Ideas

by Peter Watson

  Done at the Mermaid! heard words that have been

  So nimble and so full of subtle flame

  Several economists, Maynard Keynes not least among them, have argued that England’s commercial prosperity was directly responsible for the emergence of its theatre.46 The defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 had engendered a sense of exuberance and irreverence among the population: nothing was sacred, even the Queen swore excessively, and ‘spat at her favourites’.47

  Although Burbage’s move to Shoreditch was the catalyst for the renaissance (or naissance) of English theatre, it grew out of several medieval traditions–the mystery, miracle, and morality plays of the midlands and north, the royal revels during the twelve days of Christmas, which grew into the masque, and the guilds and livery companies which produced pageants. Even so, when Shakespeare was growing up there were no plays outside London and no professional theatres even there. A ‘game-house’ had existed in Yarmouth in 1538 and a theatrum in Exeter since the fourteenth century, where farces were performed. But there was no professional acting as such and, since the Reformation, even Passion plays had been discontinued. Classical theatre was studied in the universities and, from the 1520s, boys in the schools performed the comedies of Plautus and Terence, and the tragedies of Seneca.48 In due course, schoolmasters and university dons were writing their own plays in the style of the classics and, around 1550, Ralph Roister Doister, in rhyming doggerel, was produced by a master at Eton. A decade later, a much better-known play, Gammer Gurton’s Needle, was performed at Christ’s College, Cambridge. But this was three years before Shakespeare was born and, since there is no evidence that he ever went to university, the connection cannot have been very strong. The archives of Westminster Abbey show that, throughout the 1560s, plays were performed there privately, acted in by the scholars and played before the Privy Council. In parallel, the monarch maintained two troupes of eight men each, who would produce entertainments–sometimes ‘of a circus nature’, sometimes more serious plays–as the theatre began to tell human stories and individual characters began to emerge.49

  In terms of structures, the theatres that existed in London at that time were two circular outfits, the Bull-Ring and the Bear-Pit, situated on the south bank of the Thames and in existence for hundreds of years. But the baiting rings never housed plays–instead it was the inn-yards that made natural playhouses to begin with (‘a wooden O’, as Shakespeare called them), with a scaffold for a stage. Convenient as these were, there were problems. The authorities feared plague and riot–drink was never far away. The livery companies–companies of actors tied to a powerful patron, Leicester, Oxford, Warwick, for example–were designed to stop vagabondage and they gradually introduced interludes into their morality plays and these interludes grew in topicality and dramatic content. When, therefore, Burbage built his theatre, the energy and appetite reflected in all these developments was at once harnessed. ‘What had been an almost feudal structure–the livery companies–was turned overnight into a capitalist one.’50 The theatre was from the start a commercial venture, with more or less professional actors.

  We should remember that these early plays were written to be heard, rather than read. The reading public was, however, growing in London by leaps and bounds. In the early seventeenth century, only 25 per cent of London’s tradesmen and artisans couldn’t sign their names. Around 90 per cent of women were illiterate but they still comprised a good part of theatre audiences, which is why spectacle was more important then even than it is now and why there was no real distinction, as there is today, between ‘high’ culture and ‘popular’ culture.51

  By the early seventeenth century, the term ‘acting’ had come to be applied to London’s theatrical performers, reflecting the fact that there had been a significant advance on ‘orators’, that ‘personation’ and characterisation were being developed and deepened. Actors were not yet respectable, not in the full sense, but the practice of repertory (no play was given two days in succession) did draw attention to the successful actor’s ability to portrayverydifferent roles in rapid succession, a versatility which could be easily appreciated. Nonetheless, when John Donne wrote his Catalogus Librorum Aulicorum in 1604–1605 he included no plays–he did not think of them as literature.

  The plays that were produced in this atmosphere contained two essential ingredients–realism, as close as the techniques of the day permitted, and emotional immediacy (there was an incipient journalistic element in London theatre along with everything else). But probably the most important element was that the theatre reflected the changing world in which the audience of the time found itself. The social situation was changing, the old rules were breaking down, private reading was growing, many people could afford more goods than ever before.

  Into this world stepped Shakespeare. As Harold Bloom pertinently asks, was Shakespeare an accident? He was not, after all, the immediately towering talent that he became. As Bloom also points out, had Shakespeare been killed at twenty-nine, as Marlowe was, his oeuvre would not have been anywhere near as impressive. ‘The Jew of Malta, the two parts of Tamburlaine, and Edward II, even the fragmentary Doctor Faustus, are a far more considerable achievement than Shakespeare’s was before Love’s Labour’s Lost. Five years after Marlowe’s death, Shakespeare had gone beyond his precursor and rival with the great sequence of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, The Merchant of Venice, and the two parts of Henry IV. Bottom, Shylock, and Falstaff add to Faulcon bridge of King John and in Mercutio of Romeo and Juliet we discover a new kind of stage character, light years beyond Marlowe’s talents or his interests…In the thirteen or fourteen years after the creation of Falstaff, we are given the succession worthy of him: Rosalind, Hamlet, Othello, Iago, Lear, Edmund, Macbeth, Cleopatra, Anthony, Coriolanus, Timon, Imogen, Prospero, Caliban…By 1598 Shakespeare is confirmed and Falstaff is the angel of the confirmation. No other writer has ever had anything like Shakespeare’s resources of language, which are so florabundant in Love’s Labour’s Lost that we feel many of the limits of language have been reached, once and for all.’52

  Shakespeare arrived in London with no career plan worked out at that stage, nor any ambitions to be more than a popular, even a hack, writer, and he became known as an actor before he earned fame as an author. He turned out serious plays, light plays, plays tailored to his actors. He paid little attention to spelling or grammar and was constantly coining new words where he needed them. And yet, in the history of ideas Shakespeare stands in no one’s shadow, a man responsible for two groundbreaking innovations. One, mutability. Shakespeare’s characters–the important ones at least–overhear themselves and show a capacity to change, to change in a psychological and moral sense, that was totally new. This shows itself in Hamlet and Lear but is best in Falstaff, arguably Shakespeare’s greatest creation. Second, and all too easily overlooked, and which was also related to urbanisation, Shakespeare’s work ‘resists Christianisation’: his plays exist in their own world, worlds complete unto themselves, which we accept almost without thinking. They are not avowedly humanist, in the obvious sense of drawing their inspiration from the classical past, nor do they make the most of learning (Milan is connected to the sea by a waterway). ‘Shakespeare appears not to have been a passionate man (not in his marriage anyway), he has no theology, no metaphysics, no ethics and very little in the way of political theory.’ Instead, in a very real sense, he invented the psyche in the way that we use the term today. Perhaps the defining Shakespearean play is King Lear where, at the end, there is what Bloom calls ‘a cosmological emptiness’, into which the survivors in the play, and the audience, are thrown. ‘There is no transcendence at the end of King Lear…The death of Lear is a release for him, but not for the survivors…And it is no release for us either…Nature as well as the state is wounded almost unto death…What matters most is the mutilation of nature, and our sense of what is or is not natural in our own lives.’53 This is an achievement quite unlike anything that had gone before.

>   Tradition has Shakespeare and Cervantes dying on the same day. A more important coincidence is that the novel, so common a form of literature in our own times, was born in Spain, with Don Quixote, and at more or less the same time as modern drama was launched in London. In Spanish literature, priority in terms of date is rightly given to Celestina, or The Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea (sixteen acts in the 1499 version, twenty-two in the 1526 version).54 The plot, so far as there is one, centres around Celestina, a professional go-between, who brings together two lovers, Calisto and Melibea, whose death Celestina eventually causes, along with her own. There is a good deal of the low life in Celestina and this helped set up the tradition of the picaresque novel in Spanish literature of which Lazarillo de Tormes was the first important example (the story of a criminal family and their adventures), and Don Quijote, or Don Quixote, by far the most overwhelming.55

  Unlike Shakespeare, Cervantes was an heroic man. Almost certainly a disciple of Erasmus, from a family who had been forced by the Inquisition to abandon their Judaism, he fought and shone at the battle of Lepanto, even though he was sick, survived long years of Moorish captivity and then in Spanish jails, where Don Quixote may have been begun. The book appeared at more or less the same time as King Lear and can claim to be as utterly original and as unprecedented. The centre of the book, and its greatness, lies in the ‘loving, frequently irascible’ relationship between the Don and his valet, Sancho Panza. Their individuality, their small-time and big-time heroism are a revelation and a celebration that fill the reader with as much warmth as the end of Lear leaves us bereft and cold. Much of the hinterland of the book is unexplained. Cervantes tell us the Don is mad, but we are not told why or given any clinical details. He may have driven himself crazy by reading chivalric romances of a different age, which caused him to set off on his impossible task of realising his dream, to live life in the course of his travels. As the friendship progresses–a relationship which has been compared to that between Peter and Jesus–throughout their travels ‘no thought on either side goes unchecked or uncritiqued. By mainly courteous disagreement, most courteous when most sharply in conflict, they establish an area of free play, where thoughts are set free for the reader to ponder.’56 Despite the differences in rank, there is an ‘equality of intimacy’ between the Don and his valet that is both comic and serious all at the same time (some of the comic interludes are pure slapstick). The Don’s eagerness for battle at every turn, his fantastic ability to mistake windmills for giants, and puppets for real persons, Sancho Panza’s wish to gain fame rather than wealth (how strange that sounds today), their meeting with Ginés de Pasamonte, the famously dangerous criminal and trickster, all this is wholly original but the central point is that the Don and his valet change during the book, they change each other by listening to what each other has to say. As with Shakespeare’s invention, mutability is the central psychological innovation of Don Quixote. Like Shakespeare, Cervantes created huge characters and like Shakespeare he moved well beyond learned humanism, well beyond antiquity, well beyond the church, to something new. ‘It is not a philosophy,’ said Eric Auerbach, describing the book. ‘It [has] no didactic purpose;…It is an attitude toward the world…in which bravery and equanimity play a major part.’ In a sense Don Quixote was not just the first novel but also the first ‘road movie’, a genre that is very much still with us.57

  There was no one reason for the explosion of imagination (and of story-telling, and storytelling techniques). But the extent to which many of these great works began to move beyond Christianity ought not to go unrecognised. Without making heavy weather of it, works of the imagination offered a very varied alternative, a refuge, to the traditional drama of the liturgy and the narratives of the Bible.

  20

  The Mental Horizon of Christopher Columbus

  To Chapter 20 Notes and References

  ‘To the end of his life Christopher Columbus maintained that he had reached the “Indies” he had set out to find. He had landed on islands close to Cipangu (Japan), and on the mainland of Cathay (China). He had skirted the coasts of Marco Polo’s Mangi [China as well] and been only leagues away from the domains of the Great Khan himself.’1 A medieval league was the distance the average ship could sail in an hour, say somewhere between seven and twelve miles. We may smile now at Columbus’ dying delusion but that he should hold to his view tells us as much about his age as do his epic voyages of discovery. They show, in particular, that the man who discovered the New World was someone from medieval times rather than the modern age.

  All manner of historical forces were represented by Columbus, whether he knew it or not. In the first place, his voyages were the culmination in a mammoth series of navigational triumphs that had begun centuries earlier. (These were surveyed and summarised by Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth century.2) Some of these voyages had been much longer than his, and no less hazardous. In some ways, these journeys of discovery collectively represent man’s most astounding characteristic: intellectual curiosity. Man’s medieval ventures into the unknown are, save for space travel, simply impossible for us to share and therefore separate us from Columbus’ time in a fundamental way. Although desire for commercial gain was as often as not a motive for these travellers, their journeys most certainly represented intellectual curiosity in its most unadulterated form.

  As was discussed earlier, there was a time when western Europe did not hold the lead in travel and exploration. The Greeks had discovered the Atlantic in the seventh century BC, when they had named the Straits of Gibraltar the Pillars of Hercules. According to Hecataeus, the world was essentially a circular flat dish, with its centre somewhere near Troy or what became Istanbul, with the Mediterranean opening on to the ocean which entirely surrounded the land.3 In the late sixth century BC a follower of Pythagoras in southern Italy put forward the idea that the earth was a sphere, one of ten such entities revolving around a central fire in space. These other entities included the sun, the moon, the fixed stars (heaven), the five planets, and a counter earth.4 We on earth could not see the central fire or indeed the counter earth because the populated side of our planet was always turned away from the central fire. To many people the earth was self-evidently flat, but both Socrates and Plato accepted the Pythagorean view, Socrates going so far as to say that the earth was apparently flat only because of its very great size.

  The Greeks knew that there was land all the way from Spain eastward as far as India and there was rumoured to be more still farther east. Land in the north–south direction was less familiar though Aristotle believed that it extended about three-fifths of the east–west distance. More important, he took the view that Asia continued so far to the east that it extended all the way round the world and there was only a small body of water between Asia and the Pillars of Hercules. This was a powerful idea, which stuck, and was still relevant when Columbus set out centuries later.5

  The first great traveller we know about was Pytheas, who lived at Massalia (the modern Marseilles). The inhabitants of Massalia knew from boatmen who had sailed up the Rhône and met other travellers that there was a great northern sea big enough to contain islands, which produced precious metals and a beautiful, brown, resinous substance, much prized and called amber. But the Rhône itself did not go as far as this north sea and no one really knew how far away it was. Then, about 330 BC, sailors returning to harbour from the western Mediterranean reported that for once the Pillars of Hercules were undefended. For the merchants of Massalia this was the chance they had been waiting for. The way was clear for them to go looking for this north sea. Pytheas was chosen for this voyage and equipped with a ship about 150 feet long (bigger than the one Columbus would use).6 Hugging the land, Pytheas eventually found his way to northern France, and then, through cold rain and fog, he sailed up between England and Ireland, reaching islands he called Orka (and we still call the Orkneys), then moving beyond the Shetland and Faeroe islands until he reached a land where, on the first day
of summer, the sun remained above the horizon for twenty-four hours. He called this place Thule, and for centuries Ultima Thule was, in effect, the end of the world in that direction–it could have been Iceland, or Norway, the Shetlands or the Faeroes. Pytheas returned via Denmark and Sweden, found a broad sea that reached far inland, the Baltic, and began his search for the Land of Amber. He discovered the rivers that flow from south to north (such as the Oder and the Vistula) and realised that this is how news of the northern sea had reached the Mediterranean. When he returned home, however, many people refused to believe him. Then the Carthaginians took control of the Pillars of Hercules and the Atlantic was once more cut off.7

  In the other direction, the Greeks also knew that beyond Persia there was somewhere called India. They had heard fabulous tales of a king who was so grand he could order a hundred thousand elephants into war; men who, it was said, had the heads of dogs, where there were huge worms that could drag an ox or a camel into the river and devour it.8 In 331 BC Alexander the Great began his series of conquests that took him beyond Persia into Afghanistan as far as the Indus river. And here he did encounter crocodiles–the giant worms of which legend told.9 He followed the Indus south until he came to a great ocean, the great southern ocean that had been rumoured. So it was now a ‘fact’–the land really was surrounded by sea as the ancients had said.10

  All these travel details began to be collected by scholars, especially at Alexandria, with its famous library (see Chapter 8).11 One of its most distinguished librarians, Eratosthenes (276–196 BC), may be regarded as the world’s first mathematical geographer and he set about producing a more accurate map of the world. By the method already described in Chapter 8, he calculated the circumference of the earth as just under 25,000 miles. This was not wide of the mark. And this was not Eratosthenes’ only achievement. He also calculated the amount of habitable land, based on climate, and developed the concept of latitude, relating to the angle of the sun, which allowed for the more precise location of such cities as Alexandria itself, Massalia, Aswan and Meroë, which had been discovered by sailing up the Nile.12 Eratosthenes’ work was built on by Hipparchus who, around 140 BC, adjusted the circumference of the earth to 25,200 miles (252,000 stades) so that he could divide it exactly into 360 degrees of seventy miles each. This enabled him to draw lines of latitude on maps one degree apart, which he called klimata and from which our word ‘climate’ is derived.13