The Elizabethans (67 page)

in russet mantle clad

Walks o’er the dew of yon high eastward hill.
⁵

Already, we have been plunged into a profoundly interesting psychological situation in which the young Prince is deeply disturbed by the hasty remarriage of his mother to his uncle, and already the Prince has treated us to one of his great soliloquies:

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable

Seem to me all the uses of this world!
⁶

Already, we are in a poem of profound psychological depth, and philosophical puzzlement. Already, we have plunged into the deepest metaphysical speculations about the pointlessness of existence itself on this planet. Already, as we have said, King Claudius and Hamlet are shown to belong not to Denmark in the Dark Ages, but to sixteenth-century Europe, with Luther’s university of Wittenberg the Prince’s alma mater. And already, as is shown by one of Shakespeare’s most masterly examples of stagecraft and scenic compression, we have entered the claustrophobic, violent and feud-ridden Renaissance court of Elsinore. Elsie is a popular diminutive of the name of Elizabeth. Elsinore is immediately recognisable as an alternative Elsie-world, or Elizabethan Universe. It is nothing so crude as a
pièce-à-clef
, or a coded metaphor or a piece of political satire, with Polonius standing for Burghley, for example – even though Polonius’s mixture of deviousness and wordiness and dry-stick pomposity were recognised as an allusion to Burghley.
Hamlet
is not a work of ephemeral satire. Elsinore, rather, is the inner workings of Elsie-Elizabeth’s London and England. It is a portrait of the Elizabethans in all their responses to life.

Hence, we should not expect this particular Prince to exact revenge in the manner of the conventional blood-and-guts stage hero of a revenge drama. For forty-four years England had been ruled over by a Hamlet-like queen, thinking too precisely upon the event. The two Revenge moments of the reign – the death of Mary, Queen of Scots and the death of the Earl of Essex – were both psychological crises for her. This was because Elizabeth, like Hamlet, could see the calamitous effects of too great a precision and too great a decisiveness in political life.

Ever since Elizabeth stepped onto the stage in November 1558, her advisers and courtiers had been urging her to make decisions: to be Catholic or to be Protestant; to marry; to fight a decisive and expensive war in Ireland or in the Low Countries. In almost all cases Elizabeth had dithered, Hamlet-like; and dithering had been, if not the right policy, then at least not the wrong policy. This god-daughter of Cranmer, the liturgical master of hendiadys, had seen the wisdom of double-think.

Hamlet depicts a society that is ‘out of joint’, a ‘Denmark’ that is ‘rotten’, a political system that is completely corrupt and based upon murder and intrigue. There is, therefore, far more in it of subversively profound political disillusion than in any other ‘revenge tragedy’. The play contains the hope for a new beginning with a new reign, which must have been a collective desire in 1603. The ambiguities and ‘unfinished’ quality of
Hamlet
are what make it so resonantly intelligent.

Many of those who have criticised
Hamlet
as fuzzy, incoherent, have failed to attend to the kind of work of art it is. Interestingly, two of the play’s most intelligent readers in the twentieth-century English world, C.S. Lewis and T.S. Eliot, both made this misjudgement. Lewis, who contrasted the Prince and the Poem, and Eliot, who dismissed the play as an artistic failure, were looking for a work of art that was finished and coherent. Shakespeare, on the other hand, presented his contemporaries, and us, with a work of art that is disturbingly incoherent, which has been on all available journeys.
Hamlet
is full of loose ends. It positively depends on its inconsistencies. As for its length, as it appears in the Second Quarto or the First Folio, it would have taken well over four hours to perform, scarcely a possibility in the pre-electrical age. So, it even outsoars its own borders, ceasing to be a play and becoming a book, a sort of novel, in which the experiences of Shakespeare’s own life – the drowning of Ophelia-like Katherine Hamlett in Warwickshire, the death of his own son Hamnet – blend into the preoccupations of the London theatre audiences in the last years of Elizabeth’s reign and together they enter into Elsie-nor. It is the first modern novel, the first work of psychoanalysis, the first great Romantic poem of the Inner Life – while continuing to be, as generations of theatre-goers ever since can testify, an electrifying drama that stretches and tests the capacities of the actor who plays the role. Scholars have noted affinities with Montaigne’s
Essays
, which Shakespeare probably knew in the translation of John Florio. Like Montaigne, it provides the companionable mystery, not of the author’s biography, but in exploring what it was like inside the author’s head. While Europe fought wars about theology, many individual men and women must themselves have been inwardly divided about the change that had come upon the European consciousness with the Reformation. The careful Protestant response to a ghost – ‘Stay, illusion!’ – is what many of them were saying to the old religious certainties. As a Protestant, Horatio technically believed that ghosts were either non-existent or illusory tricks played on the eyes by the Devil. Yet instinct makes him old-fashioned enough to believe in the Catholic soul discontented with Purgatory and ‘doomed for a certain term to walk the night’. But – a war between people who believed that the Eucharistic elements actually changed into flesh and blood and those who believed that God had predestined them to everlasting salvation? ‘Stay, illusion!’ You feel the gentle scepticism in Shakespeare and in Montaigne. Neither man was an unbeliever in the post-Victorian way. Montaigne was a practising Catholic, and Shakespeare allows his characters purely Christian sentiments:

Why all the souls that were, were forfeit once,

And He that might the vantage best have took

Found out a remedy.
⁷

But neither man could have felt at home in the insanity of contemporary religious controversy.
Hamlet
was full of the Elizabethan division – the division in individual minds between the old world and the new, between the old geocentric universe and the new worlds opened up by Copernicus; between Catholic and Protestant; between worship of Gloriana and discontent with the way in which politics had led England into wasteful wars.

There could have been no more appropriate play for the London audiences to have seen performed in Elizabeth’s last days, unless it had been
Julius Caesar
, written a little earlier, perhaps in 1599, with its devastating reminder of the human frailty of monarchs:

He had a fever when he was in Spain.

And when the fit was on him, I did mark

How he did shake; ’tis true, this god did shake.

His coward lips did from their colour fly,

And that same eye, whose bend doth awe the world,

Did lose his lustre; I did hear him groan;

Ay, and that tongue of his that bade the Romans

Mark him, and write his speeches in their books,

‘Alas!’ it cried, ‘Give me some drink, Titinius’,

As a sick girl.
⁸

Elizabeth Tudor had been neither so vain nor so foolish as to be blind to the brutal truth contained in Cassius’s republican speech. She knew her own bodily frailty. She had specified one last message to her nation and people, the sepulchral equivalent of hendiadys.

Her dead body was brought by Thames boat from Richmond. The coffin was sealed and covered, but, as was the custom with funerals of the great, there was a wax effigy of the Queen. William Camden, who walked in the procession as Clarenceux King of Arms tells us:

The City of Westminster was surcharged with multitudes of all sorts of people, in their streets, houses, windows, leads and gutters, that came to see the obsequy; and when they beheld her statue or picture, lying upon the coffin, set forth in royal robes, having a crown upon the head thereof, and a ball and sceptre in either hand, there was such a general sighing and groaning, and weeping, as the like has not been seen or known in the memory of man; neither doth any history mention any people, time or state, to make like lamentation for the death of their sovereign.
⁹

The funeral sermon was preached by the great Lancelot Andrewes, Dean of Westminster. Sir Walter Raleigh was present as captain of the guard. It was his last public act. Elizabeth was carried to the north aisle of Henry VII’s chapel, and it was here that she made her last statement to the world. She was buried at her request in the unmarked grave of her half-sister, Mary I. Later, the great tomb that we see today in the Abbey was erected over the sisters. Was it Andrewes himself who devised the perfect epitaph –
Regno consortes et urna, hic
obdormimus
Elizabetha et Maria sorores, in spe resurrectionis
: we sisters, sharers in reigning, in a burial place and in the hope of the resurrection are here fallen asleep? One of the sisters had never tried to live with Doubt. Mary Tudor was as far as possible from the intellectual world of Montaigne and
Hamlet
. But the other sister, in her burial – which was both a humble nod to her Roman Catholic subjects and a pious aspiration for the flourishing of truth, unity and concord – was different. Elizabeth in her burial held out the hope that the English people might learn the lessons she imparted. To judge from the first fifty-seven years after her death, it would seem as if they were slow to learn the lesson – with the clumsy Stuart experiment in absolute monarchy on a continental pattern, with the Civil Wars, with the triumphs of Puritan absolutism and the abolition of Parliament. But history is a long game. Perhaps some of the factors that made Britain emerge, in the post-1660 era, as a country of such enormous intellectual, commercial, scientific and political resource derived in part from the legacy of her most distinguished monarch, and the evolved experience of the Elizabethan Age.

Notes

Preface

1
Lewis, p. 378.

2
Ciarán Brady ‘The Road to the View. On the Decline of Reform Thought in Tudor Ireland,’ in Coughlan (ed.), p. 40.

1 The Difficulty

1
The phrase is the title of an invaluable study by Nicholas Canny (2001) of a history of Ireland from 1580 to 1650.

2
Ranelagh, p. 48.

3
Rowse, (1955), p. 120.

4
Ibid., p. 120.

5
Ranelagh, p. 50.

6
Ciaran Brady, ‘The Road to the View’, in Coughlan (ed.), p. 35.

7
Brady (1994) p.96.

8
Ciaran Brady, (1994), p. 273.

9
Ibid., p. 17.

10
Hiram Morgan, ‘The Fall of Sir John Perrot’, in Guy (ed.) p. 121.

11
Quoted Canny (2001), pp. 62–3.

12
See Brendan Bradshaw, ‘Robe and Sword in the Conquest of Ireland’ in Cross, Loades and Scarisbrick (eds).

13
For example, Coughlan (ed).

14
Ibid., pp. 18ff.

15
Moryson, ‘The Manners and Customs of Ireland’, quoted Canny,
Making Ireland British
p. 7.

16
Graves, ‘Edmund Campion’,
ODNB
, 9, p. 872.

17
Edmund Campion,
A Historie of Ireland
, quoted McGuire, p. 15.

18
Canny Ibid., p. 30.

19
William Butler, p. xi.

20
Rev Paul Walsh,
Gleanings from Irish Manuscripts
, 2nd edition, Dublin, Colm & Lochlainn 1933, p. 182.

21
Ibid., pp. 189–90.

22
Moryson, II. i. 77.

23
Shakespeare,
Macbeth
, III.iv. 1.152.

24
Canny (2001), p. 132.

2 The New World

1
J. A. Williamson (1949), p. 309.

2
‘
Un Cassario Ingles
,
Uamado Juan Achines, que he andado en las Indias con quarto navios de armade, haziendo robos y dãnos harto grandes a mis subditos
 . . . quoted Kelsey (2002), pp. 76 and 325.

3
Ibid., p. 75.

4
Ibid., p. 27.

5
Hugh Thomas p. 21.

6
Ibid., p. 38.

7
Ibid., p. 180.

8
Ibid., pp. 203 and 219.

9
Laughton, ‘Sir John Hawkins or Hawkyns’,
DNB
, IX, p. 212.

10
Hugh Thomas, p. 88.

11
Shakespeare,
The Tempest,
I. ii. 389 . . . 403.

12
Hakluyt (1903–5), pp. 520–1.

13
Kelsey (2002), p. 11.

14
Ibid., p. 13.

15
Ibid., p. 268.

16
Williamson (1949), p. 69.

17
Hugh Thomas, p. 156.

18
Kelsey (2002), p. 68.

19
BL Cotton MS, Otho E, viii, modernised by Williamson (1949), p. 133.

20
Hakluyt – the remark is omitted in the narrative in BL Cotton, MS Otho E, viii.

21
Testimony of Gregorio de Sias, quoted Kelsey (2002), p. 96.

3 Ceremonial – Twixt earnest and twixt game

1
Rowse (1950), pp. 301–2.

2
Goodman, p. 76.

3
William Camden, p. 18.

4
Black, p. 1.

5
Challis,
The Tudor Coinage
, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1978, pp. 119–28.

6
Jenkins (1958), p. 66.

7
Maria Perry, p. 133.

8
Hunt,
The Drama of Coronation
. Unless otherwise stated, all that follows about Elizabeth’s coronation and the ceremonies proceeding from it derive from Dr Hunt’s highly recommended and original study.