The Elizabethans (51 page)

Dickie your boy, that with his grumbling voice

Was wont to cheer his dad in mutinies?

Or, with the rest, where is your darling, Rutland?

Look, York: I stained this napkin with the blood

That valiant Clifford, with his rapier’s point

Made issue from the bosom of the boy . . .

There had never been writing like this in the English theatre before, and the intimacy of the language – ‘cheer his dad’ – immeasurably adds to the menace and the torture. And here were the Kings and Queens of England, and the cartels of aristocrats who vied for power in the previous century and steeped the country in anarchy and blood, brought alive, in a language that is both realistic (to that degree demotic) and vividly poetic. More than any of the other dramatists, Shakespeare wrote evermore challenging roles for the boy actors playing formidable women. Queen Margaret is the first of them – a great line that will include Cleopatra, Goneril and Regan, Lady Macbeth and Gertrude. Margaret is denounced by York as the ‘she-wolf of France’ and as ‘O, tiger’s heart wrapped in a woman’s hide’. So we can have no doubt that the University Wits, of whom Greene was one, saw Shakespeare the man of Stratford as an upstart. Greene’s ‘upstart Crow’ joke is a reference to the Aesop fable in which the crow dresses in the brighter plumage of other birds. Poor Greene, only in his early thirties, was living in abject poverty as the lodger of a poor shoe-maker when he met his end. None of his Cambridge friends came near him in his dejection and sickness. (It appears to have been some sort of food poisoning – he fell ill after a dinner of pickled herring and Rhenish wine.)

Shakespeare’s histories still work on the stage. The
Henry VI
plays have enjoyed a number of revivals in England in recent years. Can we hope to reconstruct what the original audiences made of them, or whether the cycle of English history plays – written by Shakespeare and others – conveys some overall shared political viewpoint? Probably not. It is no longer fashionable to suppose that Shakespeare set out to write a National Epic, in which the chronicles of Hall and Holinshed come to life as stage plays. But, as at other periods of history – one thinks of the Soviet theatre, or of the life of the theatre in Paris during the German occupation – the theatre is a flexibly creative outlet for political dissent.

The
Henry VI
plays, in particular, do not provide us with a homogeneous or obvious political message. They are not, as earlier generations of critics wanted to say, a finished piece of propaganda for the Tudor dynasty, or upholders of the Tudor myth, or even a consistent defence of privilege against the mob. On the contrary, in
Henry VI Part II
, for example, the rebellion of Jack Cade is viewed as a prelude to the anarchy that is going to engulf the whole of England during the Wars of the Roses. But Cade is not viewed as inferior to the aristocrats, whose behaviour is in many ways like his. Indeed, Cade inverts the chivalric code by asserting, ‘The proudest peer in the realm shall not wear a head on his shoulders, unless he pay me a tribute; there shall not a maid be married, but she shall pay to me her maidenhead ere they have it . . .’
²³
This
droit de seigneur
is no more than the medieval aristocracy demanded of the English people. Cade is not seen by Shakespeare as less noble than the murderous York family, the bloodthirsty Queen Margaret; or as more of an anarchist than Hotspur and Owain Glynd
ŵ
r and the ‘rebels’ of later plays. ‘What, Buckingham and Clifford, are ye so brave? And you, base peasants, do ye believe him?’
²⁴

There is a deep-seated radicalism in the very idea of depicting English history as a stage play, and Shakespeare is by no means the arch-conservative, afraid of taking away ‘degree’, whom an earlier generation saw. By ‘radicalism’, however, I do not mean that Shakespeare – once thought to be right-wing – was really left-wing. I mean that he saw down to the roots of the political realities of his day, more intelligently and more subversively than that. Watching the history plays now is to feel what an extraordinarily explosive, changeable and dangerous period the later years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign were. By looking back at the previous century, when contention about the Crown and the succession were the causes of civil war, the London audiences were looking at their own age – in which Ireland was, as ever, in a state of semi-anarchy and hostility to England; when, behind the doll-like figure of the ageing queen and her court of senescent sycophants, lurked the spectre of the Succession Question. London, in particular, where these plays were staged, was a place where we can meet factions just as likely to tear one another apart as the factions depicted in Shakespeare’s sixteenth-century reconstructions. There were the Roman Catholics hoping for Elizabeth to be replaced by – whom? Arbella Stuart? There were the extreme radicals who wanted the Reformation to be finished. There were the merchants of the City, the money-men who were not sufficiently represented in the seats of power, and who would, together with the Puritans, come to see Parliament as the setting for challenging the royal prerogative. The struggles that turned into the English Civil War all lay ahead, but we can see them at work in Elizabethan London and we can read prophetic meditations upon the issues of that war in Shakespeare’s plays. And we can also read his monumental distaste for politics, his assertion of the personal above the collective. By far the most sympathetic, as well as memorable, figure in all the history plays was not a king or a queen or a noble warrior, but a fat old man who wanted to waste his time (and everyone else’s) in whorehouses and taverns, undermining a prince not for reasons of political anarchy, but because he loved young men and mischief and drink.

22

Marprelate and Hooker

SOME OF THE
funniest writing of Elizabeth’s reign is to be found in the seven anonymous pamphlets of Martin Marprelate, published on a secret printing press between 1588 and 1589. The object of his satirical abuse is the Church of England, and its bishops in particular. Although the specific
matter
of the tracts would seem to a modern reader narrowly ecclesiastical – ‘Martin’ is arguing for the abolition of bishops and the setting up of a form of Presbyterianism in England – the pamphlets have a far wider importance in literary and political history. For a start, they are superbly inventive and surreal in their manipulation of language, standing worthy of comparison with the prose of Milton (which they plainly influenced), Dean Swift and – in their gleeful puns and coinages – James Joyce.

But they are also, from the midst of that repressively censored world, a cry for intellectual and political freedom. At the centre of his target is the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, who in 1586 had persuaded the Council in the Star Chamber (it was not difficult!) to give to himself and John Aylmer, the bustling, aggressive, diminutive Bishop of London, the power of sole censors of all printed material. They had the power – if they did not like what the press was printing – to destroy the press, deface the type, disable the printer and imprison him for up to six months.
¹
Marprelate cited the case of a Protestant painter, Robert Waldegrave, who:

dares not show his face for the bloodthirsty desire you have for his life, only for printing of books which toucheth the Bishops’ mitres. You know that Waldegrave’s printing press and letters [i.e. type] were taken away. His press, being timber, was sawn and hewed in pieces. The iron work battered and made unserviceable, his letters melted, with cases and other tools defaced . . . and he himself utterly deprived forever [of] printing again, having a wife and six small children. Will this monstrous cruelty never be revenged, think you?
²

Marprelate pretends to address the archbishop reverently as ‘your Grace’ and ‘your Lordship’, but it isn’t long before the archbishop has become ‘Master Whitgift’ and ‘your Paltripolitanship’ (a coinage suggesting the paltriness of Whitgift and his claims to exercise authority from the Metropolitical See of Canterbury. Whitgift is also addressed as ‘His Canterburinesse’. Doctors of Divinity become ‘Doctors of Divillitie’. And the pamphlets fizz with imagined hecklers in the margins – ‘M. Marprelate you put more then the question in the conclusion of your syllogisme’ – with Marprelate then shouting back at the supposed interruption, ‘This is a pretie matter that standers by must be so busie in other men’s games.’ He represents sniggering and laughter: ‘Tse, tse, tse – hy, hy – py, py. Ha, ha ha.’ No writing of this freshness and spontaneity had ever appeared in English prose, still less in a work whose primary function was religious.

Marprelate voiced the view, widespread among Puritans, that the laws and censors persecuted Protestantism more vigorously than it condemned papism. Compare the fate of poor Waldegrave having his press, and his livelihood, destroyed, with ‘knave Thackwen the printer, which printed popish and traitorous Welsh books in Wales. Thackwen is at liberty to walk where he will and permitted to make the most he could of his press and letters . . .’ As well as making a strong point about the perils of Protestantism, there was also a brave joke here since Waldegrave was, we presume, the printer of the tract itself. Two presses were involved in the series, one in the possession of John Penry, which was hidden by Elizabeth Crane, a London Puritan in her house in East Molesey, and another that was concealed by a Warwickshire squire called Roger Wigston.

We can hear in Marprelate the authentic voice of radicalism, who proclaims, ‘Thought is free.’ He is giving witty and fantastical voice to a constituency of opinion that would sail to America in the
Mayflower
; which would take up arms against Charles Stuart in the Civil Wars; which, among the nonconformists of the eighteenth century, would give birth to more robustly political forms of republicanism and egalitarianism in the writings of Blake and Paine and Shelley.

Likewise, the response of the Establishment to Marprelate was the classic establishment view that by pulling one thread, episcopacy, the Puritans would undo the whole fabric of society. ‘If this outragious spirit of boldenesse be not stopped speedily,’ opined Thomas Cooper, the Bishop of Winchester, ‘I feare he wil prove himself to bee, not only
Marprelate
but
Mar-prince
,
Mar-state
,
Mar-lawe
,
Mar-magistrate
, and all together, until he bring it to an Anabaptisticall equalitie and communite.’ Cooper had reason to complain of Marprelate, who in the tract entitled
An Epistle to the Terrible Priests
had denounced ‘My Lord of Winchester’ as ‘a monstrous hypocrite’ and ‘a very dunce’.
³

Marprelate, by contrast, saw the bishops themselves as ‘not only traitors against God and His Word, but also enemies to the Prince and to the State’.
⁴

Despite their best endeavours, they never did find out for certain who wrote the tracts. Nor did the literary historians and detectives of subsequent ages. At least twenty-two candidates have been suggested as the likely author. Leland H. Carlson makes strong claims for Job Throckmorton, an Oxford-educated (the Queen’s College) country gentleman from Haseley in Warwickshire. From the 1570s onwards, Throckmorton wrote many letters and pamphlets insulting the bishops. Carlson makes out a convincing case for stylistic similarity between the anonymous Marprelate and works to which Throckmorton gave his name. He points to the number of allusions to betting and games of chance in both authors; to a similarly knowledgeable use of legal terminology. Both authors like coining words with the preface ‘be’ – Marprelate has ‘bedeaconed, besir, becetyfull’ and Throckmorton ‘beglazed, beprouded, behackled’. Both, tellingly, refer to Dean Bridges of Salisbury as ‘old Lockwood of Sarum’; both denounce the Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘a giddie head’ – and there are many other persuasive points of comparison.
⁵

The most persuasive feature of Carlson’s thesis is that, plainly, Marprelate was not representative of any faction. Though he sided with the Puritans, they distanced themselves from him: they disliked his ribaldry, his bawdry, his satire. Throckmorton, who was a Member of Parliament, believed passionately in free speech for those speaking in the House of Commons and those speaking from a pulpit. He was really a hundred years at least ahead of his time, advocating political ideals that were not achieved until the Bill of Rights and the Toleration Act in the reign of William and Mary.

Viewed as a campaign on behalf of the Puritans, the Marprelate tracts misfired. The authorities rumbled Throckmorton, but they could not prove his authorship. It may even be the case that the Queen herself was partly amused by the vigour of the tracts, and smiled upon a cousin of a lady-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton – who was a favourite of the Queen until it was discovered that she had secretly married Sir Walter Raleigh.
⁶

One of the more remarkable features of the Marprelate controversy was how quickly it burst out of the confines of the Church and became a matter of general public interest. The prelates writhed beneath his lash, but they could not match his wit. The bishops engaged Gabriel Harvey and Thomas Nashe to answer Marprelate in kind. But in a sense this was just what was
not
needed. The mainstream Puritans shared Marprelate’s view that contemporary Church order should be modelled as simply as possible on the elders, presbyters and deacons mentioned in the New Testament. But they knew that he was not really one of their number. Josias Nichols, a Puritan writing at the end of Elizabeth’s reign, said that the appearance of the Marprelate pamphlets ‘did greatlie astonish us, & verie much demean the righteouesnesse of our cause’. Nichols would never have used Throckmorton’s vivid turns of phrase, which were applied to Puritans as well as prelates. When he visited William Hacket, a self-proclaimed prophet, for instance, Throckmorton likened his prayer to ‘the wildgoose chase, neither heade, nor foote, rime nor reason’. He was amused by ‘the very puffing and swellinge of his face, the staring and goggling of his eies, with his gahstlie [
sic
] countenance’.
⁷