Well, who's to say a dragon can't look like a dog?

"Advance our standards, set upon our foes;
Our ancient word of courage, fair Saint George,
Inspire us with the spleen of fiery dragons!"

                                                           Richard III     (V, iii)



It's petal-to-the-metal time in the Wars of the Roses.

The clash and clatter of the fifteenth century's Battle of Bosworth Field ushered in the Tudor era with the victory of the Earl of Richmond over that recent headline-grabber, King Richard III. Undoubtedly wiping a bit of blood and grime off his sleeve, Richmond ascended the throne as King Henry VII, ran the nation like a meticulous shopkeeper, and fathered the many-wived Henry VIII, who in his turn fathered that magnificence of Shakespeare's age, Queen Elizabeth I.

Perhaps surprisingly, Shakespeare's version of the battle may not be inaccurate in placing Richard himself, for the moment still a crowned king, in the very heat of the action. There has long been considerable speculation among scholars that Shakespeare exaggerated the seamier aspects of Richard's character in order to make the reigning Tudor line look so much the better in retrospect. But neither the playwright nor contemporary historical records make Richard out to be any kind of a coward on the field of battle: he was evidently anything but.

All this despite having the spinal deformity that his newly-found bones confirm he did indeed have.

In the quotation above from Shakespeare's play, Richard calls on St. George, the patron saint of England, to make veritable fire-breathers of his troops. He's already described their enemy as "...vagabonds, rascals, and runaways....base lackey peasants..."  in much the same way that a football coach tries to pump up his team's confidence by disparaging the opposition.

Hey, sometimes it works. Not this time.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a powder horn with iron mounts, dating to about 1650, elaborately carved with a scene depicting the legend of St. George, mounted on horseback (on the left side of the carving) and with sword raised, attacking the dragon (on the right) which looks a bit like a friendly dog with wings. Trees in the background are apparently meant to give this the look of a forest encounter. The name of the carver is not known.

There are any number of medieval and Renaissance depictions of the legend that make both the fire-breathing dragon and St. George look much more exotic, fearsome, and impressive. Perhaps the difficulty of depicting such an epic scene on a piece of horn made this version look somewhat tame in comparison.

The origins of the tale have been traced back to lands of the Eastern Orthodox faith, particularly to what is now central Turkey and to Georgia in the Caucasus. There are a number of indications that Crusaders returning from the Holy Land were instrumental in spreading the tale of brave St. George and his flame-tongued adversary across Western Europe. Undoubtedly, the picturesque nature of the story enhanced its popularity: even the makers of modern cinema find it impossible to resist.

Shakespeare's Richard III would have gladly given his kingdom for a horse; it's probably safe to assume he would have gladly traded up to a fire-breathing dragon, given the opportunity.

Much more to the point

"......................................Let us revenge this with
our pikes, ere we become rakes: for the gods know I
speak this in hunger for bread, not in thirst for revenge."

                                                                        Coriolanus          (I, i)



Shakespeare's tragedy Coriolanus begins with hunger, that most ancient of afflictions. The citizens of Rome are clamoring for bread. They have learned to hate the self-indulgent patricians of privilege, and that hatred simmers. The lean and the famished are on the outside looking in; that figurative window is in danger of being smashed with the weapons of the mob: the fist, the club, the barrel stave, the pike.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is the end of an ornate ceremonial pike that dates to the nineteenth century, by which time pikes had long since ceased to be regarded as effective weapons in battle. Not that the idea of their use had by then disappeared entirely: in London during World War II, there were brief and ill-advised discussions of the idea that even a pike-wielding Home Guardsman was of more use than a completely unarmed one. But the concept of using so primitive a weapon in the midst of a 20th-century war was widely regarded as ludicrous and morale-busting, and the idea was soon scrapped.

During the European heyday of the pike in the Middle Ages, the weapon could be reasonably effective if wielded by well-trained, disciplined troops: the Swiss were among the most highly regarded in the use of both pikes and halberds, which were essentially long-poled axes that also had a sharp spike at their extreme end. Some had a hook-like appendage that was used for violently dismounting an opposing horseman. The poles of pikes were usually at least ten feet long; some were twice that.

It should be added that the pike was a much less effective weapon if the battle came to close quarters: although the poles varied in length they were inevitably cumbersome if not impossible to use if an attacker managed to get close enough for a face-to-face encounter. Tactics frequently called for formations of pikemen to maneuver in conjunction with mounted troops or infantry armed with shorter weapons, to compensate for this liability.

Ultimately, of course, gunpowder weapons cleared most bladed weapons from the battlefield. It isn't easy to regard this as progress.

To bee or not to bee (with regrets, wincing, and gnashing of teeth)

"The commons, like an angry hive of bees
That want their leader, scatter up and down,
And care not who they sting in his revenge."

                                                      Henry VI, Part 2        (III, ii)


As any number of Shakespearean scholars have pointed out over the centuries since the playwright lived, this was a man raised in a world that valued order. Chaos and disorder were regarded as forms of plague: just as deadly, just as fear-engendering and disruptive to the health of the state. As an earlier posting has mentioned, Shakespeare liked to use a well-tended garden as a metaphor for a well-ordered nation. Weeds were to be rooted out; troublemakers were taught to kick the oxygen habit at the end of a rope or the edge of a blade.

Shakespeare also used beehives as symbols of an ordered society, of a healthy body politic that becomes imperiled when any member of that corporate body is dysfunctional, seeks to climb above its station or vanishes altogether.

Regarding the quotation above, the Earl of Warwick has just reported that the King's uncle "good Duke Humphrey traitorously is murder'd" and that, like a hive that has just lost its queen bee, a swarm of malcontents will be out seeking vengeance.

Warwick's words prove prophetic: England had sustained some semblance of fragile order under Humphrey, who served as Protector to King Henry VI during the monarch's youth. But with the good Duke now out of the way, the stick has been poked in the hive, and the swarm is forthcoming.

Pictured above, in the Herb Garden at Agecroft Hall, are three bee skeps (they're called "skeps" if made by people, "hives" if made by bees). In Shakespeare's time, bee skeps were frequently placed in gardens to encourage the creation of good sources of honey, always in demand among the sweet-toothed English. Also, the bees helped with plant pollination.

Due to 21st century Virginia bee-keeping regulations, Agecroft's skeps do not actually house productive hives, but with their high-mounded form they do closely resemble skeps seen in any number of garden-related European woodcut illustrations made during Shakespeare's lifetime. His was an age that placed a greater value on self-sufficiency than we do today: like bread-baking and ale-making, the domestic production of honey helped make the English Tudor home in good times an all the more resourceful world unto itself.

Pages worth drying out

"...............I'll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I'll drown my book."

                                                       The Tempest    (V, i)


Shakespeare's Prospero is calling it quits: he has decided that it's time to set aside his magic, his spells, his conjurations, his books. His masterful knowledge of the otherworldly arts certainly came in handy: not just any crackpot could brew up a raging sea storm, drag a passing ship and its hapless passengers ashore to his island, and eventually make fools of long-time adversaries that had conspired to usurp his dukedom of Milan.

Not bad for a day's work.

Shakespeare makes much of Prospero's absorption in books, the predilection of many an acolyte of the European Renaissance. In The Tempest, books and the knowledge they contain are depicted as the source of Prospero's power, much as  Christopher Marlowe shows us a man nose-deep in necromantic literature in his London stage hit The Tragical History of Dr. Faustus. Books offer the input of the ages, both playwrights seem to be saying. But overindulge at your own risk.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a 1597 copy of John Gerard's classic Historie of Plants. When it was published, William Shakespeare was 33 and had yet to write Hamlet, Macbeth, King Lear, The Tempest. His rival playwright Christopher Marlowe had been dead four years, stabbed during an argument over a tavern bill in Deptford, downriver from London. Neither man would likely have scoffed at the publishing success of Gerard's work, dubbed the Herball. With his encyclopedic knowledge of the botanical world, Gerard had a winner on his hands.

As an English herbalist and surgeon, Gerard became superintendent of the gardens of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who was Queen Elizabeth's chief secretary of state. In later years, Gerard was herbalist to King James I. One reason that Gerard's work was so well received lies in the importance that people attached to plant lore and its medicinal uses in daily life during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Plant-based concoctions were used, with variable results, as a means to cure just about every ailment one could imagine.

Herbs were known as "simples," and Gerard maintains that the "art of Simpling" was "neither base nor contemptible" as it might seem - rather it was a kingly art practiced in Eden "where Adam was set to be the Herbalist." It should be pointed out that Adam's talents as an herbalist went largely unappreciated.

The binding of Agecroft's Herball is brown calfskin with gilt borders that include a central panel. The spine bands are gilt-tooled, also with panels. The flyleaf includes a bucolic scene with gardeners, tools, and plants. It was popular subject matter in Shakespeare's day, as it is now, so it is hardly surprising that Gerard's volume is so lushly illustrated and grandly produced.

Oh, Say, can't you see? Your days are numbered....

"Tell me wherein have I offended most?
Have I affected wealth or honor? Speak.
Are my chests filled up with extorted gold?"

                                                Henry VI, Part 2      (IV, vii)

Shakespeare's character Lord Say is about to be thrown to the dogs: Jack Cade's rebellion is gathering steam, and since rebellions rarely succeed without scapegoats, Say is beginning to look more goatish by the minute. In a few moments, he looks even less like himself: he and and his son-in-law have just had their heads lopped off, and the murderous legions of the rogue Jack Cade are on the march toward London.

If Lord Say did have a chest "filled up with extorted gold," it might have resembled the one pictured below at Agecroft Hall, made during Shakespeare's lifetime or very shortly thereafter (curatorial records indicate that the chest was made in Germany between 1575 - 1625).

This chest presently stands in Agecroft's front hallway, beneath a portrait of William Dauntesey painted in 1566, two years after Shakespeare's birth. Dauntesey became master of Agecroft Hall upon his marriage to Anne Langley, who had inherited the property several years earlier.

The chest, made of oak and walnut, measures 74x44x34 inches. The origins of the piece might be traced to one of several German cities, including Cologne, Nuremberg, and Augsburg. There were very strong trade relations between London and Cologne via the commercial hub of Antwerp. Curatorial research at Agecroft Hall mentions elaborate marquetry chests whose decoration originated in the Mannerist style of the German Kunstschrank. These were cabinets with many enclosed small spaces and were regarded as works of art in themselves, with utility taking only a secondary role. Agecroft Hall's chest is definitely of this type.

It should also be noted that many chests that were constructed in England and featured elaborate marquetry were actually made by German immigrants working in Norwich and in Southwark across the Thames from London. Southwark also happened to be the brothel-bestrewn locale of the Globe Theatre, built there in 1599 in an attempt by Shakespeare's troupe to get beyond the legal reach of puritanical London magistrates.

Curatorial notes include an additional bit of insight: a "famous example of this type of chest and very similar to ours (Agecroft's) is the Offley chest in St. Saviour's Cathedral in Southwark. It was given to the church by Hugh Offley, the Lord Mayor of London, in 1556. Its classical style is evinced by its ornamentation of arches, architraves and pilasters....Our chest, like the Offley, has a variety of colored wood in the marquetry and both have three drawers at the bottom." However, unlike the Offley piece, Agecroft's chest does not have a chessboard inside, held in place by vertical grooves, with a small built-in inlaid box for the chessmen. Perhaps the services grew long and tedious in the cathedral.

Did either chest have any hidden compartments for "extorted gold?" Well, we're not telling.

Day of the Black Tents

Tamerlan. Tamerlan. Tamerlan.

Since shortly after the Boston Marathon bombing of April 15th, that name has punched its way into the consciousness of the American public. The elder bombing suspect, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, carried the name of a 14th-century Scythian shepherd (the region is in present-day Uzbekistan) who rose to take tyrannical control of a vast realm and branded his name as the "Scourge of God" on the backs of his defeated enemies.

In his early years as a playwright, William Shakespeare's rival Christopher Marlowe was on a roll, and with good reason: his play Tamburlaine the Great had created such a sensation among theater audiences in London that Marlowe was prompted to write a second, inevitably less exciting Part 2.

Entered in London's Stationers' Register in 1590, the first part had sent shock waves through London's fledgling industry of stagecraft. Marlowe's Tamburlaine is an exotic villain from the mysterious East, who climbs to the summit of conquest and descends into the abyss of cruelty yet never gets his just deserts. Quite to the contrary, he thrives. He howls in pleasure at the humiliation of his foes and insatiably hungers for new forms of terror.

He uses one defeated Turkish king as a human footstool, others to draw his chariot with bits in their mouths. When laying siege to a city, he pitches white tents outside its walls, signifying to its inhabitants that they can surrender without reprisal. After a day, red tents are put up, indicating that while the citizens might still see mercy, their governors will not.

"On the third day, when the black tents go up, the point of no return has passed, and all are subject to fire, sword, and rape," noted George Wilbur Meyer of Tulane University in an essay on Marlowe's  sinister protagonist. Undoubtedly, the character's origins fascinated the English theater-going public: here was a despot amidst the dust storms of Samarkand who out-viced the Vice of the medieval English morality plays. As Christopher Marlowe must have duly noted, Londoners seemed fascinated by all things Eastern.

That fascination extended to furnishings in upscale English homes well before Shakespeare's birth in 1564. Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English "Turkey work" pillow, made c1575 of wool, linen, and hemp in a Turkish design of the sort that had become fashionable by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries throughout much of Europe. Cardinal Wolsey is often credited with popularizing the use of items of Turkish style or origin in England during his ascendancy as the right-hand man of King Henry VIII. Interestingly, woven goods from the Levant were often regarded as too valuable to be used under foot as rugs in most households: they were more often used to adorn tables, chairs, and other furniture.

Like Marlowe's Tamburlaine, this Turkey work had the allure of exoticism: the Ottoman Turks with their Islamic faith had captured Constantinople in 1453 and were ultimately stopped only at the gates of Vienna. All of Western Europe felt threatened yet in some ways intrigued by this aggrandizing culture from the East. Then, as now, the force of Islam proved difficult to ignore.

The bane of gunpowder

"The soldiers' music and the rites of war
Speak loudly for him.
Take up the bodies: such a sight as this
Becomes the field, but here shows much amiss.
Go, bid the soldiers shoot."

                                   Hamlet    (V, ii)

These last lines of Shakespeare's tragic masterpiece, a reaction to unexpected slaughter at the court of Elsinore, could have been written today, April 23rd, a day we traditionally mark as the playwright's birthday. We've just witnessed slaughter and fearlessness in a place we wouldn't ordinarily expect: near the finish line of a storied footrace in Boston. The brand of courage that usually emerges in battle became evident on Boylston Street, as a festive occasion became a war zone with one tick of the stopwatch, one gasping breath, one thump of the heart.

Terrorism plagued Shakespeare's age as it plagues ours. The spectacularly memorable Gunpowder Plot of 1605 was an attempt on the part of a group of Roman Catholic conspirators to pack gunpowder in the cellar below the English Parliament chambers and blow it all sky-high with King James I and lords in attendance on the session's opening day, November 5th. Shortly before that day, a conspirator warned one Lord Monteagle not to be present that day, hoping to see his life spared.

Evidently, this ominous hint created a heightened state of alert. A professional soldier and conspirator by the name of Guido (Guy) Fawkes was allegedly caught in the cellar with the incriminating gunpowder and related paraphernalia. In the weeks following, other alleged conspirators were captured or killed in the course of  an extensive manhunt. Trials (promptly forthcoming by today's standards) and the inevitable grisly executions followed.

The entire plot had been conceived by Robert Catesby, like Shakespeare a native of Warwickshire. A number of other conspirators also had ties to the area. They were drawn together by frustration after seeing James succeed Elizabeth I on the English throne in 1603 but only continue the persecution of Catholics. For Shakespeare the playwright and his extended family in and around Stratford-Upon-Avon, the plotters' local connections were uncomfortably close to home. Suspicion had become the coinage of the realm.

Pictured above is the breech end of a wheellock musket, made c1620 in Italy, that is exhibited in Agecroft's Great Hall. Gunpowder's use in weaponry had made its way into Europe from the Far East by the 13th century. The English used large charges of gunpowder in siege cannons at Calais in 1346; the development of these types of weapons literally changed the face and even the spirit of warfare.
Castles and armor became obsolete, and so, for that matter, did the concept of the honorable confrontation in battle.

Codes of medieval chivalry valued bravery shown in face-to-face combat with an opponent. Nothing could have been more foreign to this code than the idea of killing someone from a distance while hiding behind protective cover. The longbow or the crossbow, although effective, were not the English nobleman's weapons of choice. Gunpowder weapons were in large measure responsible for changing such chivalrous modes of thinking, and the world has been hearing the blast ever since.

The type of wheellock mechanism on this particular musket was invented c1509, about the same time Henry VIII came to the English throne. Curatorial records indicate that its firing mechanism "worked on the same principle as the modern cigarette lighter - a serrated metal wheel revolved against a piece of flint, or pyrite, thus creating a spark. This enabled the gun to be fired without using a light from another source. The works of the wheellock gun are similar to those of a clock."  A clock that tolled very loudly, no doubt.