The Plays of Shakespeare

The young King Edward VI resembled the late Prince Arthur, the uncle he had never known, more than he did his own father. Studious, thoughtful, and idealistic, especially in matters of religion, he understood from the start the gravity of his role in life with a thoroughness that belied his age of just nine years. Less fortuitously, his earthly shell was frail and sickly, again more like that of his uncle than his father.

He took as his Lord Protector another uncle, this time from his mother’s side. Edward Seymour, who was now made Duke of Somerset in addition to his other new title, was a far more committed Protestant than Henry VIII had ever been. The same could be said of King Edward himself. Together, the two Edwards worked to complete the transformation that Henry had begun. By order of the king, church services were now to be conducted in English rather than Latin; the concept of Purgatory was abolished, and with it the strange and often corrupt practice of family members buying a path into Heaven for their dead and stranded relatives through the purchase of so-called “indulgences”; the great cathedrals were stripped of their gaudiest ostentation; priests were allowed and even encouraged to marry and have children, so as to remove from them the temptation of seeking sexual gratification elsewhere and give them more of the same life experience as their parishioners.

Alas, all of these changes that would eventually come to be considered bedrocks of English Protestantism stirred up trouble and controversy in the shorter term. Catholic France and Scotland both threatened war in the name of the offended and rejected pope. Even more critically, yet another peasant rebellion took shape and spread across much of the English countryside in 1549, just two years into Edward VI’s reign. The common people of England were as angry as foreign Catholics about the burning of monasteries and nunneries; contrary to the picture of lazy and dissipated layabouts that was painted by the Protestants in charge, their occupants had actually done many good services for the communities around them. And in addition, there was the ever-present peasant’s bane of high taxation. (The European peasantry as a whole was a bit like Marlon Brando in The Wild One, who famously replied, “What have you got?” when asked precisely what he was rebelling against; in Catholic countries, peasant rebellions were Protestant, while in Protestant countries they were Catholic.) Edward Seymour seemed to feel that the peasants had a point, at least when it came to their complaints about taxation, showing a reluctance to crack down on them. While he hesitated and prevaricated, an opportunistic and rather ruthless up-and-comer named John Dudley, the Earl of Warwick, raised an army of his own to crush the largest group of rebels. He succeeded in doing so, whereupon the remainder meekly returned to their lives of toil.

But Dudley wasn’t finished. Upon returning to London as the triumphant hero, a status that stood him in dramatic contrast to Seymour’s inaction in the recent time of troubles, Dudley toppled the latter from his post and took over as Lord Protector, while England’s dissatisfied but powerless boy king looked on. Despite his best intentions, his reign was already going the way of so many others before it; it was becoming an open season for amoral, Machiavellian realpolitik. To wit: not content with having disgraced Seymour, Dudley took off his rival’s head on trumped-up charges on January 22, 1552.

The following January, the boy king came down with a burning fever and a hacking, persistent cough. As the weeks went by and he failed to improve, the question of the succession loomed large. All of Henry VIII’s efforts to find a wife who could bear him male children had in the end succeeded only in granting England a six-year reprieve from the destabilizing prospect of a dead king with no male heir. Desperate to avoid an all-out civil war among the kingdom’s many ambitious nobles, Parliament turned to a novel solution to an age-old problem. What if they put a woman on the throne — not as just the handmaiden to her king and bearer of his children, but as the reigning monarch herself? England, although as patriarchal a country as any other in Europe in most ways, was about to try a radical experiment in feminine rule. It was a case of needs must, as the English themselves like to say.

The obvious heiress to the throne under the current circumstances was Mary Tudor, the only surviving child of Henry VIII and his first queen, Catherine of Aragon. Parliament duly passed an act that made her status official. But there was a fly in the ointment: it was well known that Mary was not fond of Protestantism, connecting it with the downfall of her mother, whose final lonely years in exile she had shared. It seemed all but guaranteed that she would attempt to return England to the Catholic fold if she attained the throne.

Not wanting to see that happen — not least because he himself would be at considerable personal risk if it did — John Dudley put forward an alternative female candidate: Jane Grey, a great-granddaughter of Henry VII and grandniece of Henry VIII. Her claim to the throne made that of the Tudor dynasty at the end of the Wars of the Roses look ironclad by contrast; one had to engage in the most disingenuous contortions imaginable to make the case for it, disinheriting both of Henry VIII’s own daughters in the process. Jane, an impressive young woman of just seventeen years who was fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew among many other talents, didn’t even particularly want to become queen. But John Dudley, who seems to have been romantically infatuated with her despite being married himself, thrust a document under the nose of the delirious King Edward that promised to make her just that. Edward signed it and then he died, on July 6, 1553, leaving his kingdom at an impasse. Parliament had decided on one queen, the last king on another. Which one was it to be? The situation was so fraught that it was almost possible to overlook the novelty of two female rivals vying for control of a European country.

Knowing that his best chance lay in making Queen Jane a fait accompli before his enemies could bestir themselves to oppose him, Dudley acted with dispatch. He rode out from London to the nearby village of Hunsdon, where Princess Mary was staying, intending to seize her and deposit her in some out-of-the-way location. But he found that she had been tipped off and fled to the north. Undaunted, he returned to the capital and declared Jane Grey to be Queen Jane I.

Hers proved a short reign. For, harnessing the discontent that was still festering in the countryside, buoyed by promises of support from the kings of France and Scotland, Princess Mary swept back down toward London on a tidal wave of popular support. There was no resisting her momentum. Parliament and most of the rest of the government announced their allegiance, and she became Queen Mary I less than two weeks after fleeing Hunsdon like the proverbial thief in the night. It is said that poor Jane Grey asked whether she could go home and return to her books now that the unpleasant business of ruling England was over for her. She should have known, from those same books if nothing else, that it didn’t work like that. Instead of going home, she went to the Tower of London. John Dudley was treated still more harshly; he was executed on August 22, just as he had feared he would be under a Queen Mary.

This left England in the sole charge of the 37-year-old woman who would go down in history as “Bloody Mary.” As the adroitness with which she had escaped her enemies and then returned to London to give them their comeuppance demonstrated, she was in many ways a force to be reckoned with. She had had to develop her self-reliance just to survive a chaotic childhood in which she had been declared illegitimate and then restored to Henry VIII’s good graces several times, exiled and then returned to the bosom of his court, all according to the whims of him and his sundry wives. She was no portrait of royal glamor; she was sickly and pale, with a gravelly voice, hair that was already more than half gray, and watery eyes that reduced the world around her to a collection of fuzzy shapes. She had no husband; nor was she a widow. She told her people proudly that she was still a virgin at 37, and she was one monarch whom the people could just about believe when she said so.

At first, Mary tried to walk a middle road in matters of religion. To be sure, she wanted badly to make England a Catholic country again, out of both honest theological conviction and familial loyalty: she was the cousin of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also King Charles I of Spain, making him the most powerful Catholic monarch by far in all of Europe.  Yet even he advised her to tread cautiously, to take the restoration of the One True Church step by step. In that spirit, one of her first public acts was one of the first declarations of religious freedom in Western history. Everybody was allowed to worship as they chose in her England, she said.

But this was pretty clearly only a stopgap measure for her, to end the persecution of her own flock while she figured out how to get rid of this new Church of England that had her as its unwilling head. Time was not on her side. She seemed unlikely to be blessed with an overly long life, even as she knew that her younger sister Elizabeth, who was as Protestant by inclination as she was Catholic, was waiting in the wings. Just months into her reign, she announced her betrothal to Charles’s son Philip, the crown prince of Spain. The marriage agreement stipulated that Philip would be king of England only as long as he had Mary by his side; he would not become the sole king if she died before him, as seemed probable, he being eleven years younger than her. Nevertheless, it was a transparent effort to return England to the Catholic sphere of influence and produce a Catholic heir. As such, it was enough to foment a rebellion, by disgruntled Protestant nobles this time. Mary succeeded in putting it down, but it was a close-run thing for a while. Giving up on compromise with the Protestants, she embarked upon the harder line that would give rise to her scarlet epithet.

The first order of business was a scourging of those remaining members of the nobility whose loyalty was in question and who were foolish enough to be caught out in London. Poor Jane Grey was belatedly executed, as were her father and at least a hundred others. Princess Elizabeth’s life hung in the balance for months. In the end, though, some sort of sisterly sentiment prevailed with Mary. Elizabeth was effectively held under house arrest, moved hither and yon across the country, but was not sent to the block or the gallows.

Philip arrived in England in July of 1554 to consummate both his marriage to Mary and London’s rapprochement with Catholic Europe. Mary wrote to her new father-in-law Charles, who was now in his dotage following a long and extremely eventful reign, that she was “happier than I can say, as I daily discover in the king my husband so many virtues and perfections that I constantly pray God to grant me grace to please him.” Philip stayed with her for over a year, reportedly striving mightily in the bedchamber over the course of that time to produce the heir they both desired so badly, but he was unsuccessful in that mission. So, he left for the continent, where his father was soon to step aside and let him be crowned king of Spain early.

In the meanwhile, Mary busily undid the changes that had been wrought since the Act of Supremacy of 1534 had officially made England a Protestant kingdom. To aid her, she reached out to a Cardinal Reginald Pole, who would prove the most worldly operator among English men of the cloth since Cardinal Wolsey. Pole, who had never accepted the annulment of Henry VIII’s first marriage nor his rejection of the pope’s authority, had been forced into exile many years ago. Now he returned like an avenging angel to undo the damage, as he saw it, of the last quarter-century or so. By no means an unsophisticated zealot, he negotiated a compromise with Rome that would let the English crown keep much of the land and wealth it had seized from the Catholic Church, thus removing one severe obstacle to reunification. He began to rebuild some of the monasteries and nunneries, restored the gilded ornamentation to the cathedrals, and gave the clergy a reverse of the choice they had faced twenty years ago: pledge allegiance to the pope and retain one’s position, stick with Martin Luther and be cast out. Some priests preemptively returned to saying the Mass in Latin. It seemed only a matter of time before this too was the law of the land once again, alongside clerical celibacy; those priests who had married in the interim looked around nervously indeed.

But the Protestant genie wasn’t so easy to stuff back into the bottle. The urban centers especially were teeming with converts, many of whose chief complaint during the time just before Mary was that the Church of England hadn’t gone far enough in rejecting the theology of Rome. Large segments of the political class opposed the rollback for more practical reasons: they had grown to like the notion of an England that was beholden to no one, had no desire to go back under the thumb of the pope, even if they did get to keep some of his former property. Nor did they want to see their country become a vassal of Spain, which Mary’s expressed subservience to her husband seemed to have it on the verge of becoming, never mind what her marriage agreement said.

Feeling this pushback, Queen Mary and her allies pushed harder in the other direction. The burnings at the stake began in earnest in February of 1555, with two deposed bishops and two defrocked priests who were still refusing to acknowledge the supreme authority of the pope. The carnage accelerated from there, reaching not just the clergy and nobility but the common folk; many a humble workingman whose only crime was owning and reading a Bible in English was sent to his death.

It was not just brutal but deeply counterproductive to Mary’s cause. For English Protestantism seemed to be strengthened for every martyr who was burnt by the English crown, just as the earliest Christians had drawn strength from their own persecution by an earlier incarnation of Rome. “We shall this day light such a candle as I trust shall never be put out,” said the dissenting bishop Hugh Latimer just before his execution. “As for the pope, I refuse him as Christ’s enemy and the Antichrist!” shouted Thomas Cranmer, the former Archbishop of Canterbury, in front of his pyre. Such predictions and exhortations bore fruit. For every Protestant plot Mary put down, ten more, real or imagined, popped up before her myopic eyes to replace it. Those of the plotters who actually existed found an unlikely ally in Henry II, the king of Catholic France, who was nevertheless enmeshed in a series of long-running territorial disputes with Spain and the Holy Roman Empire that frequently came to blows. He was happy to do whatever he could to muck up relations between those realms and England, even if it meant quietly making common cause with Protestants.

On June 7, 1557, during one of his sporadic visits to London, King Philip confirmed everyone’s worst fears when he convinced Mary to join Spain in declaring war on France. It was a disastrous decision; in no sense was this divided country in any condition to take on such a potent external foe. Six months later, the French overran Calais, England’s last toehold on the continent, the last piece of territory it still had to show for the Hundred Years War. Adding insult to injury, Philip soon signed a peace treaty on behalf of himself and his queen that left Calais permanently in French hands.

Already the most hated woman in the kingdom, Mary became that times two or three after losing the precious port that was commonly called “the brightest jewel in the English crown.” In all probability, she died in her bed instead of at the hands of an assassin or executioner only because she died relatively soon after her country’s supreme humiliation. She was taken away by a fever on the morning of November 17, 1558. Cardinal Pole, her closest confidant, was likewise spared a more violent retribution by dying of natural causes on the very same day. Together the two of them had accomplished the ironic opposite of what they had set out to do. As the twentieth-century popular historian Will Durant says of Bloody Mary, “it is her strange distinction that she carried on the work of her father in alienating England from Rome. She showed to England the worst side of the Church she served. When she died England was readier than before to accept the new faith that she had labored to destroy.”

Mary died without leaving any child behind, much less a male one. Once again, the question of the succession loomed large. But as matters transpired, the crown was passed on in a surprisingly orderly way. On the afternoon of the very day that Mary died, a courier arrived at Hatfield House, the palace where her younger sister Elizabeth was staying (or being interred), to inform the unmarried 25-year-old princess that she was now the queen of England. Powerful men in London had acted, for once for the good of the country rather than in service of their own ambitions, to ensure that it was so. For Elizabeth already had a reputation for being wise and brilliant beyond her years; she was familiar with all of the ancient classics of literature and philosophy, fluent in half a dozen languages, as entrancing and engaging in person as her sister had been dull and pedantic. And it was well known that she was a Protestant by nature and inclination. Under Mary, England had had all of the Catholicism it could stand.

Elizabeth stepped onto the balcony at Hatfield House to address the nobles and commoners who were gathering in the courtyard. She cut a better figure of female majesty than Mary ever had: tall, well-proportioned, with striking aquamarine eyes and bright auburn hair. Her modest, moderate words sounded like ones that might have dropped from the tongue of Richard III when he was slyly trying to ingratiate himself with someone. But we have reason to believe that she really meant them — some of them, at any rate.

The laws of nature move me to sorrow for my sister; the burden that has fallen upon me maketh me amazed. And yet, considering I am God’s creature ordained to obey his appointment, I will thereto yield, desiring from the bottom of my heart that I may have assistance of his grace to be the minister of his heavenly will in the office now committed to me. And as I am but one body materially considered, though by his permission a body politic to govern, so shall I desire you all — chiefly you of the nobility — every one in his degree and power, to be assistant to me, that I with my ruling, and you with your service, may make a good account to almighty God, and leave some comfort to our posterity on Earth.

Never ruled by a woman before, England now had its second sovereign queen in a row (or third, depending on what one thought of the Jane Grey escapade). This woman would continue to rule for 44 and a half years, while the soul of the modern English nation was coming into its own around her — not least thanks to the scribblings of a little boy who would be born in Stratford-upon-Avon five and a half years into her tenure.

She wasn’t a perfect ruler by any means, but she was a very good one, who bore her crown and the authority that came with it so easily and naturally that few of her countrymen bothered to plot against her. She was the best sort of politician: a non-ideological, solutions-oriented one. Under her, England became more stable than it had been since the reign of her grandfather Henry VII, and for much longer than he had managed. Commerce flourished, as did the arts and literature. Elizabeth was an unabashed elitist — certainly she was no democrat, as her frequently strained relations with Parliament demonstrated — but she had the populist touch. She was more visible to the ordinary citizenry than any English monarch ever, riding her own horse down public roads to attend parades and fetes where her people could hear and even touch her directly. She knew how to talk to them; she could curse in her native tongue better than most English sailors when she wasn’t speaking flawless, formal Latin, Greek, Italian, or French in some diplomatic salon somewhere. “She is much attached to the people, and is confident that they are all on her side,” wrote the Spanish ambassador back to Elizabeth’s former brother-in-law Philip II — and then concluded, a little glumly, that this belief was “indeed true.” Back in the Rome from which she separated England forevermore, Pope Sixtus V grudgingly admitted to his friends that “if she were not a heretic, she would be worth a whole world.”

She could be endlessly charming, even self-deprecating — not a quality for which kings and queens are generally noted. When one diplomat complimented her for her facility with languages, she replied that “it is no marvel to teach a woman to talk; it is far harder to teach her to hold her tongue.” Her court was generally regarded as the most entrancing in all of Europe; this in a country that the more cosmopolitan capitals on the continent had been wont to regard as an uncouth, more or less savage backwater. Costume balls, sporting events, lawn games, concerts, jousts, riddle- and and card- and board-game evenings, and of course plays… all of it was on the menu. For a theater troupe such as the one Shakespeare would join, the greatest imaginable honor was be called in to perform for the queen. (It appears that Shakespeare and his colleagues were accorded this honor on a fairly regular basis during the later years of Elizabeth’s reign.)

From the very moment she took the throne, Elizabeth was under tremendous pressure to marry and produce an heir. For the Tudor dynasty was otherwise fresh out of ways to perpetuate itself. If she didn’t have a baby, her line would end, an event which had the potential to produce a free-for-all for the crown that would make the Wars of the Roses look staid. Yet Elizabeth steadfastly resisted the pressure, saying at first that marriage wasn’t yet “convenient,” then gradually taking on the persona of the “Virgin Queen” as her childbearing years dwindled and ran out. The implication was that she was too righteous and pure to suffer the profaning touch of any man. Her people came to see her as almost a divinity in her own right.

She was no virgin in reality. It was an open secret at court that she enjoyed a good roll in the hay as much as anyone else, and a string of men — usually younger men — passed discreetly through her bedchamber. Why she never became pregnant from any of these trysts is an unanswered question. Perhaps she was incapable of so becoming, or perhaps she practiced some form of prevention or even abortion.

Elizabeth was a Protestant, but for her the choice of religion was as much a political as a theological one. It is doubtful to what extent she was really a believer at all. “No woman,” writes the nineteenth-century historian John Richard Green, “ever lived who was so totally destitute of the sentiment of religion.” His peer James Anthony Froude states that Elizabeth considered “the Protestant creed as little true as the Catholic,” that she was “without emotional conviction” and “had a latitudinarian contempt for theological dogmatism.” She wanted England to be Protestant primarily because she believed that being so would serve the country — and her — better than the alternative of being constantly answerable to the pope. Therefore she re-instituted the Church of England as a staunchly independent entity with herself at its head, and re-reversed the many doctrinal reversals of Mary. Yet she did it carefully, as she did most things, taking full advantage of the long reign with which she was blessed. Freedom of speech and freedom of religion as we understand those notions today would have to wait for the Enlightenment; the conventional wisdom of the age, as expressed by her favored advisor William Cecil, was still that “that state could never be in safety where there was toleration of two religions.” Still, it was tacitly recognized that you could more or less be a Catholic in Elizabeth’s England if you really wanted to, as long as you paid your tithe to the Church of England and didn’t make a spectacle out of your dissent. (If you did, all bets were off; at least 61 priests and many more members of the laity were put to death for objecting too flagrantly to the dogma of the Church of England.)

Elizabeth’s relatively relaxed attitude toward religion rubbed off on her people, producing what was in many ways an unusually secular age. Many a critic has noticed how Shakespeare, in the midst of capturing almost every other aspect of the human condition, doesn’t much seem to care about the eternal God Question. Some have suggested that he was one of the secret English Catholics, who decided not to say anything at all instead of saying something that could get him into trouble, but this seems a dubious proposition. The fact is that the same disinterest in matters of theological doctrine is present in the works of most of his peers. Assuming they weren’t all members of a secret Catholic cabal, the most likely explanation is that they just couldn’t be bothered, found this world more interesting than the next one. It’s one of the ways in which Elizabethan drama — Shakespeare’s in particular, but not only his — can seem paradoxically more in tune with our current secular epoch than with the religious upheavals that bookend the greatest age of English theater-going.

In terms of foreign policy, Elizabeth endeavored to stay out of local European wars, whether over religion or anything else, and to take steps toward building an overseas empire. She did this partly through the dashing persona of Francis Drake, a sea captain and explorer — and occasional slave trader and pirate — whose colorful adventures mark the point of origin of the grand English seafaring tradition of the centuries to come. In 1580, Drake returned to England at the helm of the Golden Hind, having circumnavigated the world for just the second time in human history. Elizabeth came out to dine aboard the vessel with his crew and award him a knighthood for his trouble. Her would-be permanent settlements in the New World, at places such as Roanoke Island and Newfoundland, were less successful. Nonetheless, she started the ball of twine rolling that would build into the largest empire in human history. Alongside her country’s sense of itself, she remade its sense of its possibilities in the wider world.

Unfortunately, those same efforts brought Elizabeth’s England into conflict with Spain and Portugal. Back in 1506, Pope Julius II had given those countries the exclusive right to colonize and exploit the two new continents that had been recently discovered by Christopher Columbus. England was now blatantly violating that decree with its ceaseless probing and its tentative attempts to place colonies in the New World — not that Elizabeth saw it in that way, since she didn’t recognize the pope’s authority to have issued such a decree in the first place. There occurred ever more naval “incidents” between the powers over the course of the 1580s. After suffering a rather humiliating defeat at the hands of Francis Drake in a skirmish just off the coast of Spain itself in April of 1587, King Philip II decided to invade the land whose previous queen had been his wife.

Since 1580, Spain and Portugal, arch-rivals in the game of empire at the time of Julius’s proclamation, had effectively been one kingdom under Philip. The pan-Iberian armada which he assembled now consisted of 130 vessels, with some 8000 sailors and 19,000 soldiers aboard. The plan was to land these troops and establish a beachhead on the Channel coast of England, then ferry over 30,000 more men who were waiting to embark in Flanders.

The fleet sailed from Lisbon on May 29, 1588, brimming with the confidence of a metaphorical force of nature. Then everything started to go wrong. Inclement winds followed by a full-on storm demonstrated what was meant by a literal force of nature, compelling the fleet to seek refuge on the northern coast of Spain and giving England precious time to prepare for  what ought to have been a surprise onslaught. An English fleet of 88 ships, most of them far smaller than their Spanish counterparts, assembled at Plymouth; some of them belonged to the recently founded Royal Navy, others to private individuals and companies. Meanwhile huge numbers of civilians who could not take to the sea to defend their homeland drilled and dug emplacements along the coast where the Spanish were most likely to land. Not until the Dunkirk rescue and the Battle of Britain of 1940 — not coincidentally, the next time England would be seriously threatened with foreign invasion — would the entire population of the country come together again in such a show of total defiance.

The sea battle was finally joined in earnest on July 21. Under the guidance of the indefatigable Francis Drake, the English sailors refused to line up neatly against the enemy in the standard way. Instead they danced around the hulking Spanish ships in their smaller, faster, more maneuverable craft, stinging and retreating like swarms of bees. The Spanish had no answer to these tactics. “The enemy pursue me,” reported a Spanish admiral. “They fire on me from morn till dark, but they will not grapple. There is no remedy, for they are swift and we are slow.” Over several days of fighting, the Spanish armada lost 76 of its 130 ships, 17,000 of its 27,000 men. The battered remnants of the fleet retreated to Iberia shamefacedly in ones and twos and threes.

It was a staggering victory for the English, achieved through cleverness, courage, audacity, and more than a little bit of sheer good luck. Speaking of the last: Philip ‘s briefly united Iberian kingdom was plunged into discord just after — and partially in response to — this defeat, preventing him from mounting a second assault on the recalcitrant island to his north. The beginning of England’s rise as a great power on the geopolitical stage marked the onset of Spain and Portugal’s slow decline.

In the nearer term, England was left in ecstasy. More than ever, the people loved their Virgin Queen, who had risked a cruel death to defy the most powerful country in the world. More than ever, commerce and the arts boomed. United and stable and feeling its oats in a way it never had before, England was the most ebullient and optimistic land in Europe.

This, then, was the England that Shakespeare knew as a young playwright, the one in which he first made a name for himself by harnessing the spirit of patriotic fervor with the tetralogy of history plays which we’ve recently examined. It doesn’t explain him — there is no explaining a genius such as his — but it does clarify how and why he was given the opportunity to share his gifts with so many people, in his own time and for centuries thereafter.

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