By the time this print was published, Elizabeth was nearly sixty, much too old to produce her own heir, so who might succeed her was a very tricky topic. But the astonishing thing is that, although printed in the 1590s, this image is actually a copy of another one made twenty years earlier. If we want to gauge the continuity, indeed the growth, of the national obsession with who would follow Elizabeth, then the twenty years between the print and its source are a very useful measure.
The original painting on which the print is based is kept at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff. Its painter, Lucas de Heere, was Flemish; he was born in Ghent and converted to Calvinism, which made him suspect to the Spanish authorities (the King of Spain was also ruler of most of the Low Countries). This probably accounts for his move to England, perhaps in the 1560s. For the Earl of Lincoln he painted a gallery, now destroyed, of the costumes of all nations, in which the Englishman was depicted as unable to choose what to wear, an image that supposedly greatly amused Queen Elizabeth.
The inscription around the frame of De Heere’s painting of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty tells us what we are to think of the Queen, her father, and her brother and sister:
A FACE OF MVCHE NOBILLITYE LOE IN A LITTLE ROOME, FOWR STATES WITH THEYR CONDITIONS HEARE SHADOWED IN A SHOWE. A FATHER MORE THEN VALYANT. A RARE AND VERTVOVS SOON. A ZEALVS DAVGHTER IN HER KYND. WHAT ELS THE WORLD DOTH KNOWE AND LAST OF ALL A VYRGIN QVEEN TO ENGLANDS IOY WE SEE SVCCESSYVELY TO HOLD THE RIGHT, AND VERTVES OF THE THREE.
The more you look at the painting, the more you see that the point of it is to tell us, the viewers, how lucky England is to have the Tudors. Because of them, we have enjoyed a hundred years of peace. Philip of Spain, Mary’s unpopular husband, has been seen off and sent home – he is painted on the left wearing black, looking almost like a pantomime villain, and the only royal figure not allowed on the grand carpet. The figure of War lurking behind Philip is a sour reminder of how the Spanish King entangled England in his European wars – in which, disastrously, Calais was lost to France – and how Philip then deserted his former ally. On the right-hand side, hurrying in to support Elizabeth and loaded with fruit and flowers, come Peace and Plenty. Below Peace’s feet are discarded weapons of war. On the throne are the royal arms supported by the English lion and the Welsh dragon. The painting’s purpose is to assert the legitimacy and benefits of Elizabeth’s reign and her place as the culmination of an orderly succession of Tudor rulers.
De Heere’s picture, painted around 1571, has one of the strongest claims to represent Elizabeth as she wanted herself to be seen – she certainly approved it after the fact, even if she did not actively commission it. It is not a great piece of painting. Nobody would thrill to the way that Lucas de Heere has painted the folds of the velvets, or the light (not) sparkling on the jewels. But if its surfaces are lacklustre, its message is still crystal clear: England and Wales were fortunate to have Elizabeth as their Sovereign. And while Elizabethan spectators would certainly have been grateful for what her reign had brought with it, they would also have been apprehensive because this peace and prosperity, although real, was fragile. Everything hinged on the Queen’s survival, and everything would be in jeopardy if she made the wrong marriage, or died without an heir. It is fair to say that all of this would have been immediately understandable to any Elizabethan standing in front of Lucas de Heere’s painting.
Shakespeare was seven years old when this picture was made, and these were the concerns of the world in which he grew up. But the picture was not made for Elizabethan spectators in general: it was made for one in particular. At the very bottom of the picture are written the following words:
THE QVENE TO WALSINGHAM THIS TABLET SENTE MARKE OF HER PEOPLES AND HER OWNE CONTENTE
The recipient of this gift, Sir Francis Walsingham, was Elizabeth’s spymaster, who specialized in foiling conspiracies to kill the Queen. In 1569, a powerful group of Catholic noblemen in the north of England had rebelled against her. Then a foreign banker called Ridolfi had plotted with the Duke of Norfolk to depose Elizabeth with the support of the Spanish. It was Walsingham who unravelled the plot and sent Norfolk to the scaffold. In the early 1570s, as the picture was being painted, the first people who looked at it knew that the Queen had just survived an attempt to overthrow her.
We do not know where Walsingham kept the picture, but we might imagine it hanging over his desk as he despatched his instructions to his queen-preserving network of spies. For the next twenty years, as he looked up at it, he would be able to feel some satisfaction that he played a part in protecting her from a whole series of plots, conspiracies and assassination attempts – indeed Shakespeare was one of the first people we know of to use the word ‘assassination’ in print, and he and all his contemporaries lived in a country used to the idea of plots and regicides. When Walsingham died in 1590, the picture was, we believe, still in his possession – but the problem of who would succeed the Queen had still not been resolved.
When we look again at the 1590s print that reproduces the painting of 1571, it is startling to realize that in those twenty years nothing had apparently changed. The print has updated Elizabeth’s costume to keep the dress in line with 1590s fashion, but apart from that nothing on the face of it has altered. Here still is the Tudor dynasty, and here still it comes to an end in the person of Elizabeth. She has produced no heir, appointed no successor. The revival of the ‘Allegory of the Tudor Succession’ as a print in the 1590s can be seen as part of the foreboding felt as Elizabeth began visibly to age and slow down. While the original painting’s purpose was to assert the legitimacy of Elizabeth’s reign, the resurgence of the image as a more widely accessible print in the 1590s captured darker anxieties in the public consciousness about the future. The original text around the painting was now replaced by a new three-stanza poem, more explicitly anti-Catholic and more condemnatory of Mary:
Now Prudent Edward dyinge in tender youth,
Queen Mary then the Royall Sceptre swayd:
With foraine blood she matchet and put down truth,
Which England’s glory suddainly decayd:
Who brought in war & discord by that deed.
Susan Doran explains the important developments that had taken place behind the scenes:
Sir Francis Walsingham, possibly after John de Critz the Elder, around 1587, by which time he was one of the most important figures in Elizabeth’s government.
There was a hope that Elizabeth was going to avoid civil war breaking out on her death, avoid there being a transitional period which might be exploited by Catholics and foreign powers, particularly Spain. The danger in 1591 was now that there might be an international war about the succession. That was what was happening in France at that time. On the death of Henry III, the Protestant Henry IV had been challenged and Spain had come in to oppose his accession to the French throne. There was an anxiety in England that that was going to happen on the death of Elizabeth and so pressure was being put on Elizabeth in parliament, quietly by some privy councillors and by James VI of Scotland, who wanted to be named her successor. It was very much a topical issue in the 1590s.
The threat from Philip of Spain was real and multiple: he was the most powerful ruler in Europe, he had been married to Mary Tudor and had held the title ‘King of England’; he was a legitimate descendant of the House of Lancaster with a claim to the English throne through John of Gaunt; and, by the 1590s, he had heirs who could follow him. For those who wanted a Catholic monarch, Philip of Spain was the ideal choice.
But there was another candidate closer to home. Mary Stuart, Mary Queen of Scots – the main contender in the 1560s – had by now been executed, but she had a grown son, James, who was also descended from the Tudor family. By the 1590s, when this print was made, Mary’s son was an experienced ruler, as King of Scotland, and had a growing family of his own. So for Protestants in England, James VI of Scotland was the great hope.
In England, the Treasons Act forbade any discussio
n on who could succeed Elizabeth. (Not that some did not risk it. One writer decided what the Queen really needed was a tract that he briskly entitled: A Pithy Exhortation to Her Majesty for Establishing Her Successor to the Crown. This was a foolish move. You could end up, as the writer Peter Wentworth did, pithily exhorting from the Tower.) But concerns about the succession could be addressed in prints and obliquely on stage, provided you were as nimble as Shakespeare was in not espousing too specifically any one particular position. When Shakespeare dramatized the Wars of the Roses in the 1590s, it was partly loyal propaganda to show the terrible crisis from which the Tudors had rescued England. At the same time, however, the plays reveal deep anxiety about succession, as one royal kinsman after another struggles for supremacy: the ever-self-dramatizing Richard II cries to the usurper Henry IV, ‘Here, cousin, seize the crown.’ Rebellion was always very much part of the family.
Final panel of the series The Kings and Queens of England by Hendrik Goltzius, 1584, depicting the Tudors in orderly sequence, ending with Elizabeth I. Male rulers with swords and shields give way to queens with sceptres and diamond plaques.
The Earl of Richmond, about to become Henry VII, had ended the Wars of the Roses with a vision of a reunited England:
RICHMOND: Abate the edge of traitors, gracious Lord,
That would reduce [bring back] these bloody days again
And make poor England weep in streams of blood!
Let them not live to taste this land’s increase
That would with treason wound this fair land’s peace!
Now civil wounds are stopped, peace lives again;
That she may long live here, God say amen!
But, as we have seen, by the 1590s fears for the future were growing stronger once again. Everybody knew about the civil wars that were going on in France, where foreign powers were intervening in a bloody struggle that had already lasted for a generation. It could easily happen in England.
As it turned out, England was luckier than France. The picture in Cardiff is a kind of history play of the whole Tudor dynasty, and when eventually the leading lady left the stage, the play had an unexpectedly happy ending. The Welsh Tudors were succeeded on the English throne by the Scottish Stuarts. There was no rebellion, no foreign invasion, no civil war. And in 1603 James VI of Scotland came peacefully to London as James I of England. This smooth succession did not, however, end Shakespeare’s dramatic investigation of these themes; indeed his most intense explorations of them were still to come in Macbeth and King Lear. The enduring issues of political violence, stability and legitimacy continued to preoccupy Shakespeare as the world around him shifted towards a new set of uncertainties.
CHAPTER FIVE
Swordplay and Swagger
RAPIER AND DAGGER FROM THE THAMES FORESHORE
The streets of London were a dangerous place in the sixteenth century. In Shakespeare’s day you could calmly admire a swordfight on stage and then find yourself perilously embroiled in one when you stepped beyond the theatre walls. In London, just as in Verona, an evening out could end up a very bloody business:
ROMEO: Gentle Mercutio, put thy rapier up.
MERCUTIO: Come, sir, your passado!
[They fight]
ROMEO: Draw, Benvolio. Beat down their weapons.
Gentlemen, for shame! Forbear this outrage!
Tybalt, Mercutio, the Prince expressly hath
Forbid this bandying in Verona streets.
Hold, Tybalt! Good Mercutio!
[Tybalt under Romeo’s arm thrusts Mercutio]
MERCUTIO: I am hurt.
A plague a’ both houses! I am sped.
Romeo and Benvolio try their best to stop the swordfight between their friend Mercutio and the hotshot swordsman, Tybalt, but it is hopeless. Mercutio is stabbed, and once again the streets of Verona run with blood.
We tend to think of Romeo and Juliet as essentially the balcony scene, a play about the romantic tribulations of young love. In fact it is just as much a play about bands of privileged lads slicing each other to death and the failure of the authorities to control their brawling. Romeo and Juliet, with its upmarket knife gangs and its bloodstained streets, leaves no doubt that urban violence – for Shakespeare and his audience – was one of the big issues of the day.
The weapons of choice were generally a dagger and a rapier, as in these examples, now housed at the Royal Armouries in Leeds. The dagger was made around 1600 and is bigger than you might expect, roughly the size of a modern carving knife – the dagger that hovered before Macbeth was clearly no slight weapon. Its companion piece, the rapier, is not equipment for the battlefield: the slender blade was designed to pierce clothing, not armour. This was the sort of weapon you carried around with you on the streets of Elizabethan England. Part dress accessories, part weapons, a rapier and dagger were essential kit for any young man out on the town.
In Shakespeare’s day there were only two ways of getting from the City of London to the south bank. Either you walked over London Bridge or you took a rowing boat or ferry over the river. Our dagger was found on the foreshore of the Thames, on the south bank: probably dropped by a young man as he got in or out of one of those rowing boats. We do not know, of course, whether the young man who lost his dagger was out looking for trouble as he set foot in Southwark. Nor, of course, do we know what clothes he was wearing, but he was almost certainly dressed in his best gear and looking for fun, because one of the main reasons for a young man to go south of the river was to get to the roaring entertainments on Bankside, which we first encountered in Chapter Three.
There were the theatres, of course – the Rose, the Swan, the Globe. But there were also bear-pits and cock-pits, brothels and inns – all easily accessible, and all conveniently outside the authority of the City of London. There were at least five bear-baiting establishments in the area around the Rose and the Globe, and some bears became national celebrities – the famous bear Sackerson was given a cameo role in The Merry Wives of Windsor:
SLENDER: That’s meat and drink to me, now. I have seen Sackerson loose twenty times, and have taken him by the chain. But, I warrant you, the women have so cried and shrieked at it that it passed. But women, indeed, cannot abide ’em – they are very ill-favoured rough things.
The south bank, with its wild entertainments, reckless youths and impresarios determined to make fast money, could be a dangerous place; particularly when groups of Elizabethan lads – not so different from the characters in Romeo and Juliet – carried lethal weapons with them. Toby Capwell, curator of arms at the Wallace Collection, says:
Once they become part of your dress as a gentleman, there is always the temptation to use them. If everybody is going to carry swords around all the time, they are going to come out pretty quickly in the event of an argument.
To be fashionable in the sixteenth century you needed to carry a sword. Only a gentleman was entitled to do so, and a true gentleman was expected to, as we know Shakespeare himself did. So it should be no surprise that the earliest known use of the word ‘blade’ to refer to a stylish young man appears in Romeo and Juliet. If the scenes between those young blades Tybalt and Mercutio are still vivid today, it is because such fights were not some fanciful invention, but the rough stuff of daily life.
The essential accompaniment to the dagger was the rapier, and this fine one was also found on the Thames foreshore – perhaps another casualty of a young man’s night on the town in Southwark, dropped as its drunken owner stumbled back into the rowing boat to take him home. This is an impressive weapon. The blade alone is well over a metre long, and it is sharp on both sides and at the end – you can slash, you can pierce with this rapier, while the matching dagger would be held in the left hand, parrying and stabbing at close range.
Going to Bankside, from Michael van Meer’s friendship album, c.1619. The Thames was covered with watermen ferrying customers across and along the river. The watermen were active supporters of the Southwark theatres, whose pop
ularity added greatly to their income.
It is clearly an expensive, elegant weapon, and the owner must have been sorry to lose it. It has been elaborately worked – at the handle, it looks as though a long, thin metal snake has coiled itself around the base of the blade to protect the owner’s hand while he is fighting. A weapon like this would have been worn in what Elizabethans called a hanger, or girdle – a sort of sling. This would have made it easier to carry, because it was certainly not light in the hand. Toby Capwell again:
We always think of rapiers as a kind of feather-light flashing blade, the weapon of Errol Flynn and Douglas Fairbanks, and of medieval swords, conversely, as being heavy and cumbersome.
But actually this is a misconception: medieval swords tend to be very light, while real rapiers tend to be quite heavy and can seem, to an untutored hand, quite ungainly.
Yet when rapiers and daggers found themselves in tutored hands, the result was, in the words of Mercutio, a kind of musical performance, an exquisite dance of death:
MERCUTIO: He fights as you sing prick-song: keeps time, distance, and proportion. He rests his minim rests, one, two, and the third in your bosom. The very butcher of a silk button. A duellist, a duellist. A gentleman of the very first house, of the first and second cause. Ah, the immortal passado! the punto reverso! the hay!
Mercutio’s description of Tybalt’s skills with a rapier and dagger captures a fashion in swordsmanship that was new in England. As Alison de Burgh, fight master at the National Theatre, explains, Tybalt’s fighting was not just deadly, it was also the last word in foreign chic:
Shakespeare was picking up on the contemporary conflict between the English school of swordplay and the new Italian school of rapier play. Romeo’s family are fighting in the old English style of swordplay, Tybalt’s are fighting in the new Italian style; a fact made evident by the terminology Mercutio uses when he makes fun of Tybalt and Tybalt’s style of swordplay. Mercutio talks of the passado, the punto reverso, and makes up a move called the hay. Through Mercutio using these words and making fun of the moves, Shakespeare is echoing a gentleman who wrote a manual on English swordplay in which he criticized the Italian school. A famous Italian Master, Vincentio Saviolo, had recently established a school and written a manual on his style of swordplay. The Englishman George Silver wrote a manual on swordplay in which he advocates the English style and denigrates the Italian style. Mercutio is using words and phrases Silver uses in his manual.
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