Back to the books

Every Tuesday for the past year and a half, we've added a new posting to Shakespeare: The Age and Agecroft Hall in hopes that the historical artifacts, the English gardens, and the remarkable Agecroft building itself might lend a modicum of insight into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-century world that William Shakespeare lived in, wrote in, dreamed in.

Since his works have proven to be essentially timeless, we hope that the observations recorded in the postings below (there are more than 100) won't become irrelevant any time soon. In addition, the reader might also enjoy visiting the Agecroft Hall blog  illustratingshakespeare.blogspot.com , which offers a look at some of the graphic art, paintings, and book illustrations that have depicted Shakespeare's works over the centuries. We've also produced a video about Agecroft Hall, to be viewed by connecting with this link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xxp-NVugSdQ .

Shakespeare's was an age of exploration of a New World and of new ways of thinking, an age when one's religious convictions could be matters of life and death. War, that great red arbitrator, held sway over so much that transpired during the playwright's lifetime, and its ravages remind us that in many ways, little has changed since then.

And then, as now, a bit of laughter could ease the pain.

Taken as a whole, it was a world that deserves attention for having fired the imagination of the greatest writer in the English language. In "this other Eden, demi-paradise,"  William Shakespeare will go on tending his garden.

Don't forget to duck, Part II

It isn't surprising that William Shakespeare, having immersed himself in London's theatrical world and its need for lively yet insightful writing, should come to see parallels between life and the stage. The stage had become his life before he had reached the age of thirty. It had helped him put clothes on his back and bread on his table. He was not one to overlook such a sublime metaphor, or much else, for that matter.

Even the most casual perusal of his plays brings to light his fascination with the subject. Shakespeare returns to it again and again, in stage situations ranging from the tragic to the comic. Perhaps he was revealing a bit of defensiveness about his chosen profession: if his art didn't imitate life, then what was it good for? Would not theatrical writing then deserve the sneering disapprobation it received from so many of the literati of his age?

A few of Shakespeare's striking allusions to the stage and its probing of the human condition are included below, along with a photograph from a rehearsal at Agecroft Hall of Henry V, with its myriad sword-flashing battle scenes on "the vasty fields of France."

HAMLET
"I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play
Have by the very cunning of the scene
Been so struck to the soul that presently
They have proclaimed their malefactions.
.......The play's the thing
Wherein I'll catch the conscience of the King."

                                                        Hamlet   (II, ii)

LEAR
"When we are born, we cry that we are come
To this great stage of fools.

                                                        King Lear   (IV, v)

BUCKINGHAM
"Tut, I can counterfeit the deep tragedian,
Tremble and start at wagging of a straw,
Speak, and look back, and pry on every side,
Intending deep suspicion; ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles."

                                                        Richard III   (III,v)

CORIOLANUS
"Like a dull actor now
I have forgot my part, and I am out
Even to a full disgrace.

                                                        Coriolanus  (V, iii)

JAQUES
"All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts."

                                                        As You Like It    (II, vii)

MACBETH
"Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle.
Life's but a walking shadow; a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale 
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury;
Signifying nothing."

                                                        Macbeth    (V, v)

CHORUS
"O, for a muse of fire, that would ascend
The brightest heaven of invention:
A kingdom for a stage, princes to act,
And monarchs to behold the swelling scene."

                                                        Henry V    (Prologue) 
                                   

A plague on so many houses

"All the contagion of the south light on you,
You shames of Rome! you herd of - Boils and plagues
Plaster you o'er; that you may be abhorr'd
Farther than seen, and one infect another
Against the wind a mile!"
 
                                                         Coriolanus   (I, iv) 

Shakespeare's hotheaded Caius Marcius is a warrior, and has nothing but scorn for men who aren't. He doles out contempt for anyone who flinches in battle, on either side of the line. Curses are never far from his lips. He wishes cowards the worst: he wishes them plague.

A more nightmarish curse would be hard to imagine. As Barbara Tuchman's masterful A Distant Mirror (1978) makes abundantly clear, the waves of bubonic plague that swept over Europe in the fourteenth century, returning periodically for centuries thereafter, were devastating almost beyond imagining. 

In 1347, there arrived in the port of Messina in Sicily several Genoese trading vessels with large numbers of dead and dying men slumped at the oars.  This was among the earliest indications that a descent of the peoples of Europe into an earthly hell had begun: the rat and flea-borne Black Death would claim roughly a third of the European population, with some areas being even more tragically affected.

Whole towns and villages were wiped out; priests were afraid to administer last rites to the dying for fear of catching the pestilence; healthy family members fearfully abandoned infected brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers. Some villages were left with not enough people living to bury the dead. Tuchman mentions cases in which physicians (whose healing practices were primitive and often ill-conceived) would contract the disease from their patients and die more quickly than did those same patients.

And perhaps surprisingly, the young seemed to be even more susceptible to plague than the old. The recurrence of plague, coupled with high infant mortality rates that were the norm in Shakespeare's age, must have made for precarious childhoods. It all must have made children seem all the more precious, all the more fragile.

Pictured above and presently displayed in the South Bedchamber at Agecroft Hall is a child's highchair, made of oak in England c1640 and displaying carved motifs in a style clearly influenced by the Italian Renaissance. The English in Shakespeare's time seemed to find all things Italian to be touchstones of taste. If such decorative touches could be made to grace the back of a child's chair, so much the better. Evidently some kind of belt or sash was used to make sure the child didn't fall from the chair. Surely, the child already faced enough in the way of danger.

According to archival records, children's chairs of the seventeenth century were frequently much like miniature versions of the panel-back chair used by adults, and often made to match a set used for dining. The chair is well-made and durable, reflecting the English preference for three types of wood in the building of furniture: oak, oak, and oak.

As has been well documented, Shakespeare and other members of London's theatrical profession had their lives periodically disrupted by recurring outbreaks of plague, which prompted lengthy and repeated closings of public theaters for fear that they were among the epicenters of contagion. The pestilence even affected Shakespeare's literary output: scholars generally believe that he wrote much if not most of his non-theatrical poetry, including Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, and perhaps his sonnets as well, at times when the theaters were closed and he felt compelled to exercise his talents elsewhere. 
 



 

So the heart be right

"Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an
acre of barren ground, long health, brown furze, any
thing. The wills above be done! but I would fain die
a dry death."

                                                               The Tempest     (I, i)


Shakespeare's wise old codger Gonzalo would just as soon die on dry land, and who can blame him? It takes the heart of an adventurer to relish the challenge of crossing the open seas, particularly when those seas turn malignant, and come roaring up and over the gunwales and into a man's teeth.

Such an adventurer was Sir Walter Ralegh (he never spelled his name with an "i" so we won't either). Born in South Devon c1552-1554, a region of southwest England that cranked out great sailors by the score, Ralegh apparently never got all of the salt out from between his molars. Whether he was raiding Spanish shipping and coastal towns or pushing another plan at colonization in Virginia, he spent much of his time as one of Queen Elizabeth's favorites, although the tale of Ralegh tossing his expensive cloak down over a puddle to keep the queen's feet dry is, wishful thinking aside, merely apocryphal. It is a testament to the man's charismatic style that such a story even exists.

Ralegh did succeed in messing up his own life when he secretly married one of the queen's maids of honor, Elizabeth Throckmorton. The queen's fondness for Ralegh turned to fury, and she had him thrown in prison for a brief period in 1592. He managed to work his way, at least somewhat, back into Queen Elizabeth's good graces with a daring and successful raid of Cadiz on the Spanish coast in 1597. Since Ralegh and the prima donna Earl of Essex were rivals at court, Ralegh's standing with the queen certainly didn't suffer in the aftermath of the failed Essex Rebellion.

But when Queen Elizabeth died, Ralegh's fortunes all but died as well.

Once James VI of Scotland ascended England's throne as King James I after the death of Elizabeth in 1603, swashbucklers like Ralegh must have looked around and wondered where their world had gone. James I brought the posture of a modern-day "peacenik" to his relations with Spain, leaving a trouble-maker like Ralegh in the lists, decidedly persona non grata.

Ralegh was incarcerated in the Tower of London on essentially trumped-up charges of treason shortly after James I came to the throne. Reprieved the day before his scheduled execution, he remained in the Tower from 1603 until January 1617 (the royal warrant for his release is in the Folger Shakespeare Library).

As a prisoner of high status Ralegh was accorded a number of creature comforts (at least by prison standards) that allowed him to write his History of the World, which he left unfinished upon the death of his young pupil, James I's son Henry, Prince of Wales. Ralegh's work is pictured above: dated 1614 and bound in brown calfskin, it is in the collection of Agecroft Hall. It contains a fine portrait of Ralegh and contains a history that extends from the world's creation up to the Roman conquest of Macedonia in 133 BC.

One of the maps, shown above, shows the Holy Land, with the top of the map facing east, as was customary at the time. Jerusalem can be seen in the lower portion of the map, a bit left of center; Sodom and Gomorra appear to smolder beneath the waves of the Dead Sea.

Ralegh's own future wasn't much brighter: James did release him from the Tower upon Ralegh's promise that he'd bring back a huge load of gold ore from Guiana in South America. Storms, sickness, ill luck, and a propensity to harass the Spanish led to Ralegh being re-imprisoned upon his return to England, and executed in 1618. Yet he had returned to England because his sense of honor had bade him do so: he deserves enormous respect for that.

When he lay his head on the block, it was reported that someone complained that he was facing the wrong direction, to which he responded: "What matter how the head lies, so the heart be right?"

Seeing apparitions

"Horatio says 'tis but our fantasy
And twice will not let belief take hold of him
Touching this dreaded sight, twice seen of us:
Therefore I have entreated him along
With us to watch the minutes of this night,
That if again this apparition come,
He may approve our eyes and speak to it."

                                                              Hamlet    (I, i)


Horatio is a skeptic. He's listened to the claims of Marcellus and Bernardo that they've seen some kind of apparition on the battlements of Elsinore Castle, but he's been hard to convince. So they've brought him along to see for himself, as they'll do for Hamlet shortly thereafter. The appearances of the ghost of Hamlet's father make for some of the most illustrated scenes in all of Shakespeare.

Pictured above is a scene from a production of Hamlet at Agecroft Hall during a Richmond Shakespeare Festival of several years past, featuring one of the reappearances of the ghost to exhort Hamlet on to revenge. It's a scene that artists (and photographers) can't seem to resist; at least three hundred years of illustration of Shakespeare's plays attest to the hold that Hamlet and his ghostly father have on the imagination.

Above is a nineteenth-century engraving of the same scene from Hamlet, with the armor-clad ghost on the right, standing before a clearly astonished Prince of Denmark. "Engraved by Hollis from an Original Painting by Reid in the possession of the Publishers," identified as The London Printing and Publishing Company. Perhaps not so surprisingly, book publishers of the time liked to identify figures in their engravings with specific actors and actresses that were popular at the moment: under this particular illustration, it is noted that Hamlet is played by William Charles Macready (1793-1873), a very highly regarded actor of the period. Evidently that helped sell books.

Apparitions also loom large in Shakespeare's Macbeth: there can be little doubt that the scenes that involve Macbeth and the three Weird Sisters (or witches) are among the most memorable in that remarkably memorable play. Like the ghost in Hamlet, book illustrators have long found the witches in Macbeth to be irresistible. Below is an engraving from another nineteenth-century volume of Shakespeare's works that features Macbeth's reaction to being shown by the three witches that a line of Banquo's sons, and not Macbeth's, will reign in a dynasty stretching out to "the crack of doom."

There are quite a few other scenes from the plays of Shakespeare that illustrators keep coming back to, again and again. Hamlet's contemplation of Yorick's skull; Ophelia in her madness bestrewn with flowers and weeds, or perched on a precarious limb above a gurgling brook; Lady Macbeth walking in her sleep; Nick Bottom wearing the head of an ass in A Midsummer Night's Dream; Othello creeping up on Desdemona as she sleeps; King Lear and his fool on the blasted heath, with the old man raging at the tempestuous sky; certainly the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet. Book illustrators have always loved to illustrate scenes of emotional intensity, and for centuries they have found a great abundance in the works of Shakespeare.

And no snoring during the sermon

"Come, sermon me no further....."

                                         Timon of Athens       (II, ii)

Shakespeare's Timon, a noble Athenian, is impatient with advice. He's finding out the hard way that once his means are no longer keeping up with his boundless generosity, the praise that he's become accustomed to falls away. Timon's steward Flavius hits the mark: he describes such shallow, fickle adulation as "feast-won, fast-lost." But his "sermon" of insight is cut short by Timon, who is evidently not one to be preached to.

Timon probably couldn't have endured the likes of Launcelot Andrewes (1555-1626), the most learned English churchman of Shakespeare's day, who fueled his lengthy sermons with remarkable biblical erudition. Andrewes is best known for overseeing the various translation committees that worked together to produce the 1611 King James Version of the Bible (called the Authorized Version at the time). Andrewes and a number of his colleagues in that effort shared an immense appreciation for the beauty of the spoken English language. A portrait of Andrewes, painted from life, hangs in the Great Parlor at Agecroft Hall and is pictured below.

The portrait of Andrewes, painted in 1615 by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1561-1635), shows Andrewes at age 59, when his position in the highest reaches of the Church of England had become well established. He served in the bishoprics of Ely, Winchester, and Chichester in the reign of King James I, after having been a chaplain to James' predecessor, Queen Elizabeth I, among other ecclesiastical roles. The painter of Andrewes' portrait, Gheeraerts the Younger, was also the painter of Elizabeth's last official portrait in 1592, and later was a favorite of Queen Anne of Denmark, wife of King James.

To his enormous credit, Andrewes was no shrinking violet when it came to preaching words that his reigning monarch did not like to hear. He was against any royal diversion of church revenues, a position that did not sit well with the increasingly cash-strapped Queen Elizabeth. Her efforts to stand in the way of Spanish hegemony were proving expensive, and she wanted to leave no stone unturned in her search for funds.

James Shapiro, in his insightful book A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare:1599  (published in 2005), maintains that Shakespeare might have been influenced by one or more of Andrewes' powerful sermons on the theological justification for an offensive war. The author points to lines written when Shakespeare was crafting his Henry V. 

Shapiro observes that when the disguised King Henry is arguing with his men on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt that "every subject's soul is his own" and that every soldier should "wash every mote out of his conscience" and renounce sin in combating sin, Shakespeare was echoing at least one of Andrewes' well-documented sermons.

After the death of Elizabeth, Andrewes assisted in the coronation of James I, and his stature as a scholar of the church continued to rise in the years that followed. He was said to have mastered fifteen languages. As a prelate, he was regarded as just and relatively tolerant, and unwavering in his high principles. His sermons frequently used word-play to convey the fundamental truths that he wished to impress on his listeners. Evidently, his was the kind of brilliance that kept snoring in the pews to a minimum.

When concussions were part of the job description

"Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York
And all the clouds that lour'd upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments........"

                                                            King Richard III       (I, i)


Richard, Duke of Gloucester and not yet on the throne he's perfectly willing to murder for, is more than a bit wistful. The Wars of the Roses appear to be over, and his Yorkist side appears to have won. So what does Richard, so good at warring yet too "rudely stamp'd" to woo the ladies, do to pass these tedious times of peace?

He decides to treat villainy as a job opportunity.

Richard did indeed have a problem in the romance department: the recent discovery in the UK of Richard's skeletal remains confirms that he had a pronounced curvature of the spine that could not have been helpful to his ambitions in war or in the bedroom. Yet surprisingly, Richard's historical reputation as a force to be reckoned with on the battlefield was evidently well-earned: by virtually all accounts he led from the front, not while safely ensconced in a palace well behind the lines.

Archaeologists at the University of Leicester have reportedly found indications of ten wounds on the remains of Richard III, eight of which were in the area of the head and neck. The wounds were evidently caused by blades, which corroborates historical accounts that he was hacked to death in the thick of the fighting. Clearly, Richard paid the price of violent ambition. And to this day, he's the last English monarch to have been killed in a war.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is an English steel helmet, c1650, of the type used in the English Civil War, decades after the death of Shakespeare. The helmet is of polished steel with a crest and inflexible neck guard; a broad brim with an attached nose guard pivots on the helmet; ear flaps are pierced and on leather straps. This helmet is in such good condition that it is doubtful that it was ever used in the thick of a battle between Parliamentarians and Royalists.

Along with a cuirass consisting of front and back plates for the warrior's upper body, such protection was essentially standard equipment for an English cavalry officer after the abandonment of the complete suits of armor that characterized the well-fitted-out medieval knight. The development of firearms had rendered most such armor obsolete; it made no sense to continue to go to the considerable expense, not to mention discomfort, of wearing sheets of metal that covered the entire body and head yet couldn't stop a projectile from a gunpowder weapon.
 
By the time of the Battle of Bosworth in Leicestershire, which saw the violent demise of Richard III in 1485, the fully-armored medieval knight and the whole chivalric tradition, for that matter, were receding into the mists of the past. The technology of warfare had moved on.




 

Up the down staircase

"Run, master, run; for God's sake, take a house!
This is some priory. In, or we are spoil'd!"

                                                         The Comedy of Errors        (V, i)



Dromio of Syracuse is frantic to get himself and his master Antipholus out of the clutches of their pursuers, and any port of refuge will do in Shakespeare's madcap farce. So they slip into a priory, a religious house of the sort that since medieval times provided comfort and protection (at least in theory) to the lost and the desperate. The confines of a cathedral supposedly offered the same kind of sanctuary, although Thomas Becket would roll his eyes and spill his own blood over that notion.

The Dissolution of the Monasteries prompted by Queen Elizabeth's tyrannical father, King Henry VIII, was a land grab, pure and simple. After many years of wasteful wars and extravagant spending, Henry needed money. He knew his country's greater nobility had long had its eye on the enormous landholdings of the church, holdings that made royal lands look meager in comparison.
 
Henry realized he could swell his coffers to overflowing if, with the administrative help of his lord chancellor Thomas Wolsey, he forcibly closed the monasteries, confiscated their lands, buildings, and other properties, and sold it to the covetous nobles.

Take it all. Sell it all. Pocket the cash. Better bring huge pockets.

So Henry did just that, and in so doing he made his country's landed nobility all the more resistant to the idea of ever returning to the status quo that preceded Henry's earth-shaking Act of Supremacy, which had made the King himself the head of the English church.

Give back the land, the buildings, the finery? Fat chance. Even Henry's Catholic daughter Mary, when she unexpectedly came to the throne in 1553, could see that would never happen. She didn't press the issue.

Pictured above, in Agecroft Hall, is a portion of an ornately carved oak staircase that originally was found in Warwick Priory, a religious house in the shire of Shakespeare's birth that met the same fate as so many others under the crushing thumb of Henry VIII. Like Agecroft Hall, portions of Warwick Priory would eventually, in the mid-1920's, be dismantled and moved to the banks of the James River in Richmond, where it was carefully reconstructed on property adjacent to Agecroft. That priory building is now called Virginia House (pictured below).

The staircase has newel posts and panels that are each carved from one piece of oak, no mean feat given the elaborate designs involved. The origin of the design is uncertain; it may derive from antique motifs distorted for expressive purposes by Italian Renaissance artists. Such designs became popular in northern Europe and particularly in the Netherlands, home to a considerable number of excellent wood-working craftsmen.

Warwick Priory, founded in the 12th century, was suppressed in 1536 at the Dissolution, evidently among the earliest of the religious houses to be shut down. Henry's minister Wolsey had carefully planned to close the smaller ones first, at least in part to get some experience in how to go about such a messy business. Then came the closings of the greater monasteries, and a way of life that had endured for centuries in England ceased to be.

Curb appeal, minus the curb

"...............write to the king
that which I durst not speak: his present gift
Shall furnish me to those Italian fields,
where noble fellows strike: war is no strife
To the dark house and the detested wife."

                                             All's Well That Ends Well     (II, iii)


Shakespeare's Bertram, Count of Rousillon, doesn't mince his words: he toes the line that warriors drew long before Achilles stood outside the walls of Troy, waiting for Hector.

Honor is won on the field of battle, not within the confines of the home. Bertram makes a comic allusion to domestic arguments ferocious enough to make war a mere holiday picnic in comparison. No doubt he wins the nodding approval of his follower Parolles, who refers to stay-at-homes as "wearing their honor in a box unseen."

Shakespeare's reference to "the dark house" would not have been lost on the average Elizabethan playgoer: most Tudor homes were pretty dark. Leaded glass windows of any size were a luxury that few could afford. Glass was expensive, and to make matters worse, windows were at times also taxed, as were the hearths in a dwelling. Windows also made it harder to keep rooms warm, and made a building less secure, always a consideration when times turned violent. And in a turbulent city like London, street violence was all too often just around the corner and on the move.

Despite these drawbacks, there were noblemen with deep pockets in both town and country who regarded glass windows as a luxury well worth having. A landowner like Agecroft Hall's William Dauntesey could afford to have sizable windows in his manor house. Clearly, Dauntesey had attained some sense of security by the time he had his portrait painted in 1566, when William Shakespeare was two years old. That portrait of Dauntesey still hangs at Agecroft Hall.

The relatively large windows not only added light to the rooms of the house but served as an unambiguous symbol of wealth and status. In the second of two views of Agecroft Hall posted above, it is evident that the more ornate and extensive oak timbering and large lower-level windows visible in the wing on the left reflect a time during Agecroft's construction in Lancashire when its owners felt most prosperous, and most willing to spend money to impress.

When times got tighter financially (and deforestation made good English oak harder to come by), the oak half-timbering became less elaborate as newer wings were added to the manor house during the Jacobean era and thereafter. At least the Elizabethans didn't have to worry about whether their houses had curb appeal: there were no curbs to speak of.

I drink, therefore I am?

"Thou art so fat-witted, with drinking of old sack
and unbuttoning thee after supper and sleeping
upon benches after noon, that thou hast forgotten
to demand that truly which thou wouldst truly
know. What a devil hast thou to do with the time of
the day?"

                                                                 Henry IV, Part 1       (I, ii)


To amuse himself, Shakespeare's Prince Hal gives that old drunken fatso, Sir John Falstaff, a hard time about his gourmandizing ways. Falstaff loves to drink, to eat, to chase tavern wenches, to put coinage in his pocket with as little physical effort as possible. Yet he soars to the Icarian heights of Shakespeare's imagination and becomes, aside from Hamlet, the playwright's most memorable character.

He is refreshingly unapologetic about who he is, what little (if anything) he's willing to fight and kill for, or what he's willing to lie, booze, or snooze through in order to make his life more comfortable. He'll take on the world with a cup of wine in his hand, or not at all.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a coconut shell goblet, made with English silver around 1640. It is not nearly as finely crafted or as ornate as an essentially similar goblet that Queen Elizabeth had arranged to be made from a coconut shell given to her by her favorite seafaring rogue, Sir Francis Drake, after Drake returned to England following a circumnavigation of the globe. That was in 1580, when William Shakespeare was sixteen.

Drake and his crew had done more than circle the earth: they had harassed Spanish shipping and silver mining operations, particularly along the Pacific coasts of South and Central America, making off across the Pacific with an enormous load of loot that would leave the English back home in a state of open-mouthed astonishment. Queen Elizabeth had winked at Drake's privateering, since she herself had a financial interest in his activities. Elizabeth wasn't stupid: she realized that Spain's loss was essentially her own nation's gain. Looking the other way while Drake enjoyed a round of high-seas pilfering seemed easy enough, so that's exactly what she did.

Elizabeth made her admiration of Drake quite clear when she had him knighted on the deck of his ship, the Golden Hind, for his exploits. It was said by many, including Sir Francis Drake himself, that no man knew more about sailing a ship, and his world-circling and piratical saga had proven it was indeed so.

Agecroft Hall's coconut cup helps provide us with an idea of how enamored the English and Europeans on the continent had become with exotic objects from the faraway places that were coming to light in this new age of exploration. One might think of coconut shells from the Pacific or similarly exotic flora and fauna as a bit like the moon rocks of our own day: so many of these things were totally new to the eyes of the English, and their curiosity would only grow.

By the time Shakespeare was writing The Tempest (probably 1611), his last known play without collaboration, he was using the imagery of an alluring new world filled with unfamiliar sights and sounds to craft scenes that have enchanted playgoers for four centuries.

Play it again, Ham

"......and there is much music, excellent voice
in this little organ; yet cannot you make it speak..."

                                                                 Hamlet        (III, ii)


Hamlet is steamed that his fair-weather friends, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, are trying to manipulate him, spy on him, "play upon" him like one might play upon a pipe. Over the centuries, the scene has been frequently acted with Hamlet getting violently hot under the collar, even using the pipe to momentarily choke Guildenstern, who has proven himself no friend but a mere lapdog to the usurping King Claudius.

Shakespeare makes this scene a bit unusual in that he uses music as a metaphor not in its more commonplace associations with harmony, pleasure and peace but rather with conflict and betrayal. There are numerous instances in his works - in The Tempest, Twelfth Night, A Midsummer Night's Dream, to name only several, where the playwright uses the sounds and imagery of music to convey a comforting sense of tranquility.

Pictured above, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, is a bellows-driven portable table organ, made in the early 17th century in Italy, that wondrous land of all things refined in the eyes of the Elizabethan English. Although the instrument retains its late Renaissance Italianate exterior, its inner workings were restored  during the Victorian era.

Presently placed in Agecroft's Great Parlor, it serves as a reminder that Shakespeare's age was well acquainted with the pleasures of what we've come to call chamber music. It was de rigueur for the accomplished Renaissance courtier to possess at least a modicum of musical skill.

Perhaps not surprising in an age when people had to do more to amuse themselves than simply turn on the telly.

From his day until ours, it's astonishing how much music has been inspired by the works of William Shakespeare, either directly or indirectly. Grove's Dictionary of Music lists about 800 musical works based on the playwright's plays, poems, and sonnets. Any list of the most highly regarded compositions would have to include Felix Mendelssohn's A Midsummer Night's Dream, Giuseppe Verdi's operatic works Macbetto, Otello, and Falstaff  (with a libretto that combines the fat knight's best moments in The Merry Wives of Windsor and Henry IV); Beethoven's Coriolan overture. It has been said that it would be easier to list the few great composers who didn't write any works based on Shakespeare than to try to list all those who did.

In music, passion is the coinage of the realm. Who better to turn to than Shakespeare?

Knot in our neighborhood

"...our sea-walled garden, the whole land
Is full of weeds; her fairest flowers choked up,
Her fruit-trees all unpruned, her hedges ruin'd,
Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs
Swarming with caterpillars?"

                                                                Richard II     (III, iv)

Agecroft Hall's Knot Garden is pictured above; it is one of several gardens at Agecroft based on English designs that were highly regarded among the courtly set in Shakespeare's age. And clearly, few things were more demanding of near-constant attention than this sort of elaborate, meticulously planned garden. The essence of the Elizabethan attitude toward nature seemed to revolve around the idea that with conscientious effort, the natural world could be made even more beautiful than it already was. The one caveat: without such human intervention, nature could quickly turn ugly, and often did.

Little wonder that in Shakespeare's Richard II, he has a servant despairing over national affairs run amok, like a garden with its "knots disordered." The king is about to take a fall, and this worried servant doesn't have to look far to find natural portents of disaster in the very garden that surrounds him.

One of Shakespeare's most distinguished contemporaries, Sir Francis Bacon, included among his expansive essays a number of observations about gardens and gardening:

     "God Almighty first planted a Garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures.
       It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man, without which buildings and palaces
      are but gross handyworks, and a man shall ever see that when ages grow to civility and
      elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely, as if gardening were
      the greater perfection."

Bacon went on to express his belief that the best gardens were planted so as to reserve some beauty for all months of the year: the drabness of the winter months would be relieved by a number of evergreens; the hottest months would not be overlooked either.  

"In July come gillyflowers of all varieties, musk roses, the lime tree in blossom, early pears and plums in fruit....In August come plums...pears, apricots, berberries, filberds, musk melons..." 

Bacon included recommendations for every other month as well. It's difficult to avoid the impression that a green thumb must have pushed his pen across the page.


Agecroft Hall's two open knot designs shown above are fairly typical of the Tudor English style. Germander, English lavender, and green santolina are among the herbs that have been used over the years to create the elaborate patterns. The aromatic qualities of the herbs were usually given due consideration: Shakespeare's world included plenty of smells that were less than pleasant, and part of the allure of a garden was the chance to escape from all that. In Elizabethan and Jacobean England, quite a few estates of the landed gentry included such gardens, some fairly modest and others large, exceedingly intricate, and designed to impress.

The four beds bordering the knots are usually planted with seasonal vegetables that would not have been uncommon in Shakespeare's England, thus combining beauty with a bit of utilitarianism that is understandable in any age. The English were nothing if not practical.


                

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.

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.