The year of lear, p.14
The Year of Lear, page 14
The show trial was almost over. After the guilty verdicts were delivered Digby asked for forgiveness, Robert Winter pleaded for mercy, and his younger brother Thomas gallantly if fruitlessly begged that he “be hanged both for his brother and himself.” The blinded Grant “was a good while mute” before admitting that he was guilty of “conspiracy intended but never executed,” and Fawkes, aggressive to the last, sought to exonerate the Jesuit priests who were implicated in the plot, insisting that “we never opened the matter to them.” Rookwood begged for mercy, not because he feared death but because “so shameful a death should leave so perpetual a blemish and blot unto all ages upon his name and blood.”
On January 30, Digby, Robert Winter, Grant, and Bates were bound and drawn on wicker sleds to St. Paul’s to be hanged, castrated, eviscerated, then cut to pieces. Having plotted “not only to make our kingdom headless but memberless,” as the preacher Samuel Garey put it, they would now suffer that very fate themselves. London itself was the stage and there was room for everyone keen on viewing part of the spectacle. The procession to the gallows had its own drama as family members hoped to greet the condemned for the last time. Martha Bates managed to slip past the armed guards and throw herself on the bound body of her husband, Thomas, as he was dragged to St. Paul’s. The executions took place at the western end of St. Paul’s churchyard and offered a combination of sanctity and savagery in equal measure. Digby was the first to mount the scaffold, followed by Winter, Grant, then Bates. According to John Aubrey, Digby was eloquent to the end. After asking forgiveness he prayed quietly for a quarter hour, “often bowing his head to the ground,” before ascending the scaffold. He was only hanged for a very short while before being cut down and butchered. It was said that when the executioner plucked out his heart and exclaimed to the crowd, “Here is the heart of a traitor,” Digby in his dying breath cried out “Thou liest!” True or not, it was reported that common folk gathered there “marveled at his fortitude” and talked “almost of nothing else.”
It was not the wisest time to criticize how the government chose to stage these executions, but Sir Arthur Gorges took that chance, complaining to Salisbury about the choice of site, not finding St. Paul’s “a fit place” to “make a butchery in the churchyard, and almost under the eaves of the most famous church of our kingdom.” Gorges added that it might generate invidious comparisons between King James and Queen Elizabeth: “I well remember that that was the place of happy memory . . . where our late dread and dear sovereign offered up in all humility upon her knees her thanksgiving to God for the great victory upon the Spaniards and therefore too worthy to be now polluted with gibbets, hangmen, or the blood of traitors.” Salisbury saw that Gorges was right, and the cumbersome set was dismantled and hastily moved to a new site, the Old Palace Yard at Westminster, so that on the following day Londoners could witness a repeat performance. On this day Thomas Winter went first, followed by Rookwood, Keyes, and last of all the star attraction, Guy Fawkes. His body broken by torture, Fawkes was “scarce able to go up the ladder.” But his end was luckier than that of the others, for his neck snapped when he was hanged, killing him before he had to endure the horrors then visited upon his body. When the carnage ended, “their quarters were placed over London gates” and their heads overlooking London Bridge.
While we will never know in what ways the Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath affected Shakespeare personally, it’s nonetheless possible to recover some of the traces it left on his work. Its most obvious impact would be on the next play he would write, Macbeth, which begins and ends with the killing of a Scottish king. In its use of squibs in the opening scene—small fireworks made of brimstone and saltpeter that made a slight but noisy explosion—it must have even smelled like a Gunpowder play. The plot also left its mark on King Lear before it had even been staged. How uncanny was it to have imagined before the Fifth of November a story that turned on a mysterious and forged letter, in a play that took an old tragicomedy and reworked it into a tragedy that ended apocalyptically, with the destruction of the entire British royal family? Kent’s grim question at the end of the play—“Is this the promised end?”—and Edgar’s rejoinder: “Or image of that horror?” (24.59–60) foreshadowed the language of “The King’s Book” and Barlow’s Gunpowder sermon. In Lear’s words on the heath, confronting the terrible elements, decrying ingratitude, and calling down destruction on his head, Shakespeare had written one of his most powerful speeches:
Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks! Rage! blow!
You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout
Till you have drenched our steeples, drowned the cocks!
You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,
Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,
Singe my white head; and thou all-shaking thunder,
Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world,
Crack nature’s mould, all germens spill at once,
That make ingrateful man.
(9.1–9)
The effect of this speech would be intensified in the wake of the trial of the traitors, with the words of Sir Edward Coke still fresh in Londoners’ minds, linking this description of elemental violence with the forces that would have been unleashed on the Fifth of November: “Lord, what a wind, what a fire, what a motion and commotion of earth and air there would have been!” Lines in the play such as the Fool’s jibe about monopolies (4.146), the kind of oblique political criticism that only a few months earlier would have slipped by the censor, now had to be cut, once the king’s abuse of monopolies had been invoked by the Gunpowder plotters to justify regicide. And in its handling of the consequences of the division of the kingdoms, the politics of King Lear had become more fraught, if more timely, for the expected resolution of the Union question by Parliament in early November had been delayed once more. There would be other effects on as-yet-unwritten plays. After the Fifth of November (with the exception of the late and collaborative Henry the Eighth), Shakespeare would never again delve into what had been a recurrent interest in his work, most famously in Hamlet with its ghost come from Purgatory: nostalgia for the residual pull of Catholicism in a world in which the old religion continued to make its presence felt. It was not that Shakespeare had stopped thinking about these matters. Who could, at a time when neighbors of opposing faiths were eyeing one another more warily than before? But it had become too volatile to engage as comfortably or as directly as he once had.
Along with Shakespeare’s late plays and the King James Bible, the story commemorated every Fifth of November is the only cultural artifact created during the first decade of King James’s reign that still matters four hundred years later. Why these three? The Authorized Version of the Bible is perhaps the easiest to explain. The teams of scholars and churchmen that James commanded at the Hampton Court Conference to produce a new translation were phenomenally knowledgeable and talented, and the English language, as the many celebrated poets and playwrights of the day recognized, was at a particularly rich moment in its evolution. The result, rare in anything done by committee, was a sonorous translation that made the divine word more accessible and urgent. And it has probably helped that, in sharing that moment’s linguistic heritage, it sounds so “Shakespearean.”
The longevity of the Fifth of November is more surprising. A ruler can’t simply declare that a day is a holiday and assume that it will last forever. If that were so, every August the Scots and English would still be lighting bonfires in celebration of Gowrie Day. What’s all the more strange is that the Fifth of November recalls a collective experience, a day of communal deliverance, on which nothing actually happened. Nobody has fully explained the deep hold that “Remember, Remember the Fifth of November” continues to have on the British psyche (though its grip seems to be slackening and the image of Guy Fawkes may soon be associated more with the visage on the masks worn by anonymous protesters). The holiday clearly touched upon religious and political issues not so easily identified or named, and, like Shakespeare’s plays, managed to evolve over time as political and religious circumstances, and anxieties, have changed. Perhaps too, much like the public theaters, the holiday filled the vacuum left in the late sixteenth century by the elimination of Catholic pageantry and communal celebration, as saint’s days were suppressed and eliminated from the public calendar. The King James Bible, Shakespeare’s plays, and the Fifth of November all managed to preserve the past, sacred and secular, for present-day needs. The plotters had tried to do the opposite, obliterating the history of post-Reformation England, for the intended blast would have eliminated England’s rulers along with the archives of her parliamentary and ecclesiastical history. Had their attempt succeeded, they would have effectively turned the clock back sixty years.
It’s not widely know that John Milton, born in 1608, too late to have lived through the Gunpowder Plot itself, was obsessed as a teenager with it and wrote five short Latin poems, school exercises, on the subject. He then returned to it in a more substantial Latin poem on the twentieth anniversary of the threatened attack, titled simply “In Quintum Novembris” (“On the Fifth of November”). In this poem Satan flies to Rome and urges the pope to destroy Britain’s leaders “and scatter their bodies through the air, burning them to ashes, by exploding gunpowder under the room where they will assemble.” But God intervenes and “thwarts the daring Papists’ outrages.” The evildoers are punished, God thanked, bonfires lit, and a promise made that henceforth “throughout the whole year there shall be no day more celebrated than the Fifth of November.” The poem, in touching on temptation, the nature of evil, and providential intervention, anticipates much of what, decades later, Milton explores so incisively in Paradise Lost (not least of all Book 6, where Satan invents gunpowder as a weapon to challenge God’s powers). Yet what makes this Fifth of November poem so unreadable today is that for the young Milton the Gunpowder Plot was about answers, not questions. He knows where evil originates. Good and bad, fair and foul, are always legible. They aren’t in Paradise Lost (even if Milton thought they were) and they certainly aren’t in Shakespeare.
Though he had finished writing King Lear, Shakespeare would continue to brood over Harsnett’s stories of possession, deception, and the human propensity for evil. The Fifth of November, that “confection of all villainy,” gave those issues fresh relevance, for it had prompted not only Shakespeare but also everyone else in the land to confront questions they had never been forced to grapple with so deeply or desperately: How can ordinary people attempt such horrible and unthinkable crimes? In doing so, what kind of lies or stories must they tell themselves and others? Does this evil come from satanic forces or from within us? What binds us together—be it a family or a marriage or a country—and what can destroy these bonds? Recognizing the hunger for a play that probed the very questions that now haunted his world, Shakespeare began to read and think about Macbeth.
8
HYMENAEI
The seasonal festivities at the outset of 1606 were no holiday for either the king or the King’s Men. King James had slipped out of London in early December, returning to Whitehall Palace just three days before Christmas. Molino, the Venetian ambassador, reported home that the day after his return James “appeared very subdued and melancholy” both “at chapel and afterwards at dinner,” where, uncharacteristically, he ate in silence. The king’s dark mood was understandable. Though he was strengthened politically in the aftermath of the failed attempt on his life, it was unclear how long that goodwill would last. The path ahead was fraught for a king who saw himself as a peacemaker both at home and abroad. An increasingly headstrong Parliament would convene at last in less than a month to debate the future of the Union. Its members would also decide whether to subsidize their profligate and financially overstretched monarch. If James cracked down too hard on England’s Catholics, it might provoke fresh attempts on his life; if he were too lenient, it might lead to the same end while alienating a House of Commons keen on passing harsh antirecusancy laws. Complicating matters further, his own wife, Queen Anne, raised as a Lutheran, had converted to Catholicism, but for the sake of appearances was now attending Protestant services. Domestic challenges were exacerbated by threats from abroad, as Pope Paul V, worried about the fate of English Catholics, warned of countermeasures.
After his sullen dinner that Sunday before Christmas, James “broke out with great violence,” his melancholy silence giving way to explosive rage. In his report home Molino tried to capture the king’s rant word for word (though this was so sensitive that he sent it in code). His quotation of James’s tirade offers the rarest of glimpses into the king’s state of mind at this time:
“I have dispatches from Rome informing me that the Pope intends to excommunicate me; the Catholics threaten to dethrone me and to take my life unless I grant them liberty of conscience. I shall most certainly be obliged to stain my hands with their blood, though sorely against my will. But they shall not think they can frighten me, for they shall taste of the agony first . . . I do not know upon what they found this perfidious and cursed doctrine of Rome that they are permitted to plot against the lives of princes and to deprive them of their crown and scepter.”
King James continued in this vein for an hour. His attendants obligingly “praised and approved” everything he said, urging him “to adopt severe measures against the Catholics.” Molino, sensitive to the plight of his fellow Catholics, also reported that “nothing is occupying more attention than the arrest of priests; and though most of them are in hiding they cannot feel safe against the wiles adopted by the officials. Many are already prisoners, and it is thought they will be put to death, while in the coming Parliament severe measures will be enacted against the Catholics.”
If negotiating all this were not challenging enough, James planned to use the New Year’s festivities to heal an old and still festering Elizabethan wound by marrying off the late Earl of Essex’s son to Frances Howard. It would be a Jacobean rewrite of Romeo and Juliet, the sacrificial union of teenage lovers binding hostile families. The political motives behind this coupling were transparent to all. Molino, an astute and gossipy observer, writes that “there is no doubt but that, when the Earl of Essex is a little older, suggestions and persuasions to revenge will not be wanting. Lord Salisbury hopes by creating ties of relationship to cancel the memory of these ancient enmities; many, however, are of opinion that this is too feeble a medicine for so great an ill.” Salisbury and the Howard faction probably feared as much, so they sought to cinch the rival clans more tightly together through a secondary pair of marriages to Frances Howard’s older sisters. Two days before Christmas her nineteen-year-old sister, Elizabeth, was married off to Sir William Knollys, uncle to the late Earl of Essex. Knollys’s first wife, Dorothy, a widow twenty years his senior, had conveniently died two months earlier. Knollys, now sixty years old and eager for an heir, was happy to take a teenager for his bride, six decades younger than the wife he had just buried. Another union was contracted that would join a third Howard sister, Catherine, to Salisbury’s only son, William (he would be seventeen and she twenty at the time of their wedding). The marriage of Essex and Frances Howard would be the centerpiece of the festivities at court ushering in 1606, the occasion marked by a masque on January 5 and a staged combat, or barriers, between the rival factions the following evening, Twelfth Night.
The Jacobean masque was a genre in its infancy. While there had been perhaps a half dozen masquelike entertainments in the first years of the new reign, two early productions had defined the form: Samuel Daniel’s Vision of the Twelve Goddesses, sponsored by Queen Anne and performed at Hampton Court in January 1604, and Ben Jonson’s The Masque of Blackness, also under the queen’s sponsorship, performed at the old Banqueting House a year later. Daniel’s masque reassembled a new Jacobean political rhetoric out of the remains of an Elizabethan one. Even the masque’s costumes signaled a reworking of the past: the former queen’s clothing was recycled, some of the thousands of pieces of her now unwearable wardrobe cut up and refashioned into new garments. Daniel had no pretensions about the artistic merit of masques, speaking of them as no more than “dreams and shows,” whatever those “deeply learned in all mysteries” might think. Jonson would have none of that. His ambitions were greater and he was finding his way toward a more complicated form, discovering in the masque’s “more removed mysteries” an art that he believed transcended its brief moment of performance and its inescapably sycophantic nature. It was Jonson, despite his rocky relationship with the authorities, rather than Daniel, who was asked to create the masque in 1606. It would be called Hymenaei (“marriage rites”) and would celebrate Union, conjugal and political.
Hymenaei was one of the most expensive entertainments ever staged in England. It was a collaborative effort, with Jonson responsible for the script and overall concept. The staging would fall to Britain’s leading architect and designer, Inigo Jones. The dance master Thomas Giles handled the choreography and the composer Alfonso Ferrabosco the music. Eight young ladies at court and eight courtiers with whom they danced would be the stars of Hymenaei’s cast, and on the second day, when the barriers would be staged, thirty-four noblemen would be part of the elaborate and carefully scripted show. The logistics of bringing all this talent together—and preparing for the sole performance with four dozen lords and ladies unused to the rigors of rehearsal and to being ordered about—must have been nearly overwhelming. While the lavishly attired aristocrats were at the heart of the masque and barriers, a supporting cast of court musicians and professional actors were still needed—at least five adult players and perhaps as many boy actors, including a pair impersonating the bride and groom. These, almost surely, were drawn from the ranks of the King’s Men, who are named as the performers hired to act in later Jonsonian masques.
