Elizabeth arrived on horseback on 9 July. At this time, Kenilworth was surrounded by a 100-acre lake and, as Elizabeth crossed it via the 600-foot bridge, she was met by a moving island carrying the Lady of the Lake and two nymphs. Such pageantry was a sign of things to come. Over the next two and a half weeks, Elizabeth was entertained with all manner of gorgeous spectacle: every detail recorded in a long letter by Laneham and an account by author George Gascoigne.
The festivities included music, dancing, hunting, boating, an ‘ambrosial banquet’ of 300 sweet dishes, ‘very strange and sundry kinds of fireworks’ including one that ‘burnt unquenchably beneath the water’, an Italian acrobat performing feats of agility, Morris dancers, thirteen bears baited with mastiffs, jousting, ceremonial gunfire, skirmishes or mock battles, a ‘Savage Man’ who appeared from the forest ‘himself for grown all in Moss and Ivy’, and water spectacles including a twenty-four-foot dolphin that emerged from the lake with six musicians in its belly — one can only imagine what on earth such a thing would have looked like. All the pageants and plays shared the same theme: marriage.
Was this Leicester’s last lavish attempt to win Elizabeth’s hand in marriage: a final extravaganza to win her round? Or was it instead an ultimatum — marry me or release me — with this extraordinary, unsurpassed revelry a parting gift? Certainly, the enormous cost half-crippled Leicester’s finances. But was it all in vain?
In December 1575, Leicester revived an old flirtation with Lettice Knollys, Countess of Essex, the Queen’s cousin. When Elizabeth discovered that they had secretly married in September 1578, she was incandescent with rage. She had regarded Leicester as her own possession, and it took him five long years to claw his way back into her affections, while his wife was never welcome at court in his lifetime.
In 1588, Leicester died, aged fifty-six, on his way to Kenilworth. In his will, he left the Queen a string of 600 pearls with a great diamond and emerald jewel as a ‘token of an humble faithful heart and the last gift that ever I can send her’. According to the Spanish ambassador, on hearing the news of his death, Elizabeth locked herself away and refused to come out for several days, until William Cecil, Lord Burghley ordered the doors to be broken down. Two months later, it was reported that the Queen was ‘much aged and spent, and very melancholy’.
Elizabeth outlived Leicester by fifteen years. He was buried in St Mary’s Church, Warwick with his elder brother Ambrose, and Kenilworth was left to Leicester’s illegitimate son, also named Robert Dudley (1574—1619). The castle would never see such magnificence again.
‘An upstart crow, beautified with our feathers … with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide.’
On William Shakespeare’s death, his cantankerous rival, Ben Jonson, paid the bard a compliment that continues to define our attitude to Shakespeare: ‘He was not of an age, but for all time.’ Shakespeare was such a rare talent that his creativity still permeates the cultural fabric of society, and his works have never been more performed, adapted or imitated than they are today. So it is easy to think of him as a man out of time. But, in fact, he was born in a rural market town in the early years of Elizabeth I’s reign, and was formed by the social, religious and political world-view of the period. His plays were written to meet the commercial demands of the flourishing theatre culture of London in the 1590s, and his heyday straddled the last days of Gloriana and the early years of James I’s reign.
You can experience Shakespeare anywhere you can see or read his plays but, as the thriving tourist industry attests, the best place to remember the man himself is in his hometown of Stratfordupon-Avon. (The controversy over whether the man from Stratford actually wrote the plays, or whether it was someone else, is an old one that flares up from time to time, including during the time of writing. Until otherwise proven, let’s assume the man from Avon and the Bard are one and the same.)
Between 20 and 25 April 1564, William was born to John Shakespeare and Mary Arden in part of the house in Henley Street, Stratford now known as ‘Shakespeare’s birthplace’. The house, built in 1530, is a timber-framed building made of wattle-and-daub. Inside, it is recreated to look as it may have done in Shakespeare’s day, and the parlour retains its original sixteenth-century floor of blue limestone across which, as a child, William might have crawled and tottered.
William’s family on both sides came from the Forest of Arden: the derivation of his mother’s maiden name. His father, John, practised the highly skilled trade of glove making — which is recreated here today — and was respected in the town: four years after William’s birth, he became bailiff (mayor) of Stratford.
William survived the devastating outbreak of plague in 1564 and lived in the Henley Street house — which was probably extended to its current size in 1575 — until the age of fourteen. He attended the excellent local grammar school, King’s New School, where he was trained in Latin literature including Ovid, Virgil, Seneca, Livy and Cicero, and was taught his Bible and Book of Common Prayer. During these years, he almost certainly saw one of the fifteen companies of players who called on Stratford between 1568 and 1582, and his love of theatre must have started here.
In the summer of 1582, as an eighteen-year-old, he started to pay visits to the cottage of orphaned siblings Anne and Bartholomew Hathaway, in the nearby village of Shottery. This fifteenth-century thatched cottage survives with the basic medieval ‘cruck’ or A-frame design [see THE TYPICAL TUDOR HOUSE]. It had been extended from a simple two-room abode in the 1560s, exchanging the central hearth for a fireplace with a smoke hood and adding a second storey. It also had two ‘joyned’ (four-poster) beds (two from the 1580s are there now).
William certainly enjoyed his visits, for on 27 November 1582, in a rush to beat the ban on marriages in Advent, a marriage licence was issued for William and Anne. His twenty-six-year-old bride was pregnant, and their daughter, Susanna, was born six months later.
The couple returned to Henley Street to live with William’s parents and, in 1585, Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith, named after old Catholic friends of the family. Twins, of course, frequently feature in Shakespeare’s plays. But no more children were born to the Shakespeares, which might suggest that William had already left for London, for apart from his children’s baptisms and a court case in 1587, Shakespeare disappears from the records for a decade after his marriage, only re-emerging in a pamphlet in 1592 that indicates he had achieved some fame (or infamy) as a writer in London.
How Shakespeare moved from glover’s son to acclaimed London playwright we may never know, and this fuels much of the speculation concerning his authorship. All we know is that by April 1592, his Henry VI Part 1 was being performed at the Rose Theatre in London, and attracting crowds of 2,000 to 3,000 people a performance, for fifteen shows.
Many of his early plays, such as Titus Andronicus, The Two Gentleman of Verona and The Taming of the Shrew, adapted existing plots, and it was for this that Robert Greene attacked Shakespeare in his 1592 pamphlet, which plays on a line from Henry VI Part 3:
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you, and being an absolute Johannes Factotum (Jack of all trades), is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Despite this criticism, it was Shakespeare’s verse that won him not only acclaim, but patronage. In 1593, he dedicated his erotic poem ‘Venus and Adonis’ to his new patron Henry Wriothesley, the Earl of Southampton. Another epic poem, ‘The Rape of Lucrece’, followed the next year. In theatrical terms, too, he had found a patron: in May 1594, Shakespeare and Richard Burbage joined with the newly formed Lord Chamberlain’s Men, under the patronage of Lord Hunsdon. What followed was an extraordinary outpouring of creativity as Shakespeare produced a series of plays including Romeo and Juliet and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
His family continued to live at the Henley Street house, with
William returning perhaps only annually. In August 1597, William received some devastating news from Stratford: his only son, Hamnet, had died at the age of eleven. Psychoanalysts may find some link between this tragedy and Shakespeare’s apparent crisis, seen in the sonnets he produced around this time. After being married for fifteen years and living mostly apart from his wife, William wrote a string of sonnets to a beautiful young aristocrat, and then a number of impassioned love poems to a married woman, his dark mistress [see GAWSWORTH HALL]. ‘Shall I Compare Thee To a Summer’s Day’ was written to a man, tentatively identified as William Herbert, later Earl of Pembroke, and described in the lines:
A woman’s face, with nature’s own hand painted, Hast thou, the master-mistress of my passion.
In 1597, Shakespeare decided to invest in some property. He returned to Stratford to buy New Place, the second biggest house in town. It no longer stands, having been demolished in the eighteenth century (something that to modern sensibilities would seem unconscionable), but has recently been excavated, and was described by antiquary John Leland as a ‘pretty house of brick and timber’. You can visit the site, next to Nash’s House, later owned by Shakespeare’s grandchild, Elizabeth, and her husband, Thomas Nash. As you walk around Stratford with its many wonderful Tudor houses, you’ll find it isn’t difficult to imagine what sort of house New Place was.
Over the next year, Shakespeare wrote The Merchant of Venice and created his beloved character, Falstaff, in Henry IV Part 2. These were followed by four famed plays examining the inner life: Henry V, As You Like It, Julius Caesar and Hamlet, his first tragedy, with its character whose name was so reminiscent of his son’s. Julius-Caesar was probably the first play to be performed in the Chamberlain’s Men’s new theatre on the south of the Thames, the Globe, which could hold an astonishing 3,300 people.
In 1601, Shakespeare again returned to Stratford, this time to bury his father, in Holy Trinity Church. Back in London, he lodged with a French Huguenot family in Silver Street (a few streets away from Nicholas Hilliard in Gutter Lane) and wrote his great Othello. On 2 February 1603, Shakespeare’s company performed before Elizabeth I for the last time. After forty-five years of rule, she died a month later and, on James I’s command, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men were reborn as the King’s Men. Over the next four years, with this royal patronage, Shakespeare was again productive, writing Measure for Measure, All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra and his great plays, King Lear and Macbeth. In total, between 1599 and 1606 he completed fourteen plays, including some of the most celebrated works in English literature.
During 1608—10, plague closed the London theatres, and Shakespeare probably returned to Stratford, where he buried his mother and, at New Place, possibly wrote The Winter’s Tale, Pericles and The Tempest. As his last solo play, The Tempest, with its talk of ‘heavenly music’, is often seen as a valediction.
The original Globe Theatre only lasted fourteen years. It burnt down in June 1613 during a performance of Henry the Eighth, or, All is True after a stray cannon ball set fire to the thatched roof. It was rebuilt a year later and this second iteration lasted until the Civil War. In 1997, a modern reconstruction was completed, 750 feet from the original theatre. Although not an exact reproduction of the Elizabethan venue, it is as faithful to the original as modern ideas of safety and comfort allow — it holds only half the original audience — and has already outlived the theatre that Shakespeare knew.
Three years later, on almost exactly his fifty-second birthday, William Shakespeare passed away. To his long-suffering Stratford wife he left ‘his second best bed’. At Holy Trinity Church in Stratford you can visit his grave, which was left unscathed during a 2008 restoration of the church, thereby respecting the lines on his gravestone which read:
‘Blessed be the man that spares these stones, and cursed be he who moves my bones.’
ELIZABETHAN THEATRE
The theatre was a boom industry in Elizabethan London.
Before the 1570s, theatrical performances had been the preserve of bands of travelling players, acting in whatever spaces they could find. The rising population of England had, however, provoked the authorities into clamping down on vagrancy and wandering beggars (a statute from 1572 required all vagabonds to be ‘grievously whipped and burned through the gristle of the right ear with a hot iron’ an inch in diameter). Touring companies of actors needed a new, fixed home.
At first, they started to perform in the courtyards of inns, such as the Bull in Bishopsgate, the Bell and the Cross Keys in Gracechurch Street and the Bel Savage outside Ludgate. But in 1576, under the patronage of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, carpenter-turned-actor James Burbage built ‘The Theatre’, the country’s first purpose-built professional theatre. It seems to have been wooden and polygonal, with three storeys of galleried seating, and a central pit open to the sky. The following year ‘The Curtain’ was built 200 yards away. Shoreditch, a mile north of the walls of the City of London, had become London’s first theatre district.
One of the earliest plays to be a popular success with the new mass audience was Thomas Kyd’s revenge tragedy The Spanish Tragedy or Hieronimo is Mad Again. It was quickly followed in 1587 by another hit, Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, the story of an oriental emperor, told in the new form of blank verse (unrhymed verse). Before Marlowe was murdered in a lodging in Deptford in 1593, he had produced several other successes, including Dr Faustus, Edward II and The Jew of Malta. William Shakespeare’s first play, meanwhile, was staged in 1592.
One of the reasons that Shakespeare would go on to produce so many plays was commercial pressure. The Elizabethan theatre had a quick turnover. Theatrical entrepreneur Philip Henslowe kept a diary that reveals that his players, the Admiral’s Men, performed as many as fifteen different plays in a month. New scripts were urgently demanded to satisfy returning spectators.
Theatre attendance became a mass phenomenon. When, in 1599, Shakespeare’s troupe, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, headed south of the river to build their new theatre, the Globe, they constructed an amphitheatre that could house an audience of 3,000. Other grand theatres, including the Swan and the Rose, soon joined them in Southwark. The Fortune was built in the north of the city.
Designed for audiences used to the cruelty of bearbaiting, theatrical performances were full of gore, ribald humour and slapstick comedy. There was no scenery or stage painting, but the actors used a great variety of props. Performances were always during daylight, as there was no possibility of lighting an outdoor theatre sufficiently at night. Although women had always acted in court masques, no women performed in public plays until after 1660, and instead, their parts were played by boys.
The theatre still retained associations with theft (pickpockets were rife), riot and licentiousness, were accused of staging ‘lewd jigs, songs and dances’ and were thought to attract ‘lewd and ill-disposed persons’. However, one person who attended some of Shakespeare’s plays was Queen Elizabeth I herself.
‘He was so skiful both to devise and frame the [hides] in the best manner … that I verily think no man can be said to have done more good of all those that laboured in the English vineyard.’
Father John Gerard, Catholic priest, describing Nicholas Owen
There is more than meets the eye to the red-brick Elizabethan mansion of Harvington Hall, located a mile outside the quaint village of Chaddesley Corbett on a moated island. At its core is a fourteenth-century timber-framed building, but the majority of the house is Tudor, built from 1578 onwards by Humphrey Packington. It was uninhabited and stripped of some of its original furnishings in the nineteenth century, but this benign neglect ensured Harvington’s survival until the early twentieth century, when it was restored. It features some beautiful and unique decorative remains, but its chief distinction is that concealed in its walls is the finest surviving set of priest holes in the country.
There are many fascinating details of architecture and design to spot at Harvin
gton Hall. The medieval house is now the restaurant, with a beamed ceiling from 1500. The Great Kitchen retains its two huge fireplaces and a separate bread oven. The best bedchamber, now Lady Yate’s Room, has Elizabethan panelling from floor to ceiling, with an ornate overmantle and ensuite garderobe, dropping to the moat. The simple sixteenth-century panelling continues onto the fourteenth-century walls of the Withdrawing Room, but it is the Great Chamber that would have had the most striking panelling, richly painted in red, black and yellow to imitate inlay. Fragments survive in two corners, and the ornately decorated door into Mermaid’s Passage gives some sense of the overall effect.
If you were suddenly transported back in time, you’d probably find the house surprisingly garish, but wealthy Tudor houses were distinguished by their use of bold, extravagant colour and elaborate ornamentation. You can see this in the rare examples of Elizabethan wall painting at Harvington. Mermaid’s Passage features exquisite arabesque paintings of scrolls, shells, flowers, birds, animals and the eponymous mermaids, in an Italianate style reminiscent of the panels from Nonsuch Palace [see LOSELEY PARK]. The Nine Worthies Passage is adorned with almost life-size images of the Nine Worthies (legendary and biblical heroes) and the Great Staircase features shadow painting from 1600. The small chapel also has walls emblazoned with rather lurid rows of red and white drops to represent the blood and water that flowed from Christ’s side. Also, don’t miss the glorious carved Elizabethan four-poster bed, from 1590, in the Priest’s Room, and a more recent example of craftsmanship: the chimneypiece in the Great Chamber, which was made in Elizabethan style in 1996 following descriptions from 1600.
Journey Through Tudor England Page 16
