The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (24 page)

As do the dates for the inception, writing, completion and first performance of the play. One recent revisionist view is that it was written in the latter half of 1603 in the aftermath of the Bye plot. But that episode, tiresome as it was for the government, had none of the resonance of the Gowrie plot which from 1603–5 was marked in England as a national holiday; nor of the gunpowder plot which for many months stupefied the nation. Both became ‘political’ festivals, with the latter having a far more extended hold on the collective memory. This was because the personnel, and very buildings of government, some very old and saturated with history, had been threatened. The succession too was dangerously jeopardized with the first royal family for over fifty years in peril. Most commentators on
Macbeth
see signs of haste in it, and the hurry according to one was not simply commercial, but the need to finish the play several weeks before a 7 August 1606 performance by the King’s Servants before James and his brother-in-law King Christian IV of Denmark.
¹⁴
But there is no record of such a performance, even of the play in an abbreviated form for a royal audience that liked short plays before long ones. Yet this absence is not conclusive either, because the company records are not complete. There is also the counter-suggestion that the porter’s third would-be entrant through hell-gate, ‘an English tailor’, refers to a matter of some public notoriety that occurred later in the year. Hugh Griffin was just such an English tailor (albeit suspiciously Welsh-sounding) who became famous in November-December for his part in the so-called miracle of Father Garnet’s straw. This was a head of straw drenched with Garnet’s blood from his dismemberment and obtained by a young Catholic, John Wilkinson, who took it to Griffin’s house. Some time later the pious householder noticed that the blood as it seemed to him had dried in such a way on one of the husks as to form a small but accurate image of Garnet’s own features. Since he was a martyr in Catholic eyes such an item fast became an object of wonder and veneration. Late in November, and again early in December, Griffin was examined by the Archbishop of Canterbury. By 1610 Garnet’s straw was familiar to Europeans like Andreas Eudaemon-Joannes who had it rendered as an engraved illustration for his
Apologia
for the late Jesuit. If Shakespeare intended this snippet of the porter scene to deride Catholic illusions and it was written at the same time as the rest, not worked in later, then it becomes doubtful if
Macbeth
was completed before early 1607.
¹⁵
This would put the first public performance in April because again the plague seems to have closed the theatres from January to March 1608. Performances there must have been if the echoes of
Macbeth
in other plays through 1607 are accepted. One possibility is of public performances following a full-length court performance during the Christmas festivities of December 1606–January 1607. That brief period seems to have been especially rich, with performances of
Antony and Cleopatra
and
King Lear
, although the writing order was surely
Lear
,
Antony and Cleopatra
and
Macbeth.

Shakespeare’s career was never troubled by incarceration in the way that Ben Jonson’s was. He was without the confrontational element in his personality, agreeing to marry an older woman, but then opting to leave her for long periods while she raised his children. Jonson, on the other hand, was a brawler, and not inclined to ingratiate himself with audiences, so that his own efforts at conspiracy drama, dressing them in togas, were dismal failures;
Catiline
was famously hissed from the stage even if it did deploy aspects of the gunpowder plot. Yet Shakespeare did create a problem of writing decorum for himself by ‘following the action primarily through the consciousness of Macbeth himself’. This hauled the playwright to the brink of human, if not moral. ambiguity so while he and his audience recognize evil in the ambition to murder a king and supplant his royal line, by trailing the regicide through his torrent of crimes, including infanticide, his suffering too in the ghastly sequence becomes apparent. For the richer, better placed gentlemen like Rookwood and Digby joining the gunpowder plot became a calamitous exercise in self-destruction, requiring them simultaneously to squander their wealth and suppress their duty and affection for king, wives and children. Macbeth and Robert Catesby command loyalty from their followers even though what they envisage and in some measure carry out is savagely delinquent. There was a curious knot of blood between the imagined regicide, the imagination of a would-be regicide and the Gowries. The first suspicion of responsibility for killing Duncan falls on two unfortunate grooms killed by Macbeth before they can give testimony in their own defence. This accelerated despatch was also the fate of Alexander Ruthven and his brother, the Earl of Gowrie, in 1600, and then Thomas Percy and Catesby in 1605. So strange and unnecessary did this seem then that many suspected the government of a deliberate act of manipulation to eliminate them without trial. Indeed, such was the swell of incredulity then that it was thought necessary to make a public explanation of why Percy had not been taken alive; the claim was the familiar one of over-zealous subordinates wrecking matters. There was also the bizarre manner in which Catesby and Percy had died – the reports said one shot had despatched them – actually two balls from the same musket. A Catholic source recorded that the John Streete who achieved this odd feat stepped out from behind a tree to fire it.
¹⁶
For Shakespeare the ambush from one tree was too small for a grand climax and it grows dramatically to become Birnam Wood. Catesby suffered a retribution appropriate for history, while that for Macbeth suits the theatre. But what did Catholics in Yorkshire make of the play when it was given, apparently in the shortened memorial reconstruction of the 1608 quarto, by Sir Richard Cholmeley’s players at Candlemas 1610 at Crowthwaite Hall – home of the recusant Yorke family?

Every year after the gunpowder plot the day was marked by the ringing of church bells, the lighting of bonfires, and special sermons in churches across the land. It was not a holiday as such, but certainly special, an occasion to reflect on God’s providence and his mercies to England. Published on 5 November 1605 Sir Francis Bacon’s
Advancement of Learning
declared, ‘This Kingdom of England, having Scotland united, and shipping maintained, is one of the greatest monarchies that hath been in the world.’ Since Bacon himself was straining after advancement the fraudulent exaggeration was understandable, but the twist in the sentence was not very well judged. He was blatantly rejigging very recent history. Of course it was true that for hundreds of years it had been the aim of the English kings and their supporters to unite the whole island of Britain in a federation. Where Edward I had failed, James had been allowed to succeed, yet not every Englishman was pleased or contented, and there was stubborn resistance within Parliament and without to the Union that James desired. Shakespeare was more subtle than Bacon; in
Macbeth
he finds an English slant though this is his Scottish play, for when Macbeth has done his worst the hope for the future is a Scottish prince, who comes out of England’s protective embrace. With art that conceals the playwright gently misleads those who give such things superficial attention. He does this first by making King Duncan a saintly and paternal character (James saw himself as the unique progenitor of his united kingdom). But in the sources for the play Duncan was criticized and George Buchanan (once tutor to James) described the earlier monarch being ‘of more indulgence to his own kindred than became a king’. Holinshed thought the same ‘how negligent he was in punishing offenders’. The consequence was ‘manic mis-ruled persons took occasion thereof to trouble the peace and quiet state of the commonwealth, by seditious commotions.’ Shakespeare had enough distance from the affairs of state to nod in wry agreement when he read this. And he could further slide together for comparison the past and present by reflecting on the king’s son.
¹⁷

The chronicles made Malcolm into the ideal king with soaring praise, his natural piety strengthened by marriage to an English princess who was later canonized. He was described as taking great pains to amend the public manners of his kingdom, setting an example that inspired others ‘to a Modest, Just and Sober life’. On reflection how very different from the sometimes unseemly exhibitions of James, whose piety was of the learned, bookish sort, who was far from modest in public or private matters and who frequently drank beyond the dictates of thirst. For an example of ill-regarded boorish behaviour Shakespeare had the shameless royal competitive drinking that took place when Christian IV and his brother-in-law visited Salisbury’s great country mansion Theobalds late in July 1606 when the avenues to the house were strewn with gold oak leaves inscribed ‘Welcome’. Then the masque devised by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones stumbled into a bacchic rout because vice got the controlling hand and all the performers were riotously drunk. By contrast, the strong reputation for orderly behaviour, good sense and sobriety that attached to Prince Henry, held out promise for the future. So when William Leigh preached to his parishioners at Standish in Lancashire on the first anniversary of the gunpowder plot, ‘Great Britaines Great Deliverance from the Great Danger of Popish Powder’ was dedicated to Prince Henry.
¹⁸
One of the covert implications of
Macbeth
for a metropolitan audience was that whatever disaster threatened the kingdom a young ruler was in the making whose careful exercise of divinely granted authority would achieve a sound balance between slackness and raging brutality. It seemed to many that God had intervened on 5 November to prevent a change from the former to the latter – ‘through God’s mercy the change was prevented: the change of a noble Kingdom into an anarchy and Babylonian tyranny.’

For the followers of the performances of the King’s Men in 1606-07, the two principal plays on stage were stirring examples of devilry enacted. In tandem with
Macbeth
there was
The Devil’s Charter
by Barnaby Barnes – very likely the only play written by him. It is far from being the feverishly imagined masterpiece that might have rivaled
Macbeth
, but like
Macbeth
the playwright exploits the recent shocking events, and both plays clearly owe a debt to
Dr Faustus.
Moreover, the two post-Plot plays have themselves similarities such as comic drunken commoners, as well as an unusually fierce woman acting with little restraint. Even so, while Shakespeare and Barnes respond to the antique notion of associating devils with tyrannical ambition (and the former is more closely beset by the dramaturgical heritage), it is Barnes who uses devils ‘to create a world defined by Machiavellian power and intimidation’.
¹⁹
The murder of Duncan may be viewed as akin to rape, but Shakespeare was not so taken with innovative Italianate ideology, something that may have stemmed from his upbringing. Barnes was the son of a bishop of Durham, had studied at Brasenose College, Oxford, and, albeit not courageously, had fought in France in the early 1590s under the command of the Earl of Essex. Barnes even seems to have tried to live what he studied, possibly working as a spy, then making an attempt to remove a political operative rival by poison. He fled the battles in France and hopelessly fumbled the poisoning. Could he be the model for Parolles?

For poets, the plot stirred both revulsion and patriotism. As a narrative became available to the bemused public, hundreds of epigrams were immediately penned, and the subject became a standard one for school exercises in Latin verses for years after the event. Of course the possibilities of the topic were much too succulent to be left to the epigrammatists and many versifiers took on the story. The hectic race to print seems to have been won by a Cambridge scholar, Thomas Goad, whose
Cithara Octochorda Pectine Pulsata
was dated 15 November 1605 – some three days only after the shooting of Catesby and Thomas Percy. This long cento or pastiche of Horatian lines, several of which address Fawkes (whose name is punned with fallax or false) is understandably vague on the details. The punning device was a time-honoured method of the poetry of abuse and greedily exploited by the otherwise unknown poet Richard Williams in
Acclamatio Patrie,
which he claimed to have begun writing the moment he heard of the plot. In his preface he declared that a printer was beyond his purse, hence copies in manuscript, one of which at length reached Prince Henry. The stanzas frequently offer a joke invoking a conspirator’s name: Catesby is a cat, a ‘filthie scratching beaste’; Digby ‘Digged a pitt, and hym selfe fell in’; Robert Winter destroyed spring, and so on. Quaintly, the one name that misled him was Fawkes, who was Vaux. As we have seen the Vaux family were prominent Catholics, and the confusion of the two names also occurs in the June 1606 transcript made in the Star Chamber trial of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland.

One very intriguing effort was
Trayterous Percyes and Catesbyes Prosopopeia
by the precocious teenage poet Edward Hawes of Westminster School, whose title page identifies him as ‘a youth of sixteen yeeres old’. Given the proximity of the school to the proposed outrage, and the opportunity he likely had to join the crowds around Parliament, Hawes’s imagination may well have been stirred by a supposed brush with death. The result is school-boyishly gruesome, describing in six-line stanzas a dream-vision dialogue heard between ‘Two Monsters Skulls’ from Hell, covered with horseflies and snakes – the heads of Thomas Percy and Robert Catesby. They are the power-hungry scions of old English families, beguiled by the pope into plotting their crime. Neither man, according to the callow Hawes, gives a fig for religion, with Percy emerging as an ‘atheist’ wanting to govern and Catesby stirred by ‘Envy, and bloody rage, with hope of gayne’. When the bodies of both were dismembered and their heads were spiked above the building they sought to blast, Hawes and his classmates could daily observe their rot into oblivion – ghastly skulls in the poem’s dream-vision and likely so in the sleep of the dormitory boys. Unlike Milton in his much later
In Quintum Novembris,
Hawes recalls the treasons against Elizabeth, and those in Scotland against the young James VI, but he omits totally Guy Fawkes.