Plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive; taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous victories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English chronicles: and what man have you now of that weak capacity that cannot discourse of any notable thing recorded even from William the Conqueror, nay from the landing of Brute, until this day, being possessed of their true use? For because plays are writ with this aim and carried with this method, to teach the subjects’ obedience to their king; to show the people the untimely ends of such as have moved tumults, commotions and insurrections; and to present them with the flourishing estate of all such as live in obedience, exhorting them to allegiance, dehorting them from all traitorous and felonious stratagems.
Wooden funeral effigy of Queen Katherine de Valois, Westminster Abbey. This is the original effigy of Queen Katherine from her funeral procession. Her body itself suffered several moves and a long exposure to public view before being placed in Henry V’s chapel in 1878.
Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, 1943–4: in the epilogue to Henry IV, part 2, Shakespeare had promised ‘our humble author will continue the story…and make you merry with fair Katherine of France’.
In other words, the people standing in the theatre watching history plays are learning to be good, law-abiding Englishmen – learning, above all, to be loyal subjects of the Queen.
There was a slight problem here. Happy though Elizabeth might have been to claim that she descended from Henry V, in fact it was not the case. Her ancestor was Henry’s French wife, Katherine of Valois, who after Henry’s death married Owen Tudor and thus became the founder of the Tudor dynasty. Shrewdly, and unsurprisingly, Shakespeare does not neglect Elizabeth’s fetching foremother when he dramatizes the story for his audience. Katherine of Valois is one of Shakespeare’s most captivating young women, whom we see struggling to lisp out a little English before being wooed, kissed and married by the strapping Henry. On stage, they are the celebrity couple of everybody’s dreams. And, like royal couples today, their public kiss in Act V is greeted with cheers from the adoring public.
KING HENRY: You have witchcraft in your lips, Kate: there is more eloquence in a sugar touch of them than in the tongues of the French Council, and they should sooner persuade Harry of England than a general petition of monarchs.
This was not to be Katherine’s last kiss. If Harry and Kate were winners on stage, they continued to be a joint attraction in death. Not far from Henry’s is the tomb of his wife, which was also a much-visited tourist sight in the 1590s – and for good reason: Katherine’s embalmed corpse lay fully exposed to view. It was perfectly possible to touch her – as indeed the diarist Samuel Pepys did seventy years later. Copying Shakespeare’s Henry, Pepys leaned over in Westminster Abbey and kissed Katherine on the lips. We do not know whether he found witchcraft in them, but he was certainly very moved:
here we did see, by particular favour, the body of Queen Katherine of Valois, and had her upper part of her body in my hands. And I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen, and that this was my birthday, 36 years old, that I did first kiss a Queen.
It must have made quite a difference watching Henry kiss Katherine on stage if you had seen – and perhaps even kissed – her dead lips yourself.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Ireland: Failures in the Present
A DANGEROUS IMAGE OF IRELAND
‘An Englishman, an Irishman, a Scotsman and a Welshman walk into a bar…’ We all know how the jokes begin, and how they are likely to end. Playing with, and playing up to, our national stereotypes is a long-standing staple of British humour, but Shakespeare’s entry in the Four Nations banter tournament is probably the oldest version of the classic set-up that any of us is likely to encounter. It sits at the very heart of his most tub-thumpingly English play, Henry V, where, on the eve of battle, four captains – the English Gower, the Welsh Fluellen, the Irish Macmorris and the Scottish Jamy – bicker round the battlements:
MACMORRIS: The day is hot, and the weather, and the wars, and the King, and the Dukes – it is no time to discourse, the town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach, and we talk…
FLUELLEN: Captain Macmorris, I think, look you, under your correction, there is not many of your nation –
MACMORRIS: Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?
FLUELLEN: Look you, if you take the matter otherwise than is meant, Captain Macmorris, peradventure I shall think you do not use me with that affability as in discretion you ought to use me, look you, being as good a man as yourself…
MACMORRIS: I do not know you so good a man as myself. So Chrish save me, I will cut off your head.
GOWER: Gentlemen both, you will mistake each other.
JAMY: Ah, that’s a foul fault!
PREVIOUS PAGES: ‘Rorie Oge in the Forest’, the eleventh of twelve woodcuts from John Derricke’s The Image of Ireland, with a discovery of Woodkarne, London, 1581.
This scene stands out in the whole of Shakespeare’s work for one striking reason: Captain Macmorris is Shakespeare’s only Irishman. We have a Scottish play – Macbeth – but there is no ‘Irish’ play. Shakespeare gives us Welsh and Scottish characters aplenty; from Ireland, we have only our solitary Captain Macmorris.
If Irish characters are conspicuously absent from the Shakespearean stage, we can, I think, be sure that they were never far from the minds of his public. As the audience of Henry V were watching Henry’s fifteenth-century conquest of France, they would have been all too aware of Elizabeth’s ongoing struggle to conquer Ireland. Captain Macmorris may be the only Irishman who appears on stage in a Shakespeare play, but behind him, just off stage, there are hundreds of other Irish bristling for battle:
MACMORRIS:…the town is beseeched, and the trumpet call us to the breach, and we talk…‘tis shame to stand still…and there is throats to be cut…
The idea of a horde of unseen Irish fighters eager to start cutting throats would have been shiveringly familiar to the English theatre-goer.
In trying to reconstruct what a Shakespearean audience might have thought about the Irish, the best place to start is probably a book published in 1581 called The Image of Ireland by John Derricke. In a mixture of prose, verse and images, Derricke’s work tells how Sir Henry Sidney, Lord Deputy of Ireland in the 1560s and 1570s, subjugated the Irish rebels. Derricke was a loyal follower of Sidney; indeed, he may well have directly witnessed Sidney’s campaigning against the Irish. His book is a devoted and passionate apologia for Sidney’s actions and a rancorous account of the Irish people, their wild history and barbarous ways. For all its animosity, however, the sheer detail of the twelve woodcuts – some of the most striking produced in a sixteenth-century English book – make it a leading source on the Irish experience, costume and customs in the late Tudor age. The book almost uniquely expresses Elizabethan militarism at its most hot-headed – from the minutiae of the military gear that was used to the fear and rage that the Irish rebellion generated.
Drawing of unused seal design for Elizabeth I as Queen of Ireland, by Nicholas Hilliard, probably 1570s. The Queen is flanked by shields, one with the harp of Ireland and the other the three crowns of Munster.
OVERLEAF: The fourth woodcut from The Image of Ireland, the Chief of the Mac Sweynes seated at dinner being entertained by his harper and bard, is among the most vivid depictions of Tudor Irish life – though details such as men baring their buttocks to the fire indicate that it is not wholly disinterested.
The Ireland that Derricke’s book describes was the setting for the great military crisis of the Elizabethan age. England in the 1590s was militarily overstretched, and the distractions of European and maritime engagements ruled out the level of action needed to bring a swift end to the Irish revolt. It was not Spain, not the Netherlands, not the high seas, but the war on England’s doorstep that brought the regime perilously close to outr
ight defeat. As Shakespeare was writing Henry V early in 1599, English affairs in Ireland were at crisis point. The rebels’ power was growing, and the English were terrified they would join forces with the great enemy, the Spanish. Andrew Hadfield of Sussex University explains:
If you want a comparison, it was like the Cuban Missile Crisis. You had the fear that there would be a destructive war that would engulf civilization, and the idea of Russian forces on America’s shores. That is exactly how the English felt about Ireland and the Spanish, that this was a back door into England that could result in the destruction of everything they had tried to build up over the years. So that is why in Henry V you have this sense of an army that is there to defend everything that everyone holds dear. The stakes are as high as they possibly could be.
Derricke’s book is split into three parts. It is clearly explained that parts one and two are devoted to the evils of the rough native Irish foot-soldier, usually referred to as the wood kern: ‘The Nature and qualities of the laied Wilde Wood karne, their notable aptnesse, celerity, and pronenesse to Rebellion.. also their habite and apparel, is there plainly showne.’ The third section tells the story of the notorious Irish rebel Rory Oge O’More: ‘The execrable life and miserable death of Rorie Roge, that famous Archtray-tour to God and the Croune…is likewise described.’ There is a dramatic illustration, in plate eleven, of Rory Oge O’More himself. The woodcut looks a little like a stage set. There is a stylized forest, with trees neatly balanced on either side. In the distance wolves prowl. And centre-stage, ready to speak, stands a bearded man with a long cloak and hood, and some of the most clumsily drawn feet in the whole of European art.
A bogeyman to the English, Rory Oge O’More was a hero – a Che Guevara – to the Irish resistance. He was one of the most successful Irish war-leaders, struggling against the Elizabethan expropriation of land from the Irish for the benefit of English settlers. In the Annals of Loch Cé a Gaelic chronicler wrote of him after his death: ‘There was not in Ireland a greater destroyer against foreigners than that man: and he was a very great loss.’ This is the kind of Irishman Shakespeare’s audience truly feared – powerful, strong and a menace to the forces of the English crown.
Rory Oge O’More was not merely a fighter; he was a wood kern – the most sinister kind of Irishman of all. ‘Kern’ is a term we hardly know today, but to Elizabethans it was practically a household word. ‘Now for our Irish wars,’ says Richard II, ‘We must supplant those rough rug-headed kerns, / Which live like venom where no venom else / But only they have privilege to live.’ The idea of the kern was so current because these guerrilla fighters were blamed for all of England’s problems in Ireland. Lightly armed, quick on their feet, kerns could melt into the countryside – they are the archetype of the nightmarishly elusive, indigenous forest-fighter. The English dream of settling Ireland was frustrated, many believed, not because the whole island was against it. The problem – it was argued – was by no means all the Irish people, just the awkward ones, the wild ones – the kerns. That is what Derricke’s book wants us to believe, as Ciaran Brady of Trinity College Dublin sets out:
The lesson is not that all the Irish are barbarous and uncivil, but that a certain kind of Irishman needs to be tamed; that kind of Irishman is the wood kern. These men were originally the members of the private armies of some 2,000 souls, commanded by the great feudal lords of Ireland. They were professional fighters, acculturated to violence, prepared to undertake acts of terrorism normally associated with people in organized crime. Once they were decommissioned, they had nowhere to go. Some of them went abroad, but in the majority of cases they went into the woods. And when rebellion broke out in Desmond, in Munster, in the 1580s, and most importantly in Ulster in the 1590s, they came out of the woods. And they are not the kind of people one would like to meet at three o’clock in the morning.
Uncivil, wretched, dirty and shaggy-haired – the feral nature of the wood kerns was a constant part of their image.
Shakespeare’s offstage kerns unpredictably fight now on one side, now on the other. They could on occasion be fighting (for the time being at least) with the English:
MESSENGER: The Duke of York is newly come from Ireland,
And with a puissant and a mighty power
Of gallowglasses and stout kerns
Is marching hitherward in proud array…
Or they could be Irish freedom-fighters of the kind that English grandees like the Duke of York are sent to deal with:
CARDINAL: My Lord of York, try what your fortune is.
Th’uncivil kerns of Ireland are in arms
And temper clay with blood of Englishmen;
To Ireland will you lead a band of men,
Collected choicely, from each county some,
And try your hap against the Irishmen?
The trouble with the kerns was that you never knew whose side they were on.
Rory Oge O’More was not an ordinary kern but a chieftain and, as far as the English were concerned, a serial offender against English rule. His family was based in Leinster in the Irish Midlands, and their land was among the first seized for English settlers after the Irish colony was officially established in 1556. Rory Oge earned a reputation for gritty opposition to this policy of plantation and led two major uprisings. The first rebellion, from 1571 to 1577, ended with him accepting some land from Henry Sidney, but mutual mistrust meant there was no final settlement. After only ten months of peace, Rory Oge rebelled again in 1577–8, and this time a punitive campaign was waged against the rebels. As the conflict dragged on, massacres were carried out by both sides, and the usual rules of war broke down. Rory Oge became a demonic figure, associated, in the English mind, with witchcraft and conscienceless malevolence.
Rory Oge O’More was at the heart of a transformation in the thinking of the English elite trying to control Ireland; they began to characterize the native Irish as innately and irredeemably addicted to violence and rebellion. He was also, as far as the English were concerned, a turncoat and a traitor. Ciaran Brady again:
Rory Oge had for a time been an ally or an agent of English government in Ireland, but he then turned and became a rebel. He had to be punished; he could not be seen to have got away with this act of treachery. What the Image of Ireland is trying to suggest is that, whereas you must apply the modes and processes of English law to normal subjects of the crown, the wood kern are simply beyond that, which means you need to take ruthless action. This is a kind of justification for getting really tough, for applying martial law to dangerous, demobbed soldiers.
Rory Oge was long famous for narrowly evading capture, but eventually his luck ran out, and on 30 June 1578 he was caught in a double ambush and beheaded.
The printed image of Rory Oge is a lesson not just in Irish wildness, but in English savagery: Derricke’s treatment of him in print three years later was almost as gruesome as his execution. By this time, Rory Oge’s head had been exhibited on a spike by Dublin Castle. Derricke makes his severed head speak to us and acknowledge his treachery:
And here I lye groveling, poore wretch, on the ground,
Thus God of justice, doeth traitours confounde…
My hed from the bodie parted in twaine,
Is set on the Castell, a signe to remaine.
OVERLEAF: This map of Great Britain and Ireland (from the Armada Plates by Augustine Ryther, 1590) shows the paths of the Spanish and English fleets in 1588.
The enemy, ambushed, defeated, executed, is now also demeaned.
*
How the beastly Irish could be subdued was not a new problem as the sixteenth century drew to its close. The action of Richard II, set 200 years earlier, is propelled by the crushing financial burden of his Irish wars, which set the King on the road to deposition and death.
NORTHUMBERLAND: And then it was, when the unhappy King –
Whose wrongs in us God pardon! – did set forth
Upon his Irish expedition;
From when
ce he, intercepted, did return
To be deposed, and shortly murdered…
Elizabeth escaped Richard’s fate – although she certainly knew about it – but the Irish war was a bleak backdrop to much of her reign, and to Shakespeare’s writing in the 1590s. Andrew Hadfield again:
By the 1590s, everybody knew what was happening in Ireland. A lot of ordinary people would have been drafted into the army through the muster system. Just before Henry V was produced on stage, the biggest army that had ever assembled in London was ready to go over to Ireland. Many people had a connection to the army, they knew people who had been killed – it was something you could not avoid, and Shakespeare refers to Ireland, very topically and very clearly, in Henry V.
Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, mounted on a horse, with Cadiz, the Azores and Ireland in the background, 1599–1600. The print misguidedly anticipates success for Essex in Ireland, as Shakespeare apparently also does in Henry V.
Though Rory Oge was by then out of the picture, rebellion against English rule broke out again in 1594, this time under the leadership of the Earl of Tyrone, Hugh O’Neill, and his allied Gaelic chieftains. So great was the concern about Ireland that Shakespeare, in what is probably his only direct reference to a topical event, compares Henry V’s victory at Agincourt to Elizabeth’s troops fighting the Irish:
Shakespeare's Restless World Page 7