers of such abominations ought not to escape the punishment of the civil magistrate.” All doctrine “repugnant to” the Gospel was to “be utterly suppressed as damnable to man’s salvation.”6 Ministers were to be elected by the congregations, were to establish schools open to all godly children, and were to have control of the Scottish universities—St. Andrews, Glasgow, and Aberdeen. The wealth of the Catholic Church and the continued ecclesiastical tithes were to be devoted to the needs of the ministers, the education of the people, and the relief of the poor. The new Kirk, and not the secular state, was to legislate on morals and prescribe penalties for offenses—drunkenness, gluttony, profanity, extravagance of dress, oppression of the poor, obscenity, fornication, and adultery. All who resisted the new doctrine or persistently absented themselves from its services were to be turned over to the secular arm, with the Kirk’s recommendation that they be put to death.7
However, the lords who dominated Parliament refused to accept the Book of Discipline (January 1561). They had no relish for a powerful and independent Kirk, and they had their own plans for using the wealth of the superseded Church. The Book remained the goal and guide of the Kirk’s development.
Defeated in his attempt to establish a theocracy—a government by priests claiming to speak for God—Knox labored with massive tenacity to organize the new ministry, to find funds for its support, and to spread it throughout Scotland in the face of a still functioning Catholic clergy. The dogmatic force of his preaching and the enthusiasm of his congregation made him a power in Edinburgh and in the state. The Catholic Queen would have to reckon with him before she could consolidate her rule.
III. MARY AND KNOX: 1561–65
She had arranged to arrive in Scotland a fortnight before she was expected, for she had feared some opposition to her landing. But word of her arrival at Leith spread through the capital, and soon the streets were crowded with people. They were surprised to find that their Queen was a pretty and vivacious girl not yet nineteen years old; most of them cheered her as she rode gracefully on her palfrey to Holyrood Palace; and there the lords, Protestant and Catholic, welcomed her, proud that Scotland had so charming a ruler, who might someday, in person or through a son, bring England under a Scottish sovereign.
The two portraits8 that have come down to us support her reputation as one of the most beautiful women of her time. We cannot tell how far the now nameless painters idealized her, but in both cases we see the finely molded features, the lovely hands, the luxuriant chestnut hair that entranced barons and biographers. Yet those pictures hardly reveal to us the real attractiveness of the young Queen—her buoyant spirit, her “laughing mouth,” her nimble-witted speech, her fresh enthusiasm, her capacity for kindness and friendliness, her longing for affection, her reckless admiration of strong men. It was her tragedy that she wished to be a woman as well as a queen—to feel all the warmth of romance without abating the privileges of rule. She thought of herself in terms of chivalric tales—of proud yet gentle beauties, at once chaste and sensuous, capable of ardent longing and sensitive suffering, of tender pity, incorruptible loyalty, and a courage rising as danger rose. She was an expert horsewoman, leaped fences and ditches rashly, and could bear the hardship of campaigns without weariness or complaint. But she was neither physically nor mentally fit to be a queen. She was frail in all but nervous vigor, she was subject to fainting fits that looked like epilepsy, and some undiagnosed ailment often hampered her with pain.9 She had not the masculine intelligence of Elizabeth. She was often clever, but rarely wise; repeatedly she let passion ruin diplomacy. At times she showed remarkable self-control, patience, and tact, and then again she would let go with hot temper and sharp tongue. She was cursed with beauty, unblessed with brains; and her character was her fate.
She tried hard to meet the manifold dangers of her situation, poised between grasping lords, hostile preachers and a decadent Catholic clergy that did no honor to her trusting faith. She chose as leaders of her Privy Council two Protestants: her bastard half-brother Lord James Stuart, later Earl of Murray (or Moray), aged twenty-six, and William Maitland of Lethington, thirty-six, who had more intellect than his character could handle, and who shifted from side to side in compromises till his death. The goal of Lethington’s diplomacy was admirable—the union of England and Scotland as the only alternative to a consuming hostility. In May of 1562 Mary sent him to England to arrange an interview between herself and Elizabeth; Elizabeth consented, but her Council demurred, fearing that even the most indirect admission of Mary’s claim to the succession would encourage Catholic attempts to assassinate Elizabeth. The two queens corresponded with diplomatic affection, while each sought to play cat to the other’s mouse.
Mary’s first three years of rule were a success in everything but religion. Though she could never reconcile herself to the climate or the culture of Scotland, she sought, with dances, masques, and charm, to make Holyrood Palace a little Paris in a subarctic zone, and most of the lords thawed under the sun of her gaiety; Knox growled that they were bewitched. She allowed Murray and Lethington to administer the kingdom, which they did reasonably well. For a time even the religious problem seemed to be solved by her concessions. When papal agents urged her to restore Catholicism as the official religion of the land she replied that this was at present impossible; Elizabeth would forcibly intervene. To appease the Scottish Protestants she issued (August 26, 1561) a proclamation forbidding the Catholics to attempt changes in the established religion, but she asked to be allowed to practice her own worship privately and to have Mass said for her in the royal chapel.10 On Sunday, August 24, Mass was there celebrated. A few Protestants gathered outside and demanded that “the idolatrous priest should die”;11 but Murray barred their entry into the chapel, while his aides led the priest to safety. On the following Sunday Knox denounced the lords for permitting the Mass, and told his congregation that to him one Mass was more offense than ten thousand armed foes.12
The Queen sent for him and strove to win his tolerance. On September 4, in her palace, the two faiths met in a historic interview, whose details are known to us only from Knox’s report.13 She reproached him for having stirred up rebellion against the duly constituted authority of her mother, and for having written his “blast” against “the monstrous regiment of women”—which had denounced all female sovereigns. He answered that “if to rebuke idolatry be to raise subjects against their princes, then cannot I be excused, for it has pleased God … to make me one (amongst many) to
disclose unto this realm the vanity of the papistical religions, and the deceit, pride, and tyranny of that Roman Antichrist,” the Pope. As for the blast, “Madam, that book was written most especially against that wicked Jezebel of England,” Mary Tudor. Knox’s report continues:
“Think ye (quod she) that subjects may resist their princes?”
“If (he [Knox] replied) their princes exceed their bounds … it is no doubt they may be resisted, even by power.”
… The Queen stood as it were amazed … At length she said:
“Well, then, I perceive that my subjects shall obey you, and not me.
“God forbid (answered he) that ever I take upon me to command any to obey me, or yet to let subjects at liberty to do what pleaseth them. But my travail is that both princes and subjects obey God … And this subjection, Madam, unto God and unto His troubled Church, is the greatest dignity that flesh can get upon this earth.”