A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  For Shakespeare’s audiences, then, the reenactment of the greatest of political assassinations in Julius Caesar followed a series of religiously motivated assassination attempts at home. They were not ignorant of the turmoil into which an assassination could throw a nation. But they may also have accepted its utility. Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, wrote to Robert Cecil in October 1598 suggesting that the Irish problem be resolved by assassinating Tyrone. Ralegh goes so far as to say that it “can be no disgrace if it were known that the killing of a rebel were practiced, for you see that the lives of anointed princes are daily sought and we have always in Ireland given head money for the killing of rebels.” Ralegh is at pains to make clear that Cecil wouldn’t be implicated in the scheme (“But for yourself, you are not to be touched in the matter”), apparently unaware that just a few months earlier Cecil had himself written to Sir Geoffrey Fenton, the Irish secretary of state, with instructions to assassinate Tyrone.

  Moral qualms aside, the real problem with political assassination for Elizabethans—and Shakespeare’s play makes this abundantly clear—was that it unleashed forces that could not be predicted or controlled. Assassination was linked with chaos, bloodletting, and potential civil war because this was what it invariably led to. However noble Brutus’s motives, however morally and politically justified, it would have been clear to many in Shakespeare’s audience that he hadn’t thought things through. Critics who fault Julius Caesar for being a broken-backed play, who are disappointed by the final two acts, and who feel that the assassination takes place too early in the action, fail to understand that the two parts of the play—the events leading up to the assassination and the bloody civil strife that follow—go hand in hand. Even as Shakespeare offers compelling arguments for tyrannicide in the opening acts of the play, he shows in the closing ones the savage bloodletting and political breakdown that, if the English history he had so compellingly chronicled was any example, were sure to follow. Recent French history—borne out in the Admiral’s Men’s collaborative four-part drama of the civil wars in France on stage the previous autumn and winter at the Rose—only confirmed this.

  If succession and assassination were long-standing problems with special contemporary relevance, there were other conflicts, no less inflected by religious divisions, that were more deep-seated in the culture and preoccupied Shakespeare as he wrote Julius Caesar. Foremost among these were those concerning the official calendar. To grasp the resonance of these issues—both for the culture and for Shakespeare himself—requires a brief digression, going back in time to the early 1570s when the theological shards that barely protrude in this play but are embedded within it cut deeply into Shakespeare and his society.

  ON MIDSUMMER DAY, 1571, WHEN SHAKESPEARE WAS SEVEN YEARS OLD, the townsfolk of Stratford-upon-Avon gathered opposite the Gild Chapel on Church Street. The “right goodly Chapel” had stood at the heart of Stratford’s religious and civic life since the thirteenth century. It had last been refurbished during the reign of Henry VII with the help of Hugh Clopton, who also built a home for himself, New Place (which Shakespeare would later own), and whose gardens faced its beautiful stained-glass windows. Adjoining the chapel was a schoolhouse as well as almshouses for old folk who could remember a time during the reign of Henry VIII when four priests had been employed to say masses in the chapel.

  The crowd had gathered to witness a historic event: a glazier was knocking out the chapel’s stained-glass windows, replacing the colored glass with pieces of “white” or clear glass. It was a considerable undertaking. The children in the crowd may have been more excited by the sound of shattering glass than in the knowledge that the glazier, paid twenty-three shillings, eight pence for his labor, was furthering the work of the English Reformation. For advocates of Protestant reform, who feared that, in William Prynne’s words, “Popery may creep in at a glass window as well as at a door,” the light of clear day would at last shine in the chapel, no longer reflected through the images of Catholic saints. For others, who had grown up and grown old worshiping in the shadows cast by those figures and who in troubled times had prayed to these saints for intercession, it was a sad day. Some may have stooped to retrieve as souvenir or relic a jagged fragment of the Virgin Mary or Saint George.

  There’s no way of knowing whether the decision to destroy the stained glass on Midsummer’s Day was deliberate. It could have been that the long days of late June were best suited for the job; it may simply have been when the unnamed glazier, who must have come from a neighboring town, was available (glass windows were a rarity in Stratford). But the timing may have struck some as intentional. When England had been Catholic, Midsummer had been a day of festive release, a time to light bonfires and “for youths and girls [to] dance all day with flowers in their hands.” For proponents of reform, however, what Shakespeare would speak of playfully in Twelfth Night as “midsummer madness” (3.4.61), smacked of the worst of papistry and paganism, and they had already succeeded in squelching most of this merrymaking. In London, John Stow lamented, the great Midsummer celebrations of his youth had all but died out by midcentury. A young Shakespeare may have asked his elders about what they did on Midsummer, but by the time he was old enough to hear their stories, those rites (some of which would be reimagined in his Midsummer Night’s Dream) were fading memories.

  When, decades later, Shakespeare searched for a metaphor that captured a sense of melancholy loss, and compared the silhouette of trees’ naked branches to the bare window tracery in a ruined Gothic choir or chancel, he may have drawn on this childhood memory of “bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang” (Sonnet 73). The chapel’s stained glass had been its last vestige of Catholic imagery. A few months before Shakespeare was born there had been an earlier and massive “defacing [of] images” in the chapel’s interior. At that time Stratford’s governing council (which included Shakespeare’s father) had ordered workmen to whitewash the extraordinary paintings that covered the interior of the chapel. Some of the more zealous workers had gotten carried away, gouging overtly Catholic images. But for the most part, it seems that the workmen had been instructed to follow a less reckless course, painting over the interior but otherwise leaving the artwork intact (and sparing the wall paintings in the chancel, which had been partitioned off). After all, the Protestant reforms instituted under Edward VI in the early 1550s had been reversed when Mary restored Catholicism later in that decade. Though the engine of reform had once again begun to churn under Elizabeth, who knew when it might be reversed again, especially since the presumed heir to the throne was the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots? A safer and less expensive policy was to apply a couple of coats of whitewash that could one day be removed (as they were in 1804 when the paintings were temporarily uncovered). Other reversible changes were made as well. The chapel’s rood loft was taken down and a communion board replaced the altar. And it wasn’t until October 1571 that Catholic vestments, including copes of white damask that had been in storage for over a decade, were finally ordered to be sold off, perhaps as bedcovers or as stage props for touring players.

  Retreating from the severity of Edward VI’s iconoclasm, Elizabeth had made clear that stained glass need not suffer the same fate as painted images and that no one should “break down or deface any image in glass windows in any church” without official permission. But in the aftermath of the Catholic-led Northern Rebellion in 1569 and the replacement of Stratford-upon-Avon’s Catholic-leaning vicar, schoolmaster, and curate with those of more confirmed Protestant credentials, it appears that the balance in town had shifted in favor of the reformers, and the chapel’s stained-glass windows, whose bright images had stood out starkly for the past six years against the background of unadorned walls, were doomed.

  Once the chapel was sanitized of visual distractions, the power of the word would predominate: the Bible, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, and the official Book of Homilies, and Book of Common Prayer—works that would leave a different though no less profound
impact on Shakespeare’s writing. Reform in Stratford-upon-Avon and throughout England was met with a degree of confusion and ambivalence. Confusion because the government kept sending mixed signals about the extent of reform, as the queen sought to avoid sectarian strife by accommodating both Puritans clamoring for radical change and Catholic subjects longing for a return to the old ways. Ambivalence, because every adult in Stratford had either been raised as a Catholic or had lived under Catholic rule. Many, if they had abandoned the faith in which they had been raised, had done so grudgingly. Even if Shakespeare’s parents, like most Elizabethans with Catholic roots, were reconciled to the latest change in state religion (and scholars are divided on this point), it’s easy to imagine John and Mary Shakespeare pointing out to their curious eldest son in visits to the Guild Chapel precisely where, beneath the whitewash, Doomsday had been visible, where lost souls could once be seen falling into hell-mouth, and where the Virgin Mary had been painted. To argue that the Shakespeares were secretly Catholic or, alternatively, mainstream Protestants misses the point that except for a small minority at one doctrinal extreme or other, those labels failed to capture the layered nature of what Elizabethans, from the queen on down, actually believed. The whitewashed chapel walls, on which, perhaps, an image or two were still faintly visible, are as good an emblem of Shakespeare’s faith as we are likely to find.

  Of all the images in Stratford’s chapel that young Will Shakespeare must have longed to see, the painting of Saint George fighting with the dragon, plunging his spear into the monster’s neck, is a strong candidate (the pommel even resembles the one on the Shakespeare coat of arms). Shakespeare, who was probably born either on the day or eve of St. George’s Day, April 23, may well have had a special affinity for this saint. Saint George, as well as being England’s patron saint, was a particular favorite in Stratford. There had been a special altar in his name in Stratford’s Holy Trinity Church and among its ceiling paintings yet another depiction of Saint George defeating the dragon. For much of the sixteenth century one of the town’s most popular celebrations was the annual pageant of Saint George, held on Holy Thursday. Though suppressed after 1547, the pageant was revived during Mary’s reign. Stratford’s wardens’ accounts at that time include payments for “dressing” and “bearing” the dragon, gunpowder, scouring Saint George’s harness, and two dozen bells—which suggests a lively show, with Saint George riding on horseback through Stratford’s streets, children running from the dragon shooting gunpowder smoke, and perhaps a clown, adorned with bells, dancing in the rear of the procession. It must have been sorely missed. The town of Norwich was so reluctant to abandon its famous pageant that officials salvaged the production by banning Saint George but allowing the dragon to march, unopposed, for the rest of Elizabeth’s reign.

  By the 1570s it was unclear whether St. George’s Day, along with other days printed in red ink on the calendar, remained a holiday. When, in 1536, Henry VIII overhauled the traditional Catholic calendar, cluttered with saints’ days, Saint George had miraculously survived the cut, and was still celebrated “as in time past hath been accustomed.” But he didn’t fare as well under Henry’s son Edward VI, who seems to have had a personal antipathy to Saint George. When Edward trimmed the number of official holidays—that is, days on which people didn’t have to work—to twenty-seven (plus Sundays), only the Knights of the Garter were granted a special dispensation to observe St. George’s Day as the feast of their order. The Book of Common Prayer issued under Edward in 1552 made clear that St. George’s Day was no longer a red-letter or holy day. But seven years later, when that Prayer Book was republished under Elizabeth, St. George’s Day, to the relief and delight of many, was restored to its holiday status, and a year later was included in a list of official holidays. Excitement about its restoration was premature, however, for in the following year new guidelines made clear that the only holidays to be observed were those recognized as holidays in the 1552 calendar (which had excluded St. George’s Day). A young William Shakespeare might be forgiven for waking up on April 23 and asking, “Is this a holiday?”

  It wasn’t just a semantic question for a non-laboring schoolboy. Shakespeare needed to know how to dress. In 1571, Parliament had decreed that on all official holidays, every male from age six and up (excluding gentlemen) were required to wear what Shakespeare calls in Love’s Labor’s Lost the “plain statute-caps” (5.2.282). These knitted woolen caps signified that it was a holiday while at the same time supported the ailing wool trade. The unpopular legislation was strengthened two years later and only repealed in 1591, when Shakespeare was in his mid-twenties. From a very early age, then, Shakespeare understood well enough that the calendar was subject to religious, economic, and political pressures.

  Shakespeare came of age when time itself was out of joint: the Western calendar, fixed by Julius Caesar in 46 B.C. (a meddling with nature deemed tyrannical by some of his fellow Romans), had by the late sixteenth century drifted ten days off the celestial cycle. Something had to be done. In 1577, Pope Gregory XIII proposed skipping ten days, and in 1582, Catholic Europe acted upon his recommendation: it was agreed that the day after October 4 would be October 15. Elizabeth was ready to go along with this sensible change, but her bishops balked, unwilling to follow the lead of the pope on this issue, or any other. Other Protestant countries also opposed the change, and, as a result, nations began to keep different time. By 1599, Easter was celebrated a full five weeks apart in Catholic and Protestant lands.

  There’s an odd moment in Julius Caesar when Brutus, on the eve of Caesar’s assassination, unsure of the date, asks his servant Lucius, “Is not tomorrow, boy, the first of March?” (2.1.40) and tells him to check “the calendar” and let him know. Virtually all modern editions silently correct Brutus’s “blunder” (how could such an intelligent man be so wrong about the date?), changing his question to “Is not tomorrow, boy, the ides of March?” Elizabethans, though, would have smiled knowingly at Brutus’s confusion about being off by a couple of weeks—as well as at his blindness to the significance of a day that would resound through history. They also knew, watching the events in the play that culminate in the ides of March, that virtually all the political upheaval their own nation had experienced since the Reformation—from the Pilgrimage of Grace in 1536, to the Cornish Rebellion of 1549, to the Northern Rebellion of 1569, coincided with or had roots in feasts and holidays. As recently as 1596, the planners of the abortive Oxfordshire Rising agreed that their armed insurrection, in which they would cut down gentleman and head “with all speed towards London” to foment a national uprising, would begin shortly after Queen Elizabeth’s Accession Day, November 17. “Is this a holiday?” was a question that touched a deep cultural nerve.

  Shakespeare, then, was born into an England poised between worlds. While the Elizabethans didn’t suffer the bloody religious wars that racked much of the Continent, its reformations meant among other things a stripping away of altars, paintings, ceremonies, vestments, sacramental rituals, and beloved holidays. At least in theory, for reformers seeking to purify a Church they saw encrusted with idolatry, this made good sense. But in practice, it also left a tear in the fabric of daily life. Traditional seasonal rhythms were disrupted, the long-standing equilibrium between holiday and workday unbalanced. The reformist effort to do away with the distracting rituals of Catholic worship resulted in a kind of sensory deprivation, for the rush to reform had overlooked the extent to which people craved the sights and sounds of the old communal celebration. It soon became obvious to Tudor authorities that reform had left a potentially dangerous vacuum. The official and avowedly Protestant Book of Homilies acknowledged as much when it incorporated into the homily “Of the Place and Time of Prayer” an imaginary dialogue between two churchgoing women confused by all these changes: “Alas, gossip,” one says to her friend, “what shall we do now at church, since all the saints are taken away, since all the goodly sights we were wont to have are gone, since we cannot hear
the like piping, singing, chanting, and playing upon the organs, that we could before?”

  In such a climate, new cultural forms—especially those that offered “goodly sights”—prospered, including the public theater. In retrospect, it seems natural enough for the stage to fill a need once met by Catholic ritual, for English theater emerged out of the liturgical plays of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and, in the three hundred years of mystery, miracle, and morality drama that followed, continued to be deeply suffused with religious ritual and subject matter. The extent to which the Elizabethan theater retained some of the energies that had been the domain of the Church may help explain why Protestant reformers, who at first embraced the stage as a means of promoting their own views, soon turned against it. John Stockwood complained from the outdoor pulpit at London’s St. Paul’s Cross in 1578, “Will not a filthy play, with the blast of a trumpet, sooner call thither a thousand, than an hour’s tolling of a bell, bring to the sermon a hundred?” And five years later the extremist Philip Stubbes decried how drama had reintroduced the “false idols, gods, and goddesses” that reformers had worked so hard to suppress: “If you will learn to condemn God and all his laws, to care neither for heaven nor hell, and to commit all kind of sin and mischief, you need go to no other school, for all these good examples may you see painted before your eyes in interludes and plays.”