General Introduction STEPHEN GREENBLATT “He was not of an age, but for all time!” There are writers whose greatness is recognized only long after they have vanished from the earth. There are writers championed by a coterie of devoted followers who tend the flame of admiration against the cold world’s indifference. There are writers beloved įn ţheir native land but despised abroad, and others neglected at home yet celebrated on distant shores. Shakespeare is none of these. His genius was recog­ nized almost immediately. The famous words with which we have begun were writ­ ten by his friend and rival Ben Jonson. They have been echoed innumerable times, across the centuries, across national and linguistic boundaries, across the demarca­ tion lines of race atţd class, religion and ideology. Shakespeare belongs not simply to a particular culture^—English culture of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries—but to world culture, the dense network of constraints and entitlements, dreams and practices that help to make us fully human. Indeed, so absolute is Shakespeare’s achievement that he has himself come to seem like great creating nature. His works embody the imagination’s power to transcend time-bound beliefs and assumptions, particular historical circumstances, and specific artistic conven­ tions. If we should ever be asked as a species to bring forward one artist who hąs most fully expressed the human condition, we could with confidence elect Shake­ speare to speak for us. As it is, when we do ask ourselves the most fundamental ques­ tions about life—about love and hatred, ambition, desire, and fear, the demand for justice and the longing for a second chance—we repeatedly turn to Shakespeare for the words we wish to hear. The nęar-worship Shakespeare inspires is one of the salient facts about his art. But we must at tfie same time acknowledge that this art is the product of peculiar historical circumstances and specific conventions, four centuries distant from our own. The acknowledgment is important because Shakespeare the working dramatist did not typically lay claim to the transcendent, visionary truths attributed to him by his most fervent admirers; his characters more modestly say, in the words of the magician Prospero, that their project was “to please” (The Tempest, Epilogue, line 13). The starting point, and perhaps the ending point as well, in any encounter with Shakespeare is simply to enjoy him, to savor his imaginative richness, to take plea­ sure įn his infinite delight in language. “If -then you do not like him,” Shakespeare’s first editors wrote in 1623, “surely you are in some manifest danger not to understand him.” Over the years, accommo­ dations have been devised to make liking Shakespeare easier for everyone. When aspects of his language began to seem difficult, texts were published with notes and glosses. When the historical events he depicted receded into obscurity, explanatory introductions were written. When the stage sank to melodrama and light opera, Shakespeare made his appearance in suitably revised dress. When the populace had a craving for hippodrama, plays performed entirely on horseback, Hamlet was duti­ fully rewritten and mounted. When audiences went mad for realism, live frogs croaked irţ productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream. When the stage was stripped Shakespeare’s World ♦ ♦ General Introduction bare and given over to stark exhibitions of sadistic cruelty, Shakespeare was our con­ temporary, And when the theater ceded some of its cultural centrality to radio, film, and television, Shakespeare moved effortlessly to Hollywood and the sound stages of the BBC. This virtually universal appeal is one of the most astonishing features of the Shakespeare phenomenon: plays that were performed before glittering courts thrive in junior high school auditoriums; enemies set on destroying one another laugh at the same jokes and weep at the same catastrophes; some of the richest and most com­ plex English verse ever written migrates With spectacular success into German and Italian, Hindi, Swahili, and Japanese. Is there a single, stable, continuous object that underlies all of these migrations and metamorphoses? Certainly not. The global dif­ fusion and long life of Shakespeare’s works depend on their extraordinary malleabil­ ity, their protean capacity to elude definition and escape secure possession. His art is the supreme manifestation of the mobility of culture. At the same time, this art is not without identifiable shared features: across centuries and continents, family resemblances link many of the wildly diverse manifestations of plays such as Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Twelfth Night. Moreover, if there is no clear limit or end point, there is a reasonably clear beginning, the England of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, when the plays and poems collected in The Norton Shake­ speare made their first appearance. An art virtually without end or limit but with an identifiable, localized, historical origin: Shakespeare’s achievement defies the facile opposition between transcendent and time-bound. It is not necessary to choose between an account of Shakespeare as the scion of a particular culture and an account of him as a universal genius who created works that continually renew themselves across national and generational boundaries. On the contrary: crucial clues to understanding his art’s remarkable power to soar beyond the time and place of its origin lie in the very soil from which that art sprang. Shakespeare’s World Life and Death Life expectancy at birth in early modern England was exceedingly low by our stan­ dards: under thirty years, compared with over seventy today. Infant mortality rates were extraordinarily high, and it is estimated that in the poorer parishes of London only about half the children survived to the age of fifteen, while the children of aris­ tocrats fared only a little better. In such circumstances, some parents must have developed a certain detachment-—one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries writes of los­ ing “some three or four children”—but there are many expressions of intense grief, so that we cannot assume that the frequency of death hardened people to loss or made it routine. Still, the spectacle of death, along with that other great threshold experience, birth, must have been far more familiar to Shakespeare and his contemporaries than to ourselves. There was no equivalent in early modem England to our hospitals, and most births and deaths occurred at home. Physical means for the alleviation of pain and suffering were extremely limited—alcohol might dull the terror, but it was hardly an effective anesthetic—rand medical treatment was generally both expensive and worth­ less, more likely to intensify suffering than to lead to a cure. This was a world without a concept of antiseptics, with little actual understanding of disease, with few effective ways of treating earaches or venereal disease, let alone the more terrible instances of what Shakespeare calls “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to." The worst of these shocks was the bubonic plague, which repeatedly ravaged England, and particularly English towns, until the third quarter of the seventeenth l60P« Mom fie * ίοφβ ?: -, ! tbmy _ ^ A , %;хъы%ттт, ti# jLibraføSjf > ° ¿'r döfi mi дев&ювд ffc? ÿwlftoaïe*·· з* Ή --------------- /У Cimata in sïï ¡cfcefc pior»— ‘j&Uc£ţpз daw . доОДв Шкс, ■ ¿л, ?. Bill recording plague deaths in London, 1609. century. The plague was terrifyingly sudden in its onset, rapid in its spread, and almost invariably lethal. Physicians were helpless in the face of the epidemic, though they prescribed amulets, preservatives, and sweet-smelling substances (on the theory that the plague was carried by noxious vapors). In the plague-ridden year of 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, some 254 people died in his native Stratford-upon-Avon, out of a total population of 800. The year before, some 20,000 Londoners are thought to have died; in 1593, almost 15,000; in 1603, 36,000, or over a sixth of the city’s inhabitants. The social effects of these horrible visitations were severe: looting, violence, and despair, along with an intensification of the age’s perennial poverty, unemployment, and food shortages. The London plague regulations of 1583, reis­ sued with modifications in later epidemics, ordered that the infected and their households should be locked in their homes for a month; that the streets should be kept clean; that vagrants should be expelled; and that funerals and plays (as occa­ sions in which large numbers of people gathered and infection could be spread) should be restricted or banned entirely. Comparable restrictions were not placed on gatherings for religious observance, since it was hoped that God would heed the des­ perate prayers of his suffering people. The plague, then, had a direct and immediate impact on Shakespeare’s own pro­ fession. City officials kept records of the weekly number of plague deaths; when these surpassed a certain number; the theaters were peremptorily closed. The basic idea was not only to prevent contagion but also to avoid making an angry God still angrier with the spectacle of idleness. While restricting public assemblies may in fact have slowed the epidemic, other public policies in times of plague, such as kill­ ing the cats and dogs, may have made matters worse (since the disease was spread not by these animals but by the fleas that bred on the black rats that infested the poorer neighborhoods). Moreover, the playing companies, driven out of London by the closing of the theaters, may have carried plague to the provincial towns. Even in good times, when the plague was dormant and the weather favorable for farming, the food supply in England was precarious. Afew successive bad harvests, such as occurred in the mid-1590s, could cause serious hardship, even starvation. Not surprisingly, the poor bore the brunt of the burden: inflation, low wages, and rent increases left large numbers of people with very little cushion against disaster. Further, at its best, the diet of most people seems to have been seriously deficient. The lower classes then, as throughout most of history, subsisted on one or two food­ stuffs, usually low in protein. The upper classes disdained green vegetables and milk and gorged themselves on meat. Illnesses that we now trace to vitamin deficiencies ♦ General Introduction Shakespeare’s World ♦ were rampant. Some but not much relief from pain was provided by the beer that Elizabethans, including children, drank almost incessantly. (Home brewing aside, enough beer was sold in England for every man, woman, and child to have consumed forty gallons a year.) Wealth Despite rampant disease, the population of England in Shakespeare’s lifetime grew steadily, from approximately 3,060,000 in 1564 to 4,060,000 in 1600 and 4,510,000 in 1616. Though the death rate was more than twice what it is in England today, the birthrate was ąlmost three times the current figure. London's population in particular soared, from 60,000 in 1520 to 120,000 in 1550, 200,000 in 1600, and 375,000 a half-century later, making iţ the largest and fastest-growing city not only in England but in all of Europe, Every year in the first half of the seventeenth century, about 10,000 people migrated to London from other parts of England—wages in London tended to be around 50 percent higher than in the rest of the country—and it is esti­ mated that one in eight English people lived in London at some point in their lives. The economic viability of Shakespeare’s profession was closely linked to this extraordinary demographic boom: between 1567 and 1642, theater historians have estimated, the London playhouses were paid anywhere between 50 and 75 million visits. As these visits to the theater indicate, in the capital city and elsewhere a substantial number of English men and women, despite hardships that were never very distant, had money to spend. After the disorder and dynastic wars of the fifteenth century, England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was for the most part a nation at peace, and with peace cąme a measure of enterprise and prosperity: the landowning classes busied themselves'building great houses, planting orchards and hop gardens, draining marshlands, bringing untilled acreage under cultivation. The artisans and laborers who actually accomplished these tasks, though they were generally paid very little, often managed to accumulate something, as did the small freeholding farmers, the yeomen, who are repeatedly celebrated in the period as the backbone of English national independence'and well-being. William Harrison’s Description of Britain (1577) lovingly itemizes the yeoman’s precious possessions: “fair garnish of pewter on his cupboard, with so much more odd vessel going about the house, three or four featherbeds, so many coverlets and carpets of tapestry, a silver salt [cellar], a bowl for wine (if not a whole nest) and a dozen of spoons.” There are comparable accounts of the hard-earned acquisitions of the city dwellers—masters and apprentices in small work­ shops, shipbuilders, wool merchants, cloth makers, chandlers, tradesmen, shopkeepers, along with lawyers; apothecaries, schoolteachers, scriveners, and the like-—whose pennies from time to time enriched the coffers of the players. The chief source of England’s wealth in the sixteenth century was its textile indus­ try, an industry that depended on a steady supply of wool. The market for English textiles was not only domestic. In 1565, woolen cloth alone made up more than threefourths of England’s exports. (The remainder consisted mostly of other textiles and raw wool, with some trade in lead, tin, grain, and skins.) The Company of Merchant Adventurers carried cloth not only to nearby countries like France, Holland, and Ger­ many but also to distant pprts on the Baltic and Mediterranean, establishing links with Russia and Morocco (each took about 2 percent of London's cloth in 1597-98). English lead and tin, as well as fabrics, were sold in Tuscany and Turkey, and merchants found a market for Newcastle coal on the island of Malta. In the latter half of the century, London, which handled more than 85 percent of all exports, regularly shipped abroad more than 100,000 woolen cloths a year, at a value of at least £750,000. This figure does not include the increasingly important and profitable trade in so-called New Drap­ eries, including textiles that went by such exotic names as bombazines, callamancoes, damazellas, damizes, mockadoes, and virgenatoes, When the Earl of Kent in King Lear insults Oswald as a “filthy, worsted-stocking knave” (2.2.14-15) or when the aristo- ćratic Biron in Love's Labor's Lost declares that he will give up “taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-piled hyperboles” and woo henceforth “in russet ‘yeas,’ and hon­ est kersey ‘noes’” (5.2.407-08, 414), Shakespeare is assuming that a substantial portion of his audience will be alert to the social significance of fabric. There is amusing confirmation of this alertness from an unexpected source: the report of a visit made to the Fortune playhouse in London in 1614 by a foreigner, Father Orazio Busino, the chaplain of the Venetian embassy. Father Busino neglected to mention the name of the play he saw, but like many foreigners, he was powerfully struck by the presence of gorgeously dressed women in the audience. In Venice, there was a special gallery for courtesans, but socially respectable women would not have been permitted to attend plays, as they could in England. In London, not only could middle- and upper-class women go to the theater, but they could also wear masks and mingle freely with male spectators and women of ill repute. The bemused cleric was uncertain about the ambiguous social situation in which he found himself: These theaters are frequented by a number of respectable and handsome ladies, who come freely and seat themselves among the men without the slightest hesita­ tion. On the evening in question his Excellency and the Secretary were pleased to play me a trick by placing me amongst a bevy of young women. Scarcely was I seated ere a very elegant dame, but in a mask, came and placed herself beside me. . . . She asked me for my address both in French and English; and, on my turning a deaf ear, she determined to honor me by showing me some fine dia­ monds on her fingers, repeatedly taking off not fewer than three gloves, which were worn one over the other. . . . This lady’s bodice was of yellow satin richly embroidered, her petticoat of gold tissue with stripes, her robe of red velvet with a raised pile, lined with yellow muslin with broad stripes of pure gold. She wore an apron of point lace of various patterns: her head-tire was highly perfumed, and the collar of white satin beneath the delicately-wrought ruff struck me as extremely pretty. Father Busino may have turned a deaf ear on this “elegant dame” but not a blind eye: his description of her dress is worthy of a fashion designer and conveys something of the virtual clothes cult that prevailed in England in the late sixteenth and early seven­ teenth centuries, a cult whose major shrine, outside the royal court, was the theater. Imports, Patents, and Monopolies England produced some luxury goods, but the clothing on the backs of the most fashionable theatergoers was likely to have come from abroad. By the late sixteenth century, the English were importing substantial quantities of silks, satins, velvets, embroidery, gold and silver lace, and other costly items to satisfy the extravagant tastes of the elite and of those who aspired to dress like the elite. The government tried to put a check on the sartorial ambitions of the upwardly mobile by passing sumptuary laws—that is, laws restricting to the ranks of the aristocracy the right to wear certain of the most precious fabrics. But the very existence of these laws, m practice almost impossible to enforce, only reveals the scope and significance ol the perceived problem; Sumptuary laws were in part a conservative attempt to protect the existing social order from upstarts, Social mobility was not widely viewed as a positive virtue, and moralists repeatedly urged people to stay in their place. Conspicuous consumption that was tolerated, even admired, in the aristocratic elite was denounced as sinful and monstrous in less exalted social circles. English authorities were also deeply concerned throughout the period about the effects of a taste for luxury goods on the balance of trade. One of the principal English imports was wine: the “sherris” whose virtues Falstaff extols in 2 Henry IV came from Xeres in Spain; the malmsey in which poor Clarence is drowned in Richard III was probably made in Greece or in ♦ General Introduction the Canary Islánds (from whence came Sir Toby Belch’s “cup of canary” in Twelfth Night); and the “flagon of rhenish” that Yorick in Hamlet had once poured on the Gravedigger’s head came from the Rhine region of Germany. Other imports included canvas, linen, fish, olive oil, sugar, molasses, dates, oranges and lemons, figs, raisins, almonds, capers, indigo, ostrich feathers, and that increasingly popular drug tobacco. Joint stock companies were established to import goods for the burgeoning English market. The Merchant Venturers of the City of Bristol (established in 1552) handled great shipments of Spanish sack, the light, dry wine that largely displaced the vintages of Bordeaux and Burgundy when trade with France was disrupted by war. The Mus­ covy Company (established in 1555) traded English cloth and manufactured goods for Russian furs, oil, and beeswax. The Venice Company and the Turkey Company— uniting in 1593 to form the wealthy Levant Company-brought silk and spices home from Aleppo and carpets from Constantinople. The East India Company (founded in 1600), with its agent at Bantam in Java, brought pepper, cloves, nutmeg, and other spices from East Asia, along with indigo, cotton textiles, sugar, and saltpeter from India. English privateers “imported” American products, especially sugar, fish, and hides, in huge quantities, along with more precious cargoes. In 1592, a privateering expedition principally funded by Sir Walter Ralegh captured a huge Portuguese carrack (sailing ship), the Madre de Dios, in the Azores and brought it back to Dartmouth. The ship, the largest that had ever entered any English port, held 536 tons of pepper, cloves, cin­ namon, cochineal, mace, civet, musk, ambergris, and nutmeg, as well as jewels, gold, ebony, carpets, and silks. Before order could be established, the English seamen began to pillage this immensely rich prize, and witnesses said they could smell the spices on all the streets around the harbor. Such piratical expeditions were rarely officially sanc­ tioned by the state, but the Queen had in fact privately invested £1,800, for which she received about £80,000. In the years of war with Spain, 1586-1604, the goods captured by the privateers annually amounted to 10-15 percent of the total value of England’s imports. But orga­ nized theft alone could not solve England’s balance-of-trade problems. Statesmen were particularly worried that the nation’s natural wealth was slipping away in exchange for unnecessary things. In his Discourse of the Commonweal (1549), the prominent human­ ist Sir Thomas Smith exclaims against the importation of such trifles as mirrors, paper, laces, gloves, pins, inkhorns, tennis balls, puppets, and playing cards. And more than a century later, the same fear that England was trading its riches for trifles and wast­ ing away in idleness was expressed by the Bristol merchant John Cary. The solution, Cary argues in “An Essay on the State of England in Relation to Its Trade” (1695), is to expand productive domestic employment. “People are or may be the Wealth of a Nation,” he writes, “yet it must be where you find Employment for them, else they are a Burden to it, as the Idle Drone is maintained by the Indus­ try of the laborious Bee, so are all those who live by their Dependence on others, as Players, Ale-House Keepers, Common Fiddlers, and such like, but more particularly Beggars, who never set themselves to work.” Stage players, all too typically associated here with vagabonds and other idle drones, could have Forging a magnet, 1600. The metal on the anvil replied in their defense that they is aligned North/South (Septentrio/Auster). not only labored in their vocation From De Magnete by William Gilbert. Shakespeare’s World ♦ but also exported their skills abroad: English actors routinely performed on the Con­ tinent. But their labor was not regarded as a productive contribution to the national wealth, and plays were in truth no solution to the trade imbalances that worried authorities. The government attempted to stem the flow of gold overseas by establishing a patent system initially designed to encourage skilled foreigners to settle in England by granting them exclusive rights to produce particular wares by ą patented method. Patents were granted for such things as the making of hard white soap (1561), ovens and furnaces (1563), window glass (1567), sailcloths (1574), drinking glasses (1574), sulfur, brimstone, and oil (1577), armor and horse harness (1587), starch (1588), white writing paper made from rags (1589), aqua vitae and vinegar (1594), playing cards (1598), and mathematical instruments (1598). By the early seventeenth century, English men and women were working in a variety of new industries like soap making, pin making, knife making, and the brew­ ing of alegar and beeregar (ale- and beer-based vinegar). But although the ostensible purpose of the government’s economic policy was to increase the wealth ofEngland, encourage technical innovation, and provide employment for the poor, the effect of patents was often the enrichment of a few and the hounding of poor competitors by wealthy monopolists, a group that soon extended well beyond foreign-born entrepre­ neurs to the favorites of the monarch who vied for the huge profits to be made. “If I had a monopoly out” on folly, the Fool in King Lear protests, glancing at the “lords and great men” around him, “they would have part in’t.” The passage appears only in the Quarto version of the play (History of King Lear 4.140-41); it may have been cut for political reasons from the Folio. For the issue of monopolies provoked bitter criti­ cism and parliamentary debate for decades. In 1601, Elizabeth was prevailed upon to revoke a number of the most hated monopolies, including aqua vitae and vinegar, bottles, brushes, fish livers, the coarse sailcloth known as poldavis and mildernix, pots, salt, and starch. The whole system was revoked during the reign of James I by an act of Parliament. Haves and Have-Nots When in the 1560s Elizabeth’s ambassador to France, Sir Thomas Smith, wrote a description of England, he saw the commonwealth as divided into four sorts of people: “gentlemen, citizens, yeomen artificers, and laborers.” At (he forefront of the class of gentlemen was the monarch, followed by a very small group of nobles:—dukes, mar­ quesses, earls, viscounts, and barons—who either inherited their exalted titles, as the eldest male heirs of their families, or were granted them by the monarch. Under Elizabeth, this aristocratic peerage numbered between 50 and 6o individuals; James’s promotions increased the number to nearer 130. Strictly speaking, Smith notes, the younger sons of the nobility were Only entitled to be called “esquires,” but in common speech they were also called “lords.” Below this tiny cadre of aristocrats in the social hierarchy of gentry were the knights, a title of honor conferred by the monarch, and below them were the “simple gentlemen.” Who was a gentleman? According to Smith, “whoever studieth the laws of the realm, who sţudieth in the universities, who professeth liberal sciences, and to be short, who can live idly and without manual labor, and will bear the port, charge and countenance of a gentleman, he shall be called master . . . and shall be taken for a gentleman.” To “live idly and without manual labor”: where in Spain, for example, the crucial mark of a gentleman was “blood,” in England it was “idleness,” in the sense of sufficient income to afford an education and to maintain a social position without having to work with one’s hands. For Smith, the class of gentlemen was far and away the most important in the king­ dom. Below were two groups that had at least some social standing and claim to author­ ity: the citizens, or burgesses, those who held positions of importance and responsibility Shakespeare’s World ♦ ♦ General Introduction in their cities, and yeomen, farmers with land and a measure of economic indepen­ dence. At the bottom of the social order was what Smith calls “the fourth sort of men which do not rule.” The great mass of ordinary people have, Smith writes, “no voice nor authority in our commonwealth, and no account is made of them but only to be ruled.” Still, even they can bear some responsibility, he notes, since they serve on juries and are named to such positions as churchwarden and constable. In everyday practice, as modern social historians have observed, the English tended to divide the population not into four distinct classes but into two: a very small empowered group—the “richer” or “wiser” or “better” sort—and all the rest who were without much social standing or power, the “poorer” or “rüder” or “meaner” sort. Ref­ erences to the “middle sort of people" remain relatively rare until after Shakespeare’s lifetime; these people are absorbed into the rulers or the rpled, depending on speaker and context. The source of wealth for most of the ruţing class, and the essential measure of social status, was land ownership, and changes to the social structure in the six­ teenth and seventeenth centuries were largely driven by the land market. The prop­ erty that passed into private hands as the Tudors and early Stuarts sold off confiscated monastic estates and then their own crown lands for ready cash amounted to nearly a quarter of all the land in England. At the same time, the buying ánd selling of pri­ vate estates was on the rise throughout the period. Land was bought up not only by established landowners seeking to enlarge their estates but also by successful mer­ chants, manufacturers, and urban professionals; even if the taint of vulgar money­ making lingered around such figures, their heirs would be taken for true gentlemen. The rate of turnover in land ownership was great; in many counties, well over half the gentle families in 1640 had appeared since the end of the fifteenth century. The class that Smith called “simple gentlemen” was expanding rapidly: in the fifteenth century, they had held no more than a quarter of the land in the country, but by the later seventeenth, they controlled almost half. Over the same period, the land held by the great aristocratic magnates held steady at 15—20 percent of the total. Riot and Disorder London was a violent place in the first half of Shakespeare’s career. There were thirtyfive riots in the city in the years Í 581—1602, twelve of them in the volatile month of June 1595. These included protests against the deeply unpopular Lord Mayor Sir John Spencer, attempts to release prisoners, anti-alien riots, and incidents of “popular man ket regulation,” There is an unforgettable depiction of a popular uprising in Cortolanus, along with many other glimpses in Shakespeare’s works, including Jack Cade’s grotesque rebellion in 2 Henry VI, the plebeian violence in Julius Caesar, and Laertes’ “riotous head” in Hamlet. The London rioters were mostly drawn from the large mass of poor and discon­ tented apprentices who typically chose as their scapegoats foreigners, prostitutes, and gentlemen’s servingmen. Theaters were very often the site of the social confron­ tations that sparked disorder. For two days running in June 1584, disputes between apprentices and gentlemen triggered riots outside the Curtain Theater involving up to a thouşand participants. On one occasion, a gentleman was said to have exclaimed that “the apprentice was but a rascal, and some there were little better than rogues that took upon them the name of gentlemen, and said the prentices were but the scum of the world.” These occasions Culminated in attącks by the apprentices on London’s law schools, the Inns of Court. The most notorious and predictable incidents of disorder came on Shrove Tues­ day (the Tuesday before the beginning of Lent), a traditional day of misrųle when apprentices ran riot. Shrove Tuesday disturbances involved attacks by mobs of young men on the brothels of the South Bank, in the vicinity of the Globe and other public theaters. The city authorities took precautions to keep these disturbances from get­ ting completely out of control, but evidently did not regard them as serious threats to public order. Of much greater concern throughout the Tudor and early Stuart years were the frequent incidents of rural rioting. Though in The Winter's Tale Shakespeare pro­ vides a richly comic portrayal of a rural sheepshearing festival, the increasingly intensive production of wool had its grim side. When a character in Thomas More's Utopia (1516) complains that “the sheep arc eating the people,” he is referring to the practice of enclosure: throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, many acres of croplands once farmed in common by rural communities were fenced in by wealthy landowners and turned into pasturage. The ensuing misery, displace­ ment, and food shortages led to repeated protests, some of them violent and bloody, along with a series of government proclamations, but the process of enclosure was not reversed. The protests were at their height during Shakespeare’s career: in the years 1590—1610, the frequency of anti-enclosure rioting doubled from what it had been earlier in Elizabeth’s reign. Although they often became violent, anti-enclosure riots were usually directed not against individuals but against property. Villagers—sometimes several hundred, often fewer than a dozen—gathered to tear down newly planted hedges. The event often took place in a carnival atmosphere, with songs and drinking, that did not prevent the participants from acting with a good deal of political canniness and forethought. Especially in the Jacobean period, it was common for participants to establish a fund for legal defense before commencing their assault on the hedges. Women were fre­ quently involved, and on a number of occasions wives alone participated in the destruc­ tion of the enclosure, since there was a widespread, though erroneous, belief that married women acting without the knowledge of their husbands were immune from prosecution. In fact, the powerful Court of Star Chamber consistently ruled that both the wives and their husbands should be punished. Although Stratford was never the scene of serious rioting, enclosure controver­ sies turned violent more than once in Shakespeare’s lifetime. In January 1601, Shakespeare’s friend Richard Quiney and others leveled the hedges of Sir Edward Greville, lord of Stratford manor. Quiney was elected bailiff of Stratford in Septem­ ber of that year but did not live to enjoy the office for long. He died from a blow to the head struck by one of Greville’s men in a tavern brawl. Greville, responsible for the administration of justice, neglected to punish the murderer. There was further violence in January 1615, when William Combe’s men threw to the ground two local aldermen who were fill­ ing in a ditch by whjch Combe was enclosing common fields near Stratford. The task of filling in the offending ditch was completed the next day by the women and children of Stratford. Combe’s enclosure scheme was eventually stopped in the courts. Though he owned land whose value would have been affected by this controversy, Shake­ speare took no active role in it, since he had previously come to a private settlement with the enclosers insuring him against personal loss. Most incidents of rural rioting were small, localized affairs, and with good reason: when confined to the village community, riot was a misdemeanor; when it spread outward to include multiple communities, it became The Peddler. From Jost Amman,The treason, punishable by death. The greatest of Book of Trades (1568). ♦ General Introduction Shakespeare's World ♦ the anti-enclosure riots, those in which hundreds of individuals from a large area par­ ticipated,commonly took place on the eve of full-scale regional rebellions, The largest of these disturbances, Kelt’s Rebellion,, involved some 16,000 peasants, artisans, and townspeople who rose up in 1549 under the leadership of a Norfolk tanner and land­ owner, Robert Kett, to protest economic exploitation. The agrarian revolts in Shake­ speare’s lifetime were on a much smaller scale. In the abortive Oxfordshire Rebellion of 1596, a carpenter named Bartholomew Steer attempted to organize a rising against the hated enclosures. The optimistic Steer allegedly promised his followers that “it was but a month’s work to overrun England” and informed them “that the commons long since in Spain did rise and kill all gentlemen .. . and since that time have lived merrily there.” Steer expected several hundred men to join him on Enslow Hill on November 21, 1596, for the start of the rising; no more than twenty showed up. They were cap­ tured, imprisoned, and tortured. Several were executed, but Steer apparently cheated the hangman by dying in prison. Rebellions, most often triggered by hunger and oppression, continued into the reign of James I. The Midland Revolt of 1607, which may be reflected inCoriolanus, consisted of a string of agrarian risings in the counties of Northamptonshire, War­ wickshire, and Leicestershire, involving assemblies of up to five thousand rebels in various places. The best known of their leaders was John Reynolds, called “Captain Powch” because of the pouch he wore, whose magical contents were supposed to defend the rebels from harm. (According to the chronicler Edmund Howes, when Reynolds was captured and the pouch opened, it contained “only a piece of green cheese.”) The rebels, who were called by themselves and others both “Levelers” and “Diggers,” insisted that they had no quarrel with the King but only sought an end to injurious enclosures. But Robert Wilkinson, who preached a sermon against the leaders at their trial, credited them with the intention to “level all states as they leveled banks and ditches.” Most of the rebels got off relatively lightly, but, along with other ringleaders, Captain Powch was executed. The Legal Status of Women English women were not under the full range of crushing constraints that afflicted women in some countries in Europe. Foreign visitors were struck by their relative freedom, as shown, for example, by the fact that respectable women could venture unchaperoned into the streets and attend the theater. Yet while England was ruled for over forty years by a powerful woman, the great majority of women in the kingdom had very restricted social, economic, and legal standing. To be sure, a tiny number of influential aristocratic women, such as the formidable Countess of Shrewsbury, Bess of Hardwick, wielded considerable power- But, these rare exceptions aside, women were denied any rightful claim to institutional authority or personal autohomy. When Sir fhomas Smith thinks of how he should describe his country’s social order, he declares that “we do reject women, as those whom nature hath made to keep home and to nourish their family and children, and not to meddle with matters abroad, nor to bear office in a city or commonwealth.” Then, with ą kind of glance over his shoulder, he makes an exception of those few for whom “the blood is respected, not the age nor the sex?’: for example, the Queen. Single women, whether widowed or unmarried, could, if they were of full age, inherit and administer land, make a will, sign a contract, possess property, sue and be sued, without a male guardian or proxy, But married women had no such rights under English common law, the system of law based on court decisions rather than on codi­ fied written laws. Early modern writings about women and the family constantly return ţo a political model of domination and submission, in which the husband and father justly rules over wife and children as the monarch rules over the state. The hus­ band’s dominance in the family was the justification for the common-law rule that prohibited married women from possessing property, administering land, signing con­ tracts, or bringing lawsuits in their own names: married women were described as legally “covered” by their husbands. Yet this conception of a woman’s role conveniently ignores the fact that a majority of the adult women at any time in Shakespeare’s England were not married. They were either widows or spinsters (a term that was not yet pejorative), and thus for the most part managed their own affairs. Even within mar­ riage, women typically had more control over certain spheres than moralizing writers on the family cared to admit. For example, village wives oversaw the production of eggs, cheese, and beer, and sold these goods in the market. As seamstresses, pawnbro­ kers, second-hand clothing dealers, peddlers and the like—activities not controlled by the all-male craft guilds-women managed to acquire sòme economic power of their own, and, of course, they participated as well in the unregulated, black-market econ­ omy of the age and in the underworld of thievery and prostitution. Women were not in practice as bereft of property as, according to English com­ mon law, they should have been. Demographic studies indicate that the inheritance system called primogeniture, the orderly transmission of property from father to eldest male heir, was more often an unfulfilled wish than a reality. Some 40 percent of marriages failed to produce a son, and in such circumstances fathers often left their land to their daughters, rather than to brothers, nephews, or male cousins. In many families, the father died before his male heir was old enough to inherit prop­ erty, leaving the land, at least temporarily, in the hands of the mother. And while they were less likely than their brothers to inherit land (“real property”), daughters normally inherited a substantial share of their parents’ personal property (cash and movables). In fact, the légal restrictions upon women, though severe in Shakespeare’s time, actually worsened in subsequent decades. English common law was significantly less egalitarian in its approach to wives and daughters than were alternative legal codes (manorial, civil, and ecclesiastical) still in place in the late sixteenth century. The eventual triumph of common law stripped women of many traditional rights, slowly driving them out of economically productive trades and businesses. Limited though it was, the economic freedom of Elizabethan and Jacobean women far exceeded their political and social freedom—the opportunity to receive a gram­ mar school or university education, to hold office in church or state, to have a voice in public debates, or even simply to speak their mind fully and openly in ordinary conversation. Women who asserted their views too vigorously risked being perceived as shrewish and labeled “scolds.” Both urban and rural communities had a horror of scolds. In the Elizabethan period, such women came to be regarded as a threat to public order, to be dealt with by the local authorities. The preferred methods of cor­ rection included public humiliation—of the sort Katherina endures in The Taming of the Shrew—and such physical abuse as slapping, bridling with a bit or muzzle, and half-drowning by means of a contraption callęd the “cucking stool” (or “ducking stool"). This latter punishment originated in the Middle Ages, but its usé spread in the sixteenth century, when it became almost exclusively a punishment for women. From 1560. onward, cucking stools were built or renovated in many English provin­ cial towns; between 1560 and 1600, the contraptions were installed by rivers or ponds in Norwich, Bridport, Shrewsbury, Kingston-upon-Thames, Marlborough, Devizes, Clitheroe, Thornbury, and Great Yarmouth. Such punishment was usually intensified by a procession through the town to the sound of “rough music,” the banging together of pots and pans. The same cruel fes­ tivity accompanied the “carting” or “riding” of those accused of being whores. In some parts of the country, villagers also took the law into their own hands, publicly shaming women who married men much younger than themselves or who beat or otherwise domineered over their husbands. One characteristic form of these chari­ varis, or rituals of shaming, was known in the West Country as the Skimmington Ride. Villagers would rouse the offending couple from bed with rough music and stage a raucous pageant in which a man, holding a distaff, would ride backward on a ♦ General Introduction Shakespeare’s World ♦ donkey, while his “wife” (another man dressed as a woman) struck him with a ladle. In these cases, the collective ridicule and indignation were evidently directed at least as much at the henpecked husband as at his transgressive wife. Women and Print Books published for a female audience surged in popularity in the late sixteenth cen­ tury, reflecting an increase in female literacy. (It is striking how many of Shake­ speare’s women are shown reading.) This jpcrease is probably linked to a Protestant longing for direct access to the Scriptures, and the new books marketed specifically for women included devotional manuals and works of religious instruction. But there were also practical guides to such subjects as female education (for example, Giovanni Bruto’s Necessary, Pit, and Convenient Education of a Young Gentle­ woman, 1598), midwifery (James Guillemeau’s Child-birth; or, the Happy Delivery of Women, 1612), needlework (Federico di Vinciolo’s New and Singular Patterns and Works of Linen, 1591), cooking (Thomas Dawson’s The Good Housewife’s Jewel, 1587), gardening (Pierre Erondelle’s The French Garden, 1605), and married life (Patrick Hanney’s A Happy Husband; or, Directions for a Maid to Choose Her Mate, 1619). As the authors’ names suggest, many of these works were translations, and almost all were written by men. Starting in the 1570s, writers and their publishers increasingly addressed works of recreational literature (romance, fiction, and poetry) partially or even exclusively to women. Some books, such as Robert Greene’s Mamillia, a Mirror or Looking-Glass for the Ladies of England (1583), directly specified in the title their desired audience. Others, such as Sir Philip Sidney’s influential and popular romance Arcadia (159093), solicited female readership in their dedicatory epistles. The ranks of Sidney’s followers eventually included his own niece, Mary Wroth, whose romance Urania was published in 1621. In the literature of Shakespeare’s time, women readers were not only wooed but also frequently railed at, in a continuation of a popular polemical genre that had long inspired heated charges and countercharges. Both sides in the polemic generally agreed that it was the duty of women to be chaste, dutiful, and modest in demeanor; the argument was whether women fulfilled or fell short of this proper role. Ironically, then, a modern reader is more likely to find inspiring accounts of courageous women not in the books written in defense of female virtue but in attacks on those who refused to be silent and obedient. The most famous English skirmish in this controversy took place in a rash of pamphlets at the end of Shakespeare’s life. Joseph Swetnam’s crude Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women (1615) provoked three fierce responses attributed to wpmen: Rachel Speght’s A Muzzle for Melastomus, Esther Sowernam’s Esther Hath Hang'd Haman, and Constantia Munda’s Worming of a Mad Dog, all in 1617. There was also an anonymous play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater Arraigned by Women (first performed around 1618), in which Swetnam, depicted as a braggart and a lecher, is put on trial by women and made to recant his misogynistic lies. Prior tp the Swetnam controversy, only one English woman, writing under the pseudonym “Jane Anger,” had published a defense of women (Jane Anger Her Protec­ tion for Women, 1589). Learned women writers in the sixteenth century tended not to become involved in public debate but rather to undertake a project to which it was difficult for even obdurately chauvinistic males to object: the translation of devo­ tional literature into English. Thomas More’s daughter Margaret More Roper trans­ lated Erasmus (A Devout Treatise upon the Pater Noster, 1524); Francis Bacon’s mother, Anne Copke Bacon, translated Bishop John Jewel (An Apology or Answer in Defence of the Church of England, 1564); Anne Locke Prowse, a friend of John Knox, translated the Sermons of John Calvin in 1560; and Mary Sidney, the Countess of Pembroke, completed the metrical version of the Psalms that her brother Sir Philip Sidney had begun. Elizabeth Tudor (the future queen) herself translated, at the age of eleven, Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’âme pécheresse (The Glass of the Sinful Soul, 1544). The translation was dedicated to her stepmother, Katherine Parr, herself the author of a frequently reprinted book of prayers. There was in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries a social stigma attached to print. Far from celebrating publication, authors, and particularly female authors, often apologized for exposing themselves to the public gaze. Nonetheless, a number of women ventured in print beyond pious translations. Some, including Elizabeth Tyrwhitt, Anne Dowriche, Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney, and Aemilia Lanyer, com­ posed and published their own poems. Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum, published in 1611, is a poem in praise of virtuous women, from Eve and the Virgin Mary to her noble patron, the Countess of Cumberland. “A Description of Cookeham,” appended to the poem, is one of the first English country house poems, a cel­ ebration in verse of an aristocrat’s rural estate. The first Tudor woman to translate a play was the learned Jane Lumley, who com­ posed an English version of Euripides’ Iphigenia atAulis (ca. 1550). The first known original play in English by a woman was by Elizabeth Cary, Viscountess Falkland, whose Tragedy of Mariam; the Fair QueenofJewry was published in 1613. This remark­ able play, which was not intended to be performed, includes speeches in defense of women’s equality, though the most powerful of these is spoken by the villainous Salóme, who schemes to divorce her husband and marry her lover. Cary, who bore S W £ ? N A MleÊãÊÊÊ^^^ÊÍiÊâàSÊSSk VVcman-fnrer, Å K K A IG N S O vv о м.e. κ. AÄed at B Y hydelate Q¿scnc« Su ruant*. Î GłOOW, Pitate·: for Âteia* J Aliuke*. ,.tò -Teto belelt! « 'r,5
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