Pistol: Yield, cur!
French Soldier: Je pense que vous êtes le gentilhomme de bonne qualité.
Pistol: Qualtitie calmie o custure me. Art thou a gentleman? What is thy name? Discuss.
(4.4.1–5)
“Calen o costure me” is itself a corrupt rendering of the original Irish for “Young maiden, my treasure”: “Cailin og a’ stor” (further debased by Pistol to “calmie o custure me”). The Irish language, like its land and people, is inexorably anglicized, corrupted, and appropriated. The brief exchange also offers insight into the ways in which Shakespeare was perfecting the art of creating characters who feel real: though he’s no Hamlet, we grasp who Pistol is by following his idiosyncratic train of associations.
Such commixtures were proving to be much less humorous when played out in Ireland itself. The underlying threat to English identity produced by conquering and intermarrying is given rich expression in the anonymous New English tract A Discourse of Ireland, written in 1599, which notes that “it is a thing observed in Ireland and grown into a proverb, that English [settlers] in the second generation become Irish but never English,” adding that the cause is that “the evil overcometh and corrupteth the good.” To preclude any more of this mix of “English with the Irish,” the author urges that the English simply relocate, rather than annihilate, the Irish: “The removing of the Irish may happily alter their dispositions when they shall be planted in another soil.” Ideally, they’ll be shipped off to provide a servant class “throughout England” (though the author of this tract never considers the possibility that they would mate there with the English). Spenser himself in his View discusses how the English living in Ireland are “grown almost mere Irish” and asks rhetorically in lines that anticipate Macmorris’s defensiveness about his national identity: “Is it possible that an Englishman brought up naturally in such a sweet civility as England affords can find such barbarous rudeness that he should forget his own nature and forgo his own nation? How may this be?”
Conquest, national identity, and mixed origins—the obsessive concerns of Elizabethan Irish policy—run deep through Henry the Fifth and sharply distinguish it from previous English accounts of Henry’s reign. Earlier in Shakespeare’s play, it is the French who complain about the mongrel English. The Dauphin asks:
Shall a few sprays of us,
The emptying of our fathers’ luxury,
Our scions, put in wild and savage stock,
Spurt up so suddenly into the clouds
And overlook their grafters?
(3.5.5–9)
The impossibly dense metaphors of breeding and grafting almost obscure the Dauphin’s point: in 1066 the Normans who conquered England went about impregnating Englishwomen—the “wild and savage stock.” Centuries later, how dare Henry and his army of upstart half-breeds challenge us, “their grafters”? A fuming Bourbon can only concur in one of the funnier lines in the play: “Normans, but bastard Normans, Norman bastards!” (3.5.10). Yes, the English are Normans—after the Norman Conquest—but bastard ones. From the Dauphin and Bourbon’s point of view, the French are the only purebreds, but they worry that “our madams mock at us and plainly say” that “our mettle is bred out, and they will give / Their bodies to the lust of English youth / To new-store France with bastard warriors” (3.5.28–31).
The danger of polluted national purity runs through the play and locates Henry the Fifth midway between Shakespeare’s extended exploration of interracial marriage in The Merchant of Venice a few years earlier and his return to this preoccupation in Othello a few years later. Henry’s threat of turning his soldiers loose to rape the French maidens of Harfleur raises the stakes considerably:
What is’t to me, when you yourselves are cause,
If your pure maidens fall into the hand
Of hot and forcing violation?
(3.3.19–21)
This time the Frenchwoman are the rootstock and the English soldiers the potential scion grafted on. The result is much the same and part of the collateral damage of wars of conquest. The overriding irony of Henry the Fifth is that its happy ending leads to just such a union, romanticized of course, with the English Henry wedded to the French princess. The language of breeding persists to the very end, as Henry tells Katharine that “thou must therefore needs prove a good soldier-breeder. Shall not thou and I, between Saint Denis and Saint George, compound a boy, half French, half English, that shall go to Constantinople and take the Turk by the beard? Shall we not?” (5.2.206–10). The specter of Islam will help the French and English temporarily forget their differences. A final Chorus, which doubles as an epilogue, reminds us that their “half French, half English” son, Henry VI, will never make it to Constantinople; in fact, he’ll lose France and then his own crown. Having inflated expectations, the Chorus now punctures them.
There’s the added irony that Pistol learns that his wife, a bawd, “is dead / I’th’spital of a malady of France” (5.1.80–81). Through the sexual transmission (often by returning soldiers) of the so-called French disease, syphilis, the French are ultimately revenged and the English fatally contaminated. The news of his wife’s death confirms Pistol’s decision to return to a criminal life in England: “bawd I’ll turn / And something lean of cutpurse of quick hand. / To England will I steal, and there I’ll steal” (5.1.84–86). Overlooked in the spectacle of Henry’s (and Essex’s) imagined homecoming is the largely suppressed and unhappy story of the return of war veterans like Pistol. Though England was taking the war to Ireland, it was clear that, in the aftermath of the campaign, English soldiers would be bringing their Irish experience home. This was a different but no less disturbing kind of contamination. The reach of the war extended into every corner of England, including Shakespeare’s native Stratford-upon-Avon, which, in June 1601, petitioned to “be eased of the charge of one Lewis Gilbert, a maimed solder in Ireland.” Gilbert was a butcher (a member of a trade that Shakespeare’s father, a glover who dealt in animal skins, knew well, and perhaps the young man or his family was known to the Shakespeares). We don’t know what Gilbert was like before he came back maimed from Ireland. But in the years after his return he was a public burden and a danger to his community—he was accused of forcible entry into a local shop, he failed to pay his debts, and finally, he stabbed a neighbor to death with “a long knife” in a quarrel. Through bitter war veterans like Pistol, Shakespeare also hints at the corrosive and unavoidable national cost of the Irish war.
INTERWOVEN WITH THE RECURRENT FANTASY IN HENRY THE FIFTH OF national purity is the fond hope that war will do away with the social barriers that divide the men who fight as one on the battlefield. The great speech on this subject is delivered by Henry himself as he prepares his soldiers for battle:
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition.
(4.3.60–63)
No speech better expresses the loyalties forged in combat. But like much in the play, its sentiments are belied by what follows. The battle won, Henry immediately reverts to the familiar divisions between aristocratic brethren and everyone else. When, for example, he scans the list of the Englishman who died at Agincourt, he tells his army of the deaths of
Edward the Duke of York, the Earl of Suffolk,
Sir Richard Keighley, Davy Gam, esquire;
None else of name, and of all other men
But five-and-twenty.
(4.8.103–6)
“None else of name.” Battlefield deaths have not gentled the condition of the anonymous soldiers who fought alongside Henry. It’s painful witnessing the soldiers’ frustrated expectations. If any one of them deserved to be knighted, it is the worthy Captain Gower. When he and the foot soldier Williams (who had exchanged blunt words with the disguised king the night before) enter in mid-conversation after the battle, they are discussing the news that Gower ha
s been invited to attend the king at his tent. That can mean only one thing: Williams expects, mistakenly, that “it is to knight you, Captain” (4.8.1). It’s the aspiration of every gentleman volunteer who would follow Essex to Ireland knowing that the earl had generously knighted dozens of men in his previous military campaigns. But Williams is wrong. There will be no knighting. Gower is simply called in to act as peacemaker between Fluellen and Williams, as Henry tries to extricate himself from an uncomfortable quarrel with Williams.
The defeated French aristocrats, like their English counterparts, are also eager to restore the division between nobility and commoners, even among the dead on the battlefield, and ask for permission
To sort our nobles from our common men.
For many of our princes—woe the while!—
Lie drowned and soaked in mercenary blood;
So do our vulgar drench their peasant limbs
In blood of princes.
(4.7.73–77)
While brotherhood figures repeatedly in the final act of the play, it refers not to the battle-forged fraternity but to preexisting ties of family and rank. Henry and the French king pointedly call each other “brother,” and Henry refers to his aristocratic kin, Gloucester and Bedford, as brothers, too. Even Alexander Court calls his fellow foot soldier “Brother John Bates” (4.1.86). But in the end this fraternal goodwill doesn’t cut across social lines: Henry, for example, refers to Court and Bates’s friend, Michael Williams, as “this fellow.” The battle over, traditional divisions are restored. And as the final Chorus reminds us, all that Henry V won was soon lost. For audiences at the Curtain, and later that year at the Globe, it’s a quietly deflating ending to an exhilarating theatrical experience, though one that cannot erase the pleasures of the victory at Agincourt or the patriotic feelings stirred up by Henry’s speeches on the eve of battle.
A WEEK OR SO LATER, IN THE EARLY AFTERNOON OF MARCH 27, THE Earl of Essex and his followers finally assembled at Tower Hill, an open field just north of the Tower of London. Their departure for the wars was theatrical, down to the timing, for the procession got under way at just the hour that plays began. It was a scene that called to mind the lines from the opening Chorus to Henry the Fifth, which exhorts spectators to picture just such a martial scene: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them / Printing their proud hoofs i’th’ receiving earth.” John Stow writes that at “about two o’clock in the afternoon,” Essex “took horse in Seething Lane, and from thence being accompanied with diverse noblemen and many others, himself very plainly attired, rode through Grace Street, Cornhill, Cheapside, and other high streets, in all which places and in the fields, the people pressed exceedingly to behold him, especially in the highways for more than four miles’ space, crying and saying, ‘God bless your Lordship, God preserve your Honor,’ and some followed him until the evening, only to behold him.”
But this dramatic sight of a powerful English army heading off to crush the Irish rebellion was undermined—at least for the superstitious—by the weather, which the army could no more control than the players could. Out of nowhere, historian John Speed writes, there struck “a strange thunderclap in a clear sunshine day.” Simon Forman, another eyewitness, offers a more detailed account. After an hour or so, he writes, “It began to rain and at three ’till four there fell such a hail shower that was very great.” The weather then turned even darker: “It thundered withal and the wind turned to the north and after the shower was past it turned to the southeast again, and there were many mighty clouds up, but all the day before one of the clock was a very fair day and clear.” Anxious Londoners read it as an ominous sign. It made so powerful an impression upon the translator John Florio that, over a decade later, he included it in a dictionary as the definition of the word ecnéphia, “a kind of prodigious storm coming in summer, with furious flashings, the firmament seeming to open and burn, as happened when the Earl of Essex parted from London to go for Ireland.” Shakespeare also took notice, and would soon work the disturbing image of this “civil strife in heaven” into his next play, Julius Caesar:
When these prodigies
Do so conjointly meet, let not men say,
“These are their reasons, they are natural,”
For I believe they are portentous things
Unto the climate that they point upon.
(1.3.28–32)
SPRING
– 6 –
The Globe Rises
From Shakespeare’s new lodgings near the Clink prison in the parish of St. Saviour’s in Southwark, it was just a few minutes’ stroll to the construction site of the Globe. It’s likely that through late winter and early spring he kept a close eye on progress there. Whether it was the relief of working in a playhouse free of the ghosts of the past or the sense of potential that the new theater offered, the Globe clearly had a lot to do with the great surge of energy and creativity at this moment in Shakespeare’s career. His surroundings could only have contributed to this vitality. Located outside the jurisdiction of the London authorities, the Bankside had a reputation for freewheeling independence. It was notorious for its criminality, prostitution, inns, theaters, and blood sports—both bull- and bearbaiting. Puritan preachers called it a “licensed stew.” Some of this local color began finding its way into Shakespeare’s plays. Everyone in the audience at Troilus and Cressida knew what Shakespeare meant when he mentions “some galled goose of Winchester” (5.10.54): a syphilitic Bankside prostitute. And Antonio’s advice to Sebastian in Twelfth Night that it’s “best to lodge” in “the south suburbs, at the Elephant” (3.3.39)—a local brothel converted to an inn—would also have produced a knowing smile.
In his new neighborhood, Shakespeare would have found himself rubbing elbows with watermen (who made up a quarter of all workers in St. Saviour’s) rather than with the merchants and musicians of St. Helen’s in upscale Bishopsgate. Southwark was a community in transition. Its population was swelling, tenements were going up all around, and the streets lining the Thames and leading from London Bridge were crammed. But a hundred yards from the Thames, Southwark took on a more bucolic appearance, and to the south and west were fields, farms, ponds, and scattered marshland.
Because of his proximity to the Globe site and because decisions about stage design constrained the kinds of scenes he could write, Shakespeare was probably consulted at various points during the theater’s construction. Though its external dimensions were necessarily identical to the Theatre’s, much else about it—the direction that its stage faced in relation to the afternoon sun, trapdoors, the balcony, special machinery for descents, the backstage, and stage doors for entrances and exits—could be customized to suit the actors’ and their resident playwright’s needs. The only document to survive about the property during the spring of 1599 (dated May 16 and in Latin), speaks of a newly built house with a garden “in the occupation of William Shakespeare and others.” Whether this house refers to the Globe, still under construction, or more likely to another dwelling on the two-parcel site, remains unclear; but this slender piece of evidence suggests that Shakespeare played a visible role in the new venture.
By spring, with the arrival of longer thaws, it was obvious that the soggy property off Maiden Lane that had been leased so hurriedly back in December was far from ideal for a playhouse. No wonder then that, a year later, the lord admiral would justify relocating his playing company from the adjacent Rose to the northern suburbs on the grounds that the site of the Rose was “very noisome”—that is, unpleasant, even noxious—“for resort of people in the winter time.” As Ben Jonson later observed, the low-lying Bankside land on which the Globe also sat better suited the defensive terrain of a “fort.” The Globe, Jonson adds, was “flanked with a ditch and forced out of a marsh.” Fortunately for the Chamberlain’s Men, Elizabethan playgoers don’t seem to have been particularly fussy about muck and smells.
Had Shakespeare visited the construction site in late spring, he would have stepped over
the newly dug foundation trenches and found himself within a large-scale version of the shape Prospero would later draw onstage in The Tempest, where the stage direction reads: “All enter the circle which Prospero had made, and there stand charmed” (SD 5.1.57). The master carpenter Peter Street had carefully measured the exact dimensions of the Theatre’s foundations after the timber structure had been dismantled. Once the location and center point of the Globe had been decided upon, Street took his surveyor’s line and, probably sprinkling lime to indicate where the exterior wall would stand, marked off a ring with a diameter of seventy-two feet. The charmed circle stopped there. It was agreed upon that, unlike the Rose, the stage at the Globe would be entirely in afternoon shadow. Playgoers rather than the actors would have the sun in their eyes; they’d have to squint at times, but they’d feel warmer.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 13