Читать книгу We British: The Poetry of a People - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 12

In all the periods of poetry we’ve looked at so far, there is nothing quite as extraordinary as what happens in the 1500s – that great, bloody and turbulent century of Reformation. We begin it with the clearly medieval figures of the Chaucerians. Even if Dunbar feels different, it’s still a recognisably medieval world, crammed with religious meaning and allegory, in which the old stories are still popular, whether Aesop or Arthur. We end the 1500s, however, with William Shakespeare nearing his zenith, and a fresh universe of new poets who feel almost modern in their directness. It’s not that one world dies and a new one is born. Things aren’t like that. But the great age of Catholic Christianity, the age of Latin learning, polychromatic cathedrals and a clear social hierarchy deriving from feudal times, was waning very quickly. Wars would carry on being fought, but mostly abroad. British culture, from Edinburgh to London, began to feel much more urban, less close to the sounds and smells of the countryside. Above all, a new religious sensibility, deriving from John Wycliffe and the early reformers, meant that people had a more direct relationship to the gospel; this seems to be connected to what we today would call individualism. Also, thanks to printing and the lack of domestic warfare, we suddenly have a much larger number of poets to choose from: simply, much more stuff survives.

Politically, the biggest change was the victory of the Tudor dynasty in England, those bringers of Protestantism and a more ruthless royal overlordship. It was the court of Henry VIII that would take poetry forward again, and so it is appropriate that the first major poet of England in this century was a highly political figure, and indeed the first Poet Laureate to be mentioned here. John Skelton probably came from Diss in Norfolk, and was an unruly, unpredictable but star figure at Oxford and Cambridge. Notorious for secretly marrying a wife while a vicar, and having a child – who he presented, naked, to his congregation – by her, he later became a great flayer of priestly corruption just as England was in revolt against the Roman Church. To start with he can sound old-fashioned and medieval, as in his jeering, triumphalist response to the death of Scotland’s King James IV at Flodden:

Kynge Jamy, Jomy your joye is all go.

Ye summoned our kynge. Why dyde ye so?

Ye have determyned to make a fraye,

Our kynge than beynge out of the waye;

But by the power and myght of God

Ye were beten weth your owne rod.

By your wanton wyll, syr,at a worde,

Ye have loste spores, cote armure and sworde …

Of the out yles ye rough foted Scottes

We have well eased you of the bottes.

Ye rowe ranke Scottes and dronken Danes

Of our Englysshe bowes ye have fette your banes.

It’s not a lot more advanced than ‘Na-na-na-na,’ but Skelton was a much more sophisticated satirist than this, though known at the time and ever afterwards as a peculiarly sarcastic poet. And, often enough, nasty too. Alongside the conventions of chivalric love there was a bitterly misogynistic strain to English poetry. In the previous chapter I refrained from including the revoltingly racist poem by Dunbar after he had seen a black woman in Edinburgh. But we shouldn’t sanitise our own history, so here is Skelton ripping to pieces a woman whose main sin seems to be that she was elderly:

Her lothely lere

Is nothynge clere,

But ugly of chere,

Droupy and drowsy,

Scurvy and lowsy;

Her face all bowsy,

Comely crynkled,

Woundersly wrynkled,

Lyke a rost pygges eare,

Brystled wyth here.

Her lewde lyppes twayne,

They slaver, men sayne,

Lyke a ropy rayne,

A gummy glayre:

She is ugly fayre;

Her nose somdele hoked,

And camously croked,

Never stoppynge,

But ever droppynge;

Her skynne lose and slacke,

Grained lyke a sacke;

With a croked backe

Ugh. Skelton was tutor to the future Henry VIII, and became heavily embroiled in his fight with Cardinal Wolsey: the ferocious assaults on Church corruption, which deeply offended the cardinal and put Skelton in serious danger, were also however an expression of the growing anti-clerical mood of pre-Reformation England. Skelton’s verse is always vigorous and exciting, and it’s not hard to see why he was such a politically controversial figure. In his famous poem ‘Speke, Parott’ he uses the bird to deliver a tirade of abuse against Wolsey’s Church. Like much of Skelton’s writing, the poem is almost manic, and doesn’t feel like a piece written to order, but rather the cry of an early reformer against the flabby, corrupt and greedy Church. Is it so different in tone to an angry blog post today directed at the political elite?

So many morall maters, and so lytell vsyd;

So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente;

So myche translacion in to Englyshe confused;

So myche nobyll prechyng, and so lytell amendment;

So myche consultacion, almoste to none entente;

So myche provision, and so lytell wytte at nede;–

Syns Dewcalyons flodde* there can no clerkes rede.

So lytyll dyscressyon, and so myche reasonyng;

So myche hardy dardy, and so lytell manlynes;

So prodigall expence, and so shamfull reconyng;

So gorgyous garmentes, and so myche wrechydnese;

So myche portlye pride, with pursys penyles

So myche spente before, and so myche vnpayd behynde;–

Syns Dewcalyons flodde there can no clerkes fynde.

So myche forcastyng, and so farre an after dele;

So myche poletyke pratyng, and so lytell stondythe in stede;

So lytell secretnese, and so myche grete councell;

So manye bolde barons, there hertes as dull as lede;

So many nobyll bodyes vndyr on dawys hedd;

So royall a kyng as reynythe vppon vs all;–

Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr sene nor shall.

So many complayntes, and so smalle redresse;

So myche callyng on, and so smalle takyng hede;

So myche losse of merchaundyse, and so remedyles;

So lytell care for the comyn weall, and so myche nede;

So myche dowtfull daunger, and so lytell drede;

So myche pride of prelattes, so cruell and so kene;–

Syns Dewcalyons flodde, I trowe, was nevyr sene.

Skelton was a one-off, similar at times in tone to his contemporary William Dunbar. But he introduces us to the fact, unavoidable at this period, that poetry and the royal court intersected deeply. Particularly at Henry VIII’s court, poetry became an essential part of daily life as perhaps it had never been before and has not been since. It was a world of incessant cod-Arthurian games, elaborate tournaments, masques and literary competitions; for an ambitious courtier, to be able to produce instant, fluent poems was a great advantage. These would not have been printed or publicly available – most would have been written on scraps of paper to be passed around the court from hand to hand. Thus a courtier might declare his love, or lament its passing. Because one such courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt, was a minor genius, aspects of this artificial, highly-coloured world have survived.

A tall, handsome man who in a Holbein drawing looks like a heavily bearded modern hipster, Wyatt served both Henry VII and his son. He was suspected of having an affair with Anne Boleyn, and was imprisoned in the Tower by Henry VIII for adultery with her. There he witnessed other alleged adulterers being executed, and possibly Anne herself. Life at Henry VIII’s court was dangerous, particularly for a glamorous and sexually driven man like Wyatt; and yet, despite flying close to the sun on numerous occasions, he survived to die of old age. From our point of view he is most important as the man who took Petrarch’s new sonnet form and introduced it properly into English verse. In Wyatt’s writing there is a specificity of description, and a humane directness, which make it sound as if it comes from a different century, almost a different planet, from Skelton’s. The metaphor of timid deer for women might seem offensive, but quickly collapses, in an almost Shakespearean way:

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewith all sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this.’

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Well-travelled on the Continent and a multilingual Cambridge scholar, Wyatt also introduced the Horatian ode into English, and his address to his friend and fellow courtier John Poynz has all the easy intimacy of Horace himself. The theme is the familiar one of the poet retiring from court and explaining that he must do so because he’s had it with double dealing, oily hypocrisy and the other necessities of life around the powerful. But in Wyatt’s hands, what could be a mere poetic exercise feels like a genuine plaint by a living courtier in the cold climate of Henry’s England: farewell to all the doublespeak of politics:

The friendly foe with his double face

Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal;

And say that Favel hath a goodly grace

In eloquence; and cruelty to name

Zeal of justice and change in time and place;

And he that suffer’th offence without blame

Call him pitiful; and him true and plain

That raileth reckless to every man’s shame.

Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign;

The lecher a lover; and tyranny

To be the right of a prince’s reign.

I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be!

This is the cause that I could never yet

Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see,

A chip of chance more than a pound of wit.

This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk,

And in foul weather at my book to sit;

In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk;

No man doth mark whereso I ride or go:

In lusty leas at liberty I walk.

And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe,

Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel.

No force for that, for it is ordered so,

That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well.

I am not now in France to judge the wine,

… Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey

For money, poison, and treason at Rome –

A common practice used night and day:

But here I am in Kent and Christendom

Among the Muses where I read and rhyme;

Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come,

Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time.

In its easy eloquence, its self-confidence, this is not so far removed, is it, from the great soliloquies we will soon be hearing on the Elizabethan stage? The Tudor court was a highly artificial human experience; but it produced an intensity of feeling, a closeness and a directness, which would soon be heard by the masses in makeshift theatres around the land. Grandees like Wyatt were confident enough to address their peers with a familiarity unknown in British poetry before. But it would spread.

So far, we’ve seen a misogynistic attack on women, and women presented as nervy, nibbling as the game for the courtly male hunter, but we haven’t actually heard from any woman. Anne Askew was born in Lincolnshire in 1520, and became one of the best-known and most spectacular of Protestant martyrs. Her family was relatively wealthy, in land at least. Arranged marriages were common in Tudor England, largely for economic reasons. Girls were often married off as early as fourteen, and some of these unions would have been, by modern standards, forced marriages. Anne’s father had planned to marry her older sister Martha to another local landowner, Thomas Kyne, but Martha died and Anne was substituted, aged fifteen. She bore Thomas two children, her first duty.

It wasn’t a happy marriage; they disagreed about religion in particular. Although Henry VIII’s long struggle with the papacy over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was driving England towards the Protestant camp, there was still huge uncertainty and division over precisely what mix of traditional Catholic teaching and the new teaching of the reformers England would end up with. Relatively small doctrinal differences could become politically toxic. On this spectrum, Anne was a hard-core reformer; her husband was Catholic. While she was still little more than a teenager, Kyne kicked Anne out of the marital home. When she arrived in London she tried to divorce him on the grounds that he was an infidel, and that therefore the marriage could not be legal. Gutsy, but she failed.

A determined woman, Anne spoke out on the streets as a female preacher, and disseminated Protestant literature. Some of it came into the hands of courtiers, and probably also reached Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Thomas Kyne pursued Anne, and had her arrested and brought back to Lincolnshire, but she escaped back to London and continued to preach. She was arrested and then brutally tortured, both at Newgate prison and the Tower of London, being almost split apart on the rack. Refusing to confess or to identify other Protestants she was burned alive at Smithfield, her body having first been sprinkled with gunpowder. She was so badly injured from her tortures that she had to be carried to her execution on a chair. Before she died, however, she composed poetry, of which the best-known example is her ballad from Newgate. If she hadn’t been tortured by then, she was about to be. It’s full, as we’d expect, of traditional Christian imagery:

Like as the armed knight

Appointed to the field,

With this world will I fight

And Faith shall be my shield.

Faith is that weapon strong

Which will not fail at need.

My foes, therefore, among

Therewith will I proceed.

As it is had in strength

And force of Christes way

It will prevail at length

Though all the devils say nay.

Behind the familiar Arthurian images we can feel the urgent drumbeat of a rebellious mind; and indeed it’s a brave poem on many levels, including a direct attack on the royal authority:

More enmyes now I have

Than hairs upon my head.

Let them not me deprave

But fight thou in my stead.

On thee my care I cast.

For all their cruel spight

I set not by their haste

For thou art my delight.

I am not she that list

My anchor to let fall

For every drizzling mist

My ship substancial.

Not oft use I to wright

In prose nor yet in rime,

Yet will I shew one sight

That I saw in my time.

I saw a rial throne

Where Justice should have sit

But in her stead was one

Of moody cruel wit.

Anne Askew’s horrific fate shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she was, in her way, a fanatic. In the sermons and other writings by the reformers, and also by their enemies, no quarter is given. Another poem by her, in which she pictures herself as a poor, blind woman in a garden full of dangers and snares – the garden being her own body – provides a window for us into the Reformation mind in its full urgency. In today’s world there is little, outside the more extreme edges of Islamism, that feels like this:

A garden I have which is unknown,

which God of his goodness gave to me,

I mean my body, wherein I should have sown

the seed of Christ’s true verity.

My spirit within me is vexed sore,

my flesh striveth against the same:

My sorrows do increase more and more,

my conscience suffereth most bitter pain:

In Anne’s world, the gardener working on her body is Satan, busy trying to entrap her, with the older generation and the Catholics all on his side:

Then this proud Gardener seeing me so blind,

he thought on me to work his will,

And flattered me with words so kind,

to have me continue in my blindness still.

He fed me then with lies and mocks,

for venial sins he bid me go

To give my money to stones and stocks,

which was stark lies and nothing so.

With stinking meat then was I fed,

for to keep me from my salvation,

I had trentals of mass, and bulls of lead,

not one word spoken of Christ’s passion.

In me was sown all kind of feigned seeds,

with Popish ceremonies many a one,

Masses of requiem with other juggling deeds,

till God’s spirit out of my garden was gone …

…‘Beware of a new learning,’ quoth he, ‘it lies,

which is the thing I most abhor,

Meddle not with it in any manner of wise,

but do as your fathers have done before.’

My trust I did put in the Devil’s works,

thinking sufficient my soul to save,

Being worse than either Jews or Turks,

thus Christ of his merits I did deprave …

Towards the end of the poem Anne’s imagery seems to prefigure her own violent ending. This is a world of savagery as well as of salvation:

Strengthen me good Lord in thy truth to stand,

for the bloody butchers have me at their will,

With their slaughter knives ready drawn in their hand

my simple carcass to devour and kill.

O Lord forgive me mine offense,

for I have offended thee very sore,

Take therefore my sinful body from hence,

Then shall I, vile creature, offend thee no more.

I would with all creatures and faithful friends

for to keep them from this Gardener’s hands,

For he will bring them soon unto their ends,

with cruel torments of fierce firebrands.

The final lines, assuming they really are by Anne Askew and not a later Protestant propagandist, are genuinely horrific. She is going to leave her carcass on earth, she says:

Although to ashes it be now burned,

I know thou canst raise it again,

In the same likeness as thou it formed,

in heaven with thee evermore to remain.

Anne was one of sixty-three people listed in the famous Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as being burned alive in the reign of Henry VIII alone. They include priests, courtiers, servants, musicians, professional actors or ‘players’, a tailor, Richard Mekins, ‘a child that passed not the age of 15 years’, Frenchmen and a Scot – a pretty good cross-section of Tudor society. There is also William Tracey, a squire from Worcestershire, the sixty-fourth victim – irritatingly for the authoriries he was already dead, so he was dug up and then burned. In the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary nearly three hundred Protestants were burned alive, and it’s an even fuller list, coming from every social class and almost every trade: upholsterers, shoemakers, candlemakers, bricklayers, servants, carpenters, wheelwrights, glovers, merchants, gentlemen and royal courtiers. Men and women, old and young, they came from every part of Britain. When the Protestants were in the saddle under the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, similar numbers of Catholics, many of them priests, were martyred in turn and beatified by the Vatican.

The punishment of death by burning alive was an ancient one, but was revived in Tudor times to cause the maximum fear – in a sense it was a terrorist punishment, worse than a public beheading. It was particularly popular for women like Anne Askew for a bizarre reason: male traitors had been traditionally hanged, drawn and quartered. For the crowd to see them being disembowelled alive, and often having their private parts cut off, they clearly needed to be naked. But while it was acceptable to torture and burn women alive, for them to be seen naked in public was indecent. William Blackstone, one of the fathers of English law, explained that ‘For as the decency due to sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows and there be burned alive.’

It’s a bleak view of Tudor London, and to balance it we could do worse than look at the writing of a very different woman. Isabella Whitney was Britain’s first published professional writer of secular poetry. We don’t know a lot about her, but she was from Cheshire and came down to London to work as a servant. Her verse – clear, punchy and very much from a woman’s point of view – is a useful counterblast to the courtly sonnets and sexual innuendo of more famous male Tudor writers. Here she is, warning young gentlewomen and maids in love about how men really behave. ‘Mermaids’ was a euphemism for prostitutes, in this case inverted and subverted to refer to wanton male lovers. Personally, I like to think it’s also a reference here to the Mermaid Tavern, the favoured haunt in Cheapside of so many poets and playwrights, from John Donne to Fletcher and Beaumont. If so, Isabella was writing a direct response to the flamboyance of the Elizabethan wits.

Ye Virgins, ye from Cupid’s tents

do bear away the foil

Whose hearts as yet with raging love

most painfully do boil …

Beware of fair and painted talk,

beware of flattering tongues:

The Mermaids do pretend no good

for all their pleasant songs.

Some use the tears of crocodiles,

contrary to their heart:

And if they cannot always weep,

they wet their cheeks by art.

Ovid, within his Art of Love,

doth teach them this same knack

To wet their hand and touch their eyes,

so oft as tears they lack.

Here we have a woman’s-eye view of the swooning swains and untrustworthy lovers described by so many sonneteers in codpieces.

Trust not a man at the first sight

but try him well before:

I wish all maids within their breasts

to keep this thing in store.

For trial shall declare his truth

and show what he doth think,

Whether he be a lover true,

or do intend to shrink.

And that’s an image, I think, you would not find in John Donne or Shakespeare. In another, more famous poem, Isabella leaves her rather scanty worldly wealth to the city of London, a place which is less the doomy moral theatre of Anne Askew than a throbbing cockpit of trade and good things:

I, whole in body, and in minde,

but very weake in Purse:

Doo make, and write my Testament

for feare it wyll be wurse …

… First for their foode, I Butchers leave,

that every day shall kyll:

By Thames you shal have Brewers store,

and Bakers at your wyll.

And such as orders doo obserue,

And pouring into London thrice a weeke:

I leave two Streets, full fraught therwith,

they neede not farre to seeke.

Watlyng Streete, and Canwyck streete,

I full of Wollen leave:

And Linnen store in Friday streete,

if they mee not deceave.

And those which are of callyng such,

that costlier they require:

I Mercers leave, with silke so rich,

as any would desyre.

In Cheape of them, they store shal finde

and likewise in that streete:

I Goldsmithes leave, with Iuels such,

as are for Ladies meete.

And Plate to furnysh Cubbards with,

full braue there shall you finde:

With Purle of Siluer and of Golde,

to satisfye your minde.

With Hoods, Bungraces, Hats or Caps,

such store are in that streete:

As if on t’one side you should misse

the t’other serues you feete.

For Nets of every kynd of sort,

I leave within the pawne:

French Ruffes, high Purles, Gorgets and Sleeves

of any kind of Lawne.

For Purse or Kniues, for Combe or Glasse,

or any needeful knacke

I by the Stoks have left a Boy,

wil aske you what you lack.

I Hose doo leave in Birchin Lane,

of any kynd of syse:

For Women stitchte, for men both Trunks

and those of Gascoyne gise.

Bootes, Shoes or Pantables good store,

Saint Martins hath for you:

… And for the men, few Streetes or Lanes,

but Bodymakers bee:

And such as make the sweeping Cloakes,

with Gardes beneth the Knee.

Artyllery at Temple Bar,

and Dagges at Tower hyll:

Swords and Bucklers of the best,

are nye the Fleete vntyll.

Now when thy Folke are fed and clad

with such as I have namde:

For daynty mouthes, and stomacks weake

some Iunckets must be framde.

Wherfore I Poticaries leave,

with Banquets in their Shop:

Phisicians also for the sicke,

Diseases for to stop.

Some Roysters styll, must bide in thee,

and such as cut it out:

That with the guiltlesse quarel wyl,

to let their blood about.

For them I cunning Surgions leave,

some Playsters to apply.

That Ruffians may not styll be hangde,

nor quiet persons dye.

For Salt, Otemeale, Candles, Sope,

or what you els doo want:

In many places, Shops are full,

I left you nothing scant …

Here, in all its plenty, is the sprawling mercantile metropolis of modern times beginning to slide into view; here is a first version of the ‘embarrassment of riches’ described by Simon Schama in relation to the slightly later civilisation of the Dutch Republic. It is clear, however, that Isabella Whitney’s London is also a harsh, challenging place where change is almost too fast-moving. As it still is.

Earlier, we saw how during Tudor times the world of the court began to intersect more closely with the ordinary urban imagination; like a dangerous magnet, the court attracted attention from everywhere. That’s partly about the politics, increasingly aggressive, of religious reform. But nowhere is it clearer than in the development of the period’s most brilliant and long-lasting cultural innovation – the English theatre. It can often seem as if William Shakespeare and a select few contemporaries exploded upon the world from nothing. But as the man said, nothing comes from nothing. The truth is that the urban world of the sixteenth century across England was brimming with spectacle and theatre long before Shakespeare.

In trying to tell the story of the British through poetry there is a particular problem which begins around now, and which I ought to own up to. Just as in high medieval culture, so in early modern culture, Britain was still a Latin-soaked society. If you wanted to get on, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be able to read and speak Latin. In towns across Britain, grammar schools had been established to birch and bully Latin conjugations into young boys – and very occasionally girls too, though almost all the education for them would have been accomplished in the home. Once you had your Latin, the chance of a university education at Oxford, Cambridge or St Andrews might be open to you. (The Scots were well served: from 1451 Glasgow was an option, and from 1495 Aberdeen as well.) Without Latin, and preferably Greek, there was no chance of a career in the Church, the law, or any literate profession connected to the court.

This double literacy had huge advantages for the educated British. It meant that scholars from these islands could talk fluently with their counterparts across the European Continent; and it meant that they had access, directly, to the greatest of the classical writers now becoming more and more freely available in Renaissance Europe. But for poetry, it bred a problem. The educated poets were doused, pickled and marinated in Latin and Greek authors. They had been brought up to parse and translate Plautus, Livy, Ovid and Cicero. Their poetic models came from Imperial Rome and ancient Greece. Their minds were stocked, and over-stuffed, with stories from classical mythology. So when they turned to write in English, they naturally showed their proficiency by imitating the Greek and Roman classics. Sometimes they did this so well you barely notice: the early Shakespeare play The Comedy of Errors comes directly from Plautus. But often anthologies of British poetry from this time seem an endless procession of Roman nymphs and swains, busy copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or, as we saw earlier, versions of Horace’s odes. This is fine. It produces some highly enjoyable poetry. There is a lot of very, very clever writing, with bold and daring games, going on. But mostly it doesn’t tell us much about the Britain of the period. For that we have to go to less clever, less fashionable verse by people further down the social scale, or who have turned their backs on the enticements of ancient Rome. Thus, in what follows there will be rather less than in most verse collections of Edmund Spenser’s droll mimicries of medieval poets and Virgil – fewer Phoebes and Chloes, fewer Strephons – and more of the earthier, homespun verse of the ballads and the morality plays.

British theatrical traditions followed directly from medieval religious pageantry. Some, at least, of the great cycles of mystery plays, from York, Coventry, Wakefield and Chester, were still being performed in the first half of the 1500s, telling the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, the New Testament and the saints in churches and marketplaces. Here was direct, simple, often funny drama which had to catch the attention of an illiterate peasant, or lose its audience. So long as the Catholic Church and the medieval guilds held on to their authority, these immensely popular and protracted (the York Cycle was composed of no fewer than forty-eight different tableaux) entertainments were an essential part of the religious education of millions of Britons, particularly in the north and Midlands of England.

But, like Christianity itself, religious theatre was changing fast, and by the 1540s there was a new kind of drama, equally didactic, in which vices and virtues appeared as characters in their own right. These morality plays, or ‘interludes’, went further in the representation of contemporary British people on the stage, albeit disguised as symbols. Vice, in particular, under many guises, represented the wickedness, lust, cruelty and arrogance that many in the audience would have recognised in the world around them. The young William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon would have come across these plays – early in his life his father had the job of authorising performances in the town. The companies of players who took them around, travelling by cart and packhorse, enjoyed the protection of leading nobles, churchmen and sometimes the court itself; and the plays that have survived often have direct connections with the Tudor court, and were first performed there.

Henry Medwall, little known these days, was a crucial bridge between the medieval world and the Elizabethan stage. Often cited as the first known vernacular English dramatist, he was born in September 1461 in Southwark, then an anarchic and dangerous place, to a family of wool merchants and tailors. He had a relatively prosperous late-medieval upbringing, doused in Latin at a monastery before he went to Eton, and then to King’s College, Cambridge, for more Latin. Alongside all the studying, he threw himself into musical and dramatic entertainments for banquets and other high days. He helped devise Christmas dramas and learned about the importance of mingling music and stories. Later he would serve as a notary public, a kind of lawyer, under Archbishop Morton, hanging on to the edges of the royal court (of Henry VII), rather as Chaucer had a century earlier. For much of his life Medwall was based at Lambeth Palace, where plays were performed in the Archbishop’s Great Hall. It is suggested that Sir Thomas More himself may have acted in Medwall’s first play, Fulgens and Lucres, in around 1497.

Medwall had learned his craft from the medieval morality plays, and he too makes symbols of his characters, but as extracts from his second play, Nature, show, he was learning to root them in the realities of contemporary life. Here, for example, is Pride, describing his exuberant long hairstyle:

I love it well to have side here

Half a foot beneath mine ear

For evermore I stand in fear

That mine neck should take cold!

I knit up all the night

And the daytime, comb it to down right

And then it crispeth and shyneth as bright

As any peryld gold …

And as for his clothing, it’s the latest London look:

My doublet is unlaced before,

A stomacher of satin and no more.

Rain it, snow it, never so sore,

Me thinketh I am too hot!

Then I have such a short gown

With wide sleeves that hang down –

They would make some lad in this town

A doublet and a coat.

Gluttony, meanwhile, lurches in with a lump of cheese and a bottle of wine, announcing:

… Of all things earthly I hate to fast.

Four times a day I make repast,

Or thrice as I suppose,

And when I am well fed

Then get I me to a soft bed

My body to repose.

There take I a nap or twain

up I go straight and to it again!

Though nature be not ready,

Yet have I some meat of delight

For to provoke the appetite

and make the stomach greedy.

Envy tries to persuade Gluttony to arm himself for the wars – this was written just at the end of the Wars of the Roses – but Gluttony is having none of the weapons or armour. If he’s going to the wars he’s going to be a victualler, looking after the food and drink:

I was never wont to that gear.

But I may serve to be a Viteller,

and thereof shall he have store,

So that I may stand out of danger

of gunshot. But I will come no near(er)

– I warn you that before.

Now, no one is saying that this is great poetry, but it’s perhaps not surprising that scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare’s Falstaff is in some respects the child of Henry Medwall’s Gluttony. We don’t know if the great playwright saw this play when he was a boy, but it’s exactly the kind of thing he would have seen, alongside exaggerated and ludicrous tragedies of the kind he mocked in Hamlet.

A slightly later contemporary of Medwall, John Heywood, born in Coventry in 1497, was one of the most celebrated wits and playwrights at the court of Henry VIII – as we have seen, a dangerous place to be. A Catholic who eventually fell foul of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Heywood had six plays published. He was on the other side of the argument from poor Anne Askew, part of the circle around Sir Thomas More, and at one point he himself narrowly escaped hanging. He was less learned than Medwall – he had risen as a chorister, a musician and an actor – but again, his drama, though highly moralistic, is full of the smell and the street language of the age. These were plays which may have been created on the edges of the court, but then made their way outwards, being performed in private houses, the inns of court, and anywhere else where there was a hall big enough to accommodate the audience.

One of the most thoroughly enjoyable takes what is perhaps the classic British conversation to new levels. The Play of the Weather imagines that Jupiter, who bears an uncanny likeness in his grandiosity to Henry VIII, is considering reform of the chaotic British weather, which has been caused by disagreements between various other gods. His chief servant or courtier, ‘Mery Report’, is a rude, puckish creature, not a million miles away from Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest. Mery will be a good servant in this judgement, he tells Jupiter, because the weather means nothing to him personally:

For all weathers I am so indifferent,

without affection standing up so right –

Sun light, moon light, star light, twilight, torch light,

Cold, heat, moist, dry, hail, rain, frost, snow, lightning, thunder,

Cloudy, misty, windy, fair, foul, above head or under,

Temperate or distemperate – Whatever it be

I promise your lordship all is one to me.

So at least we know that the weather around 1533, when this play was probably written, wasn’t so different from today’s. The play is also about the antagonism and rivalry between different parts of the British economy, again a contemporary theme: among those asking for meteorological favours are a lordly huntsman, a woodsman, a merchant, the owner of a watermill and the owner of a windmill, a gentlewoman who wants to keep herself from being sunburnt, a laundress who needs good drying weather and a schoolboy who enjoys throwing snowballs. So it’s clear that in moving from moral archetypes towards contemporary Britons, we have already come quite far.

Although Heywood was a serious man and a passionate Catholic, he was also typically Tudor in his enjoyment of bawdy and of raucous argument. And the play is surprisingly hard-edged in its economic assessment of England at the time. Remember the buzzing market of Isabella Whitney’s London, its goods pouring in by merchant ships? Here is Heywood’s merchant pleading with Jupiter for favourable winds, and a lack of mists and storms. He sounds at times like an early free-market economist:

In the daily danger of our goods and life,

First to consider the desert of our request,

What wealth we bring the rest to our great care and strife –

And then to reward us as ye shall think best.

What were the surplusage of each commodity

Which grows and increases in every land,

Except exchange by such men as we be,

By way of intercourse that lyeth on our hand?

We brought from home things whereof there is plenty,

And homeward we bring such things as they be scant.

Who should afore us merchants accounted be?

For were not we, the world should wish and want …

What does this tell us? Certainly that there was a vigorous discussion going on about whether or not the merchant classes deserved their wealth and position. But the play takes on more sensitive questions as well. After a pompous gentleman demands good weather for his hunting, a forest ranger, in charge of hunting territory, eloquently protests his lot:

Rangers and keepers of certain places

As forests, parks, purlews and chases

Where we be charged with all manner and game

Small is our profit and great is our blame.

Alas for our wages, what be we the near?

What is forty shillings or five mark a year?

There is a distinct class edge to this. What would Henry VIII, that manically enthusiastic hunter, or indeed a local lord hosting such a play, make of this demand for higher wages? It would certainly have caused a hubbub of debate once the show was over. Similarly, after the libidinous gentlewoman has complained about her complexion being ruined by sun and rain, a working-class laundress gives her a terrific scolding. She too might have been as fair, except that she knew she had to work, partly because of the danger of idleness:

It is not thy beauty that I disdain,

But thine idle life that thou hast rehearsed,

Which any good woman’s heart would have pierced.

For I perceive in dancing and singing,

In eating and drinking and thine appareling,

Is all the joy wherein thy heart is set.

But naught of all this doth thine own Labour get.

For how dost thou nothing but of thine own travail,

Thou mightest go as naked as my nail.

The passages between the owners of the windmill and the watermill fascinatingly compare the two ways of grinding meal, and their usefulness to ordinary farmers and peasants. But there’s a lot of sly comedy to be had: the owner of the windmill, of course, wants maximum wind and little rain. But the watermiller explains that the blazing sun is a wonderful thing:

And so for drought, if corn thereby increase

The sun doth comfort and ripe all, doubtless

And often the wind so leyth the corn, God wot,

That never after can it right, but rot.

England’s heavy rains are in fact essential: water is no mere commodity, but

… thing of necessity,

For washing, for scouring, all filth cleansing.

Where water lacketh, what beastly being!

In brewing, in baking, in dressing of meat,

If ye lack water what could ye drink or eat?

Without water could live neither man nor beast,

For water preserveth both most and least.

The argument between the two millers quickly degenerates into a sexual competition about grinding; the pecking of their millstones becomes a fairly grotesque metaphor of the kind that Tudor audiences apparently liked. The puckish messenger, Mery, complains that his watermill is ‘many times choked’, to which the watermiller replies:

So will she be though you should burst your bones,

Except you be perfect in setting your stones …

and advises him on good ‘pecking’. Mery responds:

So saith my wife and that maketh all our checking.

She would have the mill pecked, pecked, pecked every day,

But by God, Millers must peck when they may.

So oft have we pecked that our stones wax right thin

and all our other gear not worth a pin …

And on and on it goes. It’s simple bawdy, not great poetry by any standards. But it tells us more about the life and talk of early modern England than all the lovelorn swains and surprised goddesses put together. There is a material directness about these Tudor ‘interludes’ from which Shakespeare and his contemporaries must certainly have learned. Here, for a final example, is the boy, explaining to Jupiter’s servant why he needs ice and snow. He is clearly a classmate of Shakespeare’s more famous schoolboy:

Forsooth Sir, my mind is this, at few words

All my pleasure is in catching of birds

And making of snowballs, and throwing the same.

For which purpose to have set in frame,

With my godfather God I would fain have spoken,

Desiring him to have sent me by some token

Where I might have had great frost for my pitfalls*

And plenty of snow to make my snowballs.

This once had, boys lives be such as no man leads

O, to see my snowballs light on my fellows heads

And to hear the birds, how they flicker their wings

in the pitfall, I say it passeth all things.

Perhaps, on reflection, he’s more like an early English Dennis the Menace.

In the end Jupiter realises that everybody wants a different kind of weather, and that to help one would be to destroy somebody else:

All weathers in all places if men all times might hire,

Who could live by other?

Therefore he’s going to leave the unpredictable and ever-changing British weather where it is; which at least gives people something to talk about for the next few hundred years. Everybody is pleased – the schoolboy offers to make some snowballs for Jupiter the next time he’s back.

By the middle of the century, it’s to drama that we look for the spirit of the times. That’s the case with the religious fanaticism already discussed: another leading playwright of the pre-Shakespearean theatre was John Bale, whose morality plays were basically anti-Catholic tirades, slashing in every direction at enemies of the true Protestant faith. In his Three Laws, for instance, Sodomy appears on stage boasting about how successful he is, particularly with the Catholic clergy:

In the first age I began,

And so persevered with man

And still will if I can

So long as he endure.

If monkish sects renew,

And popish priests continue

Which are of my retinue

To live I shall be sure.

Clean marriage they forbid,

Yet cannot their ways be hid …

… In Rome with to me they fall,

Both Bishop and Cardinal

Monk, Friar, priest and all,

More rank than they are ants.

Example in Pope Julye,

Which sought to have in his fury

Two lads, and to use them beastly,

From the Cardinal of Nantes.

The accusation that priestly celibacy led straightforwardly to interfering with boys, particularly choirboys, seems to go back a long way; this is the uncensored language of the Protestant Reformation in full flood, many miles away from the aureate stanzas of the poets in the anthologies. Again, the boys who grew up to become the great playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain were brought up on this kind of thing. In the same John Bale play, when Sodomy and Idolatry cackle together, surely we can hear the echo of the witches in Macbeth:

Let her tell forth her matter

With holy oil and watter,

I can so cloyne and clatter

That I can at the latter

More subtleties contrive

I can work wiles in battle,

if I do once but spattle

I can make corn and cattle

That they shall never thrive …

John Bale in his 1539 play Kynge Johan is also the author of the first history play we know of in English; sadly, he makes that too into little more than a diatribe against the wickedness of the Catholic Church.

Much more genial plays are two versions of comedies by Terence, Ralph Roister-Doister from 1566, by the Eton and Westminster teacher Nicholas Udall; and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, first acted a year later at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and probably written by John Still, who later became the Bishop of Bath and Wells. These were two sober fellows – Udall was known for the severity of his thrashings of schoolboys, and Still was an eminent professor of divinity. But in each case they caught the tone of contemporary language in ways that none of the earlier morality plays had quite achieved. Roister-Doister is the story of the attempted wooing, then unsuccessful abduction, of a rich widow. Here is the villain’s boy or servant, protesting at the effect on him of Ralph’s frantic pursuit of his woman. The satirical asides on his work with the lute and gittern (a small stringed instrument of the time) are particularly wonderful.

… now that my maister is new set on wooing,

I trust there shall none of us finde lacke of doing:

Two pair of shoes a day will now be too little

To serve me, I must trot to and fro so mickle.

– Go bear me this token, carry me this letter,

Now this is the best way, now that way is better.

Up before day sirs, I charge you, an hour or twain,

Trudge, do me this message, and bring word quick again,

If one miss but a minute, then his armes and wounds,

I would not have slacked for ten thousand pounds.

Nay see I beseeche you, if my most trusty page,

Go not now about to hinder my marriage,

So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving,

I trow never was any creature living,

With every woman is he in some loves pang,

Then up to our lute at midnight, twangle-dome twang,

Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps,

And hey-hough from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps:

Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poope

As the howlet out of an ivy bushe should hoope.

Anon to our gitterne, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum,

Thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum.

This is a play known mainly to scholars these days, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling that some of these lines are worthy of Shakespeare: it’s the kind of thing we might have had from Malvolio at his most ridiculous.

In Gammer Gurton’s Needle we have an even thinner plot – old lady loses her precious and valuable sewing needle in the leather trousers of her servant Hodge while mending them. Predictably it eventually turns up in his bottom. But again, the play is full of the authentic-sounding dialect of Cambridgeshire in Tudor times. Here is the opening speech, delivered by a servant who stumbles across the house in the immediate chaos of the needle’s loss:

Many a mile have I walked, divers and sundry ways,

And many a good man’s house have I been at in my days;

Many a gossip’s cup in my time have I tasted,

And many a broach and spit have I both turned and basted,

Many a piece of bacon have I had out of their balks,

In running over the country, with long and weary walks;

Yet came my foot never within those door cheeks,

To seek flesh or fish, garlick, onions, or leeks,

That ever I saw a sort in such a plight

As here within this house appeareth to my sight.

There is howling and scowling, all cast in a dump,

With whewling and puling, as though they had lost a trump.

It’s like eavesdropping on a culture that has vanished – genial, tough, robust people leading rawly physical lives. This play, as it happens, also contains the earliest English drinking song to have survived:

I cannot eat but little meat;

My stomach is not good;

But sure I think that I could drink

With him that weareth a hood. More

Drink is my life; although my wife

Some time do chide and scold,

Yet spare I not to ply the pot

Of jolly good ale and old.

Back and side go bare, go bare;

Both hand and foot go cold;

But, belly, God send thee good ale enough,

Whether it be new or old.

I love no roast but a brown toast,

Or a crab in the fire;

A little bread shall do me stead,

Much bread I never desire.

Nor frost, nor snow, nor wind, I trow,

Can hurt me if it would;

I am so wrapped within, and lapped

With jolly good ale and old …

The drinker goes on to curse sellers of thin ale, and like many pub-haunters today insists that he is all the better for a skinful the following morning. But as to his wife, happily it turns out that he isn’t quite as misogynistic as it first appears. Indeed, she’s a bit of a toper too:

And Kytte, my wife, that as her life

Loveth well good ale to seek,

Full oft drinketh she that ye may see

The tears run down her cheek.

Then doth she troll to me the bowl

As a good malt-worm should,

And say, ‘Sweetheart, I have taken my part

Of jolly good ale and old.’

And so the pictures painted of Tudor society by the courtiers, the women who have been pushed out of their houses, the religious fanatics and the burgeoning playwrights all point towards a country that is recognisably ours. It’s an unfair country, full of hypocrisy and special pleading, whose common people by and large ignore their rulers. Despite its fanaticism and brutality, and its terrible weather, it feels surprisingly warm.

* ‘Deucalion’s flood’ refers to the Greek version of the Noah flood story, and therefore simply means ‘since time immemorial’.

* A pitfall is a kind of bird trap.