OBERON: We the globe can compass soon, Swifter than the wandering moon.
PUCK: I’ll put a girdle round about the earth In forty minutes.
CHAPTER TWO
COMMUNION AND CONSCIENCE
THE STRATFORD CHALICE
In every society, sharing a drink together affirms friendship and builds community. It’s a universal ritual. It can be joyous, it can be ceremonial – and it can be dangerous. What you drink and who you drink it with is always significant. For Shakespeare’s generation, if you were handed a cup by a bishop or a king and told to drink, how you responded could be, quite literally, a matter of life or death – in real life just as much as in the theatre.
Here is part of the closing scene of Hamlet:
KING: Stay, give me drink. Hamlet, this pearl is thine,
Here’s to thy health. Give him the cup.
HAMLET: I’ll play this bout first; set it by a while.
Come.
[They play]
Another hit. What say you?
LAERTES: A touch, a touch. I do confess’t.
KING: Our son shall win.
QUEEN: He’s fat and scant of breath.
Here, Hamlet, take my napkin. Rub thy brows.
The Queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet.
HAMLET: Good madam!
KING: Gertrude, do not drink.
QUEEN: I will, my lord. I pray you, pardon me.
[She drinks]
KING: [aside] It is the poisoned cup. It is too late.
In 1600, when Shakespeare’s audience at the Globe heard Hamlet for the first time, every one of them knew very well what it meant to be handed a cup of wine by a figure in authority and told to drink. And for every one of them, the stakes were high. This small silver cup with a matching lid, which is kept at Shakespeare’s parish church, Holy Trinity in Stratford-upon-Avon, was, so far as we know, never used to poison anybody. But what this cup held, and what that meant, was a matter of life and death in this church as in every other church in sixteenth-century Europe.
It is quite a plain silver goblet: the only decoration is a run of engraved leaves and flowers round the rim. It is about thirteen centimetres high, stands on a small base and looks a little like a bell turned upside down. It is a communion cup, but it is specifically a Protestant communion cup, much simpler than the usual ornate Catholic chalice – a new kind of vessel for a new kind of religious service. It came to Stratford when Shakespeare was a boy as part of a nationwide campaign to make it clear to every town in England that Catholicism was well and truly finished, and that the Protestant Reformation was not only back under Elizabeth, but here to stay.
Hamlet, Act V, Scene 2, Royal Shakespeare Company, 2010. Hamlet’s mother, Queen Gertrude (Penny Downie), drinks unwittingly from a cup poisoned by her husband, King Claudius (Patrick Stewart), and intended for the prince.
Henry VIII’s break with Rome in the 1530s and the Reformation that followed had been brutal, but piecemeal. After Henry’s death in 1547 came a dizzying six years of extreme Protestantism under his son, Edward VI, followed by a no less vertiginous five years of vigorously reimposed Roman Catholicism under Edward’s half-sister Mary, daughter of Henry’s first wife, the Spanish princess Catherine of Aragon. When Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 and reinstated Protestantism once more, many people must have wondered whether her reign and her religion were going to last long enough for it to be worth converting again.
In the Catholic mass, the wine in the chalice was drunk only by the priest. In the new Protestant service, every parishioner was allowed – indeed obliged – to sip it in commemoration of the Last Supper. A silver cup like this one therefore was, for Elizabethans, a kind of Protestant team-building exercise – a new communal experience, not just a religious innovation but a social and a political one, and one in which everybody had to join: drinking from this cup meant not just that you were a Protestant, but that you were a loyal subject of the Queen. To refuse to drink from this cup would have been a grave step.
In Shakespeare’s day church attendance was compulsory, imposed by act of parliament and enforced by law, so every religious change affected the fabric of the whole society. Every life was lived within the framework provided by the church, but ever since Henry VIII’S break with Rome that framework had become more and more unstable. The generation that first heard Hamlet had never known the changeless security of the faith of their grandparents.
The parish register of Holy Trinity Church for 26 April 1564 includes the baptism entry ‘Guliemus filius Johannes Shakspere’: William, son of John Shakespeare.
Shakespeare’s own life is marked out in Holy Trinity in Stratford, the place where he made his entrance and his exit: he was baptised in its medieval font and it was there, fifty-two years later, that he was buried on 25 April 1616. The entry in the parish register for Shakespeare’s birth lists him as ‘Gulielmus filius Johannes Shakspere’ and gives the date, 26 April 1564. The Reverend Martin Gorick, the vicar of Holy Trinity Church, says:
But that is his baptism date, rather than his birth date, which we don’t actually know. We do know that people then baptised their children as soon as possible after birth; Shakespeare would have been baptised when he was only a few days old. But in fact this was not a good moment to be born in Stratford: on 11 July there is an entry which says: ‘Here begins the plague,’ and then the deaths start: one on the 20th, two on the 24th, three on the 26th. Within a couple of days in July there were two children from the same family dying here of the plague. The pattern continued until the end of the year – and this in a town of only 3,000 people at the time. So you could imagine that number going on week by week, each death a great mound of earth in the churchyard. Dramatic really.
Shakespeare was lucky to survive. Of the eight children born to his family, five made it to adulthood, of whom William was the eldest.
Although Shakespeare was baptised into a clearly Protestant church, there were still many physical traces of the old Catholic faith around him, and indeed many worries that the Catholic past might still be dangerously present. The lid of the Stratford chalice is engraved ‘1571’, a highly significant date, because only a year earlier the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth and declared that English Catholics were no longer bound to obey her. It was an explosive, provocative move on the part of the Papacy – a great polarizing moment in the struggle between Catholicism and Protestantism in England. From that point on, English Catholics could be seen as unreliable subjects, and to be a practising Catholic was perilously close to treason.
The Stratford cup was made during a push towards religious conformity. It was part of a political calculation that, after a decade of gradual Protestant adjustments and changes, a swing back towards Catholicism was now highly unlikely: reform could be more trenchantly enforced. This cup, and many others like it, were a form of physical propaganda introduced diocese by diocese across the country in a design dictated centrally by the Archbishop of Canterbury. It was the orchestrated imposition of a new, more simple, Protestant aesthetic to replace the traditional, elaborate chalices, which, in their precious intricacy, gave undue reverence to the rites of the old mass.
During Shakespeare’s childhood, the visible signs of Catholicism were being systematically removed, and few played a bigger part in that process in Stratford than his own father. John Shakespeare was a glover by profession, and he did well for himself, at least for a while. He bought a house in Henley Street, Stratford, in 1556, after which his ownership of freehold property made him eligible for public office – at various times he was elected bailiff, the town’s most senior civic office, and senior alderman. At the height of his public career, the elimination of Catholic objects and symbols was part of his official remit.
Just a couple of streets away from Holy Trinity church is Stratford’s Gildhall, whose chapel provides a striking example of how the world changed as the Reformation bit deeper. Inside the chapel we can still see the remains of a great wall paint
ing of the Last Judgement. In the middle, a cross; on one side, the heavenly city; and on the other, hell. Everybody sitting in this chapel would have known that the Day of Judgement was going to be the most important moment of their existence, the goal of their spiritual life. But Protestants were taught to dislike images of all sorts, and so in 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, his father John arranged for the whole of this Last Judgement scene to be whitewashed over, and for 250 years it disappeared. A huge part of the inherited spiritual landscape, familiar for centuries, was wiped out. John Shakespeare was also responsible for taking down the guild chapel’s rood loft – which would have carried a rood (a sculpture of the crucifixion), and in 1571, the same year that the cup arrived in Stratford, he organized the removal of the old Catholic stained-glass windows in the gild chapel and had them replaced with clear glass – a scene of destruction probably witnessed by his seven-year-old son. It would be very hard to now to go back to Catholicism.
Holy Trinity Church, Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was baptised and where he was buried on 25 April 1616. His wife Anne shares his tomb, and his father and son were buried in the churchyard.
The Gildhall, Stratford upon Avon, where John Shakespeare presided as a town officer, where William was entitled to a free education in the grammar school upstairs and probably where he saw his first plays.
The Stratford Gildhall may also have been the place where the young William Shakespeare saw plays being performed for the first time. Though we do not know their repertoire, there were at least thirteen visits by touring companies of players while Shakespeare was between the ages of four and seventeen. These touring performances were usually held in the largest available roofed space and in the presence of town officials, so John Shakespeare and his family would have been present at many of the shows.
Such was the environment that Shakespeare grew up in. Unlike his parents, he never heard a church service in Latin. He read and heard the Bible and the prayer book in English. He drank communion wine from a communal cup in a church where virtually all the images had been suppressed. But in this Protestant environment, just below the whitewash, in the Gildhall chapel in Stratford and across the whole of England, memories and images of the Catholic faith were still present, and still potent.
Historian Eamon Duffy of the University of Cambridge says:
The shift from one way of doing things to a new service, which was often seen as being imposed from London, would certainly have been noticed. Some people were thrilled by it, like the arrival of the English Bible. For many people that was literally a revelation and an empowerment; for others it was tiresome gobbledegook. It took people time to accustom themselves to these changes, so when we look at this cup, we are looking at a whole culture in movement, adjusting itself.
In his plays Shakespeare captures this painful transition, the moment when the Catholicism that his parents had practised became something to be spoken of only in the past tense. By the time Hamlet was written in 1600, you probably had to be about fifty to remember the mass taking place in an English parish church – and in 1600, not many people made it to fifty. In Titus Andronicus a soldier wanders off to gaze upon the decaying remains of a monastery. And in one of the loveliest lines in his Sonnets, Shakespeare conjures the monastic ruins which would have been one of the visible remnants of the old Catholic world: ‘Bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’.
Last Judgement wall painting, the Gildhall Chapel, Stratford upon Avon. As a Stratford civic official, John Shakespeare was responsible for whitewashing over this scene in 1564 at a cost of two shillings.
Yet Shakespeare knew, as well as anyone, that the reality was more complex. Hamlet and his student friends have all just returned to Denmark from studying at the University of Wittenberg, the German city where Luther had originally proclaimed the new Protestant beliefs in 1517. Like Shakespeare himself, this Hamlet generation is caught up in the new Protestant future of northern Europe. But it is a future dangerously haunted, as Shakespeare shows us, by the ghosts of the past, in England, as on the ramparts of Elsinore.
GHOST: I am thy father’s spirit,
Doomed for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in my days of nature
Are burnt and purged away.
When the ghost of Hamlet’s father appears, he speaks not the language of Lutheran Protestantism, but in the older terms of a soul suffering in purgatory – an idea that Protestantism had vigorously denied. And throughout the play, the old speak the language of an abandoned faith to the bewildered young. Polonius continues to swear ‘by the mass’. The habits and the haunting fears of the past just would not die. Catholicism could be suppressed – blotted out, like the whitewashed image of the Last Judgement in Stratford’s Gildhall – but it was never eliminated. Eamon Duffy again:
There would still have been old people when Shakespeare was young saying the rosary, crossing themselves when there was thunder, using holy water. Catholic beliefs remained current in one form or another, especially around things like funerals, for a very long time.
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Title page of the Bishop’s Bible, 1569 quarto edition, depicting the Queen enthroned between justice and mercy. From 1568 all English churches were ordered to have a copy of the Bishop’s Bible.
Things seem to have started to go wrong for John Shakespeare in the 1570s; he got into trouble for illegal trading and usury. He had mortgaged and then lost some property by 1580 and was arrested for debt. The likeliest explanation is that in his twenty-year rise to the top in Stratford, he had over-extended himself – his time in civic office was over by 1586, when he was discharged from common council for non-attendance. In 1592, falling further, he was one of nine recusants (non-attenders at church services) arraigned ‘for feare of processe of Debtte’ – a fear that appearance in public made him vulnerable to arrest. His family’s shifting fortunes may explain Shakespeare’s careful management of his own career: in London, he lived in relatively inexpensive lodgings, but when he made his fortune he invested in property in his home town, acquiring New Place – the second-largest house in Stratford at the time, where his family always remained. The year before he bought the house, in 1596, Shakespeare’s eleven-year-old son, Hamnet, died. The grieving Constance in King John, written around this time, laments
CONSTANCE: Grief fills the room up of my absent child,
Lies in his bed, walks up and down with me,
Puts on his pretty looks, repeats his words,
Remembers me of all his gracious parts,
Stuffs out his vacant garments with his form…
Hamnet, like Shakespeare’s father and Shakespeare himself, is almost certainly buried somewhere at Holy Trinity.
*
KING: Give him the cup…
The last Act of Hamlet is set in a palace. But even in a church, as the Stratford chalice demonstrates, drinking as the sovereign commands was inescapably about political obedience. The ghosts of the old faith lingered on, and, as Elizabeth’s reign drew to a childless close, so an old fear was revived and strengthened – the fear of a succession crisis and of civil war. Hamlet ends with that fear coming true – there is no clear heir to the Danish throne, and the country is invaded by a foreigner who takes the crown. In 1600 everybody watching Hamlet knew that this fear, which had preoccupied the nation for over thirty years, was now becoming of unavoidable urgency. Chapter Four examines a painting made only a year after the Stratford cup, which addresses the fearful question of what is going to happen if the Queen dies.
CHAPTER THREE
Snacking Through Shakespeare
BRASS-HANDLED IRON FORK FROM THE ROSE THEATRE
I think most of us have some idea of what people are likely to have felt when they first watched the great love scenes from Romeo and Juliet or heard Macduff being told of the killing of his children. The words move us now as we imagine they must always
have moved an audience. But in this chapter I want to ask a less elevated question: what did Shakespeare’s public eat in the theatre? What were you likely to be nibbling or crunching as you first heard ‘To be or not to be’? Modern audiences embark on films and plays armed with chocolate and popcorn, glasses of wine or bottles of water. What about the Elizabethans? It is a question that recent archaeological work has taken us a long way towards answering. Over the last few decades the Museum of London has excavated the sites of a number of Elizabethan theatres: they have found huge quantities of glass and pottery fragments, fruit seeds, nuts and mussel shells, and, in among all the detritus, this sharp and stylish fork.
It has a slender shape, a little longer (9 inches) and much narrower than the kind of fork we use today, with two fierce-looking prongs at the end; it is easy to imagine somebody languidly pronging a delicacy with it while watching a play. But this is not the equivalent of disposable plastic cutlery, thrown away at the end of the performance: this fork is made of durable iron and it once had an elegant wooden handle – you can still see the pins that held the wooden plates in place – with at the end a tiny brass knop (a rounded ornamental handle) beautifully engraved with the initials ‘A.N.’ This sort of fork, a sucket fork as it is known, is for spearing suckets or sweetmeats – selections of marchpane (marzipan), sugar-bread, gingerbread and the like, the equivalent of a box of chocolates. This is very smart cutlery, and it is meant to last. And last it did, for this particular fork lay for centuries on the site of the Rose Theatre on the south bank of the River Thames. It was excavated from the layers associated with the second phase of the Rose’s life, from 1592 to 1603. The fork comes from the remains of the theatre’s inner gallery walls, where it nestled in the debris and dirt among an eclectic range of discarded food, the remains of clothes and shoes, and pieces of weaponry, such as a sword scabbard, which may have been stage props.
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