Confusion makes a modest masterpiece

"This is as strange a maze as ever men trod...."

                                                              The Tempest   (V, i)

The shipwrecked Alonso, King of Naples, is scratching his head over the strange but joyful happenings he's witnessed on Prospero's island: his son, given up for dead, is restored to him; his own crass behavior has been forgiven; his mostly disreputable retinue let off with a very mild scolding. He's justifiably baffled, as if stumbling about in a maze that has new wonders around every unexpected corner.

Pictured above is the turf maze at Agecroft Hall. It's almost invariably a highlight for visiting children, who  wend their way through its not-too-labyrinthine turns and by trial and error usually make it to the center. The maze was laid out years ago in emulation of similar designs that had become popular during the Tudor period or earlier. There were also labyrinth designs which, in the strictest use of the term, differed from mazes in that they did not involve confusing choices of direction, but were essentially meandering, one-way journeys to a (usually) central destination, which often had a fountain, sundial, or statue.

Labyrinths and mazes had historical antecedents ranging from ancient Crete with its mythological Minotaur to the floor of medieval Chartres Cathedral in France. The cathedral and its labyrinth are to this day a destination of pilgrimmage for religious penitents, medievalists, mystics and the merely curious.

In Shakespeare's age, English society's upper social strata enjoyed formal gardens, often walled in or cloistered to add to the sense of exclusiveness and privacy. A variety of types of mazes were created: one popular style involved using box hedges, sometimes allowed to grow high enough to preclude seeing over, making the correct path more of a mystery. Frustratingly, turf mazes in England and on the European continent tend to be difficult if not impossible to date because they must be periodically recut: neglect quickly leads to oblivion.

Among the finest mazes in England can be found at Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. Its maze is of yew and the hedges stand taller than a man's height, making navigation to its center quite an adventure.

Better not drink the water, either

"............Hamlet, this pearl is thine;
Here's to thy health.
                [Trumpets sound, and cannon shot off within.
         Give him the cup."

                                                             Hamlet         (V, ii)

Hamlet has just scored "a hit, a very palpable hit" in his fencing duel with Laertes. King Claudius, in league with Laertes to kill Hamlet, has put poison in the drinking cup he offers the prince. Had Lady Macbeth been Claudius' wife she might have applauded; her immortal advice to her husband was to "....look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under't...."

In the collection of Agecroft Hall is an ornate silver covered cup, German in origin and made c1600 (shown above). Most Shakespearean scholars believe that Hamlet was written at about that same time, although many also point to the possible existence of an earlier version of the play, perhaps by Shakespeare himself. In any case, the setting of Hamlet in the sumptuous court of a Danish king makes it easy to imagine such a fine cup as holding the proffered drink that would mean "the present death of Hamlet," doing what England never got its chance to do.

This silver cup is slightly over nine and one-half inches tall, with elaborate ornamentation depicting flowers and fruit. Much of the northern European continent was justifiably well-regarded for the quality of its metalwork, and German craftsmanship was no exception in the eyes of the English. German silver pieces were said to be rarely melted down for reworking due to their quality, according to archival sources.

In Hamlet, when the poisoned cup is offered the Danish prince, he politely declines it for the moment, and Queen Gertrude drinks from the cup instead. Interestingly, like so much of Hamlet, there have been contrasting interpretations of this scene in performance. The more conventional approach has the Queen quite oblivious to the fact that the cup is poisoned: by the time she realizes what has happened, it's too late.

An intriguing alternative interpretation (used by Diane Venora, for example, in the Ethan Hawke film version that was released in 2000) has the Queen, guilt-ridden and suicidal, suspecting the cup to be poisoned and using it to deliberately end her own life. That modernized take on Shakespeare's classic also has Laertes pulling out a pistol when his fencing skills prove inadequate to the task at hand.

Be all this as it may, there's one interpretation that hasn't changed in 400 years: Hamlet's a goner.

Sleep, death's counterfeit

"To note the chamber: I will write all down:
Such and such pictures; there the window; such
the adornment of her bed; the arras, figures...."

                                                                      Cymbeline     (II, ii)

In the middle of the night, as Shakespeare's heroine Imogen sleeps, sly Iachimo emerges from hiding in a large trunk that he has persuaded Imogen to have placed in her own bedchamber for safekeeping. He is already convinced of Imogen's undying loyalty and devotion to her husband; but to win a wager with that husband Iachimo needs to have some convincing proof that he's slept with her. He figures that a detailed description of her bedchamber, of a mole on her left breast, and a stolen bracelet should do the trick. And it does, for a time.

Believed to be numbered among Shakespeare's last dramatic works, his play Cymbeline is set in the misty age of British resistance to imperial Roman hegemony. It might be a bit surprising to recall that in the playwright's own day, beds were not always located in rooms we would strictly regard as "bedchambers."

Generally, it was not until later in the 17th century that many of the rooms of an English home began taking on the kind of specific, distinct functions that we've become so familiar with today. Since most lacked what we would call "hallways," walking through a house meant walking through various rooms. It's hardly surprising that their functions were more blurred at that time.

Pictured above is an ornately carved English bedstead, made around 1580, in the Great Parlor at Agecroft Hall. When it was completed, Shakespeare was about sixteen years old. Even at a glance, it's an extremely impressive piece of furniture: in Shakespeare's time, bedsteads were frequently among a home's most valuable items. Much ink has been spilled on the "second best bed" that the playwright from Stratford famously left to his wife in his will. Various explanations notwithstanding, it's worth noting that bedsteads were relatively valuable enough to merit specific, prominent mention in many wills made during the Tudor and Jacobean periods.

The oak bed in Agecroft's parlor has a headboard decorated with two arches, with recessed panels painted with tempera paint. Stylized floral arrangements and a figure of Pan, the Greek mythological god of meadows and forests, feature prominently in the bed's decoration. A bit evocative, perhaps, of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream or As You Like It.

The curtains that can be drawn around the bed helped keep out drafts, and were conducive to privacy, probably not a minor consideration in a home without hallways. On the wall to the left of the bed is an "arras," a hanging tapestry that was not only decorative but of much-needed help in keeping a room warm. The name comes from Arras, a town in the Netherlands across the English Channel (it now lies within the border of northern France), where so many of the finest tapestries were made during Shakespeare's era.

Horse, hound, and hind

"Under this thick-grown brake we'll shroud ourselves;
For through this land anon the deer will come;
And in this covert will we make our stand,
Culling the principal of all the deer."

                                                              Henry VI, Part III         (III, i)

Two gamekeepers, crossbows in hand, make these plans in one of Shakespeare's earliest plays. Little do they know that into their midst will shortly wander a royal quarry indeed: a dethroned Henry VI, pious but weak, incompetent, pitiful. Henry has stumbled over the border from exile in Scotland, longing to see his own country again. The keepers, undoubtedly surprised by this turn of events, take Henry into custody, regarding him as no longer their king.

He would later be murdered in the Tower of London at the hands of RP3 (whether that was a hip nickname for Richard Plantagenet III is merely wishful thinking). Anyway, at the time of the murder, Richard was still titled Duke of Gloucester. He'd weasel his way to the throne in a while.

Pictured above is a 17th-century decorative carving of a male deer beneath one of the east-facing upstairs windows of Agecroft Hall. It has long since been coated with a tar-like, carbon-based substance for its preservation. The imagery is not the least bit out of the ordinary in a time when hunting with horse, hound, and hawk was usually the favorite sport of English kings and nobility alike. They were well aware, even then, that the country's resources were not infinite and they made incredibly harsh laws preventing commoners from lawfully pursuing all but the most worthless types of game, even in times of dearth. A poacher caught on royal or manorial lands was lucky to avoid being hanged.

The nobility loved their sport, they enjoyed venison on their dining tables, and they were greedy. Whether the low-born went hungry was not their problem, or so they thought. The mid-to-late 1590's, by which time Shakespeare had already written his Henry VI plays, saw several consecutive years of bad weather and crop failures, making the hungry lower social classes all the more desperate, all the more willing to risk the noose for a deer stolen in the night.

The scarecrow as Shakespearean metaphor

"We must not make a scarecrow of the law,
Setting it up to fear the birds of prey,
And let it keep one shape, till custom make it
Their perch and not their terror."

                                                       Measure for Measure        (II, i)

Shakespeare knew that there is no worse hypocrite than a newly-empowered hypocrite. In Measure for Measure, Duke Vincentio of Vienna leaves his deputy Angelo temporarily in charge of the kingdom, and Angelo quickly turns Draconian. He has decided that if every last letter of the law was enforced with the utmost severity, then fear and respect for the law would be reimposed on a citizenry grown accustomed to leniency and rule-bending. To Angelo, the people have become like crows who lose their fear of a scarecrow that never moves. Conveniently, Angelo also finds his lust for the innocent Isabella better served by following a strict code of merciless conduct.

Pictured above is a scarecrow from Agecroft Hall's aptly-titled Scarecrow: The Challenge and Exhibit, which invited local schools and non-profit organizations to use their creativity in making scarecrows to help raise money for their organizations. Close inspection of this particular scarecrow reveals a gourd for a heart!

As a precaution before the arrival of Hurricane Sandy ("Mad as the sea and wind when both contend / which is the mightier...."   Hamlet {IV, i} ), all of the scarecrows at Agecroft were taken down and stored. Since the storm went relatively easy on Richmond, we've been able to get them back out and on display through Nov. 4th. The local crows will not rest easy tonight.

A bit of mystery, a touch of conjecture

Shakespearean scholars often make reference to the poet's "Lost Years," from the time he left grammar school in Stratford-Upon-Avon in the late 1570's until his marriage to Anne Hathaway in 1582, and then again for an extended period later in that decade and into the next, just prior to his earliest successes on the London stage and his literary vilification by a mean-spirited and envious rival,  Robert Greene, in 1592. Greene had written sneeringly of Shakespeare's presumptuousness in trying to compete with his university-trained betters. Shakespeare's education didn't extend beyond grammar school; how dare he write for the stage? At least that demeaning outburst allowed us to pinpoint Shakespeare's whereabouts.

A long-standing tradition, flavored with some traces of circumstantial evidence, holds that Shakespeare was for a while a "Schoolmaster in the Countrey," according to the late 17th-century diarist John Aubrey, who cites as his source the actor son of Christopher Beeston, who had been an actor in Shakespeare's company during the great writer's lifetime. Peter Ackroyd, in his masterfully written Shakespeare: The Biography, points out that teacher-and-student or otherwise pedantic scenes and references are unusually frequent in Shakespeare's plays, often harking back to the torturous grind of grammar school experience, with its "whining schoolboy.....creeping like snail/unwillingly to school" (As You Like It    Act II, Scene vii).

What makes this little touch of conjecture pertinent to Agecroft Hall is this: Ackroyd, Stephen Greenblatt, Michael Wood, and  numerous other Shakespeare biographers have pointed to Lancashire (where Agecroft Hall once stood) as a possible venue for Shakespeare's brief career as a tutor of children. Lancashire was a stronghold of the Old Religion, Catholicism, and there is considerable evidence that Shakespeare's family might have continued to cling to the old faith. Several of William's grammar school teachers were Catholics from Lancashire. Might one of them have recommended a bright young pupil named William Shakespeare to serve as a tutor to the children of a wealthy Lancastrian landholder? Certainly a plausible theory. And the acting out of simple morality plays and other edifying fare was regarded as both a common and effective teaching tool in Tudor England, perhaps allowing Shakespeare to show the earliest glints of his brilliance.

Specifically, these biographers point to the intriguingly ambiguous will left by Alexander Hoghton of Hoghton Tower in Lancashire. He left actors' costumes and musical instruments to his half-brother Thomas Hoghton, asking him to take into his service "ffoke Gyllome and William Shakeshafte now dwellinge with me" or to find someone who would. Given the nonexistence of spelling rules in Tudor England, and the fading memory of an aging man, might not "Shakeshafte" and Shakespeare be one and the same young man?

Hoghton Tower is but a half-day's walk, if that, from where Agecroft Hall once stood. Even some of the less professional or polished acting groups, under noble patronage, traveled about the county if not the country. A mobile form of entertainment, though slow on its tours by today's standards.

If such was the case, it is not beyond the realm of possibility that Shakespeare, under the patronage of either the Hoghtons or later fellow Lancastrians Thomas Hesketh or Ferdinando Stanley (who as Lord Strange patronized the acting group The Lord Strange's Men) might conceivably have come to Lancashire's Agecroft Hall as a young actor or in some theatrical capacity, getting his feet wet in the trade.

Pictured above is Agecroft Hall as it stood in Lancashire in the latter part of the 19th century; the original portions of the structure date back to the 15th century. In 1926, having fallen into a state of significant deterioration, it was purchased by Virginia businessman Thomas C. Williams, Jr. The building was dismantled, shipped across the Atlantic, and rebuilt on the banks of the James River in Richmond, where it stands to this day. Whether a young William Shakespeare ever counted its chimneys (Agecroft once had eleven hearths) is a tickler for the imagination.

A well-rounded education

"Take you the lute, and you the set of books;
You shall go see your pupils presently."

                                                              The Taming of the Shrew      (II, i)

Renaissance Italy seemed to have a particular hold on Shakespeare's imagination: its warm southern climate and reputedly hot-blooded, passionate populace added credence to the action and soaring emotions of so many of his plays. A delightfully mercurial Mercutio strolls the streets of Verona, peppering the likes of Romeo and Tybalt with his quips. A Jewish moneylender with unflinching tribal loyalties demands his bond in Venice. Petruchio comes to Padua and determines to have his Kate.

And Kate's father Baptista, like any good Italian patrician, wants his two daughters to be tutored in a manner deemed appropriate for Italian Renaissance women. Music, poetry, and the affairs of the home were high on the list of priorities for young women; the arts of war, of political aggrandizement, of business were left largely to the Italian male.

Pictured above is an Italian chitarrone, a bass or contrabass of the lute family, in the collection of Agecroft Hall, acquired from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Although the precise year of its making is uncertain, it bears characteristics of late 17th century workmanship.The sounding board has a parchment rosette surrounded by an ebony band, inlaid with ivory. Similar inlays are in the ebony neck and base of the instrument.

Baptista's daughters, Katharina and Bianca, would have used such a delicate instrument to accompany their equally delicate recitations of poetry or song, not necessarily playing and singing at once. Music was thought to soothe the more passionate impulses and in Shakespeare's Italy, there seemed to be plenty of that to go around.

One point should not be overlooked: Shakespeare might have chosen Italy as a venue for so many of his plays simply because by doing so, any political or social implications in action or speech onstage could be regarded as far removed from English contemporary political circumstances. Shakespeare was later to discover, in the aftermath of the quashed Essex Rebellion, just how precarious a playwright's life could be when his history play Richard II was exploited by the Essex faction for its supposed rabble-rousing potential. The rabble never roused, but Shakespeare and his acting fellows fell under suspicion nevertheless.

Plays set in exotic, far-away Italy must have seemed, for the most part, benign in comparison and ideal for Shakespeare.