Texts and Traditions: Religion in Shakespeare 1592-1604 (Oxford English Monographs)

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Author: Beatrice Groves

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Texts and Traditions Religion in Shakespeare 1592–1604 B E AT R I C E G ROV E S

CLARENDON PRESS · OXFORD

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford   Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York  Beatrice Groves 2007 The moral rights of the author have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2007 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Data available Typeset by Laserwords Private Limited, Chennai, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by Biddles Ltd., King’s Lynn, Norfolk ISBN 0–19–920898–0

978–0–19–920898–2

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

For my husband

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Preface In the late seventeenth century Richard Davies, Archdeacon of Coventry, claimed that Shakespeare had created the character of ‘Justice Clodpate’ in order to satirize ‘Sr Lucy’ who had had him whipped for poaching. Davies also stated that Shakespeare ‘dyed a papist’. The Archdeacon’s unreliability as a witness (his inability to distinguish between Justice Shallow and a character created by Shadwell over three-quarters of a century later) is one example of the difﬁculties that bedevil any attempt to prove Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Nonetheless the idea has found its advocates since the Victorian period, and has recently become one of the most popular and hotly contested areas of Shakespeare studies. Peter Milward, E. A. J. Honigmann, Richard Wilson, Stephen Greenblatt, and Clare Asquith are among those who have lately suggested that Shakespeare’s own beliefs underlie his trademark ambiguity of tone and the romance world of chantry chapels and wayside crosses inhabited by many of his characters. This book, however, attempts to engage with the religious nuances in Shakespeare’s plays in a less sectarian manner. Shakespeare’s dramaturgy includes traces of Catholicism’s visual emphasis but it also embraces the rich verbal stimulus of Protestantism’s focus on the Word. This book is entitled Texts and Traditions because it argues that Shakespeare enriched his plays through appropriating both the linguistic wealth of the English Bible and the theatrical splendour of liturgy, images, and mystery plays from England’s recent Catholic past. Rather than ﬁnd the clue to these appropriations in his own biography, this monograph aims to articulate the way that Shakespeare’s verbally sophisticated, embodied drama engaged with the religious culture in which both he and his works were embedded; a culture which, as recent historical research has suggested, assimilated rather than destroyed much of its Catholic past. This less confessional approach enables a focus which is not directed at Shakespeare’s beliefs but at the interpretative possibilities that his engagement with religious culture opens up within his plays. This work grew out of an Oxford D.Phil. and I would like to thank my supervisors Peter McCullough and Emma Smith, for their

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encouragement, advice, and friendship, for which I am ever indebted. My gratitude is also owed for the generosity of my grandmother Phil who gave me a place in her home in which to study. I would also like to thank all those who have taught and inspired me, foremost among whom is my mother Jane, who ﬁrst fed my love for Shakespeare, and took me to see his plays. A great debt of gratitude goes also to my undergraduate tutors: Jeremy Maule, Adrian Poole, Anne Barton, Bart van Es, Phil West, and, above all, Eric Grifﬁths. I have been amazed, throughout the time spent working on this project, by the generosity I have encountered. I have found both strangers and friends content to give up their time and eager to share their expertise. I particularly want to thank Pascale Aebischer, Philippa Berry, Santha Bhattacharji, Imogen Black, Jeremy Boulton, Henry Chadwick, Helen Cooper, Helen Deeming, Sarah Dewar-Watson, Katherine DuncanJones, Trevor Grifﬁths, Helen Hackett, Ralph Hanna, Lorna Huett, Martin Ingram, Felicity James, Karen Junod, Laurie Maguire, Diarmaid MacCulloch, Stephen Medcalf, Llewelyn Morgan, John Muddiman, David Norbrook, Adrian Paterson, Benjamin Prance, Alison Shell, and Jenny Wormald. I am grateful to the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the award of a scholarship which enabled me to write my D.Phil. and to St John’s College, Oxford, for my time there as a graduate student. In particular I would like to thank the fellows of Wolfson College, Oxford, whose award of a Junior Research Fellowship enabled me to complete this book. I am grateful to the many librarians who have been unfailingly helpful during my research, in particular those of the Duke Humphrey and Upper Reading Room of the Bodleian. Thanks are also due to the staff of the Oxford English Faculty library, the British Library, the Cambridge University Library, and numerous college libraries. The chapter on the second tetralogy ﬁrst appeared in a slightly different form in Shakespeare Survey as ‘Hal as Self-Styled Redeemer: The Harrowing of Hell and Henry IV Part 1’ Shakespeare Survey 57 (2004): 236–48. My thanks to Peter Holland and Cambridge University Press for allowing its inclusion here. I am grateful to Tom Perridge and all the staff at Oxford University Press involved in the publication of this monograph, and in particular for the helpful advice of their anonymous readers.

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I wish to thank my parents, all my family, and Alan and Dorothy Groves for their love, kindness, and support. Finally, this book is dedicated to my husband, Peter, in love and gratitude for all that he has given me in the years of its writing. B.L.R.G.

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Contents Introduction

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1. Drama and the Word: The Bible on the Early Modern Stage

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2. Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic: The Mystery Plays and Catholicism

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3. Comedic Form and Paschal Motif in the First and Second Quartos of Romeo and Juliet

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4. ‘I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house’: Religious Imagery and the Succession to the English Throne in King John

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5. ‘Covering discretion with a coat of folly’: The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal

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6. ‘Usurp the beggary he was never born to’: Measure for Measure and the Questioning of Divine Kingship

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Conclusion

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Bibliography Index

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Introduction I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? (Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’)

To Larkin, in 1954, rood-lofts (carved wooden balconies which surmounted the rood screen and supported the rood) have become the epitome of arcane church furniture which only a ‘ruin-bibber, randy for antique’ would be able to describe. This is because, with their vast Cruciﬁxion scenes and physical connection with the division of clergy and laity, they became the focus of Reformation iconoclasm. They were destroyed during the Edwardian purges of 1547 and 1548, but rebuilt under Mary. In the early years of Elizabeth’s reign they became the subject of the most determined struggles between reformers and parish ofﬁcials, although, as Henry Machyn records in his diary, by 1560 the battle seemed won: ‘the ij yere of the quen Elesabeth was alle the rod-loftes taken down in London, and wrytynges wrytyne in the sam plase’.¹ The Royal Order of 10 October 1561 stated: ‘it is thus decreed and ordained, that the rood-lofts … be quite taken down unto the upper part of the vaults, and beam running in length over the said vaults, by putting some convenient crest upon the said beam’.² John Shakespeare, ¹ Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 81–2, 96, 108–9; The Diary of Henry Machyn, Citizen and Merchant Taylor of London, From A.D. 1550 to A.D. 1563, ed. John Gough Nichols (London: The Camden Society, 1848), 241. However, rood-lofts did remain up to the 1580s in some outlying parishes in Lancashire and Essex: Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1999), 15. ² Walter Howard Frere, ed., Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation (London: Longmans, Green, 1910), iii. 108.

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acting as Chamberlain of Stratford, oversaw the dismantling of the rood as well as the white washing of the wall paintings in the Stratford Guild chapel in 1564.³ Memory, however, cannot be destroyed in the same way as objects, despite the implicit aim to whitewash minds as well as walls in the Edwardian Injunctions of 1547, which ordered that ‘monuments of idolatry’ should all be destroyed ‘so that there remain no memory of the same in walls, glass-windows, or elsewhere’.⁴ Rood-lofts were almost entirely destroyed, although their ghost remained, and still remains, visible in the fabric of some churches in the rood-loft stairs that lead nowhere. One rood-loft which did survive (in King’s College chapel) was ﬁtted up to accommodate the queen in a strikingly appropriative gesture: ‘a fayr closet glased towardes the Queen was devised and made in ye mydle of the Rode lofte yf ye Quenes maiestie perhaps would there repose herselfe’.⁵ In Sir Thomas More (1593) a rood-loft carries instead the eponymous hero, a rebellious Catholic: Methought I saw him here in Chelsea church, Standing upon the rood loft, now defaced, And whilst he kneeled and prayed before the image, It fell with him into the upper choir, Where my poor father lay all stained in blood.⁶

For this writer, unlike for Larkin, rood-lofts are not part of an unrecoverably distant and dreamlike past, but powerful enough to haunt dreams. Anthony Munday, who, despite his apparently ardent Protestantism, had a profound interest in the devotional objects of Catholicism, was probably responsible for this passage.⁷ Munday lays anachronistic stress ³ S. Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 30–1. ⁴ Frere, Visitation Articles, ii. 126. ⁵ Alan H. Nelson, ed., Cambridge, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), i. 233. ⁶ Anthony Munday et al., Sir Thomas More, ed. Vittorio Gabrieli and Giorgio Melchiori (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990), 4. 2. 37–41. ⁷ Munday’s spying on English Catholics in Rome resulted in a tract which details many such rituals: Anthony Munday, The English Roman Life, ed. Philip J. Ayres (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 45–78. Some critics have wondered whether Munday may actually have been a crypto-Catholic: Munday, English Roman Life, p. xiv. Munday’s detailed account of the ‘Papist lies’ about Elizabeth was censored in the second edition of the English Roman Life.

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on the defacement of the rood (which had not happened by Thomas More’s time) and is able to make powerful dramatic and aesthetic use of a devotional artefact that he himself, being born in 1560, had probably never seen. In Sir Thomas More the ﬁgure of a living man who could have walked up the rood-loft stairs in Catholic times and knelt before the image blends with the ﬁgures of Mary and John kneeling at the foot of the cross; the blood of Christ’s body which would have been seen on his statue and displayed from the rood-loft during Benediction is transferred onto More and the destruction of the rood (the felling of St Paul’s rood had actually killed someone) becomes metonymic for More’s fall from grace and the demise of his religion.⁸ This striking image in Sir Thomas More (a play in which Shakespeare was involved) is evidence of how relics of medieval religion, even this most viliﬁed example, were not only known but put to creative use by Shakespeare’s contemporaries. The allusion is evidence of a framework which, although ofﬁcially abolished by the Reformation, could still be used and understood by early modern writers, readers, and theatregoers. England’s Catholic past is likewise an abiding presence in Shakespeare’s work, although often in slightly more subtle manifestations. Hamlet, for example, can be read as an extended meditation on maimed funeral rites. The play begins with a mourning period interrupted by a wedding—‘the funeral baked meats | Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’—and one precipitating cause of its catastrophe is Laertes’s anger at his father’s obscure burial: ‘No trophy, sword, nor hatchment o’er his bones, | No noble rite nor formal ostentation.’⁹ Ophelia too is interred with curtailed obsequies and her brother asks angrily: Must there no more be done? · · · · · · I tell thee, churlish priest, A minist’ring angel shall my sister be When thou liest howling.

(5. 1. 229–37)

The angel invoked by Laertes is heard again as Hamlet dies ‘Good night, sweet prince, | And ﬂights of angels sing thee to thy rest’ (5. 2. 311–12) ⁸ The felling of St Paul’s rood in 1547 killed at least one workman: Margaret Aston, ‘Iconoclasm in England: Ofﬁcial and Clandestine’, in Clifford Davidson and Ann Eljenholm Nichols, eds., Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 71. ⁹ Hamlet, 1. 2. 179–80, 4. 5. 211–13. All references to Shakespeare’s plays, unless otherwise stated, are to William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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and here it unmistakably echoes the Latin antiphon sung during the Requiem Mass: In Paradisum deducant te angeli … aeternum habeas requiem (May the angels bear you to paradise, and may you have eternal rest).¹⁰ This echo of Catholic liturgy suggests that these repeatedly disrupted sacraments engage with the psychic rupture caused by Reformation’s abandonment of traditional mourning practices. The world of the play reﬂects the world in which it was ﬁrst performed, and with the destruction of the panoply of Catholicism, rituals become fractured and fragmentary. The words of the requiem are spoken by a friend rather than a priest, Ophelia sings ‘lauds’ over her own drowning body, and Hamlet’s father comes from purgatory to request a rather different sacriﬁce than the masses which were traditionally offered for the repose of souls. These distortions seem to brood over Protestantism’s destruction of the comforting and familiar rituals of death, and the hero’s stasis itself can be read as a reﬂection on the unavailability of ofﬁcial forms of mourning.¹¹ Criticism which is sensitive to the way that Shakespeare’s plays engage with the religious obsessions and uncertainties of his time has much to teach us about his work. We need, however, to disentangle the acknowledgement of Catholic nuances in his plays from the search for evidence about the beliefs of the writer himself. Anthony Munday was a Protestant spy who persecuted Catholics, and yet his play retains the symbolic power of the old faith. Finding similar echoes in Shakespeare does not commit us to believing that he was a crypto-Catholic, an idea which has recently resurfaced in a blaze of publicity. ‘Catholic Shakespeare’ has seized the popular imagination and been explored through numerous books and magazine articles, as well as television shows and conferences, which have suggested that Shakespeare’s ‘signature ambiguity ¹⁰ Peter Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays (Curdridge: Saint Austin, 1997), 45. See also: Maurice J. Quinlan, ‘Shakespeare and the Catholic Burial Services’, Shakespeare Quarterly 5 (1954): 303–6; Baldwin Peter, ‘Hamlet and In Paradisum’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3 (1952): 279–80. ¹¹ Stephen Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 247 and passim; Stephen Greenblatt, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Jonathan Cape, 2004), 312–22; Gerard Kilroy, ‘Requiem for a Prince: Rites of Memory in Hamlet’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 143–60; Laurie Maguire, ‘ ‘‘Actions that a man might play’’: Mourning, Memory, Editing’, Performance Research 7/1 (2002): 74. My grateful thanks to Laurie Maguire for sending me this paper.

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came from the collision of his Catholic context with his need to conform’.¹² We need, however, to recognize the cultural desires which underlie the Catholic Shakespeare, just as clearly as we can see the cultural conservatism which bolstered the ‘Anglican’ Shakespeare who preceded him. Shakespeare is at the heart of the canon in a period which is uneasy about canonicity, and his postulated Catholicism invests him with an exciting marginality. Entertaining a ‘Catholic’ Shakespeare is the intellectual equivalent of the visual effect of looking at the Xray photograph of the Flower portrait (reproduced on the cover of this book): the slight shock with which we recognize the Virgin Mary behind the familiar hooded eyes of the Bard.¹³ The analogy with the Flower Portrait, however, is peculiarly potent. Initially the image is startling, but the explanation is quite matter of fact. A portrait of Shakespeare ¹² Richard Wilson, ‘‘Introduction: A Torturing Hour—Shakespeare and the Martyrs’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 6. This book, and its companion volume, are the conference proceedings of the Lancaster University conference about whether Shakespeare was the ‘Shakeshaft’ who was a player in a recusant Lancashire household in the 1580s: Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003). For other works on Shakespeare’s Catholicism, see Henry Sebastian Bowden, The Religion of Shakespeare (London: Burns & Oates, 1899); John Henry de Groot, The Shakespeares and ‘The Old Faith’ (New York: King’s Crown, 1946); H. Mutschmann and K. Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1952); Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1973); Ian Wilson, Shakespeare: The Evidence: Unlocking the Mysteries of the Man and his Work (London: Headline Book Publishing, 1993); Eric Sams, The Real Shakespeare: Retrieving the Early Years, 1564–1594 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Eamon Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?’, The Tablet, 27 April (1996): 536–8; Milward, The Catholicism of Shakespeare’s Plays; Richard Wilson, ‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits’, Times Literary Supplement, no. 4942, 19 December 1997; E. A. J. Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’, 2nd edn. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 64–71; Velma Bourgeois Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance (London: Continuum, 2000); Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory; Michael Wood, In Search of Shakespeare (London: BBC Worldwide, 2003), 270–3, 340; Richard Wilson, Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004); Greenblatt, Will in the World; Clare Asquith, Shadowplay: The Hidden Beliefs and Coded Politics of William Shakespeare (New York: PublicAffairs, 2005). ¹³ Paint analysis has proved conclusively that the Flower portrait is a nineteenthcentury image, and not early seventeenth century, as has been sometimes thought. See Tarnya Cooper, Searching for Shakespeare (London: National Portrait Gallery, 2006), 72–5. For an earlier overview of theories about the painting, see Paul Bertram and Frank Cossa, ‘ ‘‘Willm(-) Shakespeare 1609’’: The Flower Portrait Revisited’, Shakespeare Quarterly 37/1 (1986): 83–96.

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was a saleable commodity; a picture of the Madonna and child was not. There is no mystery about the reuse of the panel. Shakespeare painted over the Virgin and Christ child is not a secret code revealing his true faith but a vivid illustration of the indubitable truth that the present rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the past. Catholicism lies behind Shakespeare as surely as it lies behind his image in the Flower portrait, but not because it can be proved to be what he truly believed. Catholicism was the faith of England’s past and whatever Shakespeare’s own doctrinal afﬁliations we should be neither shocked nor surprised to ﬁnd Catholicism underlying his dramaturgy as well as his portrait. Drama is a synthesis of visual and verbal and Shakespeare’s dramaturgy is sensitive both to the intensely visual aspects of his Catholic cultural heritage and to the rich verbal texture of Protestantism with its long, punning sermons, catechizing, Prayer Book, witty Marprelate tracts, and, above all, the Bible to be heard and read in English. This book engages with the way in which Shakespeare appropriated both the linguistic wealth of the English Bible and the theatrical splendour of liturgy, images, and mystery plays from England’s recent Catholic past in order to enrich his plays. It will not attempt to unravel Shakespeare’s beliefs, but instead will explore the inﬂuence of the sacred texts and traditions of his time on his dramaturgy and argue for the new interpretative possibilities which live in these religious nuances. The two ﬁrst chapters will tease out the shaping effect of both Protestant and Catholic religious culture on his dramaturgy in order to establish a foundation from which to pursue the in-depth studies undertaken in the rest of the book. The ﬁrst chapter is about the primary text of Shakespeare’s society—the Bible—and its relationship with the stage: its familiarity to both Shakespeare and his audience, and the way that stage censorship fostered subtle allusion and engagement with biblical themes. The second chapter looks at residual Catholicism in early modern culture, focusing on the mystery plays, and argues that their Incarnational aesthetic was inherited by Shakespeare. The rest of the book will centre on close readings of Shakespeare’s plays and consider how both the religious consciousness of the time and the relics of medievalism in early modern England affected his dramaturgy. It will focus on the ﬁrst half of Shakespeare’s career—from King John to Measure for Measure —because critical work on Christian and Catholic nuances in Shakespeare has tended to focus on the reconciliations and theophanies of the late plays and mature tragedies. The readings given here of these earlier plays show that from the beginning of his career

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Shakespeare uses biblical allusions, strengthened by staging which recalls liturgy or the mystery cycles, to explore and enrich the wider concerns of his drama. The third chapter establishes a previously unrecognized allusion to Easter, and the Easter sepulchre, in Romeo and Juliet. It argues that the religious echoes confer sanctity on the young couple and encourages the audience expectation that Juliet will rise from her tomb. The paschal motif strengthens the comedic impulse of the play, created through comic characters and the subject matter of young love, and so increases the powerful shock of the tragic ending. The fourth chapter argues that in another of Shakespeare’s early plays, King John, Christian imagery is likewise used to enhance the sympathetic portrayal of one of the protagonists, in a way fundamentally opposed to the Christic imagery of his sources. Shakespeare takes the crypto-religious quality which surrounds the king in his sources and transfers it on to Arthur. Instead of the proto-Protestant martyr king, it is now the innocent boy who is the locus for holiness in the play. The sympathy for the innocent suffering of Arthur is intensiﬁed by the powerful language and theatrical memory of the Passion, particularly in the blinding scene of Act 4 Scene 1. The biblical echoes interact with the political concerns of the play and form part of the wider conception of Arthur as the true king, unique to Shakespeare’s telling of the story. The ﬁfth and sixth chapters consider in greater depth Shakespeare’s engagement with the language of divine right. The ﬁfth chapter focuses on 1 Henry IV, contextualizing it within the religious iconography employed by the eponymous kings of Richard II and Henry V. This chapter argues for the Incarnational nuance of Hal’s self-fashioning as a Cheapside rogue turned royal prince. Hal stages his own redemption in Christian terms: a Lenten period of expectant, self-imposed exile is followed by a reconciliation between father and son through a decisive single combat with a rebellious enemy. The dramatic form of the liturgy, the biblical story, and the mystery plays, have been appropriated by Hal to invest his own history with its power. The ﬁnal chapter looks at Shakespeare’s ﬁrst play after the regime change of 1603 and considers how the fusion of divine and royalist imagery examined in King John and 1 Henry IV is affected by the advent of the new king. Measure for Measure is one of a cluster of plays performed before the king shortly after his accession which have a disguised protagonist. Angelo’s allusion to ‘power divine’, combined with the biblical title of the play, has led some critics and directors to

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posit a connection between the Duke and Christ. By exploring new biblical and mystery play sources for parts of the play—in particular the scenes between the Duke and Lucio and the reappearance of Claudio—this chapter both creates a ﬁrmer basis for this supposition and questions the praise implicit in some Christianized readings of the play. Divine aspects of the Duke’s enterprise may ﬂatter the king, but Shakespeare also suggests through them the impossibility of a perfect imitation of Christ in an earthly ruler. The play engages with and critiques contemporary conﬂations of human and divine law, and this chapter argues that central to this is the creation of a divine image of rule, which the Duke cannot sustain. In the portrayal of the Duke of Measure for Measure, as in the portrayal of Hal or King John, biblical echoes may appear to fall in with the language of power, but on closer scrutiny Shakespeare is not simply parroting the royalist panegyric of his age. The three very different rulers all attempt to project a holy image of themselves in these plays. Shakespeare, however, uses biblical language and analogues to suggest the fundamental dichotomy between earthly kingship and Christ’s rule. Biblical echoes which are present in Measure for Measure, King John, the ﬁrst tetralogy, and Romeo and Juliet are more complicated than has often been realized. The matrix of associations surrounding such an intensely analysed and almost overfamiliar text, ensure that biblical allusions are complex and multifaceted. Shakespearean drama explores and exploits this ambiguity to its utmost. Shakespeare draws on the emotional and dramatic power of biblical stories—familiar through Bible reading, liturgy, mystery cycles, and the fading visual culture of Catholicism—and assimilates it into his own secular drama. This book argues for the inﬂuence of both embodied and verbal religious forms on Shakespeare’s stagecraft, as elements in a drama which integrates word and image. The Reformation involved a tug of war over competing epistemologies. In medieval England, according to Walter Ong, ‘the culture as a whole assimilated the biblical word not verbatim but as an oral culture typically assimilates a message, thematically and formulaically, tribally rather than individually’.¹⁴ With the Reformation came the insistence on sola scriptura, the logocentrism of the reformer’s programme decisively empowered by print which made exact, almost unvarying texts possible. Typographical accuracy ¹⁴ Walter Ong, The Presence of the Word: Some Prolegomena for Cultural and Religious History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1971), 269.

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gave a strong foundation for a semantic system which relied on the written, printed word as the bearer of truth. This was in sharp contrast with the biblical drama of the mystery cycles which was less concerned with literal ﬁdelity to the words of Scripture than with emotional engagement with its patterns of fall and redemption, judgement and salvation.¹⁵ Shakespearean drama, however, unites these approaches. Shakespeare’s intimate knowledge of the biblical text, as the following chapters will demonstrate, allows him to allude to it in verbally speciﬁc ways. However, he also inherits from earlier English drama a thematic and formulaic interpretation of the Bible based on the emotional power of recurring patterns. This book aims to articulate the way that Shakespeare’s verbally sophisticated, embodied drama engaged with the religious culture in which both he and his works were embedded. ¹⁵ Ibid. 272; Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 28–9.

1 Drama and the Word: The Bible on the Early Modern Stage In Love’s Labour’s Lost Shakespeare presents on-stage a biblically illiterate audience. When presented with the Pageant of the Nine Worthies Berowne and his companions feign ignorance and affect to mistake Judas Maccabaeus for Judas Iscariot:  (as Judas) Judas I am—  A Judas?  Not Iscariot, sir. (As Judas) Judas I am, yclept Maccabaeus.  Judas Maccabaeus clipped is plain Judas.  A kissing traitor. (5. 2. 590–5)

Holofernes’s ‘Not Iscariot’ is itself a biblical quotation: John’s Gospel stresses that Judas son of James is speaking by stipulating: ‘Iudas said unto him (not Iscariot)’.¹ Dumaine’s slightly forced use of the word ‘clipped’ (meaning shortened) sets up Berowne’s pun on ‘clipped’ (meaning embraced). This joke indicates the currency of the knowledge that Judas betrayed Jesus with a kiss, as this kind of humour relies on being widely and immediately recognized. A more subtle biblical knowledge is assumed in Boyet’s ﬁnal line to Holofernes: ‘a light for Monsieur Judas! It grows dark; he may stumble’ (5. 2. 624). This alludes to the biblical passage about night having fallen when Judas left the Last Supper, a metaphor for the darkness within his heart: ‘assoone then as he had receiued the sop, he went immediatly out, and it was night’ (John 13: 30).² ¹ John 14: 22. All biblical references, unless otherwise stated, are to The Bible, Translated according to The Ebrew and Greeke, and conferred with the best translations in diuers Languages (London, 1594). This is the Geneva Bible, which is the version which Shakespeare seems to have known best. For the evidence of Shakespeare’s knowledge of different biblical versions, see below. ² Thomas Carter, Shakespeare and Holy Scripture: with the Version he used (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1905), 38. Most modern editors do not recognize the allusion.

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Many biblical allusions in Shakespeare are seamlessly integrated into the text and it is difﬁcult to tell whether he, or his audience, were aware of them; although as Shakespeare’s audience was part of only the second generation to whom an English Bible was accessible, its language would not yet have become simply proverbial.³ Passages such as this, however, where jokes and puns would make no sense without the biblical context, show Shakespeare consciously using biblical quotation and holding up biblical illiteracy—confusing Judas Maccabaeus with Judas Iscariot—as something which can destroy theatrical presentation. Judas’s kiss was proverbial, but the joke about his exit into darkness at the Last Supper suggests that Shakespeare expected his audience to recognize allusions even to relatively obscure parts of biblical stories.⁴ Shakespeare can stage biblically learned spectators feigning ignorance in his comedy precisely because he knows that most of his audience will catch the references and laugh at the jokes. Shakespeare’s audience not only knew the Bible, but could be relied on to bring their knowledge to what they saw on the stage.⁵ The Bible was a unique resource for early modern playwrights as, unlike the classics or even the chronicle histories, it was known by the vast majority of their audience. Church attendance was compulsory in Elizabethan England and every person who did not attend their parish church each Sunday and on holy days had to pay a ﬁne of twelve pence for every abstention. The increasing fear of Catholicism later in Elizabeth’s reign led to the ﬁnes being increased, and legislation in 1581 imposed the immense penalty of twenty pounds a month for those absenting themselves from church.⁶ The documentary evidence suggests ³ Richmond Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge and the Use of the Book of Common Prayer as Exempliﬁed in the Plays of the First Folio (London: Macmillan, 1935), 41. ⁴ This passage in John 13 was also used by Shakespeare in Macbeth, when Macbeth leaves the supper table at which Duncan, the master he intends to betray and the man he intends to murder, is eating his last meal. On leaving Duncan, Macbeth’s words (‘if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well | It were done quickly’ (1. 7. 1–2) ) recall Jesus’ words to Judas at the Last Supper: ‘that thou doest, doe quickely’ (John 13: 27). See Roy Walker, The Time is Free: A Study of Macbeth (London: Andrew Dakers, 1946), 53–5. ⁵ For more on this argument, see Harold Fisch, The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton and Blake: A Comparative Study (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17; Gerald M. Pinciss, Forbidden Matter: Religion in the Drama of Shakespeare and His Contemporaries (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 15–16. ⁶ Frere, Visitation Articles, iii. 168; William Page, ed., Warwick in The Victoria History of the Counties of England (London: Archibald Constable, 1908), ii. 37.

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that the majority of English people not only attended church but also partook in its central rites: there was near universal baptism and, at Easter at least, most also received communion.⁷ Religious conformity was not left to the individual conscience, but imposed by the order of law, and legislation was likewise passed requiring all heads of families to instruct their children in the catechism and principles of religion.⁸ Recent historical research in the ﬁeld of late Elizabethan and early Jacobean popular religion has suggested that this programme of reform was to a large extent successful and most people’s beliefs could be characterized as ‘unspectacular orthodoxy’.⁹ Protestantism was a religion of the Word, but this did not mean that the illiterate were exempt from the drive towards religious uniformity. The religious literacy of Shakespeare’s audience—their ability to recognize allusions to the Bible or Christian ideas in his work—has a complex relationship with actual literacy. Protestant evangelism in post-Reformation England championed educational reform and even the most conservative estimates suggest that it was not only the noblemen in Shakespeare’s audience who could read and write. According to David Cressy’s seminal study, the overwhelming majority of London tradesmen could sign their name by the early seventeenth century, but even this has been widely regarded as a ‘spectacular underestimate’ of reading ability in the period.¹⁰ Those who could read would have been familiar with basic Christian tenets from their infancy: they learnt from hornbooks inscribed with the Lord’s Prayer and their earliest schooling was based on Bible ⁷ Martin Ingram, ‘From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Culture in England, 1540–1690’, in Tim Harris, ed., Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1995), 110; J. P. Boulton, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion: The Administration of Holy Communion in Late Elizabethan and Early Stuart London’, The London Journal 10/2 (1984): 137; Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 212. ⁸ Ivy Pinchbeck and Margaret Hewitt, in Children in English Society, i. From Tudor Times to the Eighteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 260. ⁹ The phrase is from Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 157/0–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 94, 123. ¹⁰ David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 146–7; Margaret Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy: The Reading and Writing Experiences of the Humblest Seventeenth-Century Spiritual Autobiographers’, Social History 4/3 (1979): 407–35; Keith Thomas, ‘The Meaning of Literacy in Early Modern England’, in Gerd Baumann, ed., The Written Word: Literacy in Transition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 103.

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reading.¹¹ But even complete illiteracy was compatible with reasonably sophisticated religious knowledge. In addition to compulsory church attendance, crowds of people ﬂocked to public sermons and preaching was a large part of the appeal of Protestantism in a semi-literate culture.¹² William Prynne angrily proclaimed that there was ‘no Analogie betweene Preachers and Players, Sermons and Playes, Theaters and Churches’, but it seems that he was ﬁghting against a public who enjoyed both forms of entertainment and instruction. The substantial audience overlap for sermons and plays meant that, as Bryan Crockett has suggested, ‘preachers could assume a high degree of receptivity to oral performance, as the playwrights could assume their audiences’ tendency to cast their experiences is religious terms’.¹³ Catechisms were also an essential form of religious instruction for those who could not read, and children, servants, and apprentices were sent to church on Sundays, an hour before the evening service began, to be catechized by the priest. Catechisms were immensely popular; it has been estimated that by the early seventeenth century there were over one million catechisms in circulation in a population of about four million.¹⁴ Catechisms with titles such as A breefe Catechisme so necessarie and easie to be learned euen of the symple sort (1576), or A Catechisme, or short kind of Instruction, whereby to teach children and the Ignoravnter sort (1588), indicate that the authors of these aphoristic texts had an illiterate or semi-literate market in mind. Many introductory epistles stressed the duty of the buyer to ‘instruct your children and servants in this Catechisme’ and Thomas Sparke and John Seddon’s catechism details how the literate members of a household could teach the illiterate by reading and explaining more complex concepts to them. Such a vision may seem implausibly idealistic, ¹¹ Margaret Spufford, ‘ ‘‘I bought me a primer’’, or, ‘‘How godly were the multitude?’’: The Basic Religious Concepts of Those Who Could Read in the Seventeenth Century’, in Spufford, ed., The World of Rural Dissenters, 1520–1725 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 72–3, 85; Spufford, ‘First Steps in Literacy’, 410–11. ¹² Collinson, Religion of Protestants, 243–5, 257–64. ¹³ William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), 934; Bryan Crockett, The Play of Paradox: Stage and Sermon in Renaissance England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 7. See also Martha Tuck Rozett, The Doctrine of Election and the Emergence of Elizabethan Tragedy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 15 ff.; Jeffrey Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe: Church, Nation, and Theater in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 5–6. ¹⁴ Ian Green, The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530– 1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 102–6; Spufford, ‘ ‘‘I bought me a primer’’ ’, 73.

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but Lady Margaret Hoby’s diary gives evidence of how, in godly households at least, servants were read to from the Bible and involved in religious discussions. The preface to Eusebius Paget’s immensely popular catechism Short questions and answeares (1584) claims: ‘in foure monethes space, I have seene these principles and aunsweres, learned by Gentelmen, Yeomen, Horskeeperes, Shepheardes, Cartars, Mylkemaydes, Kitchenboyes, & al in that houshold (where these orders were observed)’.¹⁵ There were also less didactic means of religious instruction open to those on the margins of literacy, such as the singing of psalms. The popularity of this pastime is shown not only by the many references to it (such as Falstaff ’s quip: ‘I would I were a weaver—I could sing psalms or anything’ (1 Henry IV, 2. 5. 132–3) ) but also by the staggering 124 editions of Sternhold and Hopkins’s Psalms in English Meter which were printed (1583–1608).¹⁶ The visual culture of pre-Reformation England had also not entirely disappeared, and had to some extent been appropriated by the lurid pictures in Foxe’s Actes and Monuments, which was the only major European reformed martyrology to be illustrated.¹⁷ Pictures helped to sell books at both ends of the market, and ballads and pamphlets were often illustrated with didactic images, in a similar manner to Foxe’s lavish folio. Tessa Watt’s excellent study of cheap print in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries has argued that the huge trade in ballads, broadsides, and chapbooks illustrates the ¹⁵ Stephen Denison, A Compendious Catechisme: Wherein are brieﬂy expounded, the Apostles Creed, the ten commandements and the Lords prayer, together with other fundamentall points of Christian Religion, very necessary for children and servantes to learne, before they go to the holy communion (London, 1632), A3r ; Thomas Sparke and John Seddon, A Catechisme, or short kind of Instruction, whereby to teach children and the Ignoraunter sort, the Christian Religion (Oxford, 1588), A3v –4r ; The Private Life of an Elizabethan Lady: The Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby 1599–1605, ed. Joanne Moody (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 3, 24, 35, 38–9, 48, 144; Eusebius Paget, Short questions and answeares, contayning the Summe of Christian Religion (London, 1584), A3r−v . This latter catechism went through at least nineteen editions between 1579 and 1639. ¹⁶ Peter Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 388. For contemporary witness to psalm-singing in the period see Nicolas Bownde, The Doctrine of the Sabbath, Plainely layde forth, and soundly proued by testimonies both of holy Scripture, and also of olde and newe ecclesiasticall writers (London, 1595), Iir−v ; Diary of Lady Margaret Hoby, 38. ¹⁷ For the importance and popularity of Foxe’s illustrations see Andrew Pettegree, ‘Illustrating the Book: A Protestant Dilemma’, in Christopher Highley and John N. King, eds., John Foxe and his World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 133–44.

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piety of ordinary people, including those on the fringes of literacy.¹⁸ The prevalence of cheap religious print, catechizing, sermons, Bible reading, and churchgoing ensured that even the illiterate were familiar with basic religious concepts and Bible stories. At the beginning of the Reformation, when illiteracy was rife, the stage itself was enlisted as a means for promulgating the Gospel. Foxe even classed the theatre with sermons and books as a didactic tool, writing that ‘plaiers, Printers, Preachers’ were ‘a triple bulwarke against the triple crowne of the Pope’.¹⁹ Protestants such as Martin Bucer, John Bale, and Foxe embraced the didactic potential of theatre. Early in the English Reformation Bucer, writing for the young Edward VI, described how Scripture could be used as a source for the stage: The Scriptures everywhere offer an abundant supply of material for tragedies, in almost all the stories of the holy patriarchs, kings, prophets, apostles, from the time of Adam, the ﬁrst parent of mankind. For these stories are ﬁlled with divine and heroic personages, emotions, customs, actions and also events which turned out contrary to what was expected, which Aristotle calls a reversal.20

Theodore de B`eze himself dramatized the sacriﬁce of Isaac and his play was a phenomenal success, going into ten editions in the sixteenth century and translated into Italian, Latin, and English.²¹ In the early Reformation period there were new plays written in England on New Testament subjects such as Grimald’s Christus Redivivus (1543) and Foxe’s Christus Triumphans (1556).²² In the 1530s John Bale set to work to write a series of biblical plays which were presumably meant to be a puriﬁed form of the mystery cycles, although the plays that survive show how differently the same stories could be dramatized by a Protestant playwright. In Bale’s God’s Promises (1538), for example, the ¹⁸ Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 322–3. Cf. Peter Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature: Cheap Print, Protestantism and Murder in Early Seventeenth Century England’, in Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake, eds., Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 277. ¹⁹ John Foxe, Actes and Monuments […] (London, 1583), ii. 1348. ²⁰ Martin Bucer, De Regno Christi (1550) in Melanchthon and Bucer, ed. Wilhelm Pauck (London: SCM, 1969), 51. ²¹ Theodore de B`eze, A Tragedie of Abrahams Sacriﬁce, Written in french by Theodore Beza, and translated into Inglish, by A[rthur] G[olding] (London, 1577); O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 104. ²² For records of other new plays on the New Testament (up to 1561), see Alfred Harbage, Annals of English Drama 975–1700: An Analytical Record of all Plays, Extant or Lost, Chronologically Arranged and Indexed by Authors, Titles, Dramatic Companies &c, edn. Sylvia Stoler Wagonheim, 3rd edn. (London: Routledge, 1989), 4–38.

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traditional cycle play about the prophecies of Christ’s birth is reworked so that it centres on the eradication of idolatry. From the Elizabethan period however, Protestant biblical theatre began to encounter censorship. Elizabeth issued a proclamation early in her reign prohibiting unlicensed interludes (16 May 1559) which stated that nothing could be played: ‘Wherein either matters of religion or of the governance of the estate of the commonweale shall be handled or treated, being no meet matters to be written or treated upon, but by men of authority, learning and wisdom, nor to be handled before any audience, but of grave and discreet persons.’²³ What this proclamation (penned by the Queen herself) suggests is that religious theatre was becoming a victim of its own success. The Latin plays, such as those by Grimald and Foxe were acceptable to those in authority; English biblical drama performed for a large, uneducated audience was not. The popularity of biblically based drama is evident from the vigorous tradition of scriptural theatre which was sustained into the late Elizabethan period, despite the censorship and censoriousness it provoked. The next chapter will look at the traditional biblical theatre of the mystery plays, but Bale was not the only Protestant to follow their lead. There is some evidence of Protestant staging of the Passion itself in Elizabeth’s reign. Thomas Beard’s Theatre of God’s Judgements (1597) notes God’s vengeance on what was presumably a university play about the Cruciﬁxion: In the Vniversity of Oxford the history of Christ was also played, and cruelly punished, and that not many yeares since: for he that bore the person of Christ, the Lord struck him with such a giddinesse of spirit and brain, that he became mad forthwith, crying when he was in his best humour, That God had laid this judgment upon him for playing Christ.24

There is also a record of a new Passion play being staged by Thomas Ashton, the Protestant headmaster of Shrewsbury school, who fostered the dramatic talents of his students (among them Philip Sidney and Fulke Greville) with regular performances. A rather damaged document records that in 1560 the school performed ‘Mr Ashton’s ﬁrst playe playe [sic] vpon the passion of Christe’. Thomas Ashton’s productions ²³ Tudor Royal Proclamations, ed. Paul L. Hughes and James F. Larkin (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1964–9), ii. 115. ²⁴ Thomas Beard, The Theatre of Gods Judgements […], 4th edn. (London, 1648), 147.

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appear to have been mounted to great applause: the local poet Thomas Churchyard estimates they were seen by twenty thousand spectators and Queen Elizabeth herself attempted to see his play of Julian the Apostate in 1565–6.²⁵ Although Ashton’s play is a strikingly late example of a new Passion play, there were a large number of plays on wider biblical themes written and performed at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign, such as Lewis Wager’s Life and Repentaunce of Marie Magdalene (1566–7), which likewise portrayed Jesus on the stage. Many of the plays—such as A Pretie new Enterlude both pithie & pleasaunt of the Story of Kyng Daryus, Beinge taken out of the third and fourth Chapter of the thyrd booke of Edras (printed 1565, with a second edition in 1577)—proudly declared their biblical source. After the 1560s biblical drama became less common, but four biblical plays printed between the opening of the Theatre and the end of Elizabeth’s reign are extant: Theodore de B`eze’s Abraham’s Sacriﬁce (1577), Thomas Garter’s The Most Virtuous and Godly Susanna (1578), Thomas Lodge and Robert Greene’s A Looking-Glasse for London and England (1594), and George Peele’s The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe (entered 1594, published 1599). However, there is evidence that many similar plays have been lost. Henslowe’s diary, for example, records performances for numerous biblical plays including Abraham and Lot (1594), Hester and Asseuerus (1594), Nebuchadnezzer (1596–7), William Haughton, William Birde, and Samuel Rowley’s Judas (1602), Pontius Pilate (1602), Anthony Munday and Thomas Dekker’s Jephthah (1602), Henry Chettle’s Tobias (1602), Samson (1602), and Samuel Rowley’s Joshua (1602).²⁶ Such plays show that the theatregoing public was enthusiastic about watching biblical subjects on their stage, and in some cases also indicate the audience’s prior familiarity with such stories. In George Peele’s ²⁵ J. Alan B. Somerset, ed., Shropshire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), i. 201; Katherine Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1991), 31. For the evidence as to whether this really was a Passion play, see Patrick Collinson, ‘The Shearman’s Tree and the Preacher: The Strange Death of Merry England in Shrewsbury and Beyond’, in Patrick Collinson and John Craig, eds., The Reformation in English Towns, 1500–1640 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 218; O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 101 n. 24. ²⁶ Henslowe’s Diary, ed. Walter W. Greg (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904), i. 8v –9r , 25v –26r , 69v , 95r –96r , 105v –106v , 108r ; Lily B. Campbell, Divine Poetry and Drama in Sixteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1959), 240–2.

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The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, for example, a popular and long-running play, dramatic irony depends on the audience’s knowledge of the story.²⁷ The play is littered with references to Absalom’s hair, and the anticipatory dread of this motif only works if the audience knows how he dies. There is also a presentiment of his death after his ﬁrst disobedience when he is reconciled to his father with the words: ‘ah Absalon my sonne, ah my sonne Absolon’. These words echo David’s lament over his son’s death in 2 Samuel, and they reappear in the play after Absalom has died: ‘O Absalon, Absalon, O my sonne, my sonne, | Would God that I had died for Absalon.’²⁸ The fame of these mourning words is conﬁrmed by Sidney’s use of them in the New Arcadia. When Philoclea believes Pamela to be dead she cries: ‘Pamela, my sister, my sister, Pamela, woe is me for thee, I would I died for thee.’²⁹ The pre-echo of the phrase before Absalom’s death in David and Bethsabe is evidence that the theatre audience were expected to be scripturally literate, just as the more educated audience for Sidney’s Arcadia was.³⁰ There were also plays which incorporated biblical stories and themes with a certain degree of theological sophistication. The parable of the prodigal son, for example, which was ubiquitous in Elizabethan comedy from Nice Wanton (1550) through to The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1586), was combined with Roman comedy to create a new and relatively sophisticated theological form. The integration creates a distinctively Christian theme: the old man who needs to be subdued is not the Senex of Roman comedy, but the internalized ‘old man’ of ²⁷ Its popularity is suggested by the title page, which declares ‘As it hath ben diuers times plaied in the stage’, and by the fact that fourteen copies of the original quarto survive: Murray Roston, Biblical Drama in England: From the Middle Ages to the Present Day (London: Faber & Faber, 1968), 100. Henslowe’s diary records a payment in October 1602 for the Earl of Worcester’s men ‘pd for poleyes & worckmanshipp for to hange absolome … xiiijd ’, which either alludes to a new play about Absalom or indicates the longevity of Peele’s play: Henslowe’s Diary, i. 116v . ²⁸ George Peele, The Love of King David and Fair Bethsabe, ed. W.W. Greg (Oxford: The Malone Society Reprints, 1912), ll. 987, 1925–8. The words are from 2 Samuel 18: 33: ‘O my sonne Absalom, my sonne, my sonne Absalom: woulde God I had dyed for thee.’ ²⁹ Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 558. ³⁰ The ﬁrst and chief audience for both versions of the Arcadia was Sidney’s sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke: Duncan-Jones, Sir Philip Sidney, 143, 192. Professor Duncan-Jones also draws attention to the more strongly charged religious language of the revised version (in which this phrase is found), ibid. 263.

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Ephesians.³¹ More solidly Protestant drama, such as the anonymous Jacob and Esau (1568), performed a protracted staging of reformed dogma, in this case the doctrine of election and reprobation: But before Jacob and Esau yet borne were, Or had eyther done good, or yll perpetrate: As the prophete Malachie and Paule witnesse beare, Jacob was chosen, and Esau reprobate: Jacob I loue (sayde God) and Esau I hate. For it is not (sayth Paule) in mans renuing or will, But in Gods mercy who choseth whome he will.³²

Protestant doctrine, however, might inﬂuence drama in more subtle ways. Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, for example, have suggested that the Queen’s Men, with their connections with Leicester and Walsingham, and their drama which insisted on ‘truth’ and ‘plainness’, were spreading Protestant ideology in scarcely perceptible ways as they toured throughout the country.³³ It is likewise possible that the Queen’s Men were involved in the most contentious performance of theological controversy on the Elizabethan stage, and that this involvement led to their decline as a leading London company.³⁴ The Martin Marprelate scandal raged from 1588 to 1590 and when more scholarly attempts to answer his anti-episcopal satire had failed, the ecclesiastical authorities employed the prose wits of the age to quash him. Nashe makes it clear that the anti-Martinists brought the dispute into the theatre: ‘Me thought Vetus Comaedia beganne to pricke him at London in the right vaine, when shee brought foorth Divinitie wyth a scratcht face, holding her hart as if she were sicke, because Martin would have forced her.’³⁵ Graphic descriptions of scenes ³¹ Ervin Beck, ‘Terence Improved: The Paradigm of the Prodigal Son in English Renaissance Drama’, Renaissance Drama 6 (1973): 107–22. See also Alan R. Young, The English Prodigal Son Plays: A Theatrical Fashion of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Salzburg: Salzburg University Press, 1979), 121. Both Young and Beck note the importance of the prodigal son plot for many Shakespearean plays. ³² Jacob and Esau, ed. John Crow and F. P. Wilson (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1956), ll. 8–14. For other predestinarian sections in the play, see ll. 150–1, 230–1, 447–50, 891, 981, 1471–8, 1780–91, 1801–19. ³³ Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean, The Queen’s Men and Their Plays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), ch. 2. ³⁴ Ibid. 49–55. ³⁵ The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (London: A. H. Bullen, 1904–10), i. 92. For a discussion of the connection of the Marprelate controversy with the stage see Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s

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in which Martin has been wormed, lanced, bled, whipped, and beaten are frequently detailed in the anti-Martin tracts to show how he has been ‘made a Maygame vpon the Stage’. The scurrilous anti-Martin plays are an explicit example of how theological debate could contribute directly to popular drama. They were played out on the stage of the Theatre at the start of Shakespeare’s career and there is evidence that he was himself inﬂuenced by the stage Martin.³⁶ This particularly vivid example of the alliance between theology and the theatre, however, was also probably directly responsible for the increased censorship which was to force playwrights to approach religious subjects in less open ways. In 1589 a Censorship Commission was created to ‘stryke oute or reforme suche partes and matters as they shall fynd unfytt and undecent to be handled in playes, both for Divinitie and State’.³⁷ This hardening of the law against biblical theatre was replaced by a blanket ban in 1606 when the Act to restrain the Abuses of Players made it illegal in ‘any Stage play, Interlude, Shewe, Maygame, or Pageant jestingly or prophanely speake or use the holy Name of God or of Christ Jesus, or of the Holy Ghoste or of the Trinitie’.³⁸ The theatre reacted by using the word ‘Jove’ as a signiﬁer for God, but authorities recognized that pagan religion was often used to mask profanity. One piece of evidence for this comes from the and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 154, 159, 165–9; Kristen Poole, ‘Facing Puritanism: Falstaff, Martin Marprelate and the Grotesque Puritan’, in Ronald Knowles, ed., Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin (London: Macmillan, 1998), 97–122; Robert Hornback, ‘Staging Puritanism in the Early 1590s: The Carnivalesque Rebellious Clown as Anti-Puritan Stereotype’, Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et R´eforme 24/3 (2000): 31–67; Ritchie D. Kendall, The Drama of Dissent: The Radical Poetics of Nonconformity, 1380–1590 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 176–87. ³⁶ For the inﬂuence of Martin on the creation of Falstaff, see below, ch. 5. Robert Hornback has argued that other Shakespearean characters (such as Jack Cade) also show the inﬂuence of the Marprelate plays: Hornback, ‘Staging Puritanism’, 44–50. ³⁷ Acts of the Privy Council of England, AD 1589–90, ed. John Roche Dasent (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Ofﬁce, 1890–1964), xviii. 215. See also Richard Dutton, ‘Censorship’, in John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan, eds., A New History of Early English Drama (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 295. ³⁸ E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1923), iv. 338–9. See also Gary Taylor, ‘Swounds Revisited: Theatrical, Editorial, and Literary Expurgation’, in Gary Taylor and John Jowett, eds., Shakespeare Reshaped 1606–1623 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 51–106.

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astonishing ﬁne incurred by the players of the Fortune for what was presumably a parody of Laudian worship: Thursday last [2 May 1639] the players of the Fortune were ﬁned £1,000 for setting up an altar, a bason, and two candlesticks, and bowing down before it upon the stage, and although they allege it was an old play revived, and an altar to the heathen gods, yet it was apparent that this play was revived on purpose in contempt of the ceremonies of the Church.39

The exploitation of pagan rites, so common in Shakespeare’s late plays, is only one example of the way in which censorship, through outlawing openly Christian drama, unintentionally promoted a subtle and sophisticated engagement with biblical language and Christian ideas in ostensibly secular plays. The censorship of the early 1590s shows that the authorities were turning away from the overtly Christian drama, popular in the Edwardian and early Elizabethan periods, and becoming unwilling to employ theatrical companies, such as the Queen’s Men, for distinctively Protestant aims. Annabel Patterson has written on the enabling aspect of censorship in this period, the way in which it led writers to exploit the ‘functional ambiguity’ of language.⁴⁰ The censorship of the 1590s may have indirectly fostered the complex and fruitful engagement with biblical language and stories which we ﬁnd emerging in Elizabethan drama at precisely this time. Shakespeare inherited a language enriched by a vigorous tradition of biblical translation in the decades before his birth and throughout his lifetime.⁴¹ His own knowledge of the Bible was excellent. It has long been recognized that Shakespeare was familiar with a range of biblical versions, in particular the Bishops’ Bible (1568) and Geneva Bible ³⁹ William Douglas Hamilton, ed., Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of Charles 1. 1639 (London: Longman & Co., Trubner & Co., 1873), clxx. 140. See also Gerald Eades Bentley, The Profession of a Dramatist in Shakespeare’s Time: 1590–1642 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 179–81; E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare: A Study of Facts and Problems (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1930/1988), i. 240–1. ⁴⁰ Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), 18 and passim. ⁴¹ For connections between Shakespeare’s and Tyndale’s language see David Daniell, ‘Shakespeare and the Protestant Mind’, Shakespeare Survey 54 (2001): 5–7; Brian Cummings, ‘Hamlet’s Luck: Shakespeare and the Sixteenth-century Bible’ (Tyndale Society IX Annual Lecture, Oxford, October 2003).

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(1560).⁴² The Bishops’ Bible replaced the Great Bible as the ofﬁcial Bible of the English Church, and in 1571 Convocation decreed that a copy should be placed in every cathedral, and, where possible, in every church. This Bible was predominantly printed as a lavish folio, too expensive for most people to own as their private copy. It is a reasonable hypothesis therefore, that Shakespeare’s allusions to the Bishops’ version are drawn primarily from a memory of what he heard in church. The Geneva Bible by contrast was printed in highly popular quarto, octaro, and duodecimo formats. These editions numbered the verses and divided them into separate paragraphs (which made for easier reference and quotation) and had extensive explanatory notes. The Geneva version was also the most scholarly translation of any sixteenth-century Bible, and was popular among not only the godly but with such mainstream Church of England divines as Richard Hooker and Lancelot Andrewes. In 1576 a new version of the Geneva New Testament was printed, with notes based on those by Theodore de B`eze, which had been translated by Laurence Tomson. The Tomson New Testament swiftly became extremely popular. The period covered by this book (1592–1604) saw the printing of ﬁfty editions of the Bible: two Bishops’ Bibles, ﬁve Bishops’ New Testaments, twenty-two Geneva Bibles, twelve Tomson New Testaments, and nineteen composite Geneva–Tomson Bibles, the latter composed of the Geneva Old Testament and the Tomson New Testament bound together.⁴³ As the Geneva Bible was not read in church it seems likely that Shakespeare’s knowledge of this biblical translation came primarily from his own reading. The hypothesis that Shakespeare chose to read the Bible suggests a commitment to its study which might appear surprising in view of the apparently secular nature of his entire output (apart from sonnet 146). Naseeb Shaheen has shown, however, that the extent of Shakespeare’s allusions to parts of the Bible not read in church indicates that Shakespeare’s private reading of the Bible was, in fact, the main source of his comprehensive knowledge of it.⁴⁴ Shakespeare also alludes to the Genevan annotations, a part of the Bible ⁴² See Noble, Shakespeare’s Biblical Knowledge, 64–76; Naseeb Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1999), 17–50. ⁴³ See A. S. Herbert, T. H. Darlow, and H. F. Moule, eds., Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961 (London: The British and Foreign Bible Society, 1968), 106–23. ⁴⁴ Naseeb Shaheen, ‘Shakespeare’s Knowledge of the Bible—How Acquired’, Shakespeare Studies 20 (1988): 210–12.

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that would never have been read out in church or passed into proverbial language.⁴⁵ Shakespeare uses biblical quotation throughout his career, and often (particularly in his comedies) the allusion functions simply as a brief joke. For example, Pistol’s description of Falstaff’s sexual appetite—‘He woos both high and low, both rich and poor, | Both young and old, one with another’ (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2. 1. 92–93)—is much funnier when it is recognized that Falstaff’s indiscriminate lust is worded so as to recall the universality of the Psalmist’s message: ‘As wel lowe as high, riche and poore, one with another’ (Psalm 49: 2).⁴⁶ Yet even where the echo is meant to make the audience laugh it can have a deeper relation with the action of the play. In The Merchant of Venice the famous story of Jacob’s gulling of his blind father Isaac is recalled by the clowning in which Blind Old Gobbo is unable to recognize his son. Jacob’s trickery in imitating the hairiness of Esau is alluded to and inverted when Lancelot Gobbo, trying to help his father recognize him, has Old Gobbo pat his head. The blind father, however, thinking he is touching his child’s face, wonders whether he has been growing a beard lately (2. 2). It is a moment of enjoyable slapstick, but it also brings forward a biblical story which has profound relevance for the main plot. An impeccably Pauline understanding of the Jacob and Esau story saw it as an analogue of the transfer of God’s favour away from his ﬁrstborn (Esau or the Jews) to his younger children (Jacob or the Christians).⁴⁷ The apparently irrelevant comic fooling about hairy faces has an important and subtle connection with the relations between Jews and Christians in the main plot.⁴⁸ In the early modern period the Bible was a uniquely holy text, and the reverence with which it was treated, and the layers of interpretation which it was subjected to, meant that biblical language carried a ⁴⁵ See Carter, Shakespeare and Holy Scripture, 15; R. A. L. Burnet, ‘Shakespeare and the Marginalia of the Geneva Bible’, Notes & Queries,  26/2 (1979): 113–14; R. A. L. Burnet, ‘Some Echoes of the Genevan Bible in Shakespeare and Milton’, Notes & Queries,  27/2 (1980): 179–81; Roger Stritmatter, ‘The Inﬂuence of a Genevan Note from Romans 7:19 on Shakespeare’s Sonnet 151’, Notes & Queries,  44/4 (1997): 514–16; Roger Stritmatter, ‘By Providence Divine: Shakespeare’s Awareness of Some Genevan Marginal Notes of I Samuel’, Notes & Queries,  47/1 (2000): 97–100. ⁴⁶ James Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions in Marlowe and Shakespeare (Gainesville, Fla.: University of Florida Monographs, 1966), 32. ⁴⁷ See Romans 9; Thomas Sutton, Englands First and Second Summons (London: John Norton, 1633), 172–3. ⁴⁸ See Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 120–4.

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fund of powerful associations. This wider interpretative framework means that single biblical phrases often resonate beyond the immediate theatrical moment in Shakespeare’s dramaturgy. For example, Hamlet’s mention of Jephthah—‘O Jephthah, judge of Israel, what a treasure hadst thou!’ (2. 2. 403)—is clearly a condemnation of Polonius’s treatment of Ophelia.⁴⁹ However, the story was also read as a ﬁat against swearing, and James Black has argued that the allusion to Jephthah indicates that Hamlet is still subconsciously turning over his promise to his father’s ghost.⁵⁰ The connective habit of mind central to Hamlet’s character is illuminated by the fact that the example of parental cruelty with which he chooses to condemn Polonius was at the centre of contemporary arguments about the moral valency of swearing. Likewise, the brief echo of Psalm 137 in Mowbray’s lament of exile (Richard II, 1. 3. 154–7) harnesses the nationalistic fervour of the Psalm, and the allusion resonates with the play’s larger concerns with nationhood.⁵¹ In Macbeth the analogy between the main plot and the Old Testament story of Elisha and Hazael seems to shed light on what Susan Snyder calls ‘the mystiﬁcations of responsibility’ which are crucial to the play.⁵² The story (2 Kings 8: 7–15) shares with Macbeth the combination of riddling prophecy and regicide, and the biblical analogue supports a reading of Shakespeare’s tragedy in which the protagonist is in thrall to his own susceptibility to evil rather than the power of external agencies. It is also generally recognized that the biblical allusions in King Lear have a profound relation to the central concerns of the play. Numerous critics have argued that King Lear is comparable in its grandeur of conception ⁴⁹ For more on Jephthah in Renaissance drama, see Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1993), 475–7; Debora Kuller Shuger, The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacriﬁce and Subjectivity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 134–60. ⁵⁰ James Black, ‘Hamlet’s Vows’, Renaissance and Reformation 2/1 (1978): 40–1; James Black, Ediﬁed by the Margent: Shakespeare and the Bible: An Inaugural Professorial Lecture in the Faculty of Humanities, University of Calgary (Calgary: Faculty of Humanities, 1979), 11–12. ⁵¹ Hannibal Hamlin, ‘Psalm Culture in the English Renaissance: Readings of Psalm 137 by Shakespeare, Spenser, Milton and Others’, Renaissance Quarterly 55 (2002): 246–7. The nationalistic agenda of the Psalm was also recognized by John Awdely in his jingoistic ballad against ‘all Traytours, Rebels, and papisticall enemies’ which stipulated ‘syng this after the tune of the cxxxvij Psalme’: Claude M. Simpson, The British Broadside Ballad and its Music (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1966), 585. ⁵² Susan Snyder, ‘Theology as Tragedy in Macbeth’, Christianity and Literature 43/3–4 (1994): 289–300.

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and execution, and its treatment of suffering and doubt, with the Book of Job.⁵³ The currency and status of the Bible made it a uniquely powerful source, and a brief allusion to a biblical story could open up a fund of associations, ambiguities, and analogues. The biblical plays of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries are evidence that religious theatre remained popular with audiences who knew the Bible and could be expected to connect their knowledge with what they saw on the stage. Censorship, however, curtailed the overt expression of biblical stories and language and forced playwrights to approach this popular subject in subtler and more complex ways. This sublimation of the Bible reached its zenith in Shakespeare, who harnesses the power of biblical language and Christian stories and uses them metonymically to express, echo, and comment upon central themes, ideas, and emotions within the plays. ⁵³ See e.g. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths: Poetry and Belief from the Bible to the Present (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989), 19; Robert Pack, The Long View: Essays on the Discipline of Hope and Poetic Craft (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 251–76; Jan Kott, Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taborski (Bristol: Methuen, 1965/1986), 100–33; Peter Milward, Biblical Inﬂuences in Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 156–7, 163, 167, 173–4, 177–80, 185, 187, 189, 191, 197; Kenneth Muir, King Lear: Critical Essays (London: Garland, 1984), 289–90; Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 59–78. In this particular case there is also an intriguing connection in form, for Job was approached by some sixteenth-century exegetes as a tragedy: see Theodore de B`eze, Iob expounded by Theodore Beza, partly in manner of a Commentary, partly in manner of a Paraphrase (London, 1589), A7r , A8r .

2 Shakespeare’s Incarnational Aesthetic: The Mystery Plays and Catholicism In the Elizabethan period Protestants and Catholics alike believed that the old faith persisted because people clung to the faith of their fathers. Protestants chose to satirize this behaviour as analogous to Jews who had refused to recognize the Messiah because he embodied a break with their past. Hugh Latimer argued that Jews ‘would folowe theyr forefathers (as our papistes are wonte to say)’ and over ﬁfty years later Thomas Aylesbury likewise suggested that a Jew was ‘somewhat popish loath to leaue the tradition of his fathers’.¹ This was not simply the belief of Protestant polemicists, but of Catholics too. Cecily Stonor, rebuked by judges for her recusancy in Oxford in 1581, believed that by remaining true to the Catholic church she was keeping faith with the religion of her upbringing: ‘I was born in such a time when Holy Mass was in great reverence, and brought up in the same Faith … I hold me still to that wherein I was born and bred’.² The 1576 proceedings of the Lord Mayor’s Court in York, which record the explanations recusants gave for their behaviour, repeatedly testify to the desire to remain, as Gregory Wilkinson expressed it, ‘in the faith that he was baptized in’. Isabel Porter declared that ‘she cometh not to the church because her conscience will not serve her, for things are not in the church as it hath been aforetime in her forefathers’ days’.³ In the twentieth century a number of historians were unwilling to believe that pre-Reformation Catholicism could be so persistent. ¹ Hugh Latimer, Certayn Godly Sermons […] (London, 1562), Sv ; Thomas Aylesbury, The Passion Sermon at Pauls-Crosse; Upon Good-Friday Last, Aprill 7.1626 (London, 1626), 13. ² Henry Clifford, The Life of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria (London: Burns & Oates, 1887), 38–9. ³ John Morris, The Troubles of Our Catholic Forefathers: Related by Themselves (Roehampton: James Stanley, 1872–7), iii. 249–50.

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A. G. Dickens formulated an inﬂuential distinction between residual Catholicism and that inspired by the Counter-Reformation, arguing that the conservative attachment to the old faith soon declined to be replaced by the dynamic Catholicism of the Jesuits and seminary priests: ‘Between survivalism and seminarism little or no connection existed; arduous proselytism, not the weight of tradition, accounted for the romanist revival’.⁴ However, the re-evalution of the strength of medieval Christianity has led likewise to a reappraisal of the continuity between pre- and post-Reformation Catholicism, and to a recognition of the accuracy of the contemporary understanding: ‘Separated English Catholicism was no novel creation of Continental missionaries, but a logical extension of its immemorial and Marian heritage: the recusant community which emerged into view a generation after the reign began neither wholly displaced nor was sharply distinct from the confused and uncoordinated collection of conservatives that was its predecessor’.⁵ The reassessment of Catholic belief in Elizabethan England has rightly stressed the importance of residual Catholicism, a Catholicism born out of affection for the church of people’s childhood—the faith of their fathers—which was strengthened, rather than created, by the missionary priests who arrived in the last quarter of the century. A certain amount of recent research has suggested that Shakespeare might be one of those who ‘somewhat popish’ was ‘loath to leaue the tradition of his fathers’. The evidence for Shakespeare’s actual father’s Catholicism has been eagerly championed by critics anxious to prove his son’s adherence to the old faith. There are two main pieces of evidence for John Shakespeare’s religious beliefs, the ﬁrst being that he was cited for recusancy, 25 September 1592. Appearance on a recusancy register proved that the offender was not a regular churchgoer, but did not prove that the reason for this non-attendance was religious ⁴ A. G. Dickens, ‘The First Stages of Romanist Recusancy in Yorkshire, 1560–1590’, The Yorkshire Archeaological Journal 35 (1941): 181. See also John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), 4, 106–7, 147–8; J. C. H. Aveling, The Handle and the Axe: The Catholic Recusants in England from Reformation to Emancipation (London: Blond & Briggs, 1976), 19, 49–50, 52, 60–1. ⁵ Walsham, Church Papists, 95. See also Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400—c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Christopher Haigh, ‘The Continuity of Catholicism in the English Reformation’, in Haigh, ed., The English Reformation Revised (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 176–208; Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1993), 251–67: J. J. Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 136–61.

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non-conformity.⁶ In John Shakespeare’s case the commissioners seem to have accepted an alternative explanation. Beside the list containing his name has been written ‘it is sayd that these laste nine, coom not to Churche for feare of processe for Debtte’. John Shakespeare’s ﬁnancial difﬁculties during the late 1570s are well documented: he sold off land, was exempted from payments to the council on which he served, and was unable to settle debts.⁷ The second piece of evidence which is used to support the belief that John Shakespeare’s recusancy was caused, or exacerbated, by doctrinal differences with the established church, is a document discovered in 1757 known as the Spiritual Last Will and Testament of John Shakespeare. If genuine, this would indeed prove that Shakespeare’s father, at least, ‘died a papist’ but there are a number of question marks surrounding it. When the document was shown to Malone he had immediate doubts about the handwriting, and after accepting it as genuine changed his mind and ﬁnally repudiated it. It has since disappeared so cannot be subjected to modern analysis.⁸ John Shakespeare conformed to the Church of England (his children were baptized in the parish church) but he may nonetheless have been some form of church papist. The primary relevance to Shakespeare studies of the new emphasis on Catholic continuity in Elizabethan England, however, lies not in its speciﬁc legacy to the playwright, but in its general legacy to his generation. The renewed realization that there was an organic continuity between medieval Christianity and the sixteenth-century Catholic community has brought forward an understanding that it was not only those who became recusants who retained an affection for the old ways. Elizabethan religious policy, by concerning itself with church attendance rather than the reception of the sacrament, was speciﬁcally formulated to enable and encourage those who preferred the old faith not to cut themselves off from their parish church. This successful fostering of conformity, rather than theological assent, renders ‘almost invisible an indeterminate number ⁶ However, recusancy often ran in families and the appearance of John Shakespeare’s granddaughter, Susanna, on a recusancy list (6 May 1606) makes the case for Catholicism in Shakespeare’s family highly plausible: Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 234–5. ⁷ Schoenbaum, William Shakespeare, 36–9. Some critics, however, have felt that debt is an insufﬁcient explanation for John Shakespeare’s withdrawal from public life at this point, and suggest that it may have been a convenient excuse when he was charged with Catholicism: Patrick Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (London: Hambledon, 1994), 250. ⁸ Ibid. 41–6. Its probable inauthenticity has recently been established by Robert Bearman, ‘John Shakespeare’s ‘‘Spiritual Testament’’: A Reappraisal’, Shakespeare Survey 56 (2003), 184–202.

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of silent sympathisers of the Old Faith, whose Catholicism was above all an attitude not an act’.⁹ This new historical perspective opens up a less sectarian understanding of the Catholic nuances in Shakespeare’s plays. The acknowledgement that there may be references to ‘creeping the cross’ in Troilus and Cressida, the Exultet in The Merchant of Venice, the sprinkling of holy water in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or the cloistered life in Twelfth Night need not involve us in the speculation that Shakespeare spent his youth in a recusant community in Lancashire or even, as Richard Wilson has suggested, that he considered training as missionary priest.¹⁰ They may be evidence of nothing more striking than that Shakespeare, in common with much of his audience, retained an affection for the old ways. Shakespeare’s plays are full of Catholic references but their subordination to the passion of his heroines makes it difﬁcult to read them as conclusive evidence for his own piety. Peter Milward, for example, argues that the Angelus, which was recited at morning, noon and night, is recalled when Imogen desires Posthumus: ‘At the sixth hour of morn, at noon, at midnight, | To encounter me with orisons, for then | I am in heaven for him’(1. 3. 32–4).¹¹ The slippage that matters here is not so much that the timing is wrong (the Angelus was said at 6 p.m. not midnight) or that this is not, as Milward claims, a parting message (rather a message that is never imparted (1. 3. 26–7) ), but that Imogen is not thinking about the Virgin, but about Posthumus. Through her prayers she hopes to encounter not Mary or God, but her beloved, whom she is ‘in heaven for’. Likewise, it has been argued that Rosalind’s description of Orlando’s kiss as ‘as full of sanctity as the touch of holy bread’ (As You Like It, 3. 4. 12–13), would have been ‘inconceivable to anyone with a Protestant upbringing’.¹² Nonetheless Shakespeare, as with the example from Cymbeline, is subjecting speciﬁcally Catholic practices (if ⁹ Walsham, Church Papists, 91; see also 11–12. ¹⁰ Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 26; Gary R. Grund, ‘The Fortunate Fall and Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice’, Studia Neophilologica 55 (1983): 154; Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 146–7; Anne Lecercle, ‘Country House, Catholicity and the Crypt(ic) in Twelfth Night’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 84–100. For the evidence that creeping the cross lived on in folk memory, see Ronald Hutton, ‘The English Reformation and the Evidence of Folklore’, Past and Present 148 (1995): 108–9. For the Lancashire hypothesis, see Honigmann, Shakespeare: The ‘Lost Years’. For the Douai hypothesis see Wilson, ‘Shakespeare and the Jesuits’. ¹¹ Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 26. ¹² F. W. Brownlow, ‘John Shakespeare’s Recusancy: New Light on an Old Document’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40 (1989): 190. In one of the most delightful pieces of

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‘holy bread’ is a reference to blessed bread rather than the eucharist) to an almost blasphemous pressure through the comparison.¹³ Richard Wilson describes Portia as one ‘who is accustomed to ‘‘stray about | By holy crosses, where she kneels and prays’’ for hours, accompanied by ‘‘None but a holy hermit and her maid’’ (5. 1. 30–4)’.¹⁴ But to search for the relevance of such images in the biography of the playwright, rather than their action within the play, is to blunt their subtlety. Wilson has softened the sharp edges of Portia’s piety, glossing over the fact that this picture is a ﬁction created to conceal Portia’s disguise as Balthasar. Portia has not been praying at wayside crosses ‘for happy wedlock hours’; she has not entrusted her nuptial bliss to God but has secured it through her own skill by winning the freedom of her husband’s friend and thus has ensured that Bassanio’s affection can centre exclusively on herself. Shakespeare subordinates Catholic imagery to the vagaries of his plots. In this he is comparable to many other 1590s writers of romantic poetry who used Catholic tropes freely, not with reverence, but with the knowledge that they were relics of a discarded religion. Helen Hackett argues that the 1590s saw a secularized Catholic revival, an occurrence which Greenblatt attributes to ‘the ﬁfty year effect’: a time in the wake of the ideological struggle in which the revolutionary generation are dying out and the survivors look back with a certain longing to the world that has been lost. Enough time has elapsed for Catholic terms to feel safe and have both a nostalgic appeal for the older generation, and novelty value for the younger.¹⁵ Hackett argues that Catholic tropes survived in both popular and literary culture as images with a colour and vibrancy which outlived their religious signiﬁcance. She concludes that for the Protestant sonneteer Barnaby Barnes, for example, Catholic imagery enabled him to ‘[have] it all ways: creating that frisson effect of rubbing up religion—and forbidden religion at that—against sex, Shakespearean censorship, Warburton changed the phrase ‘holy bread’ to ‘holy beard’ and glossed its meaning as ‘the kiss of charity from hermits and holy men’: The Works of William Shakespeare, in Eight volumes (Edinburgh, 1795), ii. 60. ¹³ See Michael Davis, ‘‘The Transubstantial Bard: Shakespeare and Catholicism’, in Douglas Burnham and Enrico Giaccherini, eds., The Poetics of Transubstantiation: From Theology to Metaphor, Studies in European Cultural Transition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 39–40. ¹⁴ Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 254. ¹⁵ Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (London: Macmillan, 1995), 161; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 248–9.

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while not doing anything that was theologically improper in a Protestant state’.¹⁶ To some extent the religious language in Shakespeare’s plays does have a different tenor than that of Barnes’s Parthenophil and Parthenophe, Spenser’s Amoretti, or Donne’s ‘Songs and Sonnets’. There is a breadth of reference that goes far beyond the conventional images of saints, shrines, pilgrimages, and incense, and an engagement which suggests that, in the plays at least, he is not using the references either as deconsecrated tropes nor to generate the outrageous and exciting frisson of the forbidden. There is something almost ordinary and accepted: the references are part of the furniture of the plays and belong there in a way that they do not in Barnes, Donne, or even his own sonnets. The difference is partly due to the genre—many of Shakespeare’s plays are set in the past and for the characters within them prayers to the Virgin, requiem masses, and Easter observances are simply part of their world. Juliet’s evening mass and the chantry chapels of Illyria are treated with neither reverence nor disdain, but as the props of a story: useful, colourful, and evocative of a different time and place. There is circumstantial evidence for church papistry in Shakespeare’s upbringing but no secure foundation for proving what he himself believed. The only external evidence that Shakespeare did not conform to the established church is that there is no record of his name in the communion token books of St Saviour’s Southwark. Patrick Collinson and Eamon Duffy have cited this as evidence that he did not receive and therefore may have been a church papist.¹⁷ However, Jeremy Boulton, the authority on St Saviour’s communion tokens, states that only the name of the head of a household would have been recorded in a communion token book, and therefore had Shakespeare been lodging in Southwark, his name would not have been recorded whether he received or not.¹⁸ There is, therefore, no substantive evidence that Shakespeare did not communicate while he was in London. Shakespeare’s faith is not provable and a certain equivocation often lies in attempts to suggest that it is. The riddling argumentative ¹⁶ Helen Hackett, ‘The Art of Blasphemy? Interfusions of the Erotic and Sacred in the Poetry of Donne, Barnes, and Constable’ (forthcoming). My grateful thanks to Helen Hackett for sending me a copy of this paper. ¹⁷ Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 251; Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?’, 537. ¹⁸ Jeremy Boulton clariﬁed this in personal communication with me, August 2003. My grateful thanks to him. See also Boulton, ‘The Limits of Formal Religion’, 130–54.

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structure of Richard Wilson’s Secret Shakespeare, for example, includes dubious assertions such as ‘until 1558 Catholicism had, after all, been the ofﬁcial state religion’ and that ‘the text [of Henry VIII ] seems to call attention to the fact that … Cardinal Wolsey’s hat was now worn by his impersonator’.¹⁹ Mutschmann and Wenterdorf ’s attempts to prove Shakespeare’s Catholicism lead them to the questionable assertion that ‘the cardinal in Shakespeare’s King John is in no sense an unworthy ﬁgure’.²⁰ Eric Sams’s similar quest likewise provokes the disingenuous description of John Shakespeare’s Last Will and Testament as a document ‘once in the possession of Edmund Malone and published by him as genuine. There is no reason to doubt its authenticity.’²¹ It is important to read the religious engagement of Shakespeare’s plays and his exploitation of the theatrical and poetic potential of the old religion in a wider way than simply as evidence of his own doctrinal afﬁliation. The work of historians such as Christopher Haigh, Alexandra Walsham, J. J. Scarisbrick, and Eamon Duffy has shown the pervasiveness of unanalysed Catholic habits of mind in conforming Elizabethans, not simply among recusants. There is an elegiac nostalgia in many of Shakespeare’s plays which interacts with the residual Catholicism present in Elizabethan England as a whole. As Duffy has expressed it ‘the sensibility which evoked in sonnet 73, ‘‘Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’’, was certainly receptive to the beauty of the old faith, alert to the tragedy and loss involved in Reformation’. As Duffy himself has shown, however, such sensitivity was not conﬁned to Catholics.²² Marotti has well expressed the nonsatiric engagement with magical experience in Shakespeare’s mature plays, and suggested that: ‘In one sense Shakespeare (like many conservative Protestants) might have been trying to salvage for a post-Catholic English culture some of those emotionally powerful features of medieval ¹⁹ Wilson, Secret Shakespeare, 6, 262; italics mine. For the evidence that Shakespeare’s Wolsey was not, in fact, wearing the real thing see John Lee, ‘The Man Who Mistook His Hat: Stephen Greenblatt and the Anecdote’, Essays in Criticism 45 (1995): 285–300. ²⁰ Mutschmann and Wentersdorf, Shakespeare and Catholicism, 301. Burton Raffel goes so far as to call him ‘virtuous’: ‘Shakespeare and the Catholic Question’, Religion & Literature 30/1 (1998): 47. ²¹ Sams, The Real Shakespeare, 32. ²² Duffy, ‘Was Shakespeare a Catholic?, 538; Eamon Duffy, ‘Bare Ruined Choirs: Remembering Catholicism in Shakespeare’s England’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 42–3, 52–3. See also William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (London: Penguin, 1995), 21.

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Catholicism … participating in a rehabilitation of magic and the visual that is elaborated in the Stuart Court masque.’²³ Shakespeare’s evocation of England’s abandoned cultural heritage—church furniture, paintings, liturgy, and the mystery plays—was available to the playwright and his audience whether they, or he, were convinced Catholics, lapsed church papists, or simply Protestants with retentive memories and developed aesthetic sensibilities. Much recent historical research has in fact centred precisely on the way in which aspects of Catholicism were assimilated rather than destroyed during the English Reformation. Tessa Watt, David Cressy, Ronald Hutton, and Alexandra Walsham have shown that many popular forms—such as ballads, wall hangings, and the festal calendar—concentrated on consensual values and created a synthesis, rather than a confrontation, between Bible-centred Protestantism and traditional visual piety.²⁴ These historians focus upon the cheap print and seasonal celebrations that were intended to entertain and engage the laity during their leisure time. It is possible that in the theatre likewise evidence may be found of an assimilation of Catholic practice which is neither the coded proof of papist playwrights, nor evidence of a charisma that has been entirely devalued in its transfer to a secular sphere. It is, in fact, as theatre that Catholic devotional practices proved most persistent in the Elizabethan period. The mystery plays were one of the few aspects of medieval worship which survived the Reformation, initially at least, relatively unscathed. Plays focusing entirely on Marian doctrine were abandoned, and nervous justiﬁcations were added to nonscriptural episodes such as the harrowing of hell, but throughout the country these large-scale civic productions of salvation history focusing on the life and Passion of Christ were performed well into the Elizabethan period. The plays are also often preserved in strikingly late manuscripts. Recent research has suggested that the Towneley manuscript was copied during Mary’s reign and all six surviving manuscripts of the complete ²³ Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Shakespeare and Catholicism’, in Richard Dutton, Alison Findlay, and Richard Wilson, eds., Theatre and Religion: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 230, 232. See also Greenblatt, Will in the World, 112–13. ²⁴ See David Cressy, Bonﬁres and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989); Watt, Cheap Print, 324–8 and passim; Hutton, ‘The English Reformation’, 89–116; Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3–5 and passim.

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Chester cycle were copied after 1590.²⁵ A number of critics have argued that these plays are not merely anachronistic texts that happen to survive into the sixteenth century but an integral part of late medieval and early modern religious life. Lawrence Clopper has suggested, for example, that the medieval Chester play was predominantly a Passion play, and the content, shape, and techniques of production which we associate with the Chester cycle are in fact a sixteenth-century phenomenon.²⁶ Throughout the country mystery plays survived into Elizabeth’s reign, the ﬁrst decade of which saw Corpus Christi pageants acted in at least Newcastle, New Romney, Norwich, Worcester, Chelmsford, Malden, Braintree, Bungay, Chester, Coventry, York, Dublin, and Cornwall. Lincoln’s Corpus Christi plays, which had been revived under Mary, were replaced by a play about Tobias, which reused the ‘gear’ of the old plays.²⁷ The York pageants were not suppressed until 1569, and in 1579 the ‘house books’ record the city’s decision ‘that Corpus Christi play shalbe played this yere’ but Archbishop Grindal seems to have impounded the play text that was sent to him for approval.²⁸ Chester’s ﬁnal performance is not until 1575. The pageants at Durham and Doncaster were acted until 1576 and Tewkesbury accounts mention payment for ‘six sheep-skins for Christ’s garments’ in 1578. Kendal, and probably Preston too, had cycles which lasted into James’s reign—perhaps until around 1605.²⁹ Religious drama was still popular in the provinces in the 1570s and 1580s and ²⁵ Barbara D. Palmer, ‘Recycling ‘‘The Wakeﬁeld Cycle’’: The Records’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 41 (2000): 96; David Mills, ‘The Chester Cycle’, in Richard Beadle, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 110; Peter Happé, Cyclic Form and the English Mystery Plays: A Comparative Study of the English Biblical Cycles and Their Continental and Iconographic Counterparts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 240. ²⁶ Gail McMurray Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion: East Anglian Drama and Society in the Late Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 2; Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘The History and Development of the Chester Cycle’, Modern Philology 75 (1978): 231; Lawrence M. Clopper, ‘English Drama: From Ungodly Ludi to Sacred Play’, in David Wallace, ed., The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 750–1. ²⁷ Other Corpus Christi pageants known to have survived the Reformation include Aberdeen, Beverley, Canterbury, Hereford, Kingston-on-Thames, Louth, Manningtree, Morebath, Reading, and Tewkesbury: E. K. Chambers, Mediaeval Stage (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1903/63), ii. 329–406. ²⁸ Alexandra F. Johnston and Margaret Rogerson, eds., York, Records of Early English Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979), 355–6, 390. ²⁹ Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 396; Audrey Douglas and Peter Greenﬁeld, eds., Cumberland Westmorland Gloucestershire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1986), 17–19.

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the post-Reformation genesis of a Corpus Christi play at Sherborne, in Dorset, shows that the form was not simply dying slowly, but was sufﬁciently vibrant to spring up in new places.³⁰ There is also the aforementioned case of Thomas Ashton’s 1560 Passion play and Shrewsbury school’s other performances of religious subjects. In 1567–8 the records state that tradespeople were willing to give ﬁnancial support to this ‘greate playe’, a civic sponsorship which suggests interesting correlations with the cycle drama.³¹ When, however, by the mid-Jacobean period, the cycle plays were entirely suppressed, their memory lived on. John Shaw’s record of an old man whom he catechized during the Civil War, unwittingly reveals the dramatic power of the mystery plays: I asked him, How many Gods there were? he said, he knew not: I informing him, asked him again: how he tho’t to be saved? he answered, he could not tell yet tho’t that was a hard question than the other, I told him yat the way to Salvation was by Iesus Christ God-man, who as he was man shed his blood for us on the crosse etc Oh, Sir (said he) I think I heard of that man you speake of, once in a play at Kendall, called Corpus-Christi play, where there was a man on a tree, & blood ran downe.³²

In 1644 the memory of a play suppressed in 1605 is still vivid, and the visual power of red, streaming blood is present to the old man in a more tangible way than the preacher’s commonplace formulation of salvation through the blood of Christ. The memory of the mysteries was retained by educated, Protestant men as well, such as the Lancashireborn John Weever (1576–1632). Weever’s Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631) is caught between the author’s Protestantism (one chapter extols the abolition of the pope’s ‘exorbitant authoritie’) and his instinctive desire to preserve and value the past. Recording the tomb inscription of Richard Marlow, he explains: This Marlow was Lord Maior in the yeare 1409. in whose Maioralitie there was a play at Skinners Hall, which lasted eight dayes (saith Stow) to heare which, most the greatest Estates of England were present. The Subiect of the play was the sacred Scriptures, from the creation of the world: They call this, Corpus ³⁰ Peter Greenﬁeld, ‘Regional Performance in Shakespeare’s Time’, in Alison Findlay, Richard Wilson, and Richard Dutton, eds., Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 245 and passim. ³¹ Collinson, ‘The Shearman’s Tree’, 218. ³² Douglas, Cumberland Westmorland Gloucestershire, 219. See also Helen Cooper, ‘Blood Running Down’, London Review of Books 23/15 (2001): 13–14.

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Christi Play in my countrey, which I haue seene acted at Preston, and Lancaster, and last of all at Kendall, in the beginning of the raigne of King Iames.³³

If people alive in the 1630s and 1640s were eyewitnesses of the Corpus Christi plays (in Weever’s case, three of them) it seems at least plausible that many Londoners would have known them a generation earlier. Mystery plays, as Weever testiﬁes, had been performed in London before the Reformation and Henry Machyn’s diary for 1557 records a Marian Passion play, ‘the vij day of Juin. begane a stage play at the Grey freers of the Passyon of Cryst’. According to Prynne a Passion play was also performed in London in the early seventeenth century, at which ‘there were thousands present’.³⁴ More importantly, perhaps, London was the focus of internal migration in England, and despite its high number of deaths and low birth rate the population of London grew from 60,000 in the beginning of the sixteenth century to 575,000 by the end of the seventeenth. The levels of migration to London in this period, much of it from northern England, means that many of those going to see Shakespeare’s plays would have had their theatrical expectations shaped by provincial religious drama.³⁵ Shakespeare, an immigrant from rural Warwickshire, is one speciﬁc example of someone who may have taken with him to London the memory of mystery plays performed in his home county.³⁶ Only fourteen miles from Stratford-upon-Avon was staged the most famous and popular mystery cycle in Tudor England: the Coventry cycle. This cycle remained an important annual event until 1579; its demise signalled by the single sentence in the City Annals, April 1580: ‘and ³³ John Weever, Ancient Fvnerall Monvments […] (London, 1631), Mm5r . ³⁴ Diary of Henry Machyn, 138; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 379–82; Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 229–32, 275–82. ³⁵ C. G. A. Clay, Economic Expansion and Social Change: England 1500–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), i. 27, 197, 210; E. A. Wrigley and R. S. Schoﬁeld, The Population Histories of England 1541–1871: A Reconstruction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 166, 467. Helen Cooper has argued that the ‘dominant living theatrical experience’ for the audience of the 1590s was the cycle plays: ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, in Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes, eds., Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture, Arden Shakespeare (London: Thomson Learning, 2006), 24. My grateful thanks to Helen Cooper for giving me a copy of this piece at an earlier stage. ³⁶ Another early-modern dramatist, Thomas Heywood, seems also to have been aware of the mystery plays and his Apology for Actors stated that pageants were still ﬂourishing among Catholics and in the north: Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), E4r , G3r .

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this yeare the padgins were layd downe’.³⁷ The excitement generated by cycle plays, even in the Elizabethan era, is demonstrated by the distances people were willing to travel to see them, such as the Shropshire man who went to Chester in 1577 because ‘he heard of the plays [t]here’.³⁸ It seems highly likely, therefore, that a young man interested in theatre would have travelled the short road between Stratford and Coventry to see the most famous dramatic presentation of his day, and Shakespeare could have seen the Coventry cycle at any time up to his ﬁfteenth year. The Coventry cycle’s popularity in the Tudor period is attested by the number of contemporary references to it. The earliest is the jestbook account of an unlearned Warwickshire village priest who preached on the articles of the Creed, and told his congregation: ‘yf you beleue not me, then for a more suerte & suffycyent auctoryte, go your way to couentre, and there ye shall se them all played in corpus cristi playe’.³⁹ John Heywood’s The Foure PP (1547), although it was not written for a Coventry audience, nonetheless chooses the Coventry Harrowing of Hell play to make a joke about a devil acting in a play. The character who goes down to hell recognizes the porter as ‘oft in the play of Corpus Cristi | He had played the deuyll at Couentry’.⁴⁰ It is also a Coventry weaver, John Careless, who, according to Foxe, is released from his imprisonment in 1556 ‘to play in the Pageant about the City’.⁴¹ As ³⁷ R. W. Ingram, ed., Coventry, Records of Early English Drama (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), 294; Lawrence M. Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 282, 293. ³⁸ A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1987), 75. ³⁹ Leonard R. N. Ashley, ed., Shakespeare’s Jest book: An edition of A Hundred Mery Talys (1526) edited in 1866 by Hermann Oesterley: A Facsimile Reproduction (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1970), 100. It has been inferred from this that Coventry was a Creed play: Alexandra F. Johnston, ‘What if No Texts Survived? External Evidence for Early English Drama’, in Marianne G. Briscoe and John C. Coldewey, eds., Contexts for Early English Drama (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 11; Margaret Rogerson, ‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play: A ‘‘Lost’’ Middle English Creed Play?’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 36 (1999): 143–78. Despite being an interesting possibility, this seems an over-literal interpretation of the jest as any mystery cycle performs the Christian story and therefore would ‘verify’ the creed. Also the extant pageants from the Coventry cycle dramatize events—such as the Presentation at the Temple, the slaughter of the innocents, and Isaiah’s prophecies—that are not in the creed. ⁴⁰ John Heywood, The Foure PP, in Specimens of the Pre-Shakespearean Drama, ed. John Matthews Manly (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1967), 509–10. ⁴¹ This is a particularly interesting anecdote as it is an example of Protestantism’s initial enthusiasm for biblical theatre and the non-sectarian attitude towards the mystery

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late as 1656 Sir William Dugdale reported that ‘I have been told by some old people, who in their younger years were eye-witnesses of these Pageants so acted, that the yearly conﬂuence of people to see the shew was extraordinary great, and yeilded no small advantage to this City’.⁴² Unfortunately for the study of the possible inﬂuence of this famous theatrical event on Shakespeare, almost all the Coventry cycle has been lost. Only two plays survive: the Shearmen and Taylors’ Nativity pageant, and the Weavers’ pageant, which is about Christ’s childhood—his Presentation and his discussion with the doctors in the Temple. The records also give evidence for the staging of the Passion by the Smiths, the Harrowing of Hell and Resurrection by the Cappers, and a Doomsday play by the Drapers. There is also some evidence that the Deposition was performed by the Pinners and Needlers, and the Assumption by the Mercers. Traditionally it has been thought that there were ten pageants performed in total, and it has been assumed that the pageants which are unaccounted for enacted the Old Testament subjects and Jesus’ ministry, hence creating a cycle similar in scope to those in York, Chester, Beverley, and Cornwall.⁴³ This has been questioned recently by Margaret Rogerson, who has suggested that the two pageants may be relics of a creed play rather than a scriptural sequence, and by Lawrence Clopper, who conjectures that Coventry’s cycle may have centred on the Passion.⁴⁴ Whatever the exact form the Coventry cycle took it is widely accepted that it is at least probable that Shakespeare caught the local expression of England’s rich heritage of civic religious drama.⁴⁵ Although the plays which enabled the Protestant weaver and the Catholic authorities to co-operate in ensuring the performance of the cycle: Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ii. 1920. ⁴² William Dugdale, The Antiquities of Warwickshire, illustrated from records, leigerbookes, manuscripts, charters, evidences, tombes and armes: beautifed with maps, prospects and portraitures (London, 1656), 116. On the importance of the cycle to Coventry see also Charles Phythian-Adams, ‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry 1450–1550’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack, eds., Crisis and Order in English Towns 1500–1700: Essays in Urban History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 57–85. ⁴³ Hardin Craig, English Religious Drama of the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), 286–92; Clifford Davidson, ‘Civic Drama for Corpus Christi at Coventry: Some Lost Plays’, in Alan E. Knight, ed., The Stage as Mirror: Civic Theatre in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 145. ⁴⁴ Rogerson, ‘The Coventry Corpus Christi Play’, 143–78; Clopper, Drama, Play, and Game, 173. ⁴⁵ Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars, 582; Collinson, Elizabethan Essays, 225. See also Clifford Davidson, ‘ ‘‘What hempen home-spuns have we swagg’ring here?’’ Amateur

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cycle was suppressed in 1579, certain members of the community were still agitating for its revival in the 1590s. In 1591 Coventry’s council recorded that ‘it is also agreed by the whole consent of this house that the distrucion of Ierusalem the conquest of the Dans or the historie of KE the 4 … shalbe plaid on the pagens … & non other playes’. As Ingram notes, the codicil ‘& non other playes’ sounds as though the council still feels the need in the early 1590s to curb the idea that the mysteries might be revived.⁴⁶ The guilds were certainly tenacious in retaining their costumes and props. A 1591 inventory of the Coventry Cappers’ props includes ‘pylates dublit … the spirate of godes cote gods cotes and the hose pylats heade fyve maries heades … mary maudlyns gowne … gods head the spirites heade … pylates clubbe hell mowth … adams spade’.⁴⁷ This determined retention of the physical accoutrements of the Corpus Christi plays is an objective correlative to the mental tenacity of those who in the 1630s and 1640s still remembered the biblical drama of their youth, and it also bears comparison with the widespread refusal to destroy vestments, mass books, and chalices which likewise accompanied the Reformation. One pious optimist, for example, bequeathed gold candlesticks to the church in Edmonton, Middlesex, in 1570, ‘should mass ever be said there again’.⁴⁸ The mystery plays, like the mass, had been a powerful spectacle, and the memory of both remained in many early-modern minds. Emrys Jones has suggested that however enthusiastically Protestantism was embraced, inward mental habits and unanalysed assumptions which were part of the older order would have been unconsciously retained for many years. He has argued that when Shakespeare came to write plays of a historical or tragic kind, he had the Passion plays of his boyhood as a dramatic paradigm and that the two tetralogies form a secular cycle inspired by the Coventry performance of scriptural history.⁴⁹ The strongest evidence that Shakespeare saw, and remembered, Actors in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Coventry Civic Plays and Pageants’, Shakespeare Studies 19 (1987): 87–100. ⁴⁶ Ingram, Coventry, 332. Three songs were added to the Shearmen and Taylors’ pageant in 1591 presumably in expectation of a revival: Thomas Sharp, A Dissertation on the Pageants or Dramatic Mysteries Anciently performed at Coventry […] (Coventry, 1825), 113; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 422. ⁴⁷ Ingram, Coventry, 334. ⁴⁸ Scarisbrick, The Reformation and the English People, 141. See also Haigh, English Reformations, 252–3. ⁴⁹ Emrys Jones, The Origins of Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 33–4, 51.

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the mysteries is that a number of the scenes and characters in his plays seem to echo those found in the cycle drama. Most conspicuously, his explicit references to biblical characters often seem to have been inspired by the dramatic spectacles of his youth rather than the Bible reading of his adulthood. The most famous example of this is Hamlet’s complaint—‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant. It out-Herods Herod’ (3. 2. 13–14)—which, by connecting Herod with boisterous overacting, indicates that Shakespeare is thinking of a dramatic presentation of the biblical character. Likewise Falstaff ’s letter in The Merry Wives of Windsor causes Mistress Page to exclaim ‘what a Herod of Jewry is this!’ (2. 1. 19–21), because Falstaff ’s jigging verses, absurd boasts, and sartorial excesses recall the strutting, ranting Herod of the mystery plays.⁵⁰ Henry V ’s graphic description of the slaughter of the innocents (‘mad mothers with their howls confused | Do break the clouds, as did the wives of Jewry’ (3. 3. 122–3) ) likewise appears to derive less from Scripture, which refers only to the single voice of Rachel mourning for her children, than from the communal grief staged in the Coventry cycle: ‘who hard eyuer soche a cry | Of wemen that there chyldur haue lost’ (1. 870–1).⁵¹ There is one suggestive correspondence with the mystery plays which is a rare example of a possible verbal echo. Shakespeare makes two explicit references to Judas greeting Jesus at the moment of betrayal with an ‘All hail!’:    Witness the loving kiss I give the fruit. He kisses the infant prince [Aside] To say the truth, so Judas kissed his master, And cried ‘All hail!’ whenas he meant all harm. (3 Henry VI 5. 7. 32–4) ⁵⁰ Diana Whaley, ‘Voices from the Past: A Note on Termagant and Herod’, in Tom Cain, Claire Lamont, and John Batchelor, eds., Shakespearean Continuities: Essays in Honour of E. A. J. Honigmann (London: Macmillan, 1997), 24–8; Michael O’Connell, ‘Vital Cultural Practices: Shakespeare and the Mysteries’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 157–9; Jonathan Gil Harris, ‘ ‘‘Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare’’: Acting Up in The Taming of the Shrew, and the Coventry Herod Plays’, Comparative Drama 34/4 (2000–1): 375. ⁵¹ Harris, ‘ ‘‘Look not big, nor stamp, nor stare’’ ’, 376. For further examples of the inﬂuence of the Coventry cycle on Shakespeare, see Irvin Leigh Matus, ‘An Early Reference to the Coventry Mystery Plays in Shakespeare?’, Shakespeare Quarterly 40/2 (1989): 196–7; Cherrell Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within Play: Medieval Imagery and Scenic Form in Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990), 85–9; Naomi Conn Liebler, ‘Shakespeare’s Medieval Husbandry: Cain and Abel, Richard II, and Brudermond’, Mediaevalia 18 (1995): 452–6.

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  Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me? So Judas did to Christ. (Richard II 4. 1. 160–1)

This phrase does not originate with the Bible, for in all sixteenth-century versions Judas greets Jesus with a simple ‘Hail’. It has therefore been argued that the phrase comes instead from the mystery plays, for in the York Agony and Betrayal Judas greets Jesus with an ‘All hayll’ (28. 248). As the Coventry play of the betrayal is not extant it may well be that Shakespeare is remembering a similar ‘All hail’ from the geographically closer cycle.⁵² Shakespeare’s debt to the mystery cycles is, however, to a large extent unrecoverable at a verbal level. This is partly because most of the text of the Coventry cycle is lost. More fundamentally, however, it is because Shakespeare’s debt to the earlier drama does not lie at the level of text. Drama is an embodied art form, and at the centre of the mysteries is the Incarnation; the cycle plays acted out the enﬂeshment of the Godhead. This centrality of the body is something that Shakespearean drama shares.⁵³ The strongest evidence that Shakespeare was inﬂuenced by the mysteries is found not in the words of his characters but in his embodiment of concepts and the shaping of his scenes. Throughout his career Shakespeare’s scenes repeatedly recall mystery play staging and secular situations ﬁnd an echo in sacred stories. Michael O’Connell argues that this is the speciﬁc legacy of medieval religious drama in Shakespeare: The pressure—moral, affective, and intellectual—of dozens of scenes both comic and tragic drawn from a history still considered sacred. It is this speciﬁc legacy that we need to know about more and that we need to ponder more attentively as we write and read about the blinding of Gloucester, the killing of Macduff ’s children, the jealousy of Leontes.⁵⁴ ⁵² Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 335–6. This expression is linked with Judas in many other texts of the period: Edmond Ironside; and Anthony Brewer’s The Love-Sicke King, ed. Martin Randall (London: Garland, 1991), 5. 1. 29–31; Samuel Rowlands, The Betraying of Christ (London, 1598), B4r , C4r ; A Letter written out of England to an English Gentleman remaining at Padua […] (London, 1599), B2r . Shakespeare, therefore, may simply be showing knowledge of a widely used phrase that had entered the language through the mystery plays. However, this, in itself, would be highly suggestive for a study of the effect of the cycle plays on Renaissance drama. ⁵³ See Pauline Kiernan, Shakespeare’s Theory of Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ⁵⁴ Michael O’Connell, ‘God’s Body: Incarnation, Physical Embodiment, and the Fate of Biblical Theater in the Sixteenth Century’, in David G. Allen and Robert A. White,

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The ﬁrst (and one of the best) pieces of such criticism was Glynne Wickham’s argument for the inﬂuence on Macbeth of the mystery play staging of the harrowing of hell and the massacre of the innocents.⁵⁵ Wickham draws attention to some speciﬁc correspondences (such as the knocking on the gate, the allusion to a ‘devil porter’, and the arrival of a ghostly ﬁgure during a banquet) which connect Macbeth with the embodiment of evil in the earlier drama. While Macbeth is not reduced to a ‘type’ of Satan or Herod, his degeneracy is clearly signalled by the parallels. Correspondences have likewise been found in the Henry VI plays, and Emrys Jones has suggested that Humphrey’s fall in 2 Henry VI and the death of York in 3 Henry VI are both shaped by the mystery play staging of the Passion.⁵⁶ John D. Cox has extended Jones’s work and argued that York’s occupation of Henry’s throne at the beginning of 3 Henry VI is a dramaturgical and visual allusion to Lucifer’s occupation of God’s throne at the beginning of the mysteries.⁵⁷ The opening of King Lear may likewise recall an inverted Fall of Lucifer in which the angelic characters are cast out and the demonic characters given the throne.⁵⁸ In these plays it seems that Shakespeare is remembering the cycles’ powerful commencement which displays God’s omnipotence and justice. By giving King Lear and 3 Henry VI an opening scene in which the expected order is inverted, Shakespeare signals not only the individual ineptitude of the kings concerned, but indicates that this weakness will have repercussions for the whole kingdom. One of the most persuasive recent connections between Shakespeare’s dramaturgy and the mystery plays is the suggestion that Mary’s pregnancy is the model for Shakespeare’s inversion of the classic fabliau in which the cuckolded husband’s jealousy is well founded. Throughout Shakespeare (for example, in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Cymbeline, and The Winter’s Tale) husbands’ apprehensions about their wives’ chastity proves to be mistaken. Shakespeare may have found a powerful dramatic antecedent for this eds., Subjects on the World’s Stage: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 81–2. ⁵⁵ Glynne Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage: Collected Studies in Mediaeval, Tudor and Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), 214–31. ⁵⁶ Jones, Origins, 38–52. ⁵⁷ John D. Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 82–103. ⁵⁸ Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within a Play, 113.

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reversal in the mystery play dramatization of Joseph’s doubts about Mary’s ﬁdelity—as occur, for example, in the N-town play Joseph’s Doubt. The sanctity of Shakespeare’s portrayal of many of these injured women (such as Desdemona and Imogen) lends weight to the correspondence, and the visual impact of Hermione’s heavily pregnant body would have made the connection especially close in her case.⁵⁹ The correspondences between Elizabethan and medieval drama, however, are far more widespread than such speciﬁc examples can show. Critics have suggested, for example, that many of the physical aspects of early-modern theatre—such as the thrust stage and the organization of the audience—retain aspects of mystery play staging.⁶⁰ These physical connections may preserve some of the valency of the medieval stage and the connection between Shakespearean drama and the mystery plays lies deeper than verbal connections, character types, or parallel scenes, although it is only through such connections that the particular relation of his plays with the earlier English drama can be established, and the meaning of the correspondences understood. The body of this book, therefore, will consider the previously unrecognized debt of speciﬁc scenes to the mystery plays, as well as to the Bible and Christian doctrine, but the rest of this chapter will consider some of the wider contexts for this work and the ways in which early-modern drama is the inheritor of the mystery plays. The dramatic theory available to early modern dramatists belonged not to their native productions, but to classical drama. Such prescriptions, enthusiastically supported by English theorists such as Sidney, taught that plays had to abide by certain rules and that decorum should be observed in the segregation of genre and classes of characters, unity of action, and the absence of staged violence. Among the decorums which Sidney famously valued, and Shakespeare famously violated, was Aristotle’s unity of action, which became the unities of time and place in Renaissance dramatic theory: ⁵⁹ Michael O’Connell, ‘Vital Cultural Practices’, 161–2. ⁶⁰ Pamela M. King and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Coventry Corpus Christi Plays (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000), 12; Glynne Wickham, Early English Stages 1300–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1959), ii. 37; Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 26–7. For the argument that the valency of the Elizabethan stage’s space was affected by medieval staging, see Robert Weimann, Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre: Studies in the Social Dimension of Dramatic Form and Function (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 73–85, 224–46.

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The stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day … [in most plays, however,] you shall have Asia of the one side, and Afric of the other … . Now, of time they are much more liberal: for ordinary it is that two young princes fall in love; after many traverses, she is got with child, delivered of a fair boy; he is lost, groweth a man, falls in love, and is ready to get another child; and all this in two hours’ space.⁶¹

When Jonson revised Every Man in his Humour for his 1616 Folio he added a prologue that promised this play would not ‘make a child, now swadled, to proceede | Man, and then shoote vp, in one beard, and weede, | Past threescore yeeres’. The prologue is a jibe levelled at Shakespeare as the lines about ‘Yorke, and Lancasters long iarres’ and more particularly a ‘Chorus’ that ‘wafts you ore the seas’ makes clear.⁶² In The Magnetic Lady (1632) Jonson extended his critique of old-fashioned drama: a child could be born, in a play, and grow up to a man i’the ﬁrst scene, before he went off the stage: and then after to come forth a squire, and be made a knight: and that knight to travel between the Acts, and do wonders i’the Holy Land, or elsewhere; kill paynims, wild boars, dun cows, and other monsters; beget him a reputation, and marry an emperor’s daughter for his mistress; convert her father’s country; and at last come home, lame, and all-to-beladen with miracles.⁶³

The killing of a dun cow was an exploit of Guy of Warwick and considering Jonson’s rivalry with the Warwickshire playwright, it seems likely that he is once more making Shakespeare his target. However, the word ‘miracles’, which is repeated three times in the next three lines along with other words connected with anti-Catholic satire—‘juggle’ and ‘Hocus Pocus’—suggests that the old Catholic drama was also the subject of Jonson’s lampoon.⁶⁴ It is suggestive that Jonson’s satire may encompass both Shakespearean and medieval drama. His complaints register his ⁶¹ Sir Philip Sidney: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 243. ⁶² Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and Evelyn Simpson, 11 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1925–52), iii. prologue, 7–9, 11, 15. ⁶³ Ben Jonson, vi. 1 chorus, 16–24. ⁶⁴ For the connection of ‘juggling’ with anti-Catholic satire, see Marie Axton, ed., Three Tudor Classical Interludes: Thersites, Jacke Jugeler, Horestes (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982), 19–20. ‘Hocus Pocus’ was an early seventeenth-century name for a juggler and assumed to be a corruption of the words of the Latin Mass ‘Hoc est corpus’: The Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. hocus pocus.

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increasing exasperation with the popularity of that ‘mouldy tale’ Pericles in particular—Shakespeare’s most disuniﬁed play.⁶⁵ Pericles is in fact not only close to medieval religious romances in form, but shares a major aspect of its plot with the King of Marcylle episode in the ﬁfteenth-century play Mary Magdalene. However, Peter Womack has shown that this is not because Mary Magdalene inﬂuenced Pericles, but that the source of Pericles inﬂuenced the source of Mary Magdalene. Womack’s argument here is not only persuasive for the speciﬁc case he cites—that Confessio Amantis is the real origin of this episode—but for the wider point he is making: So if, as has more than once been suggested, Pericles is a Jacobean miracle play in secular disguise, there is more to the conjunction than a biographical collision, such as the hypothesis that Shakespeare was a crypto-Catholic, or that he had seen a fugitive saint play in his youth. The point is rather that romance and miracle are separable but not separate manifestations of a common repertoire of plots and plot devices … Sidney’s implicit program can be seen in this context as a strategy for decatholicizing the theater … by insisting on a single stage world, he effectively calls for a secularised theater, devoid of heaven, hell, theophany and magic.⁶⁶

Romance was not only written in the Catholic past, it was also a Catholic form. Jonson’s critique is part of the humanist attack on the implausibility of romance, begun by men such as Sir Thomas More.⁶⁷ This critique was perpetuated by Protestant Elizabethans such as Roger Ascham, and it began to assume an anti-Catholic edge. Roger Ascham’s attack on romance is situated within an argument against travel to Catholic Italy: ‘In our forefathers tyme, whan Papistrie … couered and ouerﬂowed all England, fewe bookes were read in our tong, sauyng certaine bookes of Cheualrie, as they sayd, for pastime and pleasure, which, as some say, were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons: ⁶⁵ Ben Jonson, vi. 492. ⁶⁶ Peter Womack, ‘Shakespeare and the Sea of Stories’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 169–77. For a more confessional argument about romance as a Catholic form, and its connection with Shakespeare, see Richmond, Shakespeare, Catholicism, and Romance. ⁶⁷ Thomas More, The Latin Epigrams of Thomas More, ed. and trans. Leicester Bradner and Charles Arthur Lynch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953), epigram 174. See also Robert P. Adams, ‘Bold Bawdry and Open Manslaughter: The English New Humanist Attack on Medieval Romance’, Huntington Library Quarterly 23 (1959–60): 33–48.

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as one example, Morte Arthure’.⁶⁸ The polemic of Protestants such as Ascham and Sidney highlighted what they perceived as Catholic stylistic methods in English writing and dramaturgy. Classical decorum celebrated by the humanists likewise decreed that there should be separation of rank along generic boundaries: tragedy belonged to high-class characters, comedy to low.⁶⁹ Sidney disapproves of the ‘mingling of kings and clowns’, a device ubiquitous to both medieval and early-modern drama.⁷⁰ The mystery plays enthusiastically mixed high-seriousness with comic play and low characters with the tragic protagonists. The domestic concerns and comedy of Noah’s wife, Mary’s midwives, or old Joseph doubting his young bride’s ﬁdelity are mingled with the recounting of God’s salvation of the world. Even the climax of the tragedy, the Cruciﬁxion, is played out by workmen who joke about the torture they commit as if it were a game. These characters, however amusing or disturbing, might seem incidental to the dramatic project of the mysteries, perhaps brought on simply to please the crowd, but in fact they are inherent to a theatrical enterprise which dramatizes the Incarnation. The central character of the mystery cycles imploded the classical decorum which separated high and low. The rustic carpenter, who is also the architect of the universe, is at one and the same time king and clown. The social ﬂuidity of the Corpus Christi drama as a whole has this central indecorum as its source. The genre of the mysteries is likewise mixed by deﬁnition: the Cruciﬁxion was the greatest tragedy, leading to the most profound comedy, of Western culture. Any cycle that staged both the Cruciﬁxion and the Resurrection could never aim to disentangle the tragic from the comic. George Whetstone’s dedicatory epistle to Promos and Cassandra (1578) is a forthright denunciation of popular dramaturgy and Whetstone is probably thinking of mystery plays as the primary abusers of ⁶⁸ Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. John E. B. Mayor (London: Bell & Sons, 1892), 135. My thanks to the members of the Oxford Tudor reading group, and Fred Schurink in particular, for a stimulating discussion of this passage. See also Nashe’s complaint about romances written by ‘Abbie-lubbers’: Works of Thomas Nashe, i. 11. Stephen Gosson’s attack on plays about knights ‘passing from countrie to countrie’ and ﬁghting monsters made of brown paper may also contain an anti-Catholic jibe in that the hero is so altered that on his return he can only be recognized by ‘a piece of cockle shell’—the symbol of a pilgrim: Playes Confuted in ﬁue Actions […] (London, 1582), C6r . ⁶⁹ In classical drama tragedy (such as Aeschylus’ Agamemnon or Sophocles’ Oedipus the King) is primarily about kings or military rulers and comedy (such as Aristophanes’ Lysistrata or Plautus’ Amphitryo) women or servants. ⁷⁰ Sir Philip Sidney, 244.

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the classical decorums of place, time, and person. Whetstone explicitly objects to Continental religious drama, which ‘is too holye: for [it] presentes on everye common Stage, what Preachers should pronounce in Pulpets’. His rejection of English popular theatre declares that the English playwright ‘fyrst groundes his worke on impossibilities: then in three howers ronnes he throwe the worlde: marryes, gets Children, makes Children men, men conquer kingdomes, murder Monsters, and bringeth Gods from Heaven, and fetcheth Divels from Hel … Manye tymes (to make mirthe) they make a Clowne companion with a Kinge’.⁷¹ Whetstone’s complaint about gods and devils being portrayed on stage suggests that he is thinking of biblical drama as the chief culprit in this regard. A diatribe against mixing kings and clowns may seem a surprising opening for Promos and Cassandra for those who know that Whetstone’s version of the unjust judge story is the source for Shakespeare’s lowerclass characters in Measure for Measure. In Whetstone’s play, however, there are discrete scenes of comic low-life, a strict separation of style on social principles, and the tacit assumption of high social status with virtue. As John Cox has noted, while Shakespeare undoubtedly followed Whetstone’s lead in introducing lower-class elements, he pointedly eschewed Whetstone’s social stratiﬁcation, preferring instead the popular—and ultimately medieval—model of mingling kings and clowns freely.⁷² Debora Kuller Shuger has argued that in the torn consciousnesses of Shakespeare’s greatest tragic heroes—King Lear and Hamlet—Shakespeare has taken such a model to its logical extreme, by ‘assimilating the ancient Christian discourses of social injustice to the structures of the psyche … The mixing of beggars, clowns, and kings takes place within the tragic protagonist’.⁷³ In one sense, however, this radical move is simply a return to the source of the mysteries’ social conscience and indecorous style: the God-man, carpenter-king, shepherd-ruler, Jesus of Nazareth. The social agenda of the mysteries is inspired by the Incarnation, and played out both in the jumbling of characters and in the virtue of the lowly and wickedness of those in authority. The status conferred on ⁷¹ Geoffrey Bullough, ed., Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964–75), ii. 443. ⁷² Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, 153. ⁷³ Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘Subversive Fathers and Suffering Subjects: Shakespeare and Christianity’, in Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier, eds., Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 57.

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lower-class characters, such as Mary, may also be the dramatic precedent not only for the indecorum of much early-modern drama, but even for an aspect of its structure. Classical drama, as Aristotle records, centres on one complete action and hence rarely has a fully developed sub-plot. Sub-plot characters, and their ability to comment on the action of the protagonist, are germane to Shakespeare and other early-modern dramatists, despite being alien to classical drama. The interweaving of two strands of plot, separate but interrelated (a structural device that Shakespeare brings to perfection in 1 Henry IV ), is not part of English drama’s classical inheritance.⁷⁴ The comic characters parody the main plot characters, and in doing so make the audience interrogate what they stand for: Falstaff ’s catechism on honour grounds Hotspur’s eulogy about it, Stephano’s bottle (which he orders Caliban to venerate with the words ‘kiss the book’) gives him an authority over his companions which shadows the ascendancy given to Prospero through his books and Lucio’s sneering denial of the bail Pompey had expected reﬂects on Isabella’s manner of refusing her brother’s hoped-for reprieve. This complex, sophisticated, and deeply satisfying plot-structure may have evolved from the iconographic and dramatic cycles of medieval culture. In a ﬁfteenth-century Book of Hours, for example, the painter of the Gold Scrolls has complemented the illustration of Passion with an interwoven life of the Virgin in the historiated initial of each page. As Peter Happé has argued: ‘The emotional effects of such juxtapositions must have been considerable, especially as the tone of the Life of the Virgin is essentially triumphant, in spite of her sorrows, whilst the Passion is progressively more sombre, yet potentially triumphant in a different way.’⁷⁵ The life of the Virgin was also used in an analogous way in drama, and it has been suggested that the addition of events in Mary’s life in the N-town cycle, so that her story becomes a mirror of Christ’s life, creates the ﬁrst consciously developed double-plot in English drama.⁷⁶ The inﬂuence of the reﬂective strands of plot in the mysteries on the sub-plots of early-modern drama has yet to be ⁷⁴ There are no extant Greek tragedies with a developed double-plot. The only Latin play I am aware of that in any way shares this form is Plautus’ Amphitruro. ⁷⁵ Roger S. Wieck et al., Time Sanctiﬁed: The Book of Hours in Medieval Art and Life, 2nd edn. (New York: George Braziller in association with the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, 2001), ﬁg. 45; Happé, Cyclic Form, 95. ⁷⁶ Martin Stevens, Four Middle English Mystery Cycles: Textual, Contextual and Critical Interpretations (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 245.

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fully articulated, but it is implicit in Empson’s brilliant discussion of double-plots in the Wakeﬁeld Second Shepherd’s play and 1 Henry IV.⁷⁷ One ﬁnal example of a classical decorum violated by both mystery plays and Shakespeare involves the presentation of violence on stage. In classical drama death, such as the killing of Agamemnon or the dismemberment of Pentheus, was reported rather than performed. Early-modern drama, however, does not shrink from staging murder, as the holocausts at the end of such plays as Hamlet, The Duchess of Malﬁ, and Women Beware Women testify. Few Greek tragedies have on-stage deaths (the eponymous heroes of Ajax and Hippolytus are, perhaps, unique examples) whereas in the mystery plays the Cruciﬁxion was the climactic stage spectacle of the whole cycle. Like death, violence against the body (such as Oedipus’s self-blinding) is generally committed off-stage in classical drama, but the scourging and beating of Christ’s body, as well as his agonized death on the cross, were vividly enacted in the mystery plays. In Shakespeare the violent power of medieval theatre, rather than the decorum of classical theatre, is revived in drama which forces the sight of Lear’s death, Gloucester’s blinding, Desdemona’s suffocation, Antony’s mangled suicide, and the gangmurders of Hector and Caesar upon its audience.⁷⁸ Elizabethan drama as a whole has inherited its emphasis on affective, high-octane theatre from the mystery plays in which the violence and death inﬂicted on the protagonist was the central, graphically staged event. Elizabethans knew Greek tragedy primarily through Seneca’s Latin translations, but early-modern theatre replaced Senecan descriptions of pain with the physical presence of the wounded body. Rhetoric does not elicit a comparable emotional response to that created by actually observing pain and death, a truism which Elaine Scarry has theorized by arguing for the inexpressibility of pain: not merely that it is difﬁcult to deﬁne, or that it reduces its victims to pre-linguistic cries and groans, but ⁷⁷ William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1966), 29–31. ⁷⁸ See Richard Strier’s excellent discussion of how the violation of classical decorum in the staging of Gloucester’s blinding creates the audience’s sympathy for the action of the servant: Richard Strier, ‘Faithful Servants: Shakespeare’s Praise of Disobedience’, in Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier, eds., The Historical Renaissance: New Essays on Tudor and Stuart Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 119–20.

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that because ‘it takes no object it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectiﬁcation in language’.⁷⁹ The staging of suffering is central to both the mysteries and early-modern drama, and in Shakespeare it is often at these moments that the connection with medieval dramaturgy is strongest.⁸⁰ In mystery plays the suffering victim was the central character and medieval affective piety encouraged the audience to enter as fully as possible into his torment. The centrality of suffering in both forms of theatre has lead Michael O’Connell to argue that: it was the traditional biblical theater that in fact authorized the portrayal of violence and physical brutality on stage and gave it a moral valence … the central point of relation is one that rests on the implications of incarnation, that God and man share a body, a body that may be shown to suffer and die. When the enactment of a singular sacred body became transgressive, the new public theater that emerged in the last quarter of the sixteenth century can be understood as refracting that body into a variety of tragic experience.⁸¹

The Incarnation lies at the core of the differences between the mysteries and classical drama that have been discussed above. The mystery plays enacted the Incarnation in which God and man become one and hence any attempt to keep characters in separate social spheres was both untenable and undesirable. They performed the whole of salvation history and hence could not preserve the unities of time or space. Their climax was the torture and killing of this God-man and therefore to obviate stage violence or death would be anathema to the affective design of the drama. The Incarnation was the subject of the cycle plays and it enforced and enabled a new form of drama. The celebration of the Incarnation, and its re-enactment in the mass, was also the occasion of these plays as well as their central event. The genesis of the mystery plays occurred as part of the festival of Corpus Christi. This feast celebrated the body of Christ in all its incarnations: the historical moment when God became man, the church as the body of ⁷⁹ Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 5. ⁸⁰ This has been recognized, in particular, at the blinding of Gloucester and the deaths of York and Desdemona. See O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 87–8; Beatrice Groves, ‘ ‘‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’’: Staging Suffering in King Lear, the Mystery Plays and Grotius’s Christus Patiens’, Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 20 (forthcoming 2007); Jones, Origins, 54–6; Cox, Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power, 93–9; The Third Part of King Henry VI, ed. Michael Hattaway, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), notes to 1. 4. 67, 1. 4. 78–83, 1. 4. 93; Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 250. See also Ch. 4. ⁸¹ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 87–8.

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Christ now present on earth and, primarily, in the mass.⁸² The doctrine of transubstantiation was formalized at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 and the feast of Corpus Christi was created by Pope Urban IV in 1264 to celebrate and give devotional focus to the new doctrine. By 1318 the feast of Corpus Christi had arrived in England and by the second quarter of the fourteenth century the Corpus Christi procession was accompanied by dramatic presentations or tableaux vivants. Corpus Christi theatre grew out of these displays, and although many towns and cities did not have the fully ﬂedged cycles that have been recorded in York, Chester, and Beverley, most celebrated the festival with some form of drama such as a Passion or sacrament play.⁸³ In the Croxton Play of the Sacrament for example, which Gail McMurray Gibson has argued was part of the Corpus Christi celebrations in Bury St Edmunds, the play merges with the other festival celebrations as the host at the centre of the plot is borne to church in procession by the character Episcopus.⁸⁴ The fever of dramatic activity that surrounded the festival from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century proves the ubiquity of dramatic creation to the celebration of the feast. Throughout England the embodied art was recognized as belonging to the festival of Christ’s body.⁸⁵ Corpus Christi drama has a fundamental connection with the Incarnation, but it is also possible to argue that the emergence of drama as a whole in medieval Europe coincided with the revaluation of the humanity of the incarnate Christ. Most extant dramatic, liturgical texts date from the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when the doctrinal debate which culminated in the doctrine of transubstantiation was taking place. Michael O’Connell has argued that the impetus for theatre came from this new concern with corporeality and that the revaluation of Christ’s humanity underlay the way in which Christianity would ⁸² For the emphasis on the church as the body of Christ in this festival see Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 16–47. On the cycles’ relation to the festival see V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1966), 44–9; Peter W. Travis, Dramatic Design in the Chester Cycle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 1–29; Lauren Lepow, Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990). ⁸³ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 199, 272–5. ⁸⁴ Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 38. ⁸⁵ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 229–32, 275–82. In certain places it was also the Corpus Christi guild which provided the play for the festival: Karl Young, ‘An Interludium for a Gild of Corpus Christi’, Modern Language Notes 48 (1933): 84–6; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 118–19, 371.

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come to valorize materiality and the physical expression of spiritual concerns. The same argument has been made by Gail McMurray Gibson, originating in her study of the devotion of ﬁfteenth-century East Anglia. The physical aspects of devotional piety in the late-medieval period and its tendency to transform the abstract and theological to the personal and concrete, Gibson argues, show a conscious effort to objectify the spiritual even as the Incarnation itself had given spirit a concrete form.⁸⁶ The Incarnation gave theoretical justiﬁcation to a defence of the visual arts, and Incarnational aspects of the Corpus Christi cycles can be seen as metonymic not only for medieval drama as a whole, but for the whole emphasis on the visual and the concrete in late-medieval devotion.⁸⁷ This Incarnational aesthetic resulted in the speciﬁc aspects of English drama that have been discussed above—mingling of genre, persons, the staging of chronological impossibilities, and violence—and the phenomenology of theatre itself also carried with it a legacy of Incarnational understanding. As Helen Cooper has argued the fundamental connection of early-modern drama and the mysteries lies here: ‘For it is that element of enactment—of subordinating the word to the deed, supplementing speech with embodiment, that the plays written for the sixteenth-century public theatres carry over from the cycle plays, and which mark both sorts as a distinctive kind, not just of text, but of theatre.’⁸⁸ The inheritance of this Incarnational aesthetic by Elizabethan and Jacobean drama is one reason why the reformer’s challenge to the theatre went beyond the suppression of the mystery plays. Theatre is a mixed medium—visual as well as verbal—and the polemists’ horror at men dressed as women, or falsehood presented as truth, or biblical phrases found in the texts of profane plays, is a symptom of a much deeper distrust of theatrical presentation as a whole. Pure and true language is infected by its visual medium: ‘The reuerend word of God, & histories of the Bible set forth on the stage by these blasphemous plaiers, are … corrupted with their gestures of scurrilitie.’⁸⁹ The mixed medium of theatre shares, in Protestant anti-theatrical tracts, the taint of the Catholic eucharistic rite. Anti-Catholic and anti-theatrical polemic converged in this period: Catholics were attacked for being theatrical, ⁸⁶ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 47, 64–5; Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 6–8 and passim. See also Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 22–37, 183–6. ⁸⁷ Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 13–15; O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 38–41, 50. ⁸⁸ Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 19. ⁸⁹ Eutheo Anglo-phile, A second and third blast of retrait from plaies and Theaters […] (London, 1580), H2r .

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actors for performing papist rites. The value placed on the physical elements of the mass was linked in the reformers’ language with the gaudy frippery of props and costumes. The instinctive fear of mixture and taint in godly rhetoric recoiled from both the drama of the mass and the ritual of plays in which powerful words are embedded in an emotionally involving spectacle. Both Catholic ceremonial and dramatic presentations rely on the assimilation of word and image, and diatribes against plays and the mass became mirror-images of each other.⁹⁰ Catholicism’s Incarnational aesthetic, centring on an event in which God became man, and re-enacted in a sacrament in which bread became ﬂesh, was something that reformers, with their stress on purity and the primacy of the Word, wished to struggle free from. Despite the initial enthusiasm for theatrical performances in the early Reformation, by the late-Elizabethan period reformers were as antagonistic to theatrical performance as they were to church ritual. Drama which contained scriptural allusions was most violently opposed, but for many reformers all theatre was idolatrous, not merely biblical theatre. William Rankins was not simply describing mystery plays when he wrote: ‘No doubt but there is amongst them can play Iudas, as naturally as if he were the very man that betrayed Christ, & verily … these godlesse men cruciﬁe Christ a newe, when they thus seeke to deface his glory, to mangle his members, and rent in peeces his sacred body.’⁹¹ In Rankins’s heated rhetoric the performers who deface the image of God in their bodies (by counterfeiting in secular plays) enact a Passion play: secular theatre is transformed into religious theatre simply because it is embodied. Early-modern drama acts out its action through the bodies of its performers, and although this might seem germane to all theatre, classical drama as inherited by Elizabethan England was a predominantly verbal medium. It has long been argued that Seneca was intended for declamation rather than for portrayal, as his plays replace affective spectacle with rhetoric and action with long speeches.⁹² Helen Cooper has argued that the mystery cycles, rather than Greek and Latin drama, were the source for early-modern theatre’s emphasis on embodied action: ‘drama that acts its action is not the automatic default position, as ⁹⁰ Jonas Barish, The Antitheatrical Prejudice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981), 160–5. ⁹¹ William Rankins, A Mirrovr of Monsters […] (London, 1587), Gv –G2r . ⁹² Norman T. Pratt, Seneca’s Drama (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 132–63; John G. Fitch, ‘Playing Seneca?’, in George W. M. Harrison, ed., Seneca in Performance (London: Duckworth, 2000), 9–10.

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classical and humanist drama shows. Rather, it is a medieval invention, and one that the sixteenth-century public theatre adopted and built on.’⁹³ Reformist biblical drama shows what classically inspired earlymodern theatre looks like. These plays centre on Christ’s words rather than his presence. The legend on the title page of Bale’s God’s Promises declares where its emphasis lies: ‘in the worde (whych now is Christ the eternall sonne of God) was lyfe from the begynnynge’.⁹⁴ The play which follows God’s Promises in Bale’s cycle is John the Baptist’s Preaching (1538), rather than the traditional Nativity play. This is because Bale is not interested in the affective spectacle of the infant Christ: for Bale, Christ is only a truly dramatic character once he can speak.⁹⁵ Bale’s stress on Christ as the Word leads to plays which are in some senses simply animated doctrine. Other reformers, such as Stephen Gosson, went even further and thought all plays should be closet drama, written only to be read. He suggests that the Passion play attributed to St Gregory of Nazianzus is one such, and imputes to St Gregory an anachronistic hatred of the mysteries in order to argue that verbal drama is a distinctively Protestant form, created to combat the physicality of Catholic theatre: For Naziancen detesting the corruption of the Corpus Christi Playes that were set out by the Papistes, and inveighing against them, thought it better to write the passion of Christ in numbers him selfe, that all such as delight in numerositie of speach might reade it, not beholde it vpon the Stage, where some base fellowe that plaide Christe, should bring the person of Christ into contempt.⁹⁶

The embodiment that is ignored by Bale, alien to Gosson, and irrelevant to Seneca is central to both mystery plays and Elizabethan drama. The ‘enﬂeshment’ of scripts by actors lies at the heart of the shared medieval and early-modern conception of theatre. The anti-theatricalists of the sixteenth century were clear that it was the aspect of embodiment (even more than any religious subject matter) ⁹³ Cooper, ‘Shakespeare and the Mystery Plays’, 20. ⁹⁴ The Complete Plays of John Bale, ed. Peter Happé (Bury St Edmunds: D. S. Brewer, 1986), ii. 2. ⁹⁵ For the evidence that there is no missing Nativity play see Bale’s account of the performance of these plays: Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 374. ⁹⁶ Gosson, Playes Confuted, E5v –6r . George Sandys detects the inﬂuence of St Gregory of Nazianzus on Hugo Grotius’s Passion play, which (in its English translation) was not intended for the stage: Hugo Grotius, Christs Passion A Tragedie: with annotations, trans. George Sandys (London, 1640), A3r .

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which made drama idolatrous. As seen above Stephen Gosson could even defend the religious subject of St Gregory of Nazianzus’s Christos Paschon because he argued that it was not intended to be staged, but that any play ‘to ye worldes end, if it be presented upon the stage, shall carry that brand of his backe … that is, idolatrie’.⁹⁷ When in 1576 Hutton, the Dean of York, forbade the performance of mystery plays, he issued an order stating that: ‘No Pageant be vsed or set furthe wherein the Maiestye of god the father god the sonne or god the holie ghoste or the administration of either the sacramentes of Baptisme or of the lordes Supper be counterfeyted or represented; or anythinge plaied which tende to the maintenaunce of superstition and idolatrie.’⁹⁸ For both Gosson and Hutton the real stumbling block is the idolatry inherent in all physical enactment. The charge of idolatry did not just belong to religious drama, but was levelled against all theatre because it was an art form which promoted the visual and embodied its action.⁹⁹ Polemists and members of the church hierarchy who inveighed against mystery plays were invariably supporters of the suppression of drama as a whole. In 1575, when Elizabeth visited Kenilworth Castle, Coventry players petitioned her for the revival of their plays, ostensibly asking for the return of the secular drama The Conquest of the Danes, which was performed ‘without ill exampl of mannerz, papistry, or ony superstition’ but had been recently suppressed by ‘the zeal of certain theyr Preacherz: men very commendabl for their behauiour and learning, & sweet in their sermons, but sumwhat too sour in preaching awey theyr pastime’.¹⁰⁰ Zealous Protestants were antithetical to all drama, not simply religious drama, because to them all plays smelt of popery. This position is wittily expressed in Thomas Randolph’s The Muses Looking-Glasse (1638), which light-heartedly acknowledges an irreducibly Catholic aspect to early-modern theatre. London playhouses were built in the liberties: those areas of the city which lay outside the city’s jurisdiction because they had been the sites of religious houses. To Puritans playhouses were the spiritual heirs of the insititutions they replaced, inheriting their vacuous visual splendour as well as their anomalous legal status, and The ⁹⁷ Gosson, Playes Confuted, E7r . Cf. O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 34. ⁹⁸ Quoted in Alan H. Nelson, The Medieval English Stage: Corpus Christi Pageants and Plays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1974), 85. ⁹⁹ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 14–15, 20, 26–7. ¹⁰⁰ Robert Laneham, A Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment vntoo the Queens Maiesty, at killingwoorth Castle, in Warwik sheer in this Soomerz Progress 1575 iz signiﬁed […] (n. pl., 1575), C2r .

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Muses Looking-Glasse reports a Puritan quip about Blackfriars playhouse that ‘He wonders how it scapd demolishing | I’ th’ time of reformation.’¹⁰¹ Blackfriars may no longer be the abode of Dominicans, but the connection between the two institutions goes deeper than their coincidence of name and situation. Reformers feared that while they were suppressing idolatry in one sphere, reducing the visual stimulus of worship by whitewashing walls, simplifying vestments, and discontinuing the elevation of the host, it might be simply re-emerging elsewhere. A number of critics have argued that it is no coincidence that the most vibrant and exciting time in England’s theatrical history occurred at the same time as the solidiﬁcation of the hegemony of Protestantism. An early proponent of this idea was C. L. Barber, who argued that the restriction of the impulse for physicality in the new Protestant worship created a compensatory fascination with drama.¹⁰² Concrete evidence for this idea seems to come from the use of vestments on the stage. Records in King’s College Cambridge state that in the 1550s ‘certayne vestmentes [were] transpoised into players garmentes’.¹⁰³ Evidence from various other parish records and players’ accounts indicates that this was not an isolated phenomenon.¹⁰⁴ Glynne Wickham uses this evidence to support his theory that the immediate parentage for the sartorial excesses of the post-Reformation stage is the colour and richness of the ecclesiastical vestments that had been purged from Protestant worship, arguing that theatre compensated for something lost in the religious sphere.¹⁰⁵ Stephen Greenblatt has argued that vestments, though originally perhaps used as an aggressive appropriation of the accoutrements of the Catholic religion by Protestant players, had the ¹⁰¹ Thomas Randolph, The Muses Looking-Glasse (London, 1638), A3v . ¹⁰² C. L. Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy: The Theater of Marlowe and Kyd, ed. Richard P. Wheeler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 125. ¹⁰³ For this and other similar records see Nelson, Cambridge, i. 127, 843, 152–3, 180–1. The records in Kings have been amended by the Marian sacristan, Carleton, who not only converted the costumes back into vestments, but entered this into the earlier inventory. He added to the 1552–3 account of ‘Item one coope of the best redde tusshes turnyd into a cloke with a cape of the best redde’ the words ‘& now in to a coope againe’ (p.181), and repeated this codicil for almost all the converted vestments. ¹⁰⁴ Somerset, Shropshire, i. 211–13; Giles E. Dawson, ed., Records of Plays and Players in Kent 1450–1642, Collections Volume VII (Oxford: Malone Society, 1965), 207; Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 38; George David, ed., Lancashire, Records of Early English Drama (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), 40; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 343, 367. See also Paul Whitﬁeld White, ‘Reforming Mysteries’ End: A New Look at Protestant Intervention in English Provincial Drama’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 29/1 (1999): 134. ¹⁰⁵ Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 38

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unexpected function of transferring to the theatre what remained of Catholicism’s charisma, although fundamentally devalued in its transfer from the sacred to the secular. The vestments stand as an objective correlative for the theological material which the Reformation had unsettled from its institutional moorings and thereby made available for theatrical appropriation.¹⁰⁶ Visual splendour is an important connection between Catholic ritual and the early-modern stage. The stage was a place of gorgeous costumes and ritual, a new space consecrated for sensory pleasure at the time when the church was becoming bare and stripped of all such visual stimulation.¹⁰⁷ As Glynne Wickham has argued: ‘Elizabethan censorship of subject matter … has neither suppressed the stagecraft associated by tradition with the Catholic ritual out of which it had developed, nor reformed the public appetite for the glamour of this ritual.’¹⁰⁸ More recent critics might be cautious about assuming the evolutionary model from liturgy to drama, but Sarah Beckwith has likewise argued that: ‘Shakespeare’s theater does not represent the supercession and succession of religion, purgatory, and ritual action by a disenchanted theater, but the persistence of its historical concerns in the incarnation of performance.’¹⁰⁹Louis Montrose also sees the theatre absorbing and providing a vital ritualistic function within Shakespeare’s society by providing a compensatory source of engaging and deeply satisfying collective experience.¹¹⁰ This reading of early-modern theatre as a visually stimulating and emotionally affective form of ritualistic communal engagement is a broadly persuasive view of the way that Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre relates to the religious climate of its time. This mode of expression had been curtailed in religious worship and it seems highly ¹⁰⁶ Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1990), 162–3. See also Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, 249; Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 94–128. ¹⁰⁷ For the astonishing value and variety of costumes see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 194–8. ¹⁰⁸ Wickham, Early English Stages, ii. 37. ¹⁰⁹ Sarah Beckwith, ‘Stephen Greenblatt’s Hamlet and the Forms of Oblivion’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33/2 (2003): 275. ¹¹⁰ Louis A. Montrose, ‘The Purpose of Playing: Reﬂections on a Shakespearean Anthropology’, Helios 7/2 (1979–80): 64, 60. See also Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy; Crockett, The Play of Paradox, 33–4; Ramie Targoff, ‘The Performance of Prayer: Sincerity and Theatricality in Early Modern England’, Representations 60 (1997): 60 and passim.

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suggestive that it should have emerged elsewhere. Nonetheless theatre did not only grow out of the demise of Catholicism, but also engaged with the vigour of Protestantism. Elizabethan theatre enacted embodiment, but it also engaged with the Reformation scepticism about the relationship between representation and truth. Huston Diehl has argued that although Elizabethan and Jacobean drama articulates the anxieties created by Protestant assaults on late medieval piety, it is not particularly sympathetic to the old religion. Central to Diehl’s argument is the idea that the meta-theatre in early-modern theatre calls attention to the act of seeing and underlies the ﬁctionality of what is perceived, and in doing so encourages a distrust of Incarnational ways of thinking and seeing.¹¹¹ Diehl, like Greenblatt and Dawson, argues that the terms of the eucharistic controversy—central to the understanding of semiotics in the post-Reformation period—affected the way that theatrical presentation was understood.¹¹² Diehl’s argument is a useful corrective to an over-romanticized view of the relation between Catholicism and early-modern drama, but meta-theatre does not destroy theatrical presence. Anthony Dawson has argued in response to Diehl that ‘the meta-theatrical sets up a second, contrary movement whereby the affective power of the visible is underscored’.¹¹³ O’Connell likewise concludes that Shakespeare’s insistent meta-theatricality ends in a celebration of the visual. He argues that: afﬁrmation of spectacle is thus more than an allowance of the visual character of theater. It is a legitimation of a way of knowing asserted against humanist claims for an exclusive, or near exclusive, truth in language … . the fullness of theater ¹¹¹ Huston Diehl, Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theatre in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997), 5, and passim; Huston Diehl, ‘Observing the Lord’s Supper and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men: The Visual Rhetoric of Ritual and Play in Early Modern England’, Renaissance Drama 22 (1991): 147–74. For engagements with, and critiques of, Diehl’s argument see Anthony B. Dawson, ‘Huston Diehl. Staging Reform, Refroming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England’, Shakespeare Quarterly 50/2 (1999): 221–4; Crockett, The Play of Paradox, 54–5. ¹¹² Stephen Greenblatt and Catherine Gallagher, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 136–62. For readings of speciﬁc plays with reference to eucharistic controversy see Anthony B. Dawson and Paul Yachnin, The Culture of Playgoing in Shakespeare’s England: A Collaborative Debate (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 148–9; Barber, Creating Elizabethan Tragedy, 99–102; Joel B. Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’: The Ampliﬁcation of Violence in the Theater of Henry V ’, Shakespeare Quarterly 42/1 (1991): 4–5, 13 n. 38, 16, 19 n. 50, 30–1. ¹¹³ Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing, 22.

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rests also on what is taken in by the eye, and its very ground is impersonation by living, breathing human bodies.¹¹⁴

Late sixteenth-century theatre is committed to both ritualistic display and meta-theatricality; to visual pleasure and the verbal interrogation of the reality of the presentation. Early-modern theatre embodied the Incarnational legacy of Corpus Christi drama, but it was also responsive to contemporary controversies about the truth of presentation. As Dawson has recently argued, these differences can be reconciled by regarding early modern theatre as a medium that reﬂexively stages the conﬂict about images, celebrating and employing affective spectacle while remaining sceptical about audience susceptibility and the relation of visual power to truth.¹¹⁵ The different devotional foci of Catholicism and Protestantism meant that reformers polarized them as the religion of the eye and the religion of the ear. The ear was the primary organ of truth for Protestants who wanted to replace the visual with the aural, the sacring of the mass with sermons, priests with preachers. Visual, embodied theatre was seen as irreducibly Catholic in the eyes of early-modern Protestants. William Lambarde, reﬂecting on the dramatic Catholic liturgy he watched as a child, concluded ‘sence true Faithe cometh by hearinge and not by seinge, [Faith] is more then al the Spectacles in the Worlde can bringe to pass’.¹¹⁶ Shakespeare, however, was engaged in awaking a different kind of faith and his drama celebrates both the visual, physical nature of its embodied art and its poetic and rhetorical sophistication. Early-modern theatre does not privilege the ear over the eye, nor the image over the word, but harmonizes them in drama which suits, as Hamlet says, ‘the action to the word, the word to the action’. The 1590s was an innovative time in English theatre when the cultural heritage of the old faith and the linguistic excitement of the new learning were both appropriated by the stage. The lingering memory of the visual stimuli of Catholicism, and the rising literary awareness inspired by Protestantism, created a culture ripe for the most verbally sophisticated and visually affective dramaturgy. ¹¹⁴ O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 143–4. ¹¹⁵ Dawson, The Culture of Playgoing, 135–6. ¹¹⁶ William Lambarde, Dictionarium Angliae Topographicum & Historicum (London, 1730), 459–60. Although not published until the eighteenth century, this account was written before Lambarde’s death in 1601. Some theatrical apologists cheekily inverted this well-known formulation into: ‘Men are not wonn by th’eares so well as eyes’: Randolph, The Muses Looking-Glasse, A4r .

3 Comedic Form and Paschal Motif in the First and Second Quartos of Romeo and Juliet In John Madden’s ﬁlm Shakespeare in Love the hero is writing a comedy (Romeo and Ethel the Pirate’s Daughter) which eventually, in response to the thwarted love affair in his own life, metamorphoses into tragedy. The scriptwriters Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard have wittily picked up on a truth about the Shakespearean plot their story is based on. The generic instability of much of Romeo and Juliet was admitted not merely in the 1990s or by the late seventeenth century, when it was played as a tragedy and tragi-comedy on alternate nights, but also by Shakespeare himself when he burlesqued his story as the ‘very tragical mirth’ of Pyramus and Thisbe.¹ A central aspect of comedic form in the play is the plot’s climax in the apparent death and resurrection of Juliet, an event concocted by the Friar to circumvent the obstacles facing the young lovers. The elasticity of death is germane to comedy and plays which copied the plot device of the sleeping potion in the following years all transmuted it into comedy.² In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, likewise, Pyramus/Bottom does not remain dead but leaps up to explain the redemptive aspect of the plot to the spectators: ‘no, I assure you, the wall is down that parted their fathers’ (5. 1. 332). ¹ Ann Pasternak Slater, ‘Petrarchism Come True in Romeo and Juliet’, in D. J. Palmer, Roger Pringle, and Werner Habicht, eds., Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 131. For the evidence that Romeo and Juliet preceded Dream, see Kenneth Muir, The Sources of Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Methuen, 1977), 77; Amy J. Reiss, ‘ ‘‘Tragical Mirth’’: From Romeo to Dream’, Shakespeare Quarterly 43/2 (1992): 215. ² John Day, Law Tricks by John Day, 1608, ed. John Crow (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1949), ll. 2288–90; Thomas Dekker, Satiromastix in The Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Fredson Bowers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1953), i. 5. 2. 96–108; Edward Sharpham, The Fleire by Edward Sharpham: Nach Der Quarto 1607, ed. Hunold Nibbe (Vaduz: Kraus Reprint, 1912/63), 4. 195–284.

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This stock romance device of an apparent death followed by restoration to life is also part of the paschal motif which runs through Romeo and Juliet and strengthens the comedic matrix of the tragedy.³ Many of the plot parallels between Romeo and Juliet and the Easter story (such as the friar who ﬂees, like the women, from the tomb) were already present in Shakespeare’s sources: Brooke’s The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet and Painter’s The Story of Romeo and Julietta.⁴ In both of these the love-story is set within a liturgical framework. The birth and death of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship occurs in synchrony with the birth and death of Christ: they meet at Christmas and are parted at Easter.⁵ Shakespeare has removed these markers of a paschal theme—his play is set in July—but retains their import. The sources draw attention to the signiﬁcant timing of the tragedy, but they make little of its metaphorical possibilities. Shakespeare, by contrast, takes up their prompt and employs it with sophisticated artistry to imbue the fabric of his play with a subverted promise of redemption. Easter is no longer openly referred to, but the threat of death and the hope of resurrection become deeply entwined with the story. This chapter will not only argue that the Easter allusions are one, unrecognized, part of the comedic theme, but also that the play’s earliest texts—An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet, printed in 1597 (Q1) and The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet, printed in 1599 (Q2)—diverge in their presentation of the paschal motif and other comedic elements.⁶ A thoroughgoing study of ³ The popularity of this motif in romance appears to date from the ﬁrst century  and it has recently been suggested this is due to the inﬂuence of Christianity on the Graeco-Roman world: N. T. Wright, The Resurrection of the Son of God (Bath: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 2003), 69–75. My thanks to Stephen Medcalf for alerting me to this. ⁴ There has been scant critical attention of this aspect of the play. The only two references I have found are Roy Battenhouse, Shakespearean Tragedy: Its Art and Its Christian Premises (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1969), 115; Peter Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 29. ⁵ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, i. ll. 155, 959; William Painter, The Story of Romeo and Julietta (1587), in Elizabethan Love Stories, ed. T. J. B. Spencer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968), 54, 65. The idea of a liturgically situated love affair, commencing at Christmas and ending at Easter, also occurs in Du Bellay’s L’Olive: Joachim Du Bellay, L’Olive, ed. Ernesta Caldarini (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1974), sonnets 5, 111; Verdun L. Saulnier, Du Bellay (Paris: Hatier, 1968), 63. ⁶ All quarto references are to An Excellent conceited Tragedie of Romeo and Iuliet (London: John Danter, 1597) and The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Iuliet. Newly corrected, augmented, and amended (London: Cuthbert Burby, 1599).

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differences which consistently alter an aspect of the text, the groundwork for a theory of authorial revision (most famously used in Taylor and Warren’s reappraisal of King Lear) has not yet been attempted for Romeo and Juliet. However, Q1 and Q2 are among the early Shakespeare texts which show patterned variation: coherent differences which create distinct continuities (such as in character, language, or theme) within the texts. There are many other Shakespearean examples of such divergences in the early texts, such as the strengthening of the character of Emilia in the Folio Othello, the presentation of the war in the two texts of King Lear and the different relationship of Hamlet to Laertes and Claudius in the second quarto and the Folio.⁷ Such themed variation, which reshapes one aspect of the play, strongly suggests that some of the differences between quarto and folio texts are the result of intentional rather than random alteration. There is no proof that this reviser is the author, but Grace Ioppolo has shown that there is ample manuscript evidence in plays of this period for authorial revision which reworks character, plot, theme, and structure in ways comparable to the differences perceived in Shakespeare’s multiple texts.⁸ The themed yet delicate alterations apparent in Shakespeare’s early texts seem to be most plausibly explained as the work of the dramatist himself, as it is the author who is most likely to take such care over revising his own play. John Kerrigan has shown that non-authorial revisers tend to add or remove large sections of text, while revising authors—then as now—tend to tinker, ﬁdgeting over single-word substitutions.⁹ This chapter suggests that the divergence of Q1 and Q2 Romeo and Juliet raises the possibility that Shakespeare revised his play, and altered his foul papers (the copy text for Q2) to give prominence to the comedic side of the plot and the latent Easter narrative which is integral to the promise of a happy resolution. ⁷ Nevill Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964), 164–202; Gary Taylor, ‘The War in King Lear’, Shakespeare Survey 33 (1980): 27–34; Paul Werstine, ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 39/1 (1988): 1–26. See also E. A. J. Honigmann, ‘Shakespeare’s Revised Plays: King Lear and Othello’, The Library, 6th ser., 4 (1982): 142–73; Gary and Michael Warren Taylor, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms: Shakespeare’s Two Versions of King Lear (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983); John Jones, Shakespeare at Work (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 166–84, and passim. ⁸ Grace Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 44–77. ⁹ John Kerrigan, ‘Revision, Adaptation, and the Fool in King Lear’, in Taylor and Warren, eds., The Division of the Kingdoms, 195–213.

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Juliet is central to the comedic strand of the tragedy: the witty female who is the instigator of her own marriage, passionate in her desire for sexual fulﬁlment, and whose language is alive with double meaning when she banters with Paris. She is also at the heart of the paschal imagery in the play, and although this grows to a climax at her death, it is present even in the account of her infancy. The nurse’s garrulous and amusing anecdote about weaning Juliet describes how she put wormwood on her teat which the baby then refused, and at this moment an earthquake shook the dovecote: ’Tis since the earthquake now eleven years, And she was weaned—I never shall forget it— Of all the days of the year upon that day, For I had then laid wormwood on my dug, Sitting in the sun under the dovehouse wall.

(1. 3. 25–9)

It is a commonplace of Shakespeare criticism that the comic characters explain more than they intend. The second part of the nurse’s story (in which the child falls and hurts herself) can be taken as a metaphor for the ensuing plot, and the ‘Ay!’ with which she responds to the nurse’s husband’s sexual innuendo preﬁgures the absolute directness with which Juliet commits herself to love and its physical expression.¹⁰ The ﬁrst part of the nurse’s story likewise reveals a theme underlying the main plot. The nurse swears ‘by the rood’ (1. 3. 38) and the scene by the dovehouse wall is a Cruciﬁxion in innocent miniature, holding within itself the Passion imagery which will underlie the passionate intensity of the lovers. There was an earthquake too when Christ was thirsty on the cross. He was given ‘gall’, and like Juliet ‘when he had tasted thereof, he would not drinke’ (Matt. 27: 34). The nurse has given Juliet wormwood to wean her: the milk will taste so bitter that Juliet will no longer desire the breast. It was a common interpretation of the gall and vinegar given to Jesus, that it was a cruel trick to deny him the drink ostensibly proffered. This remained the dominant interpretation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as being the explanation favoured by the mystery plays. In the Chester Passion Jesus is given the mixture with the words: ‘Yea, thou shalt have drynke ¹⁰ John Woolley, ‘Juliet’s Earthquake’, Critical Survey 3/1 (1991): 32. See also Barbara Everett, ‘Romeo and Juliet: The Nurse’s Story’, in C. B. Cox and D. J. Palmer, eds., Shakespeare’s Wide and Universal Stage (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 134–45.

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therfore | that thou shalt lyst to drynke no more.’¹¹ And shortly afterwards, as with Juliet, ‘the earth did quake, & the stones were clouen’ (Matt. 27: 51). The earthquake and wormwood are part of the biblical account of the Cruciﬁxion, but the nurse’s story contains another associated image—doves and a dovecote—which also belonged to meditations on the Passion and the mystery plays. An early seventeenth-century sermon connects the spirit which Christ gave up when he died with the dove released from the ark: ‘as Saint Ambrose comments, hee [the dying Christ] sent his spirit out of his body as Noah sent his Dove out of the Arke’.¹² In mystery plays too, the moment of Christ’s ‘giving up the ghost’ was staged with a dove. One stage direction reads ‘bowing his head, he gives up the spirit and a white dove shall ﬂy off’; another indicates that ‘a live dove is to be hidden in the cross, to ﬂy out at the death of Christ’.¹³ It is perhaps the representation of Christ’s spirit as a dove that led Richard Rolle, in his ‘Meditations on the Passion’, in which he imagines Christ’s cruciﬁed body as inﬁnitely open and permeable, to use the image of a dovecote for the Saviour’s body: ‘swet Jhesu, thy body is like to a dufhouse. For as a dufhouse is ful of holys, so is thy body ful of wounds.’ This dovecote metaphor arose from the devotional apprehension of the accessibility of Christ’s body. It is a striking link between the nurse’s anecdote and the Passion and is also present in the morality play Wisdom, in which Christ describes his cruciﬁed body as being ‘full of holys as a dovehows’.¹⁴ It is not only the events of the nurse’s story that recall Christ’s story; the dramatic method of surrounding a child with pre-echoes of ¹¹ The Chester Mystery Cycle, ed. R. M. Lumiansky and David Mills, Early English Text Society,  3 and 9 (London: Early English Text Society, 1974–86), 16a. 353–4. For the longevity of this interpretation, see Hugo Grotius, Christ’s Passion, A Tragedy; with Annotations, trans. George Sandys, 2nd edn. (London, 1687), F4v . ¹² Samuel Wallsall, The Life and Death of Iesus Christ in part: Summarily Comprising his Inﬁrmities and Sorrowes &c (Cambridge, 1607), D3r . For the iconographic connection between Noah and the cruciﬁed Christ in the Holkham Bible Picture Book, see Happé, Cyclic Form, 106. ¹³ Peter Meredith and John E. Tailby, The Staging of Religious Drama in Europe in the Later Middle Ages (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1983), 119. ¹⁴ Richard Rolle, English Writings of Richard Rolle: Hermit of Hampole, ed. Hope Emily Allen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 35; The Play of Wisdom: Its Texts and Contexts, ed. Milla Cozart Riggio (New York: AMS, 1998), l. 1106. For the importance of the permeability of Christ’s body in medieval devotional poetry see Sarah Beckwith, Christ’s Body: Identity, Culture and Society in Late Medieval Writings (London: Routledge, 1993), 56–63.

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death is a traditional part of the Nativity. In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, the wise men’s words ‘King of the Jews’ (2: 2) are to be repeated in that Gospel only when they are written above him on the cross (27: 37). Cruciﬁxion images were likewise ubiquitous in medieval paintings and plays of the Nativity. The Chester playwright dwells on the pre-echo of Christ’s death in the magi’s gift of myrrh, the ointment with which Christ’s dead body is anointed in John (19: 39).¹⁵ The narrative of Juliet’s childhood at the beginning of the play partakes of these traditional intimations of death; and her ‘death’ near the end of the play, like Christ’s death, is likewise surrounded with hopes of resurrection. In John 20: 3–4 Peter and John race to the sepulchre, but John outstrips Peter. When this story was dramatized in medieval Easter liturgy, the youth of John and the age of Peter were emphasized: ‘let the cantor appoint two, one old and the other young, who … should come to the sepulchre, the youth ﬁrst’. This has been described as the most dramatic part of the Easter liturgy, because the priests impersonate the disciples, and it is therefore unsurprising that it was also performed in the mystery cycles. The stage direction of the N-Town play runs: ‘Hic currunt Johannes et Petrus simul ad sepulchrum, et Johannes prius venit.’¹⁶ When Juliet is believed to have died, there is likewise a race to her tomb in which the young man arrives ﬁrst. This arrival of the beloved young man, and then the old man, at Juliet’s tomb seems to be dramatically affected by and reminiscent of the race between the young and old disciples. The echo imbues Juliet with sanctity and her death with the hope of resurrection, and it adds another facet to the opposition of youth and age within the play. The religious resonance here, as in the nurse’s enjoyable but apparently inconsequential story, is incorporated into the comedic strand of the play. The old are consistently slow with their delivery of news to the young in Romeo and Juliet. With the nurse, in both her early long-winded ¹⁵ See also the echo of the magi’s words in Mary’s language as she brings her gift of myrrh: Chester Mystery Cycle, 9. 176–81, 18. 329–32. ¹⁶ David Bevington, Medieval Drama (London: Houghton Mifﬂin, 1975), 38; Karl Young, The Dramatic Associations of the Easter Sepulchre (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1920), 128; The N-Town Play: Cotton MS Vespasian D.8, ed. Stephen Spector, Early English Text Society,  11 and 12 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1991), 36. 364. See also the anti-Catholic satire, Regnum Papisticum, translated into English in 1570, which describes this race being performed on Easter day: Thomas Naogeorgus, The Popish Kingdome, or reigne of Anti christ, trans. Barnabe Googe (London, 1570), P4v .

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anecdote, and her refusal to impart Romeo’s proposal without a good sit down and a drink ﬁrst, this tardiness is played as comedy. Comedy revels in delayed revelation and in this latter scene, at least, Shakespeare is drawing on the humour of the sluggish running slaves of Plautus.¹⁷ With Friar John, however, the gap between young and old creates the fall into tragedy. In the ﬁrst half of the play, Romeo and Juliet echoes both the situation and the characters of Roman comedy, with its young lovers who bear down the restraints of elderly parents who stand in the way of their love. But after the deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt, the variance between the young and old takes a tragic turn: the young die and the old lose their children. Both the comic and tragic aspects of age are crystallized in the second quarto. In Q2 Old Capulet is far more of a pantaloon: his wife quips that he needs a crutch rather than a sword (Q2 only, A4r14), and himself admits that he is too old for quarrelling ‘and tis not hard I thinke, | For me so old as we to keepe the peace’ (Q2 only, B2v9–10). Likewise his nostalgic remembrance of his visor-wearing youth—‘tis gone, tis gone’—is also only present in Q2 (C3r14–17). Nostalgia is part of the comic presentation of old men (think of Justice Shallow), but Q2 also highlights the tragedic side of old age.¹⁸ The mature women in the play, lamenting the death of those they have nursed and loved, feel their approach to death accelerated by suffering. The nurse, in the midst of the grief for Tybalt’s death says, ‘These griefs, these woes, these sorrows make me old’ (Q2 only, G2v21) and Juliet’s mother, seeing her daughter’s body, says ‘this sight of death, is as a Bell | That warns my old age to a sepulcher’ (Q2 only, L4v26). Death is the absolute which underlies tragedy, but it is rendered pliable in comedy. Susan Snyder has shown how in popular plays performed before Romeo and Juliet resuscitations—such as the reappearance of Emilia in Comedy of Errors, Sempronio in Knack to Know an Honest Man, Dorothea in James the Fourth, and Jack in Peele’s Old Wives’ Tale —all belong to comedy.¹⁹ Through the device of the sleeping potion death becomes something that can be controlled, and hence ¹⁷ Act 2 Scene 4 imitates the slow delivery of news by Pinacium in Stichus, Curculio in Curculio, and, in particular, by Acanthio in Mercator: Plautus, trans. and ed. Paul Nixon, The Loeb Classical Library (London: William Heinemann, 1916–38), v. ll. 274–401, ii. ll. 280–370, iii. ll. 111–224. See also Franklin M. Dickey, Not Wisely but Too Well: Shakespeare’s Love Tragedies (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1957), 74–5. ¹⁸ For this characteristic of old men in comedy, see Marvin T. Herrick, Comic Theory in the Sixteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1950), 154. ¹⁹ Susan Snyder, The Comic Matrix of Shakespeare’s Tragedies: Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Othello and King Lear (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 20–1.

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a central aspect of Romeo and Juliet’s plot is attuned to comedy. Snyder argues that the turning point away from comedy occurs with the ﬁrst real death, the death of Mercutio.²⁰ The mood of the play certainly changes with his demise; however, Snyder underestimates the extent to which comedic elements are kept in play. Mercutio’s most famous pun is uttered even as he is dying and the nurse’s doubles entendres outlive both Mercutio and Tybalt. Juliet retains her comedic role as a witty female in her double-edged repartee with Paris outside Friar Lawrence’s cell and the humorous servants, who populate the ﬁrst act, resurface in Act 4: drawing Old Capulet into banter at the beginning of 4. 2 and 4. 4, and then performing their own comic riff after the rhetorical excesses of the mourning scene. This scene itself has many comic possibilities, and for an audience expecting a happy ending Friar Lawrence’s long-winded speech reads as comic suspense rather than the delay of tragic inevitability.²¹ Shakespeare teases his audience with the possibility of an averted catastrophe up to the moment Romeo kills himself—for example in the otherwise gratuitous death of Paris, which means that the suitor favoured by old Capulet no longer stands as a threat to the young lovers.²² Aristotle writes that pity and fear are evoked when events ‘happen contrary to expectation but because of one another’.²³ This thwarting of expectation is precisely what Shakespeare achieves in Romeo and Juliet. As Snyder has argued: ‘by evoking the world where lovers always win, death always loses, and nothing is irrevocable, a dramatist can set up false expectations of a comic resolution so as to reinforce by sharp contrast the movement into tragic inevitability’.²⁴ Shakespeare uses the comic matrix of his tragedy, therefore, to create the illusion that the young lovers may yet reconcile the families without having to be sacriﬁced. The comedic aspects of the plot are part of its tragic pleasure, and Shakespeare sustains them until the bitter end. ²⁰ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 62. ²¹ James Forse, ‘Arden of Faversham and Romeo and Juliet: Two Elizabethan Experiments in the Genre of ‘‘Comedy-Suspense’’ ’, Journal of Popular Culture 29/3 (1995): 93; Charles B. Lower, ‘Romeo and Juliet, Iv. V: A Stage Direction and Purposeful Comedy’, Shakespeare Studies 8 (1975): 177–94. ²² E. Pearlman, ‘Shakespeare at Work: Romeo and Juliet’, English Literary Renaissance 24 (1994): 325–6. ²³ Aristotle, Poetics I, trans. and ed. Richard Janko (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 3. 3. 2. ²⁴ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 5.

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The Easter allusions explored by this chapter are central to the comedic strand of the play. Romeo’s propitious dream at the beginning of Act 5, which is unique to Shakespeare’s version of the story, sustains the hope of a happy ending and imputes to Juliet a quasi-divine power: I dreamt my lady came and found me dead · · · · · · · And breathed such life with kisses in my lips That I revived and was an emperor. (5. 1. 6–9)

Romeo imagines that Juliet can bring him back from the dead, and his description of her power is a pre-echo of Isabella’s description of Christ’s salvation: ‘and mercy then will breathe within your lips, | like man new made’ (Measure for Measure, 2. 2. 80–1). Redemption is a second creation of man in God’s image; Isabella’s words, and perhaps Romeo’s too, are derived from the creation of Adam by God’s life-giving breath (Gen. 2: 7). One of the strongest and most thoroughgoing aspects of Romeo and Juliet which highlights the possible religious connotations of the story is the language in which the lovers address each other as ‘the god of my idolatry’.²⁵ Romeo—as his name suggests²⁶—is a pilgrim to the shrine of Juliet and the implications of this are punningly teased out in the lovers’ ﬁrst exchange:  If I profane with my unworthiest hand This holy shrine, the gentler sin is this: My lips, two blushing pilgrims, ready stand To smooth that rough touch with a tender kiss.  Good pilgrim, you do wrong your hand too much, Which mannerly devotion shows in this. For saints have hands that pilgrims’ hands do touch, And palm to palm is holy palmers’ kiss.  Have not saints lips, and holy palmers, too?  Ay, pilgrim, lips that they must use in prayer.  O then, dear saint, let lips do what hands do: They pray; grant thou, lest faith turn to despair. ²⁵ For a recent discussion of Romeo and Juliet’s language of ‘incarnate spirituality’ see Graham Ward, True Religion (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 5–34. ²⁶ Florio deﬁnes ‘Romeo’ as ‘a roamer, a wanderer, a palmer’: John Florio, A Worlde of Wordes, or Most copious, and exact Dictionarie in Italian and English (London, 1598), Ee5r .

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 Saints do not move, though grant for prayers’ sake.  Then move not while my prayer’s effect I take. (1. 5. 92–105)

The conversation takes the form of a shared sonnet and is phrased in the religious terminology popular in contemporary sonnet sequences. The language of saints, shrines, prayer, and pilgrims that Romeo and Juliet use here was in vogue not only among sonneteers but among many early modern poets and Shakespeare’s other lovers frequently speak in a similar vein.²⁷ The Catholicism of saints and shrines may have led to such language being heard as romantic rather than blasphemous; however, some sonneteers moved beyond the possibly deconsecrated language of Catholicism to describe their love in terms reminiscent of biblical descriptions of Christ, or God the Father.²⁸ Romeo and Juliet behave likewise: when Romeo asks his love what he should swear by, she replies: Do not swear at all, Or if thou wilt, swear by thy gracious self, Which is the god of my idolatry, And I’ll believe thee. (2. 1. 154–7)

With these impulsive words Juliet not only overturns Christ’s injunction, which she has just quoted—‘Sweare not at all’ (Matthew 5: 34)—but she also instructs her ‘god’ to follow the action of God described in Hebrews: ‘for when God made the promises to Abraham, because hee had no greater to sweare by, he sware by him selfe’ (6: 13).²⁹ Shakespeare is not alone in such daring biblical allusions, but he does make particularly striking use of them in this play. When Romeo says to Juliet ‘call me but love, and I’ll be new baptized’ (2. 1. 92) he imputes a godlike power to her: just by speaking that name ‘love’, she will baptize him anew. When he tells Friar Laurence ‘her I love now | Doth grace for grace and love for love allow’ (2. 2. 85–6), he describes Juliet’s return ²⁷ See All’s Well That Ends Well, 1. 1. 96–7; The Two Gentlemen of Verona, 2. 4. 127 ff.; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 466–7. Helen Hackett fully and subtly explores this language in contemporary sonnet sequences in ‘The Art of Blasphemy?’. ²⁸ See Resolved to Love: The 1592 Edition of Henry Constable’s Diana Critically Considered, ed. Robert F. Fleissner (Salzburg: University of Salzburg, 1980), sonnets 4, 7, 15; Michael Drayton, The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), i, sonnets 12, 19, 29. ²⁹ Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 513.

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of his affection in the biblical language of Christ’s giving himself to humanity: ‘and of his fulnesse haue all we receiued, and grace for grace’ (John 1: 16).³⁰ These moments, like all the religious allusions so far discussed, are present in both the early texts of the play. However, the Easter nuances, latent in the story which centres on the resuscitation of the protagonist in a tomb, and brought out by Shakespeare through biblical echoes and sacred descriptions of erotic love, are rendered more prominent in the second quarto. The status of the ﬁrst quarto of Romeo and Juliet is a matter of scholarly debate. New Bibliographers argued that Q1 was a memorial reconstruction by an actor attempting to remember the manuscript underlying Q2. It was therefore considered not to be authorial, and could be dismissed by the textual critic. Recent criticism, however, has shown that there are a number of problems with memorial reconstruction as a theory in general and with its bearings on this text in particular. Laurie Maguire has argued that the textual disturbance caused by an actor’s faulty memory is difﬁcult to identify because it is often identical with that caused by scribes, compositors, revising authors, or adapters. Peter Blayney has debunked a central tenet of the theory of memorial reconstruction, in which the short quartos were ‘stolne, and surreptitious copies’, by showing that no printer would have been eager to pirate Shakespeare’s work.³¹ Lucas Erne has likewise recently suggested that Q1 Romeo and Juliet, along with other ‘bad quartos’, is the product ‘of a more authorized and communal undertaking than has often been assumed’.³² A reader or director approaching Q1 Romeo and Juliet as a text in its own right is unlikely to consider it as deﬁcient. It plays particularly well and is fast paced and coherent.³³ Despite being a considerably shorter text, 92 per cent of Q1’s lines are roughly ³⁰ Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions, 46. ³¹ Harry Hoppe, The Bad Quarto of Romeo and Juliet: A Bibliographical and Textual Study (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1948); Laurie Maguire, Shakespearean Suspect Texts: The ‘Bad’ Quartos and their Contexts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 155–211; Blayney, ‘The Publication of Playbooks’, 389–94. ³² Lukas Erne, Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 218. ³³ For a discussion of Q1 as ‘an excellent acting text’ see Michael Mooney, ‘Text and Performance: Romeo and Juliet, Quartos One and Two’, Colby Quarterly 26/2 (1990): 124; Pascale Aebischer, ‘Looking for Shakespeare: The Textuality of Performance’, in Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bulens, eds., The Limits of Textuality (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000), 168. Pascale Aebischer directed Q1 in 1998; my grateful thanks to her for discussing its theatrical virtues with me.

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equivalent to lines in Q2. This has lead to the idea that Q1 is a deliberately cut play-text. There are a number of speeches that sound truncated, and of more than eight hundred lines unique to Q2, around ﬁve hundred occur in blocks of at least four lines.³⁴ The ﬁrst quarto shows signs of redaction, but this alone is not sufﬁcient to explain the differences between the two earliest quartos. The alternative, and older, explanation—that the early quartos record Shakespeare’s ﬁrst thoughts and the later printings his revisions—has lately been regaining currency. A number of critics have suggested examples of minor, lexical variants between Q1 and Q2, which add depth or interest to the text and hence seem to suggest Shakespearean revision. Jay Halio, for example, argues that the small differences in the Queen Mab speech are authorial.³⁵ Grace Ioppolo likewise posits that in the process of transferring the ‘grey-eyed morne’ speech from the Friar to Romeo Shakespeare appears to have introduced minor second-thought variants.³⁶ Such analysis supports more ambitious arguments which suggest that single word alterations are themed in such a way as to promote an alternative reading of the text. Steven Urkowitz, for example, has shown that the ﬁnal scene of Act 2 (where the two texts diverge completely) has been entirely altered in tone as well as content. He argues that Shakespeare has revised the meeting between Romeo and Juliet in Friar Lawrence’s cell so that a scene which in Q1 ‘rings exuberantly’ has been transformed into one which ‘tolls ominously’. Yaship Bains has shown how the death scene of Mercutio has been entirely reconceived in a way which changes his characterization. Katherine Duncan-Jones argues that the references to plague in Q1 are consistently absent in Q2, so that a terrifying reality becomes no more than a vague threat.³⁷ ³⁴ David Farley-Hills, ‘The ‘‘Bad’’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Survey 49 (1996): 28–31; Kathleen Irace, Reforming the ‘Bad’ Quartos: Performance and Provenance of Six Shakespearean First Editions (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994), 142. ³⁵ Jay L. Halio, ‘Handy-Dandy: Q1/Q2 Romeo and Juliet’, in Jay L. Halio, ed., Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts and Interpretation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 135. See also David Farley-Hill’s suggestion that the Prologue was invented by the redactor of Q1, and Q2’s prologue is Shakespeare’s revision of the interpolation: Farley-Hills, ‘The ‘‘Bad’’ Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, 34, 43. ³⁶ Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 90. ³⁷ Steven Urkowitz, ‘Two Versions of Romeo and Juliet 2.6 and Merry Wives of Windsor 5.5.215–45: An Invitation to the Pleasures of Textual/Sexual Di(Per)versity’, in R. B. Parker and S. P.Zitner, eds., Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1996), 229; Yaship Singh Bains, Making Sense

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The main problem with the traditional argument that Q1 is Shakespeare’s original text and he revised it to create Q2 is the widespread agreement that Q1 is set from a prompt book and Q2 from foul papers. This is suggested by the latter’s permissive stage directions, unstable speech preﬁxes, unmarked entrances and exits, and ‘false-starts’, which are not present in Q1. A possible reading of the differences between the two texts, which reconciles Q2’s advert ‘newly corrected, augmented, and amended’ with the universally accepted idea of foul paper copy for Q2, is that two years after Q1 had been printed, Romeo and Juliet was popular enough to warrant a new printing. Q1 had been set from the prompt book, which had been formed from a fair copy cut for performance. For the second printing, however, the uncut foul papers are used as the copy-text. Before the papers were sent off to the printer Shakespeare looked over his script and tinkered with it. He revised the stress and tone of the play through the addition of the odd line, altering the occasional word or phrase and rewriting Act 2 Scene 6 entirely. Nevill Coghill describes the revisions in Othello in terms of Shakespeare’s return to and alteration of something with which he was dissatisﬁed.³⁸ One of the aspects of Romeo and Juliet that Shakespeare returned to the play to alter may have been the submerged Easter narrative. In the revised text, perhaps, he determined to draw it nearer to the surface. Studying Romeo and Juliet in its unconﬂated texts leads to an illumination of the Easter motif, because of minor variants that are focused precisely on this theme. The divergence is apparent from the opening scene in which Q1 lacks Benvolio and Tybalt’s dialogue in the ﬁrst brawl. This means that Benvolio’s echo of Christ’s words as he is nailed to the cross ‘they know not what they do’ (Luke 23: 34)—‘you know not what you do’ (A3v 36)—is only present in Q2. This line carries with it an unmistakable overtone of the paschal story and it is in keeping with the text as a whole that it should not be present in Q1, which downplays the sacred aspect of the narrative. Although Shakespeare has removed his sources’ direct references to Easter, liturgical festivals are constantly alluded to throughout both texts. of the First Quartos of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Henry V, Merry Wives of Windsor and Hamlet (Shimla: Indian Institute of Advanced Study, 1995), 27; Katherine DuncanJones, ‘William Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet ed. Jill Levenson’, Review of English Studies 52 (2001): 447. ³⁸ Coghill, Shakespeare’s Professional Skills, 200.

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The Nurse and Old Capulet both use them to measure time: the nurse repeatedly relates that Juliet was born on Lammas eve (1. 3. 15–23) and Capulet says it is twenty-ﬁve years since he wore a mask ‘Come Pentecost as quicklie as it will’ (1. 5. 36).³⁹ It is only in Q2, however, that the love affair is described in relation to the liturgical year. In Q2, as Juliet keeps watch for Romeo, she likens herself to one waiting for a holy day: So tedious is this day, As is the night before some festiuall, To an impatient child that hath new robes And may not weare them.

(Gv 27)

The image of a child’s clothes is suited to Juliet’s half-way state. She is no longer a child precisely because she is about to be covered by a man, as Donne has it: ‘To night put on perfection, and a womans name’.⁴⁰ Juliet’s apprehension of her marital consummation as a holy day is in keeping with her Q2 characterization. Juliet, who is central to the paschal theme, undergoes one of the most striking changes between Q1 and Q2.⁴¹ Juliet’s rich mental life, expressed in Q2 through her erotic soliloquy as she waits for her new husband to arrive and her internal struggle before she drinks the potion, is downplayed in Q1 in which these speeches are absent or appear in a shortened form. In keeping with her smaller role, Q1’s Juliet does not have the active religious life that her Q2 counterpart does. For example, it is only in Q2 that Juliet’s language shows traces of the Book of Common Prayer. When Juliet describes how the news of Romeo’s banishment ‘presses to my memorie, | Like damned guiltie deeds to sinners mindes’ (Q2 only, G3r 7), her words recall the general confession of the Communion service, in which the penitent states: ‘the remembrance of them is grievous unto us, the burthen of them is intolerable’. Juliet’s simile is the product of a mind used to conceiving of sin as a weight pressing on the memory. Likewise, in Q1 Juliet seeks the help of the Friar to solve what is a secular problem ³⁹ See also 2. 3. 127, 5. 1. 57. For the festive associations of July, the month in which the play is set, see Philippa Berry, ‘Between Idolatry and Astrology: Modes of Temporal Repetition in Romeo and Juliet’, in Dympna Callaghan, ed., A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 360–3, 368–9. ⁴⁰ The refrain of ‘Epithalamion made at Lincoln’s Inn’: The Poems of John Donne: Edited from the Old Editions and Numerous Manuscripts, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson (London: Oxford University Press, 1953), i. 141–4. ⁴¹ For the relevance of alteration of a central character to a theory of authorial revision, see Werstine, ‘The Textual Mystery of Hamlet’, 11.

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of keeping faith with Romeo. By contrast in Q2 she is distressed about breaking faith with God as well as her husband (Iv 20), and tells the Friar: ‘God ioynd my heart, and Romeos thou our hands’ (Q2 only, I3r 7), echoing of the Book of Common Prayer’s marriage service: ‘then shall the Priest ioyne their hands together, and say. Those whome God hath ioyned together, let no man put asunder.’⁴² Unique to Q2 likewise are her lines about the state of sin that bigamy would entail:  I haue need of many orysons, To moue the heauens to smile vpon my state, Which well thou knowest, is crosse and full of sin. (I4v 23)

In both texts Juliet is estranged from her nurse because of her advice that she should marry Paris, but it is only in Q2 that the sacred ﬁat against bigamy weighs on Juliet’s mind along with the impossibility of deserting Romeo. To preserve herself from a forced marriage she drinks the potion, is believed to be dead, and is ‘laid into the Tombe’ (Q2 only, Kr 16), from which she hopes to rise again to a blessed life with Romeo. As the climax of Q2 draws closer the hopes and fears of the paschal story crowd in upon the text. The catalyst for the catastrophe is the proposed marriage of Juliet to Paris. Shakespeare has darkened her parents’ motives from the sources in which, miserable at their daughter’s month-long weeping at (as they think) the death of her cousin, they determine on a marriage to make her happy. Even so her father is hesitant to marry her so young. In one source he objects: ‘scarce saw she yet full xvi’, and in the other that: ‘sith as yet she is not attained to the age of eighteen years, I thought to provide a husband at leisure’. Juliet’s youth is also sharply out of line with the normal marrying age of a woman in late sixteenth-century England, which was their early twenties.⁴³ Despite these changes the Capulets in Q1 are not entirely forcing their daughter against her will. Steven Urkowitz has pointed out how, in the scene in which Lady Capulet ⁴² The Booke of Common prayer, and administration of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Ceremonies in the Church of England (London, 1590), Nr , O8v . Shaheen notes both these Prayer Book references, although he does not mention that they are unique to Q2: Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 517, 520. For evidence of the popularity of, and familiarity of the populace with, the Book of Common Prayer in early modern England see Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33, 44–5, 118–19. ⁴³ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, i. l. 1860; Painter, Romeo and Julietta, 75; Ingram, Church Courts, 129.

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ﬁrst introduces the match to her daughter, the variants between Q1 and Q2 systematically increase the coercive pressure of the mother.⁴⁴ When the marriage with Paris is urged the second time, the parents are again harsher in Q2. In Q1, Old Capulet is described as ‘pittying’ (G4r 30) his daughter’s sorrow. Q2 omits this word and when the argument between father and daughter comes his anger is harsher and more sarcastic. The climax in the divergence in Juliet’s treatment by her parents comes as Capulet prepares for his daughter’s wedding day, unaware that she is lying like death in her room. In Q1 he cries: Make hast, make hast, for it is almost day, The Curfewe bell hath rung, t’is foure a clocke. (Ir 17)

The father is not such a guilty man in this text and his words here are ominous only in that the audience knows that sorrow awaits him. In Q2, however, at this moment the old man is cast as the unwitting Peter in this Passion story. Shakespeare has altered his source to make Peter a prominent name. The church at which Juliet was to be married is dedicated to St Peter instead of St Francis (as it was in Brooke) and Juliet swears she will not marry Paris: ‘by Saint Peter’s Church, and Peter too’ (3. 5. 116). St Peter’s is the name of the church at which Old Capulet was to have betrayed his child into a loveless marriage, and Peter is the name of the servant who, in Q2, he repeatedly names in this scene (Kv 29–31). In Q2 Capulet enters saying: Come stir, stir, stir, the second Cock hath crowed. The Curphew bell hath roong, tis three a clock. (Kv 12)

The second line is almost identical with Q1—‘the Curfewe bell hath rung, t’is foure a clocke’—with only a single change in the time from four to three o’clock. John Jones’s excellent work on the insistent number changes in King Lear argues that they are a sign of the author’s mind ‘ﬁdgeting and tinkering as he attends to a mental itch which is also a symptom of something else’.⁴⁵ I think this is true of this number ⁴⁴ Steven Urkowitz, ‘Five Women Eleven Ways: Changing Images of Shakespearean Characters in the Earliest Texts’, in D. J. Palmer, Werner Habicht, and Roger Pringle, eds., Images of Shakespeare: Proceedings of the Third Congress of the International Shakespeare Association, 1986 (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1988), 298–9. ⁴⁵ Jones, Shakespeare at Work, 176.

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change too. ‘Three a clock’ is a portentous time in a way that four is not. It is the time at which Christ died.⁴⁶ The alteration of the time is accompanied by a change in the way the time is heralded: ‘the second Cock hath crowed’.⁴⁷ At the sound of the second cock crow, Peter realized that he had denied Christ, and Capulet is heading for a similar awakening. Mark is the only Gospel that has the cock crow twice, but this is the more dramatically effective version, as it makes the listener forcibly aware that Jesus’ prophecy is about to come true. The stage directions of N-town play 29 (‘Et cantabit gallus … Et cantabit gallus … and Petyr xal wepyn’) and Jesus’ prophecy in the Towneley cycle (‘or the cok have crowen twyse, | Thou shall deny me tymes thre’) show that in these cycles the second cock crow was certainly staged. We cannot be sure about the Coventry play, but the accounts do record a payment for ‘cokcroing’.⁴⁸ This aspect of St Peter’s story had also been dwelt on in Southwell’s poem Saint Peter’s Complaint, in which three verses are dedicated to the cock crow.⁴⁹ This poem came out almost immediately after Southwell’s execution in 1595, and it went through three editions in that year alone. Despite being written by a Catholic priest, the book found popularity among all denominations, and it would have been surprising if Shakespeare had not known about one of the most talked-about poems of the year.⁵⁰ Southwell’s poetic meditation on Peter’s betrayal of Christ spawned numerous imitations and made the topic highly fashionable both at the time Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, and during its early performances.⁵¹ The double cock crow in Q2 gives that text a sense of expectation, and of dread, not present in Q1. The ⁴⁶ For another example in which 3 o’clock might carry this signiﬁcance in Shakespeare, see Steve Sohmer, Shakespeare’s Mystery Play: The Opening of the Globe Theatre 1599 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 96. ⁴⁷ The curfew bells, which are mentioned in both texts, also had a festal association, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 40. ⁴⁸ The N-Town Play, 29. 198, 212; The Towneley Plays, ed. Martin Stevens and A. C. Cawley, 2 vols.,  13 and 14 (Oxford: Early English Text Society, 1994), xx. 452–3; Ingram, Coventry, 289. ⁴⁹ Robert Southwell, Saint Peters Complaint, with other Poemes (London, 1595), Ev . ⁵⁰ Some critics have thought the connection closer than this. One version has a prose dedication to ‘W.S.’, and there are possible puns on Venus and Adonis and Shakespeare’s name in the dedicatory poem. For an overview of this theory see Alison Shell, ‘Why Didn’t Shakespeare Write Religious Verse?’, in Takashi Kozuka and J. R. Mulryne, eds., Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson: New Directions in Biography (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 85–112. My grateful thanks to Alison Shell for giving me a copy of this essay. ⁵¹ Alison Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558– 1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 57–79.

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audience becomes aware of the sorrow that is inherent in the father’s bustling joy. As far as the world is aware Juliet has died, but there are some who are hopeful that she will come back to life. When the Friar comes to open the tomb, Q2 draws parallels (absent from Q1) with Christ’s sepulchre on Easter morning. The Q2 stage directions detail that the Friar should carry ‘Lanthorne, Crowe and Spade’ (L3v 1), implements that mark him as ready to open a tomb, which like the women on Easter morning, he will ﬁnd already open. With a cry he says: Alack alack, what bloud is this which staines The stony entrance of this sepulchre? (L3v 26)

In the New Testament the word ‘sepulchre’ is associated with just one thing: the Easter tomb. The Gospels in the Geneva Bible use ‘sepulchre’ thirty-seven times and only referring to Christ’s tomb. The word is not present in Q1, which has instead: What bloud is this that staines the entrance Of this marble stony monument? (K2r 25)

In Shakespeare ‘sepulchre’ can simply refer to a tomb, but it is noticeable that the word is present in two of his rare, explicitly pious references to Christianity. Henry IV speaks of leading a crusade ‘to the sepulchre of Christ’ to ﬁght under his ‘bless`ed cross’ (1 Henry IV, 1. 1. 19–20), and Gaunt’s paean to England includes a reference to her soldiers who are famed as far away ‘as is the sepulchre, in stubborn Jewry, | Of the world’s ransom, bless`ed Mary’s son’ (Richard II, 2. 1. 55–56). The sacred resonance of the word may be the reason that it is used in Q2 to describe Juliet’s tomb. Until Elizabeth’s reign the Easter liturgy in England centred on a sepulchre built inside the church. The Easter sepulchre appeared in churches in the south of the country around the tenth century and by the sixteenth century they were present in the overwhelming majority of urban parishes.⁵² It is possible that Shakespeare and some of his audience could have been aware of the liturgical ceremonies associated with the sepulchre. At the beginning of the Reformation, Henry allowed the ancient customs of the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday, the carrying of palms on Palm Sunday, the Easter sepulchre, and creeping the cross to continue ‘as good and laudable things to put us in memory ⁵² Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 52–3.

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of what they signify’, and the Easter sepulchre was never speciﬁcally forbidden by Royal Injunctions under Henry or Edward. Nonetheless it is clear from the rebuilding of sepulchres carried out under Mary that many were destroyed, and Cranmer’s Articles for Canterbury Diocese (1548) pursues clergy who ‘upon Good Friday last’ used ‘the sepulchres with their lights, having the Sacrament therein’.⁵³ Under Mary, Easter ceremonial such as the veiling of the rood, the lighting of the paschal candle, and creeping the cross were enforced by visitations, and the lack of prosecutions suggests that such physical aspects of the Easter liturgy were widely readopted.⁵⁴ The enthusiastic support for the sepulchre during Mary’s reign does not always show a comparable diminishment at her death. In Ludlow, for example, the only difference between the accounts for the setting-up of the sepulchre in the last years of Mary’s reign and the beginning of Elizabeth’s is, surprisingly, that the latter involves far more expensive and elaborate rites, despite the government’s attempts to suppress the sepulchre.⁵⁵ In the neighbouring diocese to Shakespeare’s, a year after his birth, the clergy were ordered to ‘abolish and put away clean out of your church all monuments of idolatry and superstition, as … sepulchres which were used on Good Friday’.⁵⁶ Bishop Bentham was right in suspecting that clergy and parishioners were hoarding their Easter sepulchres, for evidence of them remains to this day in at least sixteen Warwickshire churches.⁵⁷ Most stone sepulchres were never entirely destroyed, and an inventory of 1566 shows that many had kept even the wooden structures too. A dismantled sepulchre frame turns up in an inventory for St Michael’s, Chester as late as the 1590s.⁵⁸ There is also evidence of Easter sepulchre ceremonies which began to be practised as folk ritual after they had been banned by the Church. In Pembrokeshire, for example, ‘Christ’s bed’ was made on Good Friday by weaving a ﬁgure ⁵³ Frere, Visitation Articles, ii. 38, 183–5; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 461. ⁵⁴ Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 97. ⁵⁵ Churchwardens’ Accounts of the Town of Ludlow, in Shropshire, from 1540 to the end of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, ed. Thomas Wright (London: Camden Society, 1869), 86, 91–2. ⁵⁶ Frere, Visitation Articles, iii. 169. ⁵⁷ Clifford Davidson and Jennifer Alexander, The Early Art of Coventry, StratfordUpon-Avon, Warwick and Lesser Sites in Warwickshire: A Subject List of Extant and Lost Art Including Items Relevant to Early Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1985), 32, 91–2, 132–3. ⁵⁸ Pamela Sheingorn, The Easter Sepulchre in England (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1987), 52; Ingram, Coventry, 65, 69, 73.

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out of reeds and laying it solemnly, together with a cross, in a concealed place in the countryside.⁵⁹ As such survivals show, the Easter sepulchre was a popular part of the liturgy and it lived on in people’s memories as well as being memorialized in stone. In the late sixteenth century Roger Martin wrote an account of the liturgy of his youth: ‘In the quire, there was a fair painted frame of timber, to be set up about Maundy Thursday, with holes for a number of fair tapers to stand in before the sepulchre, and to be lighted in service time … the sepulchre being placed, and ﬁnely garnished, at the north end of the high altar.’⁶⁰ Another account, written in 1593, recalls how the sepulchre in a church in Durham was ‘sett upp in the morninge, on the north side of the Quire, nigh to the High Altar … all covered with red velvett and embrodered with gold’ and describes how, at the Good Friday service there were ‘two tapers lighted before it, which tapers did burne unto Easter day’.⁶¹ A liturgical drama was created in and around the sepulchre in which the host and a cross were ‘buried’ on Good Friday (the depositio) and raised on Easter day (the elevatio), after which the empty tomb was visited by the three Marys and the disciples (the visitatio sepulchri). Scholars have long argued that the dramatic revival in medieval England grew out of the third part of this liturgy, the visitatio sepulchri and the quem quaeritis.⁶² Even though this view is no longer accepted, the liturgy of the sepulchre was certainly intensely dramatic, both during Easter and at Corpus Christi, when Miri Rubin has described it as the site at which drama and eucharistic practices merged.⁶³ The sepulchre ⁵⁹ Hutton, ‘The English Reformation’, 102. See 101–4 for other examples of Easter sepulchre ceremonies which survived outside the church. ⁶⁰ David Dymond and Clive Paine, The Spoil of Melford Church: The Reformation in a Suffolk Parish (Ipswich: Salient Press, 1992), 3–6, 61; Bevington, Medieval Drama, 33. ⁶¹ A Description or Briefe Declaration of all the Ancient Monuments, Rites, and Customes Belonginge, beinge within the Monastical Church of Durham Before the Suppression, ed. James Raine (London: J. B. Nichols, 1842), 10. For another contemporary account of the Easter sepulchre see Philips van Marnix van St. Aldegonde, The Bee hiue of the Romishe Churche, trans. George Gilpin (London, 1579), Cc8v –Ddr . ⁶² Young, Dramatic Associations. For the critique of this idea, see O. B. Hardison, Christian Rite and Christian Drama in the Middle Ages: Essays in the Origin and Early History of Modern Drama (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 12–13; David A. Bjork, ‘On the Dissemination of Quem quaeritis and the visitatio sepulchri and the Chronology of Their Early Sources’, in C. J. Gianakaris, John H. Stroupe, and Clifford Davidson, eds., The Drama of the Middle Ages: Comparative and Critical Essays (New York: AMS, 1982), 1–24. ⁶³ Rubin, Corpus Christi, 294–7. See also Gibson, The Theatre of Devotion, 93.

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was the dramatic focus of the Easter liturgy: curtains and lights were erected round it, and the story which it symbolized was re-enacted. When the Friar arrives at Juliet’s tomb, he is shocked (like the women in the visitatio sepulchri) to ﬁnd the ‘sepulchre’ already open and light shining out of it (5. 3. 125–7, 135).⁶⁴ In the Bible there are bright angels in the empty tomb and in the Chester Resurrection light pours out of the tomb, blinding the watch: ‘Alas, what ys thys great light | shyninge here in my sight?’ (18. 210–11). Light surrounding or emanating from Juliet’s tomb could also have been reminiscent of the Easter sepulchre, and Q2 highlights this aspect of the staging. Throughout both versions Romeo describes Juliet in terms of the Christian iconography of light: ‘It is the east, and Juliet is the sun’ (2. 1. 45).⁶⁵ However, the ﬁnal light imagery, uttered at the tomb, occurs only in Q2:  A Graue, O no. A Lanthorne slaughtred youth: For here lies Iuliet,and her bewtie makes This Vault a feasting presence full of light.

(L2v 34)

Here the image of a darkened hall, lit by lanterns for late night feasting, slides into a profane refraction of the ﬁnal feasting place of the blest in a heaven irradiated by the glory of God.⁶⁶ In Romeo’s imagery the radiance of Juliet’s beauty is an analogue to the divine luminescence that shines out of the tomb in the biblical accounts. As Romeo dies and leaves his light beside her, his metaphor is actualized. The boy leading the others to the tomb says: ‘this is the place there where the torch doth burne’ (Q2 only, L4r 22). The Easter sepulchre was lit throughout holy week by the ‘sepulcre lyght’ and the candles surrounding the sepulchre were one of the main focuses of devotion to it: the commonest form of individual benefaction was the endowment of wax to light the sepulchre during holy week. John Garyngton of Mundon, Essex, for example, willed thirty ewes to his ⁶⁴ There is also another possible parallel: some versions of the visitatio sepulchri elaborated on the Gospels to include an episode in which the Marys stopped to buy their spices, before taking them to the sepulchre, just as Romeo stops to purchase drugs at the apothecary before proceeding to Juliet’s tomb: E. K. Chambers, The English Folk Play (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933), 165–8. ⁶⁵ For the importance of light imagery in the lovers’ descriptions of each other see Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 310–12. ⁶⁶ ‘Lanthorn’ is a variant form of ‘lantern’, and at this time the word was ‘applied to things metaphorically giving light. Formerly often of persons’, Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. lantern. For a possible interpretation of ‘lanthorn’ as a type of candle-lit grave see Gilian West, ‘Juliet’s Grave’, English Language Notes 28/1 (1990): 33–4.

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parish church in 1517 to pay for ‘ij Tapurs brennyng yerely afore the sepulchre at the fest of Easter as long as the worlde doth stande’.⁶⁷ It is probable that the stage property for Romeo’s ‘torch’ was likewise some form of candle (the latter being used in open air theatres to signify night).⁶⁸ The staging at this point in Q2 would, therefore, have increased the resemblance between tomb and sepulchre. This effect has been powerfully realized in one of the most famous ﬁlm productions of modern times. In Baz Lurhman’s William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet (1996) religious imagery is fetishized and nowhere more so than in the ‘supersaturated religiosity of the Capulet tomb’. However, Peter Donaldson has described how the thousands of candles which surround Juliet in this production also highlight the sacrality of her resting place: ‘as shots proceed from wide shots to close-ups of Romeo, the myriad candles shift function, from markers of excess to resonance with his grief, and then, as we draw nearer still, to light sources, tender, [and] appropriate’.⁶⁹ In addition to the candles at Juliet’s side, she is also curtained off, just as the sepulchre would have been. According to Q1’s stage directions, after Juliet has drunk the potion ‘she fals upon her bed within the Curtaines’ (Ir 8). Then, after the lament over her body, ‘they all but the Nurse goe foorth, casting Rosemary on her and shutting the Curtens’ (Q1 only, I2v 8). Shortly afterwards Paris enters and ‘strewes the Tomb with ﬂowers’ (Q1 only, I4v 9). Most critics believe that the early quartos can give a guide to contemporary staging, and although caution needs to be exercised over this assumption, it is likely, if this is how the play was staged, that the ﬂower-strewn bed and the ﬂower-strewn tomb are one.⁷⁰ There are no stage directions for moving Juliet, and the careful ⁶⁷ Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 34; Pamela Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good Friday’’: The Impact of the Reformation on the Easter Rites of England’, in Clifford Davidson and Ann Elijenhom Nichols, eds., Iconoclasm vs. Art and Drama (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989), 161. ⁶⁸ Gurr, Shakespearean Stage, 198; R. B. Graves, Lighting the Shakespearean Stage 1567–1642 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1999), 204. ⁶⁹ Peter S. Donaldson, ‘ ‘‘In Fair Verona’’: Media, Spectacle, and Performance in William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet’, in Richard Burt, ed., Shakespeare after Mass Media (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 67, 79, and passim. ⁷⁰ Alan Dessen is the strongest advocate of this theory; see his ‘Q1 Romeo and Juliet and Elizabethan Theatrical Vocabulary’, in Jay L. Halio, ed., Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet: Texts, Contexts and Interpretation (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 107–22. However, for the contrary view see Paul Werstine, ‘Touring and the Construction of Shakespeare Textual Criticism’, in Laurie E. Maguire and Thomas L. Berger, eds., Textual Formations and Reformations (Newark: University of Delaware

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curtaining of her body suggests that she has remained on stage, shielded from the action either by the drapes of her bed, or behind the arras, until ‘Romeo opens the tombe’ (Q1 only, Kr 24) by drawing back the curtains.⁷¹ This curtaining-off of Juliet’s tomb/bed connects it with the Easter sepulchre, which was likewise carefully shielded. The accounts of St Matthew’s, Friday Street, London, for 1547–8, record a payment of nine shillings ‘receyved of Mr. Beche for ij curtyns whiche hong about the sepulker, sold within the tyme of this accompt’. Likewise the accounts of St Michael’s, Bedwardine, Worcester, for 1547, record two pence paid ‘for wyer for the Curteynes for the Sepulter at Easter’. As this wire suggests, it seems that the curtains were ﬁxed in such a way that they could be drawn to conceal or reveal the contents of the sepulchre: ‘item ij blew Cortyns [to] draw afore the sepulture; iij Cortyns of launde to draw afore the sepulture on the ester holy days’.⁷² Flowers, such as those which the Nurse strews on Juliet’s bed, and Paris strews on her grave, were likewise a ubiquitous part of the decoration of the Easter sepulchre. The anti-Catholic satire, Regnum Papisticum, translated in 1570, describes the rites at the Easter sepulchre thus: And frankensence and sweete perfumes before the bread doth burne: With tapers all the people come, and at the barriars stay, Where downe upon their knees they fall, and night and day they pray: And violets and every kinde of ﬂowres about the graue They straw.⁷³

The candles, curtain, and ﬂowers surrounding Juliet may all have recalled an Easter sepulchre, but the strongest connection with that liturgical object is perhaps that, as discussed above, Juliet’s tomb is also Press, 1998), 45–66. John Jowett has persuasively argued that the stage directions of Q1 are probably derived from the printing house: ‘Henry Chettle and the First Quarto of Romeo and Juliet’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 92/1 (1998): 53–74. I am cautious, therefore, of arguing that Q1’s stage directions are accurate records of sixteenth-century staging. However, even if they were written in the printing house, they could still record a memory of performance. ⁷¹ A survey of the stage directions of early-modern plays suggests that the secretion of a bed behind stage curtains, presumably in the discovery space, was a common device: Alan C. Dessen and Leslie Thomson, eds., A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), s.v. bed and discover. ⁷² Neil C. Brooks, ‘The Sepulchre of Christ in Art and Liturgy, with Special Reference to Liturgical Drama’, University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature 7/2 (1921): 81. ⁷³ Naogeorgus, Popish Kingdome, P3v .

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her bed. In The Rape of Lucrece Shakespeare describes Lucrece’s head as ‘entomb`ed’ between the hills of her pillow: ‘Where like a virtuous monument she lies | To be admired of lewd unhallowed eyes’ (391–2). Lucrece’s bed is described as a tomb to preﬁgure her death, and Juliet’s tomb, conversely, is staged and described as a bed to convey the hope of her rising to new life. Paris enters in Act 5 Scene 3 with ﬂowers, which could be brought either to sweeten a bridal bed, or to dress a corpse. As Gertrude says as she throws blooms on Ophelia’s body: ‘I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid, | And not t’have strewed thy grave’ (Hamlet, 5. 1. 242–3). Paris’s ﬂowers express the equivocal nature of this tomb as he reimagines it as her bridal bed: ‘sweet ﬂower, with ﬂowers thy bridal bed I strew. | O woe! Thy canopy is dust and stones’ (5. 3. 12–13). Beds and graves were frequently twinned in religious texts for didactic purposes. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, continuously stresses the religious signiﬁcance of the metaphor of sleeping for death and waking for resurrection in his Easter sermons. In his 1606 Easter sermon on Romans 6: 9—‘knowing that Christ being raised from the dead, dieth no more, death hath no more dominion over him’—Andrewes wrote: he said ‘death is … a fall … like to that of men into their bedds, when they make accompt to stand up again’ … The very word which the Apostle useth (εγ ερθεις —egertheis) implieth … a fall into a bed in our chamber; where though we lye (to see to) little better than dead for a time; yet in the morning we awake and stand up notwithstanding.74

The correlation between tombs and beds, which is created in Romeo and Juliet to convey a hope of resurrection for Juliet, is present also in the Easter sepulchre, a tomb which was known to be only temporary. In the medieval and early Tudor period the Blessed Sacrament was honoured with people’s most expensive possessions, which was often their bed linen. People who lived along the route of the York Corpus Christi procession were instructed by the civic order of 1544: ‘that every howseholdr that dwellith in the hye way ther as the sayd procession procedith, shall hang before ther doores & forefrontes beddes & coverynges of beddes of the best that they can gytt and strewe before ther doores resshes and other suche fﬂowers’.⁷⁵ People also bequeathed bedding to the sepulchre. In 1500 Henry Willyams willed to a church ⁷⁴ Lancelot Andrewes, XCVI Sermons (London, 1629), Nn3v . ⁷⁵ Johnston and Rogerson, York, i. 283.

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in Stanford, ‘my coverlet to the use of the sepulcre’ and in the same year Basilla Laxton left a bed-sheet to the same sepulchre.⁷⁶ Elizabeth Hatﬁeld, likewise, in 1509 bequeathed her arras bed to the parish church in Hedon, York, to be used to cover her tomb on her year’s mind (the anniversary of her death) and to adorn the sepulchre at Easter.⁷⁷ It was no doubt the costliness of the bed linen that caused it to be donated to the Easter sepulchre, but once the structure was swathed in coverlets and sheets, and curtained off, it may have reminded the pious of a bed—such as that in the Corpus Christi Carol—in which the Blessed Sacrament was merely to sleep, to rise again on Easter day.⁷⁸ Elizabeth Hatﬁeld’s bequest, in which her bed was used to adorn both her tomb and the sepulchre, shows the powerful association between the burial of ordinary men and women and that of the host at Easter. Likewise, John Cheyne of Bedford willed in 1413 that the tapers that burned beside his body during his funeral should ‘brenne to fore the sepulcre from good freiday in to Esterday’.⁷⁹ The strongest symbolism, however, occurred in churches whose permanent stone sepulchres doubled as the tombs of wealthy patrons. These people had created a resting place for themselves which would also be the sepulchre for the host, and the tombs were adorned with Resurrection imagery which interwove personal hopes with a visualization of the Gospel story.⁸⁰ This combination of an expensive tomb with the liturgical burial place of Christ seems particularly resonant for Romeo and Juliet and strikingly there is a ﬁne example of one such sepulchre in the chancel of Holy Trinity, Stratford, underneath Shakespeare’s mural. This is the tomb of Dean Thomas Balsall, erected in the late ﬁfteenth century, and decorated ⁷⁶ R. M. Serjeantson and H. Isham Longden, ‘The Parish Churches and Religious Houses of Northamptonshire: Their Dedications, Altars, Images and Lights’, The Archaelogical Journal 70/279 (1913): 229–30. An 1538 inventory for the Benedictine Priory at Castle Hedingham, Essex, listed silk cloths and sheets for the sepulchre: Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good Friday’’ ’, 150. ⁷⁷ Brooks, ‘The Sepulchre of Christ’, 82. ⁷⁸ In the Corpus Christi Carol Christ’s bleeding body lies on a bed, which in the different versions of the poem is draped variously with curtains, silk sheets, and red and gold hangings (see above for the red and gold of the Durham sepulchre, 79). This bed probably symbolizes the Easter sepulchre, see R. T. Davies, ed., Medieval English Lyrics: A Critical Anthology (London: Faber & Faber, 1963), 272, 364. For the different versions, see Richard L. Greene, ‘The Meaning of the Corpus Christi Carol’, Medium Aevum 29 (1960): 10–11. ⁷⁹ Sheingorn, ‘ ‘‘No Sepulchre on Good Friday’’ ’, 149. ⁸⁰ For examples, see Gibson, Theatre of Devotion, 93; Duffy, Stripping of the Altars, 30–7; Sheingorn, Easter Sepulchre, 28–52, 342.

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with a frieze which leads chronologically from Jesus’ betrayal through to the Resurrection appearance on the road to Emmaus.⁸¹ Although it is very unlikely that this tomb was used as an Easter sepulchre during Shakespeare’s boyhood, he might have been told about how, in the old days, it had been swathed with rich cloths, decorated with ﬂowers and surrounded by lights at Easter. Dean Balsall’s monument was both his ﬁnal resting place and a temporary resting place for the host before its ‘resurrection’ at the elevation; a site where the universal connection between the little death (sleep) and the ﬁnal sleep (death) was played out in the hope that the patron’s death might be as short-lived as Christ’s. If Juliet’s tomb was also her bed, draped with sumptuous clothes, strewn with ﬂowers, surrounded by candles and hidden by an arras until opened by Romeo drawing the curtain back, then the Easter allusions in the text would have been heightened by a strong visual parallel to the Easter sepulchre.⁸² The promise of resurrection, however, is subverted. Romeo and Juliet’s love cannot triumph over death, and despite the reconciliation of the two families, the hope of redemption that the allusion engenders remains largely illusory. The alchemical promise of new life suggested by the lovers’ embrace in the tomb is made painfully literal in the raising of gold statues to the two dead lovers.⁸³ If Shakespeare’s audience, however, had consciously or subconsciously recognized the Easter allusion it may have connected in their mind with the other comedic possibilities of the play. The comic wordplay with which the play begins—as servants quibble over swords and maidenheads—belies the ostensible tragedy of the play’s title and the prologue. The ambiguous tone of this ‘Conceited Tragedy’ is clear from the comedic nature of not only its dialogue, but also its form. According to contemporary dramatic theory, comedy had turbulent beginnings and bourgeois protagonists and was derived ⁸¹ Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 63–8. ⁸² There is evidence that at least one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries recognized the connection between Juliet’s tomb and Christ’s sepulchre. The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611), probably by Thomas Middleton, is strongly indebted to Romeo and Juliet and has also been called by one recent editor ‘an allegory of Christ’s redemption of his Church’. The tomb of the Lady is broken open in a scene which recalls both the breaking open of Christ’s tomb in the mystery plays and Romeo and Juliet: The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, ed. Anne Lancashire (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1978), 30, 40–4, 4. 3. 74–5, 4. 4. 40–3. ⁸³ The embrace of lovers in a tomb was a symbol of alchemical resurrection: Lyndy Abraham, ‘ ‘‘The Lovers in the Tomb’’: Alchemical Emblems in Shakespeare, Donne and Marvell’, Emblematica 5/2 (1991): 301–11.

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from ﬁction, whereas tragedy was a true history of the high-born, whose peaceful opening belied its tragic conclusion.⁸⁴ Contemporary expectation, not simply dramatic theory, also suggested that Romeo and Juliet, centred on young romantic love, would be a comedy. Susan Snyder has shown that every comedy performed on the popular stage in the early 1590s included a love story, and in most the courtship of the young lovers was the mainspring of the plot, as it is in Romeo and Juliet.⁸⁵ She has argued that: ‘Romeo and Juliet, young and in love and deﬁant of obstacles, are attuned to the basic movement of the comic game toward marriage and social regeneration. But they do not win: the game turns into a sacriﬁce.’⁸⁶ But there is a story in which sacriﬁce itself is part of the comic matrix, and through the Easter allusions Shakespeare maintains the viability of a happy ending. Flippant humour, as well as the comedic form of the paschal theme, is also a much larger component of Q2. The hen-pecked husbands of the opening scene are only present in the second quarto, in which Capulet’s wife enters mockingly suggesting that her husband needs a crutch rather than a sword, and Montague’s wife is apparently successful in her ﬁat that her husband is forbidden to enter the fray (A4r 12–19). The Nurse is funnier throughout—her anecdotes more garrulous, her bawdy coarser, and her tardiness more drawn out.⁸⁷ Q2 also extends the Nurse’s lament over Juliet’s dead body so that the scene’s latent instability of tone becomes more obviously comic. The repetitious form of her wail—‘O wo, O wofull, wofull, wofull day | … O day, O day, O day, O hatefull day’ (K2v 22, 25)—is mirrored in the open comedy of Pyramus’s lines in A Midsummer Night’s Dream: ‘O night, O night, alack, alack, alack’ (5. 1. 170). The servants who are so essential to comedy are rendered more prominent in Q2 not only through the increased role of the Nurse, but also through the additional scene before the Capulet feast showing the serving men have their own amorous desires (towards Susan Grindstone and Nell) which they hope to fulﬁl that evening (C2v 27–C3r 5), and the extended exchange between Will Kempe and the minstrels after Juliet drinks the potion (K3v 1–K4r 3). There also seems to be some attempt in Q2 to have Peter, the servant ⁸⁴ Herrick, Comic Theory, 59. ⁸⁵ H. B. Charlton, ‘Romeo and Juliet as Experimental Tragedy’, Proceedings of the British Academy 25 (1939): 143–85; Harry Levin, ‘Form and Formality in Romeo and Juliet’, Shakespeare Quarterly 11 (1960): 6; Snyder, Comic Matrix, 19. ⁸⁶ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 58. ⁸⁷ See e.g. B4v 8–13, Cr 14, E4v 6–18, Fr 35–Fv 3.

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played by Will Kempe, accompany Romeo as he approaches Juliet’s tomb, and hence to retain his comic presence right up to the last moment.⁸⁸ The Friar, who unites the lovers and enables the reconciliation of the two families, is central to the comic matrix of the play. His canniness—shown through the creation of the love potion—is a speciﬁcally comedic attribute, and his hopes for the stratagem are expressed through wordplay in Q2. In Q1 the Friar describes how the potion ‘coapst with death it selfe to ﬂy from blame’ (H3r 18). In Q2 the comedic resurrection is made present through the language: ‘That coapst with death, himselfe to scape from it’ (I3r 27)—the phoenix ‘scape’ rises out of the ashes of ‘coapst’. The comedic form of the tragedy is also more pronounced in Q2. The increased paschal motif is strengthened by other moments which suggest the promise of a happy ending. In both texts Romeo is not condemned to death for his killing of Tybalt, but only exiled, thereby enabling the future reunion of the lovers. Snyder has suggested that the overturn of a law in favour of a protagonist is so ubiquitous in early Shakespearean comedy (essential to The Comedy of Errors, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona and, to some extent, Love’s Labour’s Lost) that it may be considered Shakespeare’s contribution to the conventions of early 1590s comedy.⁸⁹ Both texts note that ‘the kind Prince | Taking thy part, hath rushed aside the law’ (3. 3. 27) but the point is stressed further in Q2 which contains the lines (absent in Q1, although embedded in a section of text which is otherwise very close): ‘The law that threatned death becomes thy friend, | And turnes it to exile, there art thou happie’ (Hv 13–14). Likewise the chorus at the beginning of Act 2, only present in Q2, stresses the comedic ideas of the elasticity of time and love’s ability to surmount obstacles: ‘But passion lends them power, time meanes to meete’ (Dr 20). At the opposite end of the play, Romeo’s soliloquy over his propitious dream at the start of Act 5, essential to the hope of a comedic resolution, is cast in a more hopeful form in Q2.⁹⁰ Such subtle strengthening of hopefulness in Q2 is also present in one of the most famous differences between the ﬁrst quartos. In Q1, the ‘grey-eyed morne’ speech is given to the Friar at the ⁸⁸ The stage direction ‘Enter Romeo and Peter’ and the speech headings (L2r 8, 27, 30) designate Romeo’s companion as Peter rather than Balthasar. ⁸⁹ Snyder, Comic Matrix, 25–6. This comic evasion ﬁnds its tragic analogue when Romeo is able to circumvent the law against procuring poison. ⁹⁰ Compare Q1 I3r 15–23 with Q2 K4r 6–16.

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beginning of Act 2 Scene 2. It is the opening of a new scene, and hence the natural place for a speech in praise of the morning. However, in Q2 the speech appears to have been transferred to Romeo.⁹¹ The aubade is now spoken at the conclusion of the balcony scene, a brilliant stroke which imbues the lovers’ exchange with promise and ends the balcony scene on an auspicious note.⁹² The ambiguous optimism of Q2 conversely sets up the audience for a greater tragic fall. Early critics who recognized the comic side of Romeo and Juliet tended to feel that Shakespeare’s early experiments in mixed genre were mistaken; one wrote that ‘there is altogether far more of the trivial, and the frivolous than any tragedy can hope to carry’.⁹³ By contrast this chapter has argued that Shakespeare combines bawdy language and stock comic characters—the garrulous nurse, illiterate servant, and old pantaloon—with more fundamental comic themes, in particular the Easter resonance, to create a tragedy in which light-heartedness is integral to the tragic effect. The promise of Juliet’s resurrection and the lovers’ reunion creates the heart-wrenching turn into tragedy. The religious allusions which are present in both the verbal and visual texture of the play increase the tragic shock of its catastrophe. ⁹¹ The speech is presumably only also still spoken by the Friar because the reviser forgot to delete it from its old position (or marked up the deletion insufﬁciently): Ioppolo, Revising Shakespeare, 90. ⁹² The use of dawn to give hope at the end of a night-time scene is a strategy Shakespeare was to use again in the Duke’s ‘unfolding star’ speech in Measure for Measure (4. 2. 202–9). ⁹³ J. M. Nosworthy, ‘The Two Angry Families of Verona’, Shakespeare Quarterly 3/3 (1952): 226.

4 ‘I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house’: Religious Imagery and the Succession to the English Throne in King John As has been seen in the previous chapter, religious imagery could be used by Shakespeare in an uncomplicated way as part of a positive presentation of a protagonist. The aura of divinity which surrounds Juliet is part of her portrayal as a deeply attractive, sacriﬁcial character. This chapter will consider another early play, King John, in which a young protagonist is also rendered in a sympathetic light through language and staging which connect him with the archetypal suffering victim, Christ. Arthur, however, unlike Juliet, is royal and this chapter will also consider the deep connection between royalty and divinity which existed in early-modern England. The way in which Shakespeare interrogates this association is fundamental to his portrayal of kingship. In King John Shakespeare skews the usually complacent equation of royal dominance with divine approval, by transferring the locus of holiness away from the seat of power—the English throne—and conferring it on a dispossessed child. King John is interesting in this regard as he had become a paradigmatic monarch in Tudor discourse. Through the work of early-modern Protestant playwrights and historiographers, John had been rescued from his medieval portrayal as an ineffective and unsympathetic king, and converted into a monarch who embodied the religio-political doctrines at the heart of ofﬁcial Tudor policy. In order to effect this transformation and reclaim John as a heroic ruler who had defended England’s sovereignty, Protestant writers used religious imagery to surround John with an aura of divinity. The rhetoric which connected King John with Christ (or Christological types such as David) strengthened his position as a Christian king.

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This chapter will ﬁrst consider the ubiquitous connection between royalty and divinity, and then look at its speciﬁc uses in Shakespeare’s main source: the anonymous Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591).¹ As this chapter will show The Troublesome Raigne not only shares its messianic tone with earlier Protestant histories of the king, such as Bale’s King Johan and Foxe’s martyrology, but also introduces analogues with the mystery cycles which deepen this aspect of the play. The chapter will then explore the way in which Shakespeare systematically transfers the signiﬁers of divinely sanctioned rule (which he found in his sources) from John to Arthur. It will argue that these religious markers crystallize in the blinding of Arthur, a scene in which Shakespeare heightens the audience’s horror and pity by creating resonances with the sacriﬁce of Isaac and its typological fulﬁlment, the Passion. Shakespeare has transferred the politically legitimating biblical echoes from John onto Arthur. The consensus of recent criticism is that Shakespeare’s alteration in the portrayal of John is symptomatic of his eschewing the religious framework of his sources. This chapter, however, will take issue with the assumption that the highly political atmosphere of King John is evacuated of religiously sanctioned ethical meaning. King John is indeed no longer surrounded by an aura of holiness, but this is not because majesty has lost its sanctity, but because John has lost his majesty. Shakespeare has transferred the crypto-religious power with which John had been imbued by Protestant writers, onto his nephew, Arthur. Just as Foxe and Bale had made John more kingly by connecting him with Christ, so Shakespeare’s divergence from his sources in making Arthur, rather than John, the locus for holiness in the play has political ramiﬁcations. The religious resonances explored in this chapter are not a denial of the deeply political nature of Shakespeare’s play, but a recognition of the fact that in a society in which divinity and royalty were so closely linked, such allusions support Arthur’s claim to be the true king. Purely political readings of King John often ignore Arthur because he is disenfranchised, but Shakespeare has reworked the ¹ For the evidence that The Troublesome Raigne is Shakespeare’s source, see Beatrice Groves, ‘Memory, Composition, and the Relationship of King John to the Troublesome Raigne of King John’, Comparative Drama 38/3 (2004): 277–90. As discussed in this article, I ﬁnd the traditional explanation that Troublesome Raigne is Shakespeare’s source far more compelling than more recent suggestions of King John’s priority, and shall therefore assume throughout this chapter that Shakespeare is indebted to The Troublesome Raigne, rather than vice versa.

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institutional complacency of divine-right thinking. His identiﬁcation of holy kingship with an innocent and vulnerable boy reinvigorates the Gospel inversion in which true royalty is found in the powerless. The relocation of religious imagery from the king to the child has a subversive political edge. In Elizabethan panegyric majesty was frequently coupled with divinity, and as David Norbrook has argued, in the early-modern period ‘the monarchy retained a semi-mystical aura, something less than magic, but still something a little more than metaphor’.² Elizabeth indulged the cult of the virgin queen which grew up around her and allowed, if not encouraged, the appropriation of Marian imagery which it entailed. Helen Hackett’s excellent work has conclusively shown that correspondences were created between the Virgin mother and the maiden queen, and has argued persuasively for pragmatic rather than psychological explanations for the phenomenon.³ A less studied, but perhaps more striking aspect of Elizabethan panegyric, is its appropriation of divine imagery. As well as being praised as the new Virgin, Elizabeth was also compared to Christ. Hackett’s argument that ﬁguring Elizabeth as the Virgin simultaneously praises and contains her power is persuasive, and perhaps some critics have been more ready to see the feminine, Marian side of Elizabethan panegyric than the Christological images which invest Elizabeth with absolute power and authority.⁴ There are numerous examples in which Elizabeth was ﬁgured as Christ by hopeful Protestants early in her reign, such as the historiated initial ‘C’ of Foxe’s Actes and Monumentes (1563) which showed Elizabeth receiving the ² David Norbrook, ‘Panegyric of the Monarch and Its Social Context under Elizabeth I and James I’ (Ph.D. diss., University of Oxford, 1978), 18. See also Debora Kuller Shuger, Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England: The Sacred and the State in Measure for Measure (New York: Palgrave, 2001), 54–61. ³ Elkin Calhoun Wilson, England’s Eliza (London: Frank Cass, 1966); Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975); Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry (Wallop, Hants: Thames & Hudson, 1977); Peter McClure and Robin Headlam Wells, ‘Elizabeth I as a second Virgin Mary’, Renaissance Studies 4/1 (1990): 38–70; Hackett, Virgin Mother, 128–30, 139–44, 162, and passim. ⁴ See e.g. example Elizabeth’s position as the ﬂower on secular Jesse trees which ﬁgures her as Christ, or at least Christ and Mary, rather than simply Mary, as it is usually explained: Robin Headlam Wells, Spenser’s Fairie Queene and the Cult of Elizabeth (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 16; Émile Mâle, The Gothic Image: Religious Art in France of the Thirteenth Century, trans. Dora Nussey (London: Harper & Row, 1958), 165. See also John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 200; Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton (London: Longman, 2001), III. iii. 22, III. iv. 3.

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homage of three kneeling, bearded men, the new ruler in a secular Nativity scene.⁵ Throughout her reign Elizabeth also made extensive use of the twinned Christological birds, the phoenix and the pelican. She was frequently praised as a new Moses, and also as the ‘day star’, Christ, whom Moses preﬁgures.⁶ Elizabeth’s death saw the publication of a collection of poems entitled Sorrowes Ioy (1603), which lamented her passing and welcomed the new king. Many of these poems ﬁgured her as Christ, and others used her appropriation of Marian imagery to glorify the king as a type of the Christ-child.⁷ A striking example occurs in ‘On the Day of our Queene’s Death, and Our king’s Proclamation’, which exploits the felicitous happenstance that the queen died on the eve of the Annunciation. The poet takes the coincidence in dates to its logical extreme, and as the ‘Lady’ of the poem oscillates between Elizabeth and the Virgin Mary, James and Christ coalesce as the ‘Lord’ who is foretold.⁸ Rulers did not always leave such relationships between the political and ecclesiastical year to chance. King John was crowned on Ascension Day, 1199, and presumably tolerated the administrative inconvenience of dating the regnal year to a movable feast because the coronation date hedged him round with a protective aura of divinity.⁹ The historical John, according to J. C. Holt, needed to secure his right against Arthur’s competing claim, and therefore chose his coronation day to confer legitimating holiness upon himself, by sharing the date of his accession with the day that Christ took up his kingship in heaven. The poets of the Jacobean era, like the politicians of the twelfth century, exploit the conjunction of the ecclesiastical and regnal year, because for both there is an innate connection between the Christian faith and the king. ⁵ Hackett, Virgin Mother, 5, 80. ⁶ Francis Sabie, Pan’s Pipe (1595), ed. James Wilson Bright and Wilfred Pirt Mustard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1910), ll. 197–208; John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1788–1805), i: ix; A. Nixon, Elizaes Memoriall (London, 1603), B3v ; Henry Chettle, Englandes Mourning Garment […] (London, 1603), Fr . For the phoenix imagery see below, ch. 6. ⁷ See John Watkins, ‘ ‘‘Out of her Ashes May a Second Phoenix Rise’’: James I and the Legacy of Elizabethan Anti-Catholicism’, in Arthur P. Marotti, ed., Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (London: Macmillan, 1999), 116–36. ⁸ John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magniﬁcent Festivities of King James the First, His Royal Consort, Family and Court (London, 1828), i. 10. ⁹ J. C. Holt, ‘King John and Arthur of Brittany’, Nottingham Medieval Studies 44 (2000): 82–103.

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Traditional modes of fostering connections between royalty and religion gained strength in England after the Reformation from the need to assert the English monarch’s divine right to rule both church and state. Divine-right monarchy became a nationalist agenda, constructing a God-given right for England to rule herself without the intervention of the pope. The more divine the monarch appeared, the more obvious was his or her right to govern in God’s stead.¹⁰ In 1198, just as John was about to ascend the English throne, Innocent III wrote: ‘The moon derives her light from the sun and is in truth inferior to the sun in both size and quality, in position as well as effect. In the same way the royal power derives its dignity from the pontiﬁcal authority.’¹¹ This was not a position which was tenable in Elizabethan England. In The Troublesome Raigne of King John the king deﬁes the papal legate, and through him Innocent III’s pronouncement, by setting up his divinely appointed kingship in opposition to the Pope’s claims: Know sir Priest as I honour the Church and holy Churchmen, so I scorne to be subject to the greatest Prelate in the world. Tell thy Maister so from me, and say, John of England said it, that never an Italian Priest of them all, shall either have tythe, tole, or poling penie out of England, but as I am King, so will I raigne next under God, supreame head both over spirituall and temprall.¹²

The author of The Troublesome Raigne introduces John in the preface as ‘a warlike Christian and your Countreyman’ and divine-right thinking is enthusiastically championed as a nationalist agenda in the play. In common with other post-Reformation writers, the playwright constructs John’s disobedience as a challenge to papal power which preﬁgures England’s break with Rome. The ﬁrst chroniclers of John’s reign—Roger of Wendover, Matthew Paris, and Ralph of Coggeshall—all portrayed John as a weak king. It was William Tyndale who ﬁrst suggested that John’s deﬁance of the pope could be read as a sign of strength rather than corruption, an interpretation seconded by the Protestant polemicists John Bale and ¹⁰ James I’s accession has been taken by some historians as the beginning of divineright thinking in England, but in fact it was gaining impetus during Elizabeth’s reign: J. P. Sommerville, ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the Advent of the Divine Right of Kings’, History of Political Thought 4/2 (1983): 231. ¹¹ Henry Bettenson, ed., Documents of the Christian Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1943), 156. ¹² The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England, ed. J. W. Sider (New York: Garland, 1979), 3. 74–81. All subsequent references are to this edition.

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John Foxe.¹³ Other historians, such as Richard Grafton and Raphael Holinshed, accepted this sympathetic portrait of John, and gradually a new orthodoxy of John as a proto-Protestant martyr who had deﬁed the pope, defended England’s sovereignty, and been murdered by a monk replaced the old image of an ineffective and grasping king. In order to support this new interpretation Bale, Foxe, and the author of The Troublesome Raigne surround him with an aura of sanctity which strengthens his position as a heroic ﬁgure. This holiness is projected forward onto the real architect of the Reformation, Henry VIII, and binds the English crown to the divine source of its power. One of the biblical tropes which illustrates the evolution of John’s status is that of King David: a cherished leader of the nation of Israel whose private life could yet make him an ambivalent ﬁgure.¹⁴ In one of the early chronicle sources, Matthew Paris’s Chronica Majora (ﬁrst published by Archbishop Parker in 1571) the Archbishop of Canterbury delivers a speech at John’s coronation which compares the new king to David. The Archbishop declares that John is following the precedent of Saul and David in being chosen by election rather than by strict descent. The reference to such Old Testament patriarchs who have likewise been chosen by the Holy Spirit rather than by the laws of succession gives a biblical precedent to John’s practice which could be read as ﬂattering to the king, but it also draws attention to his dubious claim to the throne. Historically it seems that the Archbishop favoured Arthur’s claim and only reluctantly submitted to John’s coronation. In this context the ostensible compliment of the Davidic reference veils a deep criticism: ‘Archbishop Hubert was afterwards asked why he acted in this manner, to which he replied that he knew John would one day or other bring the kingdom into great confusion, wherefore he determined that he should owe his elevation to election and not hereditary right.’¹⁵ Paris’s ¹³ William Tyndale, The Obedience of Christian Man, in Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Portions of Holy Scripture, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1847), 338. ¹⁴ See e.g. the undercurrents in Wyatt’s translation of the penitential Psalms: Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 121. For the inverse, positive, and Christological signiﬁcance of David in this period, see David Evett, ‘Types of King David in Shakespeare’s Lancastrian Tetralogy’, Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 139–42. ¹⁵ This is one of Paris’s additions to the earlier chronicle: Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, trans. J. A. Giles (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1849), ii. 181. For the evidence that the Archbishop opposed John’s succession see W. L. Warren, King John (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1964), 49.

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ambiguous use of the patriarch, however, is simpliﬁed by Bale. The Protestant writer compares John to David merely to indicate the extent to which the king enjoys God’s favour: ‘As a stronge Dauid at the voyce of verytie, | great Golye, the pope, he strake downe with hys slynge.’¹⁶ In Bale the analogue has lost its equivocation and John is likened to David because both are holy kings and national heroes. The author of The Troublesome Raigne combines these approaches and the Davidic analogue recognises the personal failings of both kings, but also strengthens John’s position as a holy, nationalistic ruler. John dies with the words: But in the spirit I cry unto my God, As did the Kingly Prophet David cry, (Whose hands, as mine, with murder were attaint) I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house, Or roote these Locusts from the face of earth: But if my dying heart deceave me not, From out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome, And with his feete treade downe the Strumpets pride, That sits upon the chaire of Babylon. (15.98–107)

John’s afﬁrmation through negation—‘I am not he shall buyld the Lord a house’—foretells a future monarch who will redeem the nation’s relationship with God. In The Troublesome Raigne the connection between John and David, suggested by Paris and reworked by Bale, reaches its zenith. John speaks David’s words about being denied the right to build the temple because of his sin: And Dauid sayde to Salomon, My sonne, I purposed with my selfe to build an house to the Name of the Lord my God, But the word of the Lord came to me, saying, Thou hast shedde muche blood, and hast made great battels: thou shalt not builde an house unto my Name … Beholde, a sonne is borne to thee … He shal build an house for my Name. (1 Chr. 22: 7–9)

The author of The Troublesome Raigne ﬁgures John as a holy king in this Davidic allusion, but the ﬂawed side of David’s character also ﬁnds ¹⁶ John Bale, King Johan, ed. Barry B. Adams (San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library, 1969), ll. 1114–18, 1651–3. See also John Elson, ‘Studies in King John Plays’, in Giles E. Dawson, Edwin E. Willoughby, and James G. McManaway, eds., Joseph Quincy Adams: Memorial Studies (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 192–3.

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an analogue in John’s sin. This writer uses the complexity inherent in the Davidic image to reconcile Protestant polemic with John’s problematic character. The contemporary relevance of the reference is clear: emancipation from Rome must be begun by John’s descendant, Henry VIII, just as it was Solomon—David’s descendant—who built the Temple. The connection with David and Solomon opens up the Christological signiﬁcance of John’s words through their association with the Jesse tree. This dying speech—in which John prophesies that ‘from out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch’—is the apogee of the arboreal imagery that has been used throughout The Troublesome Raigne to indicate royal blood. The bastard is greeted as a ‘brave braunch of kingly stock, | A right Plantaginet’ (11. 30) and John says that by killing Arthur ‘we have proynd the more than needfull braunch | That did oppresse the true wel-growing stock’ (8. 28). As Scott McMillin and Sally-Beth MacLean have recently argued, this royal family tree is a celebration of Elizabeth’s lineage in which John dies ‘placing himself on the tree of Jesse and predicting a major outbranching called Henry VIII’.¹⁷ The tree of Jesse was a pictorial representation of the royal section of Christ’s family tree which, by illustrating his right to the throne of Israel, proved his kingliness. The Jesse-tree established Christ as the fountainhead of all secular monarchies.¹⁸ John’s speech combines Jesse-tree imagery with the prophecy of a holy future king: a union which was fundamental to the mystery plays known as the Ordo Prophetarum or Prophets’ plays which form a transition between the Old and New Testament sections of the cycle, as prophets from both parts of the Bible foretell the coming of Christ.¹⁹ The Prophets’ plays may not be a direct source for the author of The Troublesome Raigne, but they are an illuminating analogue drawn from a relatively close theatrical tradition.²⁰ ¹⁷ McMillin and MacLean, The Queen’s Men, 157–8. ¹⁸ Matthew 1: 6–16. See John K. Bonnel, ‘The Source in Art of the So-called Prophets Play in the Hegge Collection’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 29 (1914): 328, 335–7. ¹⁹ See Bale’s Protestant version of this play, God’s Promises, in Complete Plays of John Bale, ii. 643–56, 771–7. ²⁰ In both the Chester and the York cycles there is evidence that these plays are sixteenth-century additions. Only one, strikingly late, manuscript of the Chester cycle (MS.H, which was transcribed in 1607) contains the procession of prophets: The Chester Plays, ed. Hermann Deimling,  62 and 115 (London: Early English Text Society, 1892), 5. 281–432; Robert A. Brawer, ‘The Form and Function of the Prophetic Procession in the Middle English Cycle Play’, Annuale Mediaevale 13 (1972): 111. It

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John’s prophecy in The Troublesome Raigne shares with the Prophets’ plays its emphasis on the royalty of the child who is about to be born.²¹ All four extant cycles stress the Messiah’s role as King of Kings, and this is something which is dwelt on in the Ordo Prophetorum. In the Towneley play David proclaims that: ‘he shall be lord and kyng of all | Tyll [at] hys feete shall kyngis fall’ (7. 127–8). The York play states that he will be born from Jesse’s royal line: ‘a wande sall brede of Jesse boure’ (12. 76). This prophecy, which incorporates Jesse tree imagery into the Prophets’ play, is most distinct in the N-town cycle in which the play is called the Jesse radix. Jesse-tree imagery and prophecy are likewise combined in The Troublesome Raigne. In the N-town play Jesse says that ‘a blyssd braunch xal sprynge of me’ (7. 19), just as John says ‘from out these loynes shall spring a Kingly braunch’ (15. 104). David says that his descendant shall ‘ageyns the deuellys fals illusyon | With regall power to make man fre’ (7. 31–2). John likewise prophesies that his royal descendant will defeat the illusory power of the pope, which is nothing more than a ‘Strumpets pride’ (15. 106). In Foxe, Augustine’s scheme of the apocalyptic struggle between two cities, Jerusalem and Babylon, is recast as the struggle between the Protestant and Catholic churches, and Babylon comes to represent Rome.²² John’s ﬁnal speech in The Troublesome Raigne prophesying the downfall of Rome is cast in the same mould of Protestant historiography. A king will come: Whose armes shall reach unto the gates of Rome, And with his feete treade downe the Strumpets pride, That sits upon the chaire of Babylon. (15.105–7)

In the Ordo Prophetarum this king was Christ and he will destroy the Antichrist and usher in a new reign of gold, but here the language of Revelation is recast and the New Jerusalem will be governed by Henry also appears to have been a sixteenth-century addition to the York cycle, see Johnston and Rogerson, York, i. 18, 704; York Plays, 423–4; Peter Meredith, ‘John Clerke’s Hand in the York Register’, Leeds Studies in English 12 (1981): 254, 259. ²¹ Thomas P. Campbell, ‘The Prophets’ Pageant in the English Mystery Cycle: Its Origin and Function’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 17 (1974): 110. ²² See Richard Bauckham, Tudor Apocalypse: Sixteenth Century Apocalypticism, Millennarianism and the English Reformation from John Bale to John Foxe and Thomas Brightman (Oxford: Sutton Courtenay, 1978), 56, 80; Isabel Rivers, Classical and Christian Ideas in English Renaissance Poetry, 2nd edn. (London: Routledge, 1994), 57.

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VIII. John’s speech is likewise connected with prophecies of Christ in the Ordo Prophetarum through his resonant ‘I am not he’ which recalls John the Baptist: the prophet into which the Ordo Prophetarum condenses all the New Testament witnesses to Christ.²³ King John’s prophecy of the greater one who will come after him is reminiscent of John the Baptist’s promise, ‘but one mightier than I cometh’ (Luke 3: 16).²⁴ King John’s speech brings together many of the aspects of the Prophet’s plays: references to the Jesse tree, Old Testament messianic prophecies, Revelation’s promise of the Second Coming, and John the Baptist’s foretelling of the coming of Christ. All are used in an earthly context—one king predicting the birth of a future king who will succeed in bringing Protestantism to England—but the scriptural references endow the English throne, under John and under his future successor Henry VIII, with a quasi-divinity. In the mystery cycles the audience knew that the prophecies had been fulﬁlled, and the procession of the prophets usually directly preceded or even (in the case of the Coventry cycle) became part of the Nativity play. The author of The Troublesome Raigne has used the same dramatic technique and John’s predictions have a frisson of excitement to them because the audience knows that his prophecies, too, have come to pass. Throughout the Protestant refashioning of John’s history the messianic resonances have crystallized at John’s death. In Actes and Monuments Foxe puts the words of Caiaphas into his murderer’s mouth: ‘The foresayde monke Simon … did cast in hys wicked heart, howe he most speedely might bring him to his ende. Hee alledged for himselfe the Prophecie of Cayphas, John II. saying It is better that one man die, then all the people should perish.’²⁵ The Christic resonance of John’s death, however, began with the chronicles of the late ﬁfteenth and early sixteenth centuries. In these histories John was no longer poisoned with a mug of ale, but shared a cup of wine with his murderer. The story had assumed its basic shape and this essential form was eucharistic: ‘The modiﬁcations wrought on the story brought together bread, wine, ²³ Brawer, ‘Form and Function’, 89. ²⁴ This resonance has also been recognized by Carole Levin; see Propaganda in the English Reformation: Heroic and Villainous Images of King John (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1988), 200–1; ‘The Historical Evolution of the Death of King John in Three Renaissance Plays’, Journal of the Rocky Mountain Medieval and Renaissance Association 3 (1982): 98. ²⁵ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, i. 256. See also Richard Grafton, A Chronicle at large and meere History of the affayres of Englande […] (London, 1569), ii. K5v .

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a table; a betrayal is revealed, a sacriﬁce made.’²⁶ This interpretation seems to have evolved from crypto-Christian stories in earlier chronicles, such as in the fourteenth-century Short English Metrical Chronicle, in which the monk decides to murder John because of his vow to feed all England with a loaf of bread and a shoulder of meat—a cruel inversion of Christ’s feeding of the ﬁve thousand.²⁷ John’s poisoner is explicitly linked with Judas in Bale’s King Johan. As John realizes that he has been poisoned, England tells him: ‘a false Iudas kysse he hath gyven you’ (l. 2144). The connection between the monk and Judas was widespread and tended to focus on the manner of the monk’s death. James Morey has shown how intestinal swelling was common to all versions of John’s death (the original explanation of his death being dysentery from overindulging in unripe fruit or new cider). It seems possible that some wish to preserve the king from this ugly and ignominious end may have been instrumental in the creation of a poisoner, so that the symptoms could be consigned to him. The murderer shares the poisoned food in order to allay John’s suspicion and the swollen belly is transferred. Once it is the betrayer and not the king who suffers this fate, the Judas parallels start to become apparent. According to Acts, Judas ‘burst a sunder in the middes, & all his bowels gushed out’.²⁸ In Foxe the monk dies with ‘his guts gushing out of his belly’ and deaths of king and poisoner are illustrated with a full-page woodcut.²⁹ In the ﬁrst edition the legend to the picture of the monk runs, ‘the Monk dead of the poyson he drank to the king’ (1563 edition, i. 150–1). The caption is changed in the second, and all subsequent editions, into: ‘the monke lyeth here burst of the poyson that he dranke to the king’ (1583 edition, i. 256–7). The vivid combination of ‘burst’ in the woodcut and ‘gushing’ in the main text to describe the monk’s death in the 1583 edition make the allusion to the account in Acts even closer: ‘he burst a sunder in the middes, & all his bowels gushed out’. In the woodcut Foxe explicitly links John’s murder with an inverted eucharist. The picture montage connects the sacrilegious mass being said for the monk’s soul with the inverted eucharist in which the monk ²⁶ Levin, ‘The Historical Evolution’, 87. ²⁷ An Anonymous Short English Metrical Chronicle, ed. Ewald Zettl,  196 (London: Early English Text Society, 1935), ll. 969–82. ²⁸ Acts 1: 18 (Bishops’ version). For depictions of this death, see Gertrude Schiller, Iconography of Christian Art, trans. Janet Seligman (London: Lund Humphries, 1972), ii. ﬁgs. 278, 280. ²⁹ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, i. 256.

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proffers the king a chalice of poisoned wine. The eucharistic imagery at John’s death, like the association between his murderer and Judas, ﬁgures his betrayal by his Catholic subjects as a Last Supper. As with The Troublesome Raigne, John’s death in Foxe clariﬁes and strengthens the quasi-Christic resonance and anti-Catholic polemic of the Protestant re-creation of John’s reign. The crypto-religious quality of John in The Troublesome Raigne, and the frankly Christlike aspects of his death in Foxe and Bale, has led some commentators to see John as sharing this holy characterization in King John. Shakespeare’s account of the monk’s death retains the allusion to his ruptured stomach: ‘a monk, I tell you, a resolv`ed villain, | Whose bowels suddenly burst out’ (5. 6. 30–1). The Judas parallel is recognized by James Morey, who concludes: ‘Shakespeare intended—and achieved—a consistent parallel in King John: the traitor is Judas, the king is Christ.’³⁰ However, in The Troublesome Raigne, as in Foxe, anti-Catholic polemic is the raison d’ˆetre for creating the character of John, and essential to his Christlike portrayal. The Christian echoes in John’s poisoning in Foxe, as in his ﬁnal speech in The Troublesome Raigne, are central to his reincarnation as a proto-Protestant martyr. Shakespeare’s play, however, softens the anti-Catholic rhetoric of its sources.³¹ When Shakespeare turns away from the anti-Catholic polemic of his sources, John’s character suffers an inevitable diminution. Shakespeare eschews both the centrality of John’s poisoning and its eucharistic resonance. Shakespeare retains the monk’s Judas-like death from Foxe, but by choosing not to stage the poisoning scene inspired by the Last Supper he removes the context which illuminates the allusion. John Barton, inﬂuenced by his reading of Bale and The Troublesome Raigne, directed a production of King John in 1974 and portrayed Shakespeare’s John as the Christlike sacriﬁcial king whom he had found ³⁰ James H. Morey, ‘The Death of King John in Shakespeare and Bale’, Shakespeare Quarterly 45/3 (1994): 331. It is true that in The Troublesome Raigne it is only the king who is described as dying in this way—‘his bowells are devided in themselves’ (15. 112)—and Shakespeare by transferring this fate onto the monk might seem to have created a Judas-allusion out of it. However, Shakespeare is probably simply borrowing straight from Foxe rather than The Troublesome Raigne at this point. ³¹ See e.g. Edward Rose, ‘Shakespeare as an Adapter’, in The Troublesome Raigne of John, King of England (London: C. Praetorius, 1888), i. pp. viii, xi; David Bevington, Tudor Drama and Politics: A Critical Approach to Topical Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968), 197–8; Lukas Erne, ‘ ‘‘Popish Tricks’’ and ‘‘a Ruinous Monastery’’: Titus Andronicus and the Question of Shakespeare’s Catholicism’, in Lukas Erne and Guillemette Bolens, eds., The Limits of Textuality (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2000), 142.

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in the earlier drama. Barton wrote in the programme: ‘I turned to The Troublesome Reign of King John (Shakespeare’s probable source play, 1591) and to the Tudor King Johan (1539)… it appeared that a marriage of the two texts (King John and Troublesome Reign) might be fruitful.’³² The poisoning scene was moved to Christmas day: a birthday which, according to Barton’s script, John shared with Jesus. The scene, which is not staged in Shakespeare’s play, was performed as ‘a winter enactment of a kind of Last Supper, with John seated at a long table in the centre of twelve cauled monks’.³³ Critics were unimpressed. Peter Thomson, who recognized in the poisoning scene ‘a Christmas feast arranged according to Leonardo’s ‘Last Supper’… with John as Christ’, saw the frequent religious references as evidence that ‘Barton was listening to himself rather than to the play’.³⁴ Barton’s production, however, is an exact illustration of the argument of this chapter. The perceived failure of Barton’s religious interpretation of King John does not prove that there is no engagement with religion in the play, but that it is no longer the king who is holy. The locus of holiness has been shifted by Shakespeare away from the monarch, and Barton, by relying on Shakespeare’s sources, unconsciously highlighted how greatly Shakespeare has departed from them in their portrayal of John as a proto-Protestant martyr. Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, critics have been reacting against those, who like John Barton and James Morey, ﬁnd a crypto-religious quality in Shakespeare’s John because they ﬁnd it in Shakespeare’s sources. The current consensus is that Shakespeare has created a deeply cynical and political play, divested of the religious nuances found in the earlier, overtly Protestant versions of the story. Carole Levin, one of the best writers on King John’s relationship with its sources, argues that: By deliberately stripping away the Christian images that surround John’s death in the earlier plays, Shakespeare … removes kingship from the religious context, turning his play into a more political statement… Shakespeare is concerned about kingship and the responsibilities of the ruler, but he does not place it within the deeply religious context of either the medieval chronicles or Bale or The Troublesome Raigne.³⁵ ³² Quoted in Geraldine Cousin, King John, Shakespeare in Performance (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 65. ³³ Ibid. 68, 71. ³⁴ Peter Thomson, ‘The Smallest Season: The Royal Shakespeare Company at Stratford in 1974’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 141. ³⁵ Levin, Propaganda, 103, 210.

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Other critics have likewise argued that in King John, ‘Shakespeare reduces the importance of the religious issue to a minimum and does not attribute any sacredness to the authority of the King as one anointed by God.’³⁶ A political reading of the play, devoid of religious nuances, is the dominant view of current scholarship, with critics arguing that ‘Shakespeare intends for us to learn from King John that things are better in Europe before God enters politics in act 3.’³⁷ Such critics argue that in this early history play Shakespeare envisages a political system empty of any religiously sanctioned ethical meaning. The rest of this chapter, however, will argue that Shakespeare has not discarded the religious sentiment of his sources, only radically altered its import. It is no longer John, the powerful proto-Protestant martyr who carries the biblical nuances of the play, but Arthur, the helpless heir to the throne. Kingship retains its aura of sanctity, but the usurped power of John has no part in this sacredness. Having established the cryptoreligious quality surrounding John in Shakespeare’s sources, this chapter will proceed to argue that Shakespeare’s portrayal of Arthur—his age, character, prominence, and near-blinding in Act 4 Scene 1—makes him into a sanctiﬁed ﬁgure who inherits the Christic resonance of John in the earlier plays. The biblical allusions with which Protestant playwrights and historiographers imbued John’s triumphs and death were part of their political enterprise to create a proto-Protestant martyr out of a monarch who had deﬁed Rome. In King John Arthur’s holiness also has political ramiﬁcations: it supports his title to the English throne and by realigning Christian virtue with powerlessness forms a latent critique of royal panegyric which connects the sacredness of monarchy with its supremacy. In both medieval and Protestant chronicles Arthur has only a minor role to play (and he is entirely omitted by Bale). Arthur is captured and dies in the ﬁrst few years of John’s reign in the ﬁrst few pages or paragraphs of the chronicle accounts and his fate does not impinge upon later more important events: John’s deﬁance of Rome, the revolt of his barons, and the signing of Magna Carta. It has long been recognized, ³⁶ S. C. Sen Gupta, Shakespeare’s Historical Plays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 103. ³⁷ Tim Spiekerman, Shakespeare’s Political Realism: The English History Plays (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 55. For further political and anti-religious interpretations of the play see Paola Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian (London: Macmillan, 1996), 82; Sigurd Burckhardt, Shakespearean Meaning (Princeton: Princeton Unviersity Press, 1968), 116–43.

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therefore, that The Troublesome Raigne and King John are unique in placing Arthur at the centre of the plot and making his death the cause of the secession of the barons.³⁸ The author of The Troublesome Raigne is responsible for this skilful piece of plotting, but he does not make Arthur as central as his innovation demands. The anonymous playwright is cautious about his modiﬁcation because it is incompatible with his desire to place John at the heroic centre of his play. John is a far more complex ﬁgure in The Troublesome Raigne than he is in any of the other Protestant accounts, but he remains the locus for holiness around which the biblical imagery and religious language revolve. Shakespeare followed the storyline of The Troublesome Raigne closely, but he has systematically increased the importance of Arthur throughout. The earlier playwright refashioned the events of John’s reign around the fate of Arthur, and created an unfolding story from the tangled skein of the chronicle sources, but it was left to Shakespeare to reﬁne and rationalize this new structure. Unlike the author of The Troublesome Raigne, Shakespeare recognized the paradigm shift that resulted from his structural innovation, and developed Arthur’s role accordingly. Arthur is central to King John in a far more fundamental way than he is in The Troublesome Raigne. In almost every scene Shakespeare expands Arthur’s importance or privileges his cause. In The Troublesome Raigne, for example, Arthur’s death is not the sole cause of the nobles’ uprising. Essex twice cites the Pope’s excommunication of John—‘the Popes most dreadfull cursse’ (11. 67) and ‘The holy charge that wee receivde from Rome’ (9.89)—as a primary reason for the revolt. The rebels are described as ‘a holy knot of Catholique consent’ (11. 200), and their eagerness to obey the Pope in deposing their monarch would have linked them, in the minds of the Elizabethan audience, with the Catholic rebels who rose against Elizabeth after her excommunication in 1570. Shakespeare has removed the Catholic taint imputed to the uprising and has simpliﬁed its motivation so that the barons revolt not because of the Pope’s order, or Chester’s banishment, but, ostensibly at least, purely through outrage at John’s treatment of Arthur. Shakespeare’s augmentation of the role of Arthur’s mother likewise gives his cause more prominence. At the height of King John’s popularity ³⁸ The Pictorial Edition of the Works of Shakespere, ed. Charles Knight (London: Charles Knight, 1838–43), i. 72. More recently it has been argued that Arthur’s centrality proves the priority of King John, see Brian Boyd, ‘King John and The Troublesome Raigne: Sources, Structure and Sequence’, Philological Quarterly 74/1 (1995): 37–56.

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during the nineteenth century Constance was recognized as a powerful stage presence and the passionate intensity of her orations ensure that Arthur is not forgotten, even when he is absent from the stage.³⁹ In Scene 3 of The Troublesome Raigne Arthur’s cause is overlooked in the Bastard’s challenge to Austria (3. 1–62), but in King John the challenge is parasitic upon Constance’s furious denouncement of Philip’s betrayal of Arthur’s enterprise (3. 1. 1–57). The exchange between John and Pandulph is likewise no longer simply about Stephen Langton, as it was in The Troublesome Raigne (3. 63–132), as Constance’s frequent interruptions remind the audience that Arthur’s fate is also involved in the broken alliance between England and France (3. 1. 61–247). Constance’s speech dwells obsessively on her son—‘Young Arthur’, ‘my son’, ‘my poor child’, ‘my boy’, ‘my pretty Arthur’, ‘my absent child’, ‘my boy, my Arthur, my fair son’—caressing the signiﬁers for her child because the child himself is absent. Another of the subtle shifts by which Shakespeare has made Arthur central is by associating him with Richard I, one of the talismanic kings of England. John Sider has argued that in The Troublesome Raigne ‘the dramatist took special pains to qualify [John] as hero-martyr by borrowing the aura of Richard I’.⁴⁰ Shakespeare has, however, shifted the mantle of Richard I’s memory onto Arthur’s shoulders. Shakespeare knows that Arthur is Geoffrey’s son not Richard’s (2. 1. 99–106, 124–7), but he also deliberately skews history to strengthen the bloodbond between the hero-king and Arthur: King Philip tells Arthur that Richard I is the ‘great forerunner of thy blood’ (2. 1. 2), Arthur describes himself as Cœur-de-Lion’s ‘offspring’ (2. 1. 13) and Constance cries that Arthur is Eleanor’s ‘eldest son’s son’ (2. 1. 177). The strengthening of Arthur’s cause in King John interacts with a corresponding weakening of the character of the King. In King John, for example, Philip claims to have been forced to take up Arthur’s right by divine order:   In the name of God, How comes it then that thou art called a king, When living blood doth in these temples beat, Which owe the crown that thou o’ermasterest?   From whom hast thou this great commission, France, ³⁹ See Carol J. Carlisle, ‘Constance: A Theatrical Trinity’, in Deborah T. CurrenAquino, ed., King John: New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1989), 144–64. ⁴⁰ The Troublesome Raigne, p. lxii.

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To draw my answer from thy articles?  . From that supernal judge that stirs good thoughts In any breast of strong authority To look into the blots and stains of right. That judge has made me guardian to this boy. (2. 1. 106–115)

Here, as throughout the play, John speaks in the interrogative mood: questions typically replace statements in Shakespeare’s reworking of John’s dialogue. John can only respond to Philip’s accusation with a query which deﬂects Philip’s challenge, but not the truth of his assertion of Arthur’s God-given right to rule. Philip may be motivated by policy, just as he was in the source play, but John is unable to refute his rhetoric of divinely sanctioned action. The Troublesome Raigne opens with the presentation of John as the new King of England, and he answers Chattilion’s request with majestic deﬁance. King John omits these preliminaries and opens directly with the question of Arthur’s right. This transfer of focus from John to Arthur is mirrored in John’s weaker response to Chattilion’s challenge. The French ambassador in King John openly calls the king a usurper (1. 1. 13), and John’s reply—‘What follows if we disallow of this?’ (1. 1. 16)—sounds irresolute beside the stately contempt of his counterpart in The Troublesome Raigne. Fundamental to Shakespeare’s new conception of John’s reign is the elimination of John’s previous status as a ‘warlike Christian’. John is portrayed as a less accomplished king from the opening scene right through to his abdication: in The Troublesome Raigne John is given over seventy lines to justify his submission to Rome, and is clearly dissembling in his obeisance, but in King John the scene is shorn of all such explanations and excuses and the audience is simply presented with a king who has given his crown to a papal legate. The uncertainty of John’s speech-acts in King John is the result of his own insecurity and a signiﬁer for his uncertain hold on power. In The Troublesome Raigne John forces Philip to be the ﬁrst to commit himself to the citizen’s plan of marrying Lewes to Blanche (‘brother of Fraunce, you heare the Citizens: | Then tell me, how you meane to deale herein’ (2. 53–4) ). In King John these words have been transferred to Philip and it is John who has to hazard his response ﬁrst: ‘speak England ﬁrst, that hath been forward ﬁrst | To speak unto this city: what say you?’ (2. 1. 483–4). In The Troublesome Raigne the French campaign ends with what was presumably staged as John’s daring rescue of his mother: ‘Elianor is rescued by John, and Arthur is taken prisoner’ (3. 191), but in

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King John it is the Bastard and not the King who rescues her (3. 2. 7). John’s weakness in King John is connected with his dubious right to the throne, his ‘borrowed majesty’ (1. 1. 4). His insecurity quickens his moral deterioration as it determines him to kill his nephew, and Shakespeare has severely curtailed the events after Arthur’s death, so that the descent of John and his designs into chaos follows more directly from his criminal intent towards his nephew. Arthur’s increased right to the throne makes John’s need to dispose of him more pressing. The order for Arthur’s death is explicit in Shakespeare, unlike in The Troublesome Raigne (in which he only ostensibly orders his blinding), and Shakespeare conveys through the King’s circumlocutions the horror even he has of voicing his command. John orders Arthur’s death, and Hubert accedes to the order through a shared line:   Thou art his keeper.  And I’ll keep him so That he shall not offend your majesty.

(3. 3. 64–5)

The word ‘keeper’ was suggested to Shakespeare by The Troublesome Raigne, in which Hubert tells Arthur: ‘frolick yong Prince, though I your keeper bee, | Yet shall your keeper live at your command’ (4. 36–7).⁴¹ The relaxed word ‘frolic’ and the courteous tone of Hubert’s second line make it difﬁcult to read these words as threatening. In King John, however, the word ‘keeper’ has become ominous. Menace has been created through the terseness of John’s utterance, which implies a secret purpose to his words.⁴² In the context of a murder the word ‘keeper’ has become an allusion to Cain’s words: ‘am I my brother’s keeper?’ (Gen. 4: 9). The connection with Cain informs Hubert what the King wants to be done to his brother’s child, and Hubert’s echo of his words indicates his understanding of the implicit command. The sense that John acts in deﬁance of God’s will runs like a seam through the play, culminating in this Cain-like murder of his relative. He stands ‘upon a slipp’ry place’ (3. 4. 137)—the place where God has placed the wicked in Psalm 73.⁴³ Arthur’s ﬁrst speech alludes, by contrast ⁴¹ See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 400–1. ⁴² Joseph A. Porter, ‘Fraternal Pragmatics: Speech Acts of John and the Bastard’, in Deborah T. Curren-Aquino, ed., King John: New Perspectives (New York: Garland, 1989), 137. ⁴³ ‘Thou hast set them in slipperie places’ (Ps. 73: 18).

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to the Psalmist’s ‘hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ (17: 8), a phrase which often denotes innocent suffering in Shakespeare.⁴⁴ God shall forgive you Coeur-de-lion’s death, The rather that you give his offspring life, Shadowing their right under your wings of war. I give you welcome with a powerless hand, But with a heart full of unstain`ed love. (2. 1. 12–16)

Arthur’s ﬁrst word is ‘God’ and throughout the play Arthur’s side claim God’s sanction for their actions.⁴⁵ In King John it is the King’s side who argue for power based on human authority and grounded in law, while Arthur and the French argue for power granted by God alone.⁴⁶ This is a dramatic change from the King who in The Troublesome Raigne is ‘a warlike Christian’ who ﬁghts ‘for Christs true faith’ (‘To the Gentlemen Readers’, 5–6). In the earlier play it is John who is chosen by God, and the Catholic church which is trying to rob him of his divine right to rule. In King John John’s majesty is a sham.⁴⁷ The King matches the church in duplicity and it is Arthur who receives the mantle of divine favour worn by his uncle in The Troublesome Raigne. In the anonymous play, as in the chronicle sources, John’s greatness meant that his downfall merited supernatural signs. In the accounts of Foxe, Holinshed, and Wendover the appearance of ﬁve moons in the heavens is a sign of John’s impending downfall, although in The Troublesome Raigne the moment is staged as a smiling prophecy which records England’s deﬁance of the pope. In both readings, however, the astrological anomaly relates to John. In Shakespeare, however, the heavenly portents are not connected with the downfall of the King, but with that of Arthur:  My lord, they say ﬁve moons were seen tonight, Four ﬁx`ed, and the ﬁfth did whirl about The other four in wondrous motion. ⁴⁴ Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 402, 392–3. See also The Two Noble Kinsmen, 1. 1. 91–2; Henry VIII, 5. 1. 161–2. ⁴⁵ Honigmann comments: ‘the French side in John claim the sanction of heaven throughout, and John’s side that of hell’: King John, ed. E. A. J. Honigmann (London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2000), note to 2. 1. 407. ⁴⁶ Donna B. Hamilton, Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 47. ⁴⁷ Sandra Billington has shown how Shakespeare draws attention to John’s counterfeit majesty by connecting him with player kings: Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 125, 128.

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As Arthur is the true king, it is his death which causes disturbances in the heavens. A sense of being close to the divine at the moment of dying means that historical and ﬁctional accounts of princes’ deaths often share a crystallizing of religious imagery at their demise. John’s death in The Troublesome Raigne, as in Foxe, is the climax of the religious imagery and biblical language which confers holiness upon him. Likewise in King John it is at Arthur’s death that the ﬁve moons appear and the Bastard has his epiphany, recognizing him as the true king: ‘How easy dost thou take all England up!’ (4. 3. 143). A parallel staging at the deaths of John and Arthur in the two plays forms a dramatic enactment of the shift in the locus of holiness between them. In the Troublesome Raigne the return of the nobles to the correct path is signiﬁed by their kneeling in the presence of a body which gives their repentance validity: the body of the dying king.  Lords, give me leave to joy the dying King, With sight of these his Nobles kneeling here With daggers in their hands, who offer up Their lives for ransome of their fowle offence.

(15. 131–4)

In King John the nobles also kneel by a body to express a change of purpose but this time the body beside which they kneel and make their ‘holy vow’ is Arthur’s:  Kneeling before this ruin of sweet life, And breathing to his breathless excellence The incense of a vow, a holy vow, Never to taste the pleasures of the world… · · · · · · · · · · Till I have set a glory to this hand By giving it the worship of revenge.    Our souls religiously conﬁrm thy words. (4. 3. 65–73)

It is at the death of Arthur, as with the death of John in the earlier accounts, that his position as the true king becomes clearest. Shakespeare has invested Arthur’s death with a horror which is not present in any of his sources. Throughout his career Shakespeare

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manipulated audience emotion through the killing of children—from the murder of Rutland to the slaughter of Macduff’s ‘babes’—and Arthur’s youth is one of the primary ways in which Shakespeare invites sympathy for him and turns the audience from John. As Hazlitt observed, ‘we are impelled to put the very worst construction on his meanness and cruelty by the tender picture of the beauty and helplessness of the object of it’.⁴⁸ The historical Arthur of Brittany was born in 1187 and died at the age of 16. The earliest account of the reign, written by Roger of Wendover during John’s rule, does not describe Arthur’s age, but his behaviour to John—while suggesting someone young in the ways of diplomacy—sounds too conﬁdent for a child: ‘Arthur ill-advisedly replied to him with indignation and threats, and demanded of the king that he should give up to him the kingdom of England … with an oath’.⁴⁹ In Holinshed, Arthur is described as a ‘yoong gentleman’ a phrase that encapsulates his liminal age, and in this text, his dealings with the king retain their teenage swagger. The king asks him ‘to leane and sticke to him being his naturall Vncle. But Arthur like one that wanted good counsell, and abounding too much in his own wilfull opinion, made a presumptuous answer’. In Foxe, likewise, Arthur’s insolence places him in early manhood rather than late childhood.⁵⁰ Shakespeare’s Arthur is not only younger than he is in any of the sources, his youth is valued as conferring innocence rather than denigrated as indicating inexperience. In The Troublesome Raigne Arthur is on the cusp of manhood and his age is manipulated according to the desires of those who wish to direct him. Constance says his ‘yeares I see are farre too greene’ (2. 448) because she does not want to take his advice; Elinor calls him ‘yongling’ (2. 110) when being contemptuous; King Philip says ‘bestirre thee man’ (3. 138) when he wants Arthur to believe himself capable of ﬁghting the English. The relatively impartial Citizen of Angiers describes Arthur as one ‘who is but yong, and yet unmeete to raigne’ (2. 339)—a criticism which Shakespeare has excised. In The Troublesome Raigne Elinor’s ‘sir boy’ (3. 169) is an insult, but in King John Arthur is called ‘boy’ throughout by his supporters: Lewis, Austria, ⁴⁸ The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1930–4), iv. 307. ⁴⁹ Roger of Wendover’s Flowers of History, ii. 205. ⁵⁰ Raphael Holinshed, The Third Volume of Chronicles, beginning at duke William the Norman, commonlie called the Conqueror, and descending by degrees of yeeres and all the kings and queenes of England in their orderlie successions (London, 1587), P3r ; Foxe, Actes and Monuments, i. 250.

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and King Philip all call him ‘noble boy’ (2. 1. 18), ‘fair boy’ (2. 1. 30), and ‘boy’ (2. 1. 43) in quick succession at his ﬁrst appearance. Likewise Hubert’s ‘young lad’ and ‘little prince’ (4. 1. 8–9) suggest a tenderness towards his vulnerability. Elinor’s insult from The Troublesome Raigne has become a form of commendation because this Arthur is too young to be offended by references to his age.⁵¹ In Shakespeare’s play Arthur’s youth and innocence are valued, whereas in The Troublesome Raigne they are simply impediments to his attempt on the crown. The change in Arthur’s age, and more importantly in the way his youth is presented, means that in King John he is uniquely innocent and vulnerable. This childlike simplicity is something which Shakespeare has added to his source and he strengthens it with an allusion to the Old Testament child who is a type of Christ’s sacriﬁce: Isaac. The scene of the near-blinding of Arthur draws some of its dramatic power from its connections with the sacriﬁce of Isaac and the Passion of Christ, which Isaac’s story was understood to preﬁgure. As discussed in Chapter 2, Shakespeare’s mind often seems to have returned to the dramatic presentation of the Passion when he wrote scenes of torture and death. The near-blinding of Arthur seems likewise to have drawn on the affective power of the mystery plays.⁵² Sandra Billington and Roy Battenhouse have recognized that this scene gathers some of its power from its scenic form which recalls the sacriﬁce of Isaac. Roy Battenhouse, for example, states that Arthur’s ‘attitude of non-resistance to evil except through kindly questioning’ (which is unlike the ‘legalistic moralising’ of the young man in The Troublesome Raigne) seems ‘to be modelled on the character of the boy Isaac in mystery-play drama’.⁵³ However, the connection is closer than either critic shows. The structural similarity on its own is striking: ⁵¹ This realization overturns, I think, Honigmann’s suggestion that the use of ‘boy’ in both texts is evidence for the Troublesome Raigne’s ‘unintelligent echoing’ of Shakespeare’s text: Honigmann, King John, 171. ⁵² The sacriﬁce of Isaac was understood as an especially moving theatrical event: ‘it is reported of Gregory Nyssen, that when hee saw but the shew and representation of the sacriﬁcing of Isaac, it made such an impression upon him, that he could not forbeare weeping’: Richard Maden, Christs Love and Affection towards Jerusalem (London, 1637), E4v . Shakespeare’s presentation of the near-blinding of Arthur, likewise, came to epitomize affecting spectacle in the Victorian era, as is shown by H. Rider Haggard’s reference to it: King Solomon’s Mines (Harmondsworth: Pufﬁn, 1885/1987), 147. ⁵³ Roy Battenhouse, ‘Religion in King John: Shakespeare’s View’, Connotations 1/2 (1991): 146–7. See also Sandra Billington, ‘A Response to Roy Battenhouse; ‘‘Religion in King John: Shakespeare’s View’’ ’, Connotations 1/3 (1991): 290–2; Pugliatti, Shakespeare the Historian, 91.

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unexpected violence is offered to a young boy by someone acting under orders from a higher power who had hitherto loved and protected him. The order to kill the boy is rescinded and the boy escapes death despite the helplessness of his situation. The position of Hubert, struggling between two duties—the command of his king and his affection for the boy in his care—has afﬁnities with the position of Abraham caught between God’s command and his love for his son. Most of all, perhaps, the imaginative attention to the anxiety and suffering of the young boy, which is unique to the performance of the story in the mystery plays, seem to have inﬂuenced Shakespeare in his conception of the scene.⁵⁴ The typological importance of Isaac’s sacriﬁce ensured that it was prominent among the Old Testament episodes staged in the mystery cycles. A relatively large number of Abraham and Isaac plays have survived: those in the cycles of Chester, N-town, Towneley, York, and the Cornish Ordinalia, and two single plays known as the Northampton and Brome Abraham plays.⁵⁵ In the Chester play the typology is explicit: Abraham preﬁgures God the Father, and Isaac, his son: ‘by Isaack understande I maye | Jesus that was obedyent aye’ (ll. 472–3). Despite the suspicion felt by reformers about typology not explicitly sanctioned by the Bible, the connection of Isaac and Christ was too deeply rooted and widespread to disappear at the Reformation and imagery linking Isaac and Christ continued to be commonplace.⁵⁶ Isaac and his lamb were painted by Lucas Cranach in 1547 for the altar screen in the Wittenberg church at which Luther preached. Lancelot Andrewes’s emphatic defence of typology (in his 1604 Good Friday sermon) included Isaac as one of the ‘types’ of Christ whose suffering was fulﬁlled on the cross.⁵⁷

⁵⁴ Clifford Davidson, History, Religion, and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance English Drama (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 124–48. ⁵⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle, play 4; N-Town Plays, play 5; Towneley Plays, play 4; The York Plays, ed. Richard Beadle (London: Edward Arnold, 1982), play 10; The Cornish Ordinalia: A Medieval Dramatic Trilogy, trans. Markham Harris (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 36 ff. The Brome and Northampton plays are included in Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments, ed. Norman Davies,  1 (London: Early English Text Society, 1970), plays 4 and 5. ⁵⁶ See e.g. ‘Prosopopeia: Containing the Teares of the holy, blessed, and sanctiﬁed Marie, the Mother of God’ (1596), in The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge [1580–1673?] (Glasgow: The Hunterian Club, 1883), iii. 17; Mary D´esir´ee Anderson, Drama and Imagery in English Medieval Churches (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 210. ⁵⁷ Schiller, Iconography, ii. 162 ﬁg. 537; Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, Ii2v .

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The image of the lamb, central to a typological understanding of Christ’s Passion, is literalized in Isaac’s story. In Genesis the animal which takes Isaac’s place is described as a ram (Gen. 22: 13): the Chester cycle begins by following the biblical precedent and Abraham sees ‘an horned wether’ caught in the thicket. But the angel’s words ‘a lambe that is both good and gaye’ and the stage direction—‘then let Abraham take the lambe and kyll him’ (4. 440, 434, 443)—indicate that a lamb was used. A 1498 note for the Corpus Christi celebrations in Dublin lists ‘a lamb’ among the stage properties for the Abraham pageant, which indicates that the Chester staging was not unique.⁵⁸ The lamb created a visual link with the sacriﬁcial Lamb of God, but it was not simply invented by the typology-seeking authors of the mystery plays. In the biblical account Isaac asks ‘where is the lambe for the burnt offering?’ and Abraham answers: ‘my sonne, God will prouide him a lambe’ (22: 7–8). A lamb is one of the most ubiquitous metaphors for Christ during his Passion. The image expresses his innocence, his symbolic relationship with the lamb slaughtered for the Passover meal, and his typological fulﬁlment of the prophecies of Isaiah. The New Testament itself authorized a typological reading of Isaiah 53:7 (‘hee is brought as a sheepe to the slaughter, and as a sheepe before her shearer is dumme, so he openeth not his mouth’). In a rare moment of overt typology in the New Testament, Acts records Philip’s reading of this passage in Isaiah as a preﬁguration of Christ: Nowe the place of the Scripture which he read, was this, He was led as a sheepe to the slaughter: and like a lambe dumme before his shearer, so opened he not his mouth… Then the Eunuch answered Philip, and sayd, I pray thee of whome speaketh the Prophet this? of himselfe, or of some other man? Then Philip opened his mouth, and began at the same Scripture, and preached vnto him Iesus. (Acts 8: 32–35)

Isaiah 53 is the Old Testament reading for Good Friday Evensong in the Book of Common Prayer, and even the annotators of the Geneva Bible explicitly glossed the passage with reference to the Passion. It is as a lamb, suffering and silent like the lamb in Isaiah, that Arthur describes himself at the beginning of Act 4 scene 1: Alas, what need you be so boisterous-rough? I will not struggle; I will stand stone-still ⁵⁸ Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 364.

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· · · · · · · · Drive these men away, And I will sit as quiet as a lamb; I will not stir, nor wince, nor speak a word, Nor look upon the iron angerly. Thrust but these men away, and I’ll forgive you, Whatever torment you do put me to. (4. 1. 75–83)

Arthur’s promises of silence and forgiveness recall the dumb lamb of Isaiah and Christ’s words to his tormentors: ‘Father, forgiue them’ (Luke 23: 34). Earlier in the scene Arthur longs to be a shepherd: ‘So I were out of prison and kept sheep, | I should be as merry as the day is long’ (4. 1. 17–18). Like Henry VI (3 Henry VI, 2. 5. 21–54), Arthur desires to take the metaphorical identiﬁcation of kings and shepherds literally, but in King John the pastoral image’s Christian source is emphasized when Arthur thinks of himself not only as a shepherd but also as a lamb. The connection between Isaac (who is replaced by a lamb), Christ (the Lamb of God), and the ovine obedience which links them both to the suffering servant of Isaiah is succinctly expressed by the seventeenth-century preacher Samuel Mather: Isaac was an eminent Type of Christ in regard to his Death and Sufferings. Isaac without resistance, without repining or reply, willingly yields himself to his Father even unto Death: So was Christ obedient to his Father even unto Death. So each of them was led away like a Lamb to the slaughter, as is said of Christ, Isai 53.7. Act 8.32.⁵⁹

The lamb imagery, like Arthur’s passive non-resistance and the promise to remain dumb, is Shakespeare’s addition to his sources. Arthur repeatedly promises to be silent, although in fact he will be voluble in his own defence: his resistance through ‘innocent prate’ follows the mystery play dramatization of the story of Isaac, rather than the biblical account. A lamb’s inability to resist is one reason why it is used as an image for the suffering of Isaac, Christ, and Arthur, and Isaac’s willing participation increased the exemplary and typological function of his story in Christian exegesis.⁶⁰ However, among the surviving medieval dramatizations of the story it is only in the N-town play that Isaac capitulates without a murmur. In all the other pageants ⁵⁹ Samuel Mather, The Figures or Types of the Old Testament […] (London, 1685), 107. ⁶⁰ Chester Mystery Cycle, 2. 55.

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he, like Arthur, offers no active resistance but tries to preserve his life through persuasion. The Northampton play has a touching moment when Isaac having resolutely asked ‘bynde myne hanndes and my leggs fast’ (5. 224) yet cannot help but say ‘A, soffte, gentil fader; ye bynde me sore’ (5. 229). In the Cornish play likewise, after Isaac’s brave and resolute ‘if it is his [God’s] will, I shan’t resist’, he asks to be bound but as he articulates the idea his determination begins to melt away: ‘Dearest father, tie my hands and legs with the rope, tie them tight, so I won’t be able to get to my feet. For unless I’m tied down, I might run away when I feel the bite of the ﬂames … . The pain will be cruel, father beloved, before I’m burned to ashes’ (p. 37). The second blandishment—‘father beloved’—does not sound as natural as the ﬁrst, and its placing suggests that Isaac is using the language of affection to try to dissuade Abraham from his action. In King John likewise Arthur’s resolution breaks as he considers what is about to happen: If heaven be pleased that you must use me ill, Why then you must. Will you put out mine eyes, These eyes that never did, nor never shall, So much as frown on you? (4. 1. 55–8)

The dissolving resolve dramatized in Isaac’s response is expressed in Arthur’s speech by the medial caesura in line 56. As with Isaac in the Cornish and Northampton plays, Arthur’s initial acceptance of his suffering as God’s will is overtaken by an instinctive desire for life. In King John, as in most of the medieval dramatizations of the Isaac story, the boy attempts to dissuade his would-be murderer from his purpose through tenderness. In both contexts the child stresses the relationship which binds man and boy, and although Hubert is not Arthur’s father, Arthur dwells on the ties of affection as if they had the strength of a ﬁlial bond for this fatherless child. While still unaware of his danger, he says ‘I would to heaven | I were your son, so you would love me, Hubert’ (4. 1. 23–4). This explicit desire for paternal love is not present in the sources, and is part of Shakespeare’s new conception of the scene. In the chronicles and The Troublesome Raigne Arthur attempts to escape not through submissive love, but through threats and violence. In The Troublesome Raigne Arthur argues vigorously for his release and prays for Hubert’s damnation: ‘then doo thy charge, and charged be thy soule | With wrongfull persecution done this day’ (7. 103). In The English Chronicle of Radulph of Coggeshall Arthur ﬁghts

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against the man who has come to mutilate him and ‘laid hands violently on that man to avenge his own destruction’.⁶¹ A practical reason for this difference is that Shakespeare has transformed a young man with the power to resist into a helpless child. In all but one of the mystery cycles, Isaac is likewise too young to oppose his father physically. In the York play, however, Abraham tells the audience that his son is just over 30 years old: ‘he is of eelde to reken right | Thyrty yere and more sumdele’ (10. 81–2). This playwright has decided to make the typological connection between Isaac and Christ explicit by making them the same age—Christ was traditionally 33 when he died.⁶² However, in Genesis 22: 5 Isaac is described as a ‘childe’ and in almost all iconography his is portrayed as a young boy. The York playwright’s ingenuity is considered unnecessary by the other cycle dramatists because having a child preﬁgure Christ is typologically accurate in a more fundamental way than simple identity of age: children possess an innocence that Christ alone retains in adulthood. As Rosemary Woolf has argued, Isaac is a particularly suitable type of Christ because, like him, he possessed innocence per naturam.⁶³ Shakespeare is using Arthur’s youth to a similar purpose. He alters Arthur’s age from his sources to make him innocent, and this ingenuousness is strengthened through the dramaturgical connection of his near-blinding with the sacriﬁce of Isaac. The Old Testament imagery in which the suffering servant was imagined as a dumb beast was fulﬁlled by Christ’s non-resistance to torture and by his silence at his trial. The imagery was also recalled in minor details of Christ’s Passion, such as his being tied like an animal. The Christian iconography of the Isaac plays meant that Isaac’s binding was typologically understood as fulﬁlled by the binding of the Lamb of God (John 18: 12). The brief reference to Isaac’s binding in Genesis was extrapolated in the mystery plays to make his sufferings closer to those of the Passion.⁶⁴ Great stress is likewise laid on Arthur being restrained: ‘bind the boy which you shall ﬁnd with me | Fast to the chair’ (4. 1. 4–5), ‘bind him here’ (4. 1. 74), ‘For God’s sake, Hubert, ⁶¹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 57–8. ⁶² See Davidson, History, Religion, and Violence, 131. ⁶³ Rosemary Woolf, ‘The Effect of Typology on the English Mediaeval Plays of Abraham and Isaac’, Speculum 32 (1957): 814. ⁶⁴ Thomas Rendall, ‘Visual Typology in the Abraham and Isaac Plays’, Modern Philology 81 (1984): 227. The binding of Isaac is explicitly mentioned and staged in the Chester, York, Brome, Northampton, and Cornish plays.

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let me not be bound!’ (4. 1. 77). Unlike Isaac, Arthur is seated in order to be bound, but this incidental detail may also echo the staging of the Passion. Although there is no biblical account of Christ being seated during his torture, this was a popular staging, and was performed in at least the Chester, N-town, York, and Towneley cycles.⁶⁵ Being seated dramatizes Jesus’ passivity, but it is also one of the attributes of royalty mockingly conferred on Jesus by his tormentors. On the stage the ‘cathedram’ (Chester Mystery Cycle, 16. 69) could look like a parodic throne.⁶⁶ In the Towneley play the second torturer mocks Christ by pretending the seat is a place of honour: Com, syt, and syt downe. Must ye be prayde? Lyke a lord of renowne, Youre sete is arayde.

(21. 521–4)

Such mocking of Christ through violent inversions of the trappings of royalty, such as the crown of thorns or the purple robe of blood, is undercut by the knowledge that Christ is more truly a king than his tormentors can comprehend. The appalling jokes of the torturers of the Towneley Cruciﬁxion play, who claim as they nail Christ to the cross to be mounting him like a ‘kyng … apon youre palfray’ (23. 108–14), gain their dramatic power from their unconscious accuracy.⁶⁷ This broken man is the King of Kings. The allusion to the Cruciﬁxion in the Isaac plays is strengthened by the blindfolding of Isaac, as well as the binding. Isaac’s blindfolding is non-biblical but occurs in most of the mystery plays.⁶⁸ Christ was blindfolded as part of the sufferings inﬂicted on him during the Passion (Mark 14: 65, Luke 24: 62) and Isaac’s blindfolding is another example of Christian interpreters altering Isaac’s story in order to make it a clearer preﬁguration of Christ’s sacriﬁce. In the York play Isaac asks to ⁶⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle, 16. 69; N-town Play, 29. 180; York Plays, 29. 354–9; Towneley plays, 21. 497–515. The Towneley episode lays the most stress on the stool and stage business is made out of the disobedient servant Froward who objects to fetching it. For the connection between this chair and the one to which Gloucester is bound, see Guilfoyle, Shakespeare’s Play within Play, 118. ⁶⁶ For a pictorial representation in which Christ is enthroned in his torture chair see James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance: A Study of the Transformation of Sacred Metaphor into Descriptive Narrative (Kortrijk: Van Ghemmert, 1979), ﬁg. 103. ⁶⁷ See Kolve, Play called Corpus Christi, 193. ⁶⁸ N-Town Play, 5. 179, Chester Mystery Cycle, 4. 386–9, York Plays, 10. 288–9, Brome play, l. 289.

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be blindfolded for the enigmatic reason, ‘than may youre offerand be parﬁte’ (10. 289). This older Isaac seems to have some understanding of the typological implications of his suffering: the reference to a perfect offering projects forward to the Cruciﬁxion that will be enacted later in the cycle. In King John the audience witnesses not a blindfolding but a near-blinding, but the stage property needed in the Isaac play—a kerchief—is likewise present at this moment, as Arthur touches on his kindness to Hubert: ‘when your head did but ache | I knit my handkerchief about your brows’ (4. 1. 41–2). The Bible recounts the blindfolding of Christ, but in some versions of the secret Passion this was extended into an actual blinding. The secret Passion was a response to the desire for fuller accounts of Christ’s death, to facilitate empathetic devotion to the details of his suffering. The episodes mentioned by the Evangelists—the arrest, the mocking, the scourging, and the crowning with thorns—were all ﬁlled out with descriptive detail culled from the Old Testament. The rise in devotion to the suffering of Christ in the late Middle Ages led to an inventive expansion of Passion imagery in which the simple formulas of earlier centuries were replaced by elaborately detailed descriptions drawn from an understanding of the literal fulﬁlment of Old Testament imagery.⁶⁹ Many of the details of the secret Passion, therefore, survived the Reformation because they were based on biblical texts. One of the events in the secret Passion—the blinding of Christ—has been recognized as possibly inﬂuencing Shakespeare in his presentation of the torture of Gloucester in King Lear. In the Towneley play of the buffeting, the Wakeﬁeld master expands on the biblical blindfolding, and Caiaphas threatens to blind Christ: ‘Nay, bot I shall out-thrist | Both his een on a raw’ (21. 79–80). The blinding of Gloucester is connected to the near-blinding of Christ through numerous small details: the chair, the plucking out of the victim’s beard, and the excitable sadism of the torturer, as well as his awareness that the law prohibits him from killing his victim.⁷⁰ The near-blinding in the Towneley play draws on a wealth of typological history that tried to square the evidence of the Gospels with the Old Testament types of Christ such as Samson. As J. W. Robinson has ⁶⁹ As Pickering and Marrow have shown, the ultimate source for all secret Passion imagery is biblical: F. P. Pickering, Literature & Art in the Middle Ages (London: Macmillan, 1970); Marrow, Passion Iconography, 196, and passim. ⁷⁰ Beatrice Groves, ‘Now wole I a newe game begynne’.

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pointed out the Towneley Caiaphas is echoing the Philistines who put out Samson’s eyes, which is one of the standard types of the mocking.⁷¹ Samson became a ubiquitous type of Christ, and even during the seventeenth century almost every event in his life—from his miraculous birth to his triumphant death—could be understood as a preﬁguration of Christ.⁷² The deep connections perceived between Samson and Jesus led to the belief that Christ too might have been blinded as one of his torments. James Marrow suggests that the juxtaposition of illustrations of the crowning with thorns and the blinding of Samson prepared the way for the merging of the two in the secret Passion. Marrow relates that during the crowning with thorns, ‘the majority of Netherlandic Passion tracts report that the thorns pierced Christ’s eyes, or at least His eyelids or brows’.⁷³ The identiﬁcation may also have been facilitated by a possible verbal slippage as the medieval word ‘blind-fellen’ means both ‘to blind, strike blind’ and ‘to blindfold’.⁷⁴ The actual blinding that Christ suffers in some versions of the secret Passion relates to the blinding of Gloucester, but the near-blinding of the Towneley play seems closer to the threatened blinding in King John. This latter scene shares with the mystery plays and secret Passion the imagery of the lamb and many details of threatened torture, such as being bound, burnt, and blinded.⁷⁵ The Passion imagery surrounding Arthur’s near-blinding confers authority on him, and marks out his innocence, innocence which will ﬁnally free him from danger. In the ⁷¹ J. W. Robinson, Studies in Fifteenth-century Stagecraft (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991), 185. ⁷² For late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century examples see The Sermons of Edwin Sandys, D.D., successively Bishop of Worcester and London, and Archbishop of York; to which are added some miscellaneous pieces, by the same author, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge: Parker Society, 1841), 370–1; Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–71), ed. Mary Ellen Riches and Thomas B. Stroup (Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1968), 191; Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 473; Joseph Hall, Contemplations Vpon the principal passages of the holie Historie (London, 1615), 191, 280. ⁷³ Marrow, Passion Iconography, 141–2, ﬁg. 85. See also M. R. James, ‘Pictor in Carmine’, Archaelogia 94 (1951): 161. A similar picture in a German text is accompanied by cryptic words that suggest that Christ too is blinded: J. E. Weis-Liebersdorf, Das Kirchenjahr in 156 Gotischen Federzeichnugen: Ulrich von Lilienfeld und die Eichstatten Evangelienpostille: Studien zur Geschichte der Armenbibel und Ihrer Fortbilungen (Strasburg: J. H. Ed. Heitz, 1913), 44. ⁷⁴ For an example of its use in this context, see Rolle, English Writings, 33. ⁷⁵ See also the connection between the ‘hot irons’ to be used on Arthur, and the burning of Christ during the secret Passion, which connects with his sacriﬁcial status as a burnt offering: Marrow, Passion Iconography, 117–22; Ryan, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II ’, 478–9.

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speech that ﬁnally persuades Hubert, Arthur describes how the blinding iron: Will sparkle in your eyes, And, like a dog that is compelled to ﬁght, Snatch at his master that doth tarre him on. All things that you should use to do me wrong Deny their ofﬁce; only you do lack That mercy which ﬁerce ﬁre and iron extends. (4. 1. 114–19)

The power of innocence is here given supernatural agency that only man ignores. Even dogs (traditionally associated with Christ’s tormentors) are imagined as losing their desire for blood.⁷⁶ The rhetoric in which the cruelty of man is highlighted by the mercy of animals and inanimate objects is a version of the stories in which ﬂora and fauna ﬂocked to hear St Francis and Bede preach when man was too hard-hearted to listen or the cherry tree that bows to Mary in the face of her husband’s rancour in the Coventry carol. The respect of the lifeless and bestial for Christ was used as a rhetorical device for showing the ignorance of man when even the lower orders of creation recognized their creator. The birth of Christ was virtually unnoticed by humans, but the whole of the animal kingdom—not just the ox and ass—is reputed to have recognized the creator and sung out for joy.⁷⁷ In the Passion plays too, God’s creation is aware that he is present, even when man is obdurate and ignorant. In the York cycle the banners of the Jews dip in homage to Jesus and the strong men carrying them cannot hold them erect.⁷⁸ Arthur’s reference to the hot irons refusing to attack him is part of the traditional belief that even inanimate objects will obey the innocent; and in particular the epitome of innocence, Christ. As discussed in Chapter 2, in Shakespeare’s plays the portrayal of the body in pain often seems to recall the most powerful dramatic enactment of suffering of his youth. In both the death of York and the blinding of Gloucester speciﬁc words and actions, as well as the underlying ⁷⁶ Psalm 22: 16 tells how ‘dogges haue compassed me, and the assemblie of the wicked have inclosed me: they perced my hands and my feete’. This Psalm was widely recognized as preﬁguring the Passion (cf. the Geneva annotations) and Christ’s tormentors were therefore frequently depicted as dogs: Marrow, Passion Iconography, 33, 36–9, 201, ﬁgs. 3, 4, 6, 22, 25–7. ⁷⁷ For this legend and the evidence for Shakespeare’s knowledge of it, see June Osborne, John Piper and Stained Glass (Stroud: Sutton, 1997), 149–52. ⁷⁸ York Plays, 33. 168 ff.

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imagery and dramaturgical ideas, point to the affective paradigm of Christ’s suffering in the Gospels and its staging in the mystery plays. Arthur’s near-blinding likewise, especially in its scenic form which recalls the dramaturgy of the Abraham and Isaac plays, is a moment when innocence threatened with insupportable pain and death recalls the Passion. Arthur does not become a Christ-ﬁgure, and his apparent resurrection from death (in John’s eyes) is followed immediately by his actual demise. Nevertheless the links with the Passion strengthen the constant reiteration of Arthur’s party that they ﬁght for the true heir. King John is an intensely political play, and the biblical echoes not only give Arthur a holiness that sets him apart from the machinations of the others, they also lend underlying support to his cause. Religious imagery was used throughout Elizabeth’s reign to strengthen her claim to be a divinely appointed ruler. In The Troublesome Raigne John’s position as a preﬁguration of a Protestant monarch is consolidated through his biblical rhetoric, but in Shakespeare’s play the cryptoreligious quality has been removed from the centre of usurped power and bestowed on the innocent holder of the right to the throne. In King John majesty has not lost its sacredness, but John has lost his majesty. Shakespeare does not abandon the association between religion and royalty, but by conferring the talismanic power of biblical language onto the dispossessed child, rather than the powerful man, he invests his play with an underlying critique of the royalist agenda. Arthur’s situation has an elusive connection with the sufferings of the secret Passion through which Jesus’ kingship was mocked: seated on a parodic throne and nearly blinded by a crown of thorns. This travesty of royalty was inﬂicted on the King of Kings, and Arthur’s torture, by recalling the Passion, recalls also Christ’s hidden royal status. King John shares with the New Testament and the mystery plays a radical social agenda in which true royalty belongs to the dispossessed.

5 ‘Covering discretion with a coat of folly’: The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal In King John, the transfer of biblical imagery from the king to a helpless boy is analogous to the Gospel inversion in which divine kingship is found in a carpenter’s son. Shakespeare’s relocation of sacred language and imagery onto the dispossessed Arthur has a subversive edge in that it illustrates that sanctity is not connected with sovereignty. In the second tetralogy, Shakespeare likewise questions the explicit cultivation of holiness by those in pursuit of secular power. The second tetralogy as a whole, and 1 Henry IV in particular, focuses upon Hal’s growth into kingship.¹ In The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth (1586) the dissolute prince repents of his waywardness and reforms. But in 1 Henry IV no real reformation takes place, as Hal’s early soliloquy reveals to the audience. The prodigal son narrative evolves into a different Christian story: a story about masked power which is only truly recognized through a redemptive battle with the enemy. This story is one model of the Atonement, and it was visualized on the medieval stage in the harrowing of hell play in which Christ revealed his glory and vanquished his enemies. Hal likewise stages his redemption through concealing his royalty—living among his inferiors and disguising himself in their clothes—before revealing himself in a climactic battle which carries speciﬁc resonances of both the Cruciﬁxion and harrowing. Hal combines the politically ¹ For the critical crux over Hal’s characterization, see Hazlitt, Complete Works, iv. 285–6; Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Problem of Meaning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 49, 55–62; Matthew H. Wikander, ‘The Protean Prince Hal’, Comparative Drama 26/4 (1992–3): 295–311; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 40–65; Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’ ’, 8 and passim; Robert Ornstein, A Kingdom for a Stage: The Achievement of Shakespeare’s History Plays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972), 125–202; Sherman H. Hawkins, ‘Virtue and Kingship in Shakespeare’s Henry the Fourth part I ’, English Literary Renaissance 5 (1975): 313–43; Gordon Ross Smith, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry V : Another Part of the Critical Forest’, Journal of the History of Ideas 37 (1976): 3–26.

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astute rule of his father with the sacral kingship of the man his father deposed, to create a brilliantly effective, if somewhat cynical, form of government. Hal revives the idea of a holy monarchy beloved of Richard II as part of his strategic assault on the affections of his country, and he manipulates his charisma through acting out the Richardian rhetoric of divine kingship. The second tetralogy opens with the politically inept Richard II who overtly styles himself as a Christ ﬁgure. Hal is an astute observer, and Richard’s self-portrayal as quasi-divine is recalled in the new prince’s search for a perfect model of kingship. Hal revives Richard’s imagery to invest his actions with the legitimating aura of divinity, but he utilizes religious language with subtlety and political insight and never overtly equates his own power and mission with Christ’s. The appearance of holiness, however, is essential for Hal as he attempts to prove his legitimacy. In the source play, The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth, the prince’s behaviour leads to a serious danger of disinheritance: ‘I heare say, if he use it long, | His father will cut him off from the Crowne.’² An audience familiar with the earlier play, therefore, might hear a genuine threat in Henry IV’s desire to discover that Hal and Hotspur had been swapped in the cradle, so that he could have ‘his Harry, and he mine’ (1. 1. 89). In his father’s eyes Hal has to prove himself a true son, and in the eyes of his country he has to prove himself a true prince, not simply the heir of a usurping monarch. Hal needs to forge a connection with the legitimate king, Richard II. To Henry IV the parallel between his son and the man he has deposed is a matter for lament:   For all the world, As thou art at this hour was Richard then, When I from France set foot at Ravenspurgh.

(3. 2. 93–5)

In fact, Hal’s scheme of ‘redeeming time’ (1. 2. 214) relies precisely on the appearance of such Richardian dissipation. Hal utilizes the assumption that he is truly idle (as Richard was) in order that his reformation ‘shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes | Than that which hath no foil to set it off’ (1. 2. 210–13). Hal’s strategy is strengthened by the fact that the English have already suffered under a politically inept and pleasure-loving king. Hal, however, affects Richard’s rhetoric, as well as his behaviour, and likewise shapes and sharpens it into a powerful political tool. ² Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 302.

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Richard II is the play in which Shakespeare describes his monarch in the most strikingly Christological terms.³ Throughout Richard’s fall from power he repeatedly compares Christ’s suffering with his own. On the apparent desertion of his followers he calls them ‘three Judases, each one thrice-worse than Judas!’ (3. 2. 128). Subjected to the insubordination of Northumberland, York, and Bolingbroke, Richard once again ﬁnds an analogue in Christ’s betrayal: Yet I well remember The favours of these men. Were they not mine? Did they not sometime cry ‘All hail!’ to me? So Judas did to Christ. But He in twelve Found truth in all but one; I, in twelve thousand, none. (4. 1. 158–62)

In his deposition scene he tells the onlookers: Though some of you, with Pilate, wash your hands, Showing an outward pity, yet you Pilates Have here delivered me to my sour cross, And water cannot wash away your sin. (4. 1. 229–32)

Although there is little of such language in Shakespeare’s primary sources, French chronicles sympathetic to Richard, circulating in London at this time and owned by such men as John Stow and John Dee, do compare him to Christ. In Créton’s Histoire du Roy d’Angleterre Richard the narratorial voice makes the connection explicit: Then spake Duke Henry quite aloud to the commons of the said city, ‘Fair Sirs, behold your king! consider what you will do with him!’ And they made answer with a loud voice, ‘We will have him taken to Westminster.’ And so he delivered him unto them. At this hour did he remind me of Pilate, who caused our Lord Jesus Christ to be scourged at the stake, and afterwards had him brought before the multitude of the Jews, saying, ‘Fair Sirs, behold your king!’⁴ ³ See King Richard II, ed. Peter Ure, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. xlviii, lxii; Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 374–5, 380–3. ⁴ John Webb, ‘Translation of a French Metrical History of the Deposition of King Richard the Second, written by a Contemporary, and comprising the Period from his last Expedition into Ireland to his death; from an MS formerly belonging to Charles of Anjou, Earl of Maine and Mortair; but now preserved in the British Museum; accompanied by Prefatory Observations, Notes, and an Appendix; with a Copy of the Original’,

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If Shakespeare was inﬂuenced by the French tradition which portrayed Richard as an innocent, Christlike victim, he has radically changed the import of the allusions. As Emrys Jones comments: the fact that Richard compares himself to Christ may be a symptom of radical difference, not likeness … the effect is to draw our attention to his bold and startling ﬁgure of speech, and, far from making us see Richard as another Christ, we are perhaps surprised into noticing the differences between them—Richard is, among other things, a man who ﬁnds such comparisons appropriate.⁵

Unlike Créton’s Histoire, in which it is the narrator who links Richard’s situation to the Passion, in Richard II it is the king who marks the resemblance. Such a change is a necessary function of a non-choric drama, but it is also reveals a new self-absorption in the parallels. While the French chronicles may reveal the original source of these allusions, it is possible that their subversive tenor can be traced instead to a native production. The inﬂuence of Marlowe’s Edward II on Richard II is considerable, going far beyond the core similarities of shared plot, characterization, and structure.⁶ It is therefore likely, considering Shakespeare’s engagement with Marlowe’s work, that the complex Christological matrix that surrounds Edward inﬂuenced Richard’s identiﬁcation of himself with Christ. Marlowe follows the chronicles in styling Edward’s torments on the Passion. As Patrick Ryan has shown, all the insults and tortures suffered by Edward are present in narratives of the secret Passion.⁷ In Edward II, as in Dr Faustus, the allusion to Christ’s death in the downfall of the protagonist intensiﬁes the ﬂamboyant violence of the ﬁnal scene and tinges it with a frisson of Archaelogia 20 (1824): 179. See also Chronique de la Traïson et Mort de Richart Deux Roy Dengleterre, ed. and trans. Benjamin Williams (London: Aux dépens de la Société, 1846), 198–9, 201. For evidence of Shakespeare’s knowledge of this text see King Richard II, ed. John Dover Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951), pp. xxxix–xlvii. ⁵ Jones, Origins, 56. ⁶ For the connections between the two plays see Wickham, Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage, 165–9; Maurice Charney, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II as Model for Shakespeare’s Richard II ’, Research Opportunities in Renaissance Drama 33 (1994): 31–41; Charles R. Forker, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II and its Shakespearean Relatives: The Emergence of a Genre’, in John W. Velz, ed., Shakespeare’s English Histories: A Quest for Form and Genre (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1996), 81–8; Meredith Skura, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II : Penetrating Language in Shakespeare’s Richard II’, Shakespeare Survey 50 (1997): 41–55. ⁷ Ryan, ‘Marlowe’s Edward II ’, 465–95. Many of these secret Passion sufferings were also present in Stow; see The Chronicles of England, from Brute vnto this present yeare of Christ, 1580 (London, 1580), 356.

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blasphemy. Richard’s overt comparison of his situation with Christ’s, and his portrayal of his sufferings as a ‘sour cross’, may owe more to Marlowe’s shock tactics than the French chroniclers’ pious, royalist alignment of a king’s suffering with Christ’s. Richard is a victim, and his suffering deserves sympathy, but his Christological imagery is part of his unashamed self-exaltation and inability to recognize his own responsibility for his situation, rather than a gloriﬁcation of his piety. Richard’s identiﬁcation of himself with Christ is one facet of his political ineptitude. Richard, like Gaunt, thinks that the king is ‘God’s substitute | His deputy anointed in his sight’ and that none of his subjects would dare to ‘lift | An angry arm against his minister’ (1. 3. 37–41). For Richard religious rhetoric is a refuge. He believes himself to be unassailable: ‘the breath of worldly men cannot depose | The deputy elected by the Lord’ (3. 2. 53–4). Through Richard’s assertion that ‘God for his Richard hath in heavenly pay | A glorious angel’ (3. 2. 56–7), Shakespeare has created a Christological allusion out of Gloucester’s conﬁdence in Woodstock that ‘God’s holy angel guards a just man’s life’.⁸ Woodstock is quoting from Psalm 34: 7—‘the angell of the Lorde taryeth rounde about them that feare him: and delivereth them’—but Richard’s version, through its speciﬁcity (the angel is only for him, not for any just man) and the chime of ‘pay’ and ‘pray’, alludes instead to Christ’s words: ‘thinkest thou, that I can not nowe pray to my Father, and he wil give me mo then Twelve legions of Angels?’ (Matt. 26: 53). The ethical bleaching that has transformed prayer into hire—the substitution of ‘pay’ for ‘pray’ brings into play the numismatic meaning of ‘angel’—is part of the instability of Richard’s self-portrayal as the Christ. Hal’s revival of Richard’s religious language, however, shares neither its complacency nor its innocence. Richard believes in his uniquely holy status, Hal is merely anxious that others should believe in it, and he stages his reformation by imbuing his behaviour with an Incarnational aura. Hal understands, as Machiavelli put it, that ‘it is necessary to know well how to colour this nature, and to be a great pretender and dissembler … [for] everyone sees how you appear, few touch what you are’.⁹ Later Christianizers of Machiavelli were to understand this ⁸ William A. Armstrong, Elizabethan History Plays (London: Oxford University Press, 1965), 245. See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 373–4. ⁹ Niccolò dei Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansﬁeld (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 70–1.

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principle of the necessary participation in evil and dissimulation by the Prince as an imitation of the Incarnation, in which divinity becomes fused with fallen humanity.¹⁰ Hal likewise attempts to infuse his Machiavellian dissimulation of his true nature with an aura of the Incarnation: a descent to the mortal world of the tavern, which is employed to hide his true royalty. In both parts of Henry IV there is an early cozening scene in the sub-plot which holds in microcosm the Incarnational allusion of Hal’s dissimulation. In 2 Henry IV Hal tricks Falstaff by putting on the leather jerkin and apron of a servant, and says: ‘from a god to a bull? A heavy descension! It was Jove’s case. From a prince to a prentice? A low transformation’ (2. 2. 165–7). This jest of a prince becoming a serving man is couched in pagan terms, but ‘Jove’ was a ubiquitous signiﬁer for the Christian God at this time, especially in the theatre.¹¹ Hal’s joke contains a veiled allusion to another god who did not scorn to stoop so low: Jesus Christ ‘who being in the forme of God, thought it no robberie to be equal with God: But hee made himselfe of no reputation, and tooke on him the forme of a seruant’ (Philippians 2: 6). Hal alludes to the Incarnation, but is unwilling to undergo the humility which the analogy entails. He soon throws off his servant’s garments and leaves the tavern never to return. Hal’s resonant dressing of himself as a servant brings into focus the Incarnational analogue of his behaviour. There is a parallel disguise scene early in 1 Henry IV, which likewise acts as a sub-plot version of his central deception of others. The Gad’s Hill incident belongs to the folk tradition of royalty concealing itself in the clothes of common man, an image which had itself been used by Origen for the Incarnation in a discussion of ‘guiler beguiled’ model of the Atonement.¹² Origen’s image is drawn from a wider, and ubiquitous, metaphor for the Incarnation which involves Christ ‘clothing’ himself in humanity.¹³ In each of Hal’s plays he disguises himself with borrowed clothes: the suit of buckram lent him by Poins in 1 Henry IV, the servant’s cap and apron in 2 ¹⁰ Peter S. Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 213–16. ¹¹ See Paula S. Berggren, ‘ ‘‘From a God to a Bull’’: Shakespeare’s Slumming Jove’, Classical and Modern Literature 5/4 (1985): 277–91. ¹² Quoted in Gustaf Aulen, Christus Victor: An Historical Study of the Three Main Types of the Idea of the Atonement, trans. A. G. Herbert (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1931), 68. ¹³ See William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman: A Critical Edition of the B-Text based Trinity College Cambridge MS B.15.17, ed. A. V. C. Schmidt (London: Everyman, 1995), passus 18. 22.

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Henry IV, and Erpingham’s cloak which he wears on the night before Agincourt in Henry V. These garments are objective correlatives of his dissimulation, as is illustrated through the sartorial metaphor employed by the Constable of France to describe Hal’s tavern life: And you shall ﬁnd his vanities forespent Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus, Covering discretion with a coat of folly. (Henry V, 2. 4. 26–38)

Hal’s disguise of himself as a prodigal son is literalized in the clothes of buckram that he puts on to ﬁght Falstaff: ‘I have cases of buckram for the nonce, to immask our noted outward garments’ (1. 2. 177–8).¹⁴ Hal’s comic subterfuge holds in miniature the masking of his nobility which is the central plot of the play. This deeper design is revealed twenty lines after the Gad’s Hill plot is hatched: Herein will I imitate the sun, Who doth permit the base contagious clouds To smother up his beauty from the world, · · · · · · · · [so that] My reformation, glitt’ring o’er my fault, Shall show more goodly, and attract more eyes Than that which hath no foil to set it off. (1. 2. 194–212)

Hal’s dissimulation at Gad’s Hill is in pursuit of the same goal as his central deception: a combat with someone who does not comprehend his true nature. The hidden royalty of Hal at Gad’s Hill reveals the most important parallel between his later duel and the combat between Christ and Satan. Christ, according to the myth, concealed his divinity, and Hal conceals his royalty, that part of himself which could in Elizabethan times be considered quasi-divine. The ancient analogy between divinity and majesty was based on the parallel between twin-natured kingship—a mortal man and an immortal ofﬁce—and the two natures of the Godman Christ: the king presents ‘on the terrestrial stage the living image of the two-natured God’.¹⁵ Hal’s character—behaving as a commoner in ¹⁴ Buckram also has connections with disguise, and as an adjective could denote ‘a false appearance of strength’: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. buckram. ¹⁵ Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 47.

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both his borrowed robes and his tavern life—is an exploration of such twin-natured kingship.¹⁶ Hal hides the fact that he is his father’s son in martial might and kingliness under a cloak of dissipation. This disguise resonates with an interpretation of the Atonement known as the ‘guiler beguiled’ theory, in which Christ deliberately conceals his divine nature in order to deceive the infernal powers. Gregory of Nyssa famously used the metaphor of a worm for Christ’s human nature: a worm which concealed the ‘hook’ of his divinity and so tempted the devil to impale himself on it: ‘For since … it was not in the nature of the opposing power to come in contact with the undiluted presence of God … the Deity was hidden under the veil of our nature, that so, as with a ravenous ﬁsh, the hook of the Deity might be gulped down along with the bait of ﬂesh.’¹⁷ Pope Leo the Great likewise explained that when Christ hid ‘the power of His Godhead which was inseparable from His manhood under the veil of our weakness, the crafty foe was taken off his guard’.¹⁸ This divine deception of the devil is a fundamental part of the abuse of power model of the Atonement, in which the devil is deceived into thinking that Jesus is just a man, and so he attempts to condemn him to hell. However, because Jesus is sinless this is an abuse of his power (the devil only has dominion over sinners) and because the devil has overreached his jurisdiction, all his rights over mankind are revoked. It is essential to God’s plan that Satan does not recognize Jesus as God, and therefore he is disguised as a mere man.¹⁹ There are two plays in the mystery cycles which dramatize this interpretation of the Atonement: the temptation in the desert and the ¹⁶ See Anne Barton, Essays, Mainly Shakespearean (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 218. ¹⁷ Gregory of Nyssa, Dogmatic Treatises etc., in A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series (Oxford: Parker & Co., 1893), v. 494. For the biblical sources of this image of the ‘divine angler’ see Pickering, Literature & Art, 269. For a use of Gregory’s metaphor by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, see Thomas Playfere, A Most Excellent and Heavenly Sermon: Vpon the 23. Chapter of the Gospell by Saint Luke (London, 1595), C2r ; See also ch. 6 below. ¹⁸ Leo the Great, in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, 2nd series (Oxford: Parker & Co., 1893), xii. 131. ¹⁹ The deception inherent in this interpretation of the Incarnation was considered to be justiﬁed because Satan had likewise tricked Adam and Eve into eating the apple. See Alan H. Nelson, ‘The Temptation of Christ; or, The Temptation of Satan’, in Medieval English Drama: Essays Critical and Contextual, ed. Jerome Taylor and Alan H. Nelson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 218–29; David L. Wee, ‘The Temptation of Christ and the Motif of Divine Duplicity in the Corpus Christi Cycle Drama’, Modern Philology 72 (1974): 1–16.

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harrowing of hell. In the former Satan pries into Jesus’ nature trying to fathom who he truly is, and in the latter, Christ ﬁnally casts aside his disguise and reveals his divinity to the infernal powers as he shatters their world. There are two people in Henry IV who are destroyed by their inability to recognize that Hal is a true prince who only plays at being a Cheapside rogue. The ﬁrst is Hotspur. Hal’s project of self-redemption involves masking of his royal identity and through this concealment he engages his enemy in a single combat which the latter thinks he will win. Hal’s revelation of his true nature as he destroys his adversary in a knightly encounter is nuanced by the guiler beguiled explanation of the Incarnation and his ﬁnal defeat of Hotspur is cast as a harrowing. The second person who is doomed by his lack of understanding of Hal’s real nature is Falstaff. Falstaff, like the devil in the temptation in the desert, shows his fundamental misconstruction of his companion’s nature, although the audience, as in the mysteries, are always aware of what Hal truly is. The initial confrontation between Jesus and Satan in the wilderness is re-enacted and memorialized in Lent: the time when 2 Henry IV is set (2. 4. 346–51) and the season that governs 1 Henry IV. The tavern scenes of Henry IV are coloured by the temptation in the desert: just as Christ was tempted by Satan, Hal is tempted by the ‘reverend Vice’ Falstaff (2. 5. 458).²⁰ Such at least is the schema. But Hal is not really tempted. He allows himself to be drawn into idleness, play-ﬁghting with his friends while his father prepares for war, but he had always intended to throw off his loose behaviour when the time was propitious. His apparent dissipation is a strategy rather than a weakness. This is a staged Lenten period, not a genuine time of temptation and selfsearching, but in an inverted manner it contains the characteristics of the season: ﬁsh, leanness, and repentance. Falstaff, both the diabolical tempter in the desert and the carnival ﬁgure of Shrove Tuesday, carries the preponderance of the Lenten imagery.²¹ The war of words between Falstaff and the prince is a battle between fat and lean, a leitmotif of the play:

²⁰ See J. Dover Wilson, The Fortunes of Falstaff (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 17–23; Willard Farnham, ‘Falstaff and the Grotesque’, in Falstaff, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1992), 166–8. ²¹ Francois Laroque, ‘Shakespeare’s Battle of Carnival and Lent: The Falstaff Scenes Reconsidered (1 & 2 Henry IV)’, in Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin, ed. Ronald Knowles (London: Macmillan, 1998), 83–96.

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The skirmish of wit with Falstaff in the tavern is a prelude to the single combat with Hotspur on the battleﬁeld, and its dramatic function of anticipation is similar to the narrative function of Christ’s temptation in the wilderness: a verbal trial of strength that anticipates the main action of the Passion. Contemporary sermons about the temptation in the desert borrowed the martial language of the devil’s ﬁnal destruction for this preliminary tussle. Lancelot Andrewes, for example, in a sermon series printed in 1592, described Christ and Satan as ‘the two Champions’ and the holy spirit as ‘the leader of Iesus into the lists’.²² The terms of Falstaff and Hal’s argument are those of the battle of Lent: the popular enactment of the ﬁnancial rivalry between ﬁshmongers and butchers during this season. Falstaff counters the Prince’s meaty criticism—‘sanguine’, ‘horse’, ‘ﬂesh’—with the piscine barb ‘stock-ﬁsh’ (and perhaps a particularly thin ‘ling’, a staple Lenten ﬁsh, could have been heard in ‘starveling’).²³ Nashe’s Praise of the Red Herring (1599), composed at a similar time to 1 Henry IV, makes reference to this martial Lenten imagery in a literal battle of ﬁsh and ﬂesh, which narrates his support for the Yarmouth ﬁshermen against ‘their bloudy adversaries, the butchers’.²⁴ Lenten Stuffe and Henry IV may also share a submerged satire against the Cobham family. In Nashe, Alice Scoufos argues, Oldcastle is parodied as the Lenten ﬁsh par excellence, the herring.²⁵ In Shakespeare the Falstaff/Oldcastle jibes have Lenten associations too, except here the ‘roasted Manningtree ox with the pudding in his belly’ (2. 5. 457) is deﬁnitely ²² Lancelot Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate (for Gods glorie and Mans saluation) betweene Christ and Satan (London, 1592), A3r . See also Robert Holland, The holie history of our Lord Jesus Christs natiuitie, life, resurrection a. acsension: gathered into English meeter (London, 1594), C2v . ²³ The Arden editor, through his emendation of ‘elf-skin’ to ‘eel-skin’ adds another ﬁsh to the list: cf. King Henry IV part 1, ed. A. R. Humphreys, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Routledge, 1960/96), 69. The emendation is strengthened by Falstaff ’s use of the epithet ‘eel-skin’ in the following play: 2 Henry IV, 3. 2. 316. ²⁴ Works of Thomas Nashe, iii. 183, 201–4. ²⁵ Alice Lyle Scoufos, ‘Nashe, Jonson and the Oldcastle Problem’, Modern Philology 65 (1968): 249–53.

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on the meaty side of the war.²⁶ The Puritan ancestry of Falstaff (as Oldcastle) seems surprising, but Puritans were not always parodied as abstainers from the pleasures of the ﬂesh. Kristen Poole has argued convincingly that Shakespeare’s presentation of Falstaff is entirely in keeping with the tenor of late sixteenth-century anti-Puritan literature. She has shown how the anti-Marprelate tracts and the burlesque stage performances of the Marprelate controversy created a grotesque, ﬂeshy Puritan who was one of the dramatic antecedents of Falstaff.²⁷ Falstaff, like a Puritan, objects to the strictures of Lent. Protestants did not observe Lent rigorously because it was based on the tradition of the Church rather than Scriptural authority. Numerous sermons objected to Lenten fasting, and Foxe frequently lists the eating of meat and dairy products during Lent as a charge levelled against Protestant martyrs. John Taylor’s Protestant satire Jack-a-Lent ends with the assertion: ‘I am persuaded that a man may go to heaven as well with a leg of a capon, as with a red herring.’²⁸ A capon leg is part of Falstaff’s avoidance of the most solemn fast of Lent. Poins asks him: ‘how agrees the devil and thee about thy soul, that thou soldest him on Good Friday last, for a … cold capon’s leg?’ (1. 2. 113–15). The religious language highlights the fact that this broken fast is not merely the act of a humorously greedy clown, but also in keeping with the image of the grotesque Puritan. Falstaff ’s refusal to observe fasts is part of his original incarnation as a Puritan martyr, but the motivation has been inverted. Falstaff eats because he is greedy, not because he wants to defy the Catholic Church. Likewise his constant Puritan idiom—such as calling himself ²⁶ For the evidence that Falstaff was once Oldcastle, see Gary Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, Shakespeare Survey 38 (1985): 85–100. ²⁷ Kristen Poole, Radical Religion from Shakespeare to Milton: Figures of Nonconformity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 34. For the inﬂuence of the Marprelate plays on the staging of Puritanism in general, and Falstaff in particular, see Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol’, 150–70; Hornback, ‘Staging Puritanism’, 31–67; Grace Tiffany, ‘Puritanism in Comic History: Exposing Royalty in the Henry Plays’, Shakespeare Studies 26 (1998): 256–87. ²⁸ Foxe, Actes and Monuments, ii. 1043; John Taylor, Jacke A Lent His Beginning and Entertainment with the mad prankes of his Gentleman Vsher Shrove Tuesday that goes before him, and his Footman hunger attending (1630), in The Old Book Collector’s Miscellany, ed. Charles Hindley (London: Reeves & Turner, 1872), 22. The opposition between herring and capons was so marked that by the late seventeenth century the joke had become linguistically enshrined and a red herring was known as a ‘Yarmouth capon’: Oxford English Dictionary, s.v. capon.

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a ‘saint’ (1. 2. 91)—is used in the pursuit of vice rather than virtue. He exhorts Poins in rousing Puritan rhetoric—‘God give thee the spirit of persuasion and him the ears of proﬁting’ (1. 2. 150–1)—to persuade Hal to commit a robbery, and in preparation for his impersonation of the king in a tavern play says: ‘an the ﬁre of grace be not quite out of thee, now shalt thou be moved’ (2. 5. 386). The mismatching is very funny, and Falstaff intends it to be so. He creates comedy by using high moral language for a low moral purpose, and expects his audience to laugh. Falstaff ’s language can be read as a parody of Puritanism, but it is also something more engaging—the parodic Puritan’s hypocritical inversion of biblical phraseology becomes innocent in Falstaff who does not intend to be misunderstood. Falstaff is not only a complex and alluring counterpart of Puritan and Vice, he is also a father ﬁgure to the young prince. Psychoanalytic critics have long argued that Falstaff is Hal’s ‘father-substitute’, but as the battle approaches Hal withdraws from him to be alone with his true father.²⁹ Hal’s apparent capitulation to his father’s will prior to the battle in 1 Henry IV (the position of the reconciliation is Shakespeare’s invention: in the sources it does not happen until after the rebellion has been crushed) has subtle links with Gethsemane, a reference which Shakespeare will make much more pronounced in Henry’s withdrawal to pray before Agincourt.³⁰ Here the reference functions as an image of perfect ﬁlial submission which resonates with the scene. Hal’s emphatic ‘I am your son’ (3. 2. 134) arrogates to himself the proud kinship of Gethsemane rather than the humility of the prodigal who tells his father: ‘I am no more worthie to by called thy sonne.’³¹ This is the moment when Hal declares his allegiance to his real father rather than his father-ﬁgure, and his proud statement of kinship with Bolingbroke marks his rejection of Falstaff and his world. Hal’s ﬁlial obedience is the more striking because in Shakespeare’s source play The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth the reconciliation between the king and his son opens with a genuine threat of danger to ²⁹ J. I. M. Stewart, Character and Motive in Shakespeare: Some Recent Appraisals Examined (London: Longman, Green, 1949), 138; James L. Calderwood, Metadrama in Shakespeare’s Henriad: Richard II to Henry V (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979), 44. ³⁰ See below. ³¹ Luke 15: 19. For the underlying prodigal son narrative of I and 2 Henry IV, see Young, English Prodigal Son Plays, 194–225; Beck, ‘Terence Improved’, 107–22.

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Henry IV: ‘enters the Prince with a dagger in his hand’.³² Shakespeare has inverted this, and in his play it is the shedding of the son’s blood, not that of the father’s, which is intimated during the scene of reconciliation: I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, And in the closing of some glorious day Be bold to tell you that I am your son; When I will wear a garment all of blood, And stain my favours in a bloody mask, Which, washed away, shall scour my shame with it. (3. 2. 132–7)

Hal’s conﬂation of blood with cleansing borrows a ubiquitous image from the doctrine of the Atonement which is expressed, for example, in the Prayer Book’s prayer of humble access: ‘that our sinfull bodies may bee made cleane by his body, and our souls washed through his most precious blood’.³³ The dominant biblical image of Hal’s speech, however, comes from Isaiah 63 (parallels are italicized): Who is this that cometh from Edom, with red garments from Bozrah? hee is glorious in his apparell … Wherefore is thine apparell red, and thy garments like him that treadeth in the winepresse? I haue troden the winepresse alone, and of all people there was none with mee: for I will treade them in mine anger, and treade them underfoote in my wrath, and their blood shal be sprinckled upon my garments, and I will staine all my rayment. For the day of uengeance is in my heart, & the yeere of my redeemed is come.³⁴

One interpretation of Christ’s fulﬁlment of Isaiah 63 was the Anselmian view that only God himself, in the person of Christ, was capable of making a complete satisfaction for the inﬁnite offence of sin. In the new dispensation therefore, the person who comes from Edom has borne the wrath of God, and his clothes are stained with his own blood instead of the blood of his enemies. The Book of Revelation, for example, describes Christ’s fulﬁlment of Isaiah 63 thus: ‘and he was clothed with a garment dipt in blood, & his name is called     … for hee it is that treadeth the winepresse of the ﬁercenesse and wrath of ³² Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 315. Psychoanalytic critics explain the lack of this undercurrent in Shakespeare’s play by arguing that Hal’s ‘parricidal impulses’ ﬁnd their outlet in his treatment of Falstaff and in the rebellion of his alter ego, Hotspur: Stewart, Character and Motive, 137–8; Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953), 278. ³³ Booke of Common Prayer, N2v . ³⁴ Isa. 63: 1–4. See Shaheen, Biblical References in Shakespeare’s Plays, 418.

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almightie God’ (19: 13–15).³⁵ The New Testament transforms the aggressive triumph of God in Isaiah into the Passion of the suffering, blood-soaked redeemer; and the two interpretations become one in the cross that is both God’s humiliation and his glory. Isaiah 63 was seen as a messianic prophecy both of Christ’s suffering on the cross and of his ﬁnal victory after the harrowing of hell. As Lancelot Andrewes preached, using this as his text on Easter day, 1623: ‘his coming heer from Edom, will fall out to be His rising from the dead. His returne from Bozra nothing but his vanquishing of hell’.³⁶ In this interpretation of Isaiah the risen Christ retains the blood-soaked clothes, the badge of his Cruciﬁxion, when he comes in glory. The suffering is remembered at the moment of triumph because it is through suffering that Christ has triumphed. In the Chester Ascension the Tailors clothe Christ in his blood-stained robes and the angels greet the ascending redeemer with the cry of Isaiah: Who ys this that cometh within the blysse of heaven that neuer shall blynne, bloodye, owt of the world of synne— and harrowed hell hath hee?³⁷

In Hal’s reworking of Isaiah he will ‘wear a garment all of blood’ and answer the question ‘who is this?’ with a triumphal ‘I am your son.’ Hal, like the authors of Revelation and the mystery plays, recalls Isaiah 63 as he looks forward to the time when a battle has been won and father and son will be reunited. The visualization of the guiler beguiled model of the Atonement involved conceiving of the climax of salvation as a battle. In most medieval Passion lyrics Christ is conceived as a victorious knight— Christus victor —who encounters the devil on the cross and in his hellish citadel.³⁸ The latter imagery is known as the harrowing of hell, an idea which originated in the apocryphal Gospel of Nicodemus. This immensely popular text may itself have been known to Shakespeare’s audience, as it was printed in England at least eight times during the sixteenth century. ³⁵ Isaiah 63 was also connected to Christ’s sacriﬁce in the Prayer Book. It was read as the epistle for the Monday before Easter: Booke of Common prayer, E5r . For contemporary examples of a typological reading of Isaiah 63 see John Andrewes, Christ his Crosse […] (Oxford, 1614), 9; Joseph Hall, The Passion Sermon, preache at Paul’s-Crosse, on Good-Friday, April 14, 1609 (Birmingham, 1784), 19. ³⁶ Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 567. ³⁷ Chester Mystery Cycle, 20. 105–8. ³⁸ For examples see Douglas Gray, ed., English Medieval Religious Lyrics (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1992), 16–37.

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A recent commentator on a manuscript version of it, copied in the late sixteenth century, suggests that it ‘retained a deep-rooted fascination which even the Reformation could not destroy’.³⁹ The martial imagery of salvation outlived the Reformation not only through the continued popularity of old texts such as The Gospel of Nicodemus and Piers Plowman (the latter of which was enthusiastically championed and printed by Protestant dissenters throughout the Tudor period) but also in the rhetoric of Protestants themselves.⁴⁰ The harrowing of hell, a non-biblical episode in which Christ enters limbo after his Cruciﬁxion, defeats Satan, and rescues the souls of the dead, is a way of visualizing the guiler beguiled model of the Atonement. In Piers Plowman, Jesus explains to the devil as he enters hell, how: ‘I in liknesse of a leode, that Lord am of hevene, | Graciousliche thi gile have quyt—go gile ayein gile!’ (passus 18. 357–8). In medieval liturgy versions of the harrowing highlighted this deception of Satan through his incomprehension at what is happening. The tollite portas, the triumphal end of Psalm 24, became associated with the harrowing of hell early in medieval liturgy and its emphasis on the interrogation of identity—‘Who is this King of glory?’—chimed with the guiler beguiled theory.⁴¹ The tollite portas also stresses that the Lord who comes is ‘the Lord mightie in battell’ and the martial imagery of salvation, and of the harrowing, survived into the post-Reformation period. The harrowing retained its martial character in the Elizabethan church, which commemorated the event daily in the recitation of the Apostles’ Creed at morning and evening prayer. The homilies taught that Christ: ‘passed through death & hell … He destroyed the devill and all his tyranny, and openly triumphed over him, and tooke away from ³⁹ C. W. Marx, ‘The Gospel of Nicodemus in Old English and Middle English’, in The Medieval Gospel of Nicodemus: Texts, Intertexts, and Contexts in Western Europe, ed. Zbigniew Izydorczyk (Tempe: Arizona State University, 1997), 259. ⁴⁰ For the continued popularity of Piers Plowman, see Barbara A. Johnson, Reading Piers Plowman and The Pilgrim’s Progress: Reception and the Protestant Reader (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992), 99; David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, 2nd edn. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 36–7. ⁴¹ ‘Lift up your heads, yee gates, and be yee lift up yee euerlasting doores, and the King of glory shal come in. Who is this King of glory? the Lord, strong and mightie, euen the Lord mightie in battell’: Karl Young, The Drama of the Medieval Church (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962), i. 149–50. For liturgical versions of the harrowing, see ibid. i. 102–4, 167; Karl Young, ‘The Harrowing of Hell in Liturgical Drama’, Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 16/2 (1909): 910; Chambers, Mediaeval Stage, ii. 4–5.

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him all his captives’.⁴² John Foxe, likewise, in Christ Jesus Triumphant (1579) calls Christ ‘our heauenly Champion’ and the verso of the title page carries a full-page picture of Christ rising out of the tomb, trampling on death and carrying a victor’s palm.⁴³ This pictorial representation of the harrowing is interesting as it seems that this was a doctrine which was strongly tied to visual representation. Luther’s Torgau sermon of 1533, the seminal text on the harrowing for Lutherans, encourages a physical apprehension of the doctrine while sidestepping the physical reality of the harrowing itself: The customary way of depicting how Christ descended into hell on church walls represents him with a cape and with banners in his hand as he makes his descent and stalks and assaults the devil, as he storms hell and rescues his own people from it. The children’s play presented at Easter depicts it in a similar way. It seems better to me that you depict, act out, sing and recite the story in a very simple way and let it remain at that and not concern yourself with sublime and precise ideas about how it actually took place.⁴⁴

In England too, visual representations of the harrowing remained in churches—the number of wall paintings of the subject which still survive illustrate its popularity.⁴⁵ Glass representations in particular, such as the ﬁfteenth-century stained glass harrowing in St Michael’s, Coventry or the ‘discending into Hell’ in the magniﬁcent windows of Malvern Priory, frequently survived into the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁴⁶ The testimony of John Bale, accused of denying ⁴² Certaine Sermons or Homilies, 192. The importance of the doctrine in the Elizabethan church is also shown by its being the third of the thirty-nine Articles: Articles whereupon it was agreed by the Archbyshops and Bishops of both provinces and the whole cleargie, in the Convocation holden at London in the yere of our Lorde God 1562 accordyng to the computation of the Churche of Englande, for the auoydyng of the diuersities of opynyons, and for the stablishyng of consent touching true religion (London, 1571), A2v . ⁴³ John Foxe, Christ Iesvs Triumphant (London: John Day, 1579), Br . ⁴⁴ For a translation of this sermon, see Robert Kolb and James A. Nestingen, eds., Sources and Contexts of The Book of Concord (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 246. ⁴⁵ C. E. Keyser, A List of Buildings in Great Britain and Ireland having Mural and other Painted Decorations, of Dates Prior to the Latter part of the Sixteenth Century, 3rd edn. (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1883), 10, 60, 126, 154, 158, 236, 279, 285. For surviving representations of the harrowing in Shakespeare’s home county, see Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 32, 131–2. ⁴⁶ Thomas Habington, A Survey of Worcestershire by Thomas Habington, ed. John Amphlett (Oxford: Worcestershire Historical Society, 1893–95), ii. 177. For the survival of stained glass in Elizabethan England, see Tudor Royal Proclamations, ii. 147; William Harrison, Harrison’s Description of England in Shakespere’s Youth, ed. Frederick J. Furnivall (London: New Shakespere Society, 1877), i. 31; Trevor Cooper, ed., The Journal of

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this article of the creed in 1536, describes the ways in which people visualized the doctrine in the early Reformation period: I neuer denyed, descendit ad inferna [but I told people] to be very cyrcumspect in receyuyng the seyd artycle. And not to beleue yt as yei se yt sett forth in peynted clothes, or in glasses wyndowes, or lyke as my self had befor tyme sett yt forth in ye cuntre yer in a serten playe. for thowgh ye sowle of crist soch tyme as hys corse laye in ye graue, ded vysytt hell, yet can we not iustlye suppose yt he fawgt vyolentlye with ye deuyls, for ye sowles of ye faythfull sort, and so toke them owte of yer possessyon.⁴⁷

Bale’s testimony illustrates how people were acquainted with the harrowing through pictorial and ludic representations of it, and expresses his own distrust of such images. Alexander Hume, one of those who took part in the 1590s debate over the doctrine, mocks the belief in the literal harrowing of hell through the reappearance of Foxe’s picture (mentioned above) on Hill’s Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell (1592): ‘This picture M. Doctor tooke to be so sure an argument of Christs descending into hell … [that he] set it before his owne booke likewise.’⁴⁸ A literalist belief in the descent was questioned by Calvin, who interpreted the Creed as referring to Christ suffering hell’s pains on the cross, not an actual descent into hell. Calvin’s interpretation was widely accepted in Puritan circles by the 1580s and 1590s, and provoked a heated debate over the doctrine, in which writers in the mainstream Church of England defended the doctrine against the onslaught of Martin Marprelate and other Puritans.⁴⁹ Martial language and imagery, however, was retained by both sides of the debate. Thomas Bilson, the Bishop of Winchester, William Dowsing: Iconoclasm in East Anglia during the Civil War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2001), 89–106, 232, 260, 295, 302. ⁴⁷ Honor McCusker, John Bale: Dramatist and Antiquary (Bryn Mawr, Pa., 1942), 7. ⁴⁸ Alexander Hume, A reioynder to doctor Hil concerning the descente of Christ into Hell […] (Edinburgh, 1594), Z4r . The picture is John Day’s device and McKerrow suggests that it may have been invented for Foxe’s book: Ronald B. McKerrow, Printers’ & Publishers’ Devices in England & Scotland 1485–1640 (London: Bibliographical Society, 1913), 78–9, ﬁg. 208. ⁴⁹ See John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), xx. 512 ff.; Dewey D. Wallace, ‘Puritan and Anglican: The Interpretation of Christ’s Descent into Hell in Elizabethan Theology’, Archiv für Reformations-Geschichte, 69 (1978): 248–87; The Marprelate Tracts 1588, 1589, ed. William Pierce (London: James Clarke, 1911), 56, 186, 271–2, 280; Adam Hill, The Defence of the Article: Christ descended into Hell (London, 1592); Hume, A reioynder to doctor Hil.

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preached a sermon supporting the doctrine at Paul’s Cross during Lent, 1597 (a possible dating for the composition of 1 Henry IV ) which argued that Christ ‘personallie conquered and disarmed’ the devil.⁵⁰ Calvin, likewise, in describing the metaphorical descent to hell on the cross, writes that Christ: ‘must also grapple hand to hand with the armies of hell’.⁵¹ This martial imagery of the harrowing is likewise present in nontheological literature of the 1590s. Spenser’s Easter sonnet, Amoretti 68, begins: Most glorious Lord of life! that, on this day, Didst make Thy triumph over death and sin; And, having harrowed hell, didst bring away Captivity thence captive, us to win.

Spenser uses a biblical image of a victorious general enslaving death and leading it in triumph. The allusion involves a numerological pun as it is Psalm 68 (the same number as the sonnet) from which the quotation ‘thou hast led captiuitie captiue’ (68: 18) comes.⁵² Spenser uses martial harrowing imagery repeatedly in The Faerie Queene when Arthur breaks into the plot to save beleaguered knights. The allegorical colouring is clearest in Book 1, canto 8. In this battle between Arthur and Duessa’s forces over the Redcross knight, Spenser alludes to the veiled Godhead of Christ. The connection with the harrowing is shown through details such as the fast-shut gates that open miraculously at Arthur’s bidding, and the fact that the dungeon in which Redcross languishes is ‘as darke as hell’.⁵³ Less generally recognized, but as important a parallel, is the fact that the inmates of the castle are ignorant of who Arthur is because his shield is covered. Ostensibly the covered shield means that Arthur’s enemies are unable to read his heraldry and ﬁnd out who he is; allegorically it ﬁnds a parallel in the demons who do not comprehend ⁵⁰ Thomas Bilson, The effect of certaine Sermons tovching The Fvll redemption of mankind by the death and bloud of Christ Jesvs […] (London, 1599), A4r . ⁵¹ Calvin, Institutes, xx. 515. ⁵² Kenneth J. Larsen’s excellent edition, which shows how the sonnets correspond with the daily order of scriptural readings in the Church of England, references the Psalm but does not draw attention to the pun: Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti and Epithalamion: A Critical Edition, ed. Kenneth J. Larsen (Tempe, Ariz.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1997), 95, 201. ⁵³ Faerie Queene, I. viii. 3, I. viii. 5, I. viii. 39. See also Matthew A. Fike, ‘Prince Arthur and Christ’s Descent into Hell: The Faerie Queene, I. viii and II. viii’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, and Reviews 7/2 (1997): 6–13.

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Christ’s divine nature while it is shrouded by his humanity. During the battle the veil is dislodged, and his enemies are blinded and vanquished, as are the devils in the harrowing when Christ comes in the full glory of his divinity. Spenser underlines the allusion by adding that the shield’s dazzling light could only be compared to divine brightness ‘as where th’Almighties lightning brond does light | It dimmes the dazed eyen, and daunts the senses quight’ (I. viii. 21). In the climactic battle of 1 Henry IV Hal is likewise using traditional Christian imagery when he connects the bloody victory of Isaiah 63 with a martial conquest: ‘I will redeem all this on Percy’s head, | … When I will wear a garment all of blood’ (3. 2. 132–5). Throughout Lancelot Andrewes’ sermon on Isaiah 63 the suffering and the triumph of the redeemer are entwined: his blood-soaked garments are also the scarlet colours of the victorious captain who has stormed the capital of his enemy. The harrowing of hell is central to Andrewes’s interpretation: the ﬁgure who comes from Edom returns triumphant from his encounter with Satan: ‘this Party, whosoeuer He is, hath gotten the upper hand, wonn the ﬁeld; marches stately, Conqueror-like. His, the day sure’. Christ has vanquished ‘even to Bozra, to hell it selfe, and there brake the gates of brasse, and made the iron-barrs ﬂie in sunder’.⁵⁴ Hal’s martial encounter with Hotspur, like the Harrowing play of the mystery cycles, is the climax of the dramatic action.⁵⁵ Hotspur, as a rebel, is automatically linked in royalist Tudor rhetoric to the ﬁrst rebel, Lucifer. The Homilie Against Disobedience and Wilfull Rebellion—which was read at least once a year in every church—makes a striking comparison between rebels and the devil: Where most rebellions and rebelles bee, there is the expresse similitude of hell, and the rebelles themselves are the verie ﬁgures of ﬁendes and devils, and their captaine the vngratious patterne of Lucifer and Satan, the prince of darkenesse, of whose rebellion as they bee followers, so shall they of his damnation in hell vndoubtedly bee partakers.⁵⁶

This connection between a rebel leader and the devil is particularly pertinent as there is strong evidence that Shakespeare drew on this ⁵⁴ Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 570, 573. For the importance of hell’s gates ﬂying asunder in the harrowing narratives see Ps. 24; Calvin, Institutes, xx. 514; Kolve, Play Called Corpus Christi, 195. ⁵⁵ For the climactic situating of the Harrowing play in the York and Chester cycles, see Happé, Cyclic Form, 232–5, 243. ⁵⁶ Certaine Sermons or Homilies, 296–7.

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homily when writing his second tetralogy.⁵⁷ It is noticeable that Falstaff, who parodies the dominant idiom through imitation, describes the rebel camp in satanic terms: ‘that ﬁend Douglas, that spirit Percy, and that devil Glyndwr’ ˆ (2. 5. 371–2). Hotspur is also linked with Lucifer in his unwillingness to give up his captives. When the king demands them he impetuously declares ‘I’ll keep them all’ (1. 3. 211). A desire to keep his prisoners is a strong part of the characterization of the devil, both in Piers Plowman and in the mystery plays. When Satan, in the Chester play, suddenly realizes that he is not strong enough to ﬁght Christ, he cries out: Owt, alas, I am shente! My might fayles, veramente. This prynce that ys nowe present Will pull from me my praye.⁵⁸

The freeing of souls is a crucial event in the iconography of the harrowing, and most depictions of it focus on this event. Hal’s ﬁrst act after his victory, in his ﬁnal speech of the play, is to free a prisoner: ‘go to the Douglas and deliver him | Up to his pleasure, ransomless and free’ (5. 5. 28–9).⁵⁹ Hal’s ﬁnal action of this play could be an attempt to imitate the largesse inherent in Christ’s deliverance of mankind, the action that ends the Harrowing of Hell plays, but Hal’s chivalrous behaviour is crucially different from Christ’s salvation of all virtuous captive souls. Not only has the number of freed men become severely curtailed, but Douglas was his prisoner, not Hotspur’s.⁶⁰ ⁵⁷ Alfred Hart, Shakespeare and the Homilies: And Other Pieces of Research into the Elizabethan Drama (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), 38–61. ⁵⁸ Chester Mystery Cycle, 17. 177–80. See also Langland, Piers Plowman, passus 18. 276–351. It is praise, not ‘praye’, that Hotspur has kept from Hal, but he dies regretting it as much as Satan does his souls: ‘O Harry, thou hast robbed me of my youth. | I better brook the loss of brittle life | Than those proud titles thou hast won of me’ (5. 4. 76–8). ⁵⁹ Cf. the liberation of the patriarchs in York Plays, 37. 349–96. See also Schiller, Iconography, ii. ﬁgs. 12, 15, 22, 379, 476, 539, 767. ⁶⁰ There is another connection between both Hotspur and Falstaff and medieval, theatrical devils. Hotspur’s ignominious exit from the stage carried by Falstaff—‘He takes up Hotspur on his back’ (5. 4. 127)—recalls the removal of the dead Vice from the stage by the devil in earlier drama: cf. Alan C. Dessen, ‘The Intemperate Knight and the Politic Prince: Late Morality Structure in Henry IV part I ’, Shakespeare Studies 7 (1974): 167; Alan C. Dessen, Shakespeare and the Late Moral Plays (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986), 87–8. This connection links both Hotspur and Falstaff with early stage representations of evil, although it reverses the roles. Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass ends with a very similar stage direction: ‘Iniquity takes him [the devil] on his back’

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Shakespeare makes Hotspur a noble rather than a devilish ﬁgure although, like the devil, he is ﬁghting for a mistaken and doomed cause. Hotspur shares with medieval and early modern dramatizations of evil what might be termed a wrong-headed attractiveness. The devil and the Vice were often the most popular theatrical ﬁgures and a rapport with the audience was an essential part of their characterization. Hotspur’s alignment with stage devils does not make him satanic, but it does support the royal attempt to discredit his cause. The most fundamental connection between Hotspur and medieval characterizations of the devil is that they both belong to an outmoded world order. Satan is part of the old dispensation. He clings to the idea that Christ will not be able to take his prey because he is bound to ﬁght according to the old law of justice. In Piers Plowman Lucifer declares: If he reve me of my right, he robbeth me by maistrie; For by right and by reson the renkes that ben here Body and soule beth myne, bothe goode and ille. For hymself seide, that sire is of hevene, That if Adam ete the appul, alle sholde deye, · · · · · · · · · And sithen he that Soothnesse is seide thise wordes, · · · · · · · · · I leeve that lawe nyl noght lete hym the leeste. ( passus 18. 276–84)⁶¹

Hotspur likewise ﬁghts according to old rules, in his case outmoded models of chivalry and honour. When the king’s servant approaches him on the battleﬁeld and demands he give over his prisoners to the king, Hotspur refuses. The king is incensed: What think you, coz, Of this young Percy’s pride? The prisoners Which he in this adventure hath surprised To his own use he keeps, and sends me word I shall have none but Mordake Earl of Fife.

(1. 1. 90–4)

and the Vice declares: ‘The Diuell was wont to carry away the euill; | But, now, the Euill out-carries the Diuell’: Ben Jonson, vi. 5. 6. 76–7. ⁶¹ What the devil does not understand is that through the paradox of the Incarnation, man has been able to make satisfaction for man: ‘al that man hath mysdo, I man, wole amende it’ ( passus 18. 343 ff.).

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But in fact according to the law of arms Hotspur is entitled to retain all the prisoners, except for the Earl of Fife who has royal blood.⁶² They are his by right, according to the old system. In common with other similar characters who Shakespeare portrays as relics within their own cultures, such as Antony and Hector, Hotspur is sympathetic and the values he stands for are not cast aside. However, unlike Antony and Hector’s adversaries (Caesar and Achilles) who refuse to ﬁght them in single combat—a method of ﬁghting that represents everything these ﬁgures of the heroic past stand for—Hal meets and overcomes Hotspur on the latter’s own terms.⁶³ Hal speaks to the drawer in his own language and beats Hotspur according to his own rules. Hal casts himself as a victorious Christlike captain in his allusion to Isaiah 63 before the battle, and this role is likewise recognized by some of his adversaries. Vernon is struck by the sight of him and reports what he has seen to Hotspur in language that glisters with light and the rhetoric of deiﬁcation. Vernon describes seeing Hal and his comrades: Glittering in golden coats like images, As full of spirit as the month of May, And gorgeous as the sun at midsummer, · · · · · · · I saw young Harry with his beaver on, His cuishes on his thighs, gallantly armed, Rise from the ground like feathered Mercury, And vaulted with such ease into his seat As if an angel dropped down from the clouds To turn and wind a ﬁery Pegasus. (4. 1. 101–10)

Christ in the Harrowing of Hell play would have been similarly bright, dressed in white and gold, and possibly also attired as a knight.⁶⁴ The bright clothes in the staging of the mystery plays were a symbol for the light which at Christ’s approach broke in upon hell and threw it into confusion. At this point in most of the harrowing narratives the other ⁶² King Henry IV part 1, ed. Humphreys, note to 1. 1. 91–4. ⁶³ Cf. Troilus and Cressida 5. 9. 9–14, and Antony and Cleopatra 3. 13. 24–30, 4. 1. 1–6. ⁶⁴ Peter Stuart Macaulay, ‘The Play of the Harrowing of hell as a Climax in the English Mystery Cycles’, Studia Germanica Gandensia 8 (1966): 129. For the bright apparel of Christ in the French Harrowing play at Mons, see Meredith, Staging of Religious Drama, 113. For the possible religious reference of ‘like images’ see M. St. Clare Byrne, ‘Like Images’, Times Literary Supplement 2313 (1946): 259.

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devils recognize that the light is a sign of Christ’s divinity and scatter in despair. Satan, however, like Hotspur in this scene, remains sceptical. In the mystery plays Satan is the last to realize that a superior adversary has entered hell. The Towneley play has a particularly strong dramatization of this as ﬁrst Rybald, and then Belzabub, realize the truth and ﬂee, while Satan remains arrogantly self-assured until he is beaten. In the York play likewise Satan does not understand how the man he has killed can come to hell not as a captive but calling himself king. He demands to know more from those who are better informed: ‘what page is there that makes prees, | And callis hym kyng of vs in fere?’ (37. 125–6). David replies: He is a kyng of vertues clere, A lorde mekill of myght And stronge in ilke a stoure, In batailes ferse to ﬁght.

(37. 128–31)⁶⁵

In the York and Towneley plays Satan does not think his challenger is worthy of him. He brushes David’s commendation aside and accuses his adversary of having led a wild and foolish life: Nay, faitour, ther-of schall he faile, For alle his fare I hym defﬁe, I knowe his trantis fro toppe to taile, He levys with gaudis and with gilery.⁶⁶

Hotspur, likewise, is incredulous about this new, reformed Hal and surprised by his princely challenge to single combat. He likewise questions those who have superior knowledge of his adversary:  The Prince of Wales stepped forth before the King And, nephew, challenged you to single ﬁght … · · · · · · · · · ·  Tell me, tell me, How showed his tasking? Seem’d it in contempt?  No, by my soul, I never in my life Did hear a challenge urg’d more modestly · · · · · · · · · ·  Cousin, I think thou art enamourèd ⁶⁵ See the similar exchange in Towneley Plays 25. 121–40. ⁶⁶ York Plays, 37. 157–60. Cf. Towneley Plays, 25. 165–8. ‘Trantis’, ‘gaudis’, and ‘gilery’ are deceitful tricks, cheats, and games: Middle English Dictionary, s.v. Trant, Gaud, and gileri.

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The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal On his follies. Never did I hear Of any prince so wild a liberty. (5. 2. 45–71)

Vernon and Worcester have understood Hal’s true nobility at this point, while the leader of the rebellion is still ignorant of it.⁶⁷ Hotspur’s questions, his incredulity, and his belief in Hal’s foolish wildness follow the pattern of the mystery plays. Hotspur, like Satan, is blind to his adversary’s true nature and does not know his strength. Hotspur still thinks of Hal as the Cheapside rogue, calls him ‘the nimble-footed madcap Prince of Wales’ (4. 1. 95). Hotspur is cozened by his guise as an ordinary young man (as the devil was by the Incarnation); he has been duped into understanding only one side of Hal’s nature. Hotspur’s own forthright character is unable to grasp Hal’s strategy of deception and he remains ignorant that beneath Hal’s feckless exterior lies a true prince, until the moment that Hal destroys him. This central confusion about Hal’s identity is highlighted by Shakespeare in the proliferation of royal ﬁgures on the battleﬁeld: ‘the king has many marching in his coats’ (5. 3. 25). At Shrewsbury there is a general bewilderment about who people truly are, which is illustrated most clearly by the killing of Blunt while dressed as the King (5. 3. 1–28). When Hotspur ﬁnally faces Hal, he seems likewise slightly unsure about whether he has indeed found the prince:  If I mistake not, thou art Harry Monmouth.   Thou speak’st as if I would deny my name.  My name is Harry Percy · · · · · · · · · ·   I am the Prince of Wales. (5. 4. 58–62)

Even Falstaff fails to recognize Hal during the battle and asks: ‘but who comes here?’ (5. 3. 39). The questioning of the champion’s identity is central to Old Testament prophecies of the harrowing (Isaiah 63 and Psalm 24) and Hotspur’s confusion and Falstaff’s words recall the ⁶⁷ This scenic form in which a combatant’s power is underestimated by his adversary, although recognized by that adversary’s companions, is also shared (in the York and Towneley cycles) by the Pharaoh play. For the interpretation of the Moses story as a type of the harrowing see Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Play (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972), 153–4. Woolf ’s interpretation, which proves the centrality of the structure analysed here to the dramaturgy of the cycles, has been accepted by all modern editors of these plays. My grateful thanks to Santha Bhattacharji for alerting me to this.

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question—‘who is this that cometh?’—asked by the demonic forces at the harrowing and by the angels when Christ ascends in glory. In the Piers Plowman harrowing Langland retains the Latin (which in this text is a sign of scriptural or liturgical quotation): ‘Quis est iste?’ The Chester playwright translates and embellishes the passage, but the allusion to Isaiah is still clear: ‘who ys he so styffe and stronge | that so maysterlyke comes us amonge?’⁶⁸ The devil does not recognize Christ’s divine nature, just as Hotspur does not realise Hal’s kingliness: both have been duped into believing their adversary is an ordinary man. Hal has constructed a pattern in which, after his Lenten period in the wilderness, he will return, overcome the opposing forces, regain his father’s favour and ascend the throne as England’s glorious new hope. After he has thrown off his disguise as a dissolute youth at Shrewsbury, and defeated Hotspur, he is ready to rise again to the new life of a courtly prince and heir apparent. However, at just the moment that Hal brings to fruition the actions that were to bring about his own carefully orchestrated resurrection, Falstaff pre-empts him: ‘Sir John rises up’ (5. 4. 109).⁶⁹ Falstaff’s resuscitation is a perfectly timed parody and postpones Hal’s rebirth because it destabilizes the imagery that he has so carefully created. Throughout the play Falstaff ’s actions and speeches comment through comparison. Hal’s redemptive scheme cannot withstand the ironic force of Falstaff’s rising from a feigned death, and unchivalric wounding of Hotspur in the (euphemistic) thigh. Falstaff jumps up and Hal’s Christlike stance collapses under the pressure. This is perhaps why he allows Falstaff’s claim that he has killed Percy himself. The design has gone awry and before Hal can become the victorious king of Henry V he must wait through another play. The second part of Henry IV shares with the earlier play its Lenten imagery, the early comic sub-plot parody of the Incarnation, and the climactic battle, but this time Hal will not allow Falstaff to steal his thunder. Hal’s ‘resurrection’, his ascent to glory and to the throne, is therefore deferred until Henry V and it is only in the ﬁnal play of the tetralogy that he becomes ‘the mirror of all Christian Kings’, who scatters ‘a largess ⁶⁸ Piers Plowman, xviii. 316; Chester Mystery Cycle, 17. 121–2. See also Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, 567–8. ⁶⁹ It has been suggested that this is a burlesque of the real Oldcastle who reputedly predicted he would ‘rise to life again, the third day’: Taylor, ‘The Fortunes of Oldcastle’, 95. The evidently messianic overtones of this prediction strengthen the reading of Falstaff ’s rising as a parodic resurrection. For another example of Falstaff ’s pre-emptive parody, see Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 54–5.

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universal like the sun’ (2. 0. 6, 4. 0. 43). There are inconsistencies, however, in the image of Henry as a perfect ruler even as he appears to have achieved the godlike status he had always aspired to.⁷⁰ As in 1 Henry IV the religious allusions create an apparent parallel between Shakespearean staging and the rhetoric of Tudor monarchist propaganda. Henry V is a highly successful monarch, and his manipulation of religiously nuanced language and actions is a masterly reprise of Richard II’s inept messianic self-portrayal. Hal has reinvested monarchy with the appearance of divinity and at one level strengthens the safety of the crown and realm through his success. But, as with his friendship with Falstaff, political necessity involves the prince in hypocrisy. The divine analogy is an artiﬁce created by Hal for his own ends in order that he may redeem himself in the eyes of his father and the country and the salvation which the Christic imagery promises, in both 1 Henry IV and Henry V, is primarily self-reﬂexive. The structure of Henry V engages with the audience’s knowledge of 1 Henry IV. The Dauphin is set up as an inferior version of Hotspur, and is equally, and as mistakenly, sceptical about Henry:  For, good my liege, she is so idly kinged, Her sceptre so fantastically borne By a vain, giddy, shallow, humorous youth, That fear attends her not.  Oh peace, Prince Dauphin. You are too much mistaken in this king. Question your grace the late ambassadors · · · · · · · · And you shall ﬁnd his vanities forespent Were but the outside of the Roman Brutus, Covering discretion with a coat of folly. (2. 4. 26–38)

The passage recalls the conversations between Vernon, Worcester, and Hotspur in 1 Henry IV, quoted above, and the sartorial metaphor is a subtle reminder of the Incarnational inﬂection of Hal’s reformation. The situation, in which a mistaken, battle-eager young man neglects the advice of his better-informed followers in his contempt for his adversary, reiterates the form of the earlier play and shares its structural similarities with the harrowing plays. This conversation, however, is not preparatory ⁷⁰ For the staging of these inconsistencies, see King Henry V, ed. Emma Smith, Shakespeare in Production (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4–79.

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to single combat as it was in 1 Henry IV and the harrowing plays. The Dauphin is not involved in any military action, so Henry cannot worst him, as he did Hotspur.⁷¹ The allusions to Christ’s triumph in Henry’s victory have a void at their centre: Agincourt is not staged and so Henry cannot display heroism on the battleﬁeld. The allusions to the Cruciﬁxion which are created before the battle by the Chorus’s emotive speech, and through the king’s actions and language, build up audience expectations which are undercut by what they witness, or fail to witness, at Agincourt. Henry waits alone for the battle to begin, and the scene of his lonely prayer contains an allusion to the agony in the garden.⁷² The scene, in which an isolated leader undergoes a spiritual struggle on the eve of the great reckoning, recalls the mystery play staging of Christ’s own night-time conﬂict. Like Christ in the Agony in the Garden play, Henry enters with attendants, whom he then dismisses, as he wishes to be alone:  Shall I attend your grace?  No, my good knight I and my bosom must debate awhile, And then I would no other company. (4. 1. 29–33)

In the Bible, Jesus also tells his disciples that he wishes to be alone—‘sit ye here, while I goe, and pray yonder’—and in the mystery plays his prayers were probably staged as soliloquies. In the Chester play, for example, the stage directions (‘tunc venit ad discipulos, et invenit dormientes’, ‘tunc redit ad discipulos’) suggest that the disciples were staged as sleeping somewhat apart from the praying Christ.⁷³ Henry’s soliloquy is about the subject that governs the story of Gethsemane: sleep. The symbolic dualism of the agony in the garden involves ⁷¹ The quarto has Bourbon present at Agincourt instead, although the Folio reallocates his lines to the Dauphin. For a discussion of the discrepancy, see King Henry V, ed. Andrew Gurr, The New Cambridge Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 224–5. The French king is clear that his son will not be present at the battle (3. 5. 64–6) although it is a near-universal performance practice to follow the Folio rather than the quarto. For the evidence about theatrical practice see Smith, Henry V, note to 3. 8. 0. ⁷² This is brieﬂy acknowledged by a number of critics who have not, however, recognized the problematic aspects of this allusion: Altman, ‘ ‘‘Vile Participation’’ ’, 25; Barbara Hodgdon, The End Crowns All: Closure and Contradiction in Shakespeare’s History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 189. ⁷³ Matthew 26: 36; Chester Mystery Cycle, 15. 280, 296.

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the praying, suffering, wakeful Christ and the peacefully sleeping disciples, and it is precisely this dichotomy that Hal brings to the scene before Agincourt: No, not all these, thrice-gorgeous ceremony, Not all these, laid in bed majestical, Can sleep so soundly as the wretched slave, · · · · · · · · The slave, a member of the country’s peace, Enjoys it, but in gross brain little wots What watch the King keeps to maintain the peace. (4. 1. 263–80)

The structure of the scene, as well as its rhetoric of suffering leadership and lethargic companions, imitates that of the mystery plays. The protagonist’s long periods of lonely prayer are punctuated by brief conversations with his sleepy followers. Henry’s soliloquy, and his prayer to the ‘God of battles’ (4. 1. 286), is interrupted by brief conversations with Erpingham and the Duke of Gloucester. In the N-town, Chester, and York mystery plays, as well as in the biblical story, this is precisely the structure of the scene. Jesus repeatedly interrupts his anxious prayers for deliverance (addressed in the York Agony in the Garden to ‘my fadir of myght’ (18. 102) ) with exhortations to his followers not to sleep. Henry’s speeches, as well as his preliminary remarks to Erpingham (‘a good soft pillow for that good white head | Were better than a churlish turf of France’ (4. 1. 14–15) ), give the impression that he, likewise, is the only person who is awake. Henry implies that, like Peter and the two sons of Zebedee, his followers do not watch and pray as he does, but slumber off-stage. Henry, however, creates an inaccurate picture. It is morning, and his followers, far from sleeping while he alone maintains the watch, are anxiously waiting for their dilatory king. Unlike Jesus who urges his somnolent friends to stay awake (Matt. 26: 40), it is the followers who are urgent with their king: ‘my lord, your nobles, jealous of your absence, | Seek through the camp to ﬁnd you’ (4. 1. 282–3).⁷⁴ Henry’s allusion to the watchful redeemer of the Passion skews the reality of what is actually happening on the battleﬁeld. As Nina Taunton has ⁷⁴ Olivier’s ﬁlm, which wants to portray this scene as a parallel to, not a parody of, Gethsemane, shows the soldiers settle down to sleep after talking to Henry. See Stephen Buhler, ‘ ‘‘By the Mass, our hearts are in the trim’’: Catholicism and British Identity in Olivier’s Henry V ’, Cahiers Élisabethains 47 (1995): 62.

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argued, Henry’s behaviour in wandering through the camp, and not safeguarding his royal person, means that his men cannot afford to sleep. His neglect of his regal function of protecting the king’s person enforces watchfulness upon his men.⁷⁵ His portrayal of the scene as a secular version of the agony in the garden is almost a complete inversion of the true situation. The scenes which follow Henry’s rousing rhetoric likewise ﬁgure the climactic reckoning at Agincourt in Christian terms. Henry returns to his small band of nobles after his lonely prayer and tells them that because of the battle which is about to commence they, and he, will be remembered for ever: ‘this story shall the good man teach his son’ (4. 3. 56).⁷⁶ Henry’s language of feasts, blood, and ‘ﬂowing cups’ give a eucharistic colouring to this act of remembrance. In particular the idea of a decisive moment which will be remembered and reiterated ‘to the ending of the world’ (4. 3. 58) forms a relationship between the event (Agincourt) and its ritualized memorial (St Crispin’s day) analogous to that of the Cruciﬁxion and the celebration of Easter, which marked the yearly reception of the eucharist for most Elizabethans.⁷⁷ This eucharistic imagery is part of the portrayal of Agincourt as a secular Cruciﬁxion, an image created by Henry and the Chorus as the conﬂict approaches.⁷⁸ The Chorus’s description of the English, as they wait for the battle in which they expect to die, is punctuated with allusions to the moments preceding Christ’s ﬁnal contest on the cross: The country cocks do crow, the clocks do toll, And the third hour of drowsy morning name. Proud of their numbers and secure in soul The conﬁdent and over-lusty French Do the low-rated English play at dice, ⁷⁵ Nina Taunton, 1590s Drama and Militarism: Portrayal of War in Marlowe, Chapman and Shakespeare’s Henry V (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 178. ⁷⁶ For the connection of this phrase with the Passover, see Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 46. ⁷⁷ For more on the eucharistic imagery of this speech, see Steven Marx, ‘Holy War in Henry V ’, Shakespeare Survey 48 (1995): 94–6; Maurice Hunt, ‘The Hybrid Reformations of Shakespeare’s Second Henriad’, Comparative Drama 32/1 (1998): 195; Knapp, Shakespeare’s Tribe, 132–40; Debora Kuller Shuger, ‘A Response’, in Christopher Ocker, ed., Preachers and Players in Shakespeare’s England: Protocol of the Colloquy of the Center for Hermeneutical Studies (Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Hermeneutical Studies, 1995), 45–6; David Ruiter, Shakespeare’s Festive History: Feasting, Festivity, Fasting and Lent in the Second Henriad (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 160–2. ⁷⁸ For similarities in lexicon and syntax between the Chorus and Henry, see Gurr, King Henry V, 15.

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The Redemptive Self-Fashioning of Hal · · · · · · · The poor condemnèd English, Like sacriﬁces, by their watchful ﬁres Sit patiently and inly ruminate The morning’s danger. (4. 0. 15–25, italics mine)

The gambling soldiers are drawn from the scene in The Famous Victories of Henry the Fifth in which the French soldiers dice for the English king whom they assume is soon to be their prisoner. The clothes which the French are anxious to own are stressed throughout the scene: ‘oh the brave, brave apparel that we shall | Have anon’.⁷⁹ This combination of gambling soldiers and clothes recalls the soldiers who diced for Christ’s tunic under the cross: Fellowes, nowe let see! Here are dyce three. Which of all wee shall wynne this ware?⁸⁰

The Towneley mysteries have a play dedicated entirely to this episode, and the York cycle once also had a Play of the Dice in which ‘Pilatus at alii milites ludebant ad talos pro vestimentis Jesu.’⁸¹ The importance of the soldiers’ gambling was expressed in the Coventry mystery play by emblazoning their jackets with nails and dice.⁸² The French soldiers in Henry V are less close to the biblical story than those in The Famous Victories, but nonetheless the dicing soldiers, so conﬁdent and careless, unaware of the enormity of what is about to happen, are part of the Cruciﬁxion imagery, along with the cock crow, the third hour, and Henry’s followers waiting, like Peter, by the ﬁre. The Chorus’s masterly picture, however, like Henry’s rhetoric, is nudging the listener towards the wrong conclusion. An audience inﬂuenced by the biblical imagery is led to expect an allusion to the Cruciﬁxion at Agincourt (perhaps the King sacriﬁcing himself and winning the battle in spite of terrible wounds) but the only sacriﬁce offered ⁷⁹ Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 331. ⁸⁰ Chester Mystery Cycle, 16a. 89–92. ⁸¹ See Peter Meredith, ‘The York Millers’ Pageant and the Towneley Processus Talentorum’, Medieval English Theatre 4/2 (1982): 104–14. ⁸² Ingram, Coventry, 73. The dice were important items in the arma Christi: cf. Schiller, Iconography, 2, ﬁgs. 654–70. For examples of extant depictions of these dice in Warwickshire, see Davidson, Early Art of Coventry, 30, 63, 123.

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is that of the soldiers whom the King has drawn into this unnecessary war. The Dauphin’s absence from the battleﬁeld means that no decisive single combat occurs. The duel between Hotspur and Hal in 1 Henry IV has been replaced by a parodic contest between Pistol and the instantly capitulating French soldier (4. 4), which is the only staged battle scene. Henry, however, continues to present Agincourt as a climactic, victorious event which follows the pattern of Christ’s victory, despite the absence of a staged martial triumph and the ironic pressure of Pistol’s farcical terrorizing of Monsieur le Fer. After Agincourt has been won Henry commands: ‘let there be sung Non nobis and Te Deum’ (4. 8. 123). The historical Henry V was welcomed back into London by this great hymn of praise and it was sung again on the anniversary of the victory: ‘the king, mindful of God’s goodness, praised Him again with the Te Deum, sung in his own chapel before mass’.⁸³ Henry VIII, in imitation of his forebear, celebrated his victory over the French in the same way, so the Te Deum in Henry V may have been recognized as a traditional victory song. Shakespeare knew about the Te Deum from Holinshed and it is possible that, like his source, he included the hymn purely to show Henry’s piety.⁸⁴ However, the climactic exit of the king and his followers to the sounds of the Te Deum after a glorious victory has another, and theatrical, precedent. It is the climax of both the Chester and Towneley Harrowing of Hell plays. As Christ and the hosts of the saved leave the stage, they sing a Te Deum: ‘Tunc eant omnes, et incipiat Michaell, ‘‘Te deum laudamus’’ ’. At the end of the Towneley play Isaiah proclaims: Therfor now let vs syng To loue oure Lord Iesus, Vnto his blys he will vs bryng, Te deum laudamus.⁸⁵

Hal has brought to a close the association between royalty and divinity he began in 1 Henry IV. Singing the Te Deum is not only a sign of humility; it is also an allusion to the greatest victory ever won. ⁸³ Gesta Henrici Quinti: The Deeds of Henry the Fifth, trans. Frank Taylor and John S. Roskell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 178. See also Christopher Allmand, Henry V (London: Methuen, 1992), 98. ⁸⁴ Charles Wriothesley, A Chronicle of England During the Reigns of the Tudors, from AD 1485 to 1559, ed. William Douglas Hamilton (London: Camden Society, 1875), i. 149; Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources, iv. 398. ⁸⁵ Chester Mystery Cycle 17. 275–6; Towneley Plays 25. 413–15.

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In 1 Henry IV the allusion to the harrowing of hell might seem analogous to traditional Tudor monarchist panegyric, because it seems to place the royal prince in the position of Christ.⁸⁶ However, the play shows that the divine analogy is an artiﬁce created by Hal for his own ends, and something which he cannot entirely fulﬁl. The nuance imparted to these plays through the allusions to the guiler beguiled theory of the Atonement has been overlooked in the critical controversy surrounding Hal. Where biblical echoes have been noticed they have often been enlisted in a simplistic way as implying support for him as a holy ruler. For example, James Sims has suggested that the Archbishop of Canterbury’s description of the new king as ‘full of grace and fair regard’ (1. 1. 23) alludes to Christ’s entry into his earthly kingdom, ‘And that Word was made ﬂesh, and dwelt among vs (and we sawe the glorie thereof, as the glorie of the onely begotten Sonne of the Father) full of grace and trueth’ (John 1. 14).⁸⁷ The parallel is not close, but if it is intended, contains a slippage: where Christ is full of truth, Henry is full of ‘fair regard’. What for Christ was inner reality, for Hal is outward show. Critics have long been aware that despite the glittering surface of Henry V and the jingoistic portrayal of Henry as a triumphant king, there might be a disjunction between the apparent sympathies of the play and what it actually endorses. Henry V has rousing rhetoric and wins Agincourt, but undercurrents in the play detract from the king’s portrayal of himself as a perfect leader. The sacred echoes in 1 Henry IV do not map straightforwardly onto the secular reality. Hal’s favours are stained with Hotspur’s blood rather than his own and the duplicity inherent in the guiler beguiled model of the Atonement becomes problematic when no longer being performed by (an irreproachable) God. Throughout the last three plays of the tetralogy Henry constructs a redemptive ascent by which he intends that the wrong done by his father can be expiated, and England, the Lancastrians, and the crown become numinous once more. But Henry V is not only the glorious zenith of Hal’s redeeming mission, but also the play in which Henry’s characterization is darkest. The failure of Hal’s attempt to save England from the civil war which threatens it is made clear by the already written,

⁸⁶ Cf. Henry Chettle’s ﬁguration of Elizabeth as the harrower of hell: Englandes Mourning Garment, Fr . ⁸⁷ Sims, Dramatic Uses of Biblical Allusions, 52.

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already staged, horror of the Wars of the Roses, recalled in the epilogue of Henry V : Henry the Sixth, in infant bands crowned king Of France and England, did this King succeed, Whose state so many had the managing That they lost France and made his England bleed, Which oft our stage hath shown. (Epilogue, 9–13)

Hal is an extremely successful king, but the illusion of divinity is part of his masterful manipulation of appearance, not the result of his Christian kingship.

6 ‘Usurp the beggary he was never born to’: Measure for Measure and the Questioning of Divine Kingship On St Stephen’s night 1604 James I sat down to watch a play which began with these words: Of government the properties to unfold Would seem in me t’affect speech and discourse, Since I am put to know that your own science Exceeds in that the lists of all advice My strength can give you.

Measure for Measure begins with an address to Escalus purporting to instruct him about good government, while acknowledging that (as his name suggests) his ‘own science’ is so great as to need no such advice. Simultaneously, the king sitting in the audience is greeted with words which recall the encomiums directed at him in the sermons on godly rule which had likewise been performed before him on his entry into England. Thomas Bilson assured James that in his discussion of the duties of a prince ‘I may be shorter, because I speake before a religious & learned king, who both by pen and practise these many yeeres hath witnessed to the world, how well acquainted he is with Christian and godly government.’¹ Preachers such as Bilson and Richard Eedes assured James that he had nothing to learn on this subject, and then ¹ Thomas Bilson, A Sermon Preached at Westminster before the King and Queenes Maiesties, at Their Coronations on Saint Iames His Day, Being the Xxv. Of Iuly. 1603 (London, 1604), B7v . See also Richard Eedes, The Dutie of a King, Preached before the Kings Maiestie in Two Sermons, in Six Learned and Godly Sermons: Preached Some of Them before the Kings Maiestie, Some before Queene Elizabeth (London, 1604), F2v –F3r ; Elizabeth Pope, ‘The Renaissance Background of ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ ’, in Kenneth Muir and Stanley Wells, eds., Aspects of Shakespeare’s ‘Problem Plays’: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 61.

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proceeded nonetheless to present him with their ideas. Shakespeare’s play implicitly adopts the same strategy, addressing the king as one who is perfectly versed in this branch of learning, and then staging a searching exploration of the complexities of good government. Measure for Measure, like the proliferation of sermons and treatises which greeted the new king, exploits contemporary interest in the issue of godly rule at a historical moment when new modes of government seemed to be available. In Measure for Measure Shakespeare engaged with the contemporary debate over godly rule by creating a central character whose quasidivine attributes mirrored the contemporary concern that a ruler should emulate God as far as possible. This chapter will put the interpretations of the Duke as a ‘God-ﬁgure’ into sharper focus and show how this identiﬁcation can both compliment and implicitly criticize the King. The dominant narrative of Measure for Measure would have ﬂattered James I, if he had recognized in the Duke (who creates a happy ending by his judicious tempering of justice with mercy) a projection of his own aims and desires. More fundamentally, however, the play problematized the contemporary theory of government which conﬂated human and divine law. Angelo’s story can be recognized as an explicit warning against the rule of the godly, but behind this straightforward satire is an implicit critique of any rule which attempts to collapse the distinction between the person and the role of those who, as James was fond of saying, ‘sit in the Throne of God’.² The aspects of the Duke which have a quasi-divine resonance seem to compliment such divine-right thinking, but the constant thwarting of his plans—above all their foundering upon the solid, comic rock of Barnadine—subtly suggests that the divine pattern cannot ﬁnd a simple analogue in an earthly ruler. Peter Lake has argued cogently that: One of the central ideological tasks being performed by the play is the exposure and critique of a whole series of confusions and conﬂations between human and divine law and authority … These errors and misapprehensions, we should note, are not conﬁned to puritan schemes for the reformation of manners and the establishment of godly rule. Rather, they suffuse a whole range of contemporary ² The Political Works of James I: Reprinted from the edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1918), 14, 333. See also Ernst H. Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State: An Absolutist Concept and its Late Mediaeval Origins’, Harvard Theological Review 48/1 (1955): 65–91; Jonathan Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and Their Contempories (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983), 65–84.

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assumptions and commonplaces, up to and including the theoretical works on the nature of kingship and good government produced by James I himself.³

Lake has situated Measure for Measure in its historical framework, a time when the discussion of moral reformation was dominated by the idea that human law could mirror divine justice.⁴ Shakespeare satirizes such thinking: explicitly in the character of Angelo, and obliquely in the character of the Duke. When James entered his new kingdom he was greeted with much excitement by the Puritan faction who saw the reign of a Scottish king as a new dawn for discipline and rigour within the English church. He was bombarded with petitions on his journey south, concerning grievances which embraced both the secular and religious spheres.⁵ James responded to Puritan aspirations by convening the Hampton Court Conference in order to discuss the issues raised by the Millenary Petition. Among these issues, and of particular relevance to Measure for Measure, was a desire for the ﬁrmer regulation of marriage.⁶ Shakespeare’s early Jacobean play creates a spectre of Puritan rule in the ‘precise’ Angelo, whose belief in his own sanctity, as well as his enthusiasm for the death penalty for sexual offences, marks him out as a hot Protestant.⁷ Angelo’s fall can be read as a defence of the king’s disappointment of Puritan demands at the Conference, but it is also a wider critique of the conﬂation of Old Testament morality with the contemporary rule of law. Angelo, as is shown in his treatment of Claudio, is not adept at distinguishing between the human law that he is meant to be enforcing and God’s law, which he ought to attempt to live by. The Duke leaves ³ Peter Lake with Michael Questier, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), 668. ⁴ Ibid. 622–3 and passim. See also Lake, ‘Deeds against Nature’, 257–83. ⁵ R. C. Munden, ‘James I and ‘‘the Growth of Mutual Distrust’’: King, Commons, and Reform, 1603–1604’, in Kevin Sharpe, ed., Faction and Parliament: Essays on Early Stuart History (Oxford: Clarendon, 1978), 43–72. ⁶ J. R. Tanner, ed., Constitutional Documents of the Reign of James I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), 56–69; Patrick Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 448–67. ⁷ For contemporary advocates for the death penalty for sexual offences, see Thomas Cartwright, The Second Replie of Thomas Cartwright: Against Maister Doctor Whitgiftes Second Answer Touching the Churche Discipline (n.pl., 1575), N2v –N3r ; Philip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), G7v –Hv ; Donald J. McGinn, ‘The Precise Angelo’, in James G. McMananway, Giles E. Dawson, and Edwin E. Willoughby, eds., Joseph Quincy Adams Memorial Studies (Washington, DC.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1948), 129–39.

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him with the words ‘Mortality and mercy in Vienna | Live in thy tongue and heart’ (1. 1. 44) but only one of these commissions engrosses him. Shakespeare speciﬁcally alters his sources to make Claudio’s sin as excusable as possible, but Angelo makes no attempt to judge the mitigating circumstances. As Peter Lake has shown, Angelo’s case against Claudio hinges on his conﬂation of a hot Protestant view of God’s law (in which there is no venial sin because of the inﬁnite glory of the party offended) and human law, in which it is incumbent upon the magistrate to distinguish between levels of offence.⁸ This conﬂation of human and divine law is highlighted by Claudio’s response to his arrest: Thus can the demigod Authority Make us pay down for our offence, by weight, The bonds of heaven. On whom it will, it will; On whom it will not, so; yet still ’tis just. (1. 2. 112)

Lake shows that Claudio’s response is that of a reprobate towards a Calvinist God (who is always justly offended), but does not note that Shakespeare makes this interpretation clear by alluding to Romans 9, the proof text for predestinarian theology: ‘I wil haue mercy on him, to whom I wil shew mercie: and wil haue compassion on him, on whom I will haue compassion’ (Rom. 9: 15). Just as God exercises this arbitrary power in order that ‘my Name might be declared throughout al the earth’ (Rom. 9: 17), Claudio bitterly concludes that Angelo’s action is simply ‘for a name’ (1. 2. 157).⁹ The biblical allusion highlights both Angelo’s conﬂation of human and divine power, and the tyranny implicit in such an action. As Isabella says: ‘O, it is excellent | To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous | To use it like a giant’ (2. 2. 109–11). Angelo has Jove’s thunder but unlike God, who in Romans 9 is justifying his right to be merciful on anyone he chooses, Angelo’s predestinarian mind asks only for death and judgement, for himself as much as for others: ‘I crave death more willingly than mercy’ (5. 1. 475). Angelo’s position has an integrity to it (except in his treatment of Mariana and Isabel), but it is an integrity which ignores not only his own need for mercy but also the earthly nature of his power; as Isabella who once more reminds him: ‘’Tis set down so in heaven, but not in earth’ (2. 4. 50). Angelo’s fall, therefore, in which he is punished for ⁸ Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 660–1. ⁹ Ibid. 657–8; Louise Schleiner, ‘Providential Improvisation in Measure for Measure’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 97/2 (1982): 230–1.

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his denial of human sexuality by falling prey to uncontrollable lust, is one facet of the play’s critique of godly rule. Angelo’s whole rationale of justice, not merely his position on sexual conduct, is undermined by his transgression, and his fall satirizes all who believe that their own unassailable moral purity is the platform from which they gain the right to judge others. Angelo seems to have learnt from the story of the woman taken in adultery not that no one should cast the ﬁrst stone, but that all her accusers ought likewise to have been stoned to death. Although the dominant satire of the play is directed at the Pharisaical judgements of Angelo, the universal mercy of the Duke—although preferable—is not presented as the perfect answer. The problem of how to enforce justice in Vienna has not been solved by the Duke’s machinations, only the problems created by his attempted solution. As A. D. Nuttall has pointed out ‘we can approve his behaviour at the end of the play only at the cost of condemning his behaviour at its outset’.¹⁰ In addition the Duke’s universal clemency produces the structure of a comic conclusion rather than actual happiness, as Shakespeare hints through the insistent open silences of almost all the characters at the end of the play. Lucio, Angelo, and quite possibly Isabella are not contented by their marriages; neither Angelo nor Barnadine asks to be forgiven and, although she will probably be overlooked by most members of the audience, Mistress Overdone, who by bringing up Lucio’s bastard at her own cost has performed one of the few altruistic acts of the play, is still languishing in prison. Madam Overdone’s punishment, while a murderer and attempted rapist are pardoned, speaks of the uneven enforcement of judgement which is not grounded in law. This subtext would presumably have been overlooked by the royal audience, but it may have jarred on other, legally minded spectators. Young men from the Inns of Court, for example, are known to have ﬂocked to the Globe, and they may well have been deliberating over the new king’s ideas at this time.¹¹ W. R. Elton has recently argued that Troilus and Cressida, which is traditionally grouped with Measure for Measure as a problem play, reﬂects, in its argumentative exploration of value and legality, the ¹⁰ A. D. Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, Shakespeare Studies 4 (1968): 239. ¹¹ For the popularity of commercial theatre among students at the Inns of Court, see Wilfrid R. Prest, The Inns of Court under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640 (London: Longman, 1972), 138, 155, 159; Alfred Harbage, Shakespeare’s Audience (New York: Columbia University Press, 1941), 80–1; G. M. Young, ‘Shakespeare and the Termers’, Proceedings of the British Academy 33 (1947): 81–99.

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interests of the law students he thinks it was written for.¹² Measure for Measure, as a play centring on the interplay between justice and mercy under the rule of law, may have been particularly popular in such circles, and young men from the Inns of Court may have been readier than their sovereign to recognize the possible critique of the Duke’s actions embedded in the play. The Duke’s sweeping but uneven clemency, like many other aspects of his character, ﬁnds a parallel in the new monarch. The speciﬁc similarities between James and the Duke—such as their dislike of crowds, sensitivity to criticism, and penchant for Roman law—bolster their more fundamental connection in a shared theory of government which considers a perfect ruler as one who, all-knowing, moves among his subjects judging and controlling them undetected.¹³ The quasidivine reading of the Duke, the reading which can be seen as most ﬂattering to James, can also, however, be read as an oblique criticism of the King. Kevin Sharpe has explored the way in which, at the court of James’s son, playwrights criticized the monarch through compliment and coupled censure with praise in an explicit strategy of counsel which was aimed at persuading the King to best government.¹⁴ The following readings of the reappearance of Claudio as an allusion to the raising of Lazarus, and the meeting of Lucio and the Duke as a version of the temptation in the desert, are suggested as divine analogues which act as an explicit endorsement of the Duke, and through him the king, but which also subtly call into question divine-right thinking in which the ruler could truly imitate God. James’s actions upon entering his new kingdom suggest a somewhat theatrical response to his new power. On his progress from Scotland, for example, he executed a cutpurse without trial at Newark-upon-Trent and then released all the inmates of the town’s jail. The ofﬁcial response declared this an exemplary display of justice and mercy, and cast it in terms of a godlike power: ‘in his benigne and gracious mercie, he ¹² William R. Elton, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 117–28, 149–59, and passim. ¹³ For speciﬁc correspondences between James and the Duke, see Ernest Schanzer, The Problem Plays of Shakespeare: A Study of Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, Antony and Cleopatra (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 121–5; Roy Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and King James’, Clio 7/2 (1978): 201; Leah S. Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare: Local Reading and Its Discontents (London: University of California Press, 1988), 173–80; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 235. ¹⁴ Kevin Sharpe, Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 290–301 and passim.

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giues life to all the other poore and wretched Prisoners’. The unofﬁcial reaction was rather less rapturous. Sir John Harington, for example, privately expressed his unease about an execution conducted without due process of law: ‘’tis strangely done: now if the wynde blowethe thus, why may not a man be tryed before he hathe offended [?]’¹⁵ Harington’s response to the spectacle at Newark is comparable to those spectators of Measure for Measure, whose memory of the still imprisoned Mistress Overdone and Pompey casts a chill over their enjoyment of the general pardon. James was fond of displaying his clemency, and a number of critics have compared his stagey last minute reprieve of (selected) Main and Bye plot conspirators with the Last Judgement-like Act 5 of Measure.¹⁶ What most of these critics overlook, however, is that the event is recounted not only in the private correspondence of Dudley Carleton, but also in a supposedly eyewitness letter which rushed into print in 1603: The Copie of a Letter Written from Master T.M. neere Salisbury to Master H.A. at London, concerning the proceeding at Winchester; where the late L. Cobham, L. Gray, and Sir Grifﬁn Marckham, all Attainted of hie treason were ready to be executed on Friday the 9. Of December 1603. This public letter suggests that James’s inscrutable mercy has a divine parallel. James is described as making the decision ‘in his owne secret heart’ and then gives leave to the sheriff to ‘reveale his mysterie’. This dissimulation is connected with the ineffability of God’s justice by the author: ‘in this late Action … this blessed King hath not proceeded after the manner of men and of Kings, sed caelestis Iudicis aeternis Regis more [but in the manner of the heavenly judge and eternal King]’.¹⁷ The switch into Latin at this moment ensures that the excessive praise is decorously shrouded, but it also delicately augments the implication of divine wisdom in James. Latin, once the preserve of the sacred mysteries ¹⁵ John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magniﬁcent Festivities of King James the First, His Royal Consort, Family and Court (London, 1828), i. 89; Sir John Harington, Nugae Antiquae […], ed. Thomas Park (London, 1804), i. 180. ¹⁶ See David L. Stevenson, ‘The Role of James I in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’. English Literary History 26 (1959): 206; Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 106–8; Craig A. Bernthal, ‘Staging Justice: James I and the Trial Scenes of Measure for Measure’, Studies in English Literature 32/2 (1992): 247–69; Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, 136–7; Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 678. ¹⁷ T.M., The Copie of a Letter Written from Master T.M. neere Salisbury to Master H.A. at London, concerning the proceeding at Winchester; where the late L. Cobham, L. Gray, and Sir Grifﬁn Marckham, all Attainted of hie treason were ready to be executed on Friday the 9. of December 1603 […] (London, 1603), A3r , A4v , B2r .

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of religion, carries with it the suggestion of something elevated and unapproachable in the King: the arcana imperii.¹⁸ This mysterious ideal of kingship, the secret knowledge and craft possessed only by divinely ordained rulers, is likewise present in Measure for Measure. The play begins and ends with the Duke deferring an explanation: he promises to disclose the reasons behind his actions, but does not do so within the audience’s hearing (1. 3. 48–9, 5. 1. 538). This connection, however, is a clear example of the way that Shakespeare problematizes such ﬂattering parallels between divinity and kingship. T.M. implies that the mysteries of state add an additional gloss to James’s proceedings, but the audience, presented with the Duke’s refusal to explain his purpose, may instead be led to question the wisdom of his proceedings. In Act 1 Scene 3, for example, it is perfectly plausible that the Duke retreats behind the arcana imperii because his main reason for his abdication—to shift the job of law enforcement, and its concomitant unpopularity, on to another—meets with Friar Peter’s censure.¹⁹ Likewise the decision to test Angelo by giving him control over Vienna (when the Duke already knows of his unscrupulous behaviour towards Mariana) seems somewhat unwise. The Duke’s policy of non-explanation seems to be based on shaky reasoning rather than godlike authority. The Duke, however, is at his most cagey when he chooses not to inform Isabella of the fact that her brother is still alive. James’s reprieve of the conspirators of the Bye plot was contrived in such a way that Markham, Grey, and Cobham each believed that the others had been executed. When they were all brought out and pardoned, they ‘looked strange one upon the other, like men beheaded and met again in the other world’.²⁰ In Measure for Measure, the Duke likewise conceals Claudio’s survival, and allows Isabella and Angelo to believe that he has been beheaded. Royal authority (as Gaunt tersely reminds Richard II) is usually limited to the taking away of life.²¹ Through Carleton’s ¹⁸ Another moment when hyperbolic praise of the new king is couched in Latin occurs in Savile’s description of James as one ‘whose presence makes old men sing, satis se vixisse se viso’. In this case a speciﬁc chime with the Nunc dimittis seems intended: John Savile, King James His Entertainment at Theobalds: With His Welcome to London, Together with a Salutatorie Poeme (London: 1603), B3r . ¹⁹ For a Machiavellian parallel to this behaviour, see Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, 238–9. ²⁰ Dudley Carleton, Dudley Carleton to John Chamberlain 1603–1624: Jacobean Letters, ed. Maurice Lee (Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1972), 51. ²¹ ‘K R Why, uncle, thou hast many years to live. | J  G But not a minute, King, that thou canst give’: Richard II, 1. 3. 219–20.

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account of the reprieve, however, as in the ofﬁcial account of James’s clemency towards Newark’s prisoners—‘in his benigne and gracious mercie, he giues life to all the other poore and wretched Prisoners’—it is suggested that this king can bring life, as well as death, to his subjects. It is an illusion that Vincentio shares with James for Shakespeare, like Carleton, explores the way in which (to the on-stage audience at least) the executed man seems to have risen from the dead. Both the Duke and James demonstrate their power over life and death and in both cases it is implicitly suggested that such power is quasi-divine. James’s new subjects presumably intended to please their new king with such excessive ﬂattery. Ostensibly, however, it was ﬂattery he did not court. In one of James’s less well-known works he asked that poets should not write about his own actions, or praise him, but should simply praise the actions of Christ. He asked to hear about the way that Jesus miraculously raised the dead: ‘the Bethaniens holy second living’ and it is as a raising of Lazarus that Shakespeare implicitly presents the return of Claudio.²² When the feckless gallant Lucio meets Isabella mourning for her brother he says to her: ‘by my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother. If the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’ (4. 3. 151–3). In the Gospel story of the raising of Lazarus Jesus has likewise left and is not present when his friend is in most need of him. When Jesus returns, Lazarus has died, and each of his sisters say to Jesus ‘Lord, if thou hadst bene here, my brother had not bene dead’ (John 11: 21, 32). Lazarus’s story preﬁgures the Resurrection, and so despite being only in John’s Gospel it has become an essential part of the Easter story: all the mystery cycles have a play of the raising of Lazarus. In the N-town Raising of Lazarus Martha’s words are even closer to Lucio’s: ‘A, gracyous Lord, had ye ben here, | My brother Lazare this tyme had lyved.’²³ Lucio’s words create a connection between Claudio’s reprieve and the raising of Lazarus, which is borne out in the staging of the moment. One ²² ‘The Uranie’, in James VI, The Essays of A Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie (Edinburgh: Thomas Vautroullier, 1585), Fr –F2v . It seems unlikely that Shakespeare would have known this poem, as the Essays were only published in Edinburgh. However, the poem is cited by another English contemporary, Joshua Sylvester: James VI & I, Poems of James VI of Scotland, ed. James Craigie (Edinburgh: Scottish Text Scoeity, 1955–8) i. 277. For evidence that Shakespeare was aware of at least some of James’s poetic endeavours, see Emrys Jones, ‘ ‘‘Othello’’, ‘‘Lepanto’’ and the Cyprus Wars’, Shakespeare Survey 21 (1968): 47–52. ²³ N-town plays, 25. 289–90. See also Chester Mystery Cycle, 13. 418–20.

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striking visual connection between the two scenes is that both involve kneeling women. The supplicatory sisters are usually foregrounded in depictions of the raising of Lazarus: the Magdalen (like Isabella) is often more prominent, but Martha and Marianna kneel too.²⁴ Thirty-six lines of dialogue pass between the plea during which Isabella kneels and the unmufﬂing of Claudio, but Angelo’s life—for which the women are kneeling—has not been granted during that time and so presumably they kneel until Claudio returns. The modern theatre places great emphasis on Isabella’s posture—often making her wait extraordinary lengths of time before kneeling, and this powerful stage image is an important part of the staging of this scene.²⁵ In the Chester Raising of Lazarus Mary sinks to the ground in her grief for her brother, declaring: ‘here will I sitt and mourninge make | tyll that Jesu my sorrowe slake’ (13. 325–6). When Jesus arrives Mary prostrates herself before him: ‘tunc Maria videns Jesum prosternat se ad pedes’ (13. 417). There is another visual connection in what Lazarus and Claudio are wearing. John’s Gospel describes how ‘then he that was dead, came foorth, bounde hande and foote with bandes, and his face was bounde with a napkin’ (11: 44). Calvin argues that John pays such attention to the graveclothes because he wants to prove that Lazarus was truly dead: The Euangelist doth diligently reckon vp the kerchiffe, and bandes, to the ende wee may knowe that Lazarus came out of the graue in such sort, as he was laid there. The Iewes also retain this manner of burying at this day, that hauing wounde the bodie in a linnen cloath, they wrap the head apart in a kerchiffe.²⁶

When Claudio returns to the stage he is described as ‘mufﬂ’d’ (5. 1. 484), a word which might mean just a head covering, like this kerchief, or the kind of binding wrapped round Lazarus in the mystery plays. A swaddled upright ﬁgure, which is how Claudio might have appeared, would have been particularly reminiscent of Lazarus, as, in keeping with Jewish burial traditions, in almost all pictures of the moment the corpse is vertical.²⁷ The stage picture at the end of Measure for ²⁴ Schiller, Iconography, ii. ﬁgs. 570–1. ²⁵ Peter Brook, The Empty Space (London: Macgibbon & Kee, 1968), 89. Kneeling was a politically charged posture at this time, see Lori Anne Ferrell, Government by Polemic: James I, the King’s Preachers, and the Rhetorics of Conformity, 1603–25 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998), 142–53. ²⁶ John Calvin, A Harmonie Vpon the Three Euangelists […], trans. Eusebius Paget (London, 1584), Sv . See also the stage directions in N-Town Plays, 25. 428; Digby Mysteries, l. 910. ²⁷ Schiller, Iconography, i. ﬁgs. 561–4, 571, 577–8.

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Measure, as well as Lucio’s language, would have recalled the raising of Lazarus: two kneeling women, pleading to a powerful man who orders the reappearance of a mufﬂed, upright ﬁgure, caught at the moment between death and life. The iconographic representation of Lazarus swaddled in grave clothes stresses the most important part of his character: his close association with death. When Claudio comes back (as it seems to the other characters) from the dead, he does not speak, and through this silence Shakespeare expresses Claudio’s intimate relationship with death. Claudio’s mute return to the stage at the end of Measure for Measure is one of numerous open silences at the end of that play, but it is one of the most intense. Speech in Shakespeare is a sign of being alive and participating fully in human life. Characters that others had thought dead—such as Falstaff at the end of 1 Henry IV (5. 4. 131–5)—are asked to speak to prove their reality. As Hermione embraces her husband, Camillo likewise asks for further proof that this woman long thought dead is truly human, ‘if she pertain to life, let her speak too’ (5. 3. 114).²⁸ This is proof that Claudio, however, is neither asked for nor gives. Alone among the many Shakespearean characters who apparently return to life when others had thought them dead (Hermione, Juliet, Imogen, Thaisa, Hero, Falstaff, and Egeon’s wife Emilia) Claudio does not speak. In the biblical account Lazarus, likewise, does not speak after his resuscitation. The Towneley play, however, makes a striking deviation from Lazarus’s traditional silence. The Towneley playwright has interpolated a 134-line lyric monologue about death into the Lazarus play.²⁹ Lazarus is in a unique position to deliver a homily on this subject, as he is both alive, and yet has an intimate knowledge of dying and being dead. Lazarus’s passionate, personal intensity about mortality is something that Claudio shares. Claudio has the most powerful and haunting monologue on this subject that Shakespeare, or perhaps anyone, ever wrote. Claudio, unlike Lazarus, has no knowledge of death, but he speaks of it with the same terriﬁed fervour: Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction, and to rot;

²⁸ See Philip C. McGuire, Speechless Dialect: Shakespeare’s Open Silences (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), pp. xiii–xiv. ²⁹ For a discussion of the passage see Rosemary Woolf, The English Religious Lyric in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968), 319 ff.

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165 (3. 1. 118–21)

The Towneley Lazarus speaks of the horrors of being ‘closid colde in clay’ (31. 127) with the same enclosing alliteration as Claudio’s: ‘cold … become | A kneaded clod’. They share fears of cold, rotting, and becoming like the wind, and most powerfully, a synaesthesic horror of the dead body being able to feel like a living one. The connection with the raising of Lazarus, suggested by Lucio’s words and supported by the staging of Claudio’s return, illuminates one of the mainsprings of the plot: Claudio’s preoccupation with, and terror of, death. In the Gospel story, however, the focus is on Christ. Christ revealed his godhead through this, his last and greatest miracle before his resurrection. In Measure for Measure the focus is likewise on the Duke. Shortly before bringing Claudio back to the stage Vincentio reveals himself in full ducal splendour, and the reappearance of Claudio is the culmination of his display of power. It is perhaps telling, however, that phrases which connect the return of Claudio with the raising of Lazarus congregate at moments of textual instability. The Duke stipulates that he will write to Angelo and request him ‘to meet me at the consecrated fount | A league below the city’ (4. 3. 97) but when Angelo receives the letters he wonders: ‘And why meet him at the gates?’ (4. 4. 4). Shakespeare, or the Duke, apparently changes his mind about where the ﬁnal act takes place, although in both accounts the action happens outside the city walls. The raising of Lazarus, like the Resurrection, also takes place outside the city walls.³⁰ Another discrepancy which interacts with the Lazarus allusion is the length of time Claudio will remain dead in the eyes of the world. Initially the Duke states that Claudio will be hidden away for four days (4. 2. 159) and Lazarus, likewise, remains in the tomb for four days (John 11: 39). This is a memorable length of time because it is surprising. The Evangelist clearly intends the raising of Lazarus to preﬁgure the Resurrection, and hence the reader expects three days, rather than four, to have elapsed since Lazarus’s death. The time compression that follows in Measure for Measure means that four days becomes two days, and then only one, but at one point Shakespeare or the Duke seems to have chosen the time period which would have brought the Lazarus resonance forward. ³⁰ John 11: 30. For the importance of this setting in Measure see Marcus, Puzzling Shakespeare, 181 and ch. 4.

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As such instability suggests, however, the allusion to the raising of Lazarus does not work as a simple endorsement of the Duke. The ﬁrst and strongest allusion was not only voiced by Lucio but was also coupled with a phrase that suggests a very different reading of the Duke’s behindthe-scenes manipulation: ‘by my troth, Isabel, I loved thy brother. If the old fantastical duke of dark corners had been at home, he had lived’ (4. 3. 151–3). The scene between the Duke and Isabella (Act 4 Scene 3)—a scene between a grieving sister and the man who could have saved her from this grief—presents the Duke’s action as a faulty imitation of Christ’s. Jesus responds to the grief of Lazarus’s sister by raising him from the dead. The Duke in the same position leaves Claudio hidden away so that he can seem to bring him back to life at a more strategically dramatic moment. The Lazarus echo shows the Duke imitating the divine pattern, just as a godly ruler was meant to, but it also highlights the inherent impossibility of fallible human beings re-enacting divine law and mercy. At one level the ‘raising’ of Claudio is entirely fake, as he never actually died, but also even this partial imitation of Christ is achieved by the Duke only after encountering the exasperating probity of the Provost, backtracking after Angelo has behaved unexpectedly, lying to Isabella and entirely failing to carry out his plan for Barnadine. Without the providential appearance of the head of Ragozine—‘an accident that heaven provides’ (4. 3. 74)—the Duke’s machinations would have failed. The Duke’s method of rule, wrapped up in a policy of non-explanation and a Friar’s cloak which is an objective correlative for the mystery of statecraft, is placed under considerable strain. The Duke’s retreat into arcana imperii—his retreat into the Friar’s cloak—is one of his strongest character attributes and one which has roots in both James’s penchant for secrecy and his desire for a kingship that was, as he stated it to be, ‘the trew paterne of Diuinitie’.³¹ Through the doctrine of the mystery of state James’s wish for a quasi-divine royal power dovetailed with his desire for privacy: just as human beings are not permitted to seek too far into God’s secrets, he argued, it is also unlawful to inquire into ‘the mysterie of the Kings power …. for that is to wade into the weaknesse of Princes and to take away the mysticall reuerence, that belongs vnto them that sit in the Throne of God’.³² James inherited the throne of England from a queen for whom visibility ³¹ James VI & I, Political Works, 54. ³² Ibid. 14, 333. See also Works of Thomas Nashe, i. 286; Kantorowicz, ‘Mysteries of State’, 65–91; Goldberg, James I and the Politics of Literature, 65–84.

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was a valuable tool of government. Through pageantry, processions, parade, and portraiture, Elizabeth had placed herself as an icon before her people. But James shrank from the public nature of early-modern rule, and wrote ruefully of how kings are set ‘upon a publike stage, in the sight of all the people; where all the beholders eyes are attentiuely bent, to looke and pry in the least circumstance of their secretest drifts’. This famous sentence comes from a passage (from the preface to the English edition of Basilikon Doron) which obsesses about secrecy—‘secretest actions’, ‘secretest drifts’, ‘secretest thoughts’—even while ostensibly dealing with the very public business of publishing.³³ James’s detractor Anthony Weldon famously claimed that James’s motto was Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare.³⁴ This was supposedly Tiberius’s motto, and James’s ideas of statecraft are in part a Christianizing of the Roman idea of arcana imperii: Tacitus’s name for Tiberius’s secrets of rule which must not be meddled in by ordinary mortals.³⁵ The ancient idea of the mystery of state argued that the obscurity and ineffable quality of the gods that must be imitated by a ruler if he is to retain respect and power.³⁶ James’s desire to be praised for his inscrutability rather than for his visible attributes reanimated a theatrical tradition. The disguised ruler—a popular character from medieval folk tales through to 1590s comic histories—was reworked as a perfect way to praise the style of the new king by highlighting the wisdom, holiness, and ineffability of the monarch. The immediate stimulus for the reanimation of the fashion for disguised ruler plays was the King’s own well-known penchant for going undetected about London.³⁷ More fundamentally his rhetoric of divine monarchy encouraged the performance of plays whose depiction ³³ James VI & I, Political Works, 5. There are nine cognates of ‘secret’ in this passage alone. ³⁴ Anthony Weldon, The Court and Character of King James (London: John Wright, 1650), H3v –H4r . ³⁵ Tacitus became a fashionable authority on statecraft in the Jacobean court; see Kenneth C. Schellhase, Tacitus in Reniassance Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 109, 157–63. A 1598 translation of Tacitus’s Annals, from which this phrase comes, was reprinted in 1604: The Annales of Cornelivs Tacitvs, trans. Richard Grenewey (London, 1604), D4v . ³⁶ Donaldson, Machiavelli and the Mystery of State, 188, 215–16; Marx, ‘Holy War in Henry V ’, 93; Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 52. ³⁷ Gilbert Dugdale, The Time Triumphant […] (London, 1604), B1v ; Robert Ashton, ed., James I By His Contemporaries: An account of his career and character as seen by some of his contemporaries (London: Hutchinson, 1969), 62; Wilson, History of Great Britain, C2v . See Thomas A. Pendleton, ‘Shakespeare’s Disguised Duke Play: Middleton, Marston and the Sources of Measure for Measure’, in John W. Mahon and Thomas A. Pendleton, eds., ‘Fanned and Winnowed Opinions’: Shakespearean Essays Presented to Harold Jenkins

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of monarchs watching and judging their subjects unbeknownst to them and then punishing the wicked and rewarding the virtuous in a ﬁnal revelation engaged with fantasies of divine omnipotence and immanence. Nashe’s Christ’s Tears over Jerusalem (1593) draws a protracted metaphor of God’s presence in terms of this more easily apprehended surveillance of a ruler in language that resonates with Measure for Measure: In the presence of his Prince, the dissolutest misliuer that lyues, wil not offend or misgouerne himselfe: how much more ought we, (abyding alwaies in Gods presence) precisely to strighten our pathes? … God is not absent, but present continuallie amongst vs, though not in sight yet as a Spirite at our elbowes euery where, (& so delight many kings to walke disguised amongst theyr subiects).³⁸

James’s shyness could be made into a matter for praise if connected to this godlike ability to watch and control his people unobserved. At least nine plays with a plot revolving around a disguised male authority ﬁgure—a ruler, a father, or a husband—were performed in the years following James’s accession.³⁹ Many of these plays engage with the Christian nuances of the traditional story in which an ever-present but unknown ruler acts as a benign patriarch. One of the most striking combinations of royal praise and religious language is Middleton’s The Phoenix, which was performed before the king on 20 February 1604.⁴⁰ The play quotes extensively from Basilikon Doron and the chief character, Phoenix, is about to inherit the throne from someone who has ruled for ‘forty-ﬁve years’: exactly the length of Elizabeth’s reign.⁴¹ The play also (London: Methuen, 1987), 80–7; Curtis Perry, The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 93–5. ³⁸ Works of Thomas Nashe, ii: 171, 120. There are a number of verbal parallels between this work and Measure for Measure, and perhaps the name of Shakespeare’s constable (a sign of the higher authority present at your elbow) could be one. Abundant borrowings from Nashe by Shakespeare have been shown by J. J. M. Tobin. For an example of Shakespeare borrowing from this text at this time, see J. J. M. Tobin, ‘Macbeth and Christs Teares over Jerusalem’, The Aligarh Journal of English Studies 7/1 (1982): 72–8. ³⁹ Middleton’s Phoenix (1604), Marston’s Malcontent (1604) and Fawn (1604), Day’s Law Tricks (c.1604), Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho! (1605), the anonymous London Prodigal (1605), Edward Sharpham’s The Fleire (1607), Dekker’s Honest Whore part II (1608), and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1604). Samuel Rowley’s When You See Me, You Know Me (1604) has a section in which the king disguises himself (Scenes 5–7) and Middleton’s Your Five Gallants (1607) also has a disguised protagonist. ⁴⁰ N. A. Bawcutt, ‘Middleton’s ‘‘The Phoenix’’ As a Royal Play’, Notes & Queries 3/7 (1956): 287. ⁴¹ The Works of Thomas Middleton, ed. A. H. Bullen, 8 vols. (London: John C. Nimmo, 1885), i: 1. 1 .7; Ivo Kamps, ‘Ruling Fantasies and Fantasies of Rule: The Phoenix

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ﬂatters James through the conspicuously named prince. The phoenix’s associations with ﬁdelity and chastity had been used by Elizabeth, as had its sacred connotations. From Roman times the phoenix’s self-sacriﬁce, resurrection, and eternal life have been connected with Christ’s own and its emblematic use was central to Elizabeth’s strategy to consolidate the relationship between royalty and divinity.⁴² James inherited Elizabeth’s phoenix emblem, and its Christological symbolism, along with her crown. Praising James as the new phoenix stressed continuity between the two reigns, and created a mystical union between him and his predecessor. References to James as a phoenix rising from Elizabeth’s ashes was one of the most popular tropes in poems celebrating James’s coronation: in Sorrowes Ioy (1603), for example, James is the ‘Phoenix of her ashes bred’.⁴³ Praising James as a new phoenix was an artful strategy for translating the fact that he was not Elizabeth’s direct descendant into a matter for praise: he is a vigorous reincarnation of an old, sick queen.⁴⁴ In Middleton’s play the emblematic name of the prince is stressed as, in a highly unusual plot device, he keeps the name while he is disguised. In the very ﬁrst line of both Act 4 and Act 5 Proditer calls his supposed new ally ‘Phoenix’. This has been taken as a mistake (‘the oversight is triﬂing’ remarks one editor) but it is more than that. It stresses the importance of his name in a play in which nomenclature is a crucial guide to character: Fidelio is faithful, Falso untrustworthy, and Quieto peaceful. Middleton updates this morality play technique with a skilful hand: the Knight and the Jeweller’s wife call each other ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Revenue’, nicknames that become morality-type indicators of their and Measure for Measure’, Studies in Philology 92/2 (1995): 253; David Farley-Hills, Shakespeare and the Rival Playwrights: 1600–1606 (London: Routledge, 1990), 142–4. The demand for Basilikon Doron was such that there were ﬁve English editions in 1603 alone. Allusions to Basilikon Doron in Measure for Measure also indicate that Shakespeare had read the King’s book: compare James VI & I, Political Works, 12, 37, with Measure, 1. 1. 32–40; pp. 17–18 with 2. 4. 1–5; pp. 5, 43, with 4. 1. 58–61. See also Stevenson, ‘The Role of James’, 195–205. ⁴² Valerie Jones, ‘The Phoenix and the Resurrection’, in Debra Hassig, ed., The Mark of the Beast: The Medieval Bestiary in Art, Life and Literature (New York: Garland, 1999), 102–8; Roy Strong, Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (London: Thames & Hudson, 1987), plates 64, 65, 90, 154; Yates, Astraea, 58, plate 6b. ⁴³ Nichols, Progresses, Processions, and Magniﬁcent Festivities of King James, i. 8. See also i. 11, 15, 16; Thomas Dekker, The Whole Magnifycent Entertainment (London, 1604), Fv . The phoenix image was later used by Shakespeare in a prophecy of James’s accession to the English crown: Henry VIII, 5. 4. 39–47. ⁴⁴ It is also particularly appropriate praise for a king who had himself written a poem entitled ‘Ane Metaphoricall Invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix’ in his collection The Essays of A Prentise.

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characters.⁴⁵ The most important allegorical name is that of the prince. The name is ﬁtting, his friend Fidelio suggests, because he is as unique and astounding as the bird: ‘thou wonder of all princes, president, and glory, | True Phoenix’ (1. 1. 135). Fidelio’s words resonate with quasi-religious praise as do Phoenix’s father’s words at the end of the play: ‘let me admire heaven’s wisdom in my son’ (5. 1. 80). It is Proditer, however, when unmasked by Phoenix as a traitor, who makes the comparison between the prince and God unequivocal: ‘tread me to dust, thou in whom wonder keeps! | Behold the serpent on his belly creeps’ (5. 1. 165–6). Middleton, by naming his play and his protagonist after a bird that symbolized both James and Christ, made his strategy of praise unambiguous.⁴⁶ He greets the new king with a play in which a perfect prince, just about to begin his rule, dispenses justice while going about his subjects undetected. His actions and power are godlike, his name is a mystical name for Christ, and these attributes reﬂect praise onto the new monarch whom he also ﬁgures. The story of the disguised ruler was employed by dramatists at James’s accession as one way to praise James as quasi-divine. At a fundamental level the tale dramatizes the hope that God’s omnipotence will ﬁnally be realized in ultimate justice for all men. The godlike aspect of the ruler who comes to dispense justice at the end of the play is made explicit in Whetstone’s Promos and Cassandra (1578), the source play for Measure for Measure. This play is based around a typical parabolic design in which the master departs, tests his subjects, and returns to punish or reward them.⁴⁷ The play makes the parabolic connection explicit when the king forgives Promos at the end of the play with words that recall the parables of the lost sheep and the prodigal son: ‘the lost sheep founde, for ioye, the feast was made’.⁴⁸ Shakespeare’s play also recalls Jesus’ stories (in particular the parable of the unjust servant (Matt. 18: 22–35) ) but he makes the connection with the absent all-knowing lord of the parables closer and more complex by having a ruler who never actually leaves, but ⁴⁵ Alan Dessen, ‘Middleton’s The Phoenix and the Allegorical Tradition’, Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 6 (1966): 299. ⁴⁶ For further connections between the character Phoenix and Christ, see George E. Rowe, Thomas Middleton and the New Comedy Tradition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 32–3. ⁴⁷ See e.g. the parable of the talents (Matt. 25: 14–30) and the parable of the vineyard (Matt. 21: 33–44). ⁴⁸ George Whetstone, The [ﬁrst and] seconde part[s] of the Famous Historie of Promos and Cassandra set forth in a comicall Discours (London, 1578), M3r .

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remains and watches his subjects.⁴⁹ The disguised duke is Shakespeare’s addition to his source play and he is placed in the role of preserver given to God in the earlier play: in Promos and Cassandra the Jailer explains, when he decides not to execute his young prisoner: ‘God it was, within my mind, that did your safety moue’ (E3v ); in Measure for Measure, it is the Duke who secures Claudio’s reprieve. These changes in the plot increase the divine resonances of the disguise, and when the Duke is unmasked at the end of the play (admittedly by Lucio, which decreases the striking self-revelation presumably intended by the Duke) Angelo’s capitulation is saturated with religious resonance: O my dread lord, I should be guiltier than my guiltiness To think I can be undiscernible, When I perceive your grace, like power divine, Hath looked upon my passes. (5. 1. 363–7)⁵⁰

In a less well known but attractive parallel between divine and ducal action in the play, the word ‘remedy’ is used for both the solution to Claudio’s predicament (Escalus and Angelo think it has ‘no remedy’ (2. 1. 274, 2. 2. 49), but a ‘remedy’ (3. 1. 200) is found by the Duke through the bed-trick) and Christ’s salvation of mankind: Why, all the souls that were were forfeit once, And He that might the vantage best have took Found out the remedy.

(2. 2. 75–7)⁵¹

⁴⁹ Schleiner, ‘Providential Improvisation’, 227–36; Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 79–80. ⁵⁰ For Christian interpretations of the Duke in general and these lines in particular, see G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Methuen, 1961), 79; Roy Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement’, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 61 (1946): 1029–59; M. C. Bradbrook, ‘Authority, Truth and Justice in Measure for Measure’, Review of English Studies 17/68 (1941): 385–99; Nevill Coghill, ‘Comic Form in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Survey 8 (1955): 14–27; Darryl J. Gless, Measure for Measure, the Law, and the Convent (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979); Arthur C. Kirsch, ‘The Integrity of ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ ’, Shakespeare Survey 28 (1975): 89–106; Pinciss, Forbidden Matter, 46. For a critique of these interpretations, see Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’; Pope, ‘Renaissance Background’, 61–2; Lake, The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat, 681; Huston Diehl, ‘ ‘‘Inﬁnite Space’’: Representation and Reformation in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Quarterly 49/4 (1998): 394–5; Shuger, Political Theologies, 54. ⁵¹ Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible, 89–90.

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An Incarnational allusion was likewise argued for by Neville Coghill who suggested that Lucio’s comment about the Duke—‘it was a mad, fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to’ (3. 1. 358–9)—is ‘an overtone reference to the Incarnation’.⁵² Coghill’s 1955 article created a new theatrical orthodoxy, and in the succeeding year a production of Measure for Measure was, for the ﬁrst time, censured for failing to bring out the divinity of the Duke. Throughout the 1960s productions of Measure for Measure began to present the Duke as a semi-allegorical ‘ﬁgure of Almighty God’ and ‘the Heavenly Bridegroom’.⁵³ Shakespeare, by altering the story, and bringing his ruler to live among his subjects like an ordinary man, has indeed created an allusion to the Incarnation which is not in his source, and as even A. D. Nuttall grudgingly concedes ‘the Grand Deception of the Atonement moves beneath the surface of the drama just as certainly as does the bloody subterfuge of Casare Borgia’.⁵⁴ However, it is not sufﬁcient to ﬁnd in the Duke an uncomplicated ‘Christ-ﬁgure’—for once again the Christic allusion suggested by Coghill (‘it was a mad, fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to’) is in the mouth of Lucio. Lucio’s unconscious echo of Incarnational theology is couched in terms of one of the Bible’s central passages about that event: ‘Christ Jesus, Who being in the forme of God thought it no robberie to be equal with God: But hee made himselfe of no reputation, and tooke on him the forme of a seruant, and was made like unto men.’⁵⁵ Lucio’s word ‘beggary’ lights on the fact that the Duke too has become a servant, as he himself says to Isabella: Your friar is now your prince. As I was then, Advertising and holy to your business, Not changing heart with habit, I am still Attorney’d at your service.

(5. 1. 379–82)

⁵² Coghill, ‘Comic Form’, 27. For further Incarnational allusions see Battenhouse, ‘Measure for Measure and Christian Doctrine of the Atonement’, 1053; Milward, Shakespeare’s Religious Background, 223. ⁵³ Jane Williamson, ‘The Duke and Isabella on the Modern Stage’, in Joseph G. Price, ed., The Triple Bond: Plays, Mainly Shakespearean, in Performance (London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975), 161; Graham Nicholls, Measure for Measure: Text and Performance (London: Macmillan, 1986), 53. ⁵⁴ Nuttall, ‘Measure for Measure: Quid Pro Quo?’, 245. ⁵⁵ Philippians 2: 5–11. This was the epistle for Palm Sunday: Book of Common prayer, Ev .

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Paul, in Philippians, tries to express Christ’s equality with God, and hence the extent of the debasement he has willingly endured, with the harsh word harpagmos—translated by both the Geneva and Bishops’ Bible as ‘robberie’ and by a Tudor preacher as ‘usurp’: Christ ‘dyd not usurpe equalitie unto god’.⁵⁶ Both ‘usurpe’ and ‘robberie’ ﬁnd parallels in Lucio’s ‘steal’ and ‘usurp’ but Lucio has fundamentally inverted the image of ruler who chooses to exchange his power for life as a mendicant preacher. What Christ refuses to grasp is equality with God (it is his right, but he chooses instead to become man), but for Lucio it is beggary that is inappropriate for the Duke.⁵⁷ Lucio’s words may indicate his lack of understanding of Christ’s condescension at the Incarnation, but they may perhaps be accurate about the Duke’s conduct. An earthly ruler does not have the right to abdicate responsibility. Lucio, despite his manifest ignorance, momentarily glances at the truth. Throughout Act 3 Scene 1, the scene between the disguised Duke and Lucio, the latter pretends to insight that he does not (ostensibly at least) possess. Lucio’s charade can be very funny, mostly because he does it with such aplomb:   I believe I know the cause of his withdrawing.  What, I prithee, might be the cause?  No, pardon, ’tis a secret must be locked within the teeth and the lips. But this I can let you understand … (3. 1. 395–8)

Lucio, however, lights unconsciously upon the truth. Relating gossip about the Duke he says, ‘some say he is with the Emperor of Russia; other some, he is in Rome’ (3. 1. 354–5) and a signiﬁcant pause before the words ‘in Rome’ might lead the audience to the realization of Lucio’s inadvertent accuracy. The Duke, by dressing up as a friar, has, ﬁguratively at least, gone over to Rome.⁵⁸ Nevill Coghill, however, ⁵⁶ N. T. Wright, The Climax of the Covenant: Christ and the Law in Pauline Theology (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1991), ch. 4, esp. 84; Cuthbert Tunstall, A Sermon of Cvthbert Byshop of Duresme, made Vpon Palme sondaye laste past, before the maiestie of our souerayne lorde kinge Henry VIII […] (London, 1539), A3v . See also the regal metaphor used by Calvin for this passage: A Commentarie of M. Iohn Caluine vppon the Epistle to the Philippians […], trans. William Becket (London, 1584), 31. ⁵⁷ Spenser’s Amoretti 61 is also based on this biblical text (because it is the sonnet that corresponds with Palm Sunday in Spenser’s liturgical structure). In this poem when Phil. 2 describes a mere human, it makes them seem proud: cf. Amoretti and Epithalamion, 93, 191–2. ⁵⁸ M. Lindsay Kaplan, The Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 98. In 1603 and 1604 some of James’s subjects did

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famously read Lucio’s lucky guesses as true knowingness and the ‘light’ of Lucio’s name as genuine illumination. This interpretation has had its adherents, and in Robin Phillips’s 1975 production at Stratford, Ontario, Lucio—as one delighted critic put it—‘searches out the Duke like a torchlight … this Lucio knew the Duke behind the robes of the Friar’.⁵⁹ Coghill’s reading is probably mistaken, not least because it ignores the dramatic irony that Shakespeare was so fond of and the unwitting discovery of truth which is a hallmark of almost all his clowns, but despite its oversimpliﬁcation Coghill’s interpretation does give an insight into an important aspect of the scene. It illuminates a biblical resonance that this meeting of disguised ruler and abusive commoner holds within it: the temptation in the desert. During the forty days and forty nights that Jesus fasted in the desert, the devil came to him and tempted him to perform miracles: ‘if thou be the Sonne of God, commaund that these stones be made bread … If thou bee the Sonne of God, cast thy selfe downe’ (Matt. 4: 3, 6). The apparently uncertain words ‘if thou bee the Sonne of God’ make it appear as though the devil does not know whether Jesus is truly divine, and is trying to entice him to demonstrate his divinity. This reading is consonant with the popular medieval ‘guiler beguiled’ interpretation of the Atonement in which Satan was cozened by the Incarnation, as has been discussed in the previous chapter. Under the primary sense of the scene as a temptation—the devil trying to goad Christ into an exercise of power—runs an undercurrent of psychological taunting: ‘are you really as powerful as you claim?’ The doubt inherent in the word ‘if ’ led patristic commentators, the writers of the mystery plays, and sixteenth-century preachers to use the temptation in the desert as a case-study for the guiler beguiled theory, and even in the seventeenth century this interpretation was still popular with some preachers. In the year Measure for Measure was ﬁrst performed William Perkins argued that through the temptation in the desert the devil tried to discover

indeed fear (or hope) that he might be sympathetic to the Catholic faith, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, of the Reign of James I, ed. Mary Anne Everett Green (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1857–72), i. 4, 6, 8, 12, 177. My thanks to Jenny Wormald and Benjamin Prance for their helpful discussion of this. ⁵⁹ Coghill, ‘Comic Form’, 24; Richard Paul Knowles, ‘Robin Phillips Measures Up: ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ at Stratford, Ontario, 1975–6’, Essays in Theatre 8/1 (1989): 48–9.

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whether Christ was the son of God. He quotes directly—although he does not acknowledge it—from Gregory of Nyssa: If Satan had seene him in his glorie, he durst not so ﬁercely and so eagerly haue set vpon him; and therefore [God] doth as the ﬁsherman, who hideth the hooke and sheweth onely the baite: so Christ he sheweth his manhood, but couereth as it were with a mantle his Godhead, so that the Diuel seeing him in the base estate of humiliation might be the more ﬁerce in his temptations and he might get the more glorious victorie.⁶⁰

The mystery cycles’ dramatizations of the temptation of Christ likewise centre on the Devil’s attempts to entice Christ into demonstrating deﬁnitively that he is God. The devil is ignorant of the mystery of the Incarnation and therefore cannot reconcile the fact that Christ is sinless (and so must be divine) and yet hungry and thirsty (and so must be human). This sense of the devil trying, and failing, to comprehend the divinity which is concealed under Christ’s humanity resonates with the scenes between Lucio and the Duke. The statement which seems to indicate that Lucio knows the Duke has become a mendicant and hence that he has penetrated the Duke’s disguise—‘it was a mad, fantastical trick of him to steal from the state and usurp the beggary he was never born to’—echoes, as has been shown, Philippians 2: 5–11, a text intimately connected with the temptation in the desert. Gregory the Great in his homily of Jesus’ trial with the devil in the wilderness explained: ‘If grasping honour was not related to avarice, Paul would not have said of God’s only-begotten Son: He did not think that being equal to God was something to be grasped … But the means by which he [the devil] overcame the ﬁrst man were the same ones which caused him to yield when he tempted the Second.’⁶¹ Gregory’s explicit connection of Philippians 2 with Jesus’ ability to overcome the sins with which the ﬁrst Adam had been tempted was drawn on both by the author of the Chester play of the temptation and by post-Reformation preachers. Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon sequence on the temptation, for example, explains the length of Christ’s fast thus: ‘As Moses fasted fortie daies at the institution of the law, and Elias fortie days at the restoration: so Christ heere. And because hee came but in the shape of a seruaunt, ⁶⁰ William Perkins, Satans Sophostrie Answered by Ovr Saviovr Christ (London, 1604), D2v , D8r , B7v . For the Gregorian source, see above, Ch. 5 n. 17. ⁶¹ Gregory the Great, Forty Gospel Homilies, trans. Dom David Hurst (Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990), 102–3.

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hee would not take vpon him aboue his fellow-seruaunts.’⁶² Philippians 2 runs like a vein through sermons on the temptation in the desert because the relationship between Christ’s divinity and humanity, his twin nature in which he is both true God and true man, is central to both texts. Lucio’s echo of Philippians 2, therefore, is part of the connection with the temptation in the desert already brought forward by the structure of the scene—one man taunting another who is in a half-penetrated disguise, and tempting him to throw off that disguise. Although the connection between Act 3 Scene 1 and the temptation in the desert has had no previous critical examination, it has been realized on the modern stage. It was played in this way in a 1954 production directed by Tyrone Guthrie and Cecil Clarke, at Stratford, Ontario: The typological explication of Measure for Measure … can be communicated in an actual production designed to be seen and heard, rather than read. Numerous modern productions have, in fact, interpreted the piece so. The one I have seen is Tyrone Guthrie’s at Stratford Ontario, some years ago. An example will illustrate. Act III scene 2 contains a dialogue between the Duke as Friar and Lucio, who slanders the Duke. Typologically, this is viewed as the temptation in the desert. If you provide the Duke with a voluminous white habit, a Christlike beard, a cross, and if you costume Lucio as Mephistopheles, then the typological interpretation is communicated to at least the more perceptive members of the audience in the visual terms appropriate to the theater.⁶³

Arnold Williams’s interpretation rests on the costuming of the two principal characters—Lucio was dressed dark and devilish while the Friar/Duke appeared in a voluminous white habit with sandals and a beard and vast cross-shaped staff—and indeed it is the characterization of the Duke and Lucio, as well as their situation, which recalls the temptation in the desert.⁶⁴ The Duke’s dual nature as ruler and man, and his concealment of his royal identity, aligns him with Jesus, and almost every part of Lucio’s character, from his slander to his dandiﬁed costume, connect him with stage representations of evil, both the devil in the mystery plays and Vices. ⁶² Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, B7v (my italics). See also F7r ; Perkins, Satans Sophostrie, B7r , C4v ; Chester Mystery Cycle, xii. 174, 181, 183, 199. ⁶³ Arnold Williams, ‘Typology and the Cycle Plays: Some Criteria’, Speculum 43 (1968): 679. ⁶⁴ For the costumes of the Duke and Lucio see Tyrone Guthrie, Robertson Davies, and Grant Macdonald, Twice Have the Trumpets Sounded: A Record of the Stratford Shakespearean Festival in Canada (London: J. Garnet Miller, 1955), 83, 96.

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Lucio’s name is not only a hint of his devilish side—reminiscent as it is of the brightest devil, Lucifer—but like all Vices (who proudly proclaim the names that denounce them: ‘my name is Ambidexter’, ‘I am Riot’, ‘My very true unchristian name is Avarice’) Lucio is entirely unabashed by his cratyllic name: ‘my name is Lucio, well known to the Duke’ (3. 1. 420).⁶⁵ Particularly telling are the parallels between Lucio and the devil in John Bale’s dramatization of the temptation in the desert The Temptation of our Lord (1538). Like Satan in the mystery plays Bale’s devil declares ‘I wyll not leave hym tyll I knowe what he ys’ (l. 71) and after each failed temptation he asks to ‘walk farther’ with Jesus (l. 163). These suggestions of Satan’s unwanted intrusions on Christ recall the Duke’s unsuccessful attempts to rid himself of Lucio:  Sir, your company is fairer than honest. Rest you well.  By my troth, I’ll go with thee to the lane’s end. (4. 3. 168–70)

The York cycle shares this sense of the devil being someone Christ has difﬁculty shaking off, and stresses the awkward, intrusive intimacy of the situation. Diabolus pretends to be Jesus’ friend and tries to coax the truth out of him by saying that since they are so entirely alone no one else need ever know. The self-evident falsehood of this last statement—proclaimed in a play, perhaps to the audience—is a humorous way of showing the hollowness of the friendship the devil offers.⁶⁶ When tempting Christ to transform the stones into bread Diabolus is coaxingly intimate, adding the short line ‘betwyxe vs two’ so that it sounds like an encouraging afterthought. This strategy is repeated at the end of the next stanza: ‘ther sall noman witte what I mene | but I and thou’. He likewise pretends that it is friendly concern that makes him ask Jesus to eat; he cares about his hunger because of the ‘old acqueyntance vs by-twene’ (York Plays, 22. 58–66). Diabolus, like Lucio, is unconsciously accurate, as God and the devil have indeed known each other long. This strategy of pretend friendship is shared by a number of Vices. Hypocrisy in Lusty Juventus tries to ingratiate himself with Juventus by alleging to be an old acquaintance, and meets with the same bemused reaction as Lucio does: ⁶⁵ For an exploration of the connections between Lucio and the Vice see Mathew Winston, ‘ ‘‘Craft Against Vice’’: Morality Play Elements in Measure for Measure’, Shakespeare Studies 14 (1981): 229–48. ⁶⁶ Diabolus enters by pushing through the spectators, which underlines the irony: York Plays, 22. 1–4.

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The Questioning of Divine Kingship  For to my symple knowledge I never knewe, That you and I together were acquainted · · · · · · · · · ·  Yes I have knowen you ever since you were bore.⁶⁷

Diabolus’s and Hypocrisy’s heavy-handed attempts at amity are similar to the intimacy that Lucio forces on the Duke: ‘I am a kind of burr; I shall stick’ (4. 3. 172).⁶⁸ In Act 3 Scene 1 Lucio is likewise impudent in his claims to have been ‘an inward’ (3. 1. 394) of the Duke’s. These boasts, as with Juventus and Hypocrisy, are proved to be false when the Duke has to ask Lucio’s name; although ironically Lucio uses the moment to assert once more that he and the Duke are old friends:  I pray you, your name?  Sir, my name is Lucio, well known to the Duke. (3. 1. 419–20)

Lucio’s pretence that he is one of the Duke’s intimate acquaintances is part of his character as a social climber, and the good side of his character—his apparently genuine friendship with Claudio—is the ﬂip side of his disloyalty to less advantageous friends such as Pompey. Lucio taunts the captive Pompey—‘what, at the wheels of Caesar? Art thou led in triumph?’ (3. 1. 311–12)—just as the Vices mock their less fortunate fellows who make the mistake of getting caught: New-fangle sneers at Cutpurse, Pickpurse and Tosspot: ‘ha ha ha, there is a brace of hounds | … Beholde the huntsman leadeth a way’.⁶⁹ Lucio’s slander, his social mobility, his unwelcome and enforced friendship, his falsehood, and his inability to penetrate the Duke’s disguise, all link him with stage representations of evil in general, and with the devil in the temptation in the desert in particular. Lancelot Andrewes’s sermon on the temptation in the desert states that the devil defames God to Christ in the ﬁrst temptation.⁷⁰ Part of ⁶⁷ An Enterlude called Lusty Juventus (Oxford: Malone Society Reprints, 1971), ll. 549–67. ⁶⁸ There is also a verbal link between Lucio and Hypocrisy, which shows they have the same sense of humour and coarseness of expression. When Hypocrisy sees Juventus kissing, he cries out: ‘What a hurly burly is here, | Smick smack—You will go tick tack’ (l. 825). The bawdy pun on the game which involved putting pegs in holes is also evident when Lucio wishes that Claudio’s head may not be ‘lost at a game of tick-tack’ (1. 2. 180). Surprisingly, the Oxford English Dictionary has no mention of this sexual innuendo: s.v. tick-tack. ⁶⁹ Ulpian Fulwell, Like Will to Like (1568), in Two Moral Interludes (Oxford: The Malone Society, 1991), ll. 1254–5. See also Nice Wanton, in Specimens of the PreShakespearean Drama, ed. John Matthews Manly (New York: Biblo & Tannen, 1967), 176. ⁷⁰ Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, A4v –A5r .

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the temptation that Jesus undergoes, therefore, is to save his Father from slander by showing his power. The Duke is likewise tempted to save himself from Lucio’s taunts by revealing his true nature. Contemporary sermons on the temptation in the desert all draw attention to the meaning of Satan’s name, which signiﬁes: ‘a cauiller, a slaunderer, a priuie accuser’.⁷¹ Slander is an important part of Lucio’s character, and it is a vice about which the Duke, like James, is particularly sensitive. In 1587, not long after James had taken over personal rule of his Scottish kingdom, a law was passed against slander. The law tied the punishment of the slanderer directly to the importance of the person defamed, declaring that the fate of such as speak ‘wordis of untreuth, to sklander, and sa far as in thame lyis to spott, the fame, honnoure and reputatioun of the saikles and innocent … salbe subject to the same pane and punishment, in thair personis, landis and guidis, that is dew to the personis aganis quhome they all writt the saidis libellis and utter the saidis speichis’.⁷² The Duke is clearly following the same logic when he sentences Lucio to death for the defamation of his character. Despite the fact that the punishment is swiftly mitigated, the Duke does not forget Lucio’s slanders uttered against him in Act 3 Scene 1, whatever he may claim (5. 1. 518), and when Lucio complains against the severity of his punishment, Vincentio proclaims ‘Slandering a prince deserves it’ (5. 1. 523). The Duke’s musings over defamation—‘What king so strong | Can tie the gall up in the slanderous tongue? (3. 1. 447)—show how little he has enjoyed his encounter with Lucio. In Act 3 Scene 1 the Duke’s humility in becoming an ordinary man is put to a rather severe test. The devil openly taunts Jesus, whereas Lucio is not aware that he is provoking the Duke, but both the devil and Lucio share an uneasy ignorance of exactly who their interlocutor is. The possibility of Coghill’s reading—that Lucio has genuinely penetrated the Duke’s disguise—interacts with the devil’s uncertainty about whether Jesus is truly God. Both Lucio and Satan remain on the borderline between knowledge and ignorance, and in both Shakespeare and the mystery plays the uncertainty is played as comedy. The dramatic irony which makes the scenes between the Duke and Lucio funny is also present in ⁷¹ Perkins, Satans Sophostrie, C2v . See also John Udall, The Combate betwixt CHRIST and the Deuil (London, 1588), B3v ; Andrewes, The Wonderfvll Combate, G2v . ⁷² The Register of the Privy Council of Scotland, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh: HM General Register House, 1881), iv. 141.

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that early joke in the Chester play in which the devil promises secrecy which the audience contradict by their presence. Dramatic irony gives the spectators a sense of power, an ascendancy over the character who provides it, and this is necessary to the comedic ending of the mystery plays’ plot. The audience know that Christ is God and because the devil does not, the redemptive ending is assured. Likewise the fact that the Friar is also the Duke means that the audience know the monstrous ransom will be unsuccessful and all will end well. The mystery play echo in this scene creates an assurance of a happy ending. It forms part of the comedic impulse of the play. However, unlike in earlier dramatic treatments of the temptation, the comedy is at the expense of the tempted as well as of the tempter. The discomﬁture of the Duke is funny, especially as he immediately seeks the consoling praise of Escalus in order to restore his damaged self-esteem (3. 1. 488). The fundamental issue of half-penetrated disguise is used in a far more broadly humorous way as a comic device in Measure for Measure than it ever was in the mystery plays, for in Shakespeare the disguised ﬁgure does not come out of the encounter unscathed. Christ shows his divinity by rising above all the temptations he is offered. The Duke reveals how human he truly is by being distinctly rattled by the encounter. In Act 3 Scene 1 it is once more Lucio who unconsciously illuminates the pretensions of the Duke to Christlike action. Lucio’s twisted biblical allusions, both to the raising of Lazarus and to the Incarnation, bring forward the true model of divine kingship which the Duke tries to emulate but cannot attain. Early in the play there had been a transient echo of the temptation in the desert in the suggestion that Angelo’s blood is such snow broth that he would not even be attracted by the offer to turn stone into bread: he ‘scarce confesses | That his blood ﬂows, or that his appetite | Is more to bread than stone’ (1. 3. 51–3).⁷³ This ironic glance at Angelo’s apparently Christlike capacity to resist physical pleasure is present to hint at the fall that must inevitably follow such egoism. The biblical echo points to an obvious satire against Angelo—who, as it turns out, is not very good at resisting temptation—but its resurfacing in Act 3 Scene 1 forms a subtler and gentler questioning of the Duke. The biblical resonance, as with the allusion to Romans 9 discussed at the beginning of this chapter, forms an explicit condemnation of Angelo’s behaviour, but the same allusion also highlights some of the inconsistencies in the Duke’s position as he ⁷³ Schanzer, Problem Plays of Shakespeare, 92.

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attempts, but does not precisely achieve, the perfect tempering of justice with mercy. At the climax of the play Vincentio endeavours to create a Last Judgement-like scene, and it is once more Lucio who unwittingly unmasks the skewed connection between the divine prototype and the Duke’s actions, when he declares: ‘the Duke yet will have dark deeds darkly answered: he would never bring them to light’ (3. 1. 435–7). Lucio reverses the biblical commonplace about the apocalypse, the ﬁnal raising of the veil. Christ declares: ‘there is nothing couered, that shall not be reveiled; neither hid, that shal not be knowen. Wherefore whatsoeuer ye haue spoken in darknesse, it shall bee heard in the light’ (Luke 12: 2–3, Matt. 10: 26–7). Lucio’s words, like the Duke’s—‘Look, th’unfolding star calls up the shepherd. Put not yourself into amazement how these things should be; all difﬁculties are but easy when they are known’ (4. 2. 202–5)—link the revelations of the ﬁnal Act with the Last Judgement.⁷⁴ Lucio, however, implies that because of the Duke’s own ‘feeling for the sport’ he would conceal the sexual encounters occurring in the dark corners of his jurisdiction. He turns the biblical phrase upside down: revelation becomes concealment, and judgement, complicity. The Duke struggles free of Lucio’s slander and does (eventually) preside over the disclosures of the ﬁnal act, but he has been the ‘duke of dark corners’ that Lucio calls him. The ideas of light and dark, revelation and judgement, which are encapsulated in both the Duke and Lucio’s speeches are also brought together in the Epistle to the Reader, which James added to the 1603 English edition of Basilikon Doron: ‘Charitable Reader, it is one of the golden Sentences, whiche Christ our Sauiour vttered to his Apostles, that there is nothing so couered, that shal not be reuealed, neither so hidde, that shall not be knowen: and whatsoeuer they have spoken in darkenesse, should be heard in the light.’⁷⁵ James does not see himself as the judge here, but as the accused; and in a theatre even the Duke is open to perpetual scrutiny. The biblical analogues that ratify his power and his actions also subject them to searching analysis. The Duke is a better ruler than Angelo, and he is not the lascivious man that Lucio makes him out to be. The king can be ﬂattered by ⁷⁴ For straight religious readings of Lucio’s words see Gless, Measure for Measure, 254; Sarah C. Velz, ‘Man’s Need and God’s Plan in ‘‘Measure for Measure’’ and Mark IV’, Shakespeare Survey 25 (1972): 37–44. ⁷⁵ James VI & I, Political Works, 4.

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the comparative justice and mercy of this ruler who quotes from his book, and shares his penchant for passing unknown among his people. However, although Lucio’s intended attacks on the Duke’s character may be satire that does not ﬁnally stick, his unconscious echoes of the Christ’s example—the Incarnation, the temptation in the desert, the raising of Lazarus, and the Last Judgement—do draw the Duke’s methods into question. The analogues, like the Duke’s plans, do not run smoothly. The uncomplicated mapping of divinity onto kingship is shown to be impossible as the Duke must resort to disguise and deceitful stratagems to accomplish what Christ performed through sovereignty of nature. James can enjoy the panegyric in which he is praised as a monarch following in the footsteps of God, but he is also reminded to take such panegyric with a pinch of salt. The title of Measure for Measure is drawn from a piece of Scripture which lies at the heart of the problem of the proper relation between justice and mercy. Jesus’ injunction to forgive others is couched in language which recalls the syntax of the old ‘eye for an eye’ law of substitionary justice: Iudge not, and ye shal not be iudged; condemne not, and ye shall not bee condemned: forgiue, and ye shalbe forgiuen. Giue and it shalbe giuen unto you: a good measure, pressed downe, shaken togethr and running ouer shall men giue into your bosome: for with what measure ye mete, with the same shal men mete to you againe.⁷⁶

When the title-phrase is quoted within the play it is intentionally twisted by the Duke so that it appears to partner the law which it is in fact intended to transcend: The very mercy of the law cries out Most audible, even from his proper tongue, ‘An Angelo for Claudio, death for death’. Haste still pays haste, and leisure answers leisure; Like doth quit like, and measure still for measure. (5. 1. 404–8)

‘An eye for an eye’ was indeed ‘the very mercy of the law’: it ensured that the injured party did not exact more than their injury. However, ⁷⁶ Luke 6: 37–8. Compare with Deut. 20: 21, Exod. 21: 23–5, Lev. 24: 17–20. Pope points out that the Lucan version of ‘measure for measure’—with its explicit connection of this passage with the command to forgive—would have been the best known: Pope, ‘Renaissance Background’, 58.

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the Duke hopes that Isabella will hear the new message of mercy which is embedded in his trite, rhyming moralizing about equity. ‘Measure still for measure’ here, therefore, is used in an ironic way, just as it was the ﬁrst time Shakespeare used the phrase in his drama. In 3 Henry VI Warwick twists its meaning to accommodate his revenge ethic: swapping the head of York for the head of Clifford on the town’s gates, arguing that ‘Measure for measure must be answer`ed’ (3 Henry VI, 2. 6. 55). The casual brutality of Warwick’s use of the phrase seems to resonate in Measure for Measure, which likewise revolves around the substitution of heads, as well as their more comedic version—maidenheads. Measure for Measure transforms the ‘head for a head’ ethic of substitutionary justice, but the substitionary mercy which replaces it is not shown to be easy to enforce. Measure for Measure explores the ﬁssures that result when the Gospel’s radical message of mercy is negotiated in the fallen world of human law and order. The practicalities of judicial mercy, which must be faced by a king who wants a Christlike rule, are confronted in the awkward and often unsettling comedy of Shakespeare’s play. As Elizabeth Pope has argued, Shakespeare does not commit the same ideological elisions of which many of his contemporaries were guilty in their discussions of a biblically based government. Instead he holds the doctrine ‘true to its own deepest implications’.⁷⁷ Measure for Measure can be read as an explicit endorsement of James’s project of Christian kingship, but also as an implicit warning that divine mercy and English law are not natural bedfellows, and the attempt to imitate the former while enforcing the latter may be more complex than he, or his subjects, have been led to believe. ⁷⁷ Pope, ‘Renaissance Background’, 71.

Conclusion The ﬁnal scene of one of Shakespeare’s last plays ends with one of his most powerful engagements with earlier biblical theatre. The statue scene in The Winter’s Tale has long been recognized as inﬂuenced by the mystery plays and has often been described in frankly religious terminology.¹ This scene also lies at the heart of the ‘spiritual’ reading of Shakespeare’s late plays which has been emphasized at the expense of recognizing biblical allusions and mystery play staging in Shakespeare’s earlier works. This book, however, has endeavoured to show that an intimate engagement with religious terminology, biblical language, and the scenic form of the mysteries is present from the beginning of Shakespeare’s career. The penultimate scene of The Winter’s Tale involves the reunion between father and daughter. The reunion, however, is not staged, only reported.² Shakespeare bypasses the conclusion which the audience had been expecting and instead redirects its attention to an unexpected, miraculously happy ending.³ The explanation of why Shakespeare has resorted to the messenger scene so common in classical drama lies in its power as a foil to the scene that follows, which constructs ‘visual wonder as the truest image of what theater can be’. As Michael O’Connell argues: ‘what becomes most signiﬁcant theatrically is the way the scene comes to insist on faith in what is seen … if the scene for the moment

¹ Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge: In Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 218; O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 142. It was perhaps in recognition of this that The Winter’s Tale was chosen for a court performance on Easter Tuesday 1618: Chris R. Hassel, Renaissance Drama & the English Church Year (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979), 142. ² For Johnson’s imputation of laziness in Shakespeare for only narrating this scene, see The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson: Johnson on Shakespeare (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), vii. 308. ³ J. A. Bryant, Hippolyta’s View: Some Christian Aspects of Shakespeare’s Plays (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1961), 207–8.

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fully associates theatricality with idolatry, Shakespeare does not counter, but embraces the charge’.⁴ As Hermione’s statue is brought back to life, the on-stage audience who love her ache to touch her. Perdita asks ‘Give me that hand of yours to kiss’ to which Paulina responds ‘O, patience! | The statue is but newly ﬁxed; the colour’s | Not dry’ (5. 3. 46–8). The desire is likewise expressed by Leontes, to whose impetuous ‘I will kiss her’ Paulina responds: ‘Good my lord, forbear. | The ruddiness upon her lip is wet. | You’ll mar it if you kiss it’ (5. 3. 80–2). When Mary Magdalen approaches her risen Lord she also tries to touch him and receives the reply: ‘touch me not: for I am not yet ascended to my Father’.⁵ Paulina’s swift admonition that the onlookers must not touch the statue is linked with Christ’s ‘Noli me tangere’ because in both cases the precipitance of human desire for physical intimacy is out of keeping with the mystery. The Bishops’ Bible’s gloss understands Jesus’ enigmatic utterance in precisely this way ‘hereby Christe corrected her carnal affection, lokynge to much to his bodyly presence’. In the Bible, Mary only tries to touch Jesus, but in the N-town play she desires, with Perdita and Leontes, to kiss him: ‘thyn holy fete that I may kys’ (37. 41).⁶ The situation of revelatory reappearance and the impulsive but rebuffed affection of someone for a beloved who they thought was dead is sufﬁciently close for the speciﬁc connections of ‘do not touch’ and the possible shared staging of the kiss to be striking. There is another illuminating connection between the two moments, in that Paulina’s swift prohibition is metonymic of a deeper separation. The reconciliation between Hermione and Leontes (unlike that of Mary and Christ) is physical, but because it is not verbal it is not complete and she holds back from him something she does ⁴ O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 140–1. ⁵ John 20: 17. ⁶ Cynthia Marshall, Last Things and Last Plays: Shakespearean Eschatology (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991), 122–6; Cynthia Lewis, ‘Soft Touch: On the Renaissance Staging and Meaning of the ‘‘Noli me tangere’’ Icon’, Comparative Drama 361 (2002): 54, 70. The expression of the Magdalen’s spiritual love of Christ as desire for physical intimacy with him is quite common in medieval plays. For example, in the anonymous Florentine Rappresentazione della conversione di Santa Maria Maddalena, she also longs: ‘to press my lips to your feet’ (quoted and translated in O’Connell, Idolatrous Eye, 76). The Holkham Bible Picture Book likewise portrays the Marys kissing the feet of the resurrected Christ: The Anglo-Norman Text of the Holkham Bible Picture Book, ed. F. P. Pickering (Oxford: Anglo-Norman Text Society, 1971), fo. 36. For another possible reference to the Noli me tangere in Shakespeare see Cynthia Lewis, ‘Viola’s ‘‘Do Not Embrace Me’’ as Icon’, Notes & Queries 233/4 (1988): 473–4; Yu Jin Ko, ‘The Comic Close of Twelfth Night and Viola’s Noli me tangere’, Shakespeare Quarterly 48 (1997): 391–405.

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not withhold from her daughter. Christ speaks to Mary, but he will not let her touch him, a reserve which he does not display in his dealings with the other disciples: Thomas, for example, is enjoined to put his hand into Christ’s side. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century theologians generally explained Christ’s reaction in terms either of the Magdalen’s sin—as a prostitute she was too ﬂeshly minded—or metaphorically as a message to the believer to look beyond things of the ﬂesh and towards those of the spirit. The need to explain away the apparent rebuff (why should her loving gesture meet with coldness?) shows that it was recognized.⁷ Hermione embraces her husband, but she does not speak to him. The physical reunion which Christ had forbidden is, after the initial reaction of Paulina, allowed, but the lack of speech makes it, in some sense, incomplete. Shakespeare includes the faintest echo of the incestuous desire (which, in his source, Pandosto feels for his daughter) in Leontes’s admiration of Perdita’s beauty, and the reunion resonates with the unfaithfulness of Alcestis’s husband who seeks another bride. Hermione, like Alcestis, does not speak to her husband once she has come back from the dead.⁸ Shakespeare makes a powerful, swift, and widely comprehensible allusion to the difﬁculties of reunion by importing the trappings of a Noli me tangere scene into his work. The religious echo makes these ideas comprehensible to almost all his audience, not simply to those literate members who had read Pandosto, or the occasional one who might have been aware of Alcestis. Hermione forgives her husband, but the moment of reunion remains problematic. The Noli me tangere is a perfect image for a lack of smoothness that is not unloving. One of the reasons that the recognition of the Noli me tangere here is particularly powerful is that in addition to the sacred analogue of a secular reunion which captures both the passion and the uncertainty with which Shakespeare has imbued his story, there is also space in this play to import some of the holiness of the biblical original. The story about the resurrected Christ has particular resonance for The Winter’s Tale in which Hermione is apparently coming back from the dead not only for ⁷ Lancelot Andrewes preached his 1621 Easter sermon precisely on this question: Andrewes, XCVI Sermons, Ccc4r -Ddd2v . ⁸ For more on the connections with Alcestis, see Sarah Dewar-Watson, ‘Shakespeare’s Poetics: Genre and The Winter’s Tale’ (M.Phil. diss., University of Oxford, 2002), 63–8. Milton’s sonnet XIX likewise connects the Alcestis story with the Christian associations of ‘Jove’s great son’: John Milton, Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 1997), 348.

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the on-stage audience but also, and almost uniquely in Shakespeare, for the theatre audience too. Shakespeare preserves Paulina’s secret, and the biblical connection, alluding to a real return from the dead, deepens the theatrical mystiﬁcation of the moment. There is no theological relation between Hermione and Jesus, but in a culture in which the primary myth of faith centred on someone rising again, Shakespeare’s scene is parasitic upon the wonder that the Resurrection generates. Throughout Shakespeare’s career he was inﬂuenced by both the Bible and biblical drama. Shakespeare’s knowledge of the Bible inﬂuenced the verbal texture of his work, and the memory of the mystery cycles affected the scenic structure of his plays. The allusive relations that he created with these religious texts were, however, ﬂexible and openended. They allowed a connection between the secular play and sacred narrative which enhanced the story Shakespeare is telling, rather than subordinating it. In The Winter’s Tale it is the staging of the moment, even more than the words, which creates the affective power of the scene. The speciﬁc memory of the mysteries seems to be awakened in the dramatist at precisely these moments of powerful visual theatre—the near-blinding of Arthur, the reappearance of Claudio, the convergence of Romeo and the Friar on Juliet’s tomb—moments when it is what is seen, rather than what is spoken which is fundamentally important. As Emrys Jones has argued, at such moments, ‘Shakespeare has invented something—a structure, an occasion—which may be said to be (however dangerous the phrase) independent of the words which are usually thought to give the scene its realization. This ‘‘something’’ we may call a ‘‘scenic form’’.’⁹ Shakespeare’s masterly construction of some of his most powerful scenes—Macbeth’s banquet, the blinding of Gloucester, the night before Agincourt—draws on the stagecraft of the mystery plays, and these deep allusions to the structure of the biblical drama show that Shakespeare did not consider his memory of them as an unusual or private thing, but as a shared consciousness of a theatrical past, a heritage which could be drawn on and which would bring with it some of the richness of earlier English theatre. The religious context of Shakespeare’s plays includes vestigial traces of Catholicism’s visual emphasis—in the mystery plays, liturgy, and church decoration—but it also centres on the rich verbal stimulus of Protestantism’s focus on the Word. Shakespeare’s theatrical medium ⁹ Emrys Jones, Scenic Form in Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1971), 3.

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meant that he was able to embrace both these aspects and engage with both aural and visual modes of communicating stories, ideas, and emotions. Only once we have come to recognize the inﬂuence of competing strands of Christianity on theatrical presentation in this period will we understand how religion was assimilated into the ostensibly secular drama of early-modern England.

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Index Andrewes, Lancelot 22, 83, 111, 130, 134, 139, 175–6, 178 Aristotle: and thwarting of expectation 67 and unity of action 43–4, 48 As You Like It, and Catholic references 29 Ascham, Roger 45 Ashton, Thomas 16–17, 35 Atonement: and ‘guiler beguiled’ model of 126, 128, 135 and Henry IV, Part 1 121, 128, 133–4, 152 and mystery plays 128–9 Aylesbury, Thomas 26 Bains, Yaship 71 Bale, John 15, 93, 94, 95, 177 and God’s Promises 15–16, 54 and harrowing of hell 137 and John the Baptist’s Preaching 54 and King Johan 90, 99 Balsall, Dean Thomas 84–5 Barber, C. L. 56 Barnes, Barnaby 30–1 Barton, John 100–1 Battenhouse, Roy 110 Beard, Thomas, and Theatre of God’s Judgements 16 Beckwith, Sarah 57 bedding: and Romeo and Juliet 82–3 and sepulchre in Tudor England 83–4 B`eze, Theodore de 15, 22 and Abraham’s Sacriﬁce 17 Bible: and associations of biblical language 23–4 as dramatic source 15–18, 25 Protestant drama 19 and religious instruction 12–16 and Shakespeare: allusions to 10–11, 23–5 knowledge of 21–3

and versions of 21–2 and widespread knowledge of 11, 18 Billington, Sandra 110 Bilson, Thomas 137–8, 154–5 Birde, William 17 Bishops’ Bible (1568) 21–2 Black, James 24 Blayney, Peter 70 Boulton, Jeremy 31 Brooke, Arthur 61 Bucer, Martin 15 Calvin, John 137, 138, 163 Careless, John 37 Carleton, Dudley 160, 161–2 catechisms 13–14 Catholicism: and assimilation of 33 and continued affection for 28–9 and persistence of pre-Reformation Catholicism 26–7 and references in contemporary literature 30–1 as religion of the eye 59 and residual Catholicism 27, 32 and Shakespeare: engagement with 32–3 references to 29–30, 31 and theatre 56–8 and visual splendour 57 censorship: and impact on use of language 21 and outlawing of Christian drama 20 and theatre 16, 20–1 Censorship Commission 20 Chester mystery play cycle 33–4 see also mystery plays Chettle, Henry 17 Cheyne, John 84 church attendance 11–12 Churchyard, Thomas 17 Clarke, Cecil 176 Clopper, Lawrence 34, 38 Coghill, Nevill 72, 172, 173–4, 179 Collinson, Patrick 31 Cooper, Helen 52

224 Cooper, Helen (cont.) and embodied action 53–4 Corpus Christi festival 34–6 and Incarnation 51–2 and mystery plays 50–1 see also mystery plays Coventry mystery cycle 36–9 see also mystery plays Cox, John D. 42, 47 Cranach, Lucas 111 Cranmer, Thomas 78 Cressy, David 12, 33 Crockett, Bryan 13 Cruciﬁxion: and Henry V 149–50 and mystery plays 63–4 gambling soldiers 150 release of doves 64 Cymbeline, and Catholic references 29 Dawson, Anthony 58, 59 death, and Romeo and Juliet 66 comedic use of 60, 66–7 elasticity of 60 Juliet’s tomb 80–2 as bed 82–3, 85 pre-echoes of 64–5 Dee, John 123 Dekker, Thomas 17 Dickens, A. G. 27 Diehl, Huston 58 disguised rulers 168–71 and Measure for Measure 171–4 temptation in the desert allusions 174–80 and Prince/King Henry 126–7 divine right/divinity: and disguised ruler 167–70 and justice and mercy 160–1 and King John 89 and Measure for Measure 7–8, 155, 161, 182 and mystery of state 166–7 and Richard II 125 and royalty 89, 90, 93, 127–8 Donaldson, Peter 81 Donne, John 31, 73 doves, in mystery plays 64 dramatic theory: and comedy 85–6 and embodied action 53–5 and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2 and Jonson 44–5

Index and mystery plays 46–7 and plot structure 48–9 and presentation of violence 49–50 and romance 45–6 and separation of rank 46–7 and sub-plots 48 and unities of time and place 43–4 and verbal drama 53, 54 and violation of classical prescriptions 43–9 Duffy, Eamon 31, 32 Dugdale, Sir William 38 Duncan-Jones, Katherine 71 Easter: and paschal motif in Romeo and Juliet 7, 61 changes in time 75–6 cock crow 75–7 Juliet’s death 65 Juliet’s infancy 62–5 Juliet’s tomb 80–2 Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85 light imagery 80–1 nurse’s anecdote 63–5 Romeo’s dream 68 use of sepulchre 77, 80–3 variations in First and Second Quartos 61–2, 72 and sepulchre in Tudor England 77–80 education, and Protestant evangelism 12, 13–14 Edwardian Injunctions (1547) 2 Eedes, Richard 154–5 Elizabeth I 55 and comparison to Christ 91–2 and cult of virgin queen 91 and death of 92 and use of religious imagery 120 and visibility of 166–7 Elton, W. R. 158–9 embodied action 53–4 and idolatry 54–5 Empson, William 49 Erne, Lucas 70 Flower Portrait 5–6 Foxe, John 14, 90, 94, 97, 109, 131 and Actes and Monuments 14, 91–2, 98 death of John 99–100

Index and Christ Jesus Triumphant 15, 136 and theatre as didactic tool 15 funeral rites, and Hamlet 3–4 Garter, Thomas 17 Garyngton, John 80–1 Geneva New Testament 22 Gethsemane: and Henry IV, Part 1 132 and Henry V 147–9 Gibson, Gail McMurray 51, 52 Gospel of Nicodemus 134–5 Gosson, Stephen 54, 55 Grafton, Richard 94 Greenblatt, Stephen 30, 56 Greene, Robert 17 Gregory of Nyssa 128, 175 Greville, Fulke 16 Grindal, Archbishop 34 Guthrie, Tyrone 176 Hackett, Helen 30, 91 Haigh, Christopher 32 Halio, Jay 71 Hamlet: and biblical allusions 24 and funeral rites 3–4 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 40 Hampton Court Conference 156 Happ´e, Peter 48 Harington, Sir John 160 harrowing of hell 134–6 and debate over doctrine 137–8 and freeing of souls 140 and Henry IV, Part 1 152 and mystery plays 134–5, 142–3, 145 and questioning of champion’s identity 144–5 and Spenser’s use of imagery of 138–9 and visual representations of 136–7 Hatﬁeld, Elizabeth 84 Haughton, William 17 Hazlitt, William 109 Henry IV, Part 1 and Atonement 128 allusions to Isaiah 133–4 guiler beguiled theory 128 and Christ’s temptation 128–30 and Falstaff: failure to understand Hal 129

225 as father ﬁgure 132 Lenten imagery 129–31 postpones Hal’s rebirth 145 Puritan idiom 131–2 and Gethsemane 132 and Hal: allusions to Isaiah 133–4 calculated use of religious language 122, 125 comparison with Christ 127, 142 failure to recognize in battle 144–5 Falstaff ’s failure to understand 129 freeing of prisoner 140 Incarnational allusions 126 masking of nobility 127 reconciliation with his father 132–3 redemption 121–2 resurrection postponed 145 strategy of 122, 129 twin-natured kingship 127–8 use of disguises 126–7 victory over Hotspur 129, 139, 142 and harrowing of hell 152 and holy monarchy 122 and Hotspur: failure to understand Hal 143–4 Hal’s victory over 129, 142 linked to Lucifer 139–40 medieval characterization of evil 141 nobility of 141 retention of prisoners 141–2 and Lenten imagery 129–31 and redemption 121–2 and religious iconography 7 and sub-plots 48 and tavern scenes 129 and use of sepulchre 77 see also harrowing of hell Henry IV, Part 2 126 Henry V 121 and Agincourt: absence of sacriﬁce 150–1 gambling French soldiers 150 Henry on eve of 147–9 as secular Cruciﬁxion 149–50 singing of Te Deum 151 and allusions to Gethsemane 147–9

226 Henry V (cont.) and Dauphin’s underestimation of Henry 146–7 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 40 and King Henry: in disguise 127 on eve of Agincourt 147–9 hypocrisy of 146 illusion of divinity 153 as perfect ruler 145–6 reinvests monarchy with divinity 146 resurrection 145 singing of Te Deum 151 and structure of 146 and Wars of the Roses 152–3 Henry VI, Part 2, and inﬂuence of mystery plays 42 Henry VI, Part 3 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 40, 42 and ‘measure for measure’ 183 Henry VIII 94, 96, 97–8, 151 Henslowe’s Diary 17 Heywood, John 37 Hill, Adam 137 Hoby, Lady Margaret 14 Holinshed, Raphael 94, 109, 151 Holt, J. C. 92 Hooker, Richard 22 Hume, Alexander 137 Hutton, Dean of York 55 Hutton, Ronald 33 idolatry: and embodied action 54–5 and mystery plays 55 and theatre 55 illiteracy 15 Incarnation: and Henry IV, Part 1 126 and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2 and Measure for Measure 171–4 and mystery plays 41, 46, 47, 50 and visual arts 52 inﬁdelity, and mystery plays 42–3 Ingram, Martin 39 Innocent III, Pope 93 Ioppolo, Grace 62, 71 Isaac: and allusions in King John 110–11 and blindfolding of 116–17 and mystery plays 113–14, 115

Index Jacob and Esau (1568) 19 James I (VI of Scotland) 92 and disguised ruler 167–8 and ﬂattery 162 Middleton’s The Phoenix 168–70 and justice and mercy: capricious approach to 159–60 divine aspects of 160–1 as giver of life 161–2 reprieve of Bye plot conspirators 160, 161 summary execution 159 and Measure for Measure 154 oblique criticism in 159 similarities with the Duke 159 and mystery of state 166–7 and Puritan hopes of 156 and revelation 181 and secrecy 166, 167 and slander 179 John, King: and crowned on Ascension Day 92 and death of, religious comparisons 98–100 and divinity 89 and portrayal of 89, 93–4 compared to David 95–6 prophecy of 95, 97–8 see also King John Jones, Emrys 39, 124, 187 Jones, John 75 Jonson, Ben: and Every Man in his Humour 44 and The Magnetic Lady 44 and satire of theatre 44–5 Kerrigan, John 62 King John: and Arthur: allusions to Isaac’s sacriﬁce 110–11 association with Richard I 104 binding of 115–16 centrality of 102–3 claims God’s sanction 106–7 death of 108–9 describes himself as a lamb 112–13 desire for life 114 desire for paternal love 114 helplessness of 115 innocence of 110, 115, 118, 119

Index as locus for holiness 90–1, 102, 120 near-blinding of 90, 110, 118–19, 120 portrayal of 89 portrayed as child 109–10, 115 wishes to be a shepherd 113 and baron’s revolt 103, 108 and Christian imagery 7 and Constance, augmentation of role of 103–4 and heavenly portents 107–8 and King John: human power 107 moral deterioration of 106 orders Arthur’s death 106 portrayal of 90 reduced religious signiﬁcance of 100–2 weakness of 104–6 and monk’s death 100 and mystery plays, inﬂuence of 110–11, 119–20 and softening of anti-Catholic rhetoric 100 see also John, King; Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591) King Lear: and biblical allusions 24–5 and blinding of Gloucester 117 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 42 Lake, Peter 155–6, 157 Lambarde, William 59 Langland, William, and Piers Plowman 135, 140, 141, 145 Larkin, Philip 1 Last Judgement, and Measure for Measure 181 Lateran Council (1215) 51 Latimer, Hugh 26 Laxton, Basilla 84 Lazarus: and allusions in Measure for Measure 162–6 and mystery plays 162, 163, 164, 165 Lent, and Henry IV, Part 1 129–31 Leo the Great, Pope 128 Levin, Carole 101 literacy 12 Lodge, Thomas 17 London:

227 and growth of 36 and mystery plays 36 Love’s Labour’s Lost, and biblical allusions 10 Lurhman, Baz 81 Luther, Martin 136 Macbeth: and biblical allusions 24 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 42 Machiavelli, Niccol`o 125–6 Machyn, Henry 1, 36 MacLean, Sally-Beth 19, 96 McMillin, Scott 19, 96 Madden, John 60 Maguire, Laurie 70 Malone, Edward 28, 32 Marlow, Richard 35 Marlowe, Christopher, and Edward II 124–5 Marotti, Arthur F 32–3 Marprelate, Martin 19–20, 137 Marrow, James 118 Martin, Roger 79 Mather, Samuel 113 Measure for Measure: and Angelo 155 conﬂation of human and divine law 156–7 fall of 157–8 integrity of 157 and biblical allusions 157 and Claudio: arrest of 157 relationship with death 164–5 return as raising of Lazarus 162–6 and comedic impulse of 180 and conﬂation of human and divine law 155 and divine rule 7–8, 155 ideal of kingship 161 impossibility of 182 and the Duke 155 attempt to stage a ‘Last Judgement’ 181 damaged self-esteem 180 as giver of life 165 imperfect imitation of Christ 166, 180–1 Incarnational allusions 171–4 Lucio’s slanders 179 mercy of 158 mystery of state 166

228 Measure for Measure: (cont.) policy of non-explanation 161 quasi-divine attributes 162 similarities with James I 159 temptation in the desert allusions 174–80 and godly rule, critique of 155–6, 183 and James I 154 oblique criticism of 159 and justice and mercy 157, 182–3 uneven application of 158 and legal audience of 158–9 and Lucio 181 character of 178 as devil 176–8 slander 179 temptation in the desert allusions 174–80 and Mistress Overdone 158 and origin of title 182 and silences in 164 and sources for 47, 170–1 Merchant of Venice, The and biblical allusions 23 and Catholic references 29 Merry Wives of Windsor, The: and biblical allusions 23 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 40 meta-theatricality 58–9 Middleton, Thomas, and The Phoenix 168–70 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 60 and Catholic references 29 and comedy 86 Milward, Peter 29 Montrose, Louis 57 More, Sir Thomas 45 Morey, James 99, 100, 101 Munday, Anthony 2–3, 4, 17 Mutschmann, H. 32 mystery plays: and Atonement 128–9 and Christ’s cruciﬁxion 63–4 gambling soldiers 150 release of doves 64 and Corpus Christi festival 50–1 and Coventry mystery cycle 36–9 and doves in 64 and dramatic theory 46–7 and Elizabethan theatre 43 and embodied action 53–5 and Gethsemane 147, 148

Index and harrowing of hell 134–5, 142–3, 145 and idolatry 55 and Incarnation 41, 46, 47, 50 and inﬁdelity 42–3 and Isaac: blindfolding of 116–17 Isaac’s sacriﬁce 111–12, 113–14, 115 and King John, inﬂuence on 110–11, 119–20 in London 36 and mixing of ranks 46–7 and presentation of violence 49–50 and Protestant reworking of 15–16 and raising of Lazarus 162, 163, 164, 165 and royalty 96–7 and secret Passion 117–18 and Shakespeare 36–7, 39–43, 47, 187 and suffering 50 and survival of: Elizabethan period 33–5 Jacobean period 35–6 and Te Deum 151 and temptation of Christ 175, 177, 179–80 and torture of Christ 116 Nashe, Thomas 19, 130, 168 Noli me tangere, and The Winter’s Tale 185–6 Norbrook, David 91 Norman, Marc 60 Nuttal, A. D. 158, 172 O’Connell, Michael 41, 51, 184–5 and presentation of violence 50 and theatrical spectacle 58–9 Ong, Walter 8 Ordo Prophetarum 96–7, 98 pagan religion, and theatrical use of 20–1 Paget, Eusebius 14 pain, and inexpressibility of 49–50 Painter, William 61 Paris, Matthew 93, 94–5 Passion plays, and Protestant staging of 16–17 Patterson, Annabel 21

Index Peele, George 17–18 Pericles 45 Perkins, William 174–5 Phillips, Robin 174 plot structure 48–9 Poole, Kirsten 130–1 Pope, Elizabeth 183 Porter, Isabel 26 preaching, and popularity of 13 Prophets’ Plays, The 96–7, 98 Protestantism 6 and catechisms 13–14 and preaching 13 and Protestant drama 19 as religion of the ear 59 as religion of the Word 12 and religious education 12–13 and theatre: engagement with 58 hostility towards 52–3, 55–6 impact on 56–7 verbal drama 54 see also religious instruction Prynne, William 13, 36 psalm-singing 14 Puritans: and harrowing of hell 137 and James I 156 and Lent 131 and theatre 55–6 Queen’s Men 19 Ralph of Coggeshall 93 Randolph, Thomas, and The Muses Looking-Glass 55–6 Rankins, William 53 Rape of Lucrece, The 83 Reformation: and destruction of rood-lofts 1–3 and printed word 8–9 religious conformity 12 religious instruction: and catechisms 13–14 and cheap religious print 14–15 and literacy 12 and psalm-singing 14 and sermons 13 and theatre 15–16 and visual culture 14 resurrection: and Henry V 145

229 and The Winter’s Tale 184–7 Richard II : and biblical allusions 24 and divine right 125 and inﬂuence of mystery plays 41 and political ineptitude 125 and self-comparison with Christ 123–4, 125 and sources for: French chronicles 123 Marlowe’s Edward II 124–5 and use of sepulchre 77 Robinson, J. W. 117–18 Roger of Wendover 93, 109 Rogerson, Margaret 38 Rolle, Richard 64 romance 45–6 Romeo and Juliet 80–1 and comedy: death 60, 66–7 dramatic theory 85–6 expectations of 86 Juliet 63, 67 nurse’s tardiness 65–6 tragic use of 67 variations in First and Second Quartos 61–2, 86–8 and death 66 comedic use of 60, 66–7 elasticity of 60 Juliet’s tomb 80–2 Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85 pre-echoes of 64–5 and liturgical year references 72–3 and opposition of youth and age 65–6 and paschal motif 7, 61 changes in time 75–6 cock crow 75–7 Juliet’s death 65 Juliet’s infancy 62–5 Juliet’s tomb 80–2 Juliet’s tomb as bed 82–3, 85 light imagery 80–1 nurse’s anecdote 63–5 Romeo’s dream 68 use of sepulchre 77, 80–3 variations in First and Second Quartos 61–2, 72 and religious language 68–70 and sources for 61 and thwarting of expectation 67

230 Romeo and Juliet (cont.) and variations in First and Second Quartos 61–2 comedy 86–8 curtaining of Juliet’s body 81–2 Easter motif 72 explanations of 71–2 Juliet’s characterization 73–4 Juliet’s treatment by parents 75 number changes 75–7 old age 66 proposed marriage of Juliet and Paris 74–5 Shakespeare’s intentions 62 status of First Quarto 70–1 use of sepulchre 77, 80–3 rood-lofts 1–3 Rowley, Samuel 17 royalty: and divine right 93 and divinity 89, 90, 127–8 see also divine right/divinity Rubin, Miri 79 Ryan, Patrick 124 St Gregory of Nazianzus 54, 55 Sams, Eric 32 Samson 117–18 Scarisbrick, J. J. 32 Scarry, Elaine 49–50 Scoufos, Alice 130 Seddon, John 13 Seneca 49, 53 sepulchre: and bedding 83–4 in Romeo and Juliet 77, 80–3 and Shakespeare’s references to 77 in Tudor England 77–80 sermons, and popularity of 13 Shaheen, Naseeb 22 Shakespeare, John 1–2 and ﬁnancial difﬁculties 28 and recusancy 27–8 and Spiritual Last Will and Testament 28 Shakespeare, William: and Bible: allusions to 10–11, 23–5, 187 knowledge of 21–3 and Catholicism: nature of engagement with 32–3 personal beliefs 4–5, 6, 27, 31–2 references to 29–30, 31

Index and dramatic theory: mixing of ranks 47 presentation of violence 49–50 sub-plots 48 and Flower Portrait 5–6 and harmonization of visual and aural 59 and mystery plays 36–7, 39–43, 47, 187 and Protestantism 6 and religious context of plays 187–8 and scenic form 187 see also entries for individual plays Sharpe, Kevin 159 Shaw, John 35 Shuger, Debora 47 Sider, John 104 Sidney, Philip 16, 18 and dramatic theory 46 Sims, James 152 Sir Thomas More (Munday et al) 2–3 slander: and James I 179 and temptation of Christ 178–9 Snyder, Susan 24, 66–7, 86, 87 Southwell, Robert 76 Sparke, Thomas 13 Spenser, Edmund 31, 138–9 Stonor, Cecily 26 Stoppard, Tom 60 Stow, John 123 suffering 49–50 Taunton, Nina 148–9 Taylor, Gary 62 Taylor, John 131 temptation in the desert: and Henry IV, Part 1 128–30 and Measure for Measure 174–9 and mystery plays 175, 177, 179–80 and slander 178–9 theatre 16–17 and anti-Catholicism 52–3 and assimilation of Catholic practice 33 and biblically based drama 16–18 and Catholicism 56–8 and censorship 16, 20–1 and characteristics of 59 and the disguised ruler 167, 168–71 and dramatic theory 43–4 comedy 85–6 Jonson’s satire 44–5

Index mystery plays 46–7 plot structure 48–9 presentation of violence 49–50 romance 45–6 separation of rank 46–7 sub-plots 48 violation of classical prescriptions 43–9 and embodied action 53–5 and idolatry 54–5 and Incarnational aesthetic 51–2 and late-Elizabethan hostility to 53 and Martin Marprelate controversy 19–20 and meta-theatricality 58–9 and mystery plays 43 and outlawing of Christian drama 20 and Protestantism: engagement with 58 hostility of 52–3, 55–6 impact of 56–7 Protestant drama 19 and religious instruction 15 and use of pagan religion 20–1 and use of vestments 56–7 and verbal drama 53, 54 and visual splendour 57 see also mystery plays Thomson, Peter 101 Tomson, Laurence 22 Tomson New Testament 22 transubstantiation 51 Troilus and Cressida 158–9 and Catholic references 29 Troublesome Raigne of King John (1591) 90, 93 and Arthur 103 age of 109 death of 114 and death of John 108 and heavenly portents 107

231 and John’s prophecy 95, 97–8 and portrayal of John 94, 100, 105, 107 compared to David 95–6 Jesse tree 96 and Richard I 104 see also King John Twelfth Night, and Catholic references 29 Tyndale, William 93 Urban IV, Pope 51 Urkowitz, Steven 71, 74–5 vestments, and theatrical use of 56–7 Vices 177–8 violence, and presentation on stage 49–50 visual culture, and religious instruction 14 Wager, Lewis 17 Walsham, Alexandra 32, 33 Warren, Michael 62 Wars of the Roses 152–3 Watt, Tessa 14, 33 Weever, John 35–6 Weldon, Anthony 167 Wenterdorf, K. 32 Whetstone, George 46–7 and Promos and Cassandra 46–7, 170–1 Wickham, Glynne 42, 56, 57 Wilkinson, Gregory 26 Williams, Arnold 176 Willyams, Henry 83–4 Wilson, Richard 29, 30, 32 Winter’s Tale, The, resurrection and the statue scene 184–7 Womack, Peter 45 Woolf, Rosemary 115