Shakespeare and the Resistance

INTRODUCTION

THE PRACTICE OF detecting covert contemporary references and hidden political allusions in the works of Shakespeare has a long and derided history. The Victorian poet Algernon Swinburne joked that Romeo must be a hidden caricature of Elizabeth I’s all-powerful minister, Lord Burghley, precisely because of the cunning dissimilarity.¹ Shakespeare’s universality, the fact that he speaks to us all on a profound level, means that we resent any attempt by academic, social, nationalist, religious, or political groups to appropriate him, to label and therefore limit him. This has not stopped thousands from trying. He has been variously portrayed as an Italian, a covert homosexual, a Jesuit, Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, the Earl of Oxford; he has been by turns a loyalist, a dissident, a Tudor apologist, an atheist, a Catholic, a Protestant, a Puritan, an elitist, a populist, a proto-Marxist, and the love-child of Elizabeth I.

The unenviable task of Shakespeare scholars is to preserve the integrity of the text in the face of this barrage. But two awkward elements stand in their way. One is Shakespeare’s famously undocumented background, which has been fully exploited by biographical fantasists in particular. The other is the fact that his work lacks a contemporary context, compounding the sense that Shakespeare exists in a kind of historical vacuum. His plots, situated at other periods or in other countries, are taken almost entirely from books, not from contemporary events. Even the themes are difficult to relate to the accepted view of the age and country in which he lived, and of which he has become almost a symbol—England on the rise: buoyant, self-confident, the victor of the Spanish Armada, a newly independent nation launched on the path of expansion and empire by a canny and charismatic queen. Their extraordinary creative vigour apart, Shakespeare’s plays and poems seem curiously detached from all this. His themes revolve around social and political division, usurpation, the destructive work of time, coercion, tyranny. One of his biographers, Peter Ackroyd, highlights what he sees as Shakespeare’s main preoccupations: they include divided loyalty, exile, the murder of innocence, the unquiet conscience, the perils of oath-taking, disguise, and sympathy with failure.² Literary critics locate the genesis of this conflicted material either somewhere in his shadowy private life or in the source of his universality—his insight into human nature.

Over the past fifteen years, however, certain historians—some of them, like Peter Lake, cautiously deferential, others, like Curtis Breight, angrily incensed—have begun to invade the territory of Shakespeare scholarship. Initially this was to challenge the recent ‘New Historicist’ angle on the sixteenth century, which aimed to reassess the literature and drama by setting it in what was understood to be the cultural and intellectual context of the time. Normally the first step in studying the creative work of the past, this approach, especially in the case of the context-free Shakespeare, was long overdue. But the historicists found they had stumbled into a hornets’ nest. Elizabeth’s reign, the last years in particular, have been undergoing a lengthy and contentious process of reassessment. According to many current historians, the New Historicists were working on an outdated and misconceived version of the period. They had been given the wrong handbook.

Stephen Greenblatt’s influential 1989 analysis of the plays, Shakespearean Negotiations, drew on a series of long-held assumptions about Elizabeth’s reign.³ Power lay with the queen: yet, in material terms, she was weak. She had no standing army, no bureaucracy, and no police force to speak of. She relied instead on theatrical display and rhetorical persuasion: and with such success that, though ‘a weak and feeble woman’, she retained power for almost fifty years—and commanded the devotion of her subjects throughout, which, as she often declared, ‘I do esteem more than any treasure or riches’. This was an age, then, when theatricality was the source of power: a great starting point for Shakespeare scholars.

But late Tudor power is not seen this way anymore. Instead, the latest body of evidence indicates that Elizabeth presided over a highly successful police state. In the view of Curtis Breight, her weakness had from the start compelled her ‘to make alliances with some of the most clever and ruthless men ever to control the English state, lawyerly humanists who knew how to weave plots and engineer harsh legislation’.⁴ Scholars such as Breight paint a picture of a country kept in check by terror and by the deliberate fomenting of aggressive wars abroad. They have highlighted damning evidence of the corrupt political dominance of Lord Burghley (William Cecil) and his son Robert, and have revised the traditional image of their doomed opponent, the Earl of Essex. So brilliant was the propaganda machine under the Cecils that Essex has been seen ever since his fall as an inept victim of a struggle between court factions. Over the past twenty years, however, thanks to the work of scholars led by Paul Hammer and Alexandra Gajda, Essex has emerged as a political and intellectual heavyweight whose ideals and character mobilised all those who had become disgusted by the self-serving rule of what was then known as the regnum Cecilianum, the reign of the Cecils.⁵ Power, it now appears, resided not in the dazzling spectacle of the queen, but in the iron fist of her ministers: and this means, say historians, that as far as Shakespeare goes, the historicists have got the story wrong. Elizabeth’s men, as hitherto marginalised evidence demonstrates, were experts in the use of torture, intimidation, propaganda, and the use of agents provocateurs to create the ‘mass paranoia’ of a society ridden with informers.⁶

A further aspect of the opposition to the Cecils has also recently come under scrutiny: the huge and varied corpus of political writings by Elizabethan exiles, many of them senior academics from Oxford and Cambridge. In 1594, the Jesuit Robert Persons’s Conference About the Next Succession, a controversial analysis of the English political system and the problems of succession, was circulated in England. Merely to possess it was treasonable. Often vilified but rarely read, it has recently been described as a ‘great tract’ by the historian Peter Lake—an attitude unthinkable even ten years ago, when these often lucid and well-informed works were dismissed by mainstream academics as mere Catholic propaganda.⁷ Altogether, says Breight, ‘it is necessary that someone yank the Elizabethan Myth from its traditionally privileged position and thereby help to counter some four centuries of what Christopher Haigh calls “reverential historiography”’.⁸ But the myth has deep roots.

In 2016, Peter Lake published a study of Shakespeare’s history plays interpreting them in the light of the newly rehabilitated opposition discourse. The long preface is diffident, even apologetic, attempting—in vain, as it turned out—to deflect the disdain of Shakespeare scholars. Yet what Lake unearths is, he believes, of such importance that, as a historian, he has no hesitation in regarding the plays as source material, as an insight into the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries ‘actually thought about “politics”’. ‘If I noticed these parallels,’ he asks, ‘might not members of an Elizabethan audience have noticed them as well?’⁹

There is a world of difference between reading in meanings and unearthing them. The new directions pioneered by recent historians amount to a radical shift in the consensus on what it was like to live in England at the turn of the seventeenth century. It is becoming clear that successive generations have bought into a diligently documented propaganda myth spun around the Elizabethan state by leading ministers of the Crown. Now crumbling, this myth has for centuries formed the foundation stone of an England which dated the birth of its empire and the establishment of its national church back to the days of the Tudors, and adopted Shakespeare as its national figurehead.

My own interest in this shift of historical perspective—and its impact on sixteenth-century literature—began almost twenty years ago. My ancestry includes multiple countercultural strands, from French Huguenot immigrants to an early member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who, after his imprisonment in Dublin, became a journalist and campaigner for human rights in New York. My father’s great-grandfather, an artist and architect, was a close colleague of Cardinal John Henry Newman. His son was the scholar John Hungerford Pollen, who almost single-handedly researched, transcribed, and saved for posterity the records of the Elizabethan exiles. Growing up, I was always conscious that there was an alternative view of the Elizabethan period, but never questioned the traditional version, which was revitalised for my own generation by the ebullient Tudor apologist A. L. Rowse. However, living in Moscow in the 1980s, I experienced at first hand the way art, cinema, and drama operate in a totalitarian state—ostensibly toeing the government line, but actually using covert references to give release to the frustrations of a silenced population. I returned to England at the point when the ‘revisionist’ history of the sixteenth century was beginning to seep into the mainstream, and it encouraged me to look again at the neglected Catholic records and the recent work of scholars such as Patrick Collinson and Michael Questier, who explore the way in which religious dissidents survived—or did not—under Elizabeth.¹⁰

In 2001, I published an article in the Times Literary Supplement proposing a contemporary religious context for Shakespeare’s mysterious poem ‘The Phoenix and the Turtle’.¹¹ It was developed two years later in the same journal by the lawyer and historian Patrick Martin and the distinguished legal philosopher John Finnis.¹² My 2005 book, Shadowplay, drew on the work of many other scholars to propose a continuous religious and political subtext underlying Shakespeare’s work and seamlessly integrated with the universal meaning. It was welcomed by historians and others, including the artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd, who commissioned programme notes on his history play cycle along with a series of talks to the cast. But it was vehemently rejected by Shakespeare scholars, who portrayed it as merely another attempt to prove that he was a Catholic. For David Scott Kastan, the search for allegory in Shakespeare’s work is simply a ‘category error’, and Alison Shell’s Shakespeare and Religion firmly distances her own view of Shakespeare’s work from ‘would-be allegorists’ like myself and G. Wilson Knight.¹³ Shakespeare is, she says, ‘highly attentive’ to religious tradition, but his ‘invariable practice’ is to ‘subordinate religious matter to the particular aesthetic demands of the work in hand’.¹⁴ In other words, topical issues may be visible—and Alison Shell is one of the scholars most sensitive to their presence—but their purpose is merely to intensify the impact of what was intended to be, first and foremost, an aesthetic work of art.

In this book I examine a single event, the Essex Rebellion of 1601, which, like so many other events of the time, has been reassessed over the past twenty years in the light of new work in local county records and the British National Archive. It sets the latest version of the rebellion side by side with two works by Shakespeare which are now rarely read: his full-length narrative poems. The purpose is to demonstrate that the poems remain impenetrable without the historical context; and that once understood, they, in their turn, serve to illuminate the causes and the consequences of this dramatic turning point, one of the most momentous of Elizabeth’s reign, and, until recently, one of the most consistently misread.

This approach confirms the latest assessments of the widespread appeal of Essex and his cause. It also seeks to persuade readers that the supposedly detached, apolitical Shakespeare had opinions and was deeply engaged. The focus on his neglected writings is intended to sidestep the traditional resistance to topical readings of his universal work. By highlighting political subtexts in the marginalised narrative poems, this book demonstrates that a readiness to detect a highly sophisticated contemporary subtext does not diminish our appreciation of Shakespeare’s work; on the contrary, it can actually make sense of its many obscurities. This book challenges the view that Shakespeare always subordinated the topical to the universal, that he never referred directly to the events of his own time, and that if he had done so it would have made him in some way a lesser genius. Instead, Shakespeare and the Resistance argues that in certain works Shakespeare took universal characters and ideas and applied them quite deliberately to the political circumstances of his own time. He did this partly because his era was one in which overt criticism of the regime was dangerous and allegory a useful deflection. But more important to Shakespeare were the themes that characterised sixteenth-century Europe, a time of such bloody upheaval and national convulsion that nothing less than the soul of England, its historical and spiritual essence, was at risk. It required a writer of extraordinary genius to find a way to adequately depict the passions of those days. To do so, he drew on classical scenes, reworking them brilliantly to speak to his fellow men and women about the deep divisions that threatened to break the country apart.