We British: The Poetry of a People. Andrew Marr

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ like Christianity itself, religious theatre was changing fast, and by the 1540s there was a new kind of drama, equally didactic, in which vices and virtues appeared as characters in their own right. These morality plays, or ‘interludes’, went further in the representation of contemporary British people on the stage, albeit disguised as symbols. Vice, in particular, under many guises, represented the wickedness, lust, cruelty and arrogance that many in the audience would have recognised in the world around them. The young William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon would have come across these plays – early in his life his father had the job of authorising performances in the town. The companies of players who took them around, travelling by cart and packhorse, enjoyed the protection of leading nobles, churchmen and sometimes the court itself; and the plays that have survived often have direct connections with the Tudor court, and were first performed there.

      Henry Medwall, little known these days, was a crucial bridge between the medieval world and the Elizabethan stage. Often cited as the first known vernacular English dramatist, he was born in September 1461 in Southwark, then an anarchic and dangerous place, to a family of wool merchants and tailors. He had a relatively prosperous late-medieval upbringing, doused in Latin at a monastery before he went to Eton, and then to King’s College, Cambridge, for more Latin. Alongside all the studying, he threw himself into musical and dramatic entertainments for banquets and other high days. He helped devise Christmas dramas and learned about the importance of mingling music and stories. Later he would serve as a notary public, a kind of lawyer, under Archbishop Morton, hanging on to the edges of the royal court (of Henry VII), rather as Chaucer had a century earlier. For much of his life Medwall was based at Lambeth Palace, where plays were performed in the Archbishop’s Great Hall. It is suggested that Sir Thomas More himself may have acted in Medwall’s first play, Fulgens and Lucres, in around 1497.

      Medwall had learned his craft from the medieval morality plays, and he too makes symbols of his characters, but as extracts from his second play, Nature, show, he was learning to root them in the realities of contemporary life. Here, for example, is Pride, describing his exuberant long hairstyle:

      I love it well to have side here

      Half a foot beneath mine ear

      For evermore I stand in fear

      That mine neck should take cold!

      I knit up all the night

      And the daytime, comb it to down right

      And then it crispeth and shyneth as bright

      As any peryld gold …

      And as for his clothing, it’s the latest London look:

      My doublet is unlaced before,

      A stomacher of satin and no more.

      Rain it, snow it, never so sore,

      Me thinketh I am too hot!

      Then I have such a short gown

      With wide sleeves that hang down –

      They would make some lad in this town

      A doublet and a coat.

      Gluttony, meanwhile, lurches in with a lump of cheese and a bottle of wine, announcing:

      … Of all things earthly I hate to fast.

      Four times a day I make repast,

      Or thrice as I suppose,

      And when I am well fed

      Then get I me to a soft bed

      My body to repose.

      There take I a nap or twain

      up I go straight and to it again!

      Though nature be not ready,

      Yet have I some meat of delight

      For to provoke the appetite

      and make the stomach greedy.

      Envy tries to persuade Gluttony to arm himself for the wars – this was written just at the end of the Wars of the Roses – but Gluttony is having none of the weapons or armour. If he’s going to the wars he’s going to be a victualler, looking after the food and drink:

      I was never wont to that gear.

      But I may serve to be a Viteller,

      and thereof shall he have store,

      So that I may stand out of danger

      of gunshot. But I will come no near(er)

      – I warn you that before.

      Now, no one is saying that this is great poetry, but it’s perhaps not surprising that scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare’s Falstaff is in some respects the child of Henry Medwall’s Gluttony. We don’t know if the great playwright saw this play when he was a boy, but it’s exactly the kind of thing he would have seen, alongside exaggerated and ludicrous tragedies of the kind he mocked in Hamlet.

      A slightly later contemporary of Medwall, John Heywood, born in Coventry in 1497, was one of the most celebrated wits and playwrights at the court of Henry VIII – as we have seen, a dangerous place to be. A Catholic who eventually fell foul of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Heywood had six plays published. He was on the other side of the argument from poor Anne Askew, part of the circle around Sir Thomas More, and at one point he himself narrowly escaped hanging. He was less learned than Medwall – he had risen as a chorister, a musician and an actor – but again, his drama, though highly moralistic, is full of the smell and the street language of the age. These were plays which may have been created on the edges of the court, but then made their way outwards, being performed in private houses, the inns of court, and anywhere else where there was a hall big enough to accommodate the audience.

      One of the most thoroughly enjoyable takes what is perhaps the classic British conversation to new levels. The Play of the Weather imagines that Jupiter, who bears an uncanny likeness in his grandiosity to Henry VIII, is considering reform of the chaotic British weather, which has been caused by disagreements between various other gods. His chief servant or courtier, ‘Mery Report’, is a rude, puckish creature, not a million miles away from Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest. Mery will be a good servant in this judgement, he tells Jupiter, because the weather means nothing to him personally:

      For all weathers I am so indifferent,

      without affection standing up so right –

      Sun light, moon light, star light, twilight, torch light,

      Cold, heat, moist, dry, hail, rain, frost, snow, lightning, thunder,

      Cloudy, misty, windy, fair, foul, above head or under,

      Temperate or distemperate – Whatever it be

      I promise your lordship all is one to me.

      So at least we know that the weather around 1533, when this play was СКАЧАТЬ