Day of the Black Tents

Tamerlan. Tamerlan. Tamerlan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The bane of gunpowder

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

                                   Hamlet    (V, ii)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




   

Jack Cade, nervous lawyers, and the weeds of disorder

"Now 'tis the spring, and the weeds are shallow-rooted;
Suffer them now, and they'll o'ergrow the garden,
And choke the herbs for want of husbandry."

                                                                 King Henry VI - Part 2    (III, i)



Clearly, it's Queen Margaret, not her weak-willed husband King Henry VI, that wears the pants in their royal household. Ambitious, disloyal subjects are the weeds Margaret has in mind.

Shakespeare paints an enigmatic portrait of King Henry as sincerely pious but too reflective and indecisive for his own good, at least by the standards of this world. Margaret sees her husband's enemies as choking weeds taking over the garden of state; it was a metaphor often used during the European Renaissance to describe the threat of disorder in a supposedly civil society that valued order above virtually everything else. To the Renaissance mind, a well-tended garden was the very picture of the idealized state.

Later in Shakespeare's play, a weed of disorder would rise up most memorably in the person of the raffish Jack Cade, the leader of a commoners' revolt that, if nothing else, gave the playwright a chance to write the immortal line of one rebel, "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."      (IV, ii)

Weeds, whether of the botanical or metaphorical variety, are routinely rooted out of the Tradescant Garden of Agecroft Hall, thanks to its diligent staff of gardeners. Pictured above in a view taken last year, the garden's name honors John Tradescant, the first Englishman to travel to Virginia in order to bring indigenous botanical specimens from the colony back to England. After a visit in 1637, he returned with a variety of plants to add to a collection that his father had begun as gardener to King Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria.

In more recent years, the names "Henrietta" and "Maria" lived on as names for two cats that used to roam the gardens and grounds of Agecroft Hall.

Native Virginia plants that can frequently be seen in the Tradescant Garden in proper season include Tradescantia virginiana or spiderwort, and Lobelia cardinalis or cardinal flower. A wide range of other plants that Tradescant would been familiar with are also grown, varying from year to year.
Agecroft Hall also features its Sunken Garden, designed by the landscape architect Charles Gillette and based on a garden at the Hampton Court Palace of King Henry VIII.

Tulips abound in the Sunken Garden during much of April each year.  Shakespeare passed away too early to witness the "tulipmania" that engulfed much of western Europe in the seventeenth century, with wealthy English patrons offering incredible sums of money for particular tulip varieties. It all must have been enough to make for a madcap comedy.

Richard III and the School of Nasty

"Stay, yet look back with me unto the Tower.
Pity, you ancient stones, those tender babes
Whom envy hath immured within your walls!
Rough cradle for such little pretty ones!

                                                              Richard III          (IV, i)



Elizabeth, queen to the just-deceased King Edward IV, finds herself and her two small children at the mercy of Shakespeare's supreme villain, the newly-crowned King Richard III. Richard has oozed to the top of the royal cesspool during the fifteenth century's Wars of the Roses. He has locked up his dead brother Edward's young sons in the Tower of London.

Although both are well beyond their infancy, they are still just children. But Richard sees his own nefarious claim to the throne as threatened by their very existence as rightful heirs, so the two small boys must be made to vanish in the Tower. Shakespeare's Richard enlists his thug du jour James Tyrrel to perform the deed. Historically, the children's ultimate end has remained unclear from that day to this. As has been trumpeted in international headlines and noted in postings below, archaeologists in the UK have only just recently verified their discovery of the bones of Richard III.

Gazing up at the Tower that imprisons her children, Elizabeth's words bear witness to the intensity of love and feelings of endless anxiety that mothers have for their children, made more intense in Shakespeare's age by the high rate of infant and child mortality. The playwright himself was to be shaken just several years after writing Richard III by the death of his only son, Hamnet, at eleven years of age in 1596. Many Shakespearean scholars point to this loss as having a profound influence on some of his best writing, inimitably sounding the depths of the human heart.

Pictured above, displayed in a bedchamber at Agecroft Hall, is an oil-on-canvas portrait of an English infant, Roger Townshend, born Dec. 21, 1628. He was the son and heir to Sir Roger Townshend of Norfolk. His mother Mary was the daughter and co-heiress of Sir Horatio de Vere, Baron Vere of Tilbury. It was at Tilbury that Queen Elizabeth I had delivered her oft-quoted exhortation to English troops awaiting Spanish invaders in the year of the Armada, 1588.

In Tudor and Stuart England, it was quite common for children, whether boys or girls, to be dressed similarly until about age five. During the first year of their lives, they were wrapped in swaddling bands over a shirt and at times wore a "biggin," a kind of delicate cap. After the first year or so, babies typically wore long clothes, as in this portrait. Not surprisingly, a bibbed apron was also a standard item of clothing. In the above portrait, the young Roger's embroidered satin gown with hanging sleeves, his lace-trimmed standing band (collar) and cap indicate the relatively wealthy status of the child's family.

It was common in portraits of young girls for the subject to be seen holding a "tussie mussie," a small, fragrant arrangement of flowers and herbs used to help ward off a variety of less pleasant odors so easily found in the busy streets of London and elsewhere. Many of these flowers also had symbolic meanings, as Ophelia referred to during her madness in Hamlet. Portraits of infant males often portrayed the boys holding teething corals, as young Roger is holding above.

At the age of twenty, Roger met an untimely death in Geneva; his passing meant that his younger brother Horatio inherited the titles and estates of the Townshend family.

A pickpurse of the pastoral empire

"Yes, I think he is not a pickpurse nor a horse stealer...."

                                                          As You Like It      (III, iv)



Celia is just trying to combine commiseration with a bit of advice for her best friend, Rosalind. Enamored of Orlando, Rosalind is crestfallen at Orlando's failure to show up after swearing he would do so. Celia confides in Rosalind her belief that Orlando, while not the most devious of young men, is faithless when it comes to love: "......the oath of a lover is no stronger than the word of a tapster; they are both the confirmer of false reckonings."

As for a paragon of pickpurses and false reckonings, one need search no further than Shakespeare's cheerful peddler/thief Autolycus in The Winter's Tale. Ever observant, buoyant and philosophical, he is the very Plato of pickpockets. With a song on his lips, he is the Sinatra of shilling-stealers. He is also refreshingly honest, at least with himself, about who he is and what he does for a living. He is "a snapper-up of unconsidered trifles."  Maybe we should all be so honest.

Pictured above are two small embroidered purses, and a detail view of a third, all in the collection of Agecroft Hall. Dating to the seventeenth century, they provide some idea of the considerable skill of embroiderers of wool, linen, and silk both in England and on the European continent at that time. They are the sorts of small bags that Shakespeare would have been accustomed to seeing, containing coins or small personal possessions. The quality of the needlework makes it evident that these were not the purses of vagabonds who were down to their last pence.

Purses like these would have caught the larcenous eye of the playwright's singing pickpocket, Autolycus. He was ever one to enjoy the crowds at a sheep-shearing: he could fleece a two-legged sheep in a heartbeat. And he boasts a certain pride in the knowledge of his craft:

"I know the business, I hear it: to have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses."      
                                                                                                                       The Winter's Tale   (IV, iv)

It's worth observing that nowhere has the embroiderers' art been more widely known or highly regarded than in that most singular of relics of England's history, the Bayeux Tapestry. The work, nearly three-quarters the length of a football field, is actually not a tapestry at all but an embroidery that uses imagery to relate the story of the Norman Conquest from a conqueror's point of view. The embroiderers stitched the story of this epic strife in linen, as compellingly as historians recounted it in ink.