CHORUS: Were now the general of our gracious Empress –
As in good time he may – from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!
Shakespeare may here be describing Elizabeth’s great favourite, the Earl of Essex, sent to Ireland in 1599 with a vast force – the largest army ever assembled in London – and about to return, it was hoped, with ‘rebellion broachèd’ and glory shining from his sword. But Essex failed in Ireland, fell out of favour and (after a disastrously ill-judged rebellion against the Queen) was in 1601, like Rory Oge, beheaded.
What became known as the Nine Years War did conclude with victory in 1603 – the medieval plan for the conquest of Ireland was completed in the final year of Elizabeth’s reign. But it was at a human cost of between 50,000 and 100,000 lives, and a financial cost of over two million pounds – more than Elizabeth spent on defence against the Armada and supporting the Dutch rebels combined. When James I inspected the documents stored at Whitehall, he exclaimed: ‘We had more ado with Ireland than all the world besides!’
CHAPTER EIGHT
City Life, Urban Strife
A CAP FOR AN APPRENTICE
One of the things most of us English speakers struggle to learn in German, French or many other languages is that there are two ways of saying ‘you’. There is the friendly, informal one, and the formal, respectful one: du and Sie, tu and vous. But in Shakespeare’s day English did exactly the same: as an Elizabethan, you established your social relationship to the person you were speaking to by using either a respectful ‘you’ or a familiar ‘thou’. So the young man in the song calls his girlfriend ‘thou’, but her mother ‘you’:
Then mother you are willing
your daughter I shall have:
And Susan thou art welcome
Ile keepe thee fine and brave.
James Shapiro explains:
In Shakespeare’s day you wouldn’t use the word ‘you’ in all circumstances. If you were speaking to somebody of a higher social station, you would address them as ‘you’, and generally, when you were speaking to somebody of a lower station, you would address them as ‘thee’. But if you were really angry you might address a superior, contemptuously, as ‘thou’. One of the things that we have really lost is sensitivity to how that works.
In modern English we have completely lost these hierarchical nuances of ‘you’, ‘thee’ and ‘thou’. The words remain, but they have lost their powers to guide us through the labyrinths of social interaction.
This cap also carries just such a lost social meaning: self-evident to an Elizabethan, but very hard for us to read today, it too was a guide to who you were, or who you were speaking to. It is an English woollen cap of the sixteenth century, a sort of flat chocolate-brown beret, and it was found about 150 years ago at Moorfields in London. Its wool has been closely knitted and felted, and it has a pleasing lived-in look. Textiles on the whole do not survive well over time; they are key pieces of physical evidence about life in the past that we often cannot recover or experience. But a relatively large number of English caps like this one have made it through the centuries, which gives us a good sense of just how many there must have been to begin with.
This hat unlocks a whole language of social difference and a whole structure of social control – both expressed through clothes. Elizabethan England had clear rules about what sort of garments could be worn by what sort of people. Between 1571 and 1597, for example, a parliamentary statute stipulated that males over the age of six had to wear a wool cap on Sundays and holidays. The law was a shrewd device for supporting the English wool industry but it was also designed to reinforce social divisions by making them visible, because in fact not every boy and man had to wear them – only those who were neither noblemen nor gentlemen. The ‘capped’ were the lower echelons of society, and for them not to wear the cap was to break the law. Shakespeare’s Uncle Henry, not quite grand enough to qualify as a gentleman, was fined in 1583 for exactly such a breach.
Everybody in Shakespeare’s audience took all this for granted, and everybody in this society wore a hat of some kind as a badge of social identity; not doing so suggested that something was seriously amiss.
OPHELIA: My lord, as I was sewing in my closet,
Lord Hamlet, with his doublet all unbraced,
No hat upon his head, his stockings fouled,
Ungartered, and down-gyvèd to his ankle,
…he comes before me.
As soon as Ophelia sees that Hamlet is hatless, both she and the audience are persuaded that he is probably mad or at least seriously distressed. Not that Prince Hamlet would be wearing a woollen cap, of course. Very broadly, the higher the status, the higher the hat, and a Danish prince would wear a high hat of taffeta or velvet, richly embroidered with gold or silver thread and probably a valuable hat jewel of some sort.
Our cap is what in Love’s Labour’s Lost is called a ‘plain statute cap’ and would have been worn by craftsmen and journeymen, servants and apprentices. Apprenticeship was a standard part of Elizabethan life. You became an apprentice around the age of fourteen and normally remained one for about seven years. In Shakespeare’s London, there might have been about 20,000 apprentices – roughly 10 per cent of the city’s population – and they would have come to the city from all over the country. Although apprentices were bound to a master and could not marry while their service lasted, these young men were not the downtrodden proletariat of a Victorian factory or a Dickensian workhouse. In fact, they often had a great deal of freedom. They were a part of their masters’ household; they would, in due course, one day be masters themselves; and a fair proportion of them would wind up marrying their masters’ daughters. They might be wearing plain statute woollen caps, but they might well be swaggering in them too.
We can see that this particular cap was probably not an apprentice’s ordinary, everyday cap. Under the brim are three lines of brown silk stitches, used to hold a silk ribbon, and there is the tiniest shred of fine tabby-weave silk still attached to the fabric. When the king in Hamlet calls Laertes’ skill with a rapier ‘a very riband in the cap of youth’, a trim of stylish silk like this is what he is picturing. This velvety brown example is probably not grand enough to be a master’s cap, but it does look like an apprentice’s best cap, one that he might wear to a special event or to the theatre. So, if you were an actor looking out from the stage around 1600, you would probably have seen a sea of flat caps like this, many of them worn by apprentices standing in the open air at the Rose, the Globe or the Fortune.
A goldsmith’s workshop, with master and four apprentices, by Étienne Delaune, August 1576. In this French engraving the status of the figures is obvious from their headgear: the bareheaded boy, the capped apprentices and the master goldsmith with his brimmed hat.
Apprentices were a routine part of the audience at the public playhouses, and, needless to say, their masters complained bitterly about both their idleness and their enthusiasm for theatres and alehouses. One master carpenter, around 1600, groused about his apprentice:
[He] will work nyver but ly drinking at the ale house & romes to playes all the day longe, & at night when he comes home & if he be sheute out of dores & cannot be let in he will climb over the bricke walles & throwe downe the windowe & come in soe that theare is no body that can rule him. I would be very fayne rid of him.
It was not just the carpenter’s apprentice who roamed to plays all the day long. Shakespeare’s audiences included apprentices from every trade. They stood for a penny in the pit, but they might also accompany their master or mistress to the balcony. Masters often sent an apprentice to escort their wives to the playhouse – respectable women attending the theatre needed an escort. There was uneasy humour to be had in this unsupervised relationship between mistress and apprentice, as this saucy anecdote from Henry Peacham’s The Art of Living in London shows:
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A tradesman’s wife of the Exchange, one day when her husband was following some business in the city, desired him he would give her leave to go see a play; which she had not done in seven years. He bade her take his apprentice along with her, and go, but especially to have a care of her purse…Sitting in a box, among some gallants and gallant wenches, and returning when the play was done, returned to her husband and told him she had lost her purse…Quoth her husband, ‘Where did you put it?’ ‘Under my petticoat between that and my smock.’ ‘What, [quoth he] did you feel no body’s hand there?’ ‘Yes [quoth she,] I felt one’s hand there, but I did not think he had come for that.’
The theatre was an environment where the mistress was not the only one likely to get into a bit of mischief. James Shapiro of Columbia University says:
Lots of people imagine that, like Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare and his contemporaries married at fourteen or fifteen. In fact, they did not marry until their mid-twenties because they were apprenticed from their mid-teens to their early twenties in a trade or profession. That leaves a lot of young men who are sexually mature, working long hours and ready to relax a little bit when they are out with a crowd, ready to drink and carouse; they are defined by belonging to a particular age group as much as anything else.
Young men out on the town were bound to get into trouble, and they did. They often went particularly wild on Shrove Tuesday, when the festivities were a last chance to let off steam before the glum privations of Lent (between 1603 and 1642 there were twenty-four serious riots on Shrove Tuesdays). Sometimes, after a bit of drink, they even wrecked the theatre if they did not like the programme. In 1617 a mob of apprentices invaded and smashed up the Cockpit Theatre, apparently in retaliation after the owners transferred the resident company from the cheaper, open-air Red Bull to the indoor Cockpit, which the apprentices could not afford and where they were no longer welcome. The simple stage direction ‘Enter three or four Apprentices of trades, with a pair of cudgels’ from Sir Thomas More (a play from the 1590s in which Shakespeare may have had a hand) conveys some of the rowdy violence that apprentices could easily produce.
The disorderly behaviour of these cap-wearing young men, particularly during public holidays, sometimes became more dangerous. During the 1590s, a series of bad harvests led to demonstrations across the country about food prices. These protests frequently ran out of control. Shakespeare depicts just such a moment in Coriolanus: the people are hungry and are being whipped up to anger against the man blamed for the food shortage:
FIRST CITIZEN: You are all resolved rather to die than to famish?
ALL: Resolved, resolved.
FIRST CITIZEN: First, you know Caius Coriolanus is chief enemy to the people?
ALL: We know’t, we know’t.
FIRST CITIZEN: Let us kill him, and we’ll have corn at our own price. Is’t a verdict?
ALL: No more talking on’t, Let it be done. Away, away!
All this would have struck a chord with the audience. But apprentices in the pit would surely not have cheered with so much gusto at the later speech by Coriolanus’ friend Menenius, who must have been speaking directly to them, pointing down at them in their caps.
MENENIUS: You are they
That made the air unwholesome when you cast
Your stinking greasy caps in hooting
At Coriolanus’ exile.
The hooting at Coriolanus’ banishment, which threatened Rome’s very existence, goes far beyond a boisterous Shrove Tuesday. There is a sense of real menace here, and Menenius, for all his condescension, has identified an aggression in the cap-wearing crowd that greatly preoccupied the English governing classes. These apprentices could, in certain circumstances, turn into a violent mob.
The cap was a tool for maintaining the social hierarchy, but, like all tools, its purpose could be redirected in unpredictable ways. The cap could come off to ask a favour – literally, cap in hand; it could be doffed to signal respect and thrown up into the air in joy, to indicate exuberant support. But, as Menenius accuses the fickle crowd, the throwing around of caps could also signal belligerence. James Shapiro explains what this tossing of caps in the air meant and why Menenius shows so much hostility to it:
It could be an expression of wanting to throw the social order over, of regime change. The symbolism of these caps tossed in the air suggests a moment of anarchy. In plays like Coriolanus, Shakespeare actually writes a stage direction, ‘Everybody tosses their caps in the air.’ That signified a kind of threatening, rebellious, popular force that kings and theatre owners should reckon with.
Title page from The History of Two Maids of Moreclack, by Robert Armin, 1609. The cap-wearing Armin specialized in comic parts including Touchstone, Feste and the Fool in King Lear.
In London, no less than in Coriolanus’ Rome, cap-wearing mobs were a potentially frightening force. And as an emblem of the lower classes, those woollen caps could carry menacing associations – not very different from hoodies today. Shakespeare’s crowd in Coriolanus is remarkable not just for its escalating violence, but because the caps almost acquire the status of a uniform. James Shapiro again:
It is a way of signifying a kind of collective identity, a bunch of young men who are rowdy, or potentially easy to stir up. I think Shakespeare likes that energy. You see crowds like that in Julius Caesar, in Coriolanus. It is threatening and unpredictable. I do not think he thinks of these young men gathered together throwing their caps in the air as either good or bad in and of themselves. They are just this energetic group of people that can shift the political terrain at any point.
The relationship between the theatrical world and the apprentices was lively, close and at times uneasy. Most playing companies contained men who were also members of London livery companies, who had themselves been apprentices: Ben Jonson, the playwright and actor, was a member of the Bricklayers’ Company, and Robert Armin, an actor in the King’s Men, was a member of the Goldsmiths’ Company. The playing companies themselves employed apprentices too – the young boys who took the female roles. More generally, if they wanted an animated audience, and plenty of pennies in their money boxes, the theatres depended on the enthusiastic attendance of apprentices, along with the porters, apple-wives, carters, butchers, serving-men and fishwives.
Suspicions about the dubious influence of the theatres on young apprentices darkened when violence broke out which seemed to implicate the players. On St Barnabas Day (11 June) 1592, celebrations took a nasty turn when the feltmakers’ apprentices ‘assembled themselves by occasion, & pretence of their meeting at a play’ near the Rose Theatre and, after a fracas with some of its officers, set off in an attempt to storm the Marshalsea Prison. Unsurprisingly, the theatre community tried to distance itself from such activities: the writer Thomas Nashe reported that the players ‘heartily wish they might be troubled with none of their youth nor their prentices’. But in 1595 apprentices rioted seriously at Tower Hill in London. The mayor and aldermen of the City used the theatre as a scapegoat for the unrest, and as a part of the clampdown of public order the theatres were closed. In fact, this was a serious outbreak, driven by desperation arising from poor harvests and famine, and what began as a protest against rising food prices ended with martial law being declared.
Ten years on, the opening scene of Coriolanus dramatized exactly this sort of riot among those demanding cheap corn – ‘Let us kill him, and we’ll have corn at our own price.’ Everyone in Shakespeare’s audience would have known how threatening that could be for social order. They would also have known how dangerous it was for the apprentices themselves and that those who controlled the political terrain were always in a position to fight back. Five of the apprentices who rioted in 1595 were executed on the scaffold.
In the next chapter, we will be looking at other ways the establishment found to control an unruly world: not through martial law or statutes about clothing, but through the power of magic.
CHAPTER NINE
New Sc
ience, Old Magic
DR DEE’S MAGICAL MIRROR
From Prospero’s hardworking helpers in The Tempest to the whimsy of Titania’s midsummer fairy train and the dark spirits that Lady Macbeth summons to turn herself into a killer, Shakespeare’s plays are filled with otherworldly presences, usually invisible but often a key part of the action:
PROSPERO: Spirits, which by mine art
I have from their confines called to enact
My present fancies.
TITANIA: I’ll give thee fairies to attend on thee,
And they shall fetch thee jewels from the deep…
Peaseblossom, Cobweb, Moth, and Mustardseed!
LADY MACBETH: Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here
And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty.
In every case the proximity and the influence of a world of spirits are taken for granted. Gregory Doran of the Royal Shakespeare Company describes the impact of these supernatural beings in Shakespeare’s era:
This was a society that believed in ghosts, was frightened of them and was aware of the presence of the devil, and though the belief in fairies was waning, the conjuration of them on the stage would nevertheless surprise and scare people.
In the late sixteenth century, harnessing invisible spirit power was an exercise similar to harnessing the invisible power of the wind. It was unpredictable and complicated, but if you could do it – rather like improving the technology of your ship’s sails – the world and its wealth were at your feet.
Reaching the spirit realm was, however, a touch more tricksy and considerably more demanding than improving navigation. One of the most effective ways of accessing the world of the spirits was through an object now housed in the British Museum. It is a round disc of highly polished black stone, about the size of a domestic side-plate but much heavier, about 880 grams. It is a mirror said to have belonged to one of the Shakespearean world’s most famous practitioners of the occult arts, Dr John Dee. Made of obsidian – a black volcanic stone – that has been highly polished, it is an oddly potent artefact that one is almost nervous to pick up. It is gleaming and smooth, like something modern and industrial, but it is at least half a millennium old. There is a small bump at the top through which a hole has been pierced. With a strong cord, you could – for whatever practice – suspend this heavy, honed disc.
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