Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution

by Peter Ackroyd

  No epoch in the history of English music can excel the diversity of genius that flourished in this period. It was the age of Dowland and of Morley, of Campion and of Byrd, of Bull and of Gibbons. It was also the age of songs such as ‘Lady, Lie Near Me’, ‘If All The World Were Paper’, ‘New, New Nothing’ and ‘Punk’s Delight’. In the time of James, the island was filled with sounds and sweet airs.

  In the closing months of 1611, the private theatre at Blackfriars echoed to such harmonies. Shakespeare’s The Tempest was a work of musical theatre with professional singers and a consort of instruments. The stage directions tell their own story, requesting ‘solemn and strange music’, ‘soft music’, ‘a strange hollow and confused noise’. ‘Enter Ferdinand, and Ariel, invisible, playing and singing.’ Ferdinand asks, ‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?’ It was everywhere, being ‘dispersed’ music that came from various parts of the stage. In this play Stephano sings sea shanties, while Caliban croons drunken catches. Music was played in the intervals between the acts, and at the close a ritual dance was performed by all of the actors. Music was also played as an accompaniment to scenes of wonder and of pathos, on Prospero’s grounds that ‘a solemn air’ is ‘the best comforter to an unsettled fancy’.

  The music of the instruments was diverse. The soft and mournful notes of the recorder were accompanied by a consort of strings including viols, lutes and citherns. An organ was suitable for the solemn music of supernatural change and awakening. Ariel often enters with pipe and tabor. Thus Caliban reveals that

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices …

  The last song of the play is sung by Ariel. The words are those of Shakespeare and at a slightly later date they were given a setting by Robert Johnson, a musician attached to the court of the king. It is clear, however, that the melodic inspiration came to Shakespeare from folk tunes or ballads that were in the air at the time.

  Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

  In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

  There I couch when owls do cry.

  This is a song of freedom, chanted just before Prospero releases Ariel from his service; perhaps the spirit danced at the close. The part was performed by a boy, or a light-voiced singer, and the role may have been taken by the seventeen-year-old ‘Jackie Wilson’ who later handed down the settings for the song. Blackfriars was known as a ‘private’ theatre because it was enclosed by roof and walls; in such a setting, the music would have a more powerful and intimate effect.

  The Tempest was also performed before the king at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and owes some of its ritual and sweet melody to the masques of the court; actors from Shakespeare’s company also took part in those masques. There was a marked cultural or courtly style in the early years of the seventeenth century.

  The great plays of Shakespeare’s maturity were written during the reign of James, Othello and King Lear, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter’s Tale among them. The witches of Macbeth were in part inspired by James’s own interest in the phenomenon. The king was a more enthusiastic patron of the drama than Elizabeth had ever been. Six days after his arrival in London, from Scotland, he called together Shakespeare and the other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and issued to them letters patent that allowed them to perform as the King’s Men. The actors were appointed to be grooms of the chamber a few months later.

  The era of James I also encouraged other forms of drama. A cardinal, dressed in crimson silk, with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable, comes upon the stage. He is meditating upon a book.

  Cardinal: I am puzzled in a question about hell:

  He says, in hell there’s one material fire,

  And yet it shall not burn all men alike.

  Lay him by. How tedious is a guilty conscience!

  When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden

  Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake

  That seems to strike at me.

  It does not occur to the cardinal that it may be his own reflection.

  The Duchess of Malfi, by John Webster, is a defining drama of the period, and is one of a number of plays that subsequently have been brought together under the collective title of ‘Jacobean tragedy’. Since it is the only literary genre that carries the name of the age, it may be of some importance for any understanding of it. It signifies melancholy, morbidity, restlessness, brooding anger, impatience, disdain and resentment; it represents the horror of life. The exuberance and optimistic inventiveness of the Elizabethan years have disappeared. The joy has gone. The vitality has become extremity and the rhetoric has turned rancid.

  The duchess herself asks, ‘Who am I?’ To which comes the reply: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little curded milk, fantastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage?’ This is perhaps the quintessence of Jacobean dramatic style and can be compared to John Donne’s contemporaneous verse on:

  This curdled milk, this poor unlitter’d whelp,

  My body …

  The Duchess of Malfi was written for Shakespeare’s company and was first performed towards the close of 1614 at the theatre in Blackfriars before a fashionable audience that would catch most of the allusions to the plays and poems of the day. In a theatrical world of death and murder, of graves and shrines, music was once again an essential element for conveying suspense and intensity.

  The plot itself is a poor thing. The duchess, a widow, wishes to marry the steward of her household in a union which might be perceived to dishonour her. Her two brothers – Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, and one known only as the cardinal – conspire to be revenged upon her. By means of a spy and secret agent, Bosola, the duchess is captured and subjected to a range of mental tortures designed to induce insanity; she is presented with the severed hand of her husband, and a gaggle of mad people is brought into her presence. A curtain is drawn to show a tableau comprising the dead bodies of her husband and children. It is revealed in an aside to the audience that they are waxworks, but not until the frisson of their discovery has subsided. The duchess is in the end strangled, but not before being shown the cord that will dispatch her.

  Duchess: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut

  With diamonds, or to be smothered

  With cassia, or to be shot to death with pearls?

  On sight of her body Ferdinand utters what are the most famous words of the play:

  Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

  Out of guilt and despair he then descends into murderous madness.

  One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane

  Behind St Mark’s church, with the leg of a man

  Upon his shoulder; and he howled fearfully;

  Said he was a wolf …

  The final scene concludes with a bloody conflict in which both Bosola and the cardinal are killed, bringing the sum total of fatalities in the play to ten. Enough has been quoted, perhaps, to convey the sensibility of the time as well as the taste of the Jacobean audience.

  It is a world of secrecy and madness, where characters hide and wait. The duchess sees a trespasser in the mirror and trembles. The broken phrases are forced out. ‘What is it?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh fearful!’ ‘Why do you do this?’ ‘What’s he?’ A common exclamation is ‘Ha!’ Some of Webster’s favourite words are ‘foul’, ‘mist’ and ‘dunghill’. The dialogue, when not fabulously ornamental, is direct and rapid, almost a whisper. ‘Can you guess?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do not ask then.’

  The play might be described as morbid or as grotesque, the English version of Grand Guignol, were it not for the fact that it is possessed by a wild and almost frantic energy. That energy is part of the characters’ desperation, their vitality and misery mingling in fr
ightful images of fever and of death. They seem to be possessed by will and desire rather than belief; they are united only in the quest for survival in an unstable world. They run towards darkness. This is in fact a most significant image of the age and one to which, as we shall see, Hobbes’s Leviathan is addressed. Indeed, this is a world from which God seems to have departed, leaving it in ‘a mist’. There seems to be no meaning in the abyss of darkness that opens beneath their feet. It was also a time when, in the work of Francis Bacon, the natural world was being stripped of its association with the divine presence.

  Where some like Bacon were possessed by the possibilities of progress in the natural sciences, others believed that the world was in the process of fatal decline. When in 1612 Galileo discovered the presence of spots upon the face of the sun, it was considered to be proof that even the heavens were in a state of dissolution.

  Yet proof of decay also lay closer to home, and much of the atmosphere of The Duchess of Malfi is conveyed by the image of a corrupt court.

  A Prince’s court

  Is like a common fountain, whence should flow

  Pure silver-drops in general. But if’t chance

  Some cursed example poison’t near the head

  Death and diseases through the whole land spread.

  This is likely to be an indirect allusion to the court of James I, already rendered suspect by whispers of corruption and malfeasance. The loss or abdication of authority is a context for the disorientation and instability that afflict all of the characters. That is why it is a play of scepticism, disillusion and disgust united in an overwhelming pessimism.

  Pleasure of life, what is’t? Only the good hours

  Of an ague …

  The figure of melancholy, therefore, might be used as the frontispiece to the play. Melancholy was the time’s delight, its presiding deity. It had its own dark dress and its own music in the compositions of John Dowland such as ‘In darkness let me dwell’ and ‘Flow my tears’. That pensive, fearful and tearful mood also had its greatest celebration and exposition in the reign of James with the publication of Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton was the master of melancholy in all its moods and phases. His great volume – more than 1,200 pages in its modern form – was first published in 1621 and went through six editions in his own lifetime.

  Burton professed that ‘all the world is melancholy, or mad, dotes, and every member of it’. We sense here the curiosity of his prose, at once precise and unsettled; it is a characteristically Jacobean touch. Melancholy is a disease both grievous and common, which he describes as ‘a kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions, fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion’.

  So Burton follows it through all its declensions and divisions, its intervals and digressions; he creates three ‘partitions’ with a variety of sections and subsections into which the various types and forms of melancholy are arranged. There are sections entitled ‘Miseries of Scholars’, ‘The Force of Imagination’, ‘Poverty and Want’, ‘Unfortunate Marriage’ and ‘Old Age’. He devotes a passage to ‘Symptoms of Maids’, Nuns’ and Widows’ Melancholy’. Hundreds of pages are consumed by ‘Love Melancholy’ and ‘Religious Melancholy’. The madness, if such it is, can be caused by stars or spirits, by the quality of meat or wine, by catarrh or constipation, by bad air or immoderate exercise, by idleness or solitariness, by anger or discontent, by poverty or servitude or shame.

  All was grist to his capacious mill, and he striates his narrative with stories, anecdotes, digressions, quotations, aphorisms and the most colourful detail. ‘A young merchant going to Nordeling Fair in Germany, for ten days’ space never went to stool; at his return he was grievously melancholy, thinking that he was robbed, and would not be persuaded but that all his money was gone … a Jew in France (saith Lodovicus Vives) came by chance over a dangerous passage or plank that lay over a brook, in the dark, without harm; the next day, perceiving what danger he was in, he fell down dead.’

  He describes the inner working of obsessive temperaments who are ‘to your thinking very intent and busy, still that toy runs in their minds, that fear, that suspicion, that abuse, that jealousy, that agony, that vexation, that cross, that castle in the air, that crotchet, that whimsy, that fiction, that pleasant waking dream, whatsoever it is’. He piles up heaps of words and throws himself into them; he has different voices, and different tones; he elaborates, and then qualifies his elaborations; he can be inconsistent and even contradictory. No opinion is stable, no judgement is certain. On eventually finishing the volume, you may feel that you know everything or that you know nothing.

  He anatomized himself. He professed that ‘I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy’. He was a student of Christ Church, Oxford, until the time of his death, and he confessed that ‘I have lived a silent, sedentary, solitary, private life, mihi et musis [for myself and the muses] in the university, as long almost as Xenocrates in Athens…’ He was a cormorant of books whose library of 1,700 volumes of forgotten lore was both his refuge and his inspiration. Burton was the magpie scholar, curator of the world’s learning, a lord of books who hoped that by quilting together references and allusions and quotations he could stitch so strong a cloth that he would be able to cover himself with it. He makes reference to more than 1,250 authors. His is a book in praise of books and a literary fancy in praise of reading. He wished to fashion an incantation to exorcize melancholy. The book concludes with an aphorism, ‘Be not solitary, be not idle’, and an epigraph:

  SPERATE MISERI

  CAVETE FELICES

  You that are unhappy, hope. You that are happy, fear.

  We are close, perhaps, to the religious spirit of the age. Lancelot Andrewes, bishop of Winchester, had on many occasions preached before James in the royal chapel and was well known to the court as he mounted the pulpit at Whitehall. He was tall and slim, with a long narrow face and expressive hands; he had a neatly trimmed beard and high forehead. In the winter of 1622 he had preached from the words of the text taken from St Matthew, ‘vidimus enim stellam Ejus’, ‘For we have seen his star’:

  Vidimus stellam. We can well conceive that: any that will but look up, may see a star. But how could they see the Ejus of it, that it was His? Either that it belonged to any, or that He it was it belonged to. This passeth all perspective: no astronomy could show them this. What by course of nature the stars can produce, that they by course of art or observation may discover. But this birth was above nature. No trigon, triplicity, exaltation could bring it forth. They are but idle that set figures for it. The star should not have been His, but He the star’s, if it had gone that way. Some other light, then, they saw this Ejus by.

  The style is hard and elliptical, almost tortuous in its slow unwinding of the sense. It relies upon repetition and alliteration, parallel and antithesis. It is knotty and difficult, almost impossible for the hearers fully to understand. Yet it is the devotional style of the Jacobean period, fully mastered by a king who prided himself on his scholarship and erudition. Andrewes hovers over a word, even a syllable, eliciting its meaning by minute degrees; he is constantly questioning, refining and rephrasing. He does not express a thought but, rather, the process of thought itself; he dramatizes the act, or art, of creative reasoning. This is the luxuriant etymology of Jacobean scholarship, similar in its strenuous tone to the prose of Francis Bacon.

  ‘Last we consider the time of their coming, the season of the year. It was no summer progress. A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year, just the worst time of the year to take a journey, and especially a long journey. The ways deep, the weather sharp, the days short, the sun farthest off, in solsitio brumali, O the very dead of winter.’ The prose is disciplined and pure, evincing clarity of thought and expression as well as a great power of ordered analysis. It may not possess the inspired eloquence or impassioned fervour of the great Elizabethan preachers, but it is marked by what T. S. Eliot described as ‘ordonnan
ce, precision, and relevant intensity’. Andrewes moves forward in pulses of light; he stops and repeats a phrase for more lucidity; he is always reaching out for the full revelation of the interior sense. An association of words can lead him further forward, caressing or coaxing their intention; he professed that such meanings can ‘strike any man into an ecstacy’.

  The soaring cadence and expressive emotionalism evident in the sermons of John Donne may seem a world away from the concerted pressure of Andrewes’s words; the articulations of any one culture, however, will not be very far apart. On 13 November 1622, the month before the bishop of Winchester gave his sermon to the king on the journey of the Magi, John Donne, the dean of St Paul’s, entered the pulpit of the cathedral.

  The first word of the text is the cardinal word, the word, the hinge, upon which the whole text turns. The first word, But, is the But, that all the rest shoots at. First it is an exclusive word: something the Apostles had required, which might not be had; not that; and it is an inclusive word; something Christ was pleased to afford to the apostles, which they thought not of; not that, not that which you beat upon, But, but yet, something else, something better than that, you shall have.

  The rapid associations are like a sudden peal of bells.

  For Donne the sermon was a species of erudite oratory, a performance that like the plays of the Jacobean tragic stage would surprise and delight the audience. He must remind his auditors of the damnation of being ‘secluded eternally, eternally, eternally, from the sight of God’. He must move and direct their emotions or else he had failed. That is why he exerts all the power of the macabre that John Webster had employed. So in one sermon Donne reminds his hearers that ‘between that excremental jelly that thy body is made of at first, and that jelly which thy body dissolves to at last; there is not so noisome, so putrid a thing in nature’.