Hiding from darkness

"......for here have been 
Some six or seven, who did hide their faces 
Even from darkness."

                                   Julius Caesar       (II, i)

Caesar's assassins gather in the night, and Shakespeare's fertile imagination has Brutus' wife Portia expressing her bewilderment over the meaning of all this. She reminds Brutus that in the moment of their marriage she and he became one, and that he is obstinate in denying her any explanation for such ominous behavior. She's scared. Who can blame her?

The cloak of night frequently provided Shakespeare with the threatening imagery that many of his scenes (or in the case of Macbeth, almost an entire play) demanded. Shakespeare knew that once the darkness robbed a man of his sight, the demons of his own mind emerged to dance around him.

Direful images of things hidden were also useful to the playwright, and for good reason: Shakespeare lived in an age rife with religious tumult. Over much of Europe, Protestants and Catholics were at each others' throats over matters of faith and liturgy.

England's Queen Elizabeth and her successor King James I were both targets of sanguinary-minded conspiracies. It isn't surprising that Shakespeare made "Rumour, painted full of tongues" a character at the induction of one of his plays; he certainly must have become familiar with the type simply by keeping his ears open on the streets of London.

With Protestantism ascendant in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, Jesuit priests had surreptitiously entered the country with the intention of returning English hearts and minds to the Catholic fold. Pope Pius V had excommunicated Elizabeth in 1570, which turned out to be a bad move: it all the more endeared her to her people, while the persecution of Catholics escalated to a level not seen in the earliest years of Elizabeth's reign.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English silver communion chalice and paten that Ian Pickford, an expert on early English silver, dated to about 1560, with a provenance in Coventry in the Midlands that Shakespeare knew. Pickford visited Agecroft back in 2001, and examined this and a number of other pieces in the collection.

Jesuit priests had to go underground or face death in Shakespeare's England. They often carried their own small kits for celebrating Mass with the Catholic faithful scattered across the country. The kits would frequently include a chalice smaller than Agecroft's, with a paten for holding the eucharistic bread, along with oil for anointing, priestly vestments, and related liturgical items, all designed to be easily hidden.

A clandestine network of Catholic safehouses across England provided the Jesuits with tiny, cramped hiding places referred to as "priest holes." Many were made by Nicholas Owen, a carpenter who always worked alone and at night, making an untold number of extraordinarily well-designed hiding places that saved many priests from capture. Baddesley Clinton, a large house in Shakespeare's Warwickshire, has several such priest holes made by Owen, with possibly more still undiscovered. Centuries later, Owen would be canonized as a saint of the Roman Catholic Church.

There is a remarkable account involving a priest hole located under an upstairs fireplace in one of these Catholic safehouses in Essex. A search party was literally dismantling portions of the house in their efforts to apprehend anyone in hiding. The searchers became fatigued and, to stay warm, lit a fire in the fireplace, sending embers down on the hidden Jesuit. The priest could probably well imagine the horrible torture and death he would face at the hands of his captors, and he managed to keep quiet and remain hidden. Nicholas Owen himself died a martyr to his faith in the Tower of London in 1606.

Agecroft Hall has its own priest hole, a hiding place made just a few years ago to help serve as a reminder of an age when religious convictions could be matters of life and death.

The wisest fool

"...They have scared away two of my best sheep,
which I fear the wolf will find sooner than the master...."

                                                                       The Winter's Tale     (III, iii)


Shakespeare wrote these lines for an old shepherd, a character bewildered by a world that was changing around him. In equal measure, the world was changing for the playwright.

It isn't surprising that Ovid's classic Metamorphoses resonated with William Shakespeare. The Roman writer's narrative poem was evidently among the playwright's favorites: along with its tales of the mythological gods and subtle erotica, it reflected on the nature of change. Shakespeare's whole life was about change: some of it burdensome and harsh,  much of it unavoidable.

The sixteenth century into which Shakespeare was born had seen three changes in England's national religion over the course of a mere twelve years. The world of trade was transformed as well: the Age of Exploration brought with it new shipping trade routes that were oriented more toward the Atlantic than the Mediterranean, making England no longer a backwater at the edge of the European scene, but rather a geographically well-situated mover and shaker.

The English rural landscape was slowly changing as the steady enclosure of more and more land for sheep pasturage drove farm laborers off the land and into the cities, towns and villages, looking for work that many couldn't find. Yet it shouldn't be forgotten that so much of the nation was still essentially agricultural and rural, with inhabitants that lived their lives by the rhythms of the seasons and clung to time-honored beliefs that couldn't be easily changed by state decree.

This world of field and forest was the world of young William Shakespeare, and if his writings are any indication, that world stayed in his heart throughout his life.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is the central portion of a large English wool and silk tapestry (11 ft., 4 in. x 11 ft., 8 in.) made c1650 at Mortlake west of London, a tapestry works founded at the behest of King James I. The work is entitled, "The Wolf Hunt," and despite its hints of classicism, it reflects the abiding interest in the English landscape that persisted long after the poet Shakespeare had passed away.

In founding the tapestry works at Mortlake, and daring to compete with Flemish weavers across the English Channel, James was dubbed "the wisest fool in Europe."  Crazy like a fox: he had secretly enticed a number of Flemish weavers to cross over to England and weave for the royal venture. Although it took several decades, the Mortlake effort succeeded, producing fine tapestries that were much sought after both in England and on the continent. Pastoral scenes were hugely popular as subject matter for many of these tapestries, just as pastoral scenes had been popular in Shakespeare's plays.

As historian Michael Wood and others have pointed out, many of Shakespeare's works are sprinkled with references that have a distinct Warwickshire country flavor: he refers to the "hade land," a strip of land left unplowed in a field; to the "breese," gadflys that swarmed around livestock. He shows ample familiarity with sheep-shearing festivals as evidenced in The Winter's Tale, the local color and detail perhaps absorbed during his childhood. His father, a glover by trade, evidently did quite a bit of wool dealing on the side, and it stands to reason that young, observant William might have learned a thing or two.

Talk about getting hammered......just check out the laundry bill

                         
                             Cassio

"Is your Englishman so expert in his drinking?"
                             
                              Iago

"Why, he drinks you with facility your Dane dead
drunk; he sweats not to overthrow your Almain; he
gives your Hollander a vomit ere the next pottle can
be filled."

                                                                     Othello       (II, iii)


The Danes, Germans, and Dutch might beg to differ with Iago's assessment of English prowess in the tournaments of the tavern. But one thing is clear, and it's not Michael Cassio's brain: he's about to get roaring drunk, against his will and better judgement. He's also about to lose his job as Othello's right-hand man.  Iago is the instigator, the Vice of the medieval morality plays, an admirer of evil for its own sake. He's referred to as "honest" numerous times during the course of the play, yet he's anything but. Iago alone can be mentioned in the same foul breath as Shakespeare's odoriferous Richard III.

Strong drink has befuddled the brain of man since time out of mind, making him all the more receptive to the allurements of absurdity. Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English tin-glazed earthenware "fuddling cup," made in the seventeenth century, several decades after the death of Shakespeare. The three drinking vessels are connected by carefully aligned channels so that the intoxicating beverage within will spill onto the drinker's clothes if he fails to drink from each of the three vessels in the proper order.

Good for guffaws, no doubt. Shakespeare has Michael Cassio admit to being a quick drunk; but sobriety would have offered no guarantees in solving this particular riddle.

One traditional anecdote about the life of William Shakespeare is the unsubstantiated tale of how he left for the hereafter: he supposedly sat down in a tavern with fellow poets Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton and proceeded to drink himself into an oblivion that he never completely recovered from, falling ill and dying not long afterward. Perhaps he, like Cassio, did "well wish courtesy would invent some other custom of entertainment."   (II, iii)

Shakespeare's tragedy Othello will be performed at Agecroft Hall as part of the Richmond Shakespeare Festival 2013, with performances slated for July 11th through August 4th, Thursday through Sunday evenings, at 8:00 PM. By all means, come and enjoy the play, but you'll have to bring your own fuddling cup.

When failure was an option, just not a very attractive one

"Were now the general of our gracious empress,
As in good time he may, from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broached on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit,
To welcome him!"

                                                     Henry V         (Prologue to Act V)

Shakespeare is making a direct reference to contemporary events in these lines from the prologue of the last act in his rousing history play, Henry V. The lines refer to the man of the moment in 1599: Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex and a favorite of Queen Elizabeth, the man sent to teach those endlessly quarrelsome Irish a lesson, once and for all.  Shakespeare's countrymen were aching for a hero: in Essex many thought they had found one.

The decade following the 1588 triumph over the Spanish Armada had been disappointing for the English in many respects. Along with an economic downturn, recurrences of bubonic plague, crop failures, atrocious weather, conspiracy rumors and the stubborn reemergence of threats from Catholic Spain, the English knew that their virgin queen was as mortal as any milkmaid, with no obvious heir to make for a smooth transition of power. The question of the royal succession would be finally settled only on Elizabeth's deathbed.

Rebelliousness in Ireland had also been a nagging concern, as attempts to establish an aggrandizing English Pale had met with a resistance that should have surprised no one, but evidently did. Attempts to put down the Irish rebels had proven ineffectual. The martial reputation and personal ego of Essex was such that he inadvertently found himself in command of troops charged with crossing the Irish Sea and setting things right. Shakespeare's image of "rebellion broached on his sword" would have seemed fitting at the time.

Pictured above, from the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English backsword (sharp along one edge rather than both) made c1650, a half-century after the fiasco that saw the Earl of Essex lead his forces to Ireland, flail away ineffectually at the rebels, and return in a rush to England, petulantly storming into Queen Elizabeth's private chamber to protest against real or imagined intrigues against him at court.

He had failed. The country was shocked. Essex had made what was regarded as a humiliating truce with the Irish. Elizabeth was angry, and her anger would grow when Essex, shortly thereafter, tried to stage a coup on the streets of London that came to nothing. Essex and his followers had even persuaded Shakespeare's theatrical group, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, to dust off the play King Richard II and perform it at the Globe. That play involves the deposition of an anointed monarch, an idea that Essex wished to promote for his own ends. But Londoners didn't take to the streets, his coup attempt failed, and his head landed in a bucket on Tower Green.

The sword pictured above is referred to as a mortuary sword, so named for its depiction of a person believed martyred by those sympathetic to a particular cause. This sword dates to the English Civil War and the ensuing Commonwealth period, and the face depicted represents King Charles I, executed during the Puritan wave that swept over England in the mid-seventeenth century. That same Puritan regime would be largely responsible for the closing and destruction of theaters in London, including Shakespeare's Globe. One might say that the actors themselves had achieved a sort of martyrdom, not to be recognized until the Restoration.  

Perhaps Shakespeare had his own word for "duh"

"O, for a muse of fire......."

                                  Henry V     (I,i)


Be very, very careful what you wish for.

This Saturday, June 29th, will mark the 400th anniversary of the day in 1613 when Shakespeare's Globe Theatre burned to the ground. The fire had started during a performance of All is True, the play more familiar to us as King Henry VIII.

Three days later, Sir Henry Wotton, an eyewitness to the calamity, wrote in a letter to his nephew: 

         
                      The King's players had a new play, called All is True, representing 
                      some principal pieces of the reign of Henry VIII.......certain chambers
                      (cannon) being shot off at his entry, some of the paper, or other stuff,
                      wherewith one of them was stopped, did light on the thatch, where 
                      being thought at first an idle smoke, and their eyes more attentive to
                      the show, it kindled inwardly and ran round......consuming within less
                      than an hour the whole house to the very grounds.


Luckily, no one was killed or seriously injured, although one man reportedly realized that his breeches were on fire and put out the flames with bottled ale. Evidently, the men responsible for setting off the gunpowder-packed cannons near a thatched roof were not mobbed and roughed up for being so incredibly dense. That is somewhat surprising.

Pictured above are some of the sandstone tiles (not all are original) on the roof of Agecroft Hall, which stood in Lancashire, England at the time of the Globe fire. When the Globe was rebuilt the following year, tile was used on the roof. Before the fire, Shakespeare had owned a fourteenth part of the theater's shares and would have faced a similar proportion of the cost of its rebuilding, as Peter Ackroyd pointed out in his masterful Shakespeare: The Biography (New York, 2005). The playwright might very well have sold his shares in the Globe at about this time. 

The earlier thatched roof of the Globe had been an obvious fire hazard, but a thatched roof was relatively cheap to construct (the roof of the nearby Rose Theatre was also thatched). This reflected the financially perilous nature of the theater business itself. The London stage industry was still in its infancy: there were plenty of worries for proprietors.

The recurrence of plague could and did keep theaters closed for extended periods, particularly in the last decade of the sixteenth century but also at times thereafter. The increasingly puritanical bent of London authorities meant constant grumbling from those who regarded theaters as dens of iniquity, hotbeds of whoring, riotous behavior, even political intrigue.

As if all that weren't enough, theater owners faced the usual threats of miserably wet weather, fire and flood, theft and endless disputes over money, and a host of other dangers that could prove ruinous. Both the Globe and the Rose stood in a seedy area known as Bankside in Southwark, across the Thames from London proper. The playhouses had to compete with playhouses of a different sort: the brothels or "stews" that dotted the neighborhood, along with bear-baiting exhibitions that by today's standards were horrific in their cruelty.

It was not a business for the fainthearted. Nor was it a business for people who played with matches.

Looks a bit like the guy behind you at the 7-11

"Laertes, was your father dear to you?
Or are you like the painting of a sorrow,
A face without a heart?"

                                            Hamlet     (IV, vii)

Shakespeare's usurping King Claudius presents Laertes with a classic gut-check: is there enough fire in his blood to avenge his father, sent to his death at the hands of Hamlet?

Claudius plays on Laertes' ignorance of what's really going on: the king has a murder of his own to hide, and his fleeting pangs of conscience have not been quite burdensome enough to force him to give up the throne.

Shakespeare's metaphorical use of a painting, which can have the look but not the breathing soul (and hence the rage) of a man, is apt for more reasons than one. The comparison not only suits the playwright's immediate purpose well. It makes for entirely credible dialogue: secular paintings had become de rigueur items of courtly display during the European Renaissance, an era when ego was not to be denied.

Set aside the fact that the origins of Shakespeare's Hamlet can be traced at least as far back as the medieval writings of the twelfth-century Danish historian Saxo Grammaticus. Move the story's setting several centuries forward in time, and the words dovetail well with the spirit of Shakespeare's age.

Pictured above and below, at Agecroft Hall, is a 1566 portrait of William Dauntesey attributed to the "Master of the Countess of Warwick." Dauntesey was the son of one of Henry VIII's courtiers. He became the owner of Agecroft Hall when he married Anne Langley, who had inherited the property in 1561. Scratched onto a pane of glass at Agecroft is the name of their grandson William and a date: June 12th, 1645.

The Dauntesey portrait captures more than a hint of pride, perhaps giving way to smug arrogance in a man who evidently gained much of what he owned through the achievements of men who came before him, and through a marriage that brought considerable property with it. In his defense, it should be added that we know much less about William Dauntesey than we would like to know. The same can be said about Shakespeare. 

The portrait includes the Dauntesey family's coat of arms on the left, along with the Latin inscription attesting that William Dauntesey, as the son of Richard Dauntesey, has the right to the depicted coat of arms. Such heraldry was a great source of aristocratic pride, so much so that Shakespeare himself finally secured such an honor for his own family in 1596, on behalf of his father.

Better get it in writing

"It is not possible, it cannot be,
The king should keep his word in loving us;
He will suspect us still, and find a time
To punish this offense in other faults...."

                                                              Henry IV, Part 1     (V, ii)


A decision has to be made, in an unforgiving minute.

Thomas Percy, the Earl of Worcester, isn't stupid. He knows that a king is but a man, and can go back on his word as quickly as the lowliest pickpurse. Shakespeare has him fill the ear of his brother-in-arms, Sir Richard Vernon, with his fears that the man they had inadvertently helped to the throne as King Henry IV has already discarded any sense of gratitude for their prior service.

This king has offered them a general amnesty after distinct rumblings of rebellion. Worcester isn't buying it, and he urges that his nephew and ally Hotspur, who is itching for a fight, not even be told of the king's suspicious offer of an olive branch.

The concept of a royal pardon appears and reappears throughout much of English history. Pictured above and in detail below, on display at Agecroft Hall, is a pardon from Queen Elizabeth I bestowed upon Agecroft's owner Robert Langley and his family in 1559, just a year after Elizabeth had ascended the throne as a young woman of 25. William Shakespeare was born five years later.

The short reign of Elizabeth's predecessor and half-sister Mary had been disastrous. Mary was an ardent Catholic who had tried to forcibly turn back the tide of the Protestant Reformation in England. To a considerable degree, at least by the standards of the age, the young Elizabeth had wanted to stop the swinging pendulum of persecution that had been set in motion by her own father, the hot-headed King Henry VIII, when he decided to bolt from Roman Catholicism and take his country with him.

For Henry it was quite an undertaking, allowing him to get a divorce from Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, Elizabeth's mother and a woman who would see soon enough Henry's cruelty, in the form of an executioner's sword.

During the course of Elizabeth's reign, a papal excommunication and plots against her life both real and imagined made her more circumspect. Her decision to allow the execution of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots in 1587 came only after years of fearful soul-searching. The attack of the Spanish Armada was quick to follow. 

Although there is no absolute certainty that Robert Langley of Agecroft Hall was Catholic, his wife and a number of other members of his family were known to be so; this was not the least bit unusual at the time in Lancashire. The whole north of the country, for that matter, was regarded as a stronghold of the Old Faith. Interestingly, the Langley pardon does not specifically cover any religious non-conformity in the family: written in Latin, it essentially defends the honor of the Langleys against any unmerited claims that the family was anything less than faithful to the English Crown.

There's just one little complication in all this: such pardons could, at times, be purchased. It was a way for the Crown to raise money, much like the "papist" sale of indulgences prior to the earthquakes of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. Elizabeth, like her predecessors on the throne, was faced with the duty of running a country, and that costs money. Money was something that neither she nor those who came before her ever had enough of, at least in the royal estimation.

She is pictured below, quite youthful in her coronation portrait. The lines of worry would follow, in time.