The Gunpowder Plot (History/16th/17th Century History) (23 page)

As Elizabeth aged in the 1590s the charmed ruthlessness of her coercion and that of her greybeard council tended to fade; the demand for docility from her subjects was a mite less insistent. Voices of criticism were heard, isolated by a heftier deference for the time being, but plain enough in the House of Commons, and too the theatres, to draw rebuke. The ‘public stage [then] was the freest open forum for political speculation’, and not even the furtive presence of intelligencers could stifle it entirely. So the playwrights were freer than members of the House of Commons to initiate a debate, even if it was rather halting and never went very far. Peter Wentworth, the Protestant parliamentarian, died in prison in 1597 for promoting the claim of James VI to the English throne. That year too Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson co-authored the (lost) comedy
The Isle of Dogs,
which irked someone at court because it satirized the queen’s courtiers, yet in contrast to Wentworth the playwrights were only lightly punished. The play was, of course, suppressed, the playwrights in some measure chastised – then the affront was forgotten because the theatre had no palpable authority.
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It was a consumer-driven forum and the powerlessness of the stage virtually guaranteed the actors and theatre entrepreneurs a marked prosperity if they could perform as often as possible. The key to this was public health and the virulence of the plague. For the most part government censorship over the stage was inconsistent and rather mildly permissive in the treatment of topical matters. The Master of the Revels, a court appointee, had a remarkably light hand in this respect, as well as a financial interest of his own in the well-being of the companies; they paid him to approve performances. There was therefore no royal whim of iron in dealing with playwrights and acting companies by 1600; they were regarded as individuals working for a living. Neither Shakespeare nor the Lord Chamberlain’s players at the Globe, who had been paid to re-stage his play
Richard II
for the Essex conspirators in February 1601, were a whit worse off for having hired out their space, time and skills in performance.

The headlong enthusiasm and wild failings of such men in public and private matters did not alter Shakespeare’s admiration for aristocracy in general and the Earl of Southampton in particular (the earl being himself an ardent supporter of Essex). Southampton had been Shakespeare’s patron years before, and if the gunpowder plot had succeeded, he and another aristocrat who figured importantly in the playwright’s life, William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, would have been killed in the massacre that was projected. The deep purpose of the plot was then rather blurred and variously conceived, but there was widespread suspicion that the Earl of Northumberland, ninth in line of succession before James arrived to take the throne, was discontented, would have benefited from the plot and therefore was involved. Unlike the late Christopher Marlowe and also John Donne, who remarkably in February 1602 had been able to use Northumberland to deliver the letter that told Sir George More that his daughter was secretly married to the poet, Shakespeare was not of the earl’s Syon House coterie of brilliant intellectuals.
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So did he know, for example, that in July 1604, after Southampton had offended the king, that it was Northumberland who had delivered the response of the privy council? It would have been a difficult encounter between the two grandees because some years before there had been talk of a duel between them and the animosity remained. Northumberland was certainly capable of nursing a grudge, and proved it when before the king and court he spat into Sir Francis Vere’s face. This dismal incident led to his banishment to the Archbishop of Canterbury’s summer home in Croydon.

Even before he began work on
Macbeth,
Shakespeare seems to have regarded the long line of the Percy family with disapproval and his use of their rebellions as plot material in the Henry IV plays is well known and has been analysed elsewhere.
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The exasperated Hotspur in them certainly bears a neatly identified vocal link in his stutter to the then current earl, and it may be that in
Macbeth
he was insinuating to an alert audience that Northumberland, despite his vehement denials, had indeed been involved in the gunpowder plot. It was, after all, common knowledge that Beaumont, the French ambassador who had so frantically quit the country then, had been a close friend of the earl. Was it a royal commission, as some critics have averred, that set Shakespeare to work on
Macbeth?
For this there is no evidence and a number of things militate against it. The most emphatic must be that James had no sustained interest in drama; plays were put on at court for festivities and quite often he was absent, though Queen Anne and Prince Henry would join the audience. Secondly, if Shakespeare had wanted to please the monarch there were certainly other topics from Scottish history he could have worked up into a satisfactory offering. Instead his darting imagination was seized by an event which if it had succeeded could have pitched the country into years of turbulence and random bloodshed. To many people the plot was the atrocious climax of years of clandestine effort; in both England and Scotland the threat to the legitimate ruler had been great. In the play evil ambition is viewed as a destructive abomination, just the view taken by Bishop Andrewes in his plot sermons afterwards. Divine providence, as it seemed, had saved James in 1600 from the Gowrie conspiracy and then again had stalled mayhem in 1605 to save the nation from calamity. These two events were of immense interest, and the second tended to enhance interest in the first so that Shakespeare had a rare opportunity to write a play that chimed with the topical, eyeing an event that had an intense whiff of the local for him in Stratford.
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It is assumed that he was not in London as the turbulence over the plot swept the city then the country, and everyone nervously peered at their neighbourhood for signs of insurrection. For example, Richard Jones saw Sir Francis Smythe ride out of London on the 4th and return on Thursday week, ‘when it should seem he had ridden very hard, for the Wednesday following his horse was so weary that he could not rise when Jones kicked him as he lay in the stable at the Red Lion, Holborn’. Shakespeare may have been still in Oxford, or more likely Stratford by then, but with the reopening of the theatres on 15 December he would surely have come back to London and he encountered in the cold and gloom of the winter city an additional burden on the spirits, a doom-laden distress and shock which took months to dissipate. The successful theatre manager and playwright had never written a play set in the London of his day, and again he chose not to do so. Instead he set to reading background material for a Scottish play that would be for his public a mordant commentary on the lure of kingship and the wretched perversities it could induce within hitherto worthwhile men – a lure that had once or twice led James himself into some ill-conceived acts of policy while fretting away the time before Elizabeth died. There were some risks in writing a conspiracy play as Ben Jonson had found with
Sejanus
(1603), and anything bearing on such activity as well as on Scottish matters was bound to be scrutinized by the government in one guise or another. Such had been the case a few years before, as Shakespeare would have been well aware. On the fourth anniversary of the Gowrie conspiracy, when the Ruthven brothers had reportedly sought to murder James, the King’s Servants (once the Lord Chamberlain’s Men) intended to perform a play (now lost) based on that intriguing and never fully explained hubbub at Gowrie House, near Perth. Prior to this play by an unnamed author (or authors) the official version of the event had been a pamphlet published in Scotland and then reprinted in London late in 1600. The Master of the Revels allowed the play for performance, and it attracted a good deal of interest, being ‘twice represented . . . with exceeding concourse of all sorts of people’. Then it was suppressed with the excuse that some men in government felt it was unseemly to present princes on stage in their own lifetime. Such a lame stipulation had not been invoked a decade before when Marlowe’s
The Massacre of Paris,
with equivalent staged horrors, had played at the Rose very successfully.
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So, who were the ‘great Councillors’ who objected to the Gowrie play? Northampton perhaps, Robert Cecil probably and most likely Thomas Sackville, Earl of Dorset, who many years before had been the co-author of
Gorboduc,
the first English blank verse tragedy that had influenced Shakespeare’s writing of
King Lear
in 1605. As Chancellor of Oxford University, Dorset was formally responsible for entertaining the great royal cavalcade headed by James when it descended on the town in late August. A number of plays were put on, including the playlet by Matthew Gwinne,
Tre Quasi Sibyllae,
acted by students which ‘recast the legendary threefold prophecy given to Macbeth as a threefold compliment to James’.
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It is not clear if the King’s Servants were there, or whether they had been excluded deliberately as a rebuke for the misliked Gowrie play. It remains a distinct possibility that it was Dorset who conveyed to the Globe’s house playwright that a suitable subject for a play on a Scottish theme might be found in the chroniclers. And can there be much doubt that the company would have wanted a new play with a satisfactory appeal to a king who preferred sitting in the saddle to sitting watching actors? The public audience, revelling in correspondences, still hugely curious about their new monarch and his background, was certain to flock to it. So Shakespeare had a commercial imperative, especially since the playhouse seasons were being so frequently disrupted by the plague. His company did have some fence building to do with James, but this does not make
Macbeth
a calculated piece of gross flattery and ‘the play’s acclaim of the king’s safe reign, if that, is at best only modestly expressed’.

The task before Shakespeare was the tricky one of writing a unified historical drama using material familiar to the court and its denizens, but simultaneously making it a public-grabbing shocker. This dual aspect of the play is constantly rehearsed in the language with the frequent use of the word ‘double’ and a rich scattering of other words of that sense.
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Even ‘double’ itself comes twice with the witches’ ‘Double, double’ in the cauldron scene. The play doubles violence, swerving between its demonization and the ‘contemplation of violent solutions to the historical blockages and depredations that form its core’. Macbeth tries to ‘make assurance double sure’, as did the Gowries in 1582 and 1600, and the gunpowder plotters did with their two-pronged attempt to sweep away much of the ruling class in London and the Midlands. Perhaps we can even say that Shakespeare, not being content with his reading on Scottish history in the accounts printed by Raphael Holinshed, had doubled back (so to speak) to the Gowrie play/plot to give weight and historical density to a more remote story. The official account of the plot supplied him with extra details which he then projected backwards and forwards; for example, the dagger omitted in the historical sources ‘is quite as central to the Gowrie account as it is to Macbeth’. The late Leslie Hotson was briskly certain that Shakespeare did not model his characters directly on contemporaries but gossipy old John Aubrey knew better and there seems to be a very strong likelihood that the Thane of Cawdor in the play, who betrays King Duncan, and is executed, was based on both the former Earl of Gowrie, an open rebel, and Sir Everard Digby. When the latter was executed Shakespeare was lodging a short walk away from St Paul’s and might easily have strolled there to observe the grisly business before writing scene IV in Act One. As it was, Digby and Robert Catesby were held to be handsome men; a double helping of good looks. But ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair,’ the witches chant together at the beginning of the act to nudge the audience so that even the sleepiest pitling knew that as ever he should be ready for dramatic reversals. Shakespeare obviously meant the play to wrap up aspects of contemporary events, revising them unexpectedly, and Act II Scene III, the notorious porter scene, certainly does this with the 3 May 1606 execution of Father Garnet.

As it has been shown (see Chapter 9) Garnet’s dogged defence of equivocation had thrust that specialized doctrine into the forefront of public consciousness. When the porter jeeringly reckons he has an equivocator knocking for entry, the audience knew that Garnet was being mocked; a man who had committed ‘treason enough for God’s sake’, but had then failed to enter Heaven and now solicits entry at what doubles as hell-gate and the entrance to Inverness castle. Even those in the undoubtedly gleeful audience who had missed his trial and execution now got a second opportunity to holler and deride him. What the porter has to say as he lumbers about contains a clutch of sly references intended to stir them: ‘Here’s a farmer that hanged himself on the expectation of plenty’ threads together two jokes. It occasioned two guffaws here because it was widely known that Garnet had on occasions used the pseudonym Farmer, and because market speculation in the price of grain was a matter of consuming interest to townspeople buying bread as their staple food. In fact, the hopes of a good harvest were abundantly fulfilled in 1606, but there was no subsequent drop in price, so any farmer behaving so had fatally miscalculated (like Farmer). Scarcity abroad caused a rise not a fall in grain prices, a matter which troubled Zorzi Giustinian in August when he entered the market to buy corn (as he called it) for export to Venice.
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The scene begins with punning on proper names: ‘If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.’ The other Jesuit arrested with Garnet at Hindlip was Father Old/corne, and Robert Keyes was in the second rank of conspirators. Some years ago an interesting (albeit not totally convincing) suggestion was made for the identity of the porter himself who finds his workplace too cold for hell. It was that he was an audience-teasing (mis)representation of Guy Fawkes, so frequently referred to then as ‘the devil’, ‘the chief devil’ and ‘the devil in the vault’.
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The identification could have been played up even then by judicious use of a prop lantern like that supposedly found when Fawkes was seized, which is now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. Could the porter’s very deliberate response to the repeated knocking of the blameless Macduff and Lennox have a double meaning? First, as a parody of Fawkes’s apparently sluggish response to the government searches of 4/5 November; and second, as a parody of the gate keeper of Blackfriars, the London home of the Earl of Northumberland. When he does eventually open the gate the porter has a series of punning jokes on the effects of drink, ‘an equivocator with lechery’, such as Garnet was said to have been by his enemies in his dealings with Anne Vaux. His last lines are all about hanging, the words indicating a laugh being ‘throat’, ‘legs’ and ‘shift’, this latter the post-mortem garment of the hanged man. So the meanings pile up.