It’s tempting to imagine a Shakespeare who “was not a company keeper” drifting away from the mournful proceedings that day at Westminster, distracted by the Chantry Chapel and tomb of Henry V and the remains of his wife, Queen Katharine, located close to where Spenser was being interred. Spenser’s interment, and with him, the chivalric world celebrated in his Faerie Queene, may have even led him there. Like Spenser, Henry V, who died at thirty-five—Shakespeare’s current age—had not lived to fulfill his great promise. Shakespeare also knew that not even the most celebrated of English kings, let alone a great poet, could be assured that posterity would be kind. Shakespeare was interested in how Henry V was commemorated; he had even staged his funeral in one of his earliest (and probably collaborative) plays, The First Part of Henry the Sixth, where mourners compare England’s fallen soldier-king to Julius Caesar:
Henry the Fifth, thy ghost I invocate:
Prosper this realm; keep it from civil broils;
Combat with adverse planets in the heavens!
A far more glorious star thy soul will make
Than Julius Caesar….
(1.1.52–56)
Shakespeare also has Henry imagine his own burial in Henry the Fifth, where he tells his followers to “lay these bones in an unworthy urn, / Tombless, with no remembrance over them” if he fails to return from France a conqueror (1.2.228–30). As Shakespeare knew, while there would be a glorious tomb, history would subsequently treat Henry’s remains in quite unexpected ways. Yes, Henry was buried with a spectacular effigy covered in silver and gold. But two gold teeth were pulled from that effigy during the reign of Edward IV, and worse desecration would follow. By 1599, all that remained of Henry’s effigy was a headless torso. Shakespeare would have found the fate of Queen Katharine’s remains even more poignant. Though buried at Westminster in 1438, her embalmed corpse was “taken up again in the reign of Henry VII.” Since that time, John Stow writes, “She was never since buried, but remaineth above ground.” Had he so desired, Shakespeare could have laid hold of the queen he was bringing back to life onstage. Samuel Pepys did exactly that seventy years later, recording in his diary how, during a visit to Westminster, he took “the upper part of her body in my hands and I did kiss her mouth, reflecting upon it that I did kiss a Queen.” This was not what Shakespeare had in mind when he spoke of “making merry with Katharine of France.” For all we know, the fate of this royal pair may have spurred Shakespeare to compose the lines later engraved on his own grave slab: “Blest be the man that spares these stones, / And cursed be he that moves my bones.” Shakespeare, who would be buried in Stratford, had no interest in being transplanted to Westminster and the company of Chaucer and Spenser.
All that remained untouched at Westminster, hanging from a thick chestnut crossbeam, were Henry V’s saddle, shield (the silk embroidery on the reverse side still intact), and dented helmet. Nearby was his sword, traces of gold still visible on its blade and pommel. These objects were familiar to Londoners and surely the inspiration for Shakespeare’s allusion to Henry’s “bruised helmet and his bended sword” that his lords desire to carry “before him through the city” upon his triumphant return to London (5.0.18–19). Henry the Fifth, like Spenser’s death, was turning into a drama that marked the end of an era for Shakespeare. Like the relics of Henry’s military campaigns hanging in Westminster, the chivalric world celebrated in Spenser’s epic and his own early histories had become increasingly tarnished.
– 4 –
A Sermon at Richmond
On February 20, the last day of playing before the theaters officially closed for Lent, the Chamberlain’s Men set off on a short journey from London to the royal palace at Richmond. It had been “hard weather” of late, making it likely that they traveled overland rather than by boat up the Thames. It was Shrove Tuesday, a day of license, an unofficial holiday on which London’s apprentices often ran wild, vandalizing brothels and occasionally theaters. Shakespeare and his fellow players were no doubt relieved to be far from any mayhem. Elizabeth had just moved her court to Richmond from Whitehall. Though imprisoned at Richmond in 1554 by her half sister Mary, in later years she had grown increasingly fond of the palace and came to think of it as “the warm box to which she could best entrust her sickly old age.”
Visitors approaching Richmond from the Thames would have first caught sight of the palace’s onion-capped towers, their weather vanes painted in gold and azure “right marvelous” to hear on windy days, for they produced a strange music. Entering the main gate from the direction of Richmond Green, visitors passed through a large outer courtyard leading to a paved inner one, beyond which was the entrance to the royal quarters overlooking “fair and pleasant gardens.” The inner courtyard was straddled by a pair of impressive and semidetached buildings, roughly the same in size (each about a hundred by forty feet). To the left was the royal chapel, where religious services were conducted and sermons read; to the right, the great hall, where plays were staged. The hall was impressively decorated, lined with the marshal images of England’s great kings in “robes of gold.” Shakespeare and his fellow players were familiar with the venue, having performed there five times in 1595 and1596.
For this Shrovetide performance Shakespeare dashed off a special eighteen-line epilogue in praise of Elizabeth. Except for the special epilogue to The Second Part of Henry the Fourth, it’s the only one of his occasional epilogues to survive. Whether Shakespeare himself stepped forward to deliver these lines or whether he had passed it along to a fellow actor to memorize and recite is unknown:
As the dial hand tells o’er
The same hours it had before,
Still beginning in the ending,
Circular account lending,
So, most mighty Queen, we pray,
Like the dial, day by day,
You may lead the seasons on,
Making new when old are gone.
That the babe which now is young,
And hath yet no use of tongue,
Many a Shrovetide here may bow,
To that empress I do now;
That the children of these lords,
Sitting at your council boards,
May be grave and aged seen,
Of her that was their father[s’] Queen.
Once I wish this wish again,
Heaven subscribe it with “Amen.”
At this moment of seasonal change, Shakespeare imagines Elizabeth as a timeless and rejuvenating force, likening her to a clock hand perpetually circling, resistant to the ravages of time, outliving generations. There’s a slight undertow to the conceit, the claustrophobic sense of being trapped in time, the uncomfortable thought that Elizabeth will still be around in a half century. Shakespeare knew better, his flattering words to the queen ignoring what he declares in his sonnets: only “in my verse,” he wrote, would the object of his devotion “ever live young” (Sonnet 19).
The epilogue’s style and diction are unmistakably Shakespearean, as are the trochaic rhythm and rhymed couplets that appear a score of times in songs and poems in his work. The only time that Shakespeare had ended a play in this meter had been in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, whose conclusion, with its call to bless the chambers of “this palace” and its “owner,” would have had special resonance at Richmond that day:
With this field dew consecrate,
Every fairy take his gait,
And each several chamber bless,
Through this palace, with sweet peace;
And the owner of it blest
Ever shall in safety rest.
(5.1.410–15)
Rhythmically, the transition between Oberon’s final lines in that play and the special epilogue (which would have replaced Puck’s final speech in the public playhouse) would have been seamless. If one had to venture a guess, it seems likely that Shakespeare wrote this special epilogue for a revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. That comedy’s mild anarchy dovetails especially well with the festive release of Shrove
Tuesday and Oberon’s words—“We the globe can compass soon, / Swifter than the wand’ring moon” (4.1.96–97)—nicely double as an allusion to their planned playhouse in Southwark.
It was brave of Shakespeare to broach the touchy subject of Elizabeth’s age. As Elizabeth’s godson John Harington put it, “There is almost none that waited in Queen Elizabeth’s court and observed any thing, but can tell, that it pleased her much to seem, and to be thought, and to be told, that she looked young.” Her age and looks mattered a great deal to Elizabeth. The French diplomat de Maisse describes the care she took in presenting herself: “She had a petticoat of white damask, girdled and open in the front, as was also her chemise, in such a manner that she often opened this dress and one could see all her belly, and even to her navel…. When she raises her head she has a trick of putting both handson her gown and opening it insomuch as all her belly can be seen.” De Maisse adds that when “anyone speaks of her beauty she says that she was never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless she speaks of her beauty as often as she can.” But he is quick to add that as “for her natural form and proportion, she is very beautiful.” Elizabeth was very much the fading Cleopatra: she knew that her age was working against her and recognized the need to silence those who drew attention to her years—and by extension her failing powers. But she also enjoyed and saw through flattery, and, as her flirtation with de Maisse makes clear, she remained a skilled enough performer to summon her charms when she wanted to, when politics demanded it.
Given her sensitivity to the matter of aging, mishandling the subject of Elizabeth’s mortality in her presence could be dangerous. Shakespeare may have heard the story of how, on Good Friday, 1596, Anthony Rudd, Bishop of St. David’s, had incautiously raised the same topic in his sermon to Elizabeth. Harington, who was present that day, writes that “this good bishop being appointed to preach before her… and wishing in a godly zeal, as well became him, that she would think some time of mortality, being then full sixty-three years of age, he took this text, for that purpose…. ‘O teach us to number our days.’ ” Like everyone else in the chapel, Elizabeth knew that this psalm was part of the Burial Service. After impatiently sitting through Rudd’s citation of many “passages of Scripture that touch the infirmity of age,” Elizabeth cut him off, saying, “He should have kept his arithmetic for himself.” The good bishop wasn’t invited back again until Lent, 1602, and he seemed not to have learned his lesson, this time preaching on the verse from the Psalm 82: “Ye are all the children of the most Highest, but ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.” Once again Elizabeth couldn’t restrain her sarcasm, dismissing him with the words, “You have made me a good funeral sermon; I may die when I will.”
WHEN THE CHAMBERLAIN’S MEN PERFORMED AT RICHMOND ON THE evening on February 20, they would have been unable to return to London until the following day. At some point on February 21, the six shareholders in the company—Burbage, Kemp, Shakespeare, Heminges, Phillips, and Pope—would meet with Cuthbert Burbage and Nicholas Brend to sign the lease on the Globe site. They may have delayed signing the lease until the first day they knew they would neither rehearse nor perform: Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. Or perhaps they wanted to wait until they were sure that Giles Allen had failed in his initial legal efforts to prevent them from using the timber of the Theatre to build the Globe.
There was a powerful incentive to linger at Richmond: Lancelot Andrewes was at court to deliver a sermon ushering in Lent, and he liked to preach his Lenten sermons in the morning, before the service of communion. Andrewes was arguably England’s greatest preacher in an age notable for its oratory. For Shakespeare that morning in court would offer a chance to hear and study a remarkable performer. Post-Reformation England had dispensed with the Catholic practice of daubing foreheads with ashes to signify repentance. Public sermons were now the primary means of conveying the spiritual meaning of the day that marked the end of Shrovetide frivolity (one need only look at Breugel’s famous painting of “The Battle of Shrovetide and Lent” to get a sense of the sharp clash of values implicit in the turning of the clock from Shrove Tuesday to Ash Wednesday, physically reinforced at Richmond by the change of venue from the great hall to the royal chapel). This symbolic shift from pleasure to serious reflection well suited a nation on the verge of war.
It wasn’t simply Andrewes’s distinctive prose style and powerful delivery that would have captured Shakespeare’s attention that day. Andrewes didn’t flinch from taking on topical issues in his sermons. True to form, he had chosen as his text for this Lenten sermon Deuteronomy 23:9, where Moses goes off to war. His sermon’s title makes its contemporary political relevance unambiguous: “Preached before Queen Elizabeth at Richmond, On the 21st of February, A.D., 1599, being Ash Wednesday, at What Time the Earl of Essex was Going Forth, upon the Expedition for Ireland.” The chapel walls, decorated with carvings of ancient British monarchs “whose life and virtue was so abundant that it hath pleased almighty God to… recount as saints,” formed a perfect backdrop for his sermon aligning church and state. It’s probable that Elizabeth, during this volatile period before Essex’s departure for Ireland, had advance notice of what Lancelot Andrewes intended to preach. Peter Heylyn recalled after her death that when Elizabeth “had any business to bring about amongst the people, she used to tune the pulpits, as her saying was; that is to say, to have some preachers in and about London, and other great auditories in the kingdom, ready at command to cry up her design.” Andrewes would not disappoint her.
The past two months had seen their share of turmoil over the Irish campaign. Infighting at court had intensified, including “high words” between Essex and the lord admiral. Chamberlain ominously observed that “many things pass which may not be written.” And he added that the “Earl of Essex is crazed, but whether more in body or mind is doubtful.” Essex only secured at the last moment permission “to return to her Majesty’s presence at such time as he shall find cause.” Essex’s “whole forces are said to be 16,000 foot and 1,400 horse,” but, Chamberlain adds, “When they shall come to the poll I fear they will fall short.”
All that remained was for the government to justify the campaign and for the church to bestow its blessings. Christopher Barker, printer to the queen, would publish “The Queen’s Majesty’s proclamation declaring her princely resolution in sending over her army into the realm of Ireland.” In it, Elizabeth declares that the Irish have “forgotten their allegiance, and (rebelliously taking arms) have committed many bloody and violent outrages upon our loyal subjects.” But she is careful to admit that the rebellion had many causes, including the abuses of some of her deputies there. The most striking lines in the proclamation have to do with Elizabeth’s defensiveness about accusations that she “intended an utter extirpation and rooting out of that nation and conquest of the country.” The charge is utterly rejected. Ireland, after all, is her own: “the very name of conquest in this case seemeth so absurd to us, as we cannot imagine upon what ground it could enter into any man’s conceit.” Barker would also print the official “Prayer for the good success of her Majesty’s forces in Ireland,” asking God “to strengthen and protect the forces of thine anointed, our Queen and Sovereign, sent to suppress these wicked and unnatural rebels.”
Andrewes’s sermon—no less than Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth—needs to be understood within the context of the huge obstacles such official pronouncements ignored. Essex feared that the Irish climate would consume “our armies, and if they live, yet famine and nakedness makes them lose both heart and strength.” Logistics, too, were nightmarish: “if victuals be sent over, yet there will be no means to carry it.” Essex had enough military experience and knowledge of the court to see that he was walking into a trap: “All those things, which I am like to see, I do now foresee…. Too ill success will be dangerous…. Too good will be envious.”
If Essex was doomed, those loyal to him might suffer the same fat
e. John Harington’s kinsman, Mr. Robert Markham, at considerable danger to himself, warned Harington of just this outcome. His extraordinary letter provides further evidence of how wary some contemporaries were of this military adventure even before the expeditionary force had set sail:
I hear you are to go to Ireland with the Lieutenant, Essex. If so, mark my counsel in this matter: I doubt not your valor nor your labor, but that damnable uncovered honesty will mar your fortunes. Observe the man who commandeth, and yet is commanded himself. He goeth not forth to serve the Queen’s realm, but to humor his own revenge. Be heedful of your bearings. Speak not your mind to all you meet. I tell you I have round for my caution. Essex hath enemies; he hath friends, too.
Markham offers his inexperienced kinsman a quick sketch of the political landscape. This was advice that might save Harington’s life: write down everything, say little, and don’t play the fool. In a world of surveillance, be a spy yourself, for “there are overlookers set on you all”:
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 10
