And my vain hopes which far too high aspired,
Are dead and buried, and for ever gone.
Forget my name since you have scorned my love,
And woman-like, do not too late lament;
Since for your sake I must all mischief prove,
I none accuse nor nothing do repent.
I was as fond as ever she was fair,
Yet loved I not more than I now despair.
It reveals a great deal about Essex that he not only seems to have believed in such sentiments, but he spent his time, as his follower Henry Wotton put it, “evaporat[ing] his thoughts in a sonnet.”
Elizabeth adapted easily enough to this familiar script. She kept her wits, heard him out, played for time, and told Essex to come back after he had cleaned himself up. She might have told him what everyone else already knew: the great age of the disappointed Petrarchan sonneteer was over. Essex, who for the second time this month had badly misread the scene he was playing, left convinced that his charm and chivalric manner had turned back Elizabeth’s anger. Delighted with how things were going, he departed “very pleasant, and thanked God, though he had suffered much trouble and storms abroad, he found a sweet calm at home…. At eleven he was ready, and went up again to the queen, and conferred with her till half an hour past twelve.” By that time, Elizabeth had gotten word that Essex had returned with only a handful of supporters and that her court and kingdom were safe.
When Essex was invited back to the queen’s presence he “found her much changed in that small time, for she began to call him to question for his return and was not satisfied in the manner of his coming away and leaving things at so great a hazard.” Essex was dismissed and told to await her instructions. He would never set eyes on the queen again. From that moment, at least in England, it’s fair to say that chivalry was dead.
EVEN AS ESSEX AND HIS COHORT WERE RACING HOME FROM IRELAND ON September 24 on their way to Nonsuch, the cream of London’s merchant class were assembling at Founders Hall, on Lothbury Street, south of Moorgate. Over a hundred of them—from Lord Mayor Soame and leading aldermen to prosperous drapers and grocers—had convened two days earlier to form a joint-stock company toward which they committed the remarkable sum of thirty thousand pounds. They were meeting again on the twenty-fourth to choose directors and treasurers and draft a petition to the queen “for the honor of our native country and for the advancement of trade… to set forth a voyage this present year to the East Indies.” It was a venture that transformed England as few things ever would. The East India Company was born at this moment, which, as it expanded its markets, geographic range, and political, industrial, and military might, helped forge a British Empire. It was also a seminal moment in the history of global capitalism.
Except that few, save for a visionary like John Dee, who had coined the phrase “British Empire” twenty years earlier, could even dream of such a future. History looks very different when read backward. Until now, efforts to establish England as an imperial power had gone nowhere. The investors gathered at Founders’ Hall that day knew all too well that England had failed to plant colonies in America; it couldn’t even protect its plantations in Ireland. English venturers had failed to break into the Caribbean slave trade, failed to discover the much sought after northern passage to the East, and failed to establish a direct trade with the East Indies around the Cape of Good Hope. Their success in importing and exporting goods through Turkey, Venice, Levant, Muscovy, and other limited trading companies had been only modestly profitable and restricted to the few members of these companies. And everyone knew that the penny-pinching queen was not ambitious for empire and was happier signing a peace treaty that would save her money than antagonizing Spain by encroaching on its exclusive trade.
But the merchants who gathered to form the East India Company had little choice. Their hand had been forced by the recent and stunning success of the Dutch in penetrating the Eastern trade. Jacob van Neck’s envy-inspiring account, immediately translated into English in 1599—A True Report of the Gainful, Prosperous and Speedy Voyage to Java in the East Indies, Performed by a Fleet of Eight Ships of Amsterdam—recounted the get-rich story in detail: the Dutch ships had returned on July 19, 1599, and “there never arrived in Holland any ships so richly laden.” The haul was staggering: eight hundred tons of pepper, two hundred tons of cloves, and great quantities of nutmeg, cinnamon, and other luxury goods. Dutch merchants had made a four hundred percent return on their investment. The English merchants knew that even as they were petitioning the queen, more Dutch ships were outward bound.
This news was potentially ruinous for many of those at Founders’ Hall. Until now, luxuries from the East had entered English markets through the Levant trade. Goods like pepper and other spices were brought overland from Southeast Asia to the Middle East, and English merchants would transport them home from there through the Mediterranean. Levant Company agents stationed in the Middle East quickly saw that the Dutch venture would put them out of business. Somewhere between a quarter and a third of those who gathered to form the East India Company were affiliated with the Levant Company and had the most to lose. They made no secret in their petition to the queen that they were responding to “the success of the voyage performed by the Dutch nation.” They were concerned that “the Dutchmen prepare for a new voyage” and threw in for good measure an appeal at once nationalist and commercial, that they were “stirred up with no less affection to advance the trade of their native country than the Dutch merchants.” In return for their huge investment, with no hope of immediate returns (the outbound voyage alone was likely to take over a year), they sought a charter from the queen guaranteeing a monopoly on trade beyond the Cape of Good Hope for fifteen years. And to forestall any argument that their venture would frustrate Elizabeth’s plans for peace with Spain, they drafted a document setting out “the true limits” of Iberian “conquest and jurisdiction,” to reassure her that the Spanish had no legal grounds for complaint.
The London merchants knew that they were in an unusually strong position with the queen and Privy Council. After all, they had twice come to the rescue of the Crown this year, first when providing loans for the Irish campaign and then again, in July and August, when they had provided substantial financial and military support in defending London against the threatened Spanish invasion. Their generosity during this false alarm (self-interest notwithstanding) had no doubt done much to erase hard feelings about rich merchants that the Privy Council had hauled in for refusing to pay the forced loan (like Augustine Skinner, now no longer pleading poverty but one of the original subscribers to the East India venture). And what they didn’t know was that the queen, wary of Essex and his militant supporters, needed the city on her side in case of armed rebellion.
The timing was right for London’s merchants to ask for something in return from the queen. To send ships around the Cape of Good Hope was a daunting enterprise (and in fact, the first expedition, which after a series of delays finally sailed in 1601, cost more than twice the thirty thousand pounds that had been committed). It required not just capital, but skilled commanders, ships of adequate tonnage capable of making the long voyage and fending off privateers, maps and knowledge of the regions, and a demand for these luxury items at home. And since this venture wasn’t about trading goods (for there wasn’t much of a market in the sweltering East Indies for heavy cloth, England’s main export), large amounts of gold and silver had to be available for export to purchase foreign commodities. In all these respects, England had reached, and passed, the tipping point. Drake and other naval heroes had made their fame and fortune privateering—glorified purse snatching. What was needed now was long-term investment in a venture that required patience and capital and cool heads—things for which merchants, not courtiers, were famous.
Because of the vast expense and because “the trade of the Indies” was “so far remote from hence,” the organizers of the East Indies subscription understood that only a
“joint and a united stock” would work, that the circle of investors had to be widened well beyond the scope of those who were already members of the Levant or other exclusive trading companies. It’s notable, though, that the initial subscription to the East India Company failed to include a single nobleman; there was as yet no overlap between Elizabethan knight adventurers seeking glory in Ireland and the stay-at-home merchant-adventurers in search of profits. Until now, aristocrats who invested in shipping did so in semimilitary operations, such as the privateering Earl of Cumberland, who personally led six of the eleven voyages he financed between 1586 and 1598. The problem was that these expeditions were hit or miss affairs, more likely to bring glory than profits (Cumberland himself complained that in the end all he had done was “thrown his land into the sea”). It couldn’t be managed alone.
Collective will was needed, too, and this was stiffened by the propagandistic efforts of men like Richard Hakluyt, who attended the organizational meetings of the East India Company this autumn and who was handsomely rewarded by the company with a gift of ten pounds, in addition to the thirty shillings he received for providing maps. Hakluyt is best known as the author of the massive three-volume Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation, a million-and-a-half-word epic of English voyages of exploration, which appeared in successive folio volumes in 1598, 1599, and 1600. In the fall of 1599, he was feverishly completing the second volume, whose dedication to Robert Cecil he finished on October 24, and which focused on voyages “to and beyond the East India.”
His preface to that volume now seems innocuous, but at the time was radical: Hakluyt describes London’s merchants as England’s true “adventurers” and criticizes the gentry, who “now too much consume their time and patrimony.” He hopes that England’s knight-adventurers “will do much more” when “they are like to have less employment than now they have,” preoccupied as they are in “our neighbor wars” in Ireland and the Low Countries. This is a role reversal of staggering proportions: true adventure now consisted in pursuing national glory through trade and empire, not through a culture of honor. Writing after Essex’s ill-fated return, Hakluyt saw which way contemporary winds were blowing. His first volume, published in 1598, had advertised on its title page Essex’s exploits in the Cadiz campaign of 1596, and the volume even culminated with a lively account of that enterprise, including a list of those knighted in the campaign. When in late 1599 a second issue of this volume was published, Hakluyt cut the Cadiz chapter and erased from the title page any reference to Essex’s heroic (and unprofitable) actions there.
The death of chivalry coincided with the birth of empire. Hakluyt wasn’t alone in seeing the writing on the wall: roughly a fifth of the men knighted by Essex in Ireland, including his most loyal supporters, the Earls of Southampton and Monteagle, would go on to become members of the investor class, belatedly elbowing their way into one or another trading venture. The knight-adventurers found themselves playing an uncharacteristically subordinate role. When, for example, Lord Treasurer Buckhurst tried pressuring the East India Company to appoint Sir Edward Michelbourne, one of Essex’s knights, to be a commander on their first voyage, the merchants demurred, explaining that they had no intention of employing a gentleman in a position of authority—they didn’t want a hotheaded knight ruining trade by wrangling with the Portuguese in the East Indies. From now on, merchant-adventurers were in charge.
Shakespeare, almost surely at work on Hamlet by this time, wasn’t among those gathered in Founders’ Hall that September day. If he didn’t have enough ready money on hand after the building of the Globe, he certainly would within a year or two, yet his name never appears in the rolls of joint-stock company investors: he preferred to invest his wealth in English property (or products like malt) rather than in speculative voyages abroad. Yet Shakespeare played his part indirectly: one of the items carried aboard an early East India Company voyage was a copy of Hamlet. In 1607, William Keeling, captain of the Dragon, and his crew were bound, along with the Hector and the Consent, for the East Indies. In early September of that year, while the ships were off Sierra Leone, Keeling notes in his ship’s log that he ordered his men to perform The Tragedy of Hamlet. Six months later, they gave a repeat performance when Captain Hawkins of the Hector came aboard. Keeling explains that he “had Hamlet acted” for practical rather than artistic reasons: “to keep my people from idleness and unlawful games, or sleep.” Shakespeare’s play had quickly become part of the cultural transformations it was itself reckoning with.
It’s not that Shakespeare wasn’t interested in adventuring and trade—The Merchant of Venice, Othello, Pericles, and The Tempest all testify to his fascination with foreign trade, conquest, and exploration. But he didn’t follow the lead of other playwrights whose plays celebrated the achievements of London’s merchants. Shakespeare’s choice of subject matter suggests that from his early twenties, and perhaps from his childhood, he was the kind of writer who dreamed and wrote of kings and queens, war and empire, heroism and nobility, and stranger shores. While there were merchants and ordinary men and women in his plays, neither they, nor London itself, were ever at the heart of it.
Shakespeare also knew that the word “adventurer” cut two ways and employed it in both senses. Hamlet, for example, when speaking of the Players, describes how “the adventurous knight shall use his foil and target” (2.2.320–21). Romeo, on the other hand, as befits a merchant’s son, tells Juliet that “were thou as far / As that vast shore washed with the farthest sea, / I should adventure for such merchandise” (2.2.82–84). That Shakespeare was alert to the decline of chivalry is clear enough by the time that he wrote Troilus and Cressida, not long after Hamlet, with its trenchant contrast between its prologue’s parody of epic language—“princes orgulous” with “high blood chafed” arriving in Troy on “deep-drawing barks” that “disgorge / Their warlike freightage” (Prologue 1–13)—and the egotism, vanity, and brutality that marks the behavior of the Greek heroes. Shakespeare exposes the seamier side of Homer’s heroic story, emphasizing the more sordid and rapacious aspects of the Trojan campaign. Only a writer who had partly believed in the possibility of heroism could have turned so sharply against it and the bitterness of this repudiation sours the play and diminishes it. Had Shakespeare’s late and collaborative play Cardenio survived (it was written around 1612 and performed at court not long after), we would probably have an even sharper sense of this disenchantment, for that play almost surely took its plot from the story of Cardenio and Lucinda in Don Quixote, Cervantes’s masterly send-up of knight-errantry, recently translated into English. Shakespeare would continue to write about heroes like Othello, Antony, and Coriolanus—though each of these tragic figures finds himself crushed by a world too small to accommodate his heroic greatness. Coriolanus offers the finest expression of this when he turns his back on Rome and declares, “There is a world elsewhere” (3.3.145); the punishing ending of Coriolanus shows him how wrong he was.
Hamlet, born at the crossroads of the death of chivalry and the birth of globalization, is marked by these forces, but, unlike the caustic Troilus and Cressida, not deformed by them. They cast a shadow over the play, though, and certainly inform its reflections on the possibility of heroic action. They also reinforce the play’s nostalgia: there’s a sense in Hamlet no less than in the culture at large of a sea change, of a world that is dead but not yet buried. The ghost of Hamlet’s father, who returns from purgatory in the play’s opening scene, not only evokes a lost Catholic past, then, but is also a ghostly relic of a chivalric age. The distance between this past and the present is underscored by the Ghost’s martial appearance. He enters dressed exactly as he was when, as a young man, he had defeated his Norwegian rival on the battlefield: “Such was the very armour he had on, / When he the ambitious Norway combated” (1.1.60–61). We see Hamlet’s father not as he died, but as he heroically fought thirty years earlier. By 1599, such dress was an anachronism; only on
Accession Day did knights still dress in otherwise rusting armor.
Shakespeare goes to considerable lengths to paint a verbal portrait of Hamlet’s father’s heroic encounter, a world of heraldic law and mortal combat, of armored men wielding broad swords, fighting to the death:
Our last king,
Whose image even but now appeared to us,
Was as you know by Fortinbras of Norway,
Thereto pricked on by a most emulate pride,
Dared to the combat; in which our valiant Hamlet,
(For so this side of our known world esteemed him)
Did slay this Fortinbras, who by a sealed compact
Well ratified by law and heraldy
Did forfeit (with his life) all these his lands
Which he stood seized of, to the conqueror;
Against the which a moiety competent
Was gaged by our King, which had return
To the inheritance of Fortinbras,
Had he been vanquisher; as by the same co-mart
And carriage of the article design,
His fell to Hamlet.
(1.1.80–95)
Hamlet ends with another celebrated encounter. But this fight, which also takes the lives of Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Hamlet himself—couldn’t be more different than the one Horatio describes at the play’s outset. It’s a duel, but not quite even that—nothing more than a fencing match, fought with blunted weapons. Shakespeare’s contemporaries would have been more attuned than we are to the difference between old and new ways of fighting and what kind of worldview each embodied. It was only in the second half of the sixteenth century that the rapier replaced the heavy sword as the weapon of choice, and it wasn’t really until the 1580s that the rapier and dagger, Laertes’ preferred weapons, became popular in England.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 32