The book is a tabloid history of England during Shakespeare’s lifetime, told entirely through plots to murder the monarch. Take for example, the Lopez conspiracy of 1594, which he presents as ‘a most dangerous and desperate treason. The point of conspiracy was Her Maties death…. The manner was poison.’
Title page of Carleton’s A Thankfvll Remembrance of Gods Mercie by G.C., London, 1627: a personification of the True Church holds up a banner displaying the book’s title, flanked by Elizabeth I and James I holding shields with their emblems and mottoes.
Throughout his book, the adversaries that Carleton describes are, as well as being mainly Catholic, also mainly foreign. They are the agents of the Kings of France and Spain and they are, more particularly, agents of the pope: ‘But he was drunke with the cup of Rome; for who would run such courses but drunken men? It may teach others to beware of those, that bring such poisoned and intoxicating cups from Rome.’ On and on, in high fulmination, Carleton goes, telling one rattling good yarn after another about evil Catholics and their dastardly acts. Time after time wicked people, aided by even more wicked and Catholic foreigners, set out to assassinate the monarch. Time after time they are foiled by loyal Englishmen and the grace of God. This is not about the divine right of kings, but the divine protection given to the Protestant rulers of England: Carleton seeks to show that without question God has been on ‘our’ – English, Protestant – side. Ultimately, the message of the book is triumphant, because all these plots against the King and Queen of England failed. Carleton’s stories are like a horror movie, danger watched (and tremulously enjoyed) from a place of safety. Strangers are concealed and in disguise. Foreigners lurk in the alleyway. As the tension mounts, the danger could not be greater.
Although none of these real plots features in Shakespeare, both the fact and the fear of conspiracy inhabit his work. Before he can set off for battle, Henry V has to deal with a group of noblemen found to be secretly in league with the King of France. Brutus and Cassius conspiring against Julius Caesar are, for Shakespeare’s audience, secret plotters of the sort they have been warned about, and, even more shocking, they are successful assassins. Julius Caesar is in many ways the archetypal assassination play, and in it Mark Antony describes the pain felt by the whole body politic when the ruler is murdered:
Woodcut from chapter 13 of Carleton’s A Thankfull Remembrance: ‘Lopez compounding [agreeing] to poyson the Queene’.
ANTONY: O, what a fall was there, my countrymen!
Then I, and you, and all of us fell down,
Whilst bloody treason flourished over us.
O, now you weep, and I perceive you feel
The dint of pity. These are gracious drops.
Kind souls, what weep you when you but behold
Our Caesar’s vesture wounded? Look you here,
Here is himself, marred, as you see, with traitors.
Shakespeare’s audiences could have told their own sad stories of the death of kings. Across Europe rulers fell before the dagger, the bullet, the cup of poison. Erik XIV of Sweden, enthusiastic suitor of Elizabeth, was poisoned in 1577. The Protestant Prince of Orange was shot in the chest in 1584. France lost so many kings to the knife that it began to look like carelessness: Henri III stabbed in 1589, Henri IV stabbed in 1610. And everyone would know of the killing in England itself of two queens in particular: Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth’s mother, sent to the scaffold by Henry VIII, Elizabeth’s father, in 1536; and James’s mother, Mary Queen of Scots, executed on the orders of her cousin Elizabeth in 1587. In each case, the killing followed sustained reports of a treasonable conspiracy.
How would news of the conspiracies Carleton describes have circulated? Moira Goff, Curator of Printed Historical Sources at the British Library, describes how he did his research:
He would have acquired his material from a variety of sources.
Quite a lot of it would have been word of mouth, and some of it privileged word of mouth. His information would also have come from printed pamphlets or from manuscript newsletters, which would later be replaced by the printed newspapers then in their infancy. Shakespeare’s audiences were drawing on the same range of sources. The groundlings would have been much more reliant on the oral – have you heard the latest news? People further up the social hierarchy would have also been getting manuscript newsletters on a regular basis. For men of business, news was a staple of their work.
Anyone hearing rumours or reading pamphlets in the 1590s – newsletters of the sort Carleton later gathered together – would have recognized in Richard II’s catalogue of killed kings not the remote history of 200 years earlier, but something uncomfortably close to current affairs.
To the modern eye, Carleton’s lurid terrors can easily seem absurd. Yet if we look behind the bluster, his anthology makes disturbing reading, because Elizabeth and James were in fact frequent, one might almost say constant, targets of assassination. And had they been killed, the consequences for every person in the land would have been grave. Reading Carleton’s Remembrance, we can see there was a great deal to be frightened about.
The book was enlivened by illustrations, twenty-one shockingly bad and crude woodcuts. We can watch William Parry, frozen with fear, finding himself unable to go through with his assassination attempt on a terrifying-looking Queen Elizabeth. Here are the Babington plotters, conspiring with Mary Queen of Scots against Elizabeth, blithely unaware of a grim execution taking place behind them – the fate that will soon be theirs. The pictures systematically underline the message of the text: Catholic traitors are everywhere, and they are plotting to destroy us.
The most sensational plot of the 1590s was the Lopez conspiracy, to which Carleton gives particular prominence. The mixture of political intrigue, paranoia about Spain, court gossip and xenophobia which lie behind the downfall of Roderigo Lopez reveals how powerful a force conspiracy anxiety had become in Elizabethan England. Lopez was a second-generation Portuguese immigrant, the son of a forcibly converted Jew. He was a wealthy and successful physician, serving the Queen as well as the Earl of Essex, one of Elizabeth’s favourites (see Chapter Seven). From about 1590 Lopez was in informal discussion with the Spanish ambassador to France, with a view to opening peace negotiations between England and Spain, but he seems to have gone well beyond his authority, enraging Essex by gossiping about his health and his political future. This was a serious mistake: when Essex came across evidence of Lopez’s unauthorized conversations, he claimed that his sources implicated Lopez in ‘a most dangerous and desperate treason’ to poison the Queen. The motive alleged was greed – a promised bribe of 50,000 crowns. Essex’s investigation was unremitting and ended with Lopez’s conviction and public execution. He was hanged, drawn and quartered at Tyburn on 7 June 1594.
‘Parry not able to kill the Queene’ from A Thankfull Remembrance. William Parry was one of the strange individuals occupying a grey world between exiled Catholic groups and the English government. Whether he was a spy or conspirator remains a mystery.
Lopez was in fact probably innocent: it appears that even the Queen had serious doubts about his guilt. But the case was hopelessly muddied by confusion, paranoia and double agents; and the momentum of events, and Essex’s determination to pursue a cause that so effectively heightened his own prestige, made Lopez’s fate inescapable.
‘Babington with his Complices in S. Giles fields’ from A Thankfull Remembrance. The plotters conspire, oblivious to the execution of a traitor behind them.
Carleton, in his account of the plot, describes the alien – the Jewish – nature of the traitor’s behaviour: ‘Lopez, like a Iew, did utterly with great oaths and execrations denie all the points, articles, and particularities of the accusation.’ But fascinatingly, Carleton feels the need to insist that behind Lopez’s Jewishness lies the even more alien, more threatening, power of the Catholic church: ‘This practise of poisoning…was brought into the Church by Popes, and reckoned among the sinnes of the Anti-christian Synagogue, an
d taught for Doctrine by the Romish Rabbies.’ Jews in league with the Pope: the ultimate Axis of Evil.
Susan Doran assesses Carleton’s constant focus on the Catholics as the main threat to the English state:
He was responding to a particular political circumstance of his time. The Catholics were considered to be the agents of the anti-Christ. It had started with the way that the burnings of Mary’s reign were being presented in England: Catholics were disloyal, they were erroneous, they were idolatrous, and if they were ever to get to power again, the Protestants would be in danger of their lives because they burned people. And the Saint Bartholomew massacre in 1572 in France again confirmed that impression. So there was an anxiety – almost like Islamophobia today, or at least as it was at the time of the Twin Towers – that there was an international conspiracy to overturn Protestantism, the true church, as well as the true monarch.
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Carleton’s climax is the Gunpowder Plot – that famous attempt in 1605 by a handful of Catholic conspirators to blow up parliament and kill the King. He calls it a ‘blow to root out Religion, to destroy the state [and] the Father of our Country’. So outraged is Carleton, so potent is the event in his and his readers’ memories, that for once he does not limit himself to the usual suspects – generally the Spanish, intermittently the French, always the Pope. So hellish is the attempt to blow up parliament that this Gunpowder Plot can have come only from ‘the deepnesse of Satan’ himself.
Carleton aims to plant a fear of terrorism so all-pervasive that if the news he reports is true, England is like Hamlet’s Denmark, a kingdom on the cusp of dissolution – where foreign armies are about to invade, everyone is spying on everyone else, and a purloined letter can either save a man’s life, or send Babington and Lopez, or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, to their deaths.
To most of us today, episodes like the defeat of the Armada, the Lopez incident and the thwarting of the Gunpowder Plot appear separate, distinct events. But Carleton knew they were all connected, all part of a sinister plot masterminded overseas and set in motion at home by covert enemy agents. For Shakespeare’s audience, these were the news stories they had heard endlessly repeated and discussed, the formative public events of their lifetime. In every Bolingbroke and every Brutus you saw not just a character from history whose motive you might ponder, but a rebel and a murderer of the sort that might any day turn your own world upside down. And in the great anonymous melting pot of the theatre, one of those secret agents, one of those covert assassins, might be standing right beside you – or even selling you an oyster.
Detail from a broadside on the Gunpowder Plot and the Guy Fawkes conspiracy, by Abraham Hogenberg, Cologne, 1606.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Sex and the City
A GOBLET FROM VENICE
Every age has its own fantasy of the great city, where glamour and pleasure not only abound, but are easily available. For the twentieth-century world, New York was that city of the world’s imagining: rich and welcoming, hedonistic, sophisticated and spectacular. In Shakespeare’s day it was Venice, the shopping capital of Europe, home of true luxury and style, one of the globe’s busiest crossroads, a place where travellers and traders, merchants and moneylenders watched greedily as Venetian gold ducats – the dollars of the day – changed hands in huge quantities. All this wealth ultimately rested on one thing: shipping.
SHYLOCK: Ho no, no, no, no! My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient. Yet his means are in supposition. He hath an argosy bound to Tripolis, another to the Indies; I understand, moreover, upon the Rialto, he hath a third at Mexico, a fourth for England, and other ventures he hath squandered abroad. But ships are but boards, sailors but men; there be land rats and water rats, water thieves and land thieves, I mean pirates; and then there is the peril of the waters, winds, and rocks. The man is, notwithstanding, sufficient. Three thousand ducats; I think I may take his bond.
Cosmopolitan and multicultural, Venice was the model of the great maritime trading city – a model that London was not merely aspiring to, but just beginning to realize that it could conceivably rival. The Englishman Thomas Coryate brilliantly evokes the allure of the place in his travel guide:
Truely such is the stupendious (to use a strange Epitheton for so strange and rare a place as this) glory of it, that at my first entrance thereof it did even amaze or rather ravish my senses. For here is the greatest magnificence of architecture to be seene, that any place under the sunne doth yeelde. Here you may both see all manner of fashions of attire, and heare all the languages of Christendome besides those that are spoken by the barbarous Ethnickes.
Coryate’s description of the city is designed to excite the English reader. Venice is, in his unforgettable new word, ‘stupendious’: Venice is wealthy, fashionable, pleasurable, a potent and dangerous mix of many different peoples. With its ‘barbarous Ethnickes’ from all over Europe, Africa and the Middle East, Venice is Babylon, where you encounter not just the babble of tongues, but stylish strangers, looser laws and the chance of boundless pleasure.
An object which speaks to all this fantasy is this large 400-year-old Venetian glass goblet. The upper part fits into the hand like a pint glass of beer, but the shape as a whole is different. The wide bowl will hold a great deal of wine, and it perches on a heart-shaped stem with a round base. Just below the rim is a showy band of gold that would touch the drinker’s lips at every sip. Beneath this gold band stands a blonde-haired woman in a billowy blue dress patterned with giant snowflakes, who looks ready to have – and to give – a very good time. This is a glass that to anybody in Shakespeare’s audience would speak of Venice and the sophisticated pleasures that it, and only it, could offer. Dora Thornton, curator of Renaissance collections at the British Museum, has made a particular study of the luxury goods of Italy:
Title page from the quarto edition of The Merchant of Venice, London, 1600.
In the mid-fifteenth century Venetian glass workers perfected a wonderful new medium, Cristallo glass. It was given this name because it has the clarity of rock crystal. But, unlike rock crystal, it can be moulded and blown into fantastic forms and shapes and it can be decorated with beautiful, brightly coloured enamels and gilding. The making of Cristallo was a very closely guarded trade secret. It needed plant ash imported from Syria and a special kind of river pebble that comes from northern Italy. The striking cobalt blue is likely to come from the Erzgebirge region on the German–Czech border. The white, which is made from tin oxide, is made using tin that has probably come from Cornwall or Brittany. And the gold, heavily used all over the rim and for touching up details and for the arms, is probably from Africa.
Glassware as stylish and clear as this, dependent on so many networks of transport and trade, was sought after all over Europe. Only the rich could afford Venetian glass, with its lavish decorations of gold and brilliant colour. These were objects literally fit for a king. When Shakespeare’s Richard II renounces the crown and the privileges and possessions that go with it, he mournfully puts aside goblets that sound very much like ours:
KING RICHARD: I’ll give my jewels for a set of beads,
My gorgeous palace for a hermitage,
My gay apparel for an almsman’s gown,
My figured goblets for a dish of wood…
When Antonio’s argosy of richly laden ships sailed for London, it would certainly have carried Venetian glassware, along with many other extravagances to fuel the fantasies of Shakespeare’s audience. Across the whole of Europe, there was such demand for Venetian glass that the glassmakers themselves were enticed to work abroad – glasses like the one discussed here may in fact have been made outside Venice, in Germany, France or England by émigré Venetian glassmakers, who came bringing their trade secrets with them. What was called Venetian glass and sold at Venetian prices was in fact a global brand, like a must-have designer handbag today, conceived in Italy or France, but possibly manufactured in the Far East.
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The Verzelini goblet, London, 1586. Elizabethan London had its own Venetian glass-master, the Protestant convert Jacopo Verzelini, permitted by the Queen to open a glasshouse at Crutched Friars at Aldgate in London.
Detail of perspective map of Venice, showing the Rialto Bridge and St Mark’s Square, by G. B. Arzenti, late sixteenth–early seventeenth century. The market centre of the Rialto is one of the few Venetian landmarks named in The Merchant of Venice.
The power behind the brand dwelt at the epicentre of banking, brokering and insurance in sixteenth-century Venice: the Rialto, the city’s business district. This was where shopping and shipping came together; the point at which news from all over the world about ships, shipwrecks and losses was announced. This is where Shylock would have heard the news that Antonio’s English argosy had been wrecked on the Goodwin Sands:
SALERIO: Why, yet it lives there unchecked that Antonio hath a ship of rich lading wracked on the narrow seas, the Goodwins I think they call the place, a very dangerous flat, and fatal, where the carcasses of many a tall ship lie buried as they say, if my gossip Report be an honest woman of her word.
Luca Molá of the European University Institute in Florence is an expert on the economy and law of sixteenth-century Venice:
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