Iron-clad security

"Fetch hither all my boxes in my closet."

                                                      Pericles      (III, ii)

Shakespeare's character Cerimon, a well-regarded physician, believes that with the help of his stored-away medical paraphernalia, he can revive Pericles' wife Thaisa, who has apparently died in childbirth while at sea. He succeeds, but Pericles still believes she's dead.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall,  is an iron strongbox, made on the European continent, probably in southern Germany, c1640. It is a good example of the type of box that would have been used in the seventeenth century to lock up and store away valuables. Fourteen and one-half inches in length, just over seven inches in height, and eight inches in depth, it might have routinely been chained to another larger, heavier object to make it harder to steal.

The box is decorated with engraved designs: on top is a representation of a bearded gentleman; one side has an engraving of a hunter with horn, dogs and a bird. The opposite side has a Creation scene depicting God and Adam. The hinges and locks are engraved with acanthus leaves, and the heavy iron ring on top of the box was evidently handy when chaining the box to a wall or some other object. Such an elaborately engraved piece would probably have been owned by a fairly well-to-do individual.

Somewhat less ornate strongboxes were common in many homes in Elizabethan England, where they were frequently kept in a closet in the most secure part of the house. Quite often, they were used in shops and other business establishments to safeguard the profits of the day's trade, or even to protect merchandise regarded as too valuable to leave out in plain view, within easy reach of the larcenous.

The strongbox is perhaps a bit of a reminder that there's nothing new about acquisitive market-prowlers looking for that "five finger discount."

Looking for wisdom

                                                   
In light of the recent tragedy in Newtown, Connecticut, the words of an African-American street person in New York spring to mind. In the aforementioned Shakespeare-related 1996 documentary film by Al Pacino, Looking for Richard, Pacino is speaking with people on the streets of New York City about Shakespeare, and about the playwright's relevance to the world we live in today. This one man-on-the-street response was perhaps the most thought-provoking moment of the entire film:

"Intelligence is hooked in with language. When we speak with no feeling we get nothing out of our society........We don't feel for each other,  that's why it's easy to get a gun and shoot each other. If we were taught to feel, we wouldn't be so violent......Shakespeare did more than help us. He instructed us."

The expression of feeling through language is one of humanity's most precious assets: it is not to be trivialized, not to be wasted, not to be scorned.

"My words fly up, my thoughts remain below.
Words without thoughts never to heaven go."

                                                               Hamlet       (III, iii)

We band of brothers

"We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today who sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother......"

                                                Henry V      (IV, iii)

The Shakespearean lines quoted above are among the most memorable ever written on the visceral emotions of human conflict: they've been used to hearten troops in wars as recent as our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. During World War II, Winston Churchill asked Laurence Olivier for a film version of Henry V as a means of bucking up the spirits of the English people and its soldiery in the face of Nazism. In more recent years, film director Steven Spielberg used "Band of Brothers" as the title of a series depicting an American fighting unit making its torturous way from the beaches of Normandy into the heart of Hitler's Europe.

Pictured above is some of the armor, primarily from the 16th and 17th centuries, in the collection of Agecroft Hall. Earlier versions of essentially the same sort of breastplates and backplates would have protected some of the English warriors and their French counterparts at the battle of Agincourt, where Henry V made himself legendary in 1415. The English had already proven victorious against the French at Crecy and Poitiers; Agincourt produced more icing for a very sweet cake.

The fact that the French, led for a time by Joan of Arc, later drove the English out of France would have to be related in a messier tale: the sad reign of Henry VI, years that saw England lose continental territory and tear itself asunder under a pious but weak king. Shakespeare found enough of a mess to make up a three-parter.

Shakespeare's Henry V has almost always been regarded as a patriotic play, extolling the virtues of England's fighting spirit. But one very talented critic begged to differ. Harold C. Goddard, who headed the English department at Swarthmore College from 1909 until 1946, wrote a book on the works of Shakespeare but died before giving his book a title. His publishers called it The Meaning of Shakespeare. An admiring and perceptive commentator, the late Joseph Sobran, wrote that a better title would have been The Spirit of Shakespeare, since each reader of the playwright would and should create a personal interpretation of the meaning of the poet's works.

Goddard maintained that Shakespeare, in writing Henry V, was adhering to personal convictions that emerge repeatedly in his histories and tragedies: that the use of force ultimately does not prevail and in fact drags human souls into darkness. As Goddard points out, a Romeo swept up in ancestral feuding ultimately did not help himself or his Juliet; Hamlet left enormous carnage in his wake (including his beloved Ophelia) after heeding the ghost of his father. The territorial gains of Henry V were wisps in the wind.

Shakespeare, Goddard believed, was convinced that giving in to the aggressive, violent side of man's nature, often urged on by atavistic sources, only led down a winding road to catastrophe. Goddard's take on Shakespeare is both surprising and magnificent, and gives Shakespeare's works a unity and coherence that so many literary critics fail to grasp.

Home is the soldier

".......Well said, courageous Feeble! Thou wilt be as valiant
as the wrathful dove or most magnanimous mouse."

                                                    Henry IV, Part II            (III, ii)

Despite his rotund self-absorption, Shakespeare's Falstaff has been given the responsibility of recruiting soldiers for an army, to help the ailing King Henry IV fight another outbreak of rebelliousness. True to his overinflated form, Falstaff sees his chance for personal gain: he'll pocket the bribes of the fit and able and recruit instead the weak, the ragged, the hopelessly pathetic. He'll make out like a bandit, figuring no one will be the wiser: he recruits the bedraggled Feeble, Shadow, and Wart.

More dependable soldierly types are depicted in the top row of the carved oak panel above, which adorns a wall in Agecroft Hall's Great Hall. The panel is believed to have been carved in the first half of the sixteenth century, perhaps during the lifetime of Agecroft's owner Robert Langley. The carving style may point to either Italian or German workmanship. It's worth remembering that even in sixteenth-century Tudor England, owning goods that were obtained from abroad translated into status. Such possessions gave owners a chance to sneer at domestic craftsmanship, regardless of its quality. Some things never change.

And oak, as a wood choice, appealed to the English: it was durable as a rock, and carving it well involved considerable skill. On the Sceptered Isle, they seemed to like virtually all of their furnishings done in oak.

Agecroft's carvings include (on the bottom row) what has been called the romayne style, a Renaissance decorative motif featuring heads in medallion-like profile, often carved into furniture and paneling. It's a style first introduced into England from Italy during the reign of Henry VIII; the word "romayne" was current in England at the time as applying to anything Roman or Italian. Whether these four particular figures were meant to have specific identities is uncertain.

Regarding the military types depicted in the top row (even the piper at far right has weaponry), research done at Agecroft Hall suggests the possibility that they represent retainers of a noble house "chosen to serve as defenders should occasion require it." If so, it is a reminder of the inherent violence of the Tudor age, when there was little sense of ease or safekeeping without some form of armed protection.

No doubt Falstaff would have let these men avoid their warlike duties in return for a few clinks of coinage.

Confusion makes a modest masterpiece

"This is as strange a maze as ever men trod...."

                                                              The Tempest   (V, i)

The shipwrecked Alonso, King of Naples, is scratching his head over the strange but joyful happenings he's witnessed on Prospero's island: his son, given up for dead, is restored to him; his own crass behavior has been forgiven; his mostly disreputable retinue let off with a very mild scolding. He's justifiably baffled, as if stumbling about in a maze that has new wonders around every unexpected corner.

Pictured above is the turf maze at Agecroft Hall. It's almost invariably a highlight for visiting children, who  wend their way through its not-too-labyrinthine turns and by trial and error usually make it to the center. The maze was laid out years ago in emulation of similar designs that had become popular during the Tudor period or earlier. There were also labyrinth designs which, in the strictest use of the term, differed from mazes in that they did not involve confusing choices of direction, but were essentially meandering, one-way journeys to a (usually) central destination, which often had a fountain, sundial, or statue.

Labyrinths and mazes had historical antecedents ranging from ancient Crete with its mythological Minotaur to the floor of medieval Chartres Cathedral in France. The cathedral and its labyrinth are to this day a destination of pilgrimmage for religious penitents, medievalists, mystics and the merely curious.

In Shakespeare's age, English society's upper social strata enjoyed formal gardens, often walled in or cloistered to add to the sense of exclusiveness and privacy. A variety of types of mazes were created: one popular style involved using box hedges, sometimes allowed to grow high enough to preclude seeing over, making the correct path more of a mystery. Frustratingly, turf mazes in England and on the European continent tend to be difficult if not impossible to date because they must be periodically recut: neglect quickly leads to oblivion.

Among the finest mazes in England can be found at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. Its maze is of yew and the hedges stand taller than a man's height, making navigation to its center quite an adventure.

Better not drink the water, either

"............Hamlet, this pearl is thine;
Here's to thy health.
                [Trumpets sound, and cannon shot off within.
         Give him the cup."

                                                             Hamlet         (V, ii)

Hamlet has just scored "a hit, a very palpable hit" in his fencing duel with Laertes. King Claudius, in league with Laertes to kill Hamlet, has put poison in the drinking cup he offers the prince. Had Lady Macbeth been Claudius' wife she might have applauded; her immortal advice to her husband was to "....look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't...."

In the collection of Agecroft Hall is an ornate silver covered cup, German in origin and made c1600 (shown above). Most Shakespearean scholars believe that Hamlet was written at about that same time, although many also point to the possible existence of an earlier version of the play, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. In any case, the setting of Hamlet in the sumptuous court of a Danish king makes it easy to imagine such a fine cup as holding the proffered drink that would mean "the present death of Hamlet," doing what England never got its chance to do.

This silver cup is slightly over nine and one-half inches tall, with elaborate ornamentation depicting flowers and fruit. Much of the northern European continent was justifiably well-regarded for the quality of its metalwork, and German craftsmanship was no exception in the eyes of the English. German silver pieces were said to be rarely melted down for reworking due to their quality, according to archival sources.

In Hamlet, when the poisoned cup is offered the Danish prince, he politely declines it for the moment, and Queen Gertrude drinks from the cup instead. Interestingly, like so much of Hamlet, there have been contrasting interpretations of this scene in performance. The more conventional approach has the Queen quite oblivious to the fact that the cup is poisoned: by the time she realizes what has happened, it's too late.

An intriguing alternative interpretation (used by Diane Venora, for example, in the Ethan Hawke film version that was released in 2000) has the Queen, guilt-ridden and suicidal, suspecting the cup to be poisoned and using it to deliberately end her own life. That modernized take on Shakespeare's classic also has Laertes pulling out a pistol when his fencing skills prove inadequate to the task at hand.

Be all this as it may, there's one interpretation that hasn't changed in 400 years: Hamlet's a goner.

Sleep, death's counterfeit

"To note the chamber: I will write all down:
Such and such pictures; there the window; such
the adornment of her bed; the arras, figures...."

                                                                      Cymbeline     (II, ii)

In the middle of the night, as Shakespeare's heroine Imogen sleeps, sly Iachimo emerges from hiding in a large trunk that he has persuaded Imogen to have placed in her own bedchamber for safekeeping. He is already convinced of Imogen's undying loyalty and devotion to her husband; but to win a wager with that husband Iachimo needs to have some convincing proof that he's slept with her. He figures that a detailed description of her bedchamber, of a mole on her left breast, and a stolen bracelet should do the trick. And it does, for a time.

Believed to be numbered among Shakespeare's last dramatic works, his play Cymbeline is set in the misty age of British resistance to imperial Roman hegemony. It might be a bit surprising to recall that in the playwright's own day, beds were not always located in rooms we would strictly regard as "bedchambers."

Generally, it was not until later in the 17th century that many of the rooms of an English home began taking on the kind of specific, distinct functions that we've become so familiar with today. Since most lacked what we would call "hallways," walking through a house meant walking through various rooms. It's hardly surprising that their functions were more blurred at that time.

Pictured above is an ornately carved English bedstead, made around 1580, in the Great Parlor at Agecroft Hall. When it was completed, Shakespeare was about sixteen years old. Even at a glance, it's an extremely impressive piece of furniture: in Shakespeare's time, bedsteads were frequently among a home's most valuable items. Much ink has been spilled on the "second best bed" that the playwright from Stratford famously left to his wife in his will. Various explanations notwithstanding, it's worth noting that bedsteads were relatively valuable enough to merit specific, prominent mention in many wills made during the Tudor and Jacobean periods.

The oak bed in Agecroft's parlor has a headboard decorated with two arches, with recessed panels painted with tempera paint. Stylized floral arrangements and a figure of Pan, the Greek mythological god of meadows and forests, feature prominently in the bed's decoration. A bit evocative, perhaps, of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It.

The curtains that can be drawn around the bed helped keep out drafts, and were conducive to privacy, probably not a minor consideration in a home without hallways. On the wall to the left of the bed is an "arras," a hanging tapestry that was not only decorative but of much-needed help in keeping a room warm. The name comes from Arras, a town in the Netherlands across the English Channel (it now lies within the border of northern France), where so many of the finest tapestries were made during Shakespeare's era.

Horse, hound, and hind

"Under this thick-grown brake we'll shroud ourselves;
For through this land anon the deer will come;
And in this covert will we make our stand,
Culling the principal of all the deer."

                                                              Henry VI, Part III         (III, i)

Two gamekeepers, crossbows in hand, make these plans in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. Little do they know that into their midst will shortly wander a royal quarry indeed: a dethroned Henry VI, pious but weak, incompetent, pitiful. Henry has stumbled over the border from exile in Scotland, longing to see his own country again. The keepers, undoubtedly surprised by this turn of events, take Henry into custody, regarding him as no longer their king.

He would later be murdered in the Tower of London at the hands of RP3 (whether that was a hip nickname for Richard Plantagenet III is merely wishful thinking). Anyway, at the time of the murder, Richard was still titled Duke of Gloucester. He'd weasel his way to the throne in a while.

Pictured above is a 17th-century decorative carving of a male deer beneath one of the east-facing upstairs windows of Agecroft Hall. It has long since been coated with a tar-like, carbon-based substance for its preservation. The imagery is not the least bit out of the ordinary in a time when hunting with horse, hound, and hawk was usually the favorite sport of English kings and nobility alike. They were well aware, even then, that the country's resources were not infinite and they made incredibly harsh laws preventing commoners from lawfully pursuing all but the most worthless types of game, even in times of dearth. A poacher caught on royal or manorial lands was lucky to avoid being hanged.

The nobility loved their sport, they enjoyed venison on their dining tables, and they were greedy. Whether the low-born went hungry was not their problem, or so they thought. The mid-to-late 1590's, by which time Shakespeare had already written his Henry VI plays, saw several consecutive years of bad weather and crop failures, making the hungry lower social classes all the more desperate, all the more willing to risk the noose for a deer stolen in the night.

The scarecrow as Shakespearean metaphor

"We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror."

                                                       Measure for Measure        (II, i)

Shakespeare knew that there is no worse hypocrite than a newly-empowered hypocrite. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio of Vienna leaves his deputy Angelo temporarily in charge of the kingdom, and Angelo quickly turns Draconian. He has decided that if every last letter of the law was enforced with the utmost severity, then fear and respect for the law would be reimposed on a citizenry grown accustomed to leniency and rule-bending. To Angelo, the people have become like crows who lose their fear of a scarecrow that never moves. Conveniently, Angelo also finds his lust for the innocent Isabella better served by following a strict code of merciless conduct.

Pictured above is a scarecrow from Agecroft Hall's aptly-titled Scarecrow: The Challenge and Exhibit, which invited local schools and non-profit organizations to use their creativity in making scarecrows to help raise money for their organizations. Close inspection of this particular scarecrow reveals a gourd for a heart!

As a precaution before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy ("Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / which is the mightier...."   Hamlet {IV, i} ), all of the scarecrows at Agecroft were taken down and stored. Since the storm went relatively easy on Richmond, we've been able to get them back out and on display through Nov. 4th. The local crows will not rest easy tonight.

A bit of mystery, a touch of conjecture

Shakespearean scholars often make reference to the poet's "Lost Years," from the time he left grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon in the late 1570's until his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582, and then again for an extended period later in that decade and into the next, just prior to his earliest successes on the London stage and his literary vilification by a mean-spirited and envious rival,  Robert Greene, in 1592. Greene had written sneeringly of Shakespeare's presumptuousness in trying to compete with his university-trained betters. Shakespeare's education didn't extend beyond grammar school; how dare he write for the stage? At least that demeaning outburst allowed us to pinpoint Shakespeare's whereabouts.

A long-standing tradition, flavored with some traces of circumstantial evidence, holds that Shakespeare was for a while a "Schoolmaster in the Countrey," according to the late 17th-century diarist John Aubrey, who cites as his source the actor son of Christopher Beeston, who had been an actor in Shakespeare's company during the great writer's lifetime. Peter Ackroyd, in his masterfully written Shakespeare: The Biography, points out that teacher-and-student or otherwise pedantic scenes and references are unusually frequent in Shakespeare's plays, often harking back to the torturous grind of grammar school experience, with its "whining schoolboy.....creeping like snail/unwillingly to school" (As You Like It    Act II, Scene vii).

What makes this little touch of conjecture pertinent to Agecroft Hall is this: Ackroyd, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Wood, and  numerous other Shakespeare biographers have pointed to Lancashire (where Agecroft Hall once stood) as a possible venue for Shakespeare's brief career as a tutor of children. Lancashire was a stronghold of the Old Religion, Catholicism, and there is considerable evidence that Shakespeare's family might have continued to cling to the old faith. Several of William's grammar school teachers were Catholics from Lancashire. Might one of them have recommended a bright young pupil named William Shakespeare to serve as a tutor to the children of a wealthy Lancastrian landholder? Certainly a plausible theory. And the acting out of simple morality plays and other edifying fare was regarded as both a common and effective teaching tool in Tudor England, perhaps allowing Shakespeare to show the earliest glints of his brilliance.

Specifically, these biographers point to the intriguingly ambiguous will left by Alexander Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancashire. He left actors' costumes and musical instruments to his half-brother Thomas Hoghton, asking him to take into his service "ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwellinge with me" or to find someone who would. Given the nonexistence of spelling rules in Tudor England, and the fading memory of an aging man, might not "Shakeshafte" and Shakespeare be one and the same young man?

Hoghton Tower is but a half-day's walk, if that, from where Agecroft Hall once stood. Even some of the less professional or polished acting groups, under noble patronage, traveled about the county if not the country. A mobile form of entertainment, though slow on its tours by today's standards.

If such was the case, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Shakespeare, under the patronage of either the Hoghtons or later fellow Lancastrians Thomas Hesketh or Ferdinando Stanley (who as Lord Strange patronized the acting group The Lord Strange's Men) might conceivably have come to Lancashire's Agecroft Hall as a young actor or in some theatrical capacity, getting his feet wet in the trade.

Pictured above is Agecroft Hall as it stood in Lancashire in the latter part of the 19th century; the original portions of the structure date back to the 15th century. In 1926, having fallen into a state of significant deterioration, it was purchased by Virginia businessman Thomas C. Williams, Jr. The building was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic, and rebuilt on the banks of the James River in Richmond, where it stands to this day. Whether a young William Shakespeare ever counted its chimneys (Agecroft once had eleven hearths) is a tickler for the imagination.

A well-rounded education

"Take you the lute, and you the set of books;
You shall go see your pupils presently."

                                                              The Taming of the Shrew      (II, i)

Renaissance Italy seemed to have a particular hold on Shakespeare's imagination: its warm southern climate and reputedly hot-blooded, passionate populace added credence to the action and soaring emotions of so many of his plays. A delightfully mercurial Mercutio strolls the streets of Verona, peppering the likes of Romeo and Tybalt with his quips. A Jewish moneylender with unflinching tribal loyalties demands his bond in Venice. Petruchio comes to Padua and determines to have his Kate.

And Kate's father Baptista, like any good Italian patrician, wants his two daughters to be tutored in a manner deemed appropriate for Italian Renaissance women. Music, poetry, and the affairs of the home were high on the list of priorities for young women; the arts of war, of political aggrandizement, of business were left largely to the Italian male.

Pictured above is an Italian chitarrone, a bass or contrabass of the lute family, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, acquired from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the precise year of its making is uncertain, it bears characteristics of late 17th century workmanship.The sounding board has a parchment rosette surrounded by an ebony band, inlaid with ivory. Similar inlays are in the ebony neck and base of the instrument.

Baptista's daughters, Katharina and Bianca, would have used such a delicate instrument to accompany their equally delicate recitations of poetry or song, not necessarily playing and singing at once. Music was thought to soothe the more passionate impulses and in Shakespeare's Italy, there seemed to be plenty of that to go around.

One point should not be overlooked: Shakespeare might have chosen Italy as a venue for so many of his plays simply because by doing so, any political or social implications in action or speech onstage could be regarded as far removed from English contemporary political circumstances. Shakespeare was later to discover, in the aftermath of the quashed Essex Rebellion, just how precarious a playwright's life could be when his history play Richard II was exploited by the Essex faction for its supposed rabble-rousing potential. The rabble never roused, but Shakespeare and his acting fellows fell under suspicion nevertheless.

Plays set in exotic, far-away Italy must have seemed, for the most part, benign in comparison and ideal for Shakespeare.

When mercy was out for the day

"Thou hast no hands, to wipe away thy tears:
Nor tongue, to tell me who hath martyr'd thee....."

                                                  Titus Andronicus      (III, i)

In one of Shakespeare's earliest plays, Titus Andronicus, the noble Roman title character addresses his daughter Lavinia in a scene usually regarded as Shakespeare's most shocking. Lavinia has been horribly assaulted and maimed by Demetrius and Chiron, sons of Tamora, Queen of the Goths. Their butchery leaves Lavinia with no hands or tongue, to prevent her from disclosing their identities.

The assault is so brutal that over the centuries since Shakespeare's death, some scholars have expressed doubts that the scene could possibly have been written by the same poet that gave us Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, King Lear, Othello. Another current of thought holds that it's simply the young Shakespeare writing for the groundlings, getting his dramatic legs up and moving without any sense of maturity or gentility to draw from. That refinement would come later.

We should bear in mind that most Londoners in Shakespeare's age were neither unacquainted nor particularly squeamish about brutality: they saw it at its worst in the horrific public executions of persons convicted of treason or any number of other crimes. Execution sites at Tyburn (for the commoner or less upscale), Tower Hill and Tower Green (for the most noble yet treasonous nonetheless) stayed busy enough to satiate the blood lust of most Englishmen.

They had already lived through the reign of Queen Mary, "Bloody Mary," Elizabeth's half-sister and immediate predecessor, who had ruled from 1553 - 1558. Staunchly Catholic, she had tried to forcibly return the English people to the papal fold by burning recalcitrant Protestants up and down the land in gruesome public spectacles meant to provoke fear whenever, wherever faith wouldn't budge.

Pictured above is a woodcut illustration of the burning of two Protestant martyrs during Mary's reign, from one of Agecroft Hall's 16th-century books, John Foxe's Actes and Monuments, often referred to as the Book of Martyrs. The book in Agecroft's collection is a third edition printed in 1583 by John Day of London; Foxe's first English edition had come out in 1563, the year prior to Shakespeare's birth. That first edition had 1741 folio-sized pages, with more pages added in later editions describing countless acts of violent persecution. Foxe was nothing if not thorough. His book was an enormous success and became a commonplace volume throughout the once-again Protestant England of Good Queen Bess. After the first few years and the early assassination plots of Elizabeth's reign, Catholics were the ones who had to look back over their shoulders. Violence? So what else is new?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T: Find out what it means to thee

"Reputation, reputation, reputation! O,
I have lost my reputation! I have lost
the immortal part of myself, and what
remains is bestial!"
               
                                                Othello      (II, iii)

Shakespeare's Michael Cassio, heretofore Othello's chief lieutenant, is horrified. He's allowed the devious Iago to talk him into getting drunk, into brandishing his sword in a raucous quarrel and getting demoted by the stern general. The schemer Iago is not only evil but enigmatically so: his mere suspicion of being cuckolded by Othello and his belief that he deserved a military rank that went instead to Cassio leaves him seething, ready to do bitter business indeed. Even Machiavelli might have found his behavior to be somewhat over the top.

In Shakespeare's world, more so than in our own, reputation was everything, or almost everything. If a man was known to have sworn an oath and then broken that oath, he was destined for Hell, at least in the eyes of the God-fearing faithful. Having lost the trust of others, he'd find life more difficult in an age when England had no standing army or police force and his friends, if he had any, might be the only thing standing between him and a sudden, violent demise.

Essentially, the subject matter of the stained glass pictured above is reputation. The glass is in a window at Agecroft Hall, and shows details of the coat of arms of the Dauntesey family, who came into possession of the Agecroft manor in Lancashire through the marriage of William Dauntesey and Ann Langley in about 1569, when Shakespeare was a child. In a lower portion of the window, a Latin inscription translates into English as "Virtue Alone Conquers."

Just how virtuous or conquering the Daunteseys actually were remains uncertain.

The College of Heralds in London granted these symbols of reputation, these coats of arms, to families that had illustrious histories of service to king and country, and to families that had preposterous claims to such ancestry and service but did produce copious amounts of  money to "legitimize" those claims. On those occasions, hitherto unknown "noble" ancestors could be found coming out of the woodwork, if the price was right.

Shakespeare himself managed to secure a coat of arms for his family in 1596, after he'd found great success as a playwright in London. His father in earlier years had made an effort to acquire such a mark of distinction on the basis of his role as one of Stratford's leading citizens, but his fortunes had taken a turn for the worse and the effort had come to nothing. It isn't difficult to imagine that when Shakespeare the son finally secured a coat of arms for his family, he must have felt that his father's honor had been justifiably reestablished.

Agecroft's Dauntesey stained glass is remarkable in that it and the other glass that was shipped across the Atlantic when Agecroft Hall came from Lancashire to Richmond in the mid-1920s arrived here without a single piece being broken. Don't bet on that happening too often these days.

Burning it at both ends

"And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out brief candle!"
                                                      
                                                             Macbeth      (V, v )


Far more often than not, Shakespeare's Macbeth is regarded as his darkest play, both figuratively and literally. Almost all of the scenes are nighttime scenes, when "Good things of day begin to droop and drowse;/While night's black agents to their prey do rouse" (III, ii).

Try for a moment to imagine the sealing darkness of a world not yet illuminated by electric light. As peculiar as it might sound, we've become so accustomed to the benefits of the bulb that we've generally forgotten just how dark darkness can be. The real and imagined perils of the night become a lot easier to understand once we see them in the context of not being able to see them. When we cannot see our hands in front of our faces, should we be surprised when the imagination takes over?

In Shakespeare's day, even candles were not an inexpensive trifle. Whether the wax came from the honeycomb of bees or tallow from sheep or other livestock was used, only the wealthy could afford to be profligate in their use: the typical Elizabethan house was not ablaze with light, but was for the most part dark to a degree we'd find startling.

Pictured above is a rush light, burning at both ends in a holder, in the Tudor Kitchen at Agecroft Hall. As the name suggests, the material used for burning generally consisted of a river rush, similar to the stem of a cattail, with its hollow center filled with perhaps lamb's fat or the tallow of some other farm animal. It would burn fairly slowly, but one of the drawbacks of using animal fat was its frequently less-than-pleasant odor as it burned. Yet it was an age of smells that we've grown less accustomed to: the smell of wood smoke, of farm animals and what they leave behind, of fish and meat in an open-air market, of the buzzard's breath of a town drunk, slumped in the corner of a tavern.

Being an important and versatile material, beeswax had at times throughout European history even been a target of taxation, making it all the more expensive and prompting the use of alternatives like the rush light.

It's simply another example of using home-spun ingenuity to avoid any unnecessary "rendering unto Caesar."

Richard III: an aside

Regarding Shakespeare's King Richard III, it's worth watching Al Pacino's sneering, oily take on the king in Looking for Richard, an innovative film about how a group of first-rate actors would hash out their own interpretation of Shakespeare's play. It's an attempt to get inside the thought processes of the actors, and at the same time perform the most essential scenes of the play for the viewer.

And Winona Ryder was great as Lady Anne.

And if you don't like the vintage, well, tough

Since an archaeological discovery in recent days has put King Richard III in the news (see posting below), we'll take a look at another disreputable deed attributed to this malignant monarch as he stalks haltingly through the pages of Shakespeare:

"Take that, and that: if all this will not do,
{stabs him}
I'll drown you in the malmsey-butt within."

                                                          Richard III        (I, iv)

Eliminating the people that stand between Richard and the throne proves to be a messy business: he pays two murderers to kill his brother George, Duke of Clarence, in the Tower of London. The murderers get a bit sloppy with the job and end up drowning George in a cask of wine. That made all the blood less of an eyesore, no doubt. The whole scenario did not just spring fully-formed from Shakespeare's imagination: the detail of the wine cask had already become a part of English lore regarding the crime.

Malmsey was a sweet wine with ancient Greek origins. Evidently it was well-loved by the English, whose own damp climate made a lost cause of viniculture.




Pictured above are 17th-century stoneware Bellarmine jugs from the collection of Agecroft Hall, of the type often used to hold wine. At that time, the English were said to have an intense loathing for a  Roman Catholic theologian, Cardinal Roberto Bellarmino, who had stood out among the most vociferous opponents of Protestantism. Evidently, although this caricatured style of jug had already been in existence for a long period, the English came to associate the jugs with Bellarmino, perhaps because the churchman  was bearded and fat.

Jugs with a more stern countenance were sometimes associated with the Spanish Duke of Alva, who as governor of the Netherlands was known for his harsh, draconian judicial decrees. Clearly, both styles of jugs helped the English give vent to their fondness for both humor and xenophobia.

The jugs were also referred to as "graybeards" and "longbeards," and were fairly common in Elizabethan taverns and households. They came in several sizes: a gallonier, a "pottle pot" which held two quarts, and a "little pot" held just a pint.

Whether the historical Richard celebrated his brother's wine-soaked demise with a glass of Malmsey is anyone's guess.

Speak of the devil

Coincidentally, yesterday morning, just one day after the last posting (see below), a story from the Associated Press in London reported that an archaeological team from England's University of Leicester may have found the bones of King Richard III.

To read more details, click link below:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/sep/12/richard-skeleton-king-remains-bosworth?INTCMP=SRCH

"My kingdom for a pork pie" just didn't sound dramatic enough

"A horse! A horse! my kingdom for a horse!"
                                                        
                                                             King Richard III       (V, iv)

Separated from his horse at the Battle of Bosworth Field, Shakespeare's Richard III stands as one of the poet's most ambiguous characters: a man of action, yet introspective; in character Machiavellian yet not without a sense of guilt that haunts his sleep. A man physically lame yet of considerable prowess with sword in hand, horse or no horse.

But above all, the quintessence of evil, at least until Shakespeare penned the lines that created Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear.

The actual battle of Bosworth took place in 1485, a definitive clash between Yorkist and Lancastrian, with the Earl of Richmond emerging victorious from the scrape to marry a daughter of the House of York. The marriage brought peace to England under the symbol of the Tudor Rose. Richard bit the dust but lived on in the pages of Shakespeare, making Richmond look like a tedious goody-goody.

Pictured above are a pair of rowel spurs, c1650, from the collection of Agecroft Hall. Made of steel and German in origin, they measure about six inches in length. Rowel spurs, which began to predominate in northern Europe beginning in the fourteenth century, were an improvement over the older "prick spur" design: the small spiked wheel of a rowel spur was more humane as far as the horse was concerned. The older spur design simply stabbed into the sides of the animal and probably drew blood far more often than not.

The use of spurs in Europe dates back at least as far as the Celts of the sixth century BC; they were also used by the Greeks and Romans further south. It's interesting to note that the appearance of stirrups on war horses in Europe during the early medieval period had an enormous impact, making riders far more effective in battle because they were more stable on their mounts. It became less difficult to swing a sword and manuever without falling off one's mount, which would cause shame and embarrassment if nothing else.

As far as the real, historical Richard III is concerned, there's been an enormous amount of debate, still ongoing, as to whether he was really all that bad, or whether his reputation suffered simply because he ended up on the losing side of the struggle for lasting possession of the English throne. It was in the best interests of the ascendant Tudors to make the origins of their rule look as attractive as possible; besmirching Richard III could have been just part of the propaganda campaign. Did Richard really have the two young sons of his brother Edward IV murdered in the Tower of London, clearing his way to the throne? There is, among other organizations, a Richard III Society that stoutly maintains his innocence.

Quite probably, we'll never know for certain.

So why did you marry that sleazeball?

"Look here, upon this picture, and on this,
the counterfeit presentment of two brothers."

                                                           Hamlet       (III, iv)

Hamlet's problem isn't madness. Among other things, he's just plain mad. Mad at his mother for her hasty remarriage to her dead husband's brother, Claudius. Debatable questions of incestuousness aside, Claudius bears the mark of Cain: he murdered the elder Hamlet to get his hands on both the crown and Queen Gertrude,  not necessarily in that order. Evidently, he didn't regard the younger Hamlet as formidable enough to worry too much about.

In a scene that's been interpreted and reinterpreted for centuries (the same could be said for the entire play), Hamlet confronts his mother about her "o'erhasty marriage" just moments after stabbing Polonius, Claudius' chief courtier. Polonius had chosen a hiding place that wasn't sufficiently sword-proof. Clearly, Gertrude's behavior has set Hamlet on an angry roar.

Dispose of Polonius' body? He'll get to that in a minute. What Hamlet wants to know right now is, "Mum, how could you so quickly transfer your affection from this superman to this slob?"

Scholars point out that there's a bit of room for speculation as to whether Shakespeare, when writing this scene, imagined Hamlet showing his mother two small, locket-framed portraits of the two kings, past and present. An alternative possibility would be larger paintings, perhaps on a wall or elsewhere. But modern productions of Hamlet often opt for lockets worn around the neck as tokens of affection: comparing the miniatures brings the two characters in the scene (three, if you count the dead one) very close to one another, making the psychological tension all the more unsettling.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a miniature embroidered portrait of England's King Charles I. It is made of silk, satin, and silver and gold thread and is displayed in a silver-colored metal mount, measuring about four and three-quarter inches in height. The portrait dates to the mid-17th century, when Charles I became a martyr in the eyes of English Royalists while remaining anathema to Parliamentarians.

Unfortunately for Charles, the Parliamentarians had the sharper axe, and they didn't mind using it.

Needlework portraits of the executed king reportedly became so popular and finely done that some were said to contain strands of his hair. Evidently the expression, "Any way to make a buck" has a distinguished ancestry.

Pick a rose. Any rose.

"Prick not your finger as you pluck it off,
Lest bleeding you do paint the white rose red,
And fall on my side so, against your will."

                                                            1 Henry VI, (II, iv)


Gardens tend to play metaphoric roles in a number of Shakespeare's plays: the playwright clearly liked the image of an unweeded garden as symbolic of human corruption, of the natural order of things thrown into disarray, of chaos run amok. By the same token, a well-kept garden was like a well-kept state: everything was where it belonged, and no weeds abounded to threaten the established order, the rule of law, the beatific peace of an undisturbed home.

In Shakespeare's lines quoted above, the Earl of Somerset, backing the House of Lancaster in its deadly struggles with the House of York, has chosen a red rose in London's Temple Garden as a symbol of the Lancastrian cause, and challenges Vernon, a Yorkist, to weigh the consequences of choosing to fight for the other side. Vernon has in turn plucked a white rose, signifying his continued allegiance to Richard Plantagenet, Duke of York. At stake in the conflict: the English throne.

Thus begins the Wars of the Roses: decades of bloodshed between the two factions that King Henry VI, weak when he wasn't insane, couldn't stop. It finally took Henry Tudor to do that. He reigned as Henry VII and had a royal son who grew up to prove himself a great juggler of wives.

Agecroft Hall's Sunken Garden was designed by the noted landscape architect Charles Gillette (1886-1968), whose garden layout pays tribute to the Pond Garden at Hampton Court Palace near London. The ill-tempered Henry VIII took the palace from his Lord Chancellor, Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, in 1529 after Wolsey proved ineffective at obtaining a papal annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon. It's probably safe to assume that Henry's new flame, Anne Boleyn, liked the gardens as well as the massive palace.

She had evidently persuaded Henry that Wolsey was reluctant to fall out of favor with the pope, didn't really approve of Henry's marital rearrangement, and was trying to slow down the course of events to a snail's pace. Wolsey, accused of treason, would have probably lost his head if he had not fallen ill and died, probably from justifiable anxiety.

I know a hawk from a handsaw

"..............O, for a falconer's voice,
to lure this tassel-gentle back again!"

                                                     Romeo & Juliet      (II,ii)


Shakespeare's Juliet anxiously awaits the reappearance of Romeo, and slips into the parlance of falconry or hawking, that sport of kings and courtiers. A "tassel-gentle" or "tercel-gentle" is a male goshawk, one of a number of different types of birds of prey trained (by no means easily) to return to the falconer's familiar voice. Given the class-consciousness of Tudor and Jacobean society, it should hardly be surprising that there was even a perceived hierarchy of nobility among hawking birds that paralleled the existing social hierarchy.

In other words, a king could hawk with a gyrfalcon or perhaps even an eagle, but a tinker or tailor could not. He'd be lucky to be allowed to use a kestrel, regarded as a much less distinguished type of bird. An earl in Tudor England might use a peregrine falcon, of the breed depicted on the oil-on-panel portrait painted c.1593 and now in the collection of Agecroft Hall.

George Poulett was the son of Sir Amias Poulett, best remembered for being the keeper of Mary, Queen of Scots from 1576 until she met her date with the axe in 1587. The elder Poulett had also served as ambassador to France, and second son George became his heir when an older brother died young. George wears a large, three-layered cartwheel ruff around his neck, quite fashionable in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Practitioners of falconry often had more than just open-air sport in mind: the small birds, rabbits, and other game that fell under the hawks' talons could bring additional meat to the dinner table, never a slight consideration. Largely for that reason, the best hunting hawks were held in the highest esteem.

It's interesting to note that the clergyman John Frith, who performed the wedding ceremony for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway at the small village of Temple Grafton near Stratford, had a local reputation as a great healer of sick hawks. Some of his detractors claimed that Frith, whom they regarded as a clandestine Roman Catholic priest, knew far more about the birds than he knew about Holy Scripture.

In the above painting, the peregrine falcon that George Poulett holds fills the bill as a bird of sufficient status: the type hunted well and was responsive to proper training, yet was not so gaudy or regally-plumed a bird as to incite jealousy in the highest social stratum. Kind of like a Volvo.

Hamlet's line, "I know a hawk from a handsaw" actually does not make reference to a bird, but rather to a craftsman's tool: a "hawk" was one of the principal tools of the plasterer's trade, used to smooth and shape a plastered surface. But the phrase does have a nice ring to it.

A city of young people

An earlier posting mentioned the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympic Games in London; we'd be remiss not to add a note of Shakespeareana at the conclusion of the Games, since the opportunity was all but handed to us, gratis.

It was difficult not to notice that the catwalk-like stage at the closing ceremony was covered with numerous large newspaper-style headlines, large enough to be read by television viewers as performers danced back and forth over them during the course of the evening. But rather than news headlines, they all seemed to be quotes and phrases that have become iconic in English literary culture. Two of the most prominently displayed were both lines from Shakespeare's Hamlet: "To Be or Not To Be" and the Dane's dying words, "The Rest is Silence."

But more importantly, the youthful vigor that characterized London's Olympics, if we let it, might give us the opportunity to imagine for a moment the London of four centuries ago, the London of Shakespeare.

So many of London's people at that time were young. Visceral. Quick to laugh, quicker to drink, quickest to fight if honor or enough alcohol were thrown into the mix. Men weren't wearing swords to clean their fingernails. Shakespeare's great young rival Christopher Marlowe was stabbed and killed in a quarrel, supposedly over a tavern bill, in 1593. The playwright Ben Jonson had killed an actor, Gabriel Spencer.

It was a world where you either looked out for yourself or oftentimes suffered the consequences.

The population of London in 1600 has been estimated to have been about two hundred thousand or so, making it Europe's most burgeoning city. Young people, many flocking to London from the countryside or from smaller towns, came to the city to try and make their way in life: scholars believe that by the early 17th century roughly half of London's population was below the age of 20. Like Shakespeare, many came to the city at least in part because they wanted to have a go at a life less tedious, with success or failure lying just down the next alley. Perhaps this was all a reflection of  events in the world at large: an enormous New World was being explored. How could that not have a stimulating effect on the national psyche?

A short life expectancy greatly contributed to London's youthful demographic profile. Men in the city on average died in their early 40's, while the average woman in the city didn't make it past 35 or 36. There was plague and a host of other diseases that might befall a Londoner; violent crime killed off more than a few. Women often died in childbirth, and infant mortality rates, even for the upper classes, were horrendous. A series of bad harvests in the mid-1590's drove up the price of bread; riots over food and labor issues became commonplace.

For many young people, that type of dangerous yet vibrant atmosphere must have given life an urgency and an immediacy that would be hard to match in our more sedentary age. There were plenty of ways to die young in Shakespeare's London, but also plenty of ways to live life on the edge and let the tavern bill fall where it may.

Pictured above is a copy of an engraving of London by Claes Janz. Visscher of Amsterdam, c.1616, which is also the year of Shakespeare's death.

Glovers and broggers

'A sentence is but a cheveril glove to a good wit:
how quickly the wrong side might be turned outward!"

                                                                                Twelfth Night      (III, i)

One of the more well-established details of William Shakespeare's early years in Stratford-upon-Avon involves his father: John Shakespeare was, among other things, a glover. Fine gloves were highly
regarded among the more affluent and status-conscious denizens of Tudor England, and sumptuary
laws even forbade the common knuckle-draggers of the lower classes from wearing anything so lavish. How's that for class consciousness?

In a roundabout way, that law actually proved beneficial to the theatre of Shakespeare's day: when a member of the nobility died, that person sometimes left articles of clothing to servants and various "go-fers" of the household. Since the recipients generally couldn't wear the clothes themselves, they would on occasion sell the upper-crust duds to theatre companies like Shakespeare's Chamberlain's Men, who became the King's Men at the ascension of James I to the English throne.

But back to Shakespeare's father. Historical research in recent years involving previously overlooked court records has made it apparent that John Shakespeare had income from more than just glove-making. He was a brogger, that is, an illegal wool dealer in a land where the wool industry was of paramount importance and in the best of times quite lucrative. Evidently, the income from the two sources helped propel the elder Shakespeare to a position of prominence in Stratford, where he eventually became a member of the town council and held a post equivalent to what we would call a mayor.

Shortly thereafter, a gradual but noticeable decline in John Shakespeare's fortunes began, for reasons not entirely understood. Historical speculation points to the possibility of brogging deals gone bad or perhaps his apparent crypto-Catholic leanings catching up with him in the Protestant realm of Elizabeth. Debts accumulated, he lost his council seat due to non-attendance, perhaps to avoid creditors. In any event, he fell from prominence in the little town.

Another point of speculation is whether William Shakespeare, as a boy, helped his father in his glover's workshop. It is evident that Shakespeare did, at the very least, become familiar with many of the terms of the glover's trade. A "cheveril glove" is made from the soft, supple skin of a young goat, and can be stretched easily. Readers of Shakespeare might as well laugh if they happen to notice the playwright's (suspicious?) knowledge of terms used in sheepshearing.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a pair of 17th century gloves; whether they were made on the European continent or in England is uncertain. Prior to about 1580, the English were importing gloves from France and Spain; their own glove-making reputation was becoming more firmly established at about that time. These gloves of leather have two bands of silver lace applied to the cuff, along with a rose-colored silk lining. Gloves of this style were worn by both men and women.

Shakespeare & London 2012

As a brief aside taking note of current events, it was fascinating to see and hear several references to William Shakespeare and his works during the Opening Ceremonies of the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

His portrait, or more specifically Martin Droeshout's engraving from the First Folio of 1623, was among the very first images television viewers here in the US saw as Great Britain trumpeted its stunning cultural contributions to the world. Later, in the Olympic Stadium, actor Kenneth Branagh read lines from Shakespeare's The Tempest that were very well-suited for the occasion.

In addition, the British Museum, in cooperation with the Royal Shakespeare Company, is hosting as its centerpiece exhibition Shakespeare: Staging the World, displaying a variety of artifacts from Shakespeare's time with direct references or allusions to the playwright's works. Performances of Shakespeare's plays at the recreated Globe Theatre are also a highlight of the London 2012 effort.

Pretty impressive for a guy with ink-stained fingers, who died nearly 400 years ago.

The undiscovered country

"No, I'll be sworn; I make as good use of it as many
a man doth of a Death's-head or a memento mori:
I never see thy face but I think upon hell-fire......"

                                                                               1 Henry IV     (III, iii)

Shakespeare's quick-witted and overfed Falstaff, ever-expansive in more ways than one, finds Bardolph's face to be useful as a memento mori  (Latin for "a reminder of death"). Since time out of mind, people have  felt a need to be reminded of their own mortality, the fleeting nature of time and the transitory pleasures that this world offers. The Elizabethans took to heart the biblical reminder that man is dust "and to dust you shall return." There was a revival of medievalism during Shakespeare's lifetime, and some of Shakespeare's characters, like Hamlet, are death-obsessed. Hamlet refers to death as "the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns" (with "bourn" meaning "boundary").

Pictured above is an English memento mori painting dating to the 16th century, in the collection of Agecroft Hall. It measures about 23 x 17 inches. Created with oil paint on a wood panel by an unknown artist, it is an allegorical painting of a young man holding a flower and an old bearded man in black costume holding a skull and prayer book. The two figures face each other on either side of a tablet with a morality verse, surmounted by a winged figure of Father Time. In the foreground is a skeleton in a coffin, with two morality verses written on its side. The overall message of this memento mori could hardly be made more clear: time passes inexorably, and we must come to bones and dust. One must live righteously while there are still days left in one's life to do so.

Besides memento mori paintings, tomb relief carvings, skull pendants, and the like, there were also the macabre transi, or cadaver tombs, that included a carved depiction of the body of the deceased in an advanced state of decomposition. Tombs of this type, many quite chilling in appearance, were carved primarily during the late Middle Ages, before Shakespeare's time.

Rue with a difference

"There's rue for you, and here's some for me:
we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays: O
you must wear your rue with a difference.
There's a daisy: I would give you some violets,
but they withered all when my father died....."

                                                             Hamlet      (IV, v)

Ophelia, in her madness at the sudden loss of her father, hands out flowers as she descends into a whirling world of her own making. Contemporary audiences might watch the play without realizing that during the Elizabethan age and long after, specific flowers had specific symbolic meaning that can lend insight into Ophelia's thoughts and feelings toward the characters that join her in the scene: her tempestuous  brother Laertes, the perfidious usurper King Claudius, the weak-willed Queen Gertrude.

To complicate matters a bit, Shakespeare leaves no specific stage directions as to which characters receive which flowers, so there's been a great deal of conjecture in that regard. What is more certain is that Elizabethan playgoers would have been less likely to overlook the significance of Ophelia's floral gift-giving.

Predictably, scholars are not in unanimous agreement as to the meaning of each flower or to their most likely recipients in Hamlet. But there is a reasonable consensus of opinion that Ophelia's rue symbolized repentance and sorrow, and that she shared it with her brother Laertes. Violets symbolized faithfulness; which Ophelia found withered in the people around her. She also handed out fennel, symbolizing marital infidelity, most probably to Gertrude or Claudius. Daisies were known to stand for forsaken love, which Ophelia had in abundance. Her columbines stood for insincerity; there was plenty of that to go around, driving Ophelia to her flower-strewn, watery end.

The rue pictured above was photographed in Agecroft Hall's herb garden, where a great variety of plants well known during the Elizabethan and Stuart periods can be found.

Shakespeare: poacher, player, playwright?

One of the most persistent, though apocryphal, stories about William Shakespeare's youth is that he was once caught poaching deer on the estate of Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote near Stratford. The tale often begins with the pedantic observation that young William had fallen in with bad company, out to make mischief at the expense of the puritanical Lucy, who was active in local affairs and regarded as a bit of a prig.

As the story goes, Shakespeare was caught stealing deer, and Lucy supposedly had him beaten for the deed. Shakespeare is said to have later retaliated by writing a ribald ballad about Lucy before hitting the road to London and fame:

                   If lowsie is Lucy, as some volke miscalle it,
                  Then Lucy is lowsie whatever befall it:
                  He thinks himself greate,
                  Yet an asse in his state,
                  We allowe by his ears but with asses to mate....."

Literary tradition also holds that the ridiculous Justice Shallow in The Merry Wives of Windsor (now being performed at The Richmond Shakespeare Festival at Agecroft Hall through July 29th) is a caricature of Sir Thomas Lucy. The irony is that were it not for the deer-stealing tale, Lucy's name might have long since been swept into the ash bin of history.

Pictured above is one of the many deer that frequent the woods and often explore the grounds of Agecroft Hall, where they usually find forage aplenty. In the hours before dawn and on misty, drizzly days, as many as a dozen or more are sometimes seen together.

Greed by any other name

"Think what you will, we take into our hands
His plate, his goods, his money and his lands."

                                                                      Richard II      (II, i)

Shakespeare's King Richard II, always cash-strapped and looking for ways to increase his royal revenues, can't resist the opportunity to seize the inheritance of Henry Bolingbroke, the Duke of Hereford and son of John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. By the time of his death in 1399 Gaunt had accumulated enormous wealth. Rather than see that wealth pass to Bolingbroke, King Richard has him banished for an internecine dustup with a fellow noble, and tries to grab the goods for himself.

A big mistake: it leads to the king's downfall.

Wealth in late medieval England was measured first and foremost by the ownership of land; the age preceded the ascension of a grasping mercantile class that would eventually demand its place among the higher rungs of the social order. Other trappings of wealth were not to be despised, however. Along with money and various household goods, fine silver "plate" stood in considerable esteem: it was both valuable and easy to show off during meals.

Agecroft Hall's collection includes a mid-seventeenth century English silver salver, its rim decorated with embossed heads of Roman emperors and their wives, interspersed with a stylized mask design. A coat of arms in its center suggests that it was owned by a member of the Anglo-Irish gentry living in Galway. The salver is about 15 inches in diameter, and is raised on a short, flared foot. It also has decoration on its underside.

The royal confiscation of this kind of eye-catching wealth was exactly what Bolingbroke was not willing to put up with. So he took it all back from King Richard, along with the throne itself. As King Henry IV, he'd have his own seditious subjects to deal with, and a prodigal son to add to his woes.

Don't forget to duck

"My birthplace hate I, and my love's upon
this enemy town. I'll enter: if he slay me,
He does fair justice; if he give me way,
I'll do his country service."

                                             Coriolanus     IV, iv

Earlier this year, a film adaptation of Shakespeare's last tragedy, Coriolanus, was released to great critical acclaim, with Ralph Fiennes directing and acting the title role, and Gerard Butler as Aufidius, his sworn enemy in blood. In Coriolanus' words, Aufidius is "a lion I am proud to hunt."

But the film does not recreate Shakespeare's imagined Rome but rather a strife-torn Balkanized state, much like the crumbling Yugoslavia that so dominated headlines a while back (the film was shot in and around Belgrade). In this setting, the relevance of Shakespeare's work to the world we live in today becomes all the more obvious.

A remarkably tense scene comes when Coriolanus, banished from his home city despite his martial honors, breaks into the stronghold of his foe Aufidius. Security has been breached; Aufidius demands to know the identity of the intruder, and comes to find it's his deadliest enemy, offering to turn against the city that had once honored him.

What might be called a rather low-tech security arrangement, quite common in Shakespeare's day, can be seen in Agecroft Hall's wicket gate. It is centuries old and can be seen in nineteenth-century photographs of Agecroft when the building stood in Lancashire, England.

The basic idea was simple: a small, awkward-to-step-through gate was cut into a larger gate.
The larger gate could be swung open to allow entrance to a rider on horseback. But if there was any question as to the visitor's intentions, that person had to dismount and step through the wicket gate, so small that it necessitated an awkward attempt at both stooping over and stepping up at the same time, to come through the opening.

That is an extremely vulnerable position in which to make an entrance; a man defending the premises could club an intruder over the head if need be. At least that was the idea. Perhaps a wicket gate would have stopped the intruding Coriolanus, but then Shakespeare would have had to change his ending.