CHAPTER NINETEEN
The Theatres of Cruelty
EYE RELIC OF THE BLESSED EDWARD OLDCORNE
Enter King Henry VI with a supplication, and the Queen with Suffolk’s head.
Re-enter one with the heads.
Enter Iden, with Cade’s head.
Throwing down Somerset’s head.
Enter Lovel and Ratcliff, with Hastings’ head.
Enter the Bastard, with Austria’s head.
Re-enter MacDuff, with Macbeth’s head.
Re-enter Guiderius, with Cloten’s head.
The most gruesome lines of Shakespeare’s plays are often not in the text itself, but in the stage directions. Time after time, especially in the history plays, the heads of major characters reappear on stage without their bodies attached. The price of political failure – or in some cases simply of weakness – has been an excruciating death. This is in a very real sense the theatre of public cruelty, and it is controlled by instructions that are occasionally spine-chilling: ‘Enter Lavinia, ravished, her hands cut off and her tongue cut out’, and sometimes comically gruesome: ‘Enter Messenger with two heads and a hand’ – both from Titus Andronicus.
By modern standards, this sort of material is what we would call strictly post-watershed, and definitely not family entertainment. But around 1600 in London’s theatres, mutilation, dismemberment and execution were matinée fare. In Shakespeare’s world, human butchery was a part of life. Strolling across London Bridge to see a play at the Globe or the Rose, you would sometimes pass rows of traitors’ heads impaled on spikes. The execution of criminals was, if not exactly public entertainment, certainly popular public spectacle. You might well go to Tyburn in the morning to witness a public hanging and then move on to the theatre after lunch to watch Macbeth lose his head or the Earl of Gloucester both his eyes. Making the suffering of criminals and traitors public was a key part of the judicial system, and, like the theatre, executions drew a large and socially very diverse audience.
Amongst the collection of historical artefacts and records held by Stonyhurst College, the Jesuit school in Lancashire, there sits a small, circular box, inscribed with four short lines of Latin. As you turn it over in your hand, you can see a little window in the shape of an eye, and on the silver mount around it are engraved some short, curled lashes and a few wrinkles. Peering through the glass reveals a small, brownish lump, a bit like a shrivelled prune. It is a human eye, and, as the Latin inscription explains, it is the right eye, the oculus dexter, of the Jesuit Edward Oldcorne. This silver box is the reliquary of an English Catholic martyr.
Jan Graffius, curator of the Stonyhurst collection, explains the background:
Edward Oldcorne was a missionary priest in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He was quietly successful, spending about seventeen years hiding and working in amongst the Catholics of Worcestershire. He was a very gentle person but had the great misfortune to be caught up in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot – despite having nothing to do with it at all. Because of the safety of the house where he was living, other Jesuits who were being hotly pursued came to him for sanctuary, and they were all caught at the same time. And although Father Oldcorne had absolutely no knowledge or complicity in the plot, as a Catholic priest and a Jesuit, which was illegal in itself, he was tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered.
The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, when Guy Fawkes very nearly blew up James I inside the Houses of Parliament, shook public opinion in much the same way as the destruction of the Twin Towers did the modern world. The plot was immediately seen as a traitorous Catholic conspiracy in which the Jesuits, the Pope and the King of Spain were all implicated. Jesuits and clandestine Catholic priests were hunted down and sentenced to brutal exemplary punishment. Among them was Edward Oldcorne, executed near Worcester on 7 April 1606. Traitors like him were hanged, cut down while still alive – sometimes still conscious – and disembowelled; then their bodies were quartered, literally hacked into separate pieces. The flavour of such occasions is captured in a description of the execution in 1586 of John Ballard, another alleged priestly plotter:
Ballard the priest, who was the first broacher of this treason, as the first that was hanged, who being cut down (according to judgement) was dismembered, his belly ripped up, his bowels and traitorous heart taken out and thrown into the fire, his head also (severed from his shoulders) was set upon a short stake upon the top of the gallows, and the trunk of his body quartered and imbrued in his own blood, wherewith the executioner’s hands were bathed, and some of the standers by (but to their great loathing, as not to be able for their lives to avoid it, such was the throng) besprinkled…Now when these venomous vipers were thus hewn in pieces, their tigers hearts burned in the fire and the sentence of law satisfied: their heads and quarters were conveyed away in baskets, to be fixed upon poles and set over the gates of London, that all the world might behold the just reward of traitors.
Edward Oldcorne by an unknown artist, 1608. Images and relics of executed priests such as Oldcorne and Henry Garnet created a new martyrology for the English Catholic community.
A row of the heads of traitors was displayed on pikes on London Bridge and would have been visible to theatre-goers crossing to the South Bank. Detail from a broadside on the Gunpowder Plot by Abraham Hogenberg, Cologne, 1606.
These violent executions were meant to deter potential traitors, but inevitably they also inspired fellow Catholics. Somehow, after Oldcorne’s execution, a sympathizer must have been able to secure his eye as a relic. To the authorities Oldcorne was a traitor: to fellow Catholics he was a martyr, whose remains must be gathered and honoured. By the time of the Gunpowder Plot, the authorities were actively taking steps to prevent Catholics from picking up clothes or body parts that would commemorate the execution of priests. Their bodies were destroyed. Jan Graffius explains what such a relic would mean to the faithful:
It would be testament to the bravery of those priests who were working in England undercover, a powerful inspiration: Jesuit priests who served in England and came back to Europe without having been caught often described themselves as too unworthy to share the crown of martyrdom. So while it was not something they sought, martyrdom was considered a huge honour.
Stonyhurst College has other relics relating to the English martyrs of the seventeenth century. There is, for instance, a late sixteenth-century beaded box, the outer decoration of which gives no clue as to what is inside. It contains, as Jan Graffius tells us:
a human shoulder bone; you can see where the knife has sliced through it, a very sharp knife. This is from the quartering. The brownish material clinging to the bone is human flesh, the skin and muscle of one of four young men who trained for the priesthood in France, landed in Durham and were unlucky. They were not disguised and were very inexperienced and within a matter of weeks they were arrested and executed. Then somebody was brave enough either to bribe the executioners for a part or to notice where the bodies were buried, often in dung heaps, and dig a piece up.
The execution of the conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot, by Claes Jansz. Visscher, 1606. This execution scene shows the sequence of events, from the drawing of the condemned on hurdles, to the execution and subsequent quartering.
Despite the best efforts of the authorities, relics were acquired, preserved and treasured. The theatre of horror was now and then subverted by the very people who were supposed to be intimidated by it.
*
Public executions were, in a very real sense, performances. The executioner’s scaffold built for the likes of Edward Oldcorne and the Gunpowder Plotters was a kind of stage – little different in construction and purpose from a theatre stage. The crowds forming the audience expected the condemned to make a speech before dying; and they usually did, mostly admitting their guilt, asserting their loyalty and asking for forgiveness.
The very word scaffold had a double meaning. In Henry V the theatre stage is memorably described by the Chorus a
s an ‘unworthy scaffold to bring forth / so great an object’. But in Richard III it is more expectedly the place of public execution, ‘where men march up to some scaffold, there to lose their heads’. Bloody spectacles could be witnessed on both. In George Peele’s play The Battle of Alcazar (which appeared around 1590, just as Shakespeare was beginning to write) three men are disembowelled, and the staging required for each one of them three separate vials of blood and a set of sheep’s entrails.
Such executions and torture were part of the fabric of public life; in Shakespeare’s plays, torture and torturers are mentioned no fewer than forty-five times. In The Winter’s Tale, Paulina reproaches the paranoid king Leontes:
PAULINA: What studied torments, tyrant, hast for me?
What wheels? Racks? Fires? What flaying? Boiling
In leads or oils? What old or newer torture
Must I receive, whose every word deserves
To taste of thy most worst?
State violence did not just share the stage of public life with London’s theatres; occasionally the two collided. The playwright Thomas Kyd, author of the revolutionary Spanish Tragedy, was tortured for information about Christopher Marlowe’s alleged treasons, and the mystery surrounding Marlowe’s death in 1593 – officially in a drunken brawl, but ten days after being questioned for blasphemy – has lingered to this day.
Tom Piper is a set designer with the Royal Shakespeare Company, and he explains the practical difficulties of staging Shakespeare’s theatre of cruelty – the beheadings, eye-squelchings and other gory scenes:
There’s a gruesome bit at the end of Richard II when all the heads of all the people who’ve fought against [Bolingbroke, the future] Henry IV are brought in one after another, and so about eight of them in sacks are dropped on the stage and they have to not bounce – it is obviously a comedy moment when one of your heads bounces across the stage – so quite often they are weighed down with a lot of buckshot. Another problem is blood. First of all there is what we call our sticky blood, which, acoustically, is just like strawberry jam: it is sort of sticky and stretchy, and you can use it for congealing wounds. Actors love it, they just get completely carried away. There is another sort of blood, which is kept in a blood bag. It is runnier, because it has to seep through a costume and spread quite quickly. Eyes are also a particular problem. For eyes, we basically use lychees, which you can fill with blood. They are the right size, they are white and they are cheap, and they come in tins, so you can bring them with you wherever you’re going around the world.
Today these bloody bits of stage business can often seem contrived, artificial or half-hearted, but in Shakespeare’s time, they were disconcertingly close to the real brutality that the audience might witness for themselves in public executions.
Contemplating the removal of Edward Oldcorne’s eye, it is hard not to think of what is probably the most unsettling stage violence in the whole of Shakespeare: the blinding of Gloucester in King Lear, written around the time that Oldcorne suffered his fate.
CORNWALL: Fellows, hold the chair.
Upon these eyes of thine I’ll set my foot.
GLOUCESTER: He that will think to live till he be old
Give me some help! – O, cruel! O, you gods!
REGAN: One side will mock another. Th’other too!
CORNWALL: If you see Vengeance –
FIRST SERVANT: Hold your hand, my lord!
I have served you ever since I was a child;
But better service have I never done you
Than now to bid you hold.
REGAN: How now, you dog!
FIRST SERVANT: If you did wear a beard upon your chin
I’d shake it on this quarrel.
[Cornwall draws his sword]
What do you mean?
CORNWALL: My villain!
[He lunges at him]
FIRST SERVANT: [drawing his sword] Nay then, come on, and take the chance of anger.
[He wounds Cornwall]
REGAN: Give me thy sword. A peasant stand up thus!
[She takes a sword and runs at him behind.]
FIRST SERVANT: O, I am slain! My lord, you have one eye left
To see some mischief on him. O! [He dies.]
CORNWALL: Lest it see more, prevent it. Out, vile jelly!
Where is thy lustre now?
King Lear, Act III, Scene 7, Globe Theatre, 29 July 2008. Today, the blinding of Gloucester can be one of the most difficult things to watch in live theatre.
The squelching of Gloucester’s eye is always a terrifying moment in the theatre. We wait for it; we turn away. We simply cannot look.
But were Shakespeare’s audiences shockable in this way? It seems unlikely: the blood-soaked plays were very popular, and real-life executions attracted thronging crowds jockeying for the best views. The executioners, many of whom normally worked as butchers, regularly handled bits of bodies in front of the crowd, as part of the performance. Standing as a groundling at the foot of the stage must have been very like jostling among the crowd pressed around the foot of the scaffold. Holinshed’s chronicle describes how:
There is no question whether there wanted people at this public spectacle…For there was no lane, street, alley or house in London, in the suburbs of the same, or in the hamlets or bordering towns near the city…out of which there issued not some of each age and sex; so much so that the ways were pestered with people so multiplied, and they thronged and overran one another for haste, contending to the place of death for the advantage of the ground where to stand, see, and hear what was said and done.
Contemplating the small silver box, I find I am haunted by the thought of the last thing that Edward Oldcorne saw with this right eye. He had been hanged and cut down while still alive, so his last sight was almost certainly of a crowd of men and women, pushing and shoving, trying to get a better view. And then, finally, the hangman approaching with his knife to disembowel him.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Shakespeare Goes Global
THE PLAYS IN PRINT
On 22 July 1942, the German SS announced that all the Jews in Warsaw would, in the euphemism of the day, be ‘resettled’ to the camp at Treblinka. It was effectively a death sentence. There were, however, six groups of people who were to be exempted from the resettlement. The twenty-two-year-old Marcel Reich-Ranicki was one of those exemptions. Now over ninety years old and Germany’s leading literary critic, he told his story to the German parliament in January 2012:
These included all able-bodied Jews of working age, all persons employed by German public authorities or in German production facilities or those who were on the staff of the Judenrat and the Jewish hospitals. One sentence suddenly set me thinking: the wives and children of the people in these categories were not to be resettled either.
A German-Polish Jew, he was working for the Judenrat, the Council of Jews set up by the Nazis. He had no wife or children, but he was engaged, and he realized that, if he acted straightaway, he could prevent his fiancée from being ‘resettled’. He must marry her at once:
Immediately after dictating the order I sent a messenger to Teofila, asking her to come right away and to bring her birth certificate. She came immediately and was quite agitated because the panic in the streets was contagious. I quickly went with her to the ground floor, where a theologian worked in the historical records department of the Judenrat. I had already discussed the matter with him. When I told Teofila we would be married she was only mildly surprised and nodded in agreement. A theologian was authorized to perform the duties of a rabbi and raised no objections. Two officials who were working in the next room served as witnesses. The ceremony did not last long. I cannot recall whether in all the rush and excitement I actually kissed Teofila, I don’t know. But I well remember the feeling that engulfed us, a feeling of fear, fear of what would happen in the coming days. And I still remember the Shakespearean line that occurred to me at the time: ‘Ward je in dieser Laun’ ein Weib gefreit?’
&
nbsp; ‘Ward je in dieser Laun’ ein Weib gefreit?’: ‘Was ever woman in this humour wooed?’ It is a quotation from the celebrated German translation of Shakespeare’s Richard III and it is an astonishing thing for a young German Pole to think of at such a moment. At the point of supreme agitation, the words that came to Marcel Reich-Ranicki were Shakespeare’s.
In this book we have been looking at how Shakespeare’s plays were crafted to speak to a particular audience and the uncertain, restless world which that audience inhabited. We have focused on what Shakespeare’s words meant to a public that was not listening to the world’s most famous playwright, but hearing for the first time the latest play by a successful writer for the commercial London stage. In this last chapter, we shall look instead at the many things that Shakespeare’s plays have come to mean to the whole world. For hundreds of years now, people like Marcel Reich-Ranicki have found in Shakespeare the words to express their own deepest feelings. How has this supremely public writer become the private companion of so many, his words the stuff that their hopes, fears and dreams are made on? How did this very English playwright go global?
Photographs of Marcel and Teofila Reich-Ranicki taken in the Warsaw Ghetto.
The simple answer lies in the form of a book: Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies – often referred to simply as the ‘First Folio’. It is a big book, about the size of a packet of cornflakes, and its 900 or so pages contain thirty-six plays. The First Folio was advertised for the Frankfurt Book Fair of 1622, six years after Shakespeare had died, but, as often happens, the publishers ran a little late, and it appeared only in 1623. At the time, it was rare for plays in English by a single author to be gathered and published like this, a tribute usually reserved for the great writers in Latin. If it had been up to Shakespeare himself, it is likely that the book would not exist – for whatever reason, he seems to have had little or no interest in getting his plays published (unlike his friend Ben Jonson, who carefully produced his own Collected Workes and was in some quarters roundly mocked for doing so). It was not, however, left up to Shakespeare. The two men who began the Shakespeare industry were his long-time colleagues John Heminges and Henry Condell, fellow members of the King’s Men. Thanks to their energy and inspiration we have the First Folio, a volume of Shakespeare’s collected plays pulled together from the King’s Men’s archives and other varied sources. They describe their motivation in the dedication: ‘onely to keepe the memory of so worthy a Friend, & Fellow alive’.
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