Shakespeare. Bill Bryson

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СКАЧАТЬ to flee faced painful reprisals, as when Thomas Cranmer, Archbishop of Canterbury, and colleagues were burned at the stake in Oxford after the Catholic Mary came to the throne in 1553. The event was graphically commemorated in a book by John Foxe formally called Actes and Monuments of these Latter and Perillous Days, touching Matters of the Church but familiarly known then and ever since as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs – a book that would provide succour to anti-Catholic passions during the time of Shakespeare’s life. It was also a great comfort to Elizabeth, as later editions carried an extra chapter on ‘The Miraculous Preservation of the Lady Elizabeth, now Queen of England’, praising her brave guardianship of Protestantism during her half-sister’s misguided reign (though in fact Elizabeth was anything but bravely Protestant during Mary’s reign).

      Though it was an age of huge religious turmoil, and although many were martyred, on the whole the transition to a Protestant society proceeded reasonably smoothly, without civil war or wide-scale slaughter. In the forty-five years of Elizabeth’s reign, fewer than two hundred Catholics were executed. This compares with eight thousand Protestant Huguenots killed in Paris alone during the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre in 1572, and the unknown thousands who died elsewhere in France. That slaughter had a deeply traumatizing effect in England – Christopher Marlowe graphically depicted it in The Massacre at Paris and put slaughter scenes in two other plays – and left two generations of Protestant Britons at once jittery for their skins and ferociously patriotic.

      Elizabeth was thirty years old and had been queen for just over five years at the time of William Shakespeare’s birth, and she would reign for thirty-nine more, though never easily. In Catholic eyes she was an outlaw and a bastard. She would be bitterly attacked by successive Popes, who would first excommunicate her and then openly invite her assassination. Moreover, for most of her reign a Catholic substitute was conspicuously standing by: her cousin, Mary, Queen of Scots. Because of the dangers to Elizabeth’s life, every precaution was taken to preserve her. She was not permitted to be alone out of doors and was closely guarded within. She was urged to be wary of any presents of clothing designed to be worn against her ‘body bare’ for fear that they might be deviously contaminated with plague. Even the chair in which she normally sat was suspected at one point of having been dusted with infectious agents. When it was rumoured that an Italian poisoner had joined her court, she had all her Italian servants dismissed. Eventually, trusting no one completely, she slept with an old sword beside her bed.

      Even while Elizabeth survived, the issue of her succession remained a national preoccupation throughout her reign – and thus through a good part of William Shakespeare’s life. As Frank Kermode has noted, a quarter of Shakespeare’s plays would be built around questions of royal succession – though speculating about Elizabeth’s successor was very much against the law. A Puritan Parliamentarian named Peter Wentworth languished for ten years in the Tower of London simply for having raised the matter in an essay.

      Elizabeth was a fairly relaxed Protestant. She favoured many customary Catholic rites (there would be no evensong in English churches now without her) and demanded little more than a token attachment to Anglicanism throughout much of her reign. The interest of the Crown was not so much to direct people’s religious beliefs as simply to be assured of their fealty. It is telling that Catholic priests when caught illegally preaching were normally charged not with heresy but with treason. Elizabeth was happy enough to stay with Catholic families on her progresses around the country so long as their devotion to her as monarch was not in doubt. So being Catholic was not particularly an act of daring in Elizabethan England. Being publicly Catholic, propagandizing for Catholicism, was another matter, as we shall see.

      Catholics who did not wish to attend Anglican services could pay a fine. These non-attenders were known as recusants (from a Latin word for refusing), and there were a great many of them – an estimated fifty thousand in 1580. Fines for recusancy were only 12 pence until 1581, and in any case were only sporadically imposed, but then they were raised abruptly – and, for most people, crushingly – to £20 a month. Remarkably some two hundred citizens had both the wealth and the piety to sustain such penalties, which proved an unexpected source of revenue to the Crown, raising a very useful £45,000 just at the time of the Spanish Armada.

      Most of the Queen’s subjects, however, were what was known as ‘church Papists’ or ‘cold statute Protestants’ – prepared to support Protestantism so long as required, but happy and perhaps even quietly eager to become Catholics again if circumstances altered.

Protestantism had its dangers, too. Puritans (a word coined with scornful intent in the year of Shakespeare’s birth) and Separatists of various stripes also suffered persecution – not so much because of their beliefs or styles of worship as because of their habit of being wilfully disobedient to authority and dangerously outspoken. When a prominent Puritan named (all too appropriately, it would seem) John Stubbs criticized the Queen’s mooted marriage to a French Catholic, the Duke of Alençon,^* his right hand was cut off. Holding up his bloody stump and doffing his hat to the crowd, Stubbs shouted ‘God save the Queen!’, fell over in a faint, and was carted off to prison for eighteen months.

      In fact he got off comparatively lightly, for punishments could be truly severe. Many convicted felons still heard the chilling words: ‘You shall be led from hence to the place whence you came…and your body shall be opened, your heart and bowels plucked out, and your privy members cut off and thrown into the fire before your eyes.’ Actually, by Elizabeth’s time it had become most unusual for anyone to be disembowelled while they were still alive enough to know it. But exceptions were made. In 1586 Elizabeth ordered that Anthony Babington, a wealthy young Catholic who had plotted her assassination, should be made an example of. Babington was hauled down from the scaffold while still conscious and made to watch as his abdomen was sliced open and the contents allowed to spill out. It was by this time an act of such horrifying cruelty that it disgusted even the bloodthirsty crowd.

      The monarch enjoyed extremely wide powers of punishment and Elizabeth used them freely, banishing from court or even imprisoning courtiers who displeased her (by, for instance, marrying without her blessing), sometimes for quite long periods. In theory she enjoyed unlimited powers to detain, at her pleasure, any subject who failed to honour the fine and numerous distinctions that separated one level of society from another – and these were fine and numerous indeed. At the top of the social heap was the monarch, of course. Then came nobles, high clerics and gentlemen, in that order. These were followed by citizens – which then signified wealthier merchants and the like: the bourgeoisie. Then came yeomen – that is, small farmers – and last came artisans and common labourers.

      Sumptuary laws, as they were known, laid down precisely, if preposterously, who could wear what. A person with an income of £20 a year was permitted to don a satin doublet but not a satin gown, while someone worth £100 a year could wear all the satin he wished, but could have velvet only in his doublets, but not in any outerwear, and then only so long as the velvet was not crimson or blue, colours reserved for Knights of the Garter and their superiors. Silk netherstockings, meanwhile, were restricted to knights and their eldest sons, and to certain – but not all – envoys and royal attendants. Restrictions existed, too, on the amount of fabric one could use for a particular article of apparel and whether it might be worn pleated or straight and so on, through lists of variables almost beyond counting.

      The laws were enacted partly for the good of the national accounts, for the restrictions nearly always were directed at imported fabrics. For much the same reason there was for a time a Statute of Caps, aimed at helping domestic capmakers through a spell of depression, which required people to wear caps instead of hats. For obscure reasons Puritans resented the law and were often fined for flouting it. Most of the other sumptuary laws weren’t actually much enforced, it would seem. The records show almost no prosecutions. Nonetheless they remained on the books until 1604.

      Food was similarly regulated, with restrictions placed on how many courses one might eat, depending СКАЧАТЬ