A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare

by James Shapiro

  Nowhere was the affinity between ancient Rome and Elizabethan England more pronounced than at court. Visitors to Woodstock Palace were told that it had been built “in Julius Caesar’s time,” while those arriving at Nonsuch Palace were struck by its exterior, “built entirely of great blocks of white stone on which are represented numerous Roman and other ancient stories.” Continuing this architectural theme, “above the doors of the inner court” stood “stone statues of three Roman emperors.” Elizabeth’s palace at Greenwich housed a bust of Julius Caesar. And when Shakespeare and his fellow players visited Hampton Court, they would have seen displayed in the room next to Elizabeth’s quarters “a gold embroidered tapestry on the walls” that “told the history of the murder of Julius Caesar, the first emperor.” If that were not enough, by “the door stood three of the emperor’s electors in customary dress painted in life-like fashion.” It seems that the desired effect of the trompe l’oeil was to make viewers feel like they were momentarily transported back in time. But, as they stood near the large tapestry of Caesar’s assassination and faced the three lifelike Roman electors painted by the door, did visitors feel like co-conspirators or witnesses to a heinous political crime? Caesar also appears in two spectacular tapestries depicting triumphs at Hampton Court—The Triumph of Chastity Over Love and The Triumph of Fame Over Death, both based on Petrarch’s poem I Trionfi. These tapestries had hung at Hampton Court since Cardinal Wolsey had purchased them early in the century, before the building, like Whitehall, was taken from him by Henry VIII. These “triumphs” quickly caught the eye of poets, including John Skelton, who described how “all the world stares” at the “Triumphs of Caesar / And of Pompeius’ war.” Ceasar’s legacy, his triumphs and his assassination, loomed large in Shakespeare’s England.

  FIFTY LINES INTO JULIUS CAESAR, AS THEY GRAPPLED WITH THE MOTIVES underlying Caesar’s triumph, Elizabethan playgoers were confronted with a dizzying overlap of religion and politics, past and present. The start is symphonic: all of the play’s major themes are established, the fundamental questions driving the drama set out. Before we even catch a glimpse of the protagonists—Caesar, Brutus, Antony, and Cassius—two disposable minor characters and a crowd make clear what’s at stake and what’s contested. Is this a holiday—and, if so, a political or religious one? Has a high-flying Caesar overreached or have his overzealous opponents read too much into his actions? Is the tribunes’ sense of the commoners as an easily manipulated rabble correct, or have they underestimated their political savvy?

  As if to compensate for keeping the protagonists offstage at the play’s outset, in the scene that immediately follows Shakespeare brings all the main characters onstage at once, though most of them don’t even speak. While Flavius and Marullus exit by one door, Caesar, Antony, Calpurnia, Portia, Decius, Brutus, Cassius, Casca, and the Soothsayer sweep in from the other. And, shortly thereafter, Murellus and Flavius return, only to see their greatest fears realized. Caesar speaks first, overseeing the rites of the holiday of Lupercal, including the footrace in which young men strike sterile women: “The barren, touched in this holy chase, / Shake off their sterile curse” (1.2.7–8). He also engages in a bit of choreography, directing his wife to stand in Antonio’s way and reminding Antonio to “touch Calpurnia”—a not so subtle hint that he’s anxious for a political heir (an inappropriate desire in republican Rome, which had long since banished dynastic succession). Plutarch tells us that Lupercal’s murky origins were variously associated with symbolic violence, collective purification, ritual sacrifice, the killing of enemies, even the preservation of Rome. These mysterious origins suited Shakespeare’s needs perfectly, even as it enabled him to anchor the play in how the genre of tragedy itself is historically rooted in the nexus of religion, collective communal identity, and bloody sacrifice—all this in a play whose central action, the slaughter of Caesar, reenacts this complex ritual.

  The crucial event of the second scene in Julius Caesar takes place off-stage: Antony’s attempt to crown the triumphant Caesar in the midst of the revelry. Brutus and Cassius, who had stayed behind rather than follow the Lupercalian race, are told by Casca that Caesar was offered a crown, “and, being offered him, he put it by with the back of his hand, thus, and then the people fell a-shouting.” Twice more, it turns out, Antony offered Caesar a crown—or rather, Casca says, “’twas not a crown neither, ’twas one of these coronets.” To Casca’s thinking, Caesar was “loath to lay his fingers off it.” As Antony yet again offered it and Caesar refused it for the third time, “the rabblement hooted and clapped their chapped hands, and threw up their sweaty nightcaps, and uttered such a deal of stinking breath because Caesar refused the crown that it had almost choked Caesar” (1.2.237–48). Once again, the meaning of the scene is left ambiguous: Was Caesar earnestly rejecting the crown? Or was Casca right in suggesting that he wanted it—and would, if he could, rule over them all?

  In his main source for this scene Shakespeare came across material he chose to suppress, for Plutarch makes clear that the coronation scene was anything but spontaneous. When Antony entered “the market place” he “came to Caesar and presented him a diadem wreathed about with laurel”:

  Whereupon there rose a certain cry of rejoicing, not very great, done only by a few, appointed for that purpose. But when Caesar refused the diadem, then all the people together made an outcry of joy. Then Antonius offering it him again, there was a second shout of joy, but yet of a few. But when Caesar refused it again the second time, then all the whole people shouted. Caesar having made this proof, found that the people did not like of it, and thereupon rose out of his chair, and commanded the crown to be carried unto Jupiter in the Capitol.

  The scene had been orchestrated: planted in the crowd were “a few” supporters “appointed for the purpose” who are ready to cry out when Antony offers Caesar the crown. But they fail to carry the rest of the crowd. Making the best of this staged show, Caesar recognizes that the people only cheer when he refuses the crown; it’s pointless to force the issue at this moment.

  Shakespeare may well have been startled when he came across this account in Plutarch, for he had himself invented a version of this scene before ever picking up a copy of the Lives. Richard the Third includes a wonderful moment when Richard, with his sidekick Buckingham, tries to manipulate the crowd in much the same way. This incident, too, is also described rather than enacted. Buckingham assures Richard that he did everything he could to persuade the citizens to join in his cry for “Richard, England’s royal king”—but they refused to join in and declare Richard king. Buckingham even employs the same strategy that Antony and Caesar had in Shakespeare’s source, planting supporters in the crowd to galvanize support:

  Some followers of mine own,

  At lower end of the hall, hurled up their caps,

  And some ten voices cried, “God save King Richard!”

  And thus I took the vantage of those few:

  “Thanks, gentle citizens and friends,” quoth I,

  “This general applause and cheerful shout

  Argues your wisdoms and your love to Richard.”

  (3.7.34–40)

  But the terrified English subjects see through the charade, and, as in Plutarch, the maneuver fails. The revelation of this political chicanery further damns Richard in our eyes—which helps explain why Shakespeare chose not to base the scene on what Plutarch wrote, for he goes out of his way in Julius Caesar never to tilt the balance so decisively against Caesar.

  Even as Julius Caesar anticipates Hamlet, it also looks back to Henry the Fifth, for Caesar’s appropriation of a religious holiday for political ends recalls Henry V’s similar efforts. The historical Henry V may have said a lot of things to his troops on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. He may have prayed to God, he may have prayed that the English longbow or the hedge of stakes planted to protect his forces from the French cavalry might carry the day. But we can be sure that he didn’t say anything about how the longed-for victory
on St. Crispin’s Day ought to be commemorated as a civic holiday. Only in a post-Reformation world would this have been imaginable. When Henry suggests that Crispin’s Day henceforth be associated with England’s great victory over France, Shakespeare has him speaking as a late-sixteenth-century monarch. We are no longer invited to remember the religious figures—the fraternal Saints Crispin and Crispinian—but rather the English military heroes who fought that day:

  Then shall our names,

  Familiar in his mouth as household words—

  Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

  Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester—

  Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.

  This story shall the good man teach his son;

  And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

  From this day to the ending of the world

  But we in it shall be remembered.

  (4.3.51–56)

  For all of Henry’s insistence that the glory of the victory be attributed to God, it is not God’s saints but rather he and the other English leaders who will be eternally celebrated. It’s hard to imagine a better example of the displacement of the religious by the nationalist. When these stirring lines were spoken on a London stage in 1599, the victory at Agincourt was no longer celebrated (it’s only because of Shakespeare’s words that its memory has been kept alive). England had lost even its final toehold in France, Calais, which had been turned back over to the French a few months before Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558. So much for “from this day to the ending of the world.” What distinguishes Henry the Fifth from Julius Caesar is that in the former, triumph and holiday are kept apart; in the latter, they form a combustible mixture.

  THE ELIZABETHANS HAD THEIR OWN “CROWNATION DAY,” AS SOME CALLED it: November 17, generally known as Accession Day—commemorating the day in 1558 that Queen Mary died and Elizabeth’s rule began. Whether it was officially a religious or political holiday depended on whom you asked. For the first couple of decades of Elizabeth’s reign, November 17, if celebrated at all, had been observed as St. Hugh of Lincoln’s Day, in memory of a popular regional saint whose holiday had nonetheless been struck from the national calendar.

  But after Elizabeth’s forces crushed the Northern Rebellion in 1569, November 17 took on a special status, with “bonfires, ringing of bells, discharging of ordinance at the Tower of London in the honor of the Queen and other signs of joy,” including “triumphs used now yearly before Whitehall.” Elizabeth’s Accession Day was probably the first political holiday in modern Europe, and it initiated the string of nationalist holidays that are now a staple of the Anglo-American calendar. While holidays like Guy Fawkes Day or Independence Day seem perfectly normal today, the notion of a nonreligious holiday, or even of a holy day celebrating a living figure, was simply unimaginable before this in Europe. Though authorities preferred to speak of these celebrations as the spontaneous effusions of loyal subjects, Elizabeth’s government quietly provided guidelines intended to promote the holiday, including a reprinted Form of Prayer with Thanksgiving to be Used… the 17th of November (1578). Works like Edmund Bunny’s Certain Prayers… for the Seventeenth of November (1585), which included a helpful folding chart of the main points preachers should use in their Accession Day sermons, furthered these governmental aims.

  While most Elizabethans, suffering from the dearth of holidays (especially in autumn), were happy enough for any excuse to carouse, those on the religious extremes—both Catholics and Protestants—immediately saw the danger of mixing politics and religion, triumph and holiday, in this way. In 1581, for example, the Puritan malcontent Robert Wright challenged a parson named Barwick over a sermon that the latter had preached. As far as Wright was concerned, Barwick had no business calling November 17 a “holiday.” Barwick tried to backtrack, claiming that he merely referred to it as a “solemn day,” but Wright wouldn’t let the matter rest. In an attack that anticipates Cassius’s bitter words about Julius Caesar—“And this man / Is now become a god” (1.2.115–16)—Wright argued that to “have a sermon on the Queen’s day and to give God thanks for her Majesty was to make her a god.” Reports of Wright’s claim that the point of the holiday was to turn the queen into a god reached Elizabeth and angered her; he was charged with slander and thrown in prison.

  Sometimes the conflicts over the celebrations on this day verged on the comical. The students at Lincoln College, Oxford—which had strong Catholic leanings—would annually on November 17 commemorate their patron saint, Saint Hugh of Lincoln. Sometime around 1580, Oxford’s mayor caught them in the act of ringing bells at All Hallow Church, and accused them of doing so in memory of the passing of Queen Mary. The quick-witted students avoided punishment by claiming that they were simply ringing bells in honor of Elizabeth’s accession. The chastened mayor, we are told, then ordered the rest of Oxford’s churches to ring their bells, too. Historians have noted that in some parts of England where payments were made for bell ringing on this day, accounts sometimes specify that they are to honor Elizabeth and sometimes Saint Hugh. If the authorities were unsure for whom the bells tolled, how could those toiling in the fields that day know with any certainty who was being honored: Saint Hugh? Mary? Elizabeth?

  Where puritan critics saw in Accession Day a reversion to Catholic ritual, Catholic ones condemned the holiday as pagan, having “no better ground than the idolatrous rites and pastimes exhibited by the heathenish to Jupiter, Mars, Hercules, etc.” Catholic polemicists also derided Accession Day as a naked attempt to supplant the cult of the Virgin Mary with an unholy cult of Elizabeth. Edward Rushton was outraged that on November 17 at St. Paul’s Cathedral an “antiphonal or hymn” once sung in praise of the Virgin was now “converted… to the… honor of Queen Elizabeth, thereby to sound her praises.” The appropriation of religious ritual for political ends had gone too far. Defenders of Elizabeth’s regime confronted with this charge were left sputtering.

  In November 1599, Londoners who had seen Julius Caesar in performances over the past few months at the Globe would have been treated to a scene in which life imitated art. On November 17 and 18, a Saturday and Sunday, Hugh Holland and John Richardson preached back-to-back sermons at Paul’s Cross pulpit. If the public theaters could hold upward of three thousand spectators, the crowded outdoor space around the raised pulpit outside St Paul’s Cathedral could hold twice that number. When Brutus and Antony take turns speaking at the open-air “pulpit” in Julius Caesar, it is just such a site that Shakespeare and his audience would have had in mind.

  Holland, preaching on Accession Day, played what might be described as Brutus’s role, for he used the pulpit to defend the actions of the state. His appointed task was to defend “the honor of this realm [that] hath been uncharitably traduced by some of our adversaries in foreign nations, and at home, for observing the 17th of November yearly in the form of a holy-day.” Richardson, for his part, got to play the role of Antony (though without Antony’s rhetorical flair or success) using as his point of departure Matthew 22:21—“Give unto Caesar’s that which is Caesar’s”—subtly challenging the position of those in power. The crowd, alert to “bugswords” or coded language, got the point and news quickly spread that Richardson, “in open pulpit, spoke much of the misgovernment in Ireland; and used many words of the duty of subjects to their princes.”

  The story of these rival pulpit speeches reveals a good deal about political sensitivities at the time, and about the extent to which the issues Shakespeare explores in Julius Caesar reflected contemporary concern with the uses of the classical past, republicanism, tyranny, holiday, popularity, censorship, political spin, and the silencing of opposing voices. The analogies in this case are particularly strong: the government was greatly concerned that Elizabeth was portrayed as tyrannical; it was no less sensitive about accusations that the queen was appropriating holiday to promote her political cult. The incident offers a sharper sense than we might otherwise have of the power of the public serm
on, the risks and dangers (so evident in Julius Caesar) of that favorite phrase of the queen, tuning the pulpits. Secretary of State Cecil himself scribbled worried notes on a copy of Richardson’s sermon.

  Classical stories could be dangerous—especially one that called to mind the Tacitean narrative of Nero’s reign that had caused John Hayward such anguish. Even if Richardson had no knowledge of Tacitus, his sermon was read as if he did, one report claiming that “he used a Latin phrase borrowed out of Tacitus.” And the same pair of powerful churchmen that had censored Hayward—Whitgift and Bancroft, the Archbishop of Canterbury and Bishop of London—now turned their attention to Richardson, and demanded to know “whether he had conferred with any man or were advised or instructed by any person to enter into that part, point, division, or application of his sermon.”

  The authorities who had invited Richardson to speak felt as taken advantage of as Brutus after he turned the pulpit over to Antony. The official immediately responsible, Edward Stanhope, Bishop Bancroft’s diocesan chancellor, was clearly caught off guard (“I least listened for novelties at his hands, as he was never of a turbulent spirit”) and noted that in the aftermath of the sermon, Whitgift and Bancroft responded by silencing Richardson: he “now stands sequestered in a private house to his chamber, with the same restraint of resort to him, and silence, as before.” It was not just on the stage of the Globe that those who challenged the authorities were, to recall Flavius and Marullus’s ominous fate, “put to silence.”