History in Shakespeare's England: from Caxton to Camden

Shakespeare's artistry uncannily animates the past. As one near contemporary insists, in a commendatory poem in the second edition of Shakespeare's collected plays (1632), the plays energetically present 'what story [i.e., history] coldly tells', and they even more literally enliven history in their ability 'to raise our ancient sovereigns from their hearse'. The stage makes the past present and allows its audiences vicarious emotional participation. When historical characters are represented in the theatre, 'the present age / Joys in their joy and trembles at their rage'. For the commendatory poet, this is value enough; we are 'by elaborate play / Tortured and tickled'.

Yet the representation of the past was of more serious concern to many in Shakespeare's England. History was unquestionably among the most influential forms of writing circulating among the ranks of an increasingly literate populace, and history plays were written not least to exploit in the theatre the enthusiasm for history that was evident in the bookstalls. But to understand what these history plays were (and were not) for the audiences that saw them, it is necessary to think about how the more traditional forms of history writing were understood and valued.

In April 1987 the Royal Shakespeare Company opened a production of Titus Andronicus at the Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, a theatre with a thrust stage and an audience capacity of 430. The play was the first to be directed for the RSC by Deborah Warner who had come to the company on the success of her Shakespeare productions with her own small touring company, Kick Theatre. There was no set other than the architectural form of the stage itself, no music other than that performed by the actors themselves (including a song from Walt Disney's Snow White whistled by Titus as he prepared to cook his monstrous pie). The costumes mixed styles from many periods and many contexts: the victorious Titus on his first entry wore Roman breastplate and modern trousers; for the final scene, he appeared 'like the chef de cuisine at a smart restaurant . . . in tall white chef 's hat and starched white overalls'. Warner did not cut a single line of the text and allowed the audience all the laughter that the play might provoke while also ensuring that it revealed all the horror that its violence demanded.

Warner’s Titus, as it became known, was a theatrical triumph, for many critics the finest Shakespeare production of the decade, but it also exemplifies many of the questions that need to be asked of any twentieth-century performance. The size of theatre, the shape of the stage, the experience of the director, the nature of the company, the choice of play, the decisions about set, music, and costumes, the range of emotional responses encouraged from the audience, the cutting of the text and the critical reception – not to mention the work of the actors themselves – are all crucial elements in our understanding of any Shakespeare production. This chapter does not offer a chronological account of Shakespeare performances this century; such accounts are available in some of the books listed at the end. Instead, it explores some of the problems and solutions, drawing heavily, though not exclusively, on examples from England.

Warwickshire illiterate; supplier of story-lines to the groundlings; Renaissance polymath. You show me your Shakespeare, and I'll show you a hypothesis about the size and character of his library. We have no hard facts about Shakespeare the reader: no personal documents, no inventories, no annotated volumes with his bookplate. And though his dramatic characters often turn up with books in their hands (sometimes merely pretending to read them), we have no neatly autobiographical equivalent of the opening moment in Sir Philip Sidney's Astrophil and Stella, where the struggling poet consults pages from his predecessors' work. The impossibility of answering the question only adds to its allure, promising to tell us both who Shakespeare was and how he wrote. Do we see the collected works as the product of an uncanny alchemy of sophistication and complexity performed by a provincial with moderate education and limited book-learning? Are they the output of an extraordinarily hard-working craftsman who had a knack for taking what was mostly second-rate contemporary writing and transforming its superficial excitements into more profound forms of high sensation? Or should we accept the proposition that the plays and poems represent a full engagement in the high culture of early modern Europe?In these responses to the matter of Shakespeare’s reading one can trace both the history of his reputation and the changing fashions of his critics.

Which conventional phrase best describes the author of Hamlet, 'the world's greatest poet' or 'the world's greatest playwright'? The two are often used interchangeably, but their different emphases, defining Shakespeare as first and foremost a literary artist or as primarily a man of the live theatre, adumbrate a genuine and enduring demarcation dispute between the library and the playhouse which has conditioned the reproduction of Shakespeare's works from his own lifetime to the present. At its heart is the question of how we are to understand the relation between the publication and the performance of Shakespeare's works. Is a play's printed text to be seen as prior and superior to its theatrical embodiments, which if so are only belated, partial, and imperfect glosses upon an essentially literary artifact? Or is that text itself to be seen as only a belated, partial, and imperfect souvenir of a theatrical event, the incomplete written trace of a dramatic work which can only fully be realized in performance? The ways in which this issue has been approached over the centuries since the writer's death, and the changing boundaries between its possible resolutions, have done much to shape both conceptions of Shakespeare and the nature of Shakespeare studies, and it is a problem which remains close to the centre of current debates in editing, in performance studies, and in biography. Some understanding of its origins and progress is therefore essential to any account of their development.

Films based on Shakespeare's plays are best considered in terms of their vision - that is, the imaginary world they create, and the way of seeing it that they offer the viewer rather than the degree of their faithfulness to a Shakespearian original. However, Shakespearian films often arise from the director's desire to do justice to what are perceived as the original's salient qualities - attempting to encompass each 'necessary question of the play' (to borrow Hamlet's term.) To an extent, the history of Shakespearian film-making is one of variations on this theme: shifting attitudes to the Shakespearian source material, varied objectives, and changing techniques.

Probably the first – and certainly the earliest surviving – 'Shakespeare film' is the brief glimpse of Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree as the dying King John exhibited in 1899. Within a decade, the narrative cinema rapidly grew in technical resource and cultural diversity. Shakespearian subjects served as a source of familiar scenes and characters and a well-accredited bank of cultural respectability on which the new medium might draw. Before the advent of fully synchronized sound, in the relatively ‘silent’ but in fact only speechless cinema, Shakespeare's plays provided the basis for more than 400 films. The more modest of these included the terse one-reelers (10–15 minutes in duration) made in New York between 1908 and 1912 by the Vitagraph company, or the short films made on stage at Stratford-upon-Avon, featuring Frank Benson's company in scenes from a number of plays – of which only Richard III (1911) survives. More ambitious projects included the 59-minute British Hamlet (1913) featuring Sir Johnston Forbes-Robertson in the title role; Sven Gade's striking Hamlet, A Drama of Revenge (Germany, 1920) in which Asta Neilsen plays a prince who is in fact a woman; and the grandly designed Othello (Germany, 1922) directed by Dmitri Buchowetski with Emil Jannings (Iago) and Werner Krauss (Othello).

In 1961 a Polish critic, Jan Kott, published a book which, when translated into English under the title Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1964), seemed to herald a brave new world of Shakespearian study. With a preface by Peter Brook, the most daring theatre director of the time, it struck a note which led away from tradition into uncharted but exciting 'contemporary' waters. Now it seems dated and influenced by the theatre of Samuel Beckett, but it remains true that as an 'event', Kott's book was a symptom of change in the 1960s. Attempting to explain the changes, Hugh Grady wrote in 1991 of Shakespeare criticism, 'Around 1970 . . . doubtless under the impact of the Vietnam era and the student insurgency which marked the late Sixties and early Seventies in both American and British universities - a fundamental change begins to occur: a paradigm crisis, usually the preliminary stage of a paradigm shift, can be observed to begin.' However, there are as many continuities as discontinuities between 'modernism' and 'post-modernism', which call into question Grady's notion. We should avoid the all too seductive course of denying any significance to earlier critics and celebrating a new maturity in Shakespearian criticism, or alternatively of berating theory-driven criticism and returning nostalgically to an earlier, cosy consensus. This is not to deny the possibility of a paradigm crisis or shift having occurred as Grady suggests, but I leave the question open.

Playhouses

Shakespeare had more predecessors as an Elizabethan actor than he did as an Elizabethan dramatist. Theatrical culture was thriving well before the performance of the famous plays we read today, which date from the 1580s and thereafter. Yet in the year of Shakespeare's birth, 1564, the Bishop of London wrote to the Secretary of State, Sir William Cecil, to complain about players performing in London every day, doubly concerned about the spread of plague likely from the assembly of large groups of people gathered as audiences and the ungodly character of plays and theatres. His letter speaks of 'the houses where they play their lewd interludes'. We know little of where Londoners were watching plays in 1564, but three years later a special stage and auditorium were built in Stepney for a show which was not ungodly at all: it was described as the story of Samson. The Red Lion playhouse, to give it the title of the farmhouse or inn where it was built, lay about three-quarters of a mile (0.9km) east of the city walls. It had a large platform stage - 30 feet by 40 (9m by 12m) - and galleries for the audience to sit and watch the play. It seems that the important features of the best-known Elizabethan playhouse, the Globe, opened in 1599, were established in theatre buildings more than thirty years earlier.

Presenting the dramatic works of Shakespeare in the Folio of 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell categorized them in the table of contents under 'Comedies', 'Histories', and 'Tragedies'. What may strike us now as a conventional grouping was not so at the time: in the most obvious precedent for such a collection, the 1616 Works of Ben Jonson, the plays were arranged chronologically. The organizational principle they chose, which is featured as well in the title of the collection - Mr. William Shakespeares Comedies, Histories,& Tragedies - invites readers of Shakespeare's plays to read in the light of genre, apprehending family resemblances within each group as well as individual distinctions.

For that matter, the individual nature of any work of art is hard to grasp without some sense of the genre to which it belongs - its 'kind', in the language of Shakespeare's day. The genres or kinds can be seen, in Rosalie Colie's words, 'as tiny subcultures with their own habits, habitats, and structures of ideas as well as their own forms'. In recognizing such habits as clowns and wordplay for comedy, and such habitats as royal courts and battlefields for histories and tragedy, we construct a notion of a play's modus operandi that in turn conditions our reactions as dialogue and action unfold. A sense of the norms of genre guides us through that unfolding: prompting sympathy or detachment, highlighting the significance of what we witness, and raising expectations about what is to come. The author may also at times invoke generic codes in order to play against them, refusing to fulfil the expectations he has aroused and thus pointing us in a marked new direction. This contra-use of genre may be overt, as when Shakespeare at the end of Love's Labour's Lost denies, or at least postpones, the traditional comic ending of multiple marriages and has one of the thwarted bridegrooms complain, 'Our wooing doth not end like an old play' (L.L.L. 5.2.851). It may be more subtle and pervasive, as when The Tempest reshapes the makings of revenge tragedy into reconciliation or Romeo and Juliet abruptly derails promises of a comedic conclusion with the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt and destroys young lovers and all in the subsequent wreck.

INTRODUCTION

The 420s mark a turning-point in the history of the Balkan provinces of the Roman empire. Since the 370s the region had been under pressure from various tribes who were themselves being stimulated to challenge the strength of imperial defences by the threat posed to them by the westward movement of the awesome Huns across the south Russian steppe. By 420, but not much before, the Huns had reached the Danube, establishing themselves on the Hungarian plain, asserting their authority over other tribal groups along the Danube, and beginning to challenge Roman imperial authority in both west and east. South of the river, the prosperity of urban and rural life varied. Most cities survived the period of Gothic ravaging and settlement, partly because Goths were not skilled besiegers, but rural hinterlands upon which the vitality of cities depended had been seriously affected. This stimulated a significant change in the pattern of settlement, with the abandonment of isolated rural villages that previously had served as nuclei for exploiting the countryside and a migration of population to the safety of urban defences or upland refuges. Some cities might benefit from an influx of wealthy rural inhabitants who now relocated their grand villas inside the walls, while others in more exposed places received impoverished country people but lost their élites. Walls were strengthened or rebuilt, perhaps to enclose a restricted, more defensible, circuit, though habitation might still extend beyond the central defended area, as at Athens.

Under detailed scrutiny, the period from 425 to 600 is seen to represent a time of significant and conspicuous artistic production and stylistic change and complexity. If the fourth century appears a time of transition, yet dominated by traditional forms and techniques, then in contrast it is easy to see that the fifth century witnesses considerable change, and that by 600 the forms of Christian art have become distinctive, and many of the aspects of later medieval art have been determined. This is the period which produced the present church of St Sophia at Constantinople (532–7), one of the most dramatic and influential buildings in world architecture. This achievement alone gives the period an identity in its own right. Yet in the broad view, it is clear that Christianity adapted rather than rejected the values of classical ‘pagan’ art. Hence the predominant discussions of the art of this period in terms of continuity and change, or – put more precisely – in terms of classical and non-classical elements, and either their interplay or their independence.

This priority for the art-historical analysis of these centuries is superfically justifiable, but one soon suspects that it may mask a whole set of more serious problems. It may, however, still offer a way of identifying the strengths and weaknesses of the current state of research; the question of the stage of ‘classicism’ embodied in the art of this period should not necessarily be evaded, so long as one remains aware that it encourages the framing of questions in terms of style, and identifies the issues from the surface appearance.

On 23 October 425 the emperor Valentinian III was installed as ruler of the western half of the Roman empire. The act was a triumph for the Theodosian dynasty, which had lost its grip on the west following the death of Valentinian’s uncle, the emperor Honorius, on 15 August 423, and, at first sight, a remarkable demonstration of imperial unity. The young Valentinian (born on 2 July 419) had been taken to Constantinople by his mother Galla Placidia even before Honorius died. Valentinian’s father, Flavius (Fl.) Constantius, had done much to reconstitute the western empire in the 410s. He then married Galla Placidia (Honorius’ sister) on 1 January 417 at the start of his second consulship, and had himself declared co-emperor of the west in February 421. He died the following September, before he could extract recognition of his self-promotion from Constantinople. His death let loose an extended power struggle in the west, which at first centred on controlling the inactive Honorius.

Placidia and Valentinian had fled east in the course of these disputes in 422. When, after Honorius’ death, power was seized by a high-ranking member of the western bureaucracy, the notarius John, the eastern emperor, Theodosius II, eventually decided to back Valentinian and the cause of dynastic unity. Hence, in spring 425, a large eastern force – combining fleet and field army – moved west, and despite the capture of its commander, Ardaburius, quickly put an end to the usurper.

Devotion to asceticism was a highly visible and in some ways alarming feature of the late Roman world. That thousands of men and women were ready to adopt a life of radical simplicity, sexual abstinence and apparent indifference to wealth, status and power, and that even larger numbers were willing to admire if not imitate their choice, tells us something remarkable about the society in which they lived. Restrictions in diet and sexual behaviour had been accepted for centuries; and abnegation was frequently accompanied by a rejection of influence in public affairs and of privilege and property. Christians, however, from the third century onwards, were responsible for an unprecedented upsurge in ascetic devotion. The movement transformed town as well as countryside: famous exemplars may have congregated at first in remoter districts; but a new class of citizen became more widely evident at an early stage. Distinguished at times by an appalling emaciation of the body, by filth and infestation, by ragged, colourless and skimpy clothes, large numbers of these ascetics converged, at moments of crisis, on the cities themselves, forming virtual mobs that were capable not only of menace but of real power. Within a relatively short time, they occupied special and prominent buildings, administered successful rural estates, broadcast their views in public fora, and gained the ear of those in power – invading, in other words, the chief components of the late Roman polity.

BISHOPS AND PATRIARCHS

The fifth-century church inherited an organization matching that of the empire. Each community usually had its bishop, though increasingly presbyters or sometimes deacons deputized for the bishop in governing congregations. Above the local bishop stood the bishop of the metropolis, the metropolian (μητροπολιτης) whose position had been codified at Nicaea in 325. Superior to the metropolitan, the city which was the centre of an imperial diocese (επαρχια) attained comparable status in the church, and its bishop was called ‘archbishop’ (αρχιεπισκοπος) This term was frequently used of the bishops of Rome, Alexandria and Antioch at the Council of Ephesus in 431, the same sees which had been named as exercising territorial superiority in the canons of Nicaea in 325. The term ‘archbishop’ was limited to those of such standing till about 500. After that it is more widely used, first of metropolitans, then of others whose independence was being asserted. The term ‘patriarch’ (πατριαρχης) then began to be applied to the bishops of the greater sees. ‘Patriarch’ was first used of the ancient biblical figures, and had been adopted for leading officers by the Jewish communities before Constantine’s time. Its rare use for Christian figures began to be extended to the superior bishops in documents associated with the Council of Chalcedon in 451. That council also specified that the metropolitan bishops of the imperial dioceses of Pontus, Asia and Thrace should be ordained by the bishop of Constantinople; thus the metropolitans of Cappadocian Caesarea, Ephesus and Philippopolis, who were to ordain bishops in their respective imperial provinces and any pendent sees among the barbarians, were declared subordinate to the capital.

The late Roman period saw the development, for the first time in the Roman world, of complex bureaucratic structures which permitted emperors, who had now abandoned the campaigning or peripatetic style of most of their predecessors during the first four centuries of imperial history, to retain their authority. The emperor and his court with its glittering ceremonies in Constantinople was the focus for the eastern empire, and from there issued the laws which announced imperial wishes. The armies, though no longer directly commanded by emperors, strove to preserve the frontiers and maintain law and order inside them. But the smooth functioning of this system required administrative structures which had to become more complex and intrusive as the curial élites in individual cities, who had traditionally performed many vital tasks in the areas of revenue generation, dissemination of imperial wishes and preservation of local order, slowly declined in authority or surrendered control of some of these duties; here was a cyclical process, with administrative developments responding to, but also encouraging, a weakening of the curial class. The impact of administration is reflected in a story from the Life of Theodore of Sykeon: devils being exorcized cried out: ‘Oh violence! Why have you come here, you iron-eater, why have you quitted Galatia and come into Gordiane? There was no need for you to cross the frontier. We know you have come, but we shall not obey you as did the demons of Galatia, for we are much tougher than they, and not milder’.

JUSTIN I (518–27)

For understandable reasons the reign of Justin I tends to be eclipsed by that of Justinian, his nephew and successor (527–65). Not only was Justinian already a powerful figure during his uncle’s reign, but Procopius of Caesarea, the leading historian of Justinian, regarded his rule as effectively including that period. In view of their common background and the continuity of imperial policy in certain areas, Justin’s reign is often associated with that of Justinian in modern accounts. Although Anastasius had three nephews, Hypatius, Pompeius and Probus, there was no designated successor when he died in 518. As magister militum per Orientem, Hypatius was away from Constantinople, and Justin, then the head of the excubitors (the palace guard), is said to have used cash destined for the support of another candidate to bribe his troops to support his own name; as a result, on 10 July 518 he was proclaimed by the senate, army and people and then crowned by the patriarch.

The new emperor was already elderly and his background was humble. He originated from Latin-speaking Illyricum, having been born at Bederiana, near Naissus (Nis), and he owed his success to his career in the guard. According to Procopius he was illiterate, and in his religious views he was staunchly Chalcedonian. Other contemporaries recorded the arrival of this backward provincial in Constantinople in about 470 and his subsequent success as something at which to marvel, and the story was depicted in art.

INTRODUCTION

The dominant pagan philosophy of the fifth and sixth century a.d. was Neoplatonism. By this period Platonism had absorbed the other philosophical traditions of antiquity. Aristotle was extensively studied but in a Platonist context, and usually as a preparation for the study of Plato himself. Epicureanism and Scepticism had faded away. Many elements of Stoicism do reappear in Neoplatonist logic and metaphysics but altered and transposed so as to fit into a very different philosophical system: the Stoics were materialists, whereas for the Neoplatonists the intelligible world is not only distinct from the material one but superior to it in reality and power. Neoplatonism was initiated by Plotinus in the third century and continued into the fourth by Porphyry, Iamblichus and their followers; by 425 it had spread all over the Mediterranean world. There were several different schools, in the physical sense, and this chapter will consider those in order. I shall begin with the school of Athens, proceed to Alexandria and then conclude with a brief account of philosophy elsewhere in the empire. The two principal schools were in Athens and Alexandria. These schools have often been seen as differing in doctrines and attitudes as well as in their geographical location. However, recent research has undermined this conventional picture. I shall argue later in the chapter that there were some genuine differences in emphasis and attitude between the two schools. However, they both derived from the Iamblichean tradition of Neoplatonism, and I shall begin by summarizing the main features of that tradition.

ROMANS AND SASANIDS

A chapter dealing with Iranian feudalism in a distinguished series dedicated to The Rise and Fall of the Roman World bears the title Iran, Rome’s Greatest Enemy. This title is more than merely a justification for the inclusion of a chapter on Iran in a series whose subject is Roman history. It also reflects a host of fears and prejudices fostered for long centuries in the Roman world, since the trauma of Crassus’ defeat by the Parthians at Carrhae. Not even extended periods of decline and internal disarray within the Parthian monarchy, in the course of which it was repeatedly invaded by the Roman army, could dispel the myth of the uncompromising threat posed by Iran to the Roman order. The replacement of the Parthian Arsacid dynasty by a new vigorous one, based in Fars, namely the Sasanid dynasty, at a time when the Roman empire itself was facing one of its severest crises, only aggravated its inhabitants’ deeply rooted fear of Iran. Ancient writers in the Roman oikoumene passed on this attitude to modern western scholars.

It is the Sasanid bogeyman which has left a deep imprint in modern historiography. The Sasanid state is widely regarded as a much more centralized and effective political entity than its Parthian counterpart, with a far better army. The great pretensions and aspirations of its monarchs are believed to have been fed by the fervour of religious fanaticism, inspired by the Zoroastrian priesthood, which is commonly depicted as a well organized state church.

SOURCES

The literary evidence for the history of Asia Minor and Cyprus is abundant for every period, but it suffers to some extent from too much familiarity: Asia Minor and Cyprus were the homeland of so many writers and readers. There was nothing exotic about this area, the heartland of the eastern empire, and so authors felt little need to describe it; much has to be deduced from what they assume. Furthermore, the chief characteristic of Asia Minor and Cyprus in the fifth and sixth century was that they were at peace, so that there was little to recount in historical narratives. The exception, here as in other things, is Isauria, whose turbulent history in the fifth century brought it into the history of the empire.

The lack of ‘historical’ events can therefore convey a spurious air of immobility. In such a situation, the contribution of archaeological evidence is particularly important; and as the archaeology of this region in this period has developed, it has revealed more and more evidence of marked change. The majority of early excavations concentrated on city sites, and it was common for the late Roman material to be dealt with cursorily during the search for ‘more interesting’ periods. More recently, excavators have come to treat such material more attentively; moreover, since the 1950s, archaeologists have been surveying the countryside, and their work is starting to provide a more balanced picture of this very large area. Recent work on Roman defences and fortifications has also produced a great deal of evidence for the period.

DIFFCULTIES AND EVIDENCE

Writing about complexity within the economy of the fifth to the seventh century will never be straightforward, partly because there has been so much debate about the nature of the ‘classical’ Roman economy that preceded it. Was the ‘Roman economy’ really a series of local economies, linked into a broader structure only by the demands of the state and by some limited trade in luxury products? Or was it a unified system in which even quite basic goods were produced by specialists, and traded by merchants across long distances? In examining economic activity in the late Roman and post-Roman period, we are inevitably measuring it against the classical economy that preceded it; but the measuring-stick itself is constantly being altered.

As with evidence for the exploitation of the land examined in the last chapter, much of our information on economic specialization now derives from archaeology. However, the written record can also produce isolated but very valuable nuggets of information. For example, just before our period, Gregory of Nazianzus happens to tell us, in a poem on the events of his own life, that one of his enemies in Constantinople in 379/80 was a priest who had come to the city from Thasos, with money supplied by his church in order to buy ‘Proconnesian slabs’ (prokonesias plachas). These must have been slabs for a chancel-screen in the marble of the island of Proconnesos (very close to Constantinople), of a type which was widely diffused in late antiquity (see Fig. 15,p. 359 below).