Shakespeare’s most overt engagement with this British question is the play called Cymbeline King of Britain. Set during the time of the Roman Empire when Julius Caesar has landed in Britain and the British tribes are having to pay tribute to Rome, it is a play about British identity, about what it is to be British and to fight against a powerful European empire. Obviously to some extent ancient Rome represents the modern Roman Catholic lands, dominated by Spain. King James had been very concerned to bring peace to Europe, to reconcile the Roman and the Protestant nations. What seems to happen in Cymbeline is that by the end of the play you get a reconciliation between the Roman Empire and this new British kingdom. There is a lot of language associated with the idea of the King of Britain bringing peace, that it is the King of Britain who is able to put an end to the divisions that have racked Europe, and this is exactly the role in which James saw himself.
Cymbeline concludes with a victorious Britain and a chastened Rome – entirely a fiction of Shakespeare’s creation – and ironically it ends with Cymbeline calling for the hoisting of a British flag:
CYMBELINE: let
A Roman and a British ensign wave
Friendly together. So through Lud’s Town march,
And in the temple of great Jupiter
Our peace we’ll ratify, seal it with feasts.
Set on there. Never was a war did cease,
Ere bloody hands were washed, with such a peace.
The audiences would all have known that the very idea of a ‘British ensign’ was still acrimonious and unresolved. By the time Shakespeare wrote Cymbeline in 1610, the English parliament had killed James’s union project dead. It would be another hundred years before the formal Act of Union united Scotland and England into one state of Great Britain.
James eventually decided not to use any of the six designs we see here and opted instead for a much simpler solution, with the English cross of St George superimposed on the Scottish cross of St Andrew. Needless to say, the Scots immediately protested, and an unofficial Scottish version with the cross of St Andrew supreme quickly began to be used on Scottish ships. Eventually the puzzle of how to design a union flag would be solved, but it took a very long time, and the arguments that lay behind it – arguments first tackled 400 years ago in these drawings of six simple combinations of crosses – have never truly gone away. Usually today, outside St Giles’ cathedral in the heart of Edinburgh, there are two or three blue and white saltires, the old Scottish flag of St Andrew, flying – and not a Union Jack to be seen anywhere.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
A Time of Change, a Change of Time
A STRIKING MUSICAL CLOCK
We take time for granted, or perhaps we just accept its tyranny, as we rush from one place to another or hurry to take our seats in the theatre. But how did Shakespeare’s audiences know when a performance was going to start, and how did they think about time? It is an important issue in many of the plays, and, like so much of life for Shakespeare’s contemporaries, even time itself had been recently changed by new ideas and new inventions. Richard II, imprisoned by his cousin and awaiting death in his cell, thinks of himself as quite literally ‘doing time’, but he does so in a very modern way:
RICHARD: For now hath time made me his numbering clock.
My thoughts are minutes, and with sighs they jar
Their watches on unto mine eyes, the outward watch
Whereto my finger, like a dial’s point,
Is pointing still in cleansing them from tears.
The ‘jar’ or ticking of a domestic clock as it marked the minutes was a new feature of Elizabethan England, and not a sound that Shakespeare’s parents would have known. For them, minutes would have been merely an idea, and the noise of time would have been almost exclusively the chimes of a public clock.
RICHARD: Now, sir, the sound that tells what hour it is
Are clamorous groans which strike upon my heart,
Which is the bell.
We are used to kings being compared to the sun, to lions, even to gods. But here, startlingly and poignantly, King Richard likens himself to a timepiece. And this is not the only moment in Shakespeare where a character will be compared to a clock. It is a device that works just as well in comedy:
BEROWNE: I seek a wife?
A woman, that is like a German clock,
Still a-repairing, ever out of frame,
And never going aright…
For Berowne in Love’s Labour’s Lost, wives, like German clocks, are high-maintenance and unreliable. To get a sense of how fresh this insult must have seemed, we need to look at a real clock, one made in 1598, just after Shakespeare wrote Love’s Labour’s Lost.
The clock here is not strictly German, but it is not English either. Its maker, Nicholas Vallin, was a Flemish Protestant who came to England in the 1580s to escape the religious persecution which followed Spanish repression in the Low Countries. He and his father settled in Blackfriars in London, where, towards the end of his career, he made this clock. The creation of a timepiece like this was an impressive feat. It stands nearly two feet tall (excluding the weights and ropes) and looks like a small, square classical temple. The main storey has four Doric columns, one at each corner, framing the clock itself. Above that, four smaller columns carry gilded triangular pediments and house a miniature belfry, and, over the top, squatting like the dome of the British Museum Reading Room, is a giant bell. This is a (barely) portable classical bell tower made for use in the home. Nicholas Vallin has proudly engraved his name on the front and dated it 1598.
Behind the clockface, the workings are exposed to view, a marvel of mechanical skill, and above them we can see thirteen small bells. It is quite clear that Vallin wanted people not just to use this clock but also to admire its workings. In The Winter’s Tale, when the Queen tells Leontes that she loves him ‘not a jar o’th’clock’ less than any lady loves her husband, she is protesting an affection as reliable as clockwork, like these minutely precise, unfailingly regular flywheels.
Berowne was absolutely right in stating that a clock like this demands – indeed commands – a great deal of attention. Mounted on a bracket high on the wall, our clock would have held a prominent position in its wealthy owner’s house, probably in a reception room or hall. One feature of Vallin’s clock would particularly have impressed contemporaries: it has two hands, one for hours and one for minutes. Before 1600, the great majority of clocks had just a single hour hand, and the divisions of the hour were judged approximately; so what now looks to us like a conventional clock was in 1598 (as for Richard II) cutting-edge technology. It would be another fifty years before minute hands became standard.
This clock also plays music – every quarter-hour. That, the quarter-hour, rather than the minute, was the unit of time that dominated how people thought. Here is William Harrison in his cheerily chatty Description of England in 1577:
In most places they descend no lower than the half or quarter of the hour, and from whence they proceed unto the hour, to wit the four and twentieth part of that which we call the common and natural day.
No one, or virtually no one, then thought in terms of seconds, a unit of time not mentioned anywhere in Shakespeare. In the late sixteenth century, only astronomers and scientists like John Dee or Tycho Brahe would have even tried to get timepieces that were accurate to the second. Seconds then were a little like nanoseconds to us today – we know they exist, but we have no need of them, and wouldn’t know how to use them, in our daily lives.
Horologia Ferrea: clock shop scene, by Jan van der Straet, Antwerp, 1580–1605. In the foreground a man is making a clock with a nobleman looking on, and large wall-clocks, like Vallin’s, clearly visible.
The smaller bells on Vallin’s clock sounded a different melody every quarter, while the big bell at the top announced the hour to the whole household – a private domestic echo of public municipal time. This clock is in fact an indoor version of the large clocks displayed in churches or civi
c buildings, which regulated public life throughout England. The medieval tradition, like the Roman, had divided the day into unequal hours, subdividing the daylight and night-time periods into twelve equal segments, which varied with the length of the day. The idea of officially calibrated time-keeping regulated by clocks – our modern idea of ‘telling the time’ – was a routine thing to do in Shakespeare’s age, but in historical terms it was a fairly recent innovation. In 1400, there were only twenty-five public clocks in the whole of England that we know about. In Shakespeare’s London there were dozens of them, and their chimes and bells were keeping time more accurately than ever before. Watches, for example – personal, mobile timekeeping – were an even more avant-garde technology. They had been invented in the sixteenth century, but were reliable only to the half-hour. Worn around the neck on a ribbon or a chain, they were a rich man’s toy, a prop in Malvolio’s daydream about the leisured, insouciant superiority with which he will treat Sir Toby once he is married to the Lady Olivia:
MALVOLIO: Seven of my people, with an obedient start, make out for him. I frown the while, and perchance wind up my watch, or play with my [fingering his steward’s chain of office] – some rich jewel. Toby approaches, curtesies there to me…
David Kindt (1580–1652) was master of the Hamburg painters’ guild. He painted himself here with a watch, a new and valuable item. In Twelfth Night Malvolio fantasizes about being a rich watch-owning gentleman.
Clocks and watches are both emphatically urban objects. ‘There’s no clock in the forest,’ says Orlando in As You Like It. But in the busy city environment, gates had to be opened, council meetings convened, markets regulated, alehouse hours supervised and public theatres opened at the time announced. Dr Paul Glennie of the University of Bristol has studied the history of timekeeping in England:
The thing about towns, at least large towns, is the density of clocks. In London, for example, there are 110 or so parishes, of which in Shakespeare’s time, somewhere around half or just over have clocks that are striking the hour. One of the great things about timekeeping with bells as opposed to looking at a clock dial is that information is being spread over quite a wide area. They may not be exactly in time with each other, but broadly there is a kind of big audible pulse broadcasting to the atmosphere, into the landscape.
It is also the sound you would have heard as you hurried (perhaps a little late) to a two o’clock performance at the Globe. Reliable public timekeeping was essential for the commercial theatre. The public had to get there in time, pay their admission and buy their refreshments. What Shakespeare called the ‘two hours’ traffic of the stage’ depended on a punctual start. The authorities liked to get people home before dark to avoid disorderly behaviour, so depending on how close to midsummer it was, plays started at either 2 or 3 p.m. In 1594, the Lord Chamberlain assured the Lord Mayor of London that: ‘Where heretofore they began not their Plaies till towards fower a clock, they will now begin at two, & have done between fower and five.’
A courtyard with a building with a large public clock, by Hans Vredeman de Vries (1542–1608). Private clocks were still quite rare in Shakespeare’s day. Large public clocks provided time-keeping in towns and cities, with their bells as important as the visible clock face.
Since afternoon church services also started at 2 p.m., this fuelled the antagonism between church and playhouse. Many Londoners must have reacted to the mid-day church bells by setting out – for the theatre.
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Of all his plays, The Winter’s Tale is perhaps Shakespeare’s greatest meditation on time. When a man sees a statue of his dead wife and it miraculously comes to life, it is as if we can turn back time, and every human loss – grief, guilt, even death – can somehow, at least within the romance of the play, be restored. There is even an extraordinary moment when Time himself becomes flesh and walks centre-stage, from where – as well as helpfully explaining a lapse of sixteen years in the plot – he contemplates his inexorable reach over restless, ever-shifting human lives:
[Enter Time, the Chorus]
TIME: I that please some, try all; both joy and terror
Of good and bad; that makes and unfolds error,
Now take upon me, in the name of Time,
To use my wings. Impute it not a crime
To me or my swift passage that I slide
O’er sixteen years, and leave the growth untried
Of that wide gap, since it is in my power
To o’erthrow law, and in one self-born hour
To plant and o’erwhelm custom.
Even when Time himself is not on stage, musing and philosophizing, there is hardly a Shakespearean sonnet or scene that does not take up the theme of time. Nicholas Hytner of the National Theatre says:
The passage of time and the effects of time come up over and over again in his plays. ‘Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, / Creeps in this petty pace from day to day / To the last syllable of recorded time.’ That ‘syllable of recorded time’ is an image which could probably only have emerged after the invention of the clock. The idea that time passes in tiny increments and ‘all our yesterdays have lighted fools the way to dusty death’, the idea that Macbeth is trapped in a vast ticking mechanism, that the human race is stuck in the middle of a slowly ticking clock which is just going to go on ticking away the syllables, ticking away the seconds until the world ends – that is an extraordinarily potent image.
Older forms of timekeeping – hourglasses and sundials – do still crop up. Mercutio tells Juliet’s nurse, surely with a heavy wink: ‘the bawdy hand of the dial is now upon the prick of noon’. But clocks appear more frequently – their sound effects explicitly required by stage directions and commented on by characters. The striking of the clock propels the comic plot in The Comedy of Errors and Merry Wives of Windsor and ratchets up the tension, Hitchcock-style, in the histories and tragedies. Even ancient Rome is awarded its own prematurely invented clock as a dramatic device: in Julius Caesar, while the conspiracy is being hatched, we hear the clock strike 3 a.m.
TREBONIUS: There is no fear in him; let him not die;
For he will live, and laugh at this hereafter.
[A clock strikes]
BRUTUS: Peace, count the clock.
CASSIUS: The clock hath stricken three.
TREBONIUS: ‘Tis time to part.
As the assassins wait to betray their friend and leader, the clock relentlessly punctuates the plot: we are told it has just struck eight in the morning when Caesar sets off to the Capitol, and when Portia asks for news at nine, we know that Caesar will soon be dead.
Theatrical tension was one by-product of the mechanical march of time, but it wasn’t only in the theatre that clocks spread a sense of menace. In the workplace also they were often seen as instruments of oppression, as Paul Glennie explains:
There is plenty of complaining about the volume and the intensity of work and hard taskmasters before time discipline comes in, so it is very easy to blame time, to blame the clock. Anyone who supposes that life in the pre-industrial countryside was an idyllic kind of existence does not have a sense of how urgent it was to get the harvest in before it rained, for example. But it is certainly true that expectations about how hard people work, how regularly people work and how intensively their output is monitored do relate quite closely to the way in which clocks can be used to record that much more closely. It becomes a way of inspecting.
Consequently it was not just clocks that the London workforce disliked – they also resented the clockmakers. Skilled Protestant refugees like Vallin were welcomed by Elizabeth’s government, but they did not always have an easy time of it – asylum-seekers rarely do. The Flemings and French were the two groups of ‘strangers’, as they were called, that drew the most persistent antagonism from London apprentices and journeymen, whose hostility was backed by Sir Walter Raleigh, among others, at Court. In 1593 a series of hostile ‘libels’ were pinned up on the walls of the Dutch church in Austin Friars,
where Vallin had married three years earlier:
Doth not the world see, that you, beastly brutes, the Belgians or rather drunken drones, and fainthearted Flemings; and you, fraudulent father, Frenchmen, by your cowardly flight from your own natural countries, have abandoned the same into the hands of your proud, cowardly enemies, and have, by a feigned hypocrisy and counterfeit show of religion, placed yourselves here in a most fertile soil, under a most gracious and merciful prince, who hath contented to the great prejudice of her own natural subjects, to suffer you to live in better care and more freedom than her own people? Be it known to all Flemings and Frenchmen that which follows: for that there shall be many a sore stripe. Apprentices will rise to the number 2336. And all apprentices and journeymen will down the Flemings and strangers.
Was this menacing rant, worthy of the most unashamed racist, anything more than xenophobic graffiti? There is no record of an attack by 2,336 apprentices on Flemish migrant craftsmen, nor do we know that Nicholas Vallin himself ever suffered any assault. But it is the world in which he worked, and in which our clock was made – Shakespeare’s world. In any case, Vallin did not live long after he made this clock: he died in the great plague outbreak of 1603 along with his father, two of his three daughters and two journeyman clockmakers who were working for him at the time: an entire household virtually obliterated.
Amidst all this human mortality, Queen Elizabeth, so long on the throne, seemed to many the very image of timelessness. In a poem sometimes attributed to Shakespeare and perhaps spoken by him as an epilogue to a play performed at court on Shrove Tuesday 1599, he addresses the elderly Queen, now well into her sixties. He compares her to a clock, like Richard II – or rather, to a clockface, unchanging herself, and the constant background against which the lives of her transient subjects were played out, like ever-moving hands:
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