A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare
Page 19
The history in the making that Midsummer Day in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1571 and in villages across England in the 1560s and 1570s marked the decline of one form of communal expression and the renaissance of others, most notably a drama that was no less rooted in spectacle, magical transformation, and wonder. As it turned out, in the hands of Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights, this theater not only absorbed social energies that had become unmoored in a post-Reformation world, but also explored in the plays it staged the social trauma that had enabled it to thrive, the repercussions of which the culture had not fully absorbed.
From the start of his career as dramatist and poet, Shakespeare was compulsively drawn to epochal moments, to what it meant to live through the transformation of so much that was familiar. His early Roman tragedy, Titus Andronicus, ends with the empire tottering on it last legs, the Goths already within Rome’s gates. And his great narrative poem Lucrece returns to a much earlier moment of Roman political history, when a rape led to the banishment of the last of the Roman kings and the birth of republicanism. When in 1599 he turned again to Rome in Julius Caesar, he addressed a pivotal moment in that empire’s (if not the world’s) tumultuous history. But even as he was writing about Rome, he felt and reimagined these stories as a Christian Elizabethan.
Notably, when Shakespeare had Brutus and Antony address the crowds following Caesar’s death, he has them speak from a “pulpit” (the only time this word appears in his work). It’s an anachronism, of course, for what he imagines is more characteristic of the architecture of Elizabethan London—with its outdoor pulpit at Paul’s Cross—rather than any detail he might have read about how Romans addressed crowds. It’s a small point but one that reveals a good deal about the extent to which Shakespeare was always writing out of his own cultural moment. Put another way, without the destruction of Midsummer Day 1571, replicated in communities large and small throughout England, there could not have been a Midsummer Night’s Dream a quarter century later, nor, more to the point, a play like Julius Caesar. A seven-year-old Shakespeare listening to glass shatter outside Stratford’s chapel could not have known it, but his future calling was in good measure made possible that day.
ALL THIS HELPS EXPLAIN WHY THE OPENING SCENE OF JULIUS CAESAR IS SO fraught and electrifying. Flavius and Marullus, tribunes of the people, burst in upon a crowd of laborers. Flavius sternly rebukes them—“Hence! Home, you idle creatures, get you home!”—and demands to know:
Is this a holiday? What, know you not,
Being mechanical, you ought not walk
Upon a laboring day without the sign
Of your profession?
(1.1.1–5)
Why are these laborers dressed in their holiday finest (including, as we later learn, the familiar “sweaty” woolen caps) instead of bearing the tools of their trade? When Flavius asks whether it’s a holiday, he obviously doesn’t think it is, or should be. And when the jocular commoners, clearly in a festive mood, bandy with the two tribunes, Flavius presses his point, and challenges one of their ringleaders, a cobbler:
But wherefore art not in thy shop today?
Why dost thou lead these men about the streets?
(1.1.27–28)
The cobbler jokingly deflects the question before getting to the point. It’s the last funny line in a play in which Shakespeare had again chosen to omit a clown’s part: “Truly sir, to wear out their shoes, to get myself into more work. But indeed sir, we make holiday to see Caesar and to rejoice in his triumph” (1.1.29–31). The victorious Caesar has returned to Rome in celebratory triumph, cause enough for the commoners to put work aside and “make holiday.” Marullus, hearing this answer, cannot restrain himself and explodes in anger and frustration in the first long speech of the play. Caesar’s bloody victory over Pompey’s sons is no cause for communal celebration. It wasn’t so long ago that the people had turned out to witness Pompey’s homecoming, in a passage whose topography, with its walls, towers, windows, chimney tops, crammed streets, and great river, would have been familiar to Londoners:
O you hard hearts, you cruel men of Rome,
Knew you not Pompey? Many a time and oft
Have you climbed up to walls and battlements,
To towers and windows, yea, to chimney tops,
Your infants in your arms, and there have sat
The livelong day, with patient expectation,
To see great Pompey pass the streets of Rome.
And when you saw his chariot but appear,
Have you not made an universal shout,
That Tiber trembled underneath her banks
To hear the replication of your sounds
Made in her concave shores?
And do you now put on your best attire?
And do you now cull out a holiday?
And do you now strew flowers in his way
That comes in triumph over Pompey’s blood?
Begone!
Run to your houses, fall upon your knees,
Pray to the gods to intermit the plague
That needs must light on this ingratitude.
(1.1.36–55)
As the commoners depart in silence, Flavius turns to Marullus and approvingly observes, “See whe’er their basest mettle be not moved. / They vanish tongue-tied in their guiltiness” (1.1.61–62)—though for all we know, the laborers have simply headed off to another part of town, where they won’t be bothered by these killjoys.
Flavius, encouraged by their retreat, instructs Marullus to take matters a step further:
Go you down that way towards the Capitol;
This way will I. Disrobe the images
If you do find them decked with ceremonies.
(1.1.63–65)
Stripping the images or statues of Caesar raises the stakes considerably. It also tells us something about Flavius, who, rather than confronting danger himself, urges Marullus to head toward a likely clash at the Capitol where Caesar and his close supporters were gathered. Marullus, fearful of pressing things too far, nervously asks “May we do so? / You know it is the Feast of Lupercal” (1.1.66–67). This line comes as a bit of a shock: so it is a holiday after all. The Saturnalian Lupercal was a major Roman festival, a mid-February carnival that resembled England’s Shrove Tuesday—a semi-official holiday associated with excess and violence. Shakespeare would have discovered in Plutarch’s Life of Romulus an explanation for why on the Lupercal young men “run through the city, striking and laying on them which they meet in their way with their goat thongs.” It was to reenact the violent founding of Rome, when “Remus and Romulus ran from Alba unto that place with their drawn swords in their hands.” Plutarch further explained that the young men touch “their forehead with a bloody knife” in “remembrance of the danger” that these founders of Rome “stood in at that time.” Shakespeare could not have found a more suggestive image of mayhem passing itself off as a ritual purgation and political commemoration.
Something complicated is happening in the play at this point, though the dialogue rushes by almost too fast to follow its implications. Rome on the Lupercal is a dangerous place, made more dangerous by the triumph of a man deliberately following in Romulus’s footsteps. Anything could happen. Elizabethan audiences were likely to grasp more quickly than modern ones what’s implied but won’t be made explicit until the following scene: the appropriation of a religious holiday for political ends, for it’s obvious to the two consuls that Caesar’s triumphant entry into Rome was intended to capitalize upon the anarchic holiday energies released on this festive day. But to oppose these makes the consuls resemble, in Elizabethan terms, puritanical reformers, eager to strip “images” and do away with “ceremonies.”
Shakespeare knew exactly what he was doing when he substituted theologically loaded terms for the more neutral ones in his source, where instead of “ceremonies” Plutarch writes that the statues were decked with “trophies” and “scarves.” Where Plutarch places Caesar’s triumphant entry into Rome in Octob
er 45 B.C., the Lupercal a full four months later on February 15, and the assassination itself on the ides of March, Shakespeare radically compressing events so that Caesar’s triumph and the Lupercal are simultaneous, and the assassination hard upon that. It’s also worth noting that the day of Caesar’s entry, with which the play begins, comes near the end of Plutarch’s Life of Caesar. It’s as if Shakespeare read patiently, circling the text, waiting for just the right point of entry into the story, before recognizing and seizing the opening that his contemporaries would find most explosive.
So when Flavius brushes off Marullus’s reservations—“It is no matter”—Elizabethans knew well enough that the issue could not be so easily dismissed, especially when Flavius urges a more aggressive course of action, one that can be read as sacrilegious or politically desperate:
Let no images
Be hung with Caesar’s trophies. I’ll about
And drive away the vulgar from the streets;
So do you too, where you perceive them thick.
(1.1.68–71)
One of the nicer ironies here is that Flavius’s disrespect for the image of Caesar echoes the contemporary controversy over the biblical injunction to render “unto Caesar what is Caesar’s.” It was defamatory and punishable to deface a ruler’s image (the fact that Flavius is doing so in order to prevent Caesar from becoming a ruler is almost beside the point). The queen’s Catholic opponents had taken to abusing her royal image. In 1591, for example, a religious extremist, aptly named Hacket, took a knife to a panel portrait of the queen and stabbed her through the breast. A few years later, the Irish Catholic rebel O’Rourke had a wooden image of Elizabeth dragged through the street while children pelted it with stones.
Catholic and Anglican polemicists had been battling over the treatment of political images for decades. Few things struck Catholics as more two-faced than the Protestants’ worship of political icons and suppression of religious ones. The Catholic writer Nicholas Sanders challenged his hypocritical Protestant adversaries in his 1567 Treatise of the Images of Christ: “Break if you dare the image of the Queen’s Majesty.” Sanders was jabbing at an especially sensitive nerve here, given the extent to which Elizabeth’s image was treated as near sacred. Royal apologists were hard-pressed to answer. The Protestant Thomas Bilson in his treatise on subjection and rebellion does his best to walk a fine line, condemning outright abuse of political images, but ruling idolatrous any over enthusiastic response: “The images of princes may not well be despised or abused, least it be taken as a sign of a malicious heart against the prince, but bowing of the knee or lifting up the hand to the image of a prince is flat and inevitable idolatry.”
Shakespeare was deeply interested in the issue of how one represented rulers and draws a good deal of attention in this play to the difference between Caesar’s infirm body and his idealized image (Calpurnia even dreams of her husband’s statue rather than the man himself). We learn that Caesar is hard of hearing, a weak swimmer, endured fever like a “sick girl” (1.2.128), and is subject to epileptic fits. The discrepancy between an admired leader’s image and actual physical condition was familiar to Elizabeth’s subjects as their queen entered her sixty-seventh year. One measure of Elizabeth’s concern with how she was depicted was the extraordinary control she exercised over her portraits. Every few years she would sit for a court artist whose work would then serve as a model for others to copy. Sometime around 1592, Isaac Oliver made the mistake of accurately rendering the queen as an old lady. Elizabeth let her Privy Council know that portraits based on this model were unacceptable. A few years later the councillors directed officers to seek out and destroy all portraits of the queen which were to her “great offence.” Some were immediately burned; others met that fate more slowly. John Evelyn writes that some of the engravings that were called in were used for years at Essex House for “peels for the use of their ovens.” From that time on, all royal portraits would show Elizabeth as an eternally young woman, her true complexion hidden by a so-called mask of youth. Years later, Jonson acknowledged what would have been fatal to say while the queen was still alive: “Queen Elizabeth never saw her self after she became old in a true glass.” It’s far more likely that she in fact did—which is why, like the physically flawed Caesar, she reacted so aggressively to how the image of that self was treated. Elizabethan audiences would not have been surprised to learn that Flavius and Marullus, for abusing Caesar’s image, were “put to silence” (1.2.286).
THE OPENING SCENES OF THE PLAY FEEL MORE CONTEMPORARY THAN classical. The theologically tinged language, the casual references to Elizabethan dress codes, professions, guilds, and shops, chimney tops and windows, and soon enough to pulpits, clocks, books with pages, and nightgowns, all contribute to a sense that either Shakespeare cared little about historical accuracy, or wanted to collapse the difference between classical Rome and Elizabethan London. This is especially true of Marullus’s description of a Roman triumph—the one thing that modern audiences might consider foreign to Shakespeare’s London: the famous procession of a victorious general from outside Rome’s wall through the Forum to Jupiter’s Temple, with politicians, spoils, and captives in tow.
But it wasn’t. Many in the audience at Shakespeare’s play would have recalled that great day a decade earlier when, on November 24, 1588, Queen Elizabeth staged a triumph—“imitating,” as John Stow put it, “the ancient Romans.” Dressed in “robes of triumph,” Elizabeth rode in a specially built “chariot-throne,” drawn by a pair of white horses through the streets of London from Whitehall to St. Paul’s. For those who missed the event, a Latin collection celebrating the triumphs of the victorious Elizabeth soon appeared in print.
Late-sixteenth-century Londoners, who regularly witnessed both royal and mayoral triumphs, lived in a golden age of civic pageantry. And many of Shakespeare’s fellow dramatists—though tellingly not Shakespeare himself—sought work scripting civic triumphs, including Ben Jonson, George Peele, John Marston, Thomas Heywood, John Webster, Anthony Munday, and Thomas Dekker. Jonson carefully annotated his copy of the great Renaissance handbook of triumphs, François Modius’s Pandectae Triumphales, a thousand pages illustrating triumphs from Romulus’s to those of sixteenth-century European rulers. Dekker spelled out the triumph’s attractions for both rulers and ruled: “Princes themselves take pleasure to behold them: they with delight, the common people with admiration.”
Elizabeth sufficiently enjoyed riding in triumph to make it part of her repertory of public display (she didn’t appear in the streets all that often, and this was a powerful way of eliciting a “universal shout” of approval and celebration). One of the most remarkable paintings executed toward the end of her reign—entitled by Sir Roy Strong Eliza Triumphans—depicts just such a scene. Elizabeth was not the first English monarch to wrap herself in the trappings and symbolism of a Roman triumph. Her grandfather, Henry VII, had followed up his victory over Richard III by displaying captive spoils in a triumphant procession to St Paul’s. And a century before him, Henry V, after his victory at Agincourt, led French prisoners through London. Shakespeare considered this triumph significant enough to include a description of it in Henry the Fifth, even if it meant confusing the audience by transporting Henry home to London for his triumph before whisking him back to France to woo Kate:
So let him land,
And solemnly see him set on to London.
So swift a pace hath thought that even now
You may imagine him upon Blackheath,
Where that his lords desire him to have borne
His bruised helmet and his bended sword
Before him through the city. He forbids it,
Being free from vainness and self-glorious pride,
Giving full trophy, signal, and ostent
Quite from himself to God.
(5.0.13–22)
Shakespeare also underscores the extent to which Henry V’s homecoming is a Roman triumph. In case we miss the point, he draws the ana
logy for us:
The Mayor and all his brethren, in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in.
(5.0.25–28)
Shakespeare didn’t invent this blurring of Roman past and Elizabethan present—he found it all around him. The Tower of London, it was believed, was built by Caesar himself—at least that’s what tourists were told. Shakespeare himself repeats and questions this myth of origins in Richard the Third, when one of the doomed young princes asks Richard, “Did Julius Caesar build that place?”—and is told, “He did, my gracious lord, begin that place, / Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified” (3.1.70–71). It was a myth of course, though one of value to the state, and as late as 1576, William Lambarde, keeper of the records in the Tower, defended this tradition. It was useful to have one’s own authority linked in a line of direct descent to that of imperial Rome—ceremonially and architecturally. And if fit nicely with the concurrent myth that London was Troynovant, Troy Revived, and Britain founded by Brutus, a mythical nephew of Aeneas.