You are to take account of all that passes in your expedition, and keep journal thereof, unknown to any in the company. This will be expected of you…. I say, do not meddle in any sort, nor give your jesting too freely among those you know not. Obey the Lord Deputy in all things, but give not your opinion; it may be heard in England. Though you obey, yet seem not to advise, in any one point. Your obeisance may be, and must be, construed well; but your counsel may be thought ill of, if any bad business follow.
Markham well knew that if his letter were intercepted he would be in grave trouble, so he gave the letter to his sister to deliver, first ensuring that she was unaware of its contents—“danger goeth abroad,” and “silence is the safest armor.”
Fear and skepticism extended well beyond the court. The popular astrologer Simon Forman was kept busy in the early months of 1599 by clients hoping to learn through the signs of the heavens the fate of loved ones going off to the war. Forman even privately cast a horoscope “to know how… Essex shall speed in his voyage into Ireland, and whether he shall prevail or no.” Here’s what he learned:
There seems to be in the end of his voyage negligence, treason, hunger, sickness and death, and he shall not do much good to bring it to effect. But at his return much treachery shall be wrought against him and in the end will be evil to himself, for he shall be imprisoned or have great trouble. For he shall find many enemies in his return and have great loss of goods and honor and much villainy and treason shall be wrought against him to the hazard of his life…. He shall escape it with much ado after long time and much infamy and trouble.
That this horoscope could double as the plot summary of a romantic tragedy owes something to Forman’s love of theater (in fact, he repeatedly visited the Curtain this spring, though his mind seems to have been more on a young woman he was pursuing than on the Chamberlain’s Men’s plays). Horoscopes, like plays, though more clumsily, give voice to hopes and fears that might otherwise remain unspoken. Unlike Forman, Shakespeare didn’t consult astrological signs to register the deep anxieties the Irish campaign was raising. The play he was completing, its timely subject matter Henry V’s military exploits overseas, would resonate deeply with the conflicted feelings of a nation committed to war—a nation hoping for the best, but knowing that “treason, hunger, sickness and death” were just as likely the fate that awaited Essex and his followers.
WHEN SCHOLARS TALK ABOUT THE SOURCES OF SHAKESPEARE’S PLAYS, they almost always mean printed books like Raphael Holinshed’s Chronicles that they themselves can read. But Shakespeare’s was an aural culture, the music of which has long faded. Lost to us are the unrecorded sounds reverberating around him—street cries of vendors, church bells, regional and foreign accents, scraps of overheard conversation, and countless bits of speech and noise that filled the densely packed capital. Some of these made their way into Shakespeare’s writing, others impeded it, and still others were a kind of precondition for it. In a culture where so little was written down, memories had to be strong. Only a tiny percentage of Elizabethan sermons were committed to print, so it’s a stroke of luck that Andrewes’s war sermon was one of them, for the evidence suggests that elements of it inspired (or uncannily paralleled) the play that Shakespeare was now completing.
Andrewes began his sermon in the usual fashion by quoting the Scripture upon which he would elaborate—“When thou goest out, with the host against thine enemies, keep thee then from all wickedness”—before launching into a dramatic start that underscored just how directly the Bible spoke to the current military crisis in Ireland. “To entitle this time to this text, or to show it pertinent to the present occasion, will ask no long preface. ‘When thou goest forth, etc.’ This when is now. There be enemies; and we have an host: It is going forth.” It’s worth quoting at length (like Shakespeare’s prose, it’s best read aloud) to catch Andrewes’s distinctive voice—abrupt, jagged, full of emphases, crammed with witty conceits and wordplay—a style beloved of the Elizabethans:
This our host so going forth, our hearts desire and prayer unto God is, that they may happily go, and thrice happily come again; with joy and triumph, to her sacred Majesty; honor to themselves; and general contentment to the whole land.
Note the thumping reiteration of “this time” and “this day”:
These former years, this time of the fast, and this day, the first day of it (both) ministered an occasion to call from an abstinence from sin. This day, and this time being set out by the Church’s appointment to that end. Now, besides that ordinary, of other years, God, this year, hath sent us another, this time of war, and that, a very seasonable time too, wherein to repent and retire from sins…. This is the sum… that our giving over sin might procure the good speed to our going forth; even an honorable and happy return.
Just five weeks later London audiences would hear far more rousing sentiments in a similar celebration of troops going into battle “this day” in Henry the Fifth:
This day is called the Feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day and comes safe home
Will stand a-tiptoe when this day is named
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live old age
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors
And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian.”
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars,
And say, “These wounds I had on Crispin’s Day.”
(4.3.40–48)
The thrust of Andrewes’s speech is to sanction, if not bless, the plan to crush Tyrone, who has broken faith: “Here, here have been diverse princely favors vouchsafed, and most unkindly rejected; means of clemency many times most graciously offered, and most ungraciously refused; yea, faith falsified, and expectation deluded; contempt upon contempt heaped up, that the measure is full. These then are the enemies against, and this the time when.” Though offering unconditional support for the campaign, Andrewes doesn’t shy away from chiding the government for its past habit of sending over ill-equipped soldiers. This time must be different: “Victuals must be supplied…. Pay must be thought of.…We must ‘go forth with our host’… ‘with our host,’ not a heap of naked or starved men.” And perhaps turning directly to Essex (who had recently boasted that he “would have thought danger a sport and death a feast”), Andrewes warns that “war is no matter of sport.” It “may be ‘sport’ in the beginning; it will be ‘bitterness in the end,’ if it hold long.” It was a sermon sure to meet with his monarch’s approval.
There are a number of moments in Henry the Fifth that owe nothing to either the chronicles or to Shakespeare’s dramatic sources. They are related to the two strands of Andrewes’s argument in this sermon: the theological justification for an aggressive offensive war and the need for those who go off to war to purge themselves of sin. Henry the Fifth opens with English clergymen debating an imminent military campaign, followed not long after by one of the longest speeches in any of Shakespeare’s plays, a virtual sermon by the Archbishop of Canterbury insisting on the legitimacy of Henry’s offensive war against his neighboring country. Even as Andrewes assures Elizabeth, Essex, and the rest of the court that war is “no sin, but lawful” and that “not only defensive war, but offensive war too hath his ‘when,’ ” Canterbury argues in Shakespeare’s play that Henry’s cause is lawful, just, and has the clergy’s blessing.
The connection between Andrewes’s sermon and Shakespeare’s play extends to the scene in which the disguised Henry V argues with his troops on the eve of the battle of Agincourt. At the climax of this scene the king refuses to accept his soldiers’ argument that if the war is unjust, their guilt is upon his head. When Henry insists rather that “every subject’s soul is his own” and that every soldier should “wash every mote out of his conscience,” he might as well be paraphrasing Andrewes’s contention that the act of going to war demands a collective renunciation of sin: “What a thing this is, how great, gross and foul a
nd incongruity it is, to pour ourselves into sin at the very time when we go forth to correct sin: To set forth to punish rebels when we ourselves are in rebellion against God?” Finally, Andrewes’s belief that the victory belongs to God not man—“that the safe and speedy coming again of them that ‘now go forth’… dependeth upon God’s ‘going forth with them’ ”—is echoed in the play by Henry’s assertion that the victory is God’s alone: “O God, thy arm was here! / And not to us, but to thy arm alone, / Ascribe we all” (4.8.106–8).
With Andrewes’s cadences ringing in his ears, Shakespeare returned to London that day to sign off on the Globe contract. The break for Lent left him a few precious weeks to finish the play before he had to turn it over, first to the master of the revels for approval and then to the actors to learn their lines in time for the reopening of the theaters in late March.
– 5 –
Band of Brothers
A month later, crowds of playgoers streamed north through Bishopsgate to the Curtain in Shoreditch, while others walked south across London Bridge to Henslowe’s Rose in Southwark. Boatmen ferried playgoers across the Thames in both directions. Flags flying from the tops of the playhouses confirmed that playing had resumed following a monthlong break for Lent. The titles of the plays to be performed that afternoon by the Chamberlain’s and Admiral’s Men—“Painted in play-bills, upon every post”—had already been widely advertised throughout the city. Musicians were dispatched to literally drum up business, while trumpets called out to the tardy from the playhouse rooftops. The rival playing companies were blessed with exceptional weather this week, the kind likely to draw audiences to the outdoor playhouses in large numbers. Between March 22 and 27, the days were “bright and clear and very hot,” Simon Forman recorded, “like summer.” Days were also getting longer; with the play and jig lasting roughly three hours, from two to five in the afternoon, there would still be an hour or so of daylight after the performance for spectators to find their way home before dark.
While no records survive for what the Chamberlain’s Men earned at the Curtain, we know that the Admiral’s Men did poorly at the Rose both this week and the next: Henslowe records receipts of three pounds, eighteen shillings followed by just over two pounds, a fraction of the weekly average of nine pounds. Coming on the heels of their excellent gate receipts right before the theaters closed for Lent, this poor attendance can best be explained by the competition. It looks like far more Londoners went to see the Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare’s much-awaited Henry the Fifth. But playgoers at the Curtain were not rewarded with the kind of play they had expected or that Shakespeare had promised. Their comic favorite, Will Kemp, wasn’t even in the cast, nor was there much merrymaking with Katharine of France.
Plays about Henry V had been a staple of the Elizabethan stage since the mid-1580s. The most popular of them, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, had been in the repertory of the Queen’s Men, and after they disbanded it continued to be performed by other companies. Henslowe’s records give some sense of its popularity: in one eight-month stretch in the mid-1590s it was staged an extraordinary thirteen times. Shakespeare knew it intimately. When looking for incidents to develop in both parts of Henry the Fourth and again in Henry the Fifth, it was the first place he turned, and he went back to it repeatedly, ransacking it for episodes, lifting everything from the highway robbery scene that opens The First Part of Henry the Fourth to the wooing of Kate that ends Henry the Fifth. And he had done so from memory, for the anonymous play was only belatedly published in 1598. Shakespeare’s easy familiarity with The Famous Victories strongly suggests that on more than one occasion, as both he and the play moved from company to company in the early 1590s, he had regularly acted in it and perhaps reflected on how he might rework it. Shakespeare knew that audiences didn’t love The Famous Victories for its complexity. Its prose was workaday and its characters two-dimensional. More a series of skits than a coherent play, it was a perfect vehicle for a great clown like Richard Tarlton. And playgoers enjoyed its untroubled patriotism: the French are silly and the war is a romp, even when the English are badly outnumbered. The Famous Victories had no ambition to leave audiences wrestling with any great moral issues, and it certainly didn’t make any intellectual demands on them. If you were paying to see a play about Henry V, you could expect to have a few laughs and cheer on your nation and its heroic past.
Playgoers at the Curtain in late March 1599 were in for a surprise the moment Shakespeare’s Henry the Fifth began. Unlike the Famous Victories, it opened not with a famous clown bantering with his prince, but with a very serious Chorus dressed in a long black velvet cloak who announces new ground rules. The Chorus, which scholars have argued was played by Shakespeare himself, picks up where the revised epilogue to The Second Part of Henry the Fourth had left off. This was going to be work. And work not just for the playwright straining for inspiration, or for the actors who have “dared / On this unworthy scaffold to bring forth / So great an object,” but for the audience, too. The playwright and players cannot manage alone: “Let us, ciphers to this great account, / On your imaginary forces work.” The burden, the Chorus repeats, falls squarely on the playgoers: “Think, when we talk of horses, that you see them.” The play will fail without their imaginative effort: they are urged to “piece out” the play’s “imperfections,” and “make imaginary puissance”—another dense phrase, meaning “picture an army in your mind’s eye”(Prologue, 9–26).
This was the first of several times in 1599 that Shakespeare, in breaking with the past and underscoring how much had changed, rewrote an old familiar story. In so doing, one of the most challenging tasks he set for his audience was insisting that they keep the two plays, old and new, simultaneously in mind. Henry the Fifth becomes a much more original and complicated work when playgoers couldn’t help but see it unfold in juxtaposition to what they were expecting, a play like The Famous Victories in which the gritty realities of war had never intruded.
An uncritical sense of England’s heroic past (forgivable when The Famous Victories was first staged for a nation that dreaded and then miraculously escaped a punishing Spanish armada) was no longer credible. And in 1599, it was impossible to recall Henry V’s celebrated invasion of France without reflecting on the fate of Essex’s much anticipated campaign in Ireland. Ireland, which never intruded in The Famous Victories, haunts Shakespeare’s play and, as much as anything else, defines what is new in Shakespeare’s version, while also suggesting what his own preoccupations were at this time.
Ireland seeps into the play at the most unexpected and even unintended moments, such as when the Queen of France, who has never met her future son-in-law Henry V, greets him with the words, “So happy be the issue, brother Ireland, / Of this good day and of this gracious meeting” (5.2.12–13). The mistake is not the nervous queen’s but Shakespeare’s, who slipped when intending to write “brother England” (and whose error modern editors silently correct). That this confusion of identity occurs in the context of the “issue” or union of English king and French princess makes the error all the more revealing, for anxiety over pure and hybrid national identity runs through the play even as it preoccupied those who wrote about England’s Irish problem.
For much of the play, allusions to the current crisis in Ireland are fleeting, such as the offhand remarks about Irish kerns and bogs. When Gower, an English captain, speaks of a soldier who wears “a beard of the General’s cut,” his reference to the Earl of Essex’s distinctive square-cut beard, which collapses the distance between Henry V’s world and their own, would not have been lost upon London playgoers. There are also glancing allusions to the kind of bitter conditions their conscripted fellow countrymen were facing at that moment in Ireland, with “winter coming on and sickness growing / Upon our soldiers” (3.3.55–56). And the stage direction in act 3, scene 6—“Enter the King and his poor soldiers”—would also have evoked with surprising realism England’s poorly outfitted forces in Irel
and.
Only in the play’s final act does Essex’s imminent Irish campaign, long submerged, break the surface of the play. Temporarily abandoning the make-believe world of theater, Shakespeare invites his fellow Londoners to think not about Henry V but about the near future, the day when they will pour into the streets of London to welcome home Essex, “General of our gracious Empress” Elizabeth. It’s an extraordinary moment and the only time in his plays that Shakespeare breaks theatrical allusion and directs playgoers’ attention away from the make-believe world of his play to the real world outside the theater:
But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens!
The mayor and all his brethren, in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’ antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in;
As by a lower but loving likelihood,
Were now the General of our gracious Empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare Page 11
