Читать книгу We British: The Poetry of a People - Andrew Marr, Andrew Marr - Страница 14

An act of magic, we are told, requires bizarrely varied ingredients. In Shakespeare’s time, apparently clever men were still trying to combine base minerals and rare chemicals to produce gold. His witches throw ‘eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing’ into their sinister cauldron. No gold was ever produced, and today we regard the witch-fever of Jacobean Britain as a horrible excuse for the torture and burning of old women. And yet, at the end of the sixteenth century something magical, almost miraculous, did happen in these islands. It reads and sounds like nothing less than a revolution in human consciousness. It was certainly a revolution in how humans understood one another, acted out on wet and greasy wooden platforms in front of a confused but captivated mob. The miracle is sometimes described by the two words ‘William Shakespeare’, but it went a bit wider than that. Although Shakespeare was the leader and prime genius of this revolution, there were others who deserve the name of genius – Kit Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and Ben Jonson among them.

The revolution on the stage and in words can reasonably be compared to the collision that created the English language in the first place. As we have seen, it was the collision of Germanic, Latin, French and some British tongues that produced the endlessly flexible stew of English. By the late 1500s another collision was taking place. This time it wasn’t simply about the ‘word hoard’, important though that was. At first sight, English culture wasn’t unusual: across Continental Europe there was a peasantry, trading and farming peoples speaking diverse local languages and, as in England, an elite speaking Latin and looking back to classical authors for their inspiration. In London above all – that same London Isabella Whitney described so vividly in the previous chapter – many who had been classically educated were forced to sell their skills to those who had no such education.

When Shakespeare arrived in London he soon found his way to the anarchic, wild group of Cambridge- and Oxford-educated writers now known as the ‘university wits’ – Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele and Christopher Marlowe himself, the acknowledged star of the early Elizabethan stage. As a non-university man Shakespeare would have been something of an outsider, though he was quick to collaborate and ‘patch’ plays with them. Later, starving and on his deathbed, Greene launched a famous attack on Shakespeare as a mere ‘upstart crowe’ – nothing but an actor, sans proper education, with ideas above his station. Ben Jonson, classically educated though never able to get to Cambridge because he was apprenticed to his bricklayer father-in-law, accused his friend Shakespeare of having ‘little Latin and less Greek’.

What quickly became obvious was that this provincial man, crammed with the folklore, smells, sounds and words of the English Midlands, was well able to absorb translated stories from the classical and humanist writers, as well as having a basic grammar-school understanding of the Latinists. Thus he took his part amongst a highly literate and competitive elite who found that, thanks to a new market for entertainment, if they wanted to eat and dress well, if they dreamed of owning their own homes, they had to tell stories in English that would captivate the man in the street. Some at least found that if they took their Plautus and their Terence, stories from Latin Renaissance writers in Italy, and their understanding of the Latin chroniclers of older Britain, and then reshaped the stories and adapted their training in rhetoric and argument, and salted it all with the biting, vivid language of town and country people, they could make gold. They became alchemists of language.

The gold came slowly, penny by penny. The population of London when Shakespeare arrived in the 1580s was around 200,000, many of them recent migrants from the countryside or abroad, crammed into a small space still bounded by Roman walls. The theatres opening up as he began his career could accommodate around two thousand observers, and the big innovation was that, rather than a hat being passed around at the end of a performance, as had been the case when the companies toured England, audiences had to pay to get in. A penny bought you standing room, tuppence a basic seat, and three pennies a comfy chair out of the rain. So long as just a few per cent of the population came regularly, that provided a good income stream. Although there were plenty of rival ways of spending time for the overwhelmingly youthful, plague-threatened and competitive Londoners – brutal animal-baiting, bloodthirsty public punishments, taverns and the whorehouses of Southwark – these public theatres were simply more interesting. They were attacked relentlessly by puritan moralists who thought they gave the mob dangerous ideas, encouraging lawlessness and lechery, and who believed the audiences were engaged in sexual misbehaviour with one another. In fact, compared to the entertainments of cruelty, they were a clear advance in civilisation. At any rate, the denunciations, the warnings and the occasional eruptions of state censorship did little to diminish the popularity of this new, cutting-edge entertainment.

This wasn’t the invention of William Shakespeare or any of his immediate contemporaries: as we have already seen, there were Tudor writers, from both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, who led the way from morality plays to the modern drama, and who were highly classically trained as well. Yet when the full colour of the theatrical revolution arrives, it does feel like magic. It happens remarkably fast. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd arrives in the mid-1580s; so do the first plays by Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage and the two parts of Tamburlaine, whose amoral plot provoked Shakespeare and whose thundering blank verse thrilled him. And we are off, though it will take Shakespeare himself some years before he puts on his first play, almost certainly Henry VI Part One. The first successful commercial theatre, called rather prosaically the Theatre, was opened by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576. The following year it was rivalled by the Curtain, and then came the Rose, the Swan and eventually, in 1599, the Globe.

It may not have felt like a revolution at the time. There had been plenty of plays put on in private theatres and in the relative privacy of the inns of court, as well as in the houses of grandees. And in towns around England plays had been performed out of doors too. The first English play in blank verse, the famously abominable Gorboduc, about a disputed succession to the throne, was performed at the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth as early as 1561. Far from being rarities, actors and acting companies were known throughout the country – they even travelled abroad, touring Germany and Denmark. And yet in little more than two decades what feels like a new art form was established, spread and produced a flood of astonishing work, much of which is still performed and enjoyed today.

It’s hard to avoid the thought that this is one of the great triumphs of early capitalism. One of Shakespeare’s best recent biographers, Stephen Greenblatt, explains why. A population of London’s size, tempted by big new theatres, produced intense competition: ‘To survive economically it was not enough to mount one or two successful plays a season and keep them up for reasonable runs. The companies had to induce people, large numbers of people, to get in the habit of coming to the theatre again and again, and this meant a constantly changing repertoire, as many as five or six plays per week. The sheer magnitude of the enterprise is astonishing: for each company, approximately twenty new plays per year in addition to some twenty plays carried over from previous seasons.’ If you want to know why Shakespeare wrote so many plays, and had a hand in so many others, there is the reason. Money, advance, security, competition: to that extent, he lived in our world.

Before the Elizabethan theatres opened, there were relatively few openings for clever writers who weren’t already rich, or had very rich patrons. Like the law and the Church, most of the roads to material advancement were blocked off by medieval regulations, by the ‘squatter’s rights’ of well-established families, and by the rigidly hierarchical nature of early modern society itself. The old stories have it that Shakespeare fled to London after being caught poaching deer. Certainly his father’s business was struggling, and even leaving aside his probable Catholic sympathies there wasn’t much for him in Stratford. In London, however, coins could come tumbling into the hands of those who were ambitious, talented and hard-working enough to give the people what they wanted. You didn’t need, necessarily, a grand patron – though almost all the companies had them, as a form of insurance and protection. What you needed was a buzz, curiosity and persistence. Very quickly a new market was formed. It was a highly competitive one. Write a bad play, or still worse, a boring play, and you were punished by empty places. Write a hit, and then another hit, and your name alone would draw the crowds.

Like modern television drama and cinema, this was entertainment which spanned the entire class structure, delighting Queen Elizabeth as well as illiterate boy apprentices. The theatre in Shakespeare’s day still had plenty of formidable enemies. They certainly included servants of the state, paranoid about threats to the monarchy and the established order, as well as the puritans, who abominated all secular entertainments. And then there was the worst enemy of all, bubonic plague, whose regular visitations shut theatres, like other centres of mingling humanity, almost immediately. But above all there was a market, there was opportunity. And there had, therefore, to be product.

Shakespeare’s England was still a land of martyrdom, spies and relentless, dangerous conflict between Protestants and Catholics. As early Protestant martyrs such as Anne Askew had been dealt with by Catholic authorities, so now in Elizabethan England, Catholics were treated. A lot of painstaking and learned research has been expended on the question of whether William Shakespeare himself was a Catholic, as if even today rival teams are desperate to recruit him posthumously onto their side. All that seems certain is that he and his family were deeply riven. His father, as one of the key civic officials in Stratford-upon-Avon, was directly involved in the Reformation programme of smashing Catholic statues, whitewashing churches and sacking Catholic officials. On the other hand, he was almost certainly married to a Catholic woman, and a Catholic ‘Confession of Faith’ was found hidden in the roof of his house long after his death. He helped recruit Catholic teachers to his son’s school, and got into trouble for failing to turn up regularly to Protestant worship, though that may have been more about embarrassment over his debts than religious belief. At any rate, he was a conflicted figure.

If, as seems likely, Shakespeare himself went to work as a teacher in northern Catholic houses before he came to London, then we must assume he had dangerously un-Protestant views of his own as a young man. Schoolfellows a little older than him fled to the Continent and returned as Catholic agents, and were duly hunted down, tortured and torn apart on the scaffold. Relatives were accused and publicly executed as well – Shakespeare may have seen their heads still rattling on poles when he first entered London across its famous bridge. The recent rediscovery of one of his First Folio collections of plays in France, where it had been in a Jesuit library, has highlighted his links with underground, Catholic England.

There are little hints and glints of Catholic teaching in Shakespeare’s plays – most famously in Hamlet – but there is little real echo of the heart-racingly urgent and dangerous politics of contemporary religion. That should surprise nobody: Shakespeare was working under the watchful eyes of government censors and in front of a largely Protestant audience. His likely first company, the Queen’s Players, had partly been formed to spread Protestant propaganda. All England was alive with special agents, or ‘searchers’, and the government’s fears were not unjustified – in 1580 Pope Gregory XIII had declared that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth would not be a mortal sin, inciting English Catholics to a coup.

However, just as in the reign of Henry VIII, the religious war did produce some seriously good poetry, this time mainly from the point of view of the harried and desperate Catholic losers. It’s perfectly possible that Shakespeare met the charismatic Jesuit agent and scholar Edmund Campion, who bravely debated with Protestant divines after he’d been tortured and imprisoned. He was confronted by Elizabeth herself, and later died the usual agonising death. Robert Southwell of Norfolk was one of the Jesuits in another mission, shortly after Campion, and came to a similar end, imprisoned, tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595. A textual comparison by some scholars suggests that Southwell, connected to Shakespeare’s famous patron the (Campion-befriending) Earl of Southampton, was an author who Shakespeare read closely. In the following extraordinary poem, penned in that year, while Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Southwell compares himself to a pounded nutmeg, and defiantly proclaims his martyrdom:

The pounded spise both tast and scent doth please;

In fadinge smoke the force doth incense showe;

The perisht kernell springeth with increase;

The lopped tree doth best and soonest growe.

Gods spice I was, and poundinge was my due;

In fadinge breath my incense favoured best;

Death was my meane my kernell to renewe;

By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest.

Some thinges more perfit are in their decaye,

Like sparke that going out geeves clerest light:

Such was my happe, whose dolefull dying daye

Begane my joye and termed fortunes spight.

Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Saint;

Once Mary cald, my name now Martyr is;

From earthly raigne debarred by restrainte,

In liew wherof I raigne in heavenly blis.

My life, my griefe, my death, hath wrought my joye;

My freendes, my foyle, my foes, my weale procurd,

My speedie death hath scorned longe annoye,

And losse of life an endles life assurd.

My scaffolde was the bedd where ease I fownde;

The blocke a pillowe of eternall rest.

My headman cast mee in a blesfull sownde;

His axe cutt of my cares from combred brest.

Rue not my death, rejoyce at my repose;

It was no death to mee but to my woe,

The budd was opened to let owt the rose,

The cheynes unloosed to let the captive goe.

A Prince by birth, a prisoner by mishappe,

From crowne to crosse, from throne to thrall I fell.

Whether or not he was reading Southwell, the up-and-coming playwright and successful London actor William Shakespeare was also leaning with some political skill in the other direction. About this time he wrote the history play King John. It’s not one of his greater efforts, and it follows the ferociously anti-Catholic play of the same name by John Bale. Like Bale, Shakespeare uses the opportunity to get in a bit of patriotic anti-papal baiting:

Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name

So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous

To charge me to an answer, as the Pope.

Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England

And thus much more: that no Italian priest

Shall tithe or toll in our dominions;

But as we, under God, our supreme head,

So, under him, that great supremacy

Where we do reign we will alone uphold

Without th’assistance of a mortal hand.

Queen Elizabeth could hardly have put it better herself. We shouldn’t look to Shakespeare for reportage on the most dangerous politics of his day. However, he does give us something even more useful – the ultimate window into a world in which faith, and in particular the fate of the soul after death, occupied almost everybody. In Measure for Measure, a play which to my ear is unforgiving of the smug certainties of any religious believers, the hero, Claudio, believes that in order to protect his sister Isabella’s virtue he must reconcile himself to execution. A duke, Vincentio, urges him not to be frightened of death – as it were, the official line. Be ‘absolute for death’, he tells Claudio – death or life

Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life:

If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing

That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art,

Servile to all the skyey influences,

That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st,

Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool;

So far, so predictable. From pulpits up and down the country, preachers constantly urged their congregations to reconcile themselves to death. On scaffolds, and alongside the pyres prepared for religious martyrs, much the same conversation was going on. We know this from the endless sermons and tracts that have survived from the period; but how did ordinary English men and women feel in response? For that, we have to go to the greatest poet. Claudio, a living, breathing and terrified contemporary, is far from convinced, but to die, he tells himself, and go we know not where,

To lie in cold obstruction and to rot;

This sensible warm motion to become

A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit

To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside

In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice;

To be imprison’d in the viewless winds,

And blown with restless violence round about

The pendent world; or to be worse than worst

Of those that lawless and incertain thought

Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible!

The weariest and most loathed worldly life

That age, ache, penury and imprisonment

Can lay on nature is a paradise

To what we fear of death.

Paradise, purgatory or hell – the possibilities are simply too awesome and too terrifying for anyone but living saints or fanatics to face. And in the single most famous speech in the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet agrees with Claudio – the impossibility of knowing what comes after life terrifies all men. For Catholics, and indeed for many Protestants, the terrors of hell are so vivid, even after the paintings of damnation in the churches have been whitewashed over by the reformers, that they literally freeze action, in this case the possibilities of revenge or suicide. Daily life in early modern Britain could be, by our standards, almost intolerably harsh. Hunger, cold, danger, terrible illness and the constant threat of being expelled from the community were all regular ripples in the sea of troubles that was daily life. Just getting out, escaping, finally resting – what a wonderful prospect. Except, in a God-haunted world, it wasn’t.

To be, or not to be: that is the question:

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep;

To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub;

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause: there’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay,

The insolence of office and the spurns

That patient merit of the unworthy takes,

When he himself might his quietus make

With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,

To grunt and sweat under a weary life,

But that the dread of something after death,

The undiscover’d country from whose bourn

No traveller returns, puzzles the will

And makes us rather bear those ills we have

Than fly to others that we know not of?

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;

And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.

What is central to Shakespeare’s tragic imagination is the understanding that, even without the fear of damnation, there is no way out – merely a universe of grey meaninglessness, which hems in the human life from either side. This is what the sinner and murderer Macbeth finally comes to believe in another of the tragedies:

To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player,

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,

Signifying nothing.

The arguments about whether Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic, struggling to disguise himself all his life, will go on. Most of the time, at least, he seems like a Christian who believes – unlike Christopher Marlowe – that divine judgement awaits a world of sinners. In that he’s a man of his time; what makes him a poet for all time is his inability to reconcile himself to the rites and consolations of any particular religious form. Here, human experience remains scarier and more thrilling than even the Bible admits.

For Shakespeare, the great escape from Thanatos was, inevitably, Eros. Again and again he presents love as the only answer to the great challenge of death and oblivion. The love of the other can quieten, if it cannot quite cancel, the remorseless and deadly passage of time, as his sublime thirtieth sonnet sings:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,

For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,

And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe,

And moan the expense of many a vanished sight:

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

All losses are restor’d and sorrows end.

In his thirty-third sonnet, Shakespeare goes further. Love is one with nature. It has the power of creation itself:

Full many a glorious morning have I seen

Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye,

Kissing with golden face the meadows green,

Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy;

Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

With ugly rack on his celestial face,

And from the forlorn world his visage hide,

Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:

Even so my sun one early morn did shine,

With all triumphant splendour on my brow;

But out, alack, he was but one hour mine,

The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;

Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth.

But what of Shakespeare’s own experience of love? It is often pointed out that while his plays brim with hopeful, ardent suitors and erotic teasing, they are mostly silent when it comes to the experience of lifelong, marital love. This is surely related to Shakespeare’s own early marriage to a woman eight or nine years older than he, who was pregnant by him. Anne Hathaway was a rare catch, a twenty-six-year-old orphan with some property of her own, able, unlike most women of her age, to make her own decisions about love and sex. But Shakespeare was only eighteen when they married, and most of what we know about him – granted, not very much – suggests that it wasn’t an entirely happy union. It produced two adult daughters as well as a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. But Shakespeare spent most of his working life away from Anne, in London. He returned to her at Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of his career, but if his last will and testament is anything to go by, it was hardly an ardent reunion. His main will leaves her absolutely nothing – it all went to Susanna, the older daughter, and her husband – except, famously for a late codicil, leaving Anne ‘my second-best bed with the furniture’. However you play it, it’s not a compliment.

More significant, perhaps, than all of that is the fact that there are so few images of happy married life in Shakespeare’s plays. Here is a man who can describe everything – war, lust, the pleasures of drunken debauchery, the agonies of young love, the furies and dementia of the old, the pleasures of male friendship – but who hardly ever gives us the state that is supposed to be at the centre of Tudor (and modern) social existence: marriage. Again and again, ill-matched lovers are briskly yoked together at the end of the play, and we are not encouraged to look ahead at what follows. The rare displays of marriage in action are hardly reassuring – think of the black, bleak compact of Lady and Lord Macbeth, or of the guilt-stricken lust of Hamlet’s mother and uncle. We know that Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining a strong, sustaining, lifelong love, because he does as much in one of his greatest sonnets:

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.

Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle’s compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

Yet it seems that in his own experience, Love was Time’s fool, and did indeed alter over months and years, if not weeks. Indeed, there is a disturbing loathing when it comes to describing love and sex between older people. The circumstances are hardly normal, of course, but remember Hamlet turning on his lustful mother:

O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardour gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn

And reason panders will …

Nay, but to live

In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed,

Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love

Over the nasty sty …

In spirit, this is very close to one of the most ferocious poems Shakespeare ever produced, the notorious sonnet about the devastating effects of lust, a kind of madness that can destroy human happiness:

The expense of spirit in a waste of shame

Is lust in action: and till action, lust

Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,

Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;

Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight;

Past reason hunted; and no sooner had,

Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait,

On purpose laid to make the taker mad.

Mad in pursuit and in possession so;

Had, having, and in quest to have extreme;

A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

All this the world well knows; yet none knows well

To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

The sexual self-hatred that seems to underlie this sonnet can easily tip over into disgust for the object of love; and the following seems to me to be a poem that is not playful or clever, but essentially hating. It’s apparently about ‘false compare’, or poetic overstatement, but the images we take from it are the black wires and the reeking breath:

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;

Coral is far more red, than her lips red:

If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;

If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.

I have seen roses damasked, red and white,

But no such roses see I in her cheeks;

And in some perfumes is there more delight

Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.

I love to hear her speak, yet well I know

That music hath a far more pleasing sound:

I grant I never saw a goddess go,

My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground:

And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare,

As any she belied with false compare.

I think it’s important to include these poems, because it’s too easy just to see Shakespeare as the champion of young, romantic love, the origin of the modern updates of Romeo and Juliet, and the hero of the brilliant but unhistorical hit movie Shakespeare in Love. The real author’s views of love and sex are, in truth, a million miles away from the elevation of sexual love as the ultimate good in itself that characterises modern culture. Catholic or not, there is plenty of guilt, self-hatred and personal disappointment wired into Shakespearean attitudes towards love and sex. It’s ‘the answer’. But only sometimes, and for some lucky people. And even then, it’s a subversive, dangerous, society-shaking force.

For the next big lesson Shakespeare teaches us about the differences between his world and that of the twenty-first century is the importance of hierarchy and order, up to – and including – monarchy. Hierarchy governed every aspect of daily life: wives and children were supposed to show respect to fathers and husbands; apprentices were tightly bound to their employers, and faced severe punishments if they broke a host of complex rules; smaller gentry owed loyalty and obedience to the great magnates; and the entire country owed absolute obedience to the monarchy. Alongside this, of course, there was the parallel hierarchy, with its many gradations and pomposities, of the Church. But it’s the monarchy, and the whole business of rulers and ruled, that is central to Shakespeare’s notion of society.

In many ways Shakespeare invented the British monarchy as such a central component of the national identity. Right from the beginning of his career, with Henry VI Part One, through to its end and The Tempest, Shakespeare believes in order, and that order, properly understood, derives from a wise monarch. The weak, deluded or self-pitying ruler spreads discord and misery throughout the kingdom. The good ruler is not simply a morally attractive figure, but a political blessing on all under his authority.

There were very good reasons for this. Murder rates in early modern Britain were higher than we can begin to comprehend today. There was a good chance of being robbed and killed if you travelled; domestic violence was very high and tolerated; this was an armed and pressurised society in which the most significant social division was between those legally allowed to carry swords or pistols, and those forbidden to. Violence was everywhere. Shakespeare may have had his first chance at becoming an actor because a row between two more senior players resulted in a fatal stabbing; and Marlowe famously met his end in a Deptford brawl or assassination, with a dagger through his eye.

So it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare believes in order; and that a highly literate, impoverished young man trying to make his way in the seething chaos of one of the world’s largest cities shows a certain nervousness about the mob. In the second part of Henry VI he portrays the medieval rebel Jack Cade as a deluded, violent and extremely dangerous mob orator, an enemy of grammar schools and learning, prepared to burn down London Bridge and behead his enemies, and whose dream of class victory amounts to slashing the price of bread and beer and declaring that the ‘pissing conduit run nothing but claret wine this the first year of our reign’. Cade’s followers dream of a massacre of lawyers – and indeed, like Maoist revolutionaries, of everyone who can read and write. These are the caricatures of a writer who fears disorder more than anything else, even the brutal punishments of the Tudor state.

Fear of disorder can be found almost everywhere in the Elizabethan theatre, even if the theatre itself was regarded as disorderly and threatening. In the play Sir Thomas More, partly written by Shakespeare, the great statesman confronts a London mob furious about immigration and determined to ‘send them back’ – nothing changes. More says:

Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England.

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

The babies at their backs, with their poor luggage

Plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation,

And that you use it as Kings in your desires,

Authority quite silenced by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed:

What had you got? I will tell you: you had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled, and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With selfsame hand, self-reasons, and self-right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.

Underpinning it all is a tough-minded and very unmodern belief in the virtues of hierarchy, class and obedience. Much of the time, these days, we almost pretend in our worship of Shakespeare that it’s not there. But it absolutely is: our greatest playwright was no kind of democrat. In Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, or one of his collaborators, goes further still, telling the London rebels that to rise against the king is to rise against God. And if they succeed in rebellion, by undoing authority, they undo all order and will succeed only in making the world a still more dangerous place:

… Why, even your hurly

Cannot proceed but by obedience.

Tell me but this: what rebel captain,

As mutinies are incident, by his name

Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor?

Or how can well that proclamation sound

When there is no addition but a rebel

To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers,

Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses …

All of which is to say no more than, in Shakespearean English, ‘the revolution devours her children’. Shakespeare shows again and again his vivid understanding of the utter misery of being outcast from the state. In King Lear, the very greatest of his plays, unsocial man, torn by the storm and by madness, excluded from a functioning society, is merely a ‘poor, bare forked animal’. In the world of the theatre, clothing was very important as a sign of social standing, belonging, authority. Now King Lear rips off his own clothes entirely, to make the point.

In writing about whipped beggars with nowhere to hide, and vividly describing the hunger of people at the bottom of the heap, Shakespeare shows that his sympathies naturally spread to the poor. But nothing, or almost nothing, is as terrifying as anarchy. And it’s simply not true that Shakespeare did not know about democracy. As a widely read man he was well aware of the history of popular revolts in England, as well as the democratic experiments of republican Rome. It’s just that as a man of his time, he doesn’t believe democracy could ever work. In his Roman play Coriolanus he puts into the mouths of the common citizens themselves his explanation of why they can’t successfully rule without an aristocratic leader: one explains that they are called ‘the many-headed multitude’, and another parses the thought:

We have been called so of many; not that our heads

are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald,

but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and

truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of

one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south,

and their consent of one direct way should be at

once to all the points o’ the compass.

And we can’t be having that. In Shakespeare’s world, whether it’s Jack Cade’s rebellion in London or the common people of Rome, who sound and dress like Londoners, the crowd is always wrong, ridiculous and often menacing. Coriolanus himself, admittedly a study in overweening and arrogant ambition, simply can’t stick the idea of grovelling to the mob:

Most sweet voices!

Better it is to die, better to starve,

Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.

Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here,

To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear,

Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t:

What custom wills, in all things should we do’t,

The dust on antique time would lie unswept,

And mountainous error be too highly heapt

For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so,

Let the high office and the honour go

To one that would do thus.

In the ancient conflict between the Roman mob and military dictatorship, Shakespeare uses an oily aristocrat, Menenius, to describe the traditional proper relationship between the different classes. In his fable, the other parts of the body rebel against the belly for gorging all the food – just as the rich take more than their fair share of social wealth. The belly replies:

Your most grave belly was deliberate,

Not rash like his accusers, and thus answer’d:

‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he,

‘That I receive the general food at first,

Which you do live upon; and fit it is,

Because I am the store-house and the shop

Of the whole body: but, if you do remember,

I send it through the rivers of your blood,

Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o’ the brain;

And, through the cranks and offices of man,

The strongest nerves and small inferior veins

From me receive that natural competency

Whereby they live: and though that all at once,

You, my good friends,’ – this says the belly, mark me, –

First Citizen. Ay, sir; well, well.

Menenius Agrippa. ‘Though all at once cannot

See what I do deliver out to each,

Yet I can make my audit up, that all

From me do back receive the flour of all,

And leave me but the bran.’

Now of course, these are only the words of another Roman aristocrat, and Shakespeare is the master of laying off one viewpoint against another. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the state as body would have been familiar and well understood to his audience. To us it may seem hilariously self-serving, but in the context of the original play it may well have felt like simple common sense.

The flipside to Shakespeare’s distaste for anything resembling democracy is, of course, his insistence that rulers must be wise and virtuous – or rather, that any of their flaws and failings spread rapidly through the whole of society, causing distress to all. Good kings, bad kings, tyrants, the self-deluded, the saintly and the merely weak – Shakespeare is utterly obsessed by the problems of holding power. This explains, surely, the most distressing reversal in the entire canon, when lively, up-for-it Prince Hal turns on Falstaff, that great, incontinent, fleshly representation of all our baser appetites – the old slob we laugh at and we love – and coldly denies him:

I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers;

How ill white hairs become a fool and jester!

I have long dream’d of such a kind of man,

So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane;

But, being awaked, I do despise my dream.

Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace;

Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape

For thee thrice wider than for other men.

Reply not to me with a fool-born jest:

Presume not that I am the thing I was;

For God doth know, so shall the world perceive,

That I have turn’d away my former self;

So will I those that kept me company.

When thou dost hear I am as I have been,

Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast,

The tutor and the feeder of my riots:

Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death,

As I have done the rest of my misleaders,

Not to come near our person by ten mile …

It is heartbreaking. Falstaff can’t believe it. By some reports Queen Elizabeth herself could not believe it, and wanted Falstaff back in another play. But for Shakespeare good kingship is the ultimate social good, which justifies even this biblical denial.

In his careful obsession with the dynasties of England, Shakespeare does more than anyone else to identify the country itself with those who have ruled it. When we speak of Victorian Britain, or the Edwardian period, we are playing unacknowledged, anti-chronological tribute to Shakespeare. To identify the entire nation through the behaviour of its ruler seems an odd thing, but for Shakespeare the character of the monarch is the character of the country itself. Nowhere is this more explicit than when the elderly John of Gaunt confronts the disastrous-seeming reign of King Richard II, vain, impetuous and hugely in debt.

Methinks I am a prophet new inspired

And thus expiring do foretell of him:

His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last,

For violent fires soon burn out themselves;

Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short;

He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes;

With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder:

Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,

Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.

This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for herself

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in the silver sea,

Which serves it in the office of a wall,

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth,

Renowned for their deeds as far from home,

For Christian service and true chivalry,

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry,

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son,

This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,

Like to a tenement or pelting farm:

England, bound in with the triumphant sea

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:

That England, that was wont to conquer others,

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Shakespeare’s England, the defiant survivor over the long, bloody wars against the Catholic monarchies of the Continent, still the unreconciled enemy of Scots and Irish, was, however, about to come to some kind of end. The death of Elizabeth and the succession of King James VI of Scotland, son of the same Queen Mary she had had beheaded, provided a ‘Union of the Crowns’ whose consequences and perplexities still surround us to this day. Shakespeare, ever the temporiser, was quickly at work on dramas calculated to appeal to the new king, an intellectual fascinated by exploration and overseas trade, and haunted by the (to him) vivid threat of witchcraft. What didn’t Shakespeare foresee? The most obvious answer is religious civil war. Little more than thirty years after he died in retirement at Stratford in 1616, English Protestant revolutionaries would cut off the head of Charles I. Shakespeare knew very well the threat of puritan fanaticism. He saw friends, near family and fellow writers meet horrible ends on the scaffold for their determination to stick with the old religion. The world of the theatre in which, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he made his fortune and survived, rising to gentility, was always threatened by the chalky fingers and hysterical harangues of puritanical preachers. Occasionally, he turns directly back at them – the odious Angelo in Measure for Measure is the most obvious example. But even he could not have imagined what riot, disturbance and upending of the very principles of monarchy were brewing as he died.