Othello, the great and valiant leader, was once himself a slave, sold after being taken prisoner. His story reminds us of something commonplace to the Elizabethans: the Mediterranean was a dangerous place of warfare, piracy, slavery and shipwreck, as the ships of the different seafaring powers – Venetian and Turkish, Genoese and Moroccan – fought for supremacy. And we know that one of these ships, passing from Morocco to northern Europe, carried this gold coin of Sharif al-Mansur – because it was found not in Morocco, but twelve miles off the coast of Devon, one of a hoard of 450 Moroccan gold coins found in Salcombe Bay in 1994. The South-West Archaeological Group, a team of amateur marine archaeologists and semi-professional divers, uncovered this astonishing treasure in a treacherous area of seabed, beset with strong currents and deep gullies. They found large quantities of sixteenth-century coins, gold ingots, earrings and pendants – all from Morocco – along with other artefacts and debris: lead weights, pewter tableware, ceramic fragments and decomposing iron. Apart from the coins, it is hard to tell what the many different pieces of gold are. Among the mass of 400-year-old Moroccan jewellery, there are no complete pieces. These are emphatically not jeweller’s goods for sale; rather they are chopped-up bullion, bits of gold intended to be melted down and reused. But the gold coins give us important information. Their inscriptions tell us that they were struck by several members of the Sa’did dynasty – of which al-Mansur was the most significant figure – that ruled Morocco from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries. The latest coin that we can date was issued by Sharif al-Walid, who ruled until 1636, so the shipwreck probably occurred shortly after that.
Pieces from the Salcombe Treasure, including coins, ingots and jewellery fragments, pendants and earrings of a type made in Morocco into the twentieth century.
This is inscrutable wreckage. There is not much about it that we know for certain: there are none of the usual signs of a boat that has gone down; no rudder, timber, deadeyes have been found, and there are no records of any ship lost in the area. Was this a trading ship on the way home from north Africa? Or was it perhaps a pirate ship? We know there were many such ships around – both English and Moroccan. Barbary pirates, in particular, took captives from ships on the high seas and from fishing vessels close to the English coast. Now and then they raided the mainland, sometimes literally dragging people from their beds and either enslaving them or holding them to ransom. In 1584, Richard Hakluyt reported that ships from Guernsey, Plymouth, Southampton and London were taken and their crews enslaved. The practice continued for decades. In 1631, 107 men, women and children were taken in Ireland; 20 per cent vanished – died or converted – before they could be ransomed.
Scene 13 of twenty-two scenes of torture by Barbary pirates, from Pierre Dan’s Histoire de Barbarie, Paris, 1637.
When we think of pirates in stories, we tend to think of Long John Silver rather than anything more sinister. But for Shakespeare’s audience pirates were much closer to the murderous hijackers of our day, and piracy off the coast of England was a frightening, much-publicized possibility. The terrifying activities of these corsairs spawned a new literary genre in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, known now as the captivity narrative: hair-raising and sword rattling tales of English victims seized by north African pirates. The mournfully and lengthily titled ballad of 1623 The Lamentable Cries of at least 500 Christians: Most of them Being Englishmen (Now Prisoners in Algiers Under the Turks) Begging God’s Hand That He Would Open the Eyes of All Christian Kings and Princes to Commiserate the Wretched Estate of So Many Christian Captives gives a compelling taste of the dangers at sea:
Being boarded so, and robbed then are they tied
On chains and dragged t’Argiers [i.e. Algiers] to feed the pride
Of a Mahumetan dog (eight in a row).
Each eighth man to the Argier king must go
And th’eighth part of what’s ta’en is still his prize;
What men he leaves are anyone’s who buys
And bids for them, for they then are led
To market and like beast sold by the head,
Their masters having liberty by law
To strike, kick, starve them, yet make them draw
In yokes, like oxen, and if dead they beat them
These captivity narratives told of attack, incarceration, derring-do and breathtaking escape. The stories of forced conversions and bestial savagery fed the xenophobia and religious hostility that coexisted, in the English popular mind, with hunger for the valuable and exotic goods of north Africa.
Pirates never took centre-stage for Shakespeare – he was, after all, a man from landlocked Warwickshire who seems never to have travelled abroad – but they are part of the elemental backdrop to sea travel in his plays. Pirates attack Hamlet en route to England, forcing him to return to Denmark, or they dash in and seize Marina in Pericles, leaving no doubt about their reputation for casual violence:
[Enter Pirates]
FIRST PIRATE: [to Leonine] Hold, villain! [Leonine flees]
SECOND PIRATE: [seizing Marina] A prize, a prize.
THIRD PIRATE: Half-part, mates, half-part. Come, let’s have her aboard suddenly.
[Exeunt]
[Enter Leonine]
LEONINE: These roguing thieves serve the great pirate Valdes,
And they have seized Marina. Let her go.
There’s no hope she will return; I’ll swear she’s dead
And thrown into the sea. But I’ll see further:
Perhaps they will but please themselves upon her,
Not carry her aboard. If she remain,
Whom they have ravished must by me be slain.
Pericles is one of Shakespeare’s later plays – one that he co-wrote in about 1607 or 1608. This scene is, perhaps, an acknowledgement of the dramatic upsurge of piracy that was sparked by the chaos and civil war in north Africa caused by the death of al-Mansur from plague in 1603. The seas were never more awash with Barbary pirates than during the first half of the seventeenth century.
Despite the heightened activity of corsairs in these decades, Kate Lowe thinks that the African treasure found in Salcombe Bay is unlikely to have been pirate gold:
I think it is far more likely to be trade. Morocco and England were only in contact because they were both united as being enemies of Spain. The English are sending timber so the Moroccans can build ships to fight against Spain, they are sending cannonballs, and sending guns. And the Moroccans are sending saltpetre to make gunpowder. They were probably trading in arms, and I suspect that the Moroccans had not got enough that the English wanted so they probably had to pay in bullion, and that is why some of it is broken up; it is just bits of jewellery and so on to get the required amount to buy the arms.
Whatever its precise history, the African treasure is evidence that England, like every other part of Europe, was now in economic, political and military terms unquestionably part of a global system. And Venice, as we saw in the last chapter, was one of its nerve centres. It is striking that in Othello the characters speak over thirty times of the ‘world’.
A battle between a Barbary ship and a European ship near the coast of Sicily, by Jacques Callot, 1620.
The Salcombe Bay treasure was a part of this new world system of sometimes violent exchange, and its gold coins show that Othello is much closer to the practical realities of Elizabethan life than we might think. Like Shylock or Cleopatra, Othello is not the distant outsider, but an example of the many encounters between the English and Africans, Arabs and others. A surprisingly large number of people around 1600 would have thought of Good Queen Bess as the mighty and lofty Sultana Isabel.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Disguise and Deception
PEDLAR’S TRUNK
When As You Like It was first performed, a boy actor got dressed up as a girl to play Rosalind, the romantic lead. In the course of the play, Rosalind then pretends to be a boy, who then goes on to impersonate a girl. By the time the epilog
ue comes up, we no longer know who this character speaking to us actually is – and he/she knows it too:
ROSALIND: If I were a woman, I would kiss as many of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that liked me, and breaths that I defied not; and, I am sure, as many as have good beards, or good faces, or sweet breaths, will, for my kind offer, when I make curtsy, bid me farewell.
And with that she – or should that be he? – ends the play. You can see why Puritan critics of the theatre found the whole enterprise dangerous and unwholesome.
At the heart of it all is disguise: both as a theatrical convention – dictated by the fact that women were not allowed to perform on stage – and as an important element of the plots themselves. Clothes need to be changed to keep the dramatic action going. Edgar, banished by the bad sisters in King Lear, finds that disguise as a beggar is the only way to save his life. Portia becomes a male lawyer to rescue Antonio in court. To escape danger when she and her friend Celia flee to the woods, Rosalind dresses up not just as a man, but as a bloke’s bloke.
ROSALIND: Were it not better,
Because that I am more than common tall,
That I did suit me all points like a man?
A gallant curtle-axe upon my thigh,
A boar-spear in my hand, and in my heart
Lie there what hidden woman’s fear there will,
We’ll have a swashing and a martial outside,
As many other mannish cowards have
That do outface it with their semblances.
Changing identities like this took no more than just changing costumes. For a boy to become ‘some squeaking Cleopatra’ required only his skill as an actor and the accoutrements of femininity: dresses and gowns, bonnets and shoes, embroidered linens and brightly coloured silks. It was a simple trick and easy to pull off, as long as the audience was willing to play along.
The object in this chapter has disguise and trickery at its heart. It promises happy endings and sudden revelations, but it also suggests darker notes of danger and potential tragedy. On the surface it is solid and straightforward: an Elizabethan trunk of clothes. From the outside it looks pretty robust: it is about the size of a bag you might use to carry sports kit around in and it is fairly heavy to lift. It is made of wood, probably pine, and it has been covered with animal hide, most likely pony, to keep the water out. Inside, the trunk is jam-packed with pieces of fabric. There is straightforward plain white linen. There are also embroidered linens, silks and damasks – brown, red, gold, green, white, some of them heavily worked. There is a ring, and some beads. And on top of everything is a fetching pink silk-lined bonnet. These, you might imagine, are the sorts of things that any Elizabethan housewife might want to buy. On the outside of the trunk are leather loops; this box was carried around on a horse. It has all the appearances of a pedlar’s trunk.
Pedlars were generally welcome arrivals in the towns and villages of Shakespeare’s England. They catered primarily to women, supplying them with their buttons and thread, bows and brocade. In a world where practically all clothes were home-made, a little piece of damask or lace would add a touch of metropolitan chic. Margaret Spufford has uncovered much of what we now know about Elizabethan pedlars:
The pedlar is a very elusive figure indeed, not only because he is peripatetic, but also because he or she – there were women pedlars too – lived near the edge of society, on the vagrant fringe. They were essentially salesmen, the travelling legs of the markets. They circulated very widely, travelling on foot and on horseback. Before the village shop was very common, these people filled in the gaps. Pedlars were also entertainers: they often earned their night’s lodging by singing, telling stories or the latest news.
Like Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, many pedlars had a good line in promotional jingles:
AUTOLYCUS: Will you buy any tape,
Or lace for your cape,
My dainty duck, my dear-a?
Any silk, any thread,
Any toys for your head,
Of the new’st and fin’st, fin’st wear-a?
Come to the pedlar:
Money’s a meddler
That doth utter all men’s ware-a.
However useful for the promotion of their wares, the pedlars’ reputation for fast talking and their constant moving around made them figures of suspicion. There were all sorts of people travelling the roads: there were respectable pedlars – chapmen or tradesmen who journeyed with horse and pack following an established route on a mental map dotted with overnight stopping places – and there were those who blended into the transient, criminal margins, little more than tramps or petty thieves. Autolycus is a typically tricky character from this netherworld of travellers and ‘rag and bone’ men. When he boasts that he is a ‘snapper-up of unconsider’d trifles’, what he really means is that he steals sheets from washing lines in one town to sell on in the next.
Pedlars of both these kinds were a sort of Elizabethan Twitter feed; they carried news quickly, spread it widely, and their relationship to the truth was similarly easy-going. In 1604 it was said of the loose-tongued Alice Bennet of Oxfordshire that she ‘goeth abroad to sell sope and candels from towne to towne to get her lyving, and she useth to carrie tales between neighboures’. Travelling about the country as they did, pedlars were unfailing sources of news, rumour, gossip – and, on occasion, sedition.
Not surprisingly, this shifting, ever-present underclass was almost impossible to pin down or control. Like Shakespeare’s disguised characters, it was hard to tell just how honest or genuine a pedlar was, or what he might be up to. Goods as innocent as linen and lace could mask more covert activities, from thievery to espionage. In the 1590s, new legislation was introduced to crack down on the ‘jugglers, tinkers, peddlars’, who were seen as undesirable vagrants. Pedlars could be dubious characters, and the contents of their trunks were not always what they seemed either. Which is the case here – for the linen, silk and damask in this particular pedlar’s trunk are not bits of material waiting to be transformed into smart clothes for a young Elizabethan woman. They have already been made into the illegal vestments of a clandestine Roman Catholic priest.
Ethan Hawke as Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, Old Vic, 2009. Autolycus, with his trunk of bangles, silk, thread and ballads, is Shakespeare’s depiction of the pedlar as rogue, stealing items in one place to sell on in the next.
The pedlar’s trunk is now in the collection of Stonyhurst, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, originally founded in 1593 in France to provide a Catholic education abroad for English boys. Jan Graffius, curator at Stonyhurst, explains its contents:
The pieces of fabric are the stoles that the priest would wear around his neck. Beneath them are long, decorated braids: this is the girdle that he would tie around his waist. Fabric like damasks and silks were extraordinarily expensive, so we think that these were made from Sunday dresses which pious Catholic women sewed into vestments for priests; it was such women who largely kept the Catholic faith alive in England. It was not possible to acquire these vestments or the fabric for them openly, but women could sew at home without arousing suspicion. The beads in this trunk are disguised rosary beads; there is also an altar stone, which has relics set into it. This was needed for the priest to say mass, as the consecration of the bread and the wine takes place on top of an altar stone. For the central ceremony of the mass there is even a pewter drinking cup, a chalice. It is just an ordinary Elizabethan drinking cup that could be found in houses and inns, but what is unusual is that there is also what looks like a little drinks coaster, made out of pewter – it is a paten, and it sits on top of the chalice. It is to cover the wine during the consecration to preserve the mystery.
This box contains everything required for a Catholic priest to say mass. This pedlar’s trunk is a secret, portable church.
The trunk was found in the mid-nineteenth century, walled up in a country house, Salmesbury Hall in Lancashire, about seven miles from Stonyhurst. Salmesbury
was the home of the Southworth family, prominent English recusants – people who refused to give up their Catholic faith – of whom three members in one generation became Catholic priests. The compartment in which the trunk was found may have been created by Nicholas Owen, a carpenter and Jesuit lay brother who specialized in the creation of ‘priest-holes’ and secret stores to hide Catholic equipment and who died under torture in 1606 following the Gunpowder Plot (see Chapters 11 and 19). Father John Gerard, a leading Jesuit priest of the time, described Owen’s work:
his chief employment was in making of secret places to hide priests and church stuff…in all shires and in the chiefest Catholic houses of England…of several fashions in several places, that one being taken might give no light to the discovery of another.
Seen as emissaries of the Pope who had relieved English Catholics of their allegiance to the Queen, and as supporters of the arch-enemy Spain, in 1585 Catholic priests were prohibited even from coming to England, let alone actively practising their vocation. In order to minister to those who persisted in Catholic worship, they had to come covertly, and risk death. In the process, they created a new sort of church, secret and hidden. A small minority of them were involved in various ways with Catholic conspiracies and attempts at rebellion and assassination; most of them were simply trying to keep the old faith alive. But in the public mind, all of them were associated with treason, violence and deception: ‘Those Snakes that do naturally sting, as soone as they get warmth, may not be harboured in the bosome of the Common-wealth: But all popish priests professe rebellions, as soone as they can presume of their strength.’ To avoid discovery and certain death, these, then, were the necessary strategies of survival for an undercover priest: false and rapidly changing identities, costumes and names; forged documents; secret assemblies; hidden chambers; codes and concealment. And such subterfuges, born out of the repression and rancour faced by practising Catholics, in turn further inflamed the suspicions of Protestants and the governing elite.
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