Something along these lines may have taken place in late December 1598, when the Privy Council directed London’s lord mayor to send his chief officers to the city’s “privileged places”—that is, the suburban Liberties, where London’s theaters were located—to gather forced loans and recruit men who mistakenly believed that they were safe there. Shakespeare and other players, because they performed for the queen, were exempt from military service. As one of the actors jokingly puts it in John Marston’s Histriomastix, an old play likely to have been updated around 1599: “We players are privileged, / ’Tis our audience must fight in the field for us, / And we upon the stage for them.” Only onstage were players soldiers and the audience for Histriomastix would have enjoyed the scene in which mustered players, their protests ignored, are ordered to march to the wars and encouraged to act as valiantly there as they had onstage.
Opinion was divided over what kind of men to impress. Local authorities were more than pleased to fulfill Privy Council quotas by ridding their neighborhoods of “the scum of their country,” as Robert Barret writes in a 1598 military treatise. Such men were prone to desertion, if not mutiny. Yet local authorities were loath to round up established citizens. And, given the likelihood that captains would take bribes to free upstanding citizens from conscription, the end result would be that poor men would be sent in their stead anyway. The system was a product of Elizabeth’s decision not to have a standing army, unlike her foreign rivals, or to rely on mercenaries. Elizabeth herself apparently thought little of those conscripted to fight her wars. She told the French ambassador de Maisse in 1597 that the English troops stationed in France “were but thieves and ought to hang.” De Maisse dropped the subject after Elizabeth “had put herself in a choler about it,” uttering imprecations “between her teeth which [he] did not well understand.”
News in early October 1598 of the desertion of three hundred Londoners conscripted for the Irish wars would have circulated widely in the metropolis. When these troops arrived at Towcester, two-thirds of them refused to go farther and mutinied, threatening to kill their captain, and wounding some of his officers. There may well have been widespread sympathy for such action—by men yanked out of churches, inns, or playhouses to die in Ireland, ill fed, poorly armed, poorly trained, even more so after the news trickled back about the disaster at Blackwater a few months earlier. John Baxter, who knew the situation on the ground in Ireland well, spoke of “the poor English” who “are half dead before they come there, for the very name of Ireland do break their hearts, it is now so grown to misery.” And Richard Bagwell records a Cheshire proverb at the time: “Better be hanged at home than die like dogs in Ireland.”
Popular broadsides spelled out the fate of those who chose this unpatriotic course, including a ballad whose lengthy title tells the whole story: “A warning for all soldiers that will not venture their lives in her Majesty’s cause and the country’s right: wherein is declared the lamentation of William Wrench, who, for running away from his captain, with two other more, were executed.” The execution of Wrench and his mates as an example to potential deserters, like the ballad itself, can be seen as part of a campaign to combat the rising number of deserters—doubly dangerous, once armed and on the loose in England.
To Londoners, the Crown’s demand for fresh troops must have seemed insatiable. In November 1598, the queen once again ordered the lieutenants of London to “levy, muster, and view, within our city of London, six hundred able men, and furnish them with armor, weapons, and apparel, in such sort as our Privy Council shall direct.” By now the government understood the cost of the shoddy recruiting practices it had long encouraged. The order went out warning lieutenants that they “are especially to have regard that the men be better chosen, both for ability of body and aptitude for war service, than heretofore, and that they be well appareled.”
One can well imagine, in such a context, what Spenser and others in attendance at Whitehall, like the audiences at the Curtain throughout the autumn of 1598, would have made of the conscription scene in The Second Part of Henry the Fourth in which Justice Shallow arranges for Falstaff to choose from available recruits who are paraded before him. Part of the dark humor is the numbers game being played by those in charge. When “Captain” Falstaff is assured that Shallow has provided him with “half a dozen sufficient men” from whom he will select four, only five are trotted out before him: Ralph Moldy, Simon Shadow, Thomas Wart, Francis Feeble, and Peter Bullcalf. They’re a pathetic-looking bunch, sure to get a laugh. Moldy is old, Shadow slight, Wart tattered, Feeble doddering, and only Bullcalf a sturdy enough fellow, despite his protests that he is “a diseased man.”
All are initially drafted, save Wart, whom even Falstaff admits is unfit for service. Shadow is no less unsuitable, but as Falstaff jokes, “We have a number of shadows fill up the muster book” (3.2.135–36)—that is, more men will be entered in the books (whose pay he will pocket) than will accompany him. After Falstaff and Shallow depart, Moldy and Bullcalf bribe Bardolph, each offering the considerable sum of two pounds for his freedom. This, too, is part of the game. Only Feeble doesn’t understand that a bribe is obligatory and his last chance to avoid impressment. The irony of watching this frail old man explaining why he wants to fight for his country, offering up bits and pieces of the patriotic propaganda he has swallowed whole, would not have been lost on contemporary audiences: “A man can die but once. We owe God a death. I’ll ne’er bear a base mind. An’t be my destiny, so; an’t be not, so. No man’s too good to serve’s prince” (3.2.235–38). Falstaff’s sidekick Bardolph, having collected four pounds in bribes from the men, lies to Falstaff that he has been given “three pound to free Moldy and Bullcalf,” which he then passes over to Falstaff, keeping the other pound for himself. In the end only Feeble and Shadow, who are too foolish or deluded to play the game, are taken (though Shallow enters four recruits in the muster rolls). Perhaps the funniest, if cruelest, line in the scene is Falstaff’s final order to Bardolph to “give the soldiers coats” (3.2.290–91). Here, too, there was money to be made, and we can only imagine what kind of dark laughter the threadbare garments would have provoked in a London playhouse familiar with such corrupt practices. Spenser, for one, who has seen firsthand the effect in Ireland of poorly equipped Feebles and Shadows, would not have been amused. He had warned readers of his View of the “corruption” of English captains who “deceive the soldier, abuse the Queen, and greatly hinder the service.”
Shakespeare had not only witnessed such scenes for the past few years on the streets of London, but could also recall from his childhood the time when his father packed off the Feebles and Shadows of Stratford-upon-Avon to help put down the Northern Rebellion in 1569. As Chief Alderman for Stratford as well as the local justice of the peace, John Shakespeare, like Shallow, had been responsible for local musters and militia. The corrupt recruiting for Ireland had a few more wrinkles. Captains like Falstaff would accept bribes from all recruits and arrive at their port of embarkation for Ireland with a troop of invisibles—further lining their pockets with conduct money. Since the Privy Council also had copies of the muster rolls, captains had to produce the right number of men when they arrived at the port of embarkation. To get around this, captains worked hand in glove with local conspirators, and men, horses, and arms would magically appear on the appropriate day when the lists were checked. Once the muster roll was certified correct, these impersonators were paid off and the horses returned. The charade was repeated upon the captain’s arrival in Ireland. Any soldier who dared to complain could be hung by his captain as a mutineer. No wonder the queen was angry at the cost of her wars and her generals perplexed that the number of troops on the ground never squared with those on the books. It was a cheater’s game.
One of the most notorious abusers was Sir Thomas North, best known to posterity as the translator of Plutarch’s Lives, a book that Shakespeare was now reading as a source for both Henry the Fifth and Julius Caesar. A memorandum o
f “the State of Ireland” from December 1596 provides a glimpse of this English captain’s corrupt doings. Perhaps North served as Shakespeare’s source in more ways than one: “Of all the captains in Ireland, Sir Thomas North hath from the beginning kept a most miserable, unfurnished, naked, and hunger-starven band. Many of his soldiers died wretchedly and woefully at Dublin; some whose feet and legs rotted off for want of shoes.” Outdoing even Falstaff, “Sir Thomas North, before his going hence, sold (as is said) the piteous, forlorn band.” Elizabeth later rewarded North with a pension of forty pounds a year “in consideration of the good and faithful service done unto us.”
The war was equally unpopular with London’s merchants, who would have to foot the bill for it through forced loans they feared would later be declared outright gifts and never repaid. Sure enough, in early December the privy councillors informed Lord Mayor Stephen Soame that a six-month loan was required of the city, which the queen promised to repay with ten percent interest. Anticipating backsliding, the privy councillors forwarded a list with the names of wealthy citizens and the amount they expected from each. And, reaching out for yet another source of funds, they told the lord mayor that the queen wanted to borrow “the sum of 200,000 French crowns” from London’s wealthy alien residents. No group was free of the heavy burden of the war.
By December 17, a shakedown of recalcitrant merchants began: those who refused to pay the forced loan were called in to explain themselves. Even intimidation didn’t work. Five days later, furious that London’s moneyed classes had refused both loans and summonses to appear daily before them, the councillors wrote again to the mayor, demanding £20,000 in loans “before the holidays,” and expressing their anger at the “contempt” of those who have ignored their requests. Yet even this threat wasn’t enough to coerce all of London’s wealthier citizens to do their part in the war effort. Simon Forman, a prosperous astrologer and physician, also describes regular collections of small sums “for the soldiers” that were made door to door (“I supposed I ought not to pay it,” he writes in his casebook in early 1599 and wrestled over whether “it was best to pay it or no”—but in the end he did, paying “for soldiers” in early January and then again in late February). If Forman’s experience was typical, Londoners were already of two minds about supporting the expensive military adventure.
In addition to these financial strains, Londoners had to deal with a refugee problem, as destitute New English settlers in Ireland, men like Spenser who were lucky to have escaped alive, started making their way back to London. The Privy Council directed the mayor and lord bishop of London to take up a “charitable collection” to assist the “poor distressed persons of sundry counties of this realm that dwelt in the county of Kerry in Ireland, lately coming hither from thence, that have sustained great losses and spoils by the rebels there.” The sight of these English refugees would have been demoralizing, as would their stories of the rebels’ atrocities.
By mid-December, some of those who had adamantly opposed peace with Spain were having second thoughts. John Chamberlain put it bluntly to his friend Dudley Carleton: “I marvel that they which knew these wants did hearken no more after the peace [with Spain] when they might have had it with good conditions.” Well aware of how unpatriotic these thoughts were, Chamberlain nervously added, “You see how confidently I write to you of all things, but I hope you keep it to yourself and then there is no danger, and I am so used to a liberty and freedom of speech when I converse or write to my friends that I cannot easily leave it.” Fear of punishment for seditious words was already in the air. Three days before Christmas the Privy Council delivered more unhappy holiday cheer to Londoners: another six hundred men were to be rounded up and shipped off to fight in Ireland. Even before the troops had sailed or Essex agreed to lead them, the Irish war was proving to be an unpopular one across a broad social spectrum.
As the Christmas festivities at Whitehall came to an end, all eyes were on the queen and Essex. Elizabeth decided to send what was for her an unambiguous signal: “On Twelfth Day,” a court observer notes, “the Queen danced with the Earl of Essex, very richly and freshly attired.” Another reporter on the scene offered more vivid details of their reconciliation: Elizabeth “was to be seen in her old age dancing three or four gaillards,” the high-spirited dance she so loved (and Essex, always awkward on the dance floor, no doubt loathed). But one didn’t say no to the queen. In early January, Essex wrote to his cousin Fulke Greville that on the eve of the new year Elizabeth had “destined me to the hardest task that ever any gentleman was sent about.” But Essex was more self-pitying than resigned: in a letter he must have expected would be leaked at court, he went on to complain of how Elizabeth is “breaking my heart” and how, only after “my soul shall be freed from this [prison] of my body,” shall she “see her wrong to me and her wound given to herself.” He put on a better face to those preparing to join him, including his naïve supporter (and godson to the queen), John Harington: “I have beaten Knollys and Mountjoy in the Council, and by God I will beat Tyrone in the field.”
ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 13, 1599, CHURCH BELLS TOLLED IN WESTMINSTER. The news was shocking and depressing: Edmund Spenser was dead at the age of forty-six. Three days later Spenser was interred near Chaucer in the south transept of Westminster Abbey, in what would come to be known as Poets’ Corner. Essex covered the cost of the funeral, repaying the debt he owed the poet who had praised him as “England’s glory and the world’s wide wonder.” William Camden, who eulogized Spenser as one who “surpassed all the English poets of former times, not excepting even Chaucer himself,” recorded the unusual funeral arrangements. As master at the school attached to Westminster Abbey, Camden was well placed to observe the day’s events. Spenser’s hearse was “attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems, with the pens that wrote them, thrown into the tomb.” Camden later added that poets even carried Spenser’s hearse. The poems and pens were a nice touch, a change of pace from handkerchiefs wet with tears or the sprigs of evergreen usually tossed into graves at Elizabethan funerals. The verses, which the poets had but three days to compose, would have first been read aloud before being ceremoniously tossed into the grave. Not just a great poet was celebrated this day, but English poetry itself. It’s unlikely that many of London’s writers would have missed the occasion.
We don’t know who the pallbearers were, and few copies of the poems tossed into Spenser’s grave survive. Most of these are by second-raters: Nicholas Breton, Francis Thynne, Charles Fitzgeoffrey, William Alabaster, the ubiquitous John Weever, Richard Harvey, and Hugh Holland. Holland’s couplet got the tone about right: “He was and is, see then where lies the odds, / Once god of poets, now poet of the gods.” But some, like Breton’s ditty, were bad enough to set teeth on edge: “Sing a dirge on Spenser’s death, / ’Til your souls be out of breath.” Three centuries later, hoping to unearth other long-buried tributes, especially one by Shakespeare, Spenser’s grave was opened. The gravediggers failed to find what they were looking for, which was not surprising, since they dug in the wrong place, exhuming the remains of the eighteenth-century poet (and admirer of Spenser) Matthew Prior before sealing things up again.
Unlike most of his fellow writers, Shakespeare had a strong aversion to heaping praise on the work of the living or the dead. Rather than be seen carrying the hearse or ostentatiously tossing a poem into the grave, it’s more likely that Shakespeare went home after the funeral and paid a quieter tribute, paging through a well-worn copy of Spenser’s poetry. Yet as he heard Spenser publicly eulogized as England’s greatest poet, Shakespeare could not have remained disinterested. Spenser, after all, had chosen paths Shakespeare had rejected. He had pursued his poetic fortune exclusively through aristocratic—even royal—patronage, and had done so in “descriptions of the fairest wights, / And beauty making beautiful old rhyme / In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights.” So Shakespeare puts it in Sonnet 106, deliberately echoing Spenser’s archaisms.
; There were other differences, too. Where Shakespeare had purchased a house in his native Stratford, Spenser had moved into a castle on stolen Irish land. And what had it got him? It’s hard not to conclude that for Shakespeare, Spenser had built on sand. Premature interment at Chaucer’s feet was poor compensation for so badly misreading history. Spenser had rewritten the course of English epic and pastoral. Shakespeare would soon enough take a turn at rewriting each in Henry the Fifth and As You Like It—and would have appreciated the vote of confidence expressed in an anonymous university play staged later this year in which a character announces, “Let this duncified world esteem of Spenser and Chaucer, I’ll worship sweet Mr. Shakespeare.”
Shakespeare knew that Spenser was not alone in following a career path that led through the wilds of Ireland. The list of Elizabethan writers who had done so was long and still growing. It included Thomas Churchyard, Barnaby Googe, Sir Thomas North, Sir Henry Wotton, Barnaby Rich, Lodowick Bryskett, Geoffrey Fenton, Sir Walter Ralegh, John Derricke, Sir John Davies, and probably Sir Philip Sidney. This year, their ranks were swollen by gentleman poet-adventurers eager to improve their fortunes, including William Cornwallis and John Harington.
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 9
