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?