by Lance Lee
But there is a question which I can hardly evade. If the development of civilization has such a far-reaching similarity to the development of the individual and if it employs the same methods, may we not be justified in reaching the diagnosis that, under the influence of cultural urges, some civilizations, or some epochs of civilization—possibly the whole of mankind—have become neurotic?11
Burckhardt closes his remarks on fifth-century Athens by observing, “For they were all being carried onwards and expected a violent end, without knowing what it would be.”12 Freud’s last lines in Civilization and Its Discontents are:
And now it is to be expected that the other of the two “Heavenly Powers” [he refers to Thanatos and Eros], eternal Eros, will make an effort to assert himself in the struggle with his equally immortal adversary. But who can tell with what success and with what result?13
The final sentence was a last-minute addition as his attention turned toward the rise of Hitler. The spiritual impulse can go out of drama: an entire civilization can corrupt itself with a worship of Thanatos. There is no room for the creative flow that manifests itself in drama to endure in such a world, while its ultimate celebration of Eros must in such a context seem profoundly false.
Shakespeare in Elizabeth’s London
Plato’s cave is the key metaphor for the Greeks after the religious drive moved past the last flowering of myth in public celebration to private religious sects. The cave encapsulates a society in decline, no longer sure of its hold on the truth, nowhere better expressed than by Oedipus’s cry of anguish in the climax of Oedipus Rex as the truth of his efforts to avoid the prophecy he would kill his father and marry his mother breaks in on him. In that moment he turns 180 degrees, so instead of the phantoms of his desire he now sees things according to a true light.
But the cave is not the key metaphor for the Elizabethans or for ourselves. For the Elizabethans it is the mirror provided by the magic of drama that shows time and character their true lineaments.
HAMLET
… for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.14
Hamlet’s antipathy in Hamlet to overemoting reminds me of Winnicott, who points out that playing is its own reality but can be brought to a halt if instinct is too aroused. Hamming it up is one way of thinking about this overexcitation, for playing depends on its ability to convince in its own terms. Hamlet’s concern not to disrupt playing shows how profoundly the ground has shifted from the Platonic view. In Shakespeare’s words for Hamlet, the truth is approached paradoxically through illusion through playing, because reality is not apparent in everyday experience. We begin to look at how our minds work when we look into the Elizabethan mirror. As eminent a critical thinker as Harold Bloom dates the creation of modern consciousness to Shakespeare, specifically to Hamlet, and as a dumb character he is particularly suitable for this inward turn, for Hamlet does not transform himself as he grows but instead steadily deepens in insight.15 Bloom is writing our own governing metaphor backward into the Elizabethans: the inward look, with all the virtues of looking at ourselves in depth combined with the solipsistic peril that angle of vision entails. Yet that clearly starts with a mirror that reflects the inward condition of the viewer, his true “form and pressure.”
How do the Elizabethans get to this mirror? Does drama play a spiritual role for them too?
They get to both through the immediate ability of political power to spark a political, social, and religious transformation, and through a swift capitalization of the heretofore long-term development of drama after its rebirth within the church five hundred years earlier.
The Tudor monarchy begins in 1485 with Henry VII; his overthrow of Richard III furnishes the material for one of Shakespeare’s enduringly fascinating plays. The period of civil war Henry brought to an end furnishes the material for Shakespeare’s early history plays. But if Henry VII ended a period of political upheaval, spiritually England was within the embrace of the broad Catholic Church and the traditions of Europe; it has never been so European since.
Henry VIII began handsome, dashing, and well-off. He even wrote a defense of Catholicism in response to Luther; Luther’s epochal Theses were nailed to the cathedral door in 1517. But Henry for political reasons introduced a religious crisis. He wanted a wife who could bear him a son but could not get a divorce because the pope was in terror of Charles V of Spain, who ruled most of Western Europe and had just sacked Rome. Henry’s wife, Catherine, was a member of Charles’s royal family. This was the hard politics under Henry’s famous romance with Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth the Great’s mother. As a consequence, Henry turned his back on Rome.
In 1534 he pushed the Act of Supremacy through Parliament, which made himself head of the still Catholic English Church, although now his divorce of Catherine and marriage to Anne was legalized and accepted in England. But Henry had only started. As head of the Church in England he could now deal with his endless need for money, attend to the late medieval corruptions of the church that were endemic throughout Europe, and bind the English governing class to his new order. He dissolved the ancient monasteries and seized their great expanse of lands and wealth, keeping a good portion of these for himself but giving the rest to the nobility and what now became the gentility of England. They would be the backbone of the monarchy for centuries.
Anne of course lost her head; Henry still needed a male heir, dreading the return of the civil wars his father had ended, and Anne failed him. He finally achieved his goal with the birth of the frail Edward VI, although Edward’s mother, Jane Seymour, died of natural causes. In 1544 Parliament recognized Mary and Elizabeth in succession to Edward; Henry died in 1547.
Trends as well as styles persevere: what began as a state power grab turned more religious under Edward, as England was now divided between Catholics and Protestants who in turn divided between Lutherans and Calvinists, both hostile to the other sects also multiplying. Catholics were caught ever more severely between their loyalty to England and Rome. When Hamlet half a century later laments in Hamlet that he was born to set right a time out of joint, his sentiments would have seemed all too pertinent to his audience. The abiding legacy of Edward’s brief reign would be the Book of Common Prayer, which became the basis of the Anglican Church, the state religion evolving under the king and archbishop of Canterbury.
Mary tried to restore Catholicism in her equally brief reign. She married Philip of Spain who later gave the occasion for the Elizabethan apogee with the destruction of his armada in 1588. Mary earned her sobriquet, “Bloody Mary”: her archbishop gained his position as the former Archbishop Cranmer was burned at the stake as a heretic. Religious divisions now attained profound and often lethal dimensions. Elizabeth herself was in danger under Mary because, while she observed Catholic rites, she was a Protestant. By the time Elizabeth ascended the throne in 1558, England was politically peripheral to Europe, in danger from the Catholicism as close to her shores as France and the Lowlands, modern Belgium and Holland, then under Spanish rule, impoverished, weak, and torn with religious dissension.
That’s easy to say, but what does “torn by religious dissension” mean? Certainly, to some extent, it meant many believed with increasing zealotry, regardless of which faith they adhered to. The crisis of faith paradoxically deepened belief as it multiplied sects that divided the country and provided the fuel for destructive acts against one another. It is an instructive illustration of the way destructiveness can bind a group together if it turns its aggression against others, as Freud saw so acutely in Civilization and Its Discontents. The order of Elizabethan civil society was under as great a stress as our own has been under the pressure of great wars and the profoundest political, social, and technological changes in history.
The paradoxes continue. Other Elizabethans were n
ot sure what to believe or so capable of changing belief from a lesser to a greater extreme. Some obeyed the laws and took their beliefs underground, hoping outward compliance would preserve them from persecution, particularly Catholics. For all the zealotry there was no perceived governing spiritual order, and in consequence the political and social order of the state was endangered from within and without. A thinking person could wonder what was the nature of reality and his or her role within it, and could ask, “What is the purpose of life, and what will happen to me at death?” Once the answers had been widely accepted; now they were not. An Elizabethan could live in an anguish of doubt akin to our own. The malaise Burckhardt notes in the Greeks appears as existential anxiety in the great Shakespearean tragedies.
This was not all. Elizabeth was excommunicated by the pope and legally became a target for Catholics aching to be martyred, while others held the view that as a woman she was unfit to reign, including John Knox in Scotland, who had to trim his views to maintain English favor for his efforts to transform Scottish religion. In response, Elizabeth developed a police state under Walsingham to contain internal and external plots and safeguard her life. Complicating everything was the absence of a direct heir: Elizabeth’s death meant the ascent of the imprisoned Catholic Mary of Scotland to the throne until her execution in 1587, and a renewed, protracted civil war.
A religious upheaval is fundamental in understanding ourselves as well as the Elizabethans, for religion answers the great questions concerning the nature of reality, life’s purpose and conduct, and our relation to the afterlife. For these to be unsettled means everything else occurs within an unsettled, uncomfortable sense of the world, where nothing finally feels sure.
English drama exemplified by Shakespeare rose within this context even more meteorically than Greek tragedy, regardless of the length of time that had passed since drama had been reborn. There is a quantum leap from late medieval drama to the Elizabethan stage.
Drama reappeared in the tenth century in the church as the “Quem Queritas Trope,” where three women question the angel at Christ’s sepulcher. As with Greek drama, the new drama’s womb is religious, and medieval drama too at first was sung, as Gregorian chant. The trope soon had three episodes: the original questions, the apostles hurrying to the sepulcher, and an episode starring Mary Magdalene. Swiftly nativity plays developed that dealt with the dramatic events of Christ’s birth. All was still sung, as with the Greeks. By 1175 these church dramatizations had grown into plays mundane enough the church forced them outdoors. A fluid, cinematic staging evolved, making use of church porticoes, so that the “stage” held multiple areas—designated hell, the terrestrial world, and heaven—between which the action could flow swiftly. Familiar stage effects like costumes, dramatic dialogue, and spectacle evolved. The plays moved into courts and marketplaces and coalesced into mystery cycles, some of which are still performed in Europe and run for weeks.
England developed five notable mystery cycles: the Chester (25 one-act plays), York (48), Wakefield (with the famous shepherds’ plays), Coventry (3), and Ludus (43). Some of these may still have been around in Shakespeare’s youth for him to see. Sometimes these were presented in great processional wagons with a stage above and dressing room below, each stage presenting a particular scene explained by mounted narrators to the crowds thronging narrow medieval streets as the wagons passed. Actors mixed with the audience, while the medieval guilds vied with one another to sponsor particular parts of plays—the bakers, “The Last Supper”; the shipwrights, “Noah’s Ark”; and so on. The Greeks drew on living myth; medieval drama relied on the Bible. Production became ruinously expensive, but at least all saw the plays, commoner as well as nobility. All were edifying; however, the spectacular effects might overwhelm religious content, whether mechanical camels or lightning, the sacrifice of real lambs or a Judas nearly hung as a superrealistic effect.
But as Protestant “reforms” moved on in England, these mystery cycles were replaced by new morality plays. Everyman is a good example of these. The bawdier elements from the older plays split off into roving troupes performing secular farces. New elements entered in Elizabeth’s reign with the revival of classical drama through the universities under Renaissance influence, which combined with the development of native romance. As if there wasn’t enough change, the English language was in upheaval too, such that we can understand the Elizabethans today despite obscurities, while the fundamental rhythm of English developed into iambic pentameter, the blank verse created before Shakespeare by Surrey and Sussex. Shakespeare invented more words than anyone in the history of our language.
So we must think of the Elizabethans going through an upheaval in religion, politics, society, and the language and art through which to express themselves, all at once. The experience was at once exhilarating and frightening: great possibility coexisted beside great insecurity. Everything was up for grabs.
Elizabethan tragicomedy draws all these dramatic elements together: morality play, humor, the revival of classical forms and native romance. We accept the resulting blend to this day, believing a drama should have elements of humor and common characters as well as higher, even if the former start off in Elizabethan times as objects of ridicule; that there should be a happy ending, although tragedy is not ruled out; and that there should be a sense of weight, of existential/spiritual meaningfulness, even if some dramas seem hopelessly trivial or one-sided, as in some of the early comedies of Shakespeare. Earlier tragedies like Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus or Tamburlaine seem flawed because low in humor and high in bombast.
In 1561, only three years after Elizabeth becomes queen, Gorbudoc is staged at the Inns of Court in blank verse, patterned on Seneca, with horror piled on horror in the story. Titus Andronicus is the closest of Shakespeare’s plays to Seneca. The more popular native romances and comedies were performed outside the cities, meaning across the Thames in London, under pressure from clerics and the early forebears of the Puritans among London’s city councilors. After 1576 ten great theatres developed on the South Bank, where today the National Theatre stands and a rebuilt Globe. All were public and unroofed, untethered to any church and the Bible, secular and audience dependent, protected by the patronage of some great figure but nonetheless the first great flowering of commercial theatre in the West. Six acting companies dominated production and performance, and all roles were performed by men or apprentice boys; women actresses had to wait their chance another eighty years for the Restoration theatre of Charles II. Eventually four private enclosed theatres were erected for aristocratic winter performances. In 1603 James I put all the companies under royal patronage to control them. By then Elizabethan drama was at a peak, barely a quarter of a century after the first theatre was built in London.
A list of primary Elizabethan playwrights is revealing: Lyly, Peele, Greene, Marlowe, Kyd, Jonson, Beaumont and Fletcher, Heywood, Middleton, Dekker, Webster, Ford, and Shakespeare. It is a group of rare brilliance not surpassed by later English or American drama. As revealing is a list of Elizabethan eras of taste: high bombast, pastoral, antiquity, comedy, aristocratic comedy, domestic comedy, satire, comedies of manners, revenge plays, tragedy, plays governed by determinism. An “era” might be a few years or, with determinism, decades following Shakespeare. Burckhardt’s summing up of the Greeks at the end of the fifth century bears here as England headed toward the civil wars in the seventeenth century that cost Charles I his head, elevated Cromwell, and shut the theatres: “For they were all being carried onwards and expected a violent end, without knowing what it would be.” The expectation of a violent end may be overstating things for the English under the Stuarts at first, but the sense of being in the hands of fate and moving toward a climactic moment certainly is less distant to their experience.
Elizabeth simultaneously seeks to control this ferment and in part creates it. Simon Schama gives a useful overview here, largely echoed by Allison Weir.16 Elizabeth was a master of public relations, “the first
true woman politician in British history.”17 She knew she had to contain powerfully divergent impulses and somehow survive, so encouraged the cult of herself as Gloriana, the Virgin Queen, the model for Spenser’s Faerie Queen. She deliberately assumed the attributes of the Madonna and magnified her impact through extravagance in palaces, jewelry, clothes, and pageantry. She was the biggest and longest running play of her reign.
In this sense, the film Elizabeth gets it right as it shows Elizabeth kneeling before a statue of the Virgin Mary. “What do they want,” she demands of Walsingham, meaning everyone and no one in particular; she has just struck down her enemies on his advice. Walsingham tells her men need to be able to touch the divine in this life. That is what the cult of the Virgin Mary allowed believers to do, but her cult is repressed in Elizabeth’s England. Elizabeth takes this to heart. She has her virgin locks shorn by her ladies-in-waiting, as they choke back sobs, and a white cosmetic applied to her flesh. Elizabeth tells them she has become a virgin, although we saw her to be anything but with her lover, Dudley, earlier in the film. Shortly after, she appears before her court as an apparition of divinity on earth—the awed courtiers stare, stunned, and fall to their knees, some grasping her hem as she passes to kiss it. Even the startled Walsingham kneels. No doubt her having just proved how lethal she is also influences their awe. She singles out the elderly Cecil, who tried to marry her off to foreigners, to declare she is now married to England.
