Titans of History (30 page)

Shakespeare's characters are multifaceted, complex, ambiguous. Hamlet, faced with his father's apparent murder, is beset by moral qualms and indecision as to whether he should take revenge. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth seize the throne by violence and then become mired in bloodshed, guilt and madness. In
Twelfth Night
, the jolly, roistering characters play a trick upon the pompous, puritanical steward Malvolio, but the trick goes beyond a joke and plunges into cruelty. In
The Tempest
, possibly Shakespeare's last play, Prospero, having used his magic powers to bring those who have wronged him into his power, decides “the rarer action is / In virtue than in vengeance.” And then, in what is often taken to be an autobiographical touch on Shakespeare's part, Prospero, the magus, abandons his magical arts: “deeper than did ever plummet sound / I'll drown my book.”

All this wealth of human experience Shakespeare embodies in language of astounding power and precision, from soaring passages of poetic intensity, through quick-fire witty dialogue, to the earthy prose of the common people who crowded into the pits of London's theaters. Shakespeare's richness of vocabulary is astonishing, drawing imagery from a range of fields and activities, from flora and fauna to warfare and heraldry, from astrology and astronomy to seafaring and horticulture. Puns and double entendres abound throughout his work, and virtually every line has layers of meanings. Not content with the vast vocabulary at his command, Shakespeare introduced many new words into English, from “meditate” and “tranquil” to “alligator” and “apostrophe.” He also gave us myriad phrases that have entered everyday speech: “Discretion is the better part of valor,” “At one fell swoop,” “In one's heart of hearts,” “Seen better days,” and many, many more.

As a master of dramatic art, Shakespeare has no peer. Many of his stories were not original—they were drawn, for example, from Boccaccio's fables, or folk tales, or Plutarch's
Lives
, or the Tudor chroniclers—but it is what he did with them that counts. He not only gave the two-dimensional figures in these tales fully rounded characters, he also knew how to build up tension, to create a mood of impending doom, and then to heighten that mood by interleaving an apparently incongruous comic scene (as he does, for example, in
Macbeth
). He was also a master of the
coup de théâtre
, such as the moment in
Much Ado About Nothing
when the hitherto lightweight, bantering world of the play is overthrown by Beatrice's sudden injunction to Benedict: “Kill Claudio.” Thus none of Shakespeare's tragedies are unremittingly tragic, nor are his comedies filled with nonstop laughter. At the end of
Twelfth Night
, for example, although all the lovers are paired off happily, the action closes with a melancholy song from the Clown, bringing us back to the quotidian world where “the rain it raineth every
day.” Such simple, poignant touches are typical of Shakespeare and mark him out, just as much as his complexities, as a writer of genius.

But there are many who have argued that an undistinguished provincial who never went to university could not have written some of the finest plays known to humankind. Despite considerable evidence to the contrary, claims have been made that either “William Shakespeare” was a fabricated pseudonym or his identity was simply used by someone else.

The instigator of the trend was an American schoolteacher who claimed descent from Sir Francis Bacon, the lawyer, statesman and philosopher. The Baconian Theory insists that Bacon co-authored the plays with a coterie of courtly writers such as Edmund Spenser and Sir Walter Raleigh. Unable to reveal their identities because of the controversial content of the plays, they left clues hidden among the texts.

Another candidate is the feisty and brilliant playwright Christopher Marlowe, a Cambridge-educated shoemaker's son who dabbled in espionage, and who was suspected of atheism and homosexuality. Conspiracy theorists insist that he did not die in a bar-room brawl in 1593, as is widely believed, but that he went underground to avoid the authorities and continued to write plays, using “William Shakespeare” as a pseudonym.

A third candidate is the earl of Derby, whose aristocratic status precluded him from dabbling in the theatrical world as a professional. He had a company of actors, and among his papers were found several poems authored by a “W.S.” His wedding may have been the first occasion on which
A Midsummer Night's Dream
was performed.

A final favorite in some quarters is the earl of Oxford, a poet, playwright (although no plays survive) and patron of an acting company. Oxford stopped producing poetry just before Shakespeare
first went into print with the dramatic poem
Venus and Adonis
in 1593 (although his first plays had already been produced). The case for Oxford is, however, handicapped by the fact that the earl died in 1604, before at least a dozen of Shakespeare's works were written. In 2011, Hollywood even produced a film—
Anonymous
—about the “real” Shakespeare. It was not a hit.

Despite all these ingenious arguments, Shakespeare's contemporaries seemed in no doubt that he was the author of his works, and in 1623 his former colleagues compiled the First Folio edition of his plays “to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare.” Modern textual analysis backs up the theory that all the poems and plays are by a single author whose name was William Shakespeare.

1571–1629

I preferred the dust from the shoe soles of the lowest Christian to the highest Ottoman personage
.

Abbas the Great

Abbas was the most successful shah of Iran in the period between the great kings of the ancient world and the modern era. He extended the kingdom both eastward and westward but importantly for understanding Iran today, it was the triumphant Abbas the Great who consolidated the Twelver Shiism that is so distinctive now; he and family offered themselves as the divinely chosen representatives of the Hidden Imam; and reassembled Iran as a
great power for the first time since the Arab conquests. All of this is very relevant to understanding Iran in the twenty-first century.

It was not Abbas who brought this form of Shiism to Iran: he was the descendant of a line of Shia sheikhs backed by a fanatical following of Turkoman tribesmen known as Qizilbash—“redheads” after their red bonnets: these featured twelve folds to symbolize the twelve Imams of the Shia. They believed that after Muhammad, God gave the guidance of humanity to a line of his descendants beginning with Ali and continuing with his son Husain. The line ended with the murder by the Sunnis of the eleventh imam in 874. His son, the twelfth imam, disappeared having been “occulted”—hidden by God—ready to appear as the Madhi, the Chosen One, “to bring justice to the world.”

In the meantime, other intermediaries—namely Abbas's Safavid family—touched by this divinity would rule until the twelfth imam reappeared. Abbas's great-grandfather Ismail had come to power in 1501, declaring himself shah and making this form of Shia the official religion. Ismail threatened the Ottoman sultans, who were Sunni, with his resurgent Shiite Iran, until Sultan Selim the Grim defeated Ismail in 1514. But this new Iran fell into disorder after Ismail's death, putting both its future and that of its distinctive Shiism into doubt. The Ottomans regained their dominance over the Caucasus and reconquered Iraq

Abbas was the grandson of the old reclusive Shah Tahmasp. Though his father was the eldest son, he was disqualified from the throne because he was blind. Abbas grew up amidst turbulence and vanished glory, dominated by powerful Qizilbash generals who behaved with unwise arrogance around the young prince. Abbas was lucky to survive the short and murderous reign of his demented uncle Ismail II, who actually ordered his execution but was found dead himself before it could be carried out. His mother was murdered by tribal rebels. Abbas' blind father was then placed
on the throne in spite of his handicap, but the kingdom was cursed by marauding over-mighty Qizilbash warlords, Ottoman and Uzbek invasions, Portuguese imperialism, and family civil wars.

Abbas was the Shah's middle son, but he became heir after his elder brother was assassinated. In 1588, the blind shah abdicated and placed the crown on Abbas's head. Initially the seventeen-year-old found himself under the control of the Qizilbash potentate Murshid Quli Khan to whom he owed the throne: after enduring many humiliations, Abbas had him assassinated and then set about ruling in his own right.

Abbas quickly showed his mettle: he reformed the army allowing him to defeat and diminish the powers of the Qizilbash tribes; then he re-conquered Khurasan, which had been lost to the Uzbeks, before turning on the Ottomans, defeating them in the Caucasus. In 1605 he decisively routed their army at Sufian near Tabriz then advanced into Azerbaijan and Georgia.

In order to undermine the Ottomans, he opened relations with Europe, especially the English, granting privileges to the East India Company, which he also used to back his campaign to reduce Portuguese influence in the Persian Gulf. His artistic masterpiece was his creation of a splendid new capital at Isfahan, where many of his beautiful creations still survive—particularly the Royal Square and Royal Mosque. Both an aesthete and a man of violence, Abbas was an exceptional political and military leader—colorful, highly intelligent, curious, a fine conversationalist with a sense of humor and theater. Nevertheless he was ruthless in imposing royal power and punishing dissent, deploying a web of police spies to watch his enemies. Paranoiac and merciless, he had his own eldest son and heir Prince Safi murdered and blinded two of his other sons. Yet typically he regretted deeply his killing of Safi and sank into remorse and melancholy.

The Ottomans were the dominant power of the Near East and
they had never accepted Abbas' resurgent Iran. In 1616, they again attacked him but the shah defeated them in 1618. A few years later, he used English backing to help defeat the Portuguese and take their island base of Hormuz. In 1622, he recaptured Kandahar in today's Afghanistan from the Mughal emperors of India. Taking advantage of court intrigues in Istanbul, Abbas was finally able in 1624 to retake Baghdad and Iraq, which had been lost to the Ottomans ten years earlier. At his death in 1629, this contemporary of James I of England left a vast and powerful Iran that included Afghanistan and Iraq and extended from the Caucasus to the borders of India, with Twelver Shiism established as its state religion. Iran remained stable and thriving for a century until the downfall of the dynasty in 1722. This was the work of Abbas.

1583–1634

The Duke of Friedland [Wallenstein] has up to now disgusted and offended to the utmost nearly every territorial ruler in the empire …

Anselm Casimir von Wambold, Elector of Mainz, in 1629

Albrecht von Wallenstein was a brutally ambitious mercenary captain who became so extraordinarily powerful and rich that he held emperors to ransom, mastered colossal estates, was raised to his own dukedom and principality, and almost joined the ranks of kings himself. But he overreached himself—his rise and fall was a tragedy of greed and megalomania.

Wallenstein was born in Hefimanice, Bohemia, into a family of minor Protestant aristocrats. His military career began in 1604 when he joined the forces of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolph II. Two years later he converted to Catholicism—the religion of his new master—and this paved the way for his marriage in 1609 to an extremely wealthy widow from Moravia.

Wallenstein put the riches and estates he had gained by his marriage toward the furtherance of his own career in the service of the Habsburgs. In 1617 he came to the aid of the future emperor Ferdinand II by raising a force for the latter's war against Venice. When the Protestant nobles of Bohemia came out in revolt in 1618 at the start of the Thirty Years' War, and proceeded to confiscate Wallenstein's estates, the warlord raised a force to fight under the imperial standard. In the Thirty Years War, a vicious religious conflict between the Catholic emperor and the Protestant princes of Germany and central Europe, much of the continent was ravaged; vast numbers perished in battle and from famine—but amoral warlords like Wallenstein thrived on this tragedy. He went on to earn distinction on the battlefield, and not only reclaimed his estates but also took over the lands of the Protestant nobles he defeated. He went on to incorporate these into a new entity called Friedland, over which he was made count palatine and in 1625 a duke.

With the onset of the Danish War in 1625, Wallenstein raised an army of over 30,000 men to fight for the imperial Catholic League against the Protestant Northern League. A grateful Ferdinand—now emperor—immediately appointed him commander-in-chief. Wallenstein went on to achieve a series of brilliant victories, and Ferdinand rewarded him with the principality of Sagan and the duchy of Mecklenburg.

Power and success now seem to have gone to Wallenstein's head. He was no longer satisfied to remain the emperor's most
dependable lieutenant; he wanted to be master of his own destiny. And to this end he opened negotiations with his erstwhile enemies—the Protestant Hanseatic ports of northern Germany. The growing cleavage between Wallenstein—who now styled himself Admiral of the North and the Baltic Seas—and the emperor was confirmed by the latter's Edict of Restitution in 1629. This declared that all Catholic lands that had, since 1552, fallen under Protestant control were to be restored to their former owners. For a man keen to build his own personal empire by means of deals with the Protestant nobles of northern Germany, the edict was a threat, and Wallenstein opted to disregard Ferdinand's orders. He had already aroused the jealousy of much of the imperial aristocracy, and they now took the opportunity to press for his dismissal—which came about in 1630. Wallenstein retired to Friedland and plotted his revenge.