We British: The Poetry of a People

We British: The Poetry of a People Andrew Marr ‘This book includes some of the greatest of our poetry. I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now.’We British is much more than an anthology. This is a veritable history of Britain, told through the verse of its greatest poets. With the entertaining and enlightening Andrew Marr as our guide, we travel from Saxon settlements to medieval courts, from Shakespeare’s Globe to the battlefields of the Somme, ending up here in the present day.On the way we will meet Middle English ploughmen, Tudor drunks, Scottish farmers, West Country priests, a Warwickshire actor, and many more bards and balladeers from across the British Isles, each adding their own distinct voice to the chorus. From Caedmon to Zephaniah, the poets we meet will paint a powerful portrait of what it means to be British. (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) Copyright (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) 4th Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF www.4thEstate.co.uk (http://www.4thestate.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by 4th Estate 2015 Text © Andrew Marr 2015 Cover image © ‘Willow Bough’ wallpaper design, 1887, Morris, William (1834–96)/Private Collection/Bridgeman Images Andrew Marr asserts his moral right to be identified as the author of this work A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books. Source ISBN: 9780008130893 Ebook Edition © October 2015 ISBN: 9780008130916 Version: 2016-07-18 Contents Cover (#u947e0f36-059c-5fb3-ad03-c4bc378580cc) Title Page (#ulink_1ffd8f53-7083-5b9b-a2cd-38b9067ca971) Copyright (#ulink_7afbe54b-0edc-5d6e-b1c8-065e4ebd517a) Dedication (#ulink_6ed46105-3f1d-56ce-8bc1-b92a50383310) Introduction (#ulink_488668a5-78e4-5dbf-8d18-8ab34168bb5a) 1 The Earliest English Poetry (#ulink_f4f6fb81-d72d-5581-b78f-c0aa989fd0df) 2 Knights in Green Satin (#ulink_ce6891d4-f24c-5919-8f54-a389765dd24b) 3 Fanatics and Courtiers (#ulink_1bd3eefa-1af0-52c0-8970-cc65c2eb370f) 4 England’s Miracle (#ulink_37b0dda3-aa4a-5467-9a7f-d716d2e38c5f) 5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities (#ulink_c54d9cf2-52a6-564d-9cd4-fe6e665487dc) 6 Nothing Left But Laughter? Britain’s Mullahs Confront the Problem of Pleasure (#litres_trial_promo) 7 The Restoration of What? Satire, Science and Cynicism, as Political Britain is Born (#litres_trial_promo) 8 The Age of Reason. And Slavery, and Filth, and So On (#litres_trial_promo) 9 The Revolution (#litres_trial_promo) 10 Romantic Agonies (#litres_trial_promo) 11 The British Age (#litres_trial_promo) 12 Plush, Mush and a Handful of Titans (#litres_trial_promo) 13 The Poets of More Than One War (#litres_trial_promo) 14 How Modern Were the Modernists? (#litres_trial_promo) 15 Lefties and Righties: Outrage and Laughter in Britain Between the Wars (#litres_trial_promo) 16 Revolt Against the Metropolis: Britain in the 1940s and 50s (#litres_trial_promo) 17 The Age of Larkin (#litres_trial_promo) 18 Fresh Freshness (#litres_trial_promo) 19 Celts, Britons and Their Friends: Modern British Poetry Furth of England (#litres_trial_promo) 20 Here Comes Everybody: The British and Poetry Now (#litres_trial_promo) Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo) Index of Poets (#litres_trial_promo) Also by Andrew Marr (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo) Dedication (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) For Emily, a poetry reader I would also like to thank Gwyneth Williams, Controller of Radio 4, who believed in this project; and James Cook, who led the ‘takeover’ of the channel for National Poetry Day, 8 October 2015 Introduction (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) Beyond the village, there’s some marshy ground. There, on a warm evening, a horny, lonely man is making rhythmic noises and shuffling his feet. Inside his head there’s a kind of music, and what he’s doing is trying to fit words to it, words that express his feelings for a woman – too good for him – living in the village. A few centuries later there’s another man, who feels he has let down God and is facing eternal hellfire. Yet he’s a kindly man, of gentle disposition, and somehow feels that God can’t be as pitiless as the Church elders suggest. So, with a goose quill and a sheaf of rough paper, he is dipping into ink and writing down a kind of private, rather bouncy, prayer. He too is humming. Then there is the woman in a foul dungeon, throbbing with pain from her torture, dictating to a shabby priest her defiant poem against the authorities. There will be many more women – rich, in chambers coloured with stained glass, protected against the cold by animal skins; and poor, living in twentieth-century London, struggling with wailing children and an absent man. And many, many more men, too – Irish mystics, Scottish farmers, West Country priests, a Warwickshire actor – all doing the same thing, setting the words to rhythm, tightening them together like the ropes on a fast-moving yacht, trying to build a compact, thrumming little engine of meaning out of the sprawling magic of the English language. Palaeo-archaeologists, who study early man, tell us that the rhythm and the music came first. Dances, perhaps led by tribal shamans, would be used to bind the people together and to express defiance of the surrounding dark and danger. To keep the beat, it was natural to hum, sing or shout. And at some point it seemed a good idea to add words. The earliest Greek tragedies, with their choruses, music and masks, give us some notion of where poetry came from. The first poets that we know were read and discussed on the archipelago of islands we call British would have been the Latin poets of the Roman Empire. It’s most unlikely that the Bronze Age tribes – technically competent people, farmers and metalworkers, miners and traders – didn’t have their own poetry. But we know nothing about it. The Romano-British, however, would have had their Virgil and their Martial, and indeed their Greeks as well; there would have been poetry recitals in the villas of Sussex, and dirty, clever ditties murmured along Hadrian’s Wall. Eventually, with the scouring of invasion and the countersweep of resistance, with defeats and victories, the ethnic make-up of the British changes, and we begin to see a new language emerging from the clash of the Germanic tongues of invaders, and the Celtic speech, by now mingled with Latin, of the resisters. Like a perpetual bubbling broth, new ingredients will be added again and again through the centuries – Norse Viking, French, Italian and Spanish, Indian and Arabic. This linguistic paella will become the world’s most extensive and flexible human tongue, used by generations of British people to express their strongest innermost feelings, their delight in the world, their loves and their terrors. Most human cultures seem to have specialities, for which they are particularly admired. What would Germany be without its music, or Italy without its painters and architects? The British have never had a musical tradition to rival that of Russia or Germany; or the gloriously exuberant architecture of Paris or Rome; or the coherent worldview of classical China. What they have had is the richest and most remarkable tradition of poetry of any major culture. The ‘nest of singing birds’ remains at the heart of the British achievement – more important, I’d say, than empire or even the extraordinary British leaps forward in science. What follows is an attempt to use British poetry as the framework for a kind of alternative epic, the story of what it was like to be British, told through poetry, and sometimes through the stories of the poets. Hundreds of thousands of Britons have left traces of what it was like to be ‘me in particular’ – letters, drawings, works of art of all kinds, text messages, emails and social-network exhibitionism. Yet poetry is special. It’s the most intimate and direct communication mankind has so far discovered. When it works – and quite often it doesn’t – it can have an intensity and an interiority unmatched by anything else. When Shakespeare describes the accumulated guilt and despair of the murderer Macbeth, we see and hear a mind working in a way that seizes us still in the twenty-first century. We can read about the catastrophe of the First World War; but to feel what it was like to be there, even now, we don’t turn first to the film-makers but to the poets. Those are rather obvious examples. But unlike texts, emails or television, poetry allows people from distant times to talk directly to us, with nobody else getting in the way: a medieval ploughman, a Tudor drunk or a jilted Georgian woman can look us straight in the eyes. Writing this in 2015, I’m acutely conscious that the very word ‘British’ has become controversial. Many of my fellow Scots would far prefer an epic of the Scots in verse – and they can indeed find that. England, happily or otherwise, seems to be beginning to find its own voice again: many contemporary historians now focus unashamedly on the story of England, when perhaps even a decade or two ago they would have automatically reached for Britain. If I restricted what follows to poetry written in English, however, I’d be in a quandary. The ‘Inglis’ tongue was established across much of southern Scotland by the early medieval period – even the patriotic epic about Robert the Bruce is written in a language which owes much more to the Saxon–French mangling we call English than to Gaelic. Scotland’s greatest poets – Dunbar, Henryson, Douglas, Fergusson, Burns, Scott and MacDiarmid – wrote at least sometimes in English; and when there was a determined attempt to return to the older Scottish versions of English in the twentieth century, the prickly ‘Scots’ that emerged was still a cousin of English. The same is true of the other Celtic nations: how could a survey of English poetry ignore Swift, Yeats and Dylan Thomas? There is no political agenda in this book, though many of the experiences of the people across the archipelago have been similar. The Vikings arrived on the coasts of all of Britain, and settled in the Orkney and Shetland Islands, Dublin, the Isle of Man and the Gower Peninsula, as well as York and most of eastern England. The rage of the Reformation arrived in full force in Scotland, as well as England; plagues did not discriminate; nor changes in agriculture; nor many of the wars. So a lot of the British experience has been common, and I aim to reflect that. I also hope to include much that is specific to different parts of these islands. And I have deliberately called this a ‘British’, not an ‘English’, epic, because I’m well aware that so much great poetry has been composed in other languages on these islands. There is a tradition of Gaelic poetry in Scotland, and Irish poetry in Ireland, and the work of the great Welsh bards. The fact that so much of this was transmitted orally, and lacks clarity about its authorship, doesn’t mean it should be excluded. So where I can, I’m going to use non-English British poetry in translation. I wish there was more of it; but that’s the fault of the rot and the rain, not mine. It also means that I will use translations where otherwise modern readers would struggle – thus, of Anglo-Saxon poetry, poetry in dialects from Cheshire to Northumbria, and a little Latin poetry too. Some say poetry today, in the twenty-first century, is going through a revival; others insist that it’s in terminal decline. I suppose that has always been the case. But the very source of the problem is how we hear and absorb poetry. These days most of us come across poetry on the printed page, though many of us were brought up with nursery rhymes recited to us. The story of poetry and the story of writing are closely connected, but historically poetry has more often been an oral art, heard rather than read. Even today some poets refuse to print their work, but insist that it can only be enjoyed properly at a live reading. So radio, as the prime spoken-word medium, even today, is the obvious place for this epic. What you are reading is the longer, book-length version of the takeover of BBC Radio 4 for a whole day. Poetry is going to elbow itself into programmes like Today, refusing to take no for an answer. It’s going to lounge and sprawl between news and weather bulletins, with readings from around the whole country, and poems going back well over a thousand years in time. This book includes some of the greatest of our poetry, including much that is far too little-known. I hope that it adds up to a new way of thinking about who we have been, and who we are now. I hope, as you come on the journey with me, you will find it surprising, uplifting, and at least a little disorientating. 1 The Earliest English Poetry (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) It begins in Yorkshire, on the coast by Whitby, in the year 657. Peat-smoke, the sound of waves and gulls, and winding through them the music of a harp, and words chanted in a language and a dialect so far-away we can barely understand one of them. Nu sculon herigean heofonrices Weard, Meotodes meahte on his modge?anc, weorc Wuldorf?der, swa he wundra gehw?s, ece Drihten, or onstealde. He ?rest sceop eor?an bearnum heofon to hrofe, halig Scyppend; ?a middangeard moncynnes Weard, ece Drihten, ?fter teode firum foldan, Frea ?lmihtig. It’s a very simple little hymn, and the traditional starting point for English poetry. Later on, we’re going to hear a lot from the educated and self-confident elite of the British countries, poets from the great cities and the courts of barons and kings. But we start with a middle-aged man, Caedmon, whose name isn’t English – it might be Celtic – and who was a herdsman looking after bullocks and heifers before he joined the great monastery of Abbess Hild as a farm labourer. He was too shy to take his turn singing poems with the other labourers and monks, and retired to a stable where he fell asleep and had a vision in which he was told to sing about God. His story was told to the abbess, who commanded him to sing, with wonderful results. We know about all of this because of the great chronicler Bede, who was working in Jarrow just fifty years after it all happened. Bede insists, again and again, on the remarkable nature of what Caedmon did. Why? In modern translation his hymn sounds pious but almost blandly straightforward: Now we must praise the Guardian of Heaven, the might of the Lord and his purpose of mind, the work of the Glorious Father; for he, God Eternal, established each wonder, he, Holy Creator, first fashioned heaven as a roof for the sons of men. Then a Guardian of Mankind adorned this middle earth below, the world for men, Everlasting Lord, Almighty King. This hardly seems like the beginning of the great story of English poetry. But almost everything about it should unsettle our sense of who we are, right at the beginning. Let’s start with the obvious, the Christian theme of the poem. Caedmon’s world had been, until relatively recently, a pagan one. Christianity had arrived in Britain long before, towards the end of the Roman era; and it was strongly established in Wales, Ireland and western Scotland, in the Celtic Church whose rites went back to early Rome. Since then, however, the waves of Germanic invaders – Angles from Denmark and northern Germany, the Saxons and the Jutes – had pushed the old Romano-British and Celtic inhabitants to the west, re-establishing paganism as they slaughtered, and then settled. Now, Northumbria, one of the new and powerful Germanic kingdoms of Britain, was being reintroduced to the religion of Christ by missionaries from the Scottish island of Iona, themselves originally Irish. In modern times, we often assume that new ideas bubble up from the south and move north – and for centuries the Celts and the Irish were regarded by the southern English as barbarians. All wrong: right here at the beginning of the story, the new Christian religion had been brought southwards and eastwards from the north and west. Caedmon’s monastery itself had been founded by Irish monks. Eventually, a different form of Christianity would push up across the Channel, and establish a new base at Canterbury, after Pope Gregory I sent Bishop Augustine to the court of King Aethelbert of Kent in 596. But when our ploughman made his poetry he was living in the Celtic religious world, not the English one. Caedmon’s Northumbria, with its monasteries at Lindisfarne, Whitby and Jarrow, was a great European centre of learning until it fell to the Vikings. And if many today think of Canterbury as the natural home of ‘English Christianity’, let’s remember that Canterbury’s power owed much to the arrival of a Greek, Theodore, and a North African monk, Hadrian. Caedmon’s Britain was differently shaped from today’s state. After the withdrawal of the Roman Empire, the islands were a hodge-podge of tiny warring statelets: warlords passed power to their children and established royal dynasties. These slowly congealed into larger kingdoms. The great ethnic division was between the Celtic or British people still surviving in the west and north, and their enemies, the immigrant Germanic tribes of the south and east. Today ‘Welsh’ describes the land and the people to the west of Offa’s Dyke, the smallest of the nations of Britain. But around the time Caedmon was writing, the ‘Welsh’ were everywhere. There was for instance a kingdom of Welsh-speaking people to the north, centred on Edinburgh, fighting for their survival against the Saxons of Northumbria. The tragic war poem about their failure and slaughter, Y Goddodin, is considered one of the earliest Welsh poems; it’s classic, heroic-battle-against-the-odds stuff, though it perhaps didn’t help its three hundred heroes that they had spent a year getting drunk on mead before they finally went into battle. Although the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians were pushing the British or Celtic people back, there was no sense that one side was more cultured than the other. The heroes of Goddodin seem, as it happens, to have been Christians fighting pagans. Does any of this matter much? Only because we need to shake up our ideas about what the very words ‘British’, ‘English’ or ‘Welsh’ mean. This was a harried, violent and marginal archipelago in which the offer of Christianity spread remarkably fast because it promised a happy and tranquil life after death – a great alternative to the cold, dangerous and relatively short experience of life in Northumbria, or anywhere else. But it would also be a mistake to think of Caedmon’s Britain as simply a wilderness of macho warlords. Note, for a start, that he answered not to a man, but to a woman – the abbess. For much of the Anglo-Saxon period, religious institutions for men and women existed side by side, with female religious leaders highly literate and, in their own way, powerful. Very little writing by them has survived, but we know enough to understand that in the world of the Church, at least, women could be as powerful as princesses. Second, from artworks that have survived, in gold hoards or the glorious illuminated manuscripts, we know that the Britain of Caedmon’s time had a highly developed artistic sense; its people valued intricacy, complexity and show-off display. Although in translation his hymn may seem simple enough to us, in the original Anglo-Saxon it was a dazzling weave of assonance and rhythm, as carefully wrought as a letter colourfully inscribed in the Lindisfarne Gospels. So, what of the language itself? I’ve called it Anglo-Saxon, and that’s the term most scholars would use; but that’s a very loose description of something that was in fact written in a specific Northumbrian dialect. The marvel of Caedmon, according to Bede, was that he could pour out poetry while being, by the standards of the day, an uneducated man. In other words, he didn’t speak Latin. Today we are used to thinking of Latin as the dry, dead, elite language of scholars and priests. Back then it was still the left-behind language of the Roman Empire, heard all over the place. In fact, it seems to have been more used in the west and the north than in the south. Bede said Britain had five languages: English, by which he meant the Germanic dialects of Anglo-Saxon; British, close to what we would call Welsh; Irish; Pictish – another ancient British language from Scotland, now vanished; and Latin, which he said ‘is in general use among them all’. Latin was the language of the monasteries; yet it is only thanks to the monasteries that we have any early English surviving at all. In fact a single book, presented to Exeter monastery around 1070, contains the single greatest trove of Anglo-Saxon poetry, in a mishmash of Germanic dialects. This is a language which takes root for just long enough that it can’t be torn up again by the next wave of invaders, the Scandinavian Vikings; and it’s still buried inside the mouths of everyone who speaks modern English today. Caedmon’s world, the great, humane monasteries of the north-east, would soon be obliterated. In the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle the record for the year 793 reads: Dire portents appeared over Northumbria and sorely frightened the people. They consisted of immense whirlwinds and flashes of lightning, and fiery dragons were seen flying into the air. A great famine immediately followed those signs, and a little after that in the same year, on 8 June, the ravages of heathen men miserably destroyed God’s church on Lindisfarne, with plunder and slaughter. Eventually Caedmon’s tongue found its defender in the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of Wessex. Meanwhile, the thread of human thought and communication ran mainly in Latin. Even the old British scripts used for cutting language into stone and onto slate, runes and ogam were simplified versions of Latin letters. So having no Latin in a monastery was, even for a cowherd, a huge disability. What was miraculous to Caedmon’s contemporaries was that he used the earthy, rhythmic old German way of making poetry and applied it directly to a religious subject. I hope it’s obvious by now that Caedmon wouldn’t have thought of himself as English – England as a country name didn’t yet exist. His very name is probably Celtic, and alongside the Irish he’d have known in his monastery there were almost certainly Scandinavians too. It wasn’t at all obvious that the west Saxons and their language would eventually triumph, or that the people of the biggest bit of the archipelago would one day call themselves English. Politically, everything was still up for grabs. We know this by looking at other early poems. For instance, ‘The Battle of Maldon’ is about a defeat of the English by the Danes, while ‘The Battle of Brunanburg’ describes a close-run-thing victory by Aethelstan, the ruler of Wessex, often described as the first King of England, over an alliance between the Viking King of Dublin, the King of the Picts and the Scots. As the relentless warfare went on, almost everywhere Christianity was gaining ground. But outside the monasteries, almost everywhere, the older beliefs remained potent. This was a world still confused about the contradictions between the old Norse warrior culture, which was pagan and toughly pessimistic, and Christianity. The enormous poem Beowulf – not even set, by the way, in Britain but in Denmark – is famously confused between its Christian vision and its pagan funerals. Beowulf is famous but it’s not much fun, except in the modern translation and rewriting by Seamus Heaney. Instead, here’s something from the wonderful ecstatic poem ‘The Dream of the Rood’, in which the anguish of daily life is confronted by God Almighty, who seems to be something like a young Saxon chieftain: then the young warrior, God Almighty, stripped himself, firm and unflinching. He climbed upon the cross, brave before many, to redeem mankind. I quivered when the hero clasped me … … now I look day by day for that time when the cross of the Lord, which once I saw in a dream here on earth, will fetch me away from this fleeting life and listening to the home of joy and happiness where people of God are seated at the feast in eternal bliss … Here is a Warrior Christ, more like a Viking than a Hebrew figure, sitting down for a good old-fashioned feast – the early British didn’t have much to compare things to, beyond their own lives and culture. What sustained them? Apart from the hope of heaven, the answer is the security of their extended families or clans: thirty-five distinct tribes were recorded around the time of Caedmon’s hymn. The most heavily populated areas were still the lowland farming territories, whose forests had been felled, and land ploughed, in prehistoric times. The Anglo-Saxon landscape was already old and heavily marked by the huge expansion of farming in the Bronze Age, and the burial mounds, castles and henges of earlier Britons. Caedmon’s people lived in a haunted landscape. Much of the infrastructure of Romano-British culture remained semi-intact. The new Saxon settlement of Lundenwic, just to the west of the walls of Roman Londinium, had well-built-up river embankments and trade facilities. To the north, towns such as Newcastle kept their Roman names well into the 400s; York was a well-established Christian centre from Roman times. People lived in their local tribal polities, but they travelled widely. Saxon roads, unmetalled, have rarely survived, but Roman roads were still being heavily used, and archaeology confirms that there was a vigorous shipping economy and trade with the Continent. Whether trading, raiding or fishing, the Anglo-Saxon British were at least as much a seafaring race as the British of the time of Raleigh, or Nelson. Hardly any of their boats survive, for obvious reasons, but there are two substantial ships, one from the famous Sutton Hoo burial, and the other from Graveney in Kent. Modern reconstructions of these clinker-built vessels (that is, overlapping planks, pinned together) suggest that they could travel long distances at around ten knots, a considerable speed, using a coarse cotton sail. Though very different from the sleeker Viking longships, these Saxon vessels could also be rowed at speed up rivers and along coasts, and beached very easily. Large numbers of finds by archaeologists and amateurs using metal detectors show that Anglo-Saxon Britain traded extensively across the North Sea and the Channel. Discoveries of French and German pottery and glass, and Continental coins, confirm that this was a well-connected culture. In a famous poem, ‘The Seafarer’, here translated by the modern poet Ezra Pound, we get a vivid sense of what this really meant. Addressing the soft-living, wine-drinking landlubbers, the poet reminds them: … how I in harsh days Hardship endured oft. Bitter breast-cares have I abided, Known on my keel many a care’s hold, And dire sea-surge, and there I oft spent Narrow nightwatch nigh the ship’s head While she tossed close to cliffs. Coldly afflicted, My feet were by frost benumbed. Chill its chains are; chafing sighs Hew my heart round and hunger begot Mere-weary mood. Lest man know not That he on dry land loveliest liveth, List how I, care-wretched, on ice-cold sea, Weathered the winter, wretched outcast Deprived of my kinsmen; Hung with hard ice-flakes, where hail-scur flew, There I heard naught save the harsh sea And ice-cold wave, at whiles the swan cries, Did for my games the gannet’s clamour, Sea-fowls’ loudness was for me laughter, The mews’ singing all my mead-drink. Storms, on the stone-cliffs beaten, fell on the stern In icy feathers; full oft the eagle screamed With spray on his pinion. Bringing luxuries from the Rhine and the Seine was hard and dangerous work. And through most of the Anglo-Saxon era, Scandinavian raiders and pirates were an ever-present threat. Even on dry land, what mattered most in this dangerous world was what matters most still in today’s colonised and harried societies, such as Iraq or Syria: a tight local network of kith and kin, to provide and sustain. Few things were scarier than exile, or losing your overlord. In ‘The Wanderer’, one of the great surviving poems of the period, it’s being excluded that really hurts: … I had to bind my feelings in fetters, often sad at heart, cut off from my country, far from my kinsmen, after, long ago, dark clothes of earth covered my gold-friend; I left that place in wretchedness, ploughed the icy waves with winter in my heart; in the sadness I sought far and wide for a treasure-giver, for a man who would welcome me into his mead-hall, give me good cheer (for I boasted no friends), entertain me with delights. Anglo-Saxon poetry harps (literally) again and again on the loss of warrior-comrades as if it’s the worst possible thing that could happen. There is remarkably little from a woman’s point of view. Anglo-Saxon women had greater property and legal rights than medieval women enjoyed, and some exercised considerable power, in monasteries and in the courts. The random destruction of literature means that we have only a single poem in a woman’s voice: it complains about the disappearance of a husband – apparently after some misbehaviour – leaving his wife to the brutal mercies of his family. Early and late, I must undergo hardship because of the feud of my own dearest loved one. Men forced me to live in a forest grove, under an oak tree in the earth-cave. This cavern is age-old; I am choked with longings. Gloomy are the valleys, too high the hills, harsh strongholds overgrown with briars; a joyless abode. The journey of my Lord so often cruelly seizes me. There are lovers on earth, lovers alive who lie in bed, when I pass through this earth-cave alone and out under the oak tree at dawn; there I must sit through the long summer’s day and there I mourn my miseries … Along with the misery and mourning, the poet, then, understands that there are good married lives to be had. She has been forced out of her community, into the woods. We used to think of Anglo-Saxon Britain as being very heavily wooded. In fact, modern historians of the landscape tell us, much of the country had been opened up for farming for a thousand years or more. There’s a strong sense in this poem of life being literally close to the earth, and surrounded by foliage. That’s an obvious separation from our lives today. Back then, even impressive towns were tiny and dangerous. Here is a fragment of an anonymous Anglo-Saxon poem about Durham, rare in being written after the Norman Conquest: All Britain knows of this noble city, its breathtaking sight: buildings backed by rocky slopes appear over a precipice. (And, particularly if you pass through by train, Durham is pretty much like that today. But hang on:) Weirs hem and madden a headstrong river, diverse fish dance in the foam. Sprawling, tangled thicket has sprung up there; those deep dales are the haunt of many animals, countless wild beasts. Archaeologists tell us that Anglo-Saxon Britain was studded with trading towns and urban centres huddled around churches, even if most of them, being made of wood and straw, have long disappeared. Durham, like York, got its sense of itself through the saints and missionaries buried there. But what about the rest of the people? What sense of history did they have? Who did they think they were? We know we live in the twenty-first century. But by seven or eight centuries after the Roman legions had left, most British had no real sense of how their own history connected to that of the rest of mankind. There’s a wonderful eighth-century poem in which an Anglo-Saxon wanders through the ruins of Bath: Wondrous is this stone-wall, wrecked by fate; the city-buildings crumble; the works of the Giants decay. Roofs have caved in, towers collapsed, barred gates are broken, hoar frost clings to mortar, houses are gaping, tottering and fallen, undermined by age. The Earth’s embrace, its fierce grip, holds the mighty craftsmen; they are perished and gone. So who were these craftsmen, who used techniques no longer understood, and built such walls? Wrongly, the Anglo-Saxon poet, himself a representative of the people who destroyed the Romano-British world, thinks they must have been destroyed by the plague, a contemporary problem; and he imagines them as being like bigger Anglo-Saxons – warriors bestriding courts where … Once many a man joyous and gold-bright, dressed in splendour, proud and flushed with wine, gleamed in his armour … Interesting, isn’t it, that passing reference to wine? But this Anglo-Saxon tourist is most impressed that these extraordinary people washed themselves, a pleasure which he almost salivates over: Stone houses stood here; a hot spring gushed in a wide stream; a stone wall enclosed the bright interior; the baths were there, the heated water; that was convenient. They allowed the scalding water to pour over the grey stone into the circular pool … And in ‘The Seafarer’, the poem quoted earlier, we get a similar strong sense that the world has decayed since the great days of – presumably – the Romans. That poet speaks of: Days little durable, And all arrogance of earthen riches, There come now no kings nor C?sars Nor gold-giving lords like those gone. Howe’er in mirth most magnified, Whoe’er lived in life most lordliest, Drear all this excellence, delights undurable! Waneth the watch, but the world holdeth. Tomb hideth trouble. The blade is layed low. This pessimism, so different from the Christian celebration of Caedmon, is something we should take with a pinch of salt. Anglo-Saxon Britain was full of advanced and sophisticated craftsmanship, from ornate goldwork to well-built ships and fine vellum books. No serious historian of the age now regards it simply as a time of anarchy and disaster. But if there is pessimism it is surely driven by politics – the restless, bloody tribal struggles that convulsed all of Britain, from the Picts in northern Scotland to the lands of the Jutes in southern England. Local warlordism isn’t much fun even for the warlords. It isn’t until the 800s, as the kingdom of the west Saxons pushed back against its Mercian, Northumbrian and Viking enemies, that the possibility of a dominant nation, an ‘England’, begins to emerge. Alfred the Great first managed to unite Wessex with Mercia, and then reached out until he could call himself the king of all the Anglo-Saxons. We know from a life written by the Welsh cleric Asser that Alfred was brought up on English poetry, though we don’t know what that was. As a ruler he was much more than a warlord, a highly ambitious and cultured figure, in touch with the latest developments on the Continent. Alfred personally oversaw the translation of key European Christian texts from Latin into English. He imported French and German men of letters. He began – almost, it seems, single-handedly – to forge a coherent English culture. Despite the devastating effects of the Norse raids on monasteries, with their books, we might from this point have expected a steady growth and flowering of English poetry. It didn’t happen. At least, it didn’t happen for another three centuries, again because of dynastic politics, in this case the unwanted arrival of those transplanted Vikings with their strange foreign tongue, the Normans. Eventually, the violent collision between Anglo-Saxon English and Norman French would produce a supple, flexible new language. But the hugely disruptive collision of the Conquest meant that there is a long gap after 1066 before we hear again the authentic voice of ordinary British people expressed in verse in their own language. No doubt it once existed. But it’s gone, and gone forever. If the prose of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is to be believed, it would have been a poetry of lamentation. The Chronicle ends by describing the coronation of the man it calls simply Count William, who despite earlier promises ‘laid taxes on people very severely’. He and Bishop Odo then ‘built castles far and wide throughout this country, and distressed the wretched folk, and always after that it grew much worse. May the end be good when God wills!’ But there was more to this than the clash of Anglo-Saxons and Normans. Recent scholarly work points out that the pre-Norman Conquest court of Cnut, king of most of Scandinavia as well as England (and the Canute who mocked himself by ordering back the waves) and the court of Edward the Confessor were open to Danish, German, French and Latin learning. English queens were notable early sponsors of what became French literature. Britain in this period was very much part of Europe, and its dynasties were interlinked with those of France, Sweden and Hungary. The cowherds spoke Anglo-Saxon; but on the coasts and in the towns you would have heard a chatter of Norse, Latin, French – and Welsh too. For the people speaking the old British or Celtic languages hadn’t gone away. What was their poetry like? Mostly oral, of course, and therefore mostly lost, of course. We have infuriatingly few fragments to go on, but there is an Irish poem about a fair in County Wexford, around the time of the Norman Conquest, which gives some idea of early non-English poetry in these islands: There are the Fair’s great privileges: trumpets, harps, hollow-throated horns, Pipers, timpanists unwearied, poets and meet musicians. Tales of Find and the Fianna, a matter inexhaustible, sackings, forays, wooings, tablets, and books of lore, satires, keen riddles: Proverbs, maxims … … The Chronicle of women, tales of armies, conflicts, hostels, tabus, captures … Pipes, fiddles, gleemen, bone-players and bag-pipers, a crowd hideous, noisy, profane shriekers and shouters. They exert all their efforts for the king of seething Berba: the King, noble and honoured, pays for each art its proper honour. That’s a translation, of course, by Professor Thomas Owen Clancy of Glasgow University. He makes it sound great fun – like a modern literary festival on acid. Not everybody in the so-called dark ages was having a miserable time. 2 Knights in Green Satin (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) It took hundreds of years for the elite language of Norman French to begin to mingle with the tongues of the Anglo-Saxons. For a long time, looking for English poetry we have to rely on very short lyrics, which nonetheless can remind us that Britain was a multi-ethnic place: Ich am of Irlande And of the holy lande Of Irlande Gode sire, pray Ich thee For of saynte charite Come and daunce with me In Irlande Oh, all right then. The lyrics of early medieval Britain are full of music and dancing, celebrations of spring and love. It’s as if the shuddering, ice-bound, rainy islands of so many Anglo-Saxon manuscripts had been transformed. Up to a point, they had been. Historians talk about the early-medieval warm period, when the world’s climate was more temperate. In Britain it lasted very roughly from 900 to 1300. Monks grew vines in Yorkshire; the Black Death hadn’t been heard of. Sumer is icumen in, Llude sing cuccu! Groweth sed, and bloweth med, And springeth the wude nu – Sing cuccu! Close to nature, the medieval lyrics brim with references to flowers – primroses, roses, blossom of all kinds – and to the incessant sound of birdsong. For more than a century after the Norman Conquest, Britain was riven by conflict – Saxon rebellions, wars between the Normans and the Welsh or the Normans and the Scots, and the bloody civil disputes between rivals for the crown. Although a lot of massive building of castles and some cathedrals was done, very little survives in English poetry, and that’s hardly surprising. Henry II, who reigned from 1154 to 1189, is generally remembered these days as the man who ordered the killing of Thomas Becket in Canterbury Cathedral. He won the throne with his sword, and later fought long wars against his children and rebel barons – it was the Plantagenet way – but his reign brought great cultural advances and long periods of peace. He famously reformed and civilised English law. Henry was, like his predecessors and immediate successors, more French than English, Count of Anjou and Normandy, Duke of Aquitaine and so forth, whose empire covered rather more than half of modern France. This matters because France was the centre of European civilisation, going through its glorious twelfth-century renaissance. French literature, with its romances, its new ideology of courtly love and its reworkings of the Arthurian myths, had a huge influence. Henry’s death is referred to in a very rare survivor of English poetry from this period. It’s a long, difficult poem, mostly read by students these days, which is nevertheless full of the sounds of medieval England – the arguments of peasants, the noise of birds – as well as the authentic stink and prejudice of the time. It’s called The Owl and the Nightingale, and it was probably written in the late 1100s, somewhere in southern England. There are teasing references to a Nicolas of Guildford, a priest living in the village of Portesham in Dorset. He may have been its author. The poem is a long argument between a nightingale, whose song represents love, lechery and frivolity, and a gloomy, croaking owl. As they argue, the nightingale stands on a sprig of foliage, and the owl on a dreary, ivy-encrusted stump. At times we might imagine that the nightingale stands for the free English people and the owl for the oppressive Norman ruling class; more likely, the nightingale is an airy French troubadour, and the owl the moralistic representative of religious poetry and attitudes. Certainly, a lot of the argument is about the nature of love – is it mere sexual lust, and who may love whom properly? The early Middle English the poem is written in is too hard to be enjoyed without translation, so here is a modern version, by the former soldier and one-legged champion of Middle English verse, the late Brian Stone. The owl is having a go at the nightingale over her merely physical view of sex, and its effect on the common people: In summer peasants lose their sense And jerk in mad concupiscence: Theirs is not love’s enthusiasm, But some ignoble, churlish spasm, Which having achieved its chosen aim, Leaves their spirits gorged and tame. The poke beneath the skirt is ended, And with the act, all love’s expended. Much of the fun in the poem comes from the side-swipes: the infuriated nightingale attacks the owl for choosing to sing at night in the very place where country people go to defecate, giving us a rare insight into medieval toilet habits: Perceiving man’s enclosure place, Where thorns and branches interlace To form a thickly hedged retreat For man to bide his privy seat, There you go, and there you stay; From clean resorts you keep away. When nightly I pursue the mouse, I catch you by the privy house With weeds and nettles overgrown – Perched at song behind the throne. Indeed you’re likely to appear Wherever humans do a rear. As to the charge that the nightingale, representing the saucy Continental troubadour and courtly love tradition, is spreading immorality amongst the English people, the songbird first responds that she isn’t to blame for the brutal behaviour of some husbands, who drive their wives to desperate straits: The husband got the final blame. He was so jealous of his wife He could not bear, to save his life, To see her with a man converse, For that would break his heart, or worse. He therefore locked her in a room – A harsh and savage kind of doom. This chauvinist husband gets what he deserves. Next, the nightingale goes on to champion the rights of girls to love whom they want. In a culture where the man of the house claimed rights over the women around him, this would have caused a lively chatter of argument among the listeners: A girl may take what man she chooses And doing so, no honour loses, Because she did true love confer On him who lies on top of her. Such love as this I recommend: To it, my songs and teaching tend. But if a wife be weak of will – And women are softhearted still – And through some jester’s crafty lies, Some chap who begs and sadly sighs, She once perform an act of shame, Shall I for that be held to blame If women will be so unchaste, Why should the slur on me be placed? The poem is a self-conscious literary confection, harking back to a long tradition of debate-poetry in Latin and French literature, and using many of the legal tricks and twists of the contemporary law. It doesn’t refer only to the recently deceased Henry II, but to the Pope and a papal embassy to Scandinavia; it’s very much a poem of its time. But for us, it’s perhaps most interesting for the way it illuminates, almost by accident, changing attitudes. By the late 1100s, thanks to the Plantagenets, southern England was firmly part of the wider European culture dominated by the French. One strongly gets the sense in the poem that the other British, to the north and west, are no longer regarded as ‘one of us’ but as incomprehensible and threatening barbarians. As today, a divide is opening up across the archipelago. The owl, who is of course heard all over the place, attacks the nightingale for sticking to the soft southern landscape: You never sing in Irish lands Nor ever visit Scottish lands. Why can’t the Norsemen hear your lay, Or even men of Galloway? Of singing skill those men have none For any song beneath the sun. Why don’t you sing to priests up there And teach them how to trill the air? To this, the nightingale replies with a ferocious description of the other British: The land is poor, a barren place, A wilderness devoid of grace, Where crags and rocks pierce heaven’s air, And snow and hail are everywhere – A grisly and uncanny part Where men are wild and grim of heart, Security and peace are rare, And how they live they do not care. The flesh and fish they eat are raw; Like wolves, they tear it with the paw. They take both milk and whey for drink; Of other things they cannot think, Possessing neither wine nor beer. They live like wild beasts all the year And wander clad in shaggy fell As if they’d just come out of hell. This is a poem still encrusted with the letters and spellings, as well as much of the archaic language, of an English we can no longer understand. That’s terribly sad, because in its energy, humour and eye for detail it stands up well to Chaucer himself. It’s interesting too because it ignores what was rapidly becoming the central story the British were telling about themselves. At some point after the Norman Conquest, the people of Britain begin to spin new and more ambitious theories about their origins. The tales of the ancient Greeks and Romans had never quite disappeared, so along with the Bible there were ideas about the origins of humanity and civilisation preserved in the monasteries and courts. But the world of the ancient heroes and the Jews of the Bible must have been worryingly disconnected from the here-and-now of medieval Britain: did ‘we British’ emerge merely from barbarian tribes, or was there a more noble and respectable descent? Presumably this didn’t much worry the fishermen of the east coast or the peasants of Wiltshire, but it certainly concerned baronial and royal courts. So now we get chronicles which connect Britain to the earliest times of all. The Welsh monk Geoffrey of Monmouth wrote a Latin history of the kings of Britain. It begins with the Trojan wars, and claims that the British Isles were settled by the descendants of Virgil’s hero Aeneas – his great-grandson Brutus arrived via the Devon settlement of Totnes, giving his name to Britain, and so on. Geoffrey, writing in around 1136, was regarded as a terrible liar by some of his contemporaries, but this notion of a connection reaching back to the Trojans proved long-lasting and popular. It probably began in Welsh and other oral literatures now lost to us. There is also a long tradition of romances and stories based on Danish or German originals, which linger in the oral tradition until they pop up as popular ballad-like poems, stanzaic or metrical romances, in the 1300s. These are ‘Horn’, ‘Guy of Warwick’, ‘Bevis of Hampton’ and the like. They were well-known in Chaucer’s time, and in Shakespeare’s, and in the case of ‘Bevis’, well into the early modern age. But they are little-known now, and perhaps for good reason. They tend to be all action, with the slaying of numerous foreign enemies – Saracens or Muslims above all – flesh-eating boars and dragons, and treacherous emperors and knights. Blood, gore, the ravishing or saving of maidens, sudden and unlikely reversals of fortune, and a hero with almost supernatural powers … They tell us, at least, that the British have always loved a good story, and have never been keen on foreigners. The opening of a north-western poem, Gawain and the Green Knight, written 250 years after Geoffrey of Monmouth, tells us that as soon as Troy had been reduced to ashes, Aeneas and his descendants spread across the west, with Romulus founding Rome and Brutus, charging across from France, founding Britain: his dynasty eventually produced King Arthur. Many of the popular romances, translated into English from Norman French, are about the doings of Arthurian knights. Arthur also features in the Original Chronicle of a Scottish priest, Andrew of Wyntoun. He says that it was Brutus who first cleared Britain of giants and founded its human story: his three sons then divided the islands between them. Wyntoun, with impressive ambition, tries to write a history of modern Scotland that connects it without a break to the creation of the world by God. It’s important to him that the Scots arrived in Britain before the English. So he tells a complicated tale about a hero, Gedyl-Glays, who marries the daughter of a pharaoh, Scota, and settles in Spain. Their descendants occupy Ireland and thence arrive in Scotland, clutching the Stone of Destiny. All of this stitching together of biblical history, the ancient myths, Arthur and the modern story of the British may not matter much to us today, but it was incredibly important to the medieval mind. It gave people in the rainy northern isles a sense of belonging to the wider human story, an essential dignity. And whether it was the Scottish priest in his tiny monastery by the edge of a loch, or the anonymous, magically gifted northern English poet who wrote Gawain, or Geoffrey of Monmouth, writing in Oxford with his tongue in his cheek, these zigzagging genealogies always seemed to foreground one single name, the man who became the ultimate British hero – and perhaps still is. Sir Gawain, who slew the green knight, was a member of King Arthur’s court, a Knight of the Round Table. Andrew of Wyntoun says that at the time of the first Pope Leo in Rome, when Lucius was Roman emperor, the ‘King of Brettane than wes Arthour’ … And not of Britain alone. Rather than a misty, romantic figure hanging around Avalon, King Arthur was regarded as the ultimate military overlord – Andrew reckons that his conquests included France, Lombardy, Flanders, Holland, Brabant, Switzerland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Ireland, Orkney ‘and all the isles in the sea’. He made Britain all one realm, free from foreign claims. It’s clear that the first references to Arthur come not from English, but from early Welsh sources. If Arthur ever existed as a historic figure – and it’s a big ‘if’ – he was probably a Romano-British knight, leading campaigns against the Anglo-Saxon invaders. Between 800 and 900 he is described as a leader of the ‘British’ – i.e. not the Saxons. In the poem Y Goddodin, mentioned earlier, there is a glancing reference. It’s clear that the retreating British people kept his name alive as a symbol of heroic resistance. To begin with, the Norman chroniclers regarded him as a ridiculous fantasy of the people they were busily oppressing. William of Malmesbury wrote around 1125 of ‘Arthur, about whom the foolish tales of the Britons rave even today; one who is clearly worthy to be told about in truthful histories rather than to be dreamed about in deceitful fables’; and seventy years later William of Newburgh attacked his rival Geoffrey of Monmouth as ‘a writer … who, in order to expiate the faults of these Britons, weaves the most ridiculous figments of imagination around them, extolling them with the most impudent vanity above the virtues of the Macedonians and the Romans’. Norman hostility to Arthur is interesting. It suggests that by the time of the Conquest the Saxons (against whom this Welsh hero fought) had already taken him over as one of their own, and saw him as their symbol of resistance to the latest, French-speaking, invaders. But Arthur proves a prize for almost everyone: almost immediately, French poets are appropriating him in turn, and he will flower as a Europe-wide hero and an enduring symbol of chivalry. During the medieval period he is steadily transformed and reshaped into the very image of Christian, knightly behaviour, a hero for all the new British – Welsh-speaking, Saxons and Norman French as well. He becomes, to all intents and purposes, the symbol of Britishness as the country coagulates. If we want to understand how the medieval British understood themselves, the Arthur poems can’t be ignored. One of the greatest, written around 1400, is the so-called Alliterative Morte Arthure, beautifully translated for modern times by the contemporary poet Simon Armitage. This King Arthur, like Andrew of Wyntoun’s, is an expansive military conqueror. His realm covers France, Germany and Scandinavia, as well as all of Britain; and he claims lordship over Rome itself, as well as all of northern Italy. The enemy is a combination of the Roman emperor Lucius with his Mediterranean allies, who, unhistorically, include Muslim warlords ‘from Babylon and Baghdad’, alongside Greek and Egyptian kings and Roman senators. No doubt this reflects the patriotic mood of England after the great victories against France of the early phase of the Hundred Years War, as well as the effect of centuries of crusading against ‘Saracens’. The result is a medieval world war epic, extremely gory. Consider the unhappy but typical fate of a certain Sir Kay: Then keen Sir Kay made ready and rode, went challenging on his charger to chase down a king, and landed his lance from Lithuania in his side so that spleen and lungs were skewered on the spear; with a shudder the shaft pierced the shining knight, shooting through his shield, shoving through his body. But as Kay drove forward, he was caught unfairly by a lily-livered knight of royal lands; as he tried to turn the traitor hit him, first in the loins, then further through the flank; the brutal lance buried into his bowels, burst them in the brawl, then broke in the middle. It’s a poem probably based on much earlier oral sources, but by 1400 it’s a modern poem too. It tells us a lot about the truth of medieval combat. In 1996, for instance, workmen at a site by the town of Towton in Yorkshire uncovered a mass grave of men killed during the battle there in 1461, just sixty years after this poem. The skeletons, stripped of their armour, showed horrific injuries. One had had the front of his skull bisected and then a second deep slash across the face splitting the bone, followed by another horizontal cut from the back. It is estimated that 3 per cent of the entire adult population of England took part in the battle, in which 28,000 people died. The corpses of the dead were said to have been mutilated, and evidence from the skeletons suggests that ears and tongues and noses were hacked off. The audience for this poem, clearly made to be read aloud on long winter nights, well understood what a bloody butchery contemporary warfare was; but they also seem to have had an almost modern enthusiasm for the grotesque. They had been brought up on the stories of Bevis and Guy of Warwick, and our poet knows what they want. At times he sounds like a scriptwriter for a horror movie, as for instance when Arthur comes across a French cannibal giant who has just had his wicked way with an unfortunate princess: How disgusting he was, guzzling and gorging lying there lengthways, loathsome and unlordly, with the haunch of a human thigh in his hand. His back and his buttocks and his broad limbs he toasted by the blaze, and his backside was bare. Appalling and repellent pieces of flesh of beasts and our brothers were braising there together, and a cook-pot was crammed with Christian children, some spiked on a spit … Poems reflect the politics of their time. By 1400, when the English and the Scots were at war again and the great Welsh rebellion of Owen Glendower was at its height, King Arthur, once a Welsh hero who fought for Edinburgh, can no longer represent all the people of Britain. In this English poem,when he returns to confront his great enemy Mordred, he meets an army of all England’s foes – Danes, Muslims and Saxons – and also Picts, pagans and proven knights of Ireland and Argyll, and outlaws of the Highlands. English archers confront them. Mordred flees to Wales. King Arthur has, in the hands of a few generations of poets, completely changed sides. But he always belongs to the people, fed on romances and ballads. The anonymous poem Gawain and the Green Knight is the most earthy and local-feeling of any work written in English in medieval times. It was produced, probably in Lancashire or Cheshire, by an educated writer born around 1330; and it was only rediscovered in a manuscript during the nineteenth century. It is, like the previous poem, alliterative rather than rhymed, though there are short rhyming lines, and it brims with the mystery and chilliness of the old English north. Very early on the poet insists that it’s the kind of story the common people knew: I’ll tell it straight, as I in town heard it, with tongue; as it was said and spoken in story staunch and strong, with linked letters loaded, as in this land so long.* (#ulink_4fa57b9e-8407-50df-a36d-352b2bddd101) He protests too much. What we are really going to get is an extremely complex, beautifully patterned work, full of symbolism, eroticism and a courtly ethic which has more to do with the French romances than anything else in English we know of. But the poet’s assertion that Arthurian tales are part of popular culture – ‘in town … as it was said and spoken’ – feels right. There must have been a huge, now lost oral culture of poems and stories in medieval England, as there was in the Gaelic lands of Ireland and Scotland and Wales. The Gawain story is, on the surface, a simple one. Arthur and his knights are feasting at Christmas, looking for a seasonal game to play. Then the door blows open and a green giant arrives, not very jolly … a dreadful man, the most in the world’s mould of measure high, from the nape to the waist so swart and so thick, and his loins and his limbs so long and so great half giant on earth I think now that he was; but the most of man anyway I mean him to be, and that the finest in his greatness that might ride, for of back and breast though his body was strong, both his belly and waist were worthily small, and his features all followed his form made and clean. Wonder at his hue men displayed, set in his semblance seen; he fared as a giant were made, and over all deepest green. He calmly rides, on his huge green horse, into the hall with a strange challenge: one of the knights can have a free go at beheading him with an axe, and if the giant survives, the knight must take a blow in return, not flinching, a year from now. They are understandably nervous, but Sir Gawain takes up the challenge, and slices off the giant’s head. He promptly gets to his feet, picks it up, pops it under his arm and walks out. As he leaves, the severed head calmly and mockingly repeats the deal. Fast forward a year, and Gawain has set out on his quest through freezing dark forests to find the giant and offer his neck to the axe. He is riding through a landscape full of monsters and challenges, but also a real Britain: He had no friend but his steed by furze and down, and no one but God to speak with on the way, till that he neared full nigh to northern Wales. All the Isle of Anglesey on the left hand he held, and fared over the fords by the forelands, over at Holyhead, till he reached the bank in the wilderness of Wirral – few thereabouts that either God or other with good heart loved. On Christmas Eve, he finally finds a mysterious castle that seems to float in a green landscape untouched by winter. He is welcomed by its lord, Bertilak. Over the next three days Gawain will stay in the castle and they will exchange gifts. But Bertilak’s wife tries hard to seduce our hero while her husband is away hunting. He doesn’t give way, except for kisses and accepting a green garter from her. Then he rides off to find the giant at his Green Chapel. The first time he kneels for the axe he flinches away, and the giant mocks him. The second time, the giant misses. The third time his blade cuts Gawain, but only slightly. He reveals himself as Bertilak, who has known all along about the attempted seduction – a test of Gawain’s nobility which he (almost) passed. Gawain returns to Arthur’s court to tell his story. Laid out like that, the poem is a straightforward enough magical romance – the monster, the wicked lady, the tempted hero, the test, the happy outcome. It is structured around triplets – three journeys, three scenes in court, three tests, and so on. It’s a longer version of the kind of story we can imagine being told around hundreds of medieval hearths. But what my account misses is everything that is really important here – the contrast between the warm, luxurious, succulent world of the castles and the bare, icy, threatening landscape of cliffs and forests beyond; the psychological subtlety of erotic temptation struggling with Christian morality; the genuine menace of the green knight as he mocks Arthur’s court. These aren’t idealisations or symbols but real people, caught up in a world of magical threats and spiritual redemption that feels very much like the world of the early 1400s. Here, for example, is Gawain snug in bed in Bertilak’s castle, as his wife tries to seduce him one morning while her husband is out hunting the deer: Thus larks the lord by linden-wood eaves, while Gawain the good man gaily abed lies, lurks till the daylight gleams on the walls, under canopy full clear, curtained about. And as in slumber he lay, softly he heard a little sound at his door, and it slid open; and he heaves up his head out of the clothes, a corner of the curtain he caught up a little, and watches warily to make out what it might be. It was the lady, the loveliest to behold, that drew the door after her full silent and still, and bent her way to the bed; and the knight ashamed, laid him down again lightly and feigned to sleep. And she stepped silently and stole to his bed, caught up the curtain and crept within, and sat her full softly on the bedside and lingered there long, to look when he wakened. The lord lay low, lurked a full long while, compassing in his conscience what this case might mean or amount to, marvelling in thought. But yet he said to himself: ‘More seemly it were to descry with speech, in a space, what she wishes.’ Then he wakened and wriggled and to her he turned, and lifted his eyelids and let on he was startled, and signed himself with his hand, as with prayer, to be safer. With chin and cheek full sweet, both white and red together, full graciously did she greet, lips light with laughter. ‘Good morning, Sir Gawain,’ said that sweet lady, ‘You are a sleeper unsafe, that one may slip hither. Now are you taken in a trice, lest a truce we shape, I shall bind you in your bed, that you may trust.’ All laughing the lady made her light jests. This is as vividly imagined, and as sexy, as any modern novel. Chaucer himself couldn’t have done it better, and it’s a fit entrant, perhaps, for the Good Sex Awards. Here, by contrast, is a description of Bertilak’s men slicing up the animals he’s killed while out hunting. As you enjoy it, remember that we, like Gawain, are waiting for the moment, which cannot be far off, when he has to present his own neck to the green giant’s blade … This isn’t really just about dead deer. Some that were there searched them in assay, and two fingers of fat they found on the feeblest. Then they slit the slot, and seized the first stomach, shaved it with sharp knives, and knotted the sheared. Then lopped off the four limbs and rent off the hide, next broke they the belly, the bowels out-taking, deftly, lest they undid and destroyed the knot. They gripped the gullet, and swiftly severed the weasand from the windpipe and whipped out the guts. Then sheared out the shoulders with their sharp knives, hauled them through a little hole, left the sides whole. Then they slit up the breast and broke it in twain. And again at the gullet one then began rending all readily right to the fork, voiding the entrails, and verily thereafter all the membranes by the ribs readily loosened … We are, all of us, only animals in the end, fragile bags of slithering flesh; if Gawain is tempted by the sins of the flesh, we have a horrible presentiment about where it will end for him. The symbolism of this poem is rich enough to keep whole departments of English academics hard at work for decades. The green giant is closely related to the ‘green man’ myths of Saxon England – in a way, he stands for authentic, menacing Britishness against the Frenchified civilisation of the beautiful castles. But the beheading test comes from ancient Welsh and Irish sources. The poem is partly about Christians trying to live in a world that remains unredeemed and pagan: there are complicated symbolic games based on the pentangle of Christian truth, and almost every aspect of Gawain’s armour and clothing has a specific meaning. The whole story takes place at Christmas, the time of Christ’s birth, and is therefore saturated with spiritual promise. In the end, our hero is redeemed. Yet beyond all that, this is a story about scared, horny human beings trying to enjoy themselves, do the right thing, and stay safe in a cold, dangerous world. There’s nothing else like it in English. That includes the other poems thought to be by the same poet – the moving Christian reflection on the death of his two-year-old daughter, ‘Pearl’, and two other religious poems, ‘Patience’ and ‘Cleanness’. But for the great Christian poem of this period we have to travel due south from the Wirral, to the Malvern Hills of Worcestershire and Herefordshire. It’s there that a shadowy figure, probably a cleric at Oxford, called William Langland, set his allegory of virtue and corruption, Piers Plowman. It has nothing to do with the world of Arthur or knightly virtues; it’s an angry poem about the here-and-now of an England where corrupt clerics and greedy priests have far too much power. It’s the first poem we’ve discussed which could be called in any real sense political. Like the work of the Gawain poet, in order to understand it most of us now need it translated – though only just. This is how it famously begins:* (#ulink_fe530f2e-cc38-5701-81d0-3be8bfd5b5bd) In a summer season when soft was the sun, I clothed myself in a cloak as I shepherd were, Habit like a hermit’s unholy in works, And went wide in the world wonders to hear. But on a May morning on Malvern hills, A marvel befell me of fairy, methought. I was weary with wandering and went me to rest Under a broad bank by a brook’s side, And as I lay and leaned over and looked into the waters I fell into a sleep for it sounded so merry. Then began I to dream a marvellous dream, That I was in a wilderness wist I not where. As I looked to the east right into the sun, I saw a tower on a toft worthily built; A deep dale beneath a dungeon therein, With deep ditches and dark and dreadful of sight A fair field full of folk found I in between, Of all manner of men the rich and the poor, Working and wandering as the world asketh. Some put them to plow and played little enough, At setting and sowing they sweated right hard And won that which wasters by gluttony destroy. So here we are again in a recognisable English landscape – a gentler, more rolling landscape than that of the forested north-west, but like it a landscape being reshaped and restructured by belief. A hilltop becomes a tower, a symbol of Christian truth; a dale becomes a dark dungeon, standing for evil and the underworld. Between them, unheeding, are all the plain people of England, the kind of busy crowd a medieval writer would rarely come across, except at a fair. And we are away, in a country ravaged by unfairness, in which the poor sweat and the rich guzzle. Langland compares the poor to mice being torn by cruel cats. He’s clearly a man who knows London and the ways of the wealthy, corrupt clerics and their allies. His vision, however, gives us a social portrait of the British of a kind we haven’t had before. Here, for instance, he’s having a go at lawyers – a favourite target of radical writers over the centuries. There hovered an hundred in caps of silk, Serjeants they seemed who practised at Bar, Pleading the law for pennies and pounds, And never for love of our Lord unloosing their lips. You might better measure the mist on the Malvern hills, Than get a sound out of their mouth unless money were showed. Barons and burgesses and bondmen also I saw in this crowd as you shall hear later. Bakers and brewers and butchers a-many, Woollen-websters and weavers of linen, Tailors and tinkers, toll-takers in markets, Masons and miners and men of all crafts. Of all kinds of labourers there stood forth some; Ditchers and diggers that do their work ill And spend all the day singing … Cooks and their knaves cried ‘Pies, hot pies! Good pork and good goose!’ So, roadworkers standing around leaning on their shovels rather than getting on with it, and takeaway food … The joy of Piers Plowman is often how extraordinarily modern it feels, behind the cloak of a medieval religious sermon. But it isn’t modern; this is a view of the world in which everything has a religious meaning and significance. A poem like this one can remind us how different life must have felt when, for instance, events as banal as high winds and bad weather were thought to be a sign from God: He proved that these pestilences were purely for sin, And the south-west wind on Saturday at even Was plainly for pure pride and for no point else. Pear-trees and plum-trees were puffed to the earth For example, ye men that ye should do better. Beeches and broad oaks were blown to the ground, Turned upwards their tails in token of dread That deadly sin at doomsday shall undo them all. This world is not our world, yet Piers Plowman keeps its wild vitality when Langland feels obliged to be explicit about the terrible behaviour he is condemning. It’s not all the corruption of the rich, but also the swinish behaviour of the ordinary Briton. Here for instance is Gluttony hard at the beer in his local pub, drinking away with ratcatchers, roadsweepers, fiddlers, horse dealers and needle sellers: There was laughing and lowering and ‘Let go the cup!’ They sat so till evensong singing now and then, Till Glutton had gulped down a gallon and a gill. His guts ’gan to grumble like two greedy sows; He pissed a pot-full in a paternoster-while; And blew with the bugle at his backbone’s end, That all hearing that horn held their nose after And wished it were stopped up with a wisp of furze. It’s perhaps only the fact that the amount of time taken to piss out so much beer is measured not in minutes but by how long it takes to say the Lord’s Prayer that reminds us that this beery scene comes from a very different England. I hope by now I’ve convinced you that medieval poetry in English is a bigger and more exciting field than just Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Yet that portly, self-deprecating, white-bearded London civil servant is unavoidable, a mountain in our landscape – the man who transforms English poetry more than any other in the medieval period. His great contemporaries Gower and Lydgate have virtually disappeared from the common culture, but Chaucer is different, and always has been. He was published in Tudor times and appropriated, despite his Catholic world, by the new England of the Protestant reformers: Shakespeare certainly knew his work. And indeed, we all know our Chaucer, don’t we – jokes about farts and fat women, the long-winded knights, parsons and the other pilgrims as they jolt and bicker their way towards Canterbury, this Chaucer who is the essence of unabashed celebratory Englishness, and the father of English poetry. These days when we say ‘Chaucerian’ we seem to mean simply lecherous and drunk. But a prolonged swim in the ocean of English verse this extraordinary man produced reminds us that his world was much more European than simply English, and that he saw himself as the inheritor and passer-on of Latin, French and Italian culture. Indeed, everything in Chaucer looks not just south to Canterbury, but south to the Continent too. If the Gawain poet stands for the wintry north, and Langland with his crowd of folk sprawls across the Midlands, Chaucer is emphatically the poet of London. His victory is also the victory of London over the rest of Britain. London in Chaucer’s time, almost as much as London today, depended upon trade and intercourse with Europe. The courts of Chaucer’s three kings – the Plantagenets Edward III and Richard II, and the Lancastrian Henry IV – were all deeply intertwined with French affairs. The to and froing of clerics, official embassies, artisans, merchants and bankers made London feel different from (and superior to) anywhere else in Britain. Chaucer himself came from a family of merchant wine-sellers, and spent his life on the fringes of the court. He served in the army in France, and was ransomed; he was connected to John of Gaunt through marriage; he received money as the king’s valet and was sent abroad on royal commissions. He made repeated trips to France and Italy, where he may have met Petrarch and Boccaccio; he worked as a civil servant, responsible for maintaining the banks of the Thames, and received money from three different monarchs, neatly negotiating the complex and lethal politics of the medieval monarchy. Chaucer was, in short, what we would call a member of the London political establishment, as smoothly elite as Langland was rebelliously crude. His early poetry owes a lot to the traditions of French courtly romance; later he would pick up the newly fashionable poetry of Florence and northern Italy; and only in later life, when he was well established, would he turn to the stories and idioms of the urban English. It’s an unfair and ungenerous thought, but perhaps, along with his duller contemporary John Gower, he was simply too successful for the greater good of British poetry, helping push out the language and the alliterative techniques used further north. Chaucer’s earlier poetry, with strong French influences, isn’t much about the contemporary world of medieval England. These early poems are fun, and make light work of the heavy learning they are based on; but they’re not the Chaucer we know today. As he moves from French influence to Italian, with a longer, more flexible line, and steadily greater vocabulary, he comes more into focus. First in his almost novel-like poem of love betrayed, Troilus and Criseyde, and then in the Tales themselves, this small, sharp-eyed bureaucrat proves himself above all a brilliant observer – of everything from clothing to the twists and turns of how we fool ourselves. But the more you read of Chaucer, the more you realise that his medieval characters are not much like us. They experience a complicated, religion-saturated existence. Saints are real, and Purgatory looms for sinners. Daily life is governed by the movement of the planets, and explained by a complex web of folklore. Living so close to animals, birdlife and flora, the Chaucerian English find allegory in everything. As Chaucer shows us in his ‘Parliament of Fowls’, every bird has its own stories and its own meaning: The noble falcon, who with his feet will strain At the king’s glove; sparrow-hawk sharp-beaked, The quail’s foe; the merlin that will pain Himself full oft the lark for to seek; There was the dove with her eyes meek; The jealous swan, that at his death does sing; The owl too, that portent of death does bring; The crane, the giant with his trumpet-sound; The thief, the chough; the chattering magpie; The mocking jay; the heron there is found; The lapwing false, to foil the searching eye; The starling that betrays secrets on high; The tame robin; and the cowardly kite; The rooster, clock to hamlets at first light; The sparrow, Venus’ son; the nightingale, That calls forth all the fresh leaves new; The swallow, murderer of the bees.* (#ulink_ebd56b8f-8d9b-55f7-8c80-ea4962b097af) And on and on … But it isn’t just birds that have special meanings in the medieval world. Almost everything carries a story, even – from the same poem – different kinds of wood: The builder’s oak, and then the sturdy ash; The elm, for pillars and for coffins meant; The piper’s box-tree; holly for whip’s lash; Fir for masts; cypress, death to lament; The ewe for bows; aspen for arrows sent; Olive for peace; and too the drunken vine; Victor’s palm; laurel for those who divine. However, as Chaucer’s other poems make clear, this is a world in which numerous divine influences, including the gods of ancient Rome and Greece, are still felt and thought to be potent. At a social level there is a huge, complicated and expensive hierarchy of priests, nuns and their servants, always present. For the upper classes there is of course a chivalric honour code which matters more than life itself. Yes, as every schoolchild knows – or used to know – Chaucer’s characters have bawdy appetites, are corrupt or cruel, and regularly fart. But as every student soon learns, this is a false familiarity. With its iron hierarchies of class and caste, its guilds, beggars, religious con-artists and its sense that allegory is ubiquitous, Chaucer’s England is closer to the more remote parts of Hindu India than to anywhere in today’s Britain. Far from being the rollicking essence of Englishness, his characters spent a great deal of their time overseas – as did Chaucer himself. His knight, for instance, has fought in Alexandria in Egypt, in Prussia, Lithuania, Russia, Spain and North Africa, as well as modern-day Turkey and Syria. For Chaucer’s religious characters, Rome is the real capital of the world. Or take that most famous and homely of the pilgrims on their way to Canterbury: A good WIFE was there from next to BATH, But pity was that she was somewhat deaf. In cloth-making she was excellent, Surpassing those of Ypres and of Ghent. … Her kerchiefs were finely wove I found; I dare to swear those weighed a good ten pounds, That on a Sunday she wore on her head. Her hose were of a fine scarlet red, And tightly tied: her shoes full soft and new. Bold was her face, and fair and red of hue. Had been a worthy woman all her life; Husbands at the church-door she had five, Besides other company in her youth – No need to speak of that just now, in truth. And thrice had she been to Jerusalem; She had crossed many a foreign stream. At Boulogne she had been, and Rome, St James of Compostella, and Cologne, And she knew much of wandering by the way, Gap toothed was she, truthfully to say. We remember the five husbands, the jolly clothing, even the gap in her teeth – she starts to feel almost like a female Falstaff – but how often do we remind ourselves that the wife of Bath spent so much time gallivanting across Europe? So why, some people will be wondering, is Chaucer still so vastly popular when so many medieval poets have faded from view? The great trick he pulls off in The Canterbury Tales is, as different characters tell different stories, discovering a multitude of voices. So the pious and learned Chaucer can mimic a foul-mouthed miller; and it’s through this ventriloquism that we hear (we hope) the voices of the ruder, cruder medieval British. We also get that wonderful, concrete description Chaucer is so famous for. ‘The Miller’s Tale’ starts with that oldest of stories – the foolish older man, in this case a carpenter, who has taken for his wife a much younger and sexier teenager called Alison. We know what’s going to happen next. A lecherous student called Nicholas becomes Alison’s lover, and persuades the carpenter that he has had a vision of the future. There is going to be a second flood, like Noah’s; to escape drowning, the carpenter agrees to be suspended in a tub, usefully well out of the way of the two lovers. But it turns out there is a third man, Absalon, who works for the parish priest and is also in love with Alison: Up rose this jolly lover, Absalon, And gaily dressed to perfection is, But first chews cardamom and liquorice, To smell sweet, before he combs his hair. Then he goes to Alison’s window and begs for a kiss. She, the minx, has other ideas. What follows is filthy, but is also one of the most famous scenes in Chaucer: Then Absalon first wiped his mouth full dry. Dark was the night like to pitch or coal, And at the window out she put her hole, And Absalon, had better nor worse than this, That with his mouth her naked arse he kissed Before he was aware, had savoured it. Back he started, something was amiss, For well he knew a woman has no beard. He felt something rough, and long-haired, And said: ‘Fie, alas, what have I done?’ ‘Tee-hee!’ quoth she, and clapped the window shut, No waxing, it seems, in medieval London. But now the story takes a darker hue. Absalon vows to take his revenge. He heats up a poker red-hot and returns to the window. He begs Alison for another kiss, in return for which he will give her a present: First he coughed then he knocked withal On the window, as loud as he dared Then Alison answered: ‘Who’s there, That knocks so? I warrant it’s a thief!’ ‘Why no’ quoth he, ‘Not so, by my faith; I am your Absalon, my sweet darling. Of gold,’ quoth he, ‘I’ve brought you a ring. My mother gave it me, so God me save. Full fine it is, and carefully engraved; This will I give you, if you will me kiss.’ Now Nicholas had risen for a piss, And thought he would improve the jape: He should kiss his arse ere he escape. And he raised the window hastily, And put his arse outside covertly, Beyond the buttock, to the haunch-bone. And then spoke up the clerk, Absalon: ‘Speak, sweet bird; I know not where you art.’ Then Nicholas at once let fly a fart, As great as if it were a thunder-clap, The clerk was nearly blinded with the blast; Yet he was ready with his iron hot, And Nicholas right in the arse he smote. Off went the skin a hand’s breadth round and some; The coulter had so burnt him on his bum, That for the pain he thought he would die. Could there be anything further from the bloodthirsty heroics of the alliterative poem about Arthur and his knights than this sordid tale of lower-class shenanigans? But there is an obvious connection which tells us another important truth about our forebears. It’s really rather cruel. The miller, and presumably his listeners, took great delight in the branding of Nicholas, who suffered huge pain, albeit on the backside. Just as the reality of medieval warfare was extremely brutal, and there must have been many hideously deformed and maimed ex-soldiers wandering London, so too ordinary civilian life was cruel. Children tormented animals; old women were publicly burned to death as witches; the decomposing bodies of executed criminals were left hanging in the streets. Despite the intense religiosity, despite hundreds of thousands of priests and monks, despite the noble promises of the chivalric cult, despite assumptions about the afterlife and eternal punishment for sin, this was simply a less civilised country than it is today. It may seem that I’m making far too much out of what was meant to be simply a coarse, funny poem, but there’s so little in medieval poetry that directly describes life at the time. To the medieval mind, poetry had many purposes. It existed to educate and amuse on long winter nights; to pass on beliefs about religion and courtly, educated behaviour; to build a bridge back to the world of the ancients. But the assumption that poetry should directly reflect the dirty, often cruel and dangerous state of daily life is something that most poets would reject. Their world, apart from relative rarities such as ‘The Miller’s Tale’, is an idealised and allegorical one: poets are forever falling into dreams in which they meet the Platonic representatives of honour, love, duty or whatever it might be. This dream world would remain hugely popular long after Chaucer died. English poetry directly after Chaucer goes into a bit of a lull. The greatest group of his followers were writing at the end of the 1400s and the beginning of the 1500s in Scotland, and not surprisingly, the poetry of the so-called Scottish Chaucerians is full of dream and allegory, and translations from the classics. But Scotland, independent politically for almost two centuries, was becoming a distinctively different country: its court poets might ape and admire the culture of London, but the country itself was both rougher and more democratic. Scotland had its own chroniclers, and just like their English equivalents they tried to tie its history back to ancient days in the Mediterranean – we have already met Andrew of Wyntoun – but its epic poets emphasise something we don’t hear much of from English poets at this time – freedom. Since the wars of independence conducted by William Wallace and then Robert the Bruce against the English, culminating in the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, Scotland had been free. It had adopted a different notion of kingship to England. In 1320 the Scots had sent a letter to the Pope expressing their view that independence from London meant a kind of freedom rare in medieval Europe. The so-called ‘Declaration of Arbroath’ asserted that ‘for, as long as but a hundred of us remain alive, never will we on any conditions be brought under English rule. It is in truth not for glory, nor riches, nor honours that we are fighting, but for freedom – for that alone, which no honest man gives up but with life itself.’ This is the spirit of the most famous Scottish medieval poem, written by John Barbour, an Aberdonian priest who studied in Oxford and Paris. His huge epic The Brus was completed at the Scottish court in the 1370s, on a commission from the great king’s grandson, Robert II. In the tale of the independence wars, essentially an adventure story, the most famous lines are a reflection on the importance of political freedom: A! Fredome is a noble thing Fredome mays man to haiff lyking Fredome all solace to man giffis, He levys at es that freely levys. A noble hart may haiff nane es Na ellys nocht that may him ples Gif fredome failyhe, for fre liking Is yharnyt [desired] our all other thing. Na he that ay has levyt fre May nocht knaw weill the propyrte The angyr na wrechyt dome [condition] That is couplyt to foule thryldome, But gif he had assayit it. But if he did say, or try, it, he Suld think fredome mar to prys Than all the gold in warld that is. This feels as if it was passionately written, and there are no equivalent passages in medieval poetry south of the border. After the wars of independence, Scotland suffered a long period of terrible bad luck with its kings. That bad luck, however, gives us a rare example of poetry by a king which isn’t half bad. In March 1406 the heir to the Scottish throne, the future King James I, set off by sea to avoid his enemies at home and escape to France. But when his vessel passed close to the English coast he was captured by pirates and handed over to Henry IV of England, beginning an eighteen-year captivity under different English kings. Clearly influenced by Chaucer, James wrote an autobiographical poem now known as The King’s Quair (The King’s Book). He falls asleep – as all poets do – and dreams of the philosopher Boethius – again, almost mandatory – before describing what actually happens to him. Here is his account of boarding ship and then being captured: Purvait of all that was us necessarye, With wynd at will, up airly by the morowe, Streight unto schip, no longer wold we tarye, The way we tuke, the tyme I tald to forowe. With mony ‘fare wele’ and ‘Sanct Johne to borowe’ Of falowe and frende, and thus with one assent We pullit up saile and furth oure wayis went. Upon the wawis weltering to and fro, So infortunate was us that fremyt day That maugr?, playnly, quhethir we wold or no, With strong hand, by forse, schortly to say, Of inymyis takin and led away We weren all, and broght in thair contree: Fortune it schupe non othir wayis to be. King James’s story ends quite well. He hears a lady singing and is entranced by her. This will be his own bride in real life, Joan Beaufort, with whom he eventually returns to Scotland. There he wasn’t a bad king, but became entangled in English wars, as Scottish kings mostly did, and was eventually murdered by his uncle, another occupational hazard of Scottish monarchy. But James shared one thing with the best of his subjects – his enthusiasm for Chaucer and the new developments in English verse. The Scottish renaissance was late and brief, but its flowering was extraordinary; and whatever the country’s political freedom, for literary inspiration its writers looked south. Gavin Douglas, a member of one of the most powerful Scottish families, and later an eminent churchman and diplomat, was the first person writing in any form of English to translate Virgil’s Aeneid, producing a powerful and gripping version. Robert Henryson, a cleric from Fife, wrote a series of dream poems and witty animal fables, and also a coda to Chaucer, the Testament of Cresseid. His great virtue is down-to-earth directness. In his tale of the country mouse and the town mouse, taken from Aesop, Henryson really makes us feel the distinction between the life of a rural peasant, constantly threatened with starvation, and the snug, smug world of a well-to-do merchant in the town – indeed, his town mouse has been elected as a city burgess, freed from any obligation to pay taxes. This rurall mous into the wynter tyde Had hunger, cauld, and tholit grit distres. The tother mous that in the burgh couth byde, Was gild brother and made ane fre burges, Toll-fre alswa but custum mair or les And fredome had to ga quhairever scho list Amang the cheis and meill in ark and kist. The town mouse goes to visit her sister in the country, but is deeply unimpressed with the poor food and humble abode, and persuades her to come to the town, where they feed richly: with vittell grit plentie, Baith cheis and butter upon skelfis hie, Flesche and fische aneuch, baith fresche and salt, And sekkis full of grotis, meile, and malt. Efter quhen thay disposit wer to dyne, Withowtin grace thay wesche and went to meit, With all coursis that cukis culd devyne, Muttoun and beif strikin in tailyeis greit. Ane lordis fair thus couth thay counterfeit Except ane thing, thay drank the watter cleir Insteid of wyne bot yit thay maid gude cheir. All is going swimmingly, until first a steward and then a cat find them. The country mouse falls into a faint, and just escapes being eaten by the cat after being played with. The cat departs, and the town mouse reappears to find her sister: Out of hir hole scho come and cryit on hie, ‘How, fair sister! Cry peip, quhairever ye be!’ This rurall mous lay flatlingis on the ground And for the deith scho wes full sair dredand For till hir hart straik mony wofull stound, As in ane fever trimbillit fute and hand. And quhan hir sister in sic ply hir fand, For verray pietie scho began to greit, Syne confort hir with wordis hunny sweit. ‘Quhy ly ye thus? Ryse up, my sister deir, Cum to your meit, this perrell is overpast.’ The uther answerit with a hevie cheir, ‘I may not eit, sa sair I am agast.’ Here, as so often in Henryson, I think you can hear the very voices of the Scottish people in the late 1400s. These and other fables tell us about life as it’s being lived. The town is full of luxuries like cheese and cooked meats, but it’s also a place of danger and rapacity. Henryson looks life squarely in the face: elsewhere he writes about leprosy and the plague. In the end, however, he has a very medieval sensibility: everything has an allegorical meaning, and the purpose of poetry is to point the moral. Here’s part of the moral drawn to the end of the story of the two mice, and it’s a familiar Christian one about the virtues of modesty and moderation. The best life is one of ‘sickerness’ – security, or safety, with only modest possessions: Blissed be sempill lyfe withoutin dreid, Blissed be sober feist in quietie. Quha hes aneuch, of na mair hes he neid Thocht it be littill into quantatie. Grit aboundance and blind prosperitie Oftymes makis ane evill conclusioun. The sweitest lyfe thairfoir in this cuntrie Is sickernes with small possessioun. Aside from Chaucer himself, Robert Henryson seems the most lovable and humane of medieval poets. His slightly later and greater contemporary William Dunbar is a very different kettle of fish. More so than anyone before him, we feel we can get inside his mind, though it’s not always attractive. Probably born south of Edinburgh around 1460, this courtier, priest and ambassador to England and Norway speaks in his own voice, in a way that feels new. He writes, for instance, about having a migraine headache: My heid did yak yester nicht, This day to mak that I na micht, So sair the magryme dois me menyie Persying my brow as ony ganyie That scant I luik may on the licht.* (#ulink_0a2a102d-7aba-56a1-9b28-aed0d7f94527) Dunbar wasn’t a particularly nice man. He was always whingeing about money, enjoyed ferocious quarrels, and is the author of a spectacularly racist poem about a black African woman who arrives in Edinburgh by ship. But he has a directness that we rarely find before him. Here, for instance, is his furious address to the merchants of Edinburgh, whom he blames for leaving their city in an embarrassingly dilapidated state. May no one, he asks, go through the principal gates of the town without being assaulted by the stench of rotten fish – haddocks and skate – and the screams of old women and ferocious arguments, descending into mere abuse? Doesn’t this dishonour the town before strangers? May nane pas throw your principall gaittis For stink of haddockis and of scattis, For cryis of carlingis and debaittis, For feusum flyttinis of defame. Think ye not schame, Befoir strangeris of all estaittis That sic dishonour hurt your name? The dirty, stinking lanes cut out the light from the parish church; the porches in front of the houses make them darker than anywhere else in the world – isn’t it a shame that so few civic improvements have been made? Your Stinkand Stull that standis dirk Haldis the lycht fra your parroche kirk. Your foirstairis makis your housis mirk Lyk na cuntray bot heir at hame. Think ye not schame, Sa litill polesie to work, In hurt and sclander of your name? The high cross in the centre of the town should be a place of gold and silk; instead, it’s all crud and milk. The public weighing beam stinks of shellfish, tripe and haggis: At your Hie Croce quhar gold and silk Sould be, thair is bot crudis and milk, And at your Trone bot cokill and wilk, Pansches, pudingis of Jok and Jame. Think ye not schame, Sen as the world sayis that ilk, In hurt and sclander of your name? … Dunbar protests that tailors, cobblers and other low craftsmen crowd the streets, defiling them. A notorious passage leading to the main church, the so-called ‘Stinking Style’, means that the merchants are crammed together as in a honeycomb: Tailyouris, soutteris, and craftis vyll The fairest of your streitis dois fyll, And merchantis at the Stinkand Styll Ar hamperit in ane honycame. Think ye not schame That ye have nether witt nor wyll To win yourselff ane bettir name? The entire town is a nest of beggars; scoundrels are everywhere, molesting decent people with their cries. Even worse, nothing has been properly provided for the honest poor: Your burgh of beggeris is ane nest, To schout thai swentyouris will not rest. All honest folk they do molest, Sa piteuslie thai cry and rame. Think ye not schame, That for the poore hes nothing drest, In hurt and sclander of your name? As to the merchants themselves, who are supposed to be in charge of all this, their profits go up every day and their charitable works are less and less. You can’t get through the streets for the cries of the crooked, the blind and the lame – shame on you. Your proffeit daylie dois incres, Your godlie workis, les and les. Through streittis nane may mak progres For cry of cruikit, blind, and lame. Think ye not schame, That ye sic substance dois posses, And will not win ane bettir name? William Dunbar’s great cry of anger against the corrupt and incompetent merchants running Edinburgh concludes with a plea for reform, proper pricing and better management. He was a junior member of the court of King James IV, and one likes to hope that his passionate protests had some effect; at any rate, it’s the most vivid account of the reality of medieval streets in British poetry thus far – we could almost say English poetry, because Dunbar and his colleagues insisted that they wrote in ‘Inglis’, albeit strongly tinged with the special words and accents of contemporary Scotland. James IV was one of the most impressive kings Scotland had had. He was multilingual, interested in everything from alchemy to shipbuilding, and he presided over a highly cultured court. Earlier, we noted the widespread influence of the old British languages – now broken up into Welsh, Scottish Gaelic, Irish and Cornish. The English wars against the Welsh had helped spread the idea that the old British were barbarians. We will see this in Shakespeare later on, and by late Tudor times the wars against the Irish kick-started a strain of intra-British racism which survives today. But even in Dunbar’s Scotland, when King James was trying to pacify the Gaelic-speaking north (Dunbar used ‘Erse’ or Irish as the preferred term), there was a profound and mutually antagonistic cultural divide. In his ‘Dance of the Seven Deadly Sins’ Dunbar imagines Mahoun – the devil – celebrating with Highlanders, the foreign-tongued Irish or Gaels of the north. I could try to translate for you, but it’s hardly worth it. The point is, they are barely human, and clog up even hell: Than cryd Mahoun for a Heleand padyane. Syne ran a feynd to feche Makfadyane Far northwart in a nuke. Be he the correnoch had done schout Erschemen so gadderit him abowt, In Hell grit rowme thay tuke. Thae tarmegantis, with tag and tatter, Full lowd in Ersche begowth to clatter And rowp lyk revin and ruke. The Devill sa devit wes with thair yell That in the depest pot of Hell He smorit thame with smuke. Scotland, at least, was still deeply divided by language. In another famous poem, Dunbar engaged in what was called a ‘flyting’, a poetic competition of mutual abuse, with the poet Walter Kennedy. The two men would have stood opposite one another, probably at the court of King James, attacking each other and responding ingeniously to the insults; the competition would be judged on the complexity of the extemporised poetry as well as the invigorating level of abuse – almost identical to today’s ‘battle rap’. It’s now thought that Dunbar probably wrote the whole thing himself, although if he did, he gave some very good lines of attack to his enemy, who portrays him as a dwarfish and treacherous fool, without any control over his bowels or bladder. Dunbar attacks Kennedy for writing in Irish; and what’s interesting is that Kennedy came not from the Highlands, but from the Ayrshire coast in the Scottish south-west. The old British languages weren’t yet in full retreat. William Dunbar could write about almost everything – the terrible winter weather, the ups and downs of court life and its politics, dancing, eating, the corruption of friars and monks, the beauties of London and his desperate need for just a bit more money. But it would be a shame to leave this wonderful writer without his greatest poem, which returns us to the ubiquitous presence of death in late-medieval Britain. Plagues, hunger and disease, not to mention wars, raiding and executions, meant that corpses were a common sight and life expectancy was short. Bodies were generally buried close to the church or under its stones, which must have meant that the smell of decomposition was something everybody knew. In ‘Lament for the Makars’, his elegy for dead poets, Dunbar gives full vent to his terror of death. We are told that he wrote the poem when he was sick himself, and there is nothing quite like it in British medieval poetry. Timor mortis conturbat me means, roughly speaking, ‘The fear of death upends me.’ I that in hail wes, and gladnes Am trublit now with gret seiknes, And feblit with infermite; Timor mortis conturbat me. Our pleasance heir is all vane glory, This fals warld is bot transitory, The flesche is brukle, the Fend is sle; Timor mortis conturbat me. The stait of man dois change and vary, Now sound, now seik, now blith, now sary, Now dansand mery, now like to dee; Timor mortis conturbat me. The stanza that follows, in which Dunbar compares life to the wind rushing through reeds (‘wicker’), seems to me a small miracle of poetic skill, in which the rhythm and the meaning are indistinguishable: No stait in erd heir standis sicker; As with the wynd wavis the wicker, Wavis this warldis vanite; Timor mortis conturbat me. Death, says Dunbar, has taken the best from all the estates of life – heavily armed knights in the field, babies at the breast, champions, captains and beautiful ladies. Death has taken magicians and astrologers, rhetoricians, theologians, surgeons, physicians, and above all poets: He hes done petuously devour, The noble Chaucer, of makaris flour, The Monk of Bery, and Gower, al thre, Timor mortis conturbat me. And he is taking Scotland’s poets one by one, not forgetting Dunbar’s old enemy: In Dumfermelyne he has done roune With Maister Robert Henrisoun … … Gud Maister Walter Kennedy In poynt of dede lyis verily, Gret reuth it were that so suld be; Timor mortis conturbat me. And so, eventually, that great clanging Latin bell can’t be avoided by Dunbar himself, as he well knows: Sen he hes all my brether tane, He will nocht lat me lif alane, On forse I man his nyxt me be; Timor mortis conturbat me. The poem has a special poignancy because, not so long after it was written, William Dunbar’s whole world was destroyed on the battlefield. In 1513 his king and patron James IV honoured a treaty with the French and invaded Northumberland, where he was confronted by the Earl of Surrey and a large English army. What followed has been described as the last great medieval battle on British soil. Though both sides used artillery, not to great effect, most of the killing was done with billhooks and spears. James, who had lingered in chivalric manner before the battle, giving the English plenty of time to prepare, was slaughtered along with a dozen earls, almost all the senior clergy of Scotland and most of the chieftains – a shattering blow to a country just emerging from a long period of feuding. The short Scottish renaissance that James had symbolised, with its poets, architects, shipwrights and men of letters, came to a juddering halt. Timor mortis, indeed. * (#ulink_34e11d38-c9b0-5119-a184-1e4b5b32e20a) This translation is by A.S. Kline. * (#ulink_d81e2e6c-73b7-5fc6-add1-6d615d9a9346) This modern translation is taken from the Harvard internet site. * (#ulink_9e689278-7a9c-5ca4-bf94-38343bc7aeb8) Translation from the poetryintranslation website. * (#ulink_bec3f961-1864-59e2-8831-75c9dd9b0a2e) In Scots-English, ‘yak’ means ache; to ‘mak’ is to write poetry – still in Scotland today ‘makar’ means poet; and a ‘ganyie’ is an arrow. 3 Fanatics and Courtiers (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) In all the periods of poetry we’ve looked at so far, there is nothing quite as extraordinary as what happens in the 1500s – that great, bloody and turbulent century of Reformation. We begin it with the clearly medieval figures of the Chaucerians. Even if Dunbar feels different, it’s still a recognisably medieval world, crammed with religious meaning and allegory, in which the old stories are still popular, whether Aesop or Arthur. We end the 1500s, however, with William Shakespeare nearing his zenith, and a fresh universe of new poets who feel almost modern in their directness. It’s not that one world dies and a new one is born. Things aren’t like that. But the great age of Catholic Christianity, the age of Latin learning, polychromatic cathedrals and a clear social hierarchy deriving from feudal times, was waning very quickly. Wars would carry on being fought, but mostly abroad. British culture, from Edinburgh to London, began to feel much more urban, less close to the sounds and smells of the countryside. Above all, a new religious sensibility, deriving from John Wycliffe and the early reformers, meant that people had a more direct relationship to the gospel; this seems to be connected to what we today would call individualism. Also, thanks to printing and the lack of domestic warfare, we suddenly have a much larger number of poets to choose from: simply, much more stuff survives. Politically, the biggest change was the victory of the Tudor dynasty in England, those bringers of Protestantism and a more ruthless royal overlordship. It was the court of Henry VIII that would take poetry forward again, and so it is appropriate that the first major poet of England in this century was a highly political figure, and indeed the first Poet Laureate to be mentioned here. John Skelton probably came from Diss in Norfolk, and was an unruly, unpredictable but star figure at Oxford and Cambridge. Notorious for secretly marrying a wife while a vicar, and having a child – who he presented, naked, to his congregation – by her, he later became a great flayer of priestly corruption just as England was in revolt against the Roman Church. To start with he can sound old-fashioned and medieval, as in his jeering, triumphalist response to the death of Scotland’s King James IV at Flodden: Kynge Jamy, Jomy your joye is all go. Ye summoned our kynge. Why dyde ye so? Ye have determyned to make a fraye, Our kynge than beynge out of the waye; But by the power and myght of God Ye were beten weth your owne rod. By your wanton wyll, syr,at a worde, Ye have loste spores, cote armure and sworde … Of the out yles ye rough foted Scottes We have well eased you of the bottes. Ye rowe ranke Scottes and dronken Danes Of our Englysshe bowes ye have fette your banes. It’s not a lot more advanced than ‘Na-na-na-na,’ but Skelton was a much more sophisticated satirist than this, though known at the time and ever afterwards as a peculiarly sarcastic poet. And, often enough, nasty too. Alongside the conventions of chivalric love there was a bitterly misogynistic strain to English poetry. In the previous chapter I refrained from including the revoltingly racist poem by Dunbar after he had seen a black woman in Edinburgh. But we shouldn’t sanitise our own history, so here is Skelton ripping to pieces a woman whose main sin seems to be that she was elderly: Her lothely lere Is nothynge clere, But ugly of chere, Droupy and drowsy, Scurvy and lowsy; Her face all bowsy, Comely crynkled, Woundersly wrynkled, Lyke a rost pygges eare, Brystled wyth here. Her lewde lyppes twayne, They slaver, men sayne, Lyke a ropy rayne, A gummy glayre: She is ugly fayre; Her nose somdele hoked, And camously croked, Never stoppynge, But ever droppynge; Her skynne lose and slacke, Grained lyke a sacke; With a croked backe Ugh. Skelton was tutor to the future Henry VIII, and became heavily embroiled in his fight with Cardinal Wolsey: the ferocious assaults on Church corruption, which deeply offended the cardinal and put Skelton in serious danger, were also however an expression of the growing anti-clerical mood of pre-Reformation England. Skelton’s verse is always vigorous and exciting, and it’s not hard to see why he was such a politically controversial figure. In his famous poem ‘Speke, Parott’ he uses the bird to deliver a tirade of abuse against Wolsey’s Church. Like much of Skelton’s writing, the poem is almost manic, and doesn’t feel like a piece written to order, but rather the cry of an early reformer against the flabby, corrupt and greedy Church. Is it so different in tone to an angry blog post today directed at the political elite? So many morall maters, and so lytell vsyd; So myche newe makyng, and so madd tyme spente; So myche translacion in to Englyshe confused; So myche nobyll prechyng, and so lytell amendment; So myche consultacion, almoste to none entente; So myche provision, and so lytell wytte at nede;– Syns Dewcalyons flodde* (#ulink_0e6d3a8b-af60-539e-b26e-84d8b5a1ecf6) there can no clerkes rede. So lytyll dyscressyon, and so myche reasonyng; So myche hardy dardy, and so lytell manlynes; So prodigall expence, and so shamfull reconyng; So gorgyous garmentes, and so myche wrechydnese; So myche portlye pride, with pursys penyles So myche spente before, and so myche vnpayd behynde;– Syns Dewcalyons flodde there can no clerkes fynde. So myche forcastyng, and so farre an after dele; So myche poletyke pratyng, and so lytell stondythe in stede; So lytell secretnese, and so myche grete councell; So manye bolde barons, there hertes as dull as lede; So many nobyll bodyes vndyr on dawys hedd; So royall a kyng as reynythe vppon vs all;– Syns Dewcalyons flodde was nevyr sene nor shall. So many complayntes, and so smalle redresse; So myche callyng on, and so smalle takyng hede; So myche losse of merchaundyse, and so remedyles; So lytell care for the comyn weall, and so myche nede; So myche dowtfull daunger, and so lytell drede; So myche pride of prelattes, so cruell and so kene;– Syns Dewcalyons flodde, I trowe, was nevyr sene. Skelton was a one-off, similar at times in tone to his contemporary William Dunbar. But he introduces us to the fact, unavoidable at this period, that poetry and the royal court intersected deeply. Particularly at Henry VIII’s court, poetry became an essential part of daily life as perhaps it had never been before and has not been since. It was a world of incessant cod-Arthurian games, elaborate tournaments, masques and literary competitions; for an ambitious courtier, to be able to produce instant, fluent poems was a great advantage. These would not have been printed or publicly available – most would have been written on scraps of paper to be passed around the court from hand to hand. Thus a courtier might declare his love, or lament its passing. Because one such courtier, Sir Thomas Wyatt, was a minor genius, aspects of this artificial, highly-coloured world have survived. A tall, handsome man who in a Holbein drawing looks like a heavily bearded modern hipster, Wyatt served both Henry VII and his son. He was suspected of having an affair with Anne Boleyn, and was imprisoned in the Tower by Henry VIII for adultery with her. There he witnessed other alleged adulterers being executed, and possibly Anne herself. Life at Henry VIII’s court was dangerous, particularly for a glamorous and sexually driven man like Wyatt; and yet, despite flying close to the sun on numerous occasions, he survived to die of old age. From our point of view he is most important as the man who took Petrarch’s new sonnet form and introduced it properly into English verse. In Wyatt’s writing there is a specificity of description, and a humane directness, which make it sound as if it comes from a different century, almost a different planet, from Skelton’s. The metaphor of timid deer for women might seem offensive, but quickly collapses, in an almost Shakespearean way: They flee from me that sometime did me seek With naked foot, stalking in my chamber. I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek, That now are wild and do not remember That sometime they put themself in danger To take bread at my hand; and now they range, Busily seeking with a continual change. Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise Twenty times better; but once in special, In thin array after a pleasant guise, When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall, And she me caught in her arms long and small; Therewith all sweetly did me kiss And softly said, ‘Dear heart, how like you this.’ It was no dream: I lay broad waking. But all is turned thorough my gentleness Into a strange fashion of forsaking; And I have leave to go of her goodness, And she also, to use newfangleness. But since that I so kindly am served I would fain know what she hath deserved. Well-travelled on the Continent and a multilingual Cambridge scholar, Wyatt also introduced the Horatian ode into English, and his address to his friend and fellow courtier John Poynz has all the easy intimacy of Horace himself. The theme is the familiar one of the poet retiring from court and explaining that he must do so because he’s had it with double dealing, oily hypocrisy and the other necessities of life around the powerful. But in Wyatt’s hands, what could be a mere poetic exercise feels like a genuine plaint by a living courtier in the cold climate of Henry’s England: farewell to all the doublespeak of politics: The friendly foe with his double face Say he is gentle and courteous therewithal; And say that Favel hath a goodly grace In eloquence; and cruelty to name Zeal of justice and change in time and place; And he that suffer’th offence without blame Call him pitiful; and him true and plain That raileth reckless to every man’s shame. Say he is rude that cannot lie and feign; The lecher a lover; and tyranny To be the right of a prince’s reign. I cannot, I; no, no, it will not be! This is the cause that I could never yet Hang on their sleeves that way, as thou mayst see, A chip of chance more than a pound of wit. This maketh me at home to hunt and to hawk, And in foul weather at my book to sit; In frost and snow then with my bow to stalk; No man doth mark whereso I ride or go: In lusty leas at liberty I walk. And of these news I feel nor weal nor woe, Save that a clog doth hang yet at my heel. No force for that, for it is ordered so, That I may leap both hedge and dyke full well. I am not now in France to judge the wine, … Nor I am not where Christ is given in prey For money, poison, and treason at Rome – A common practice used night and day: But here I am in Kent and Christendom Among the Muses where I read and rhyme; Where if thou list, my Poinz, for to come, Thou shalt be judge how I do spend my time. In its easy eloquence, its self-confidence, this is not so far removed, is it, from the great soliloquies we will soon be hearing on the Elizabethan stage? The Tudor court was a highly artificial human experience; but it produced an intensity of feeling, a closeness and a directness, which would soon be heard by the masses in makeshift theatres around the land. Grandees like Wyatt were confident enough to address their peers with a familiarity unknown in British poetry before. But it would spread. So far, we’ve seen a misogynistic attack on women, and women presented as nervy, nibbling as the game for the courtly male hunter, but we haven’t actually heard from any woman. Anne Askew was born in Lincolnshire in 1520, and became one of the best-known and most spectacular of Protestant martyrs. Her family was relatively wealthy, in land at least. Arranged marriages were common in Tudor England, largely for economic reasons. Girls were often married off as early as fourteen, and some of these unions would have been, by modern standards, forced marriages. Anne’s father had planned to marry her older sister Martha to another local landowner, Thomas Kyne, but Martha died and Anne was substituted, aged fifteen. She bore Thomas two children, her first duty. It wasn’t a happy marriage; they disagreed about religion in particular. Although Henry VIII’s long struggle with the papacy over his divorce from Catherine of Aragon was driving England towards the Protestant camp, there was still huge uncertainty and division over precisely what mix of traditional Catholic teaching and the new teaching of the reformers England would end up with. Relatively small doctrinal differences could become politically toxic. On this spectrum, Anne was a hard-core reformer; her husband was Catholic. While she was still little more than a teenager, Kyne kicked Anne out of the marital home. When she arrived in London she tried to divorce him on the grounds that he was an infidel, and that therefore the marriage could not be legal. Gutsy, but she failed. A determined woman, Anne spoke out on the streets as a female preacher, and disseminated Protestant literature. Some of it came into the hands of courtiers, and probably also reached Katherine Parr, Henry VIII’s sixth and final wife. Thomas Kyne pursued Anne, and had her arrested and brought back to Lincolnshire, but she escaped back to London and continued to preach. She was arrested and then brutally tortured, both at Newgate prison and the Tower of London, being almost split apart on the rack. Refusing to confess or to identify other Protestants she was burned alive at Smithfield, her body having first been sprinkled with gunpowder. She was so badly injured from her tortures that she had to be carried to her execution on a chair. Before she died, however, she composed poetry, of which the best-known example is her ballad from Newgate. If she hadn’t been tortured by then, she was about to be. It’s full, as we’d expect, of traditional Christian imagery: Like as the armed knight Appointed to the field, With this world will I fight And Faith shall be my shield. Faith is that weapon strong Which will not fail at need. My foes, therefore, among Therewith will I proceed. As it is had in strength And force of Christes way It will prevail at length Though all the devils say nay. Behind the familiar Arthurian images we can feel the urgent drumbeat of a rebellious mind; and indeed it’s a brave poem on many levels, including a direct attack on the royal authority: More enmyes now I have Than hairs upon my head. Let them not me deprave But fight thou in my stead. On thee my care I cast. For all their cruel spight I set not by their haste For thou art my delight. I am not she that list My anchor to let fall For every drizzling mist My ship substancial. Not oft use I to wright In prose nor yet in rime, Yet will I shew one sight That I saw in my time. I saw a rial throne Where Justice should have sit But in her stead was one Of moody cruel wit. Anne Askew’s horrific fate shouldn’t blind us to the fact that she was, in her way, a fanatic. In the sermons and other writings by the reformers, and also by their enemies, no quarter is given. Another poem by her, in which she pictures herself as a poor, blind woman in a garden full of dangers and snares – the garden being her own body – provides a window for us into the Reformation mind in its full urgency. In today’s world there is little, outside the more extreme edges of Islamism, that feels like this: A garden I have which is unknown, which God of his goodness gave to me, I mean my body, wherein I should have sown the seed of Christ’s true verity. My spirit within me is vexed sore, my flesh striveth against the same: My sorrows do increase more and more, my conscience suffereth most bitter pain: In Anne’s world, the gardener working on her body is Satan, busy trying to entrap her, with the older generation and the Catholics all on his side: Then this proud Gardener seeing me so blind, he thought on me to work his will, And flattered me with words so kind, to have me continue in my blindness still. He fed me then with lies and mocks, for venial sins he bid me go To give my money to stones and stocks, which was stark lies and nothing so. With stinking meat then was I fed, for to keep me from my salvation, I had trentals of mass, and bulls of lead, not one word spoken of Christ’s passion. In me was sown all kind of feigned seeds, with Popish ceremonies many a one, Masses of requiem with other juggling deeds, till God’s spirit out of my garden was gone … …‘Beware of a new learning,’ quoth he, ‘it lies, which is the thing I most abhor, Meddle not with it in any manner of wise, but do as your fathers have done before.’ My trust I did put in the Devil’s works, thinking sufficient my soul to save, Being worse than either Jews or Turks, thus Christ of his merits I did deprave … Towards the end of the poem Anne’s imagery seems to prefigure her own violent ending. This is a world of savagery as well as of salvation: Strengthen me good Lord in thy truth to stand, for the bloody butchers have me at their will, With their slaughter knives ready drawn in their hand my simple carcass to devour and kill. O Lord forgive me mine offense, for I have offended thee very sore, Take therefore my sinful body from hence, Then shall I, vile creature, offend thee no more. I would with all creatures and faithful friends for to keep them from this Gardener’s hands, For he will bring them soon unto their ends, with cruel torments of fierce firebrands. The final lines, assuming they really are by Anne Askew and not a later Protestant propagandist, are genuinely horrific. She is going to leave her carcass on earth, she says: Although to ashes it be now burned, I know thou canst raise it again, In the same likeness as thou it formed, in heaven with thee evermore to remain. Anne was one of sixty-three people listed in the famous Foxe’s Book of Martyrs as being burned alive in the reign of Henry VIII alone. They include priests, courtiers, servants, musicians, professional actors or ‘players’, a tailor, Richard Mekins, ‘a child that passed not the age of 15 years’, Frenchmen and a Scot – a pretty good cross-section of Tudor society. There is also William Tracey, a squire from Worcestershire, the sixty-fourth victim – irritatingly for the authoriries he was already dead, so he was dug up and then burned. In the reign of Henry’s daughter Mary nearly three hundred Protestants were burned alive, and it’s an even fuller list, coming from every social class and almost every trade: upholsterers, shoemakers, candlemakers, bricklayers, servants, carpenters, wheelwrights, glovers, merchants, gentlemen and royal courtiers. Men and women, old and young, they came from every part of Britain. When the Protestants were in the saddle under the reigns of Edward VI and Elizabeth I, similar numbers of Catholics, many of them priests, were martyred in turn and beatified by the Vatican. The punishment of death by burning alive was an ancient one, but was revived in Tudor times to cause the maximum fear – in a sense it was a terrorist punishment, worse than a public beheading. It was particularly popular for women like Anne Askew for a bizarre reason: male traitors had been traditionally hanged, drawn and quartered. For the crowd to see them being disembowelled alive, and often having their private parts cut off, they clearly needed to be naked. But while it was acceptable to torture and burn women alive, for them to be seen naked in public was indecent. William Blackstone, one of the fathers of English law, explained that ‘For as the decency due to sex forbids the exposing and public mangling of their bodies, their sentence (which is to the full as terrible to sensation as the other) is to be drawn to the gallows and there be burned alive.’ It’s a bleak view of Tudor London, and to balance it we could do worse than look at the writing of a very different woman. Isabella Whitney was Britain’s first published professional writer of secular poetry. We don’t know a lot about her, but she was from Cheshire and came down to London to work as a servant. Her verse – clear, punchy and very much from a woman’s point of view – is a useful counterblast to the courtly sonnets and sexual innuendo of more famous male Tudor writers. Here she is, warning young gentlewomen and maids in love about how men really behave. ‘Mermaids’ was a euphemism for prostitutes, in this case inverted and subverted to refer to wanton male lovers. Personally, I like to think it’s also a reference here to the Mermaid Tavern, the favoured haunt in Cheapside of so many poets and playwrights, from John Donne to Fletcher and Beaumont. If so, Isabella was writing a direct response to the flamboyance of the Elizabethan wits. Ye Virgins, ye from Cupid’s tents do bear away the foil Whose hearts as yet with raging love most painfully do boil … Beware of fair and painted talk, beware of flattering tongues: The Mermaids do pretend no good for all their pleasant songs. Some use the tears of crocodiles, contrary to their heart: And if they cannot always weep, they wet their cheeks by art. Ovid, within his Art of Love, doth teach them this same knack To wet their hand and touch their eyes, so oft as tears they lack. Here we have a woman’s-eye view of the swooning swains and untrustworthy lovers described by so many sonneteers in codpieces. Trust not a man at the first sight but try him well before: I wish all maids within their breasts to keep this thing in store. For trial shall declare his truth and show what he doth think, Whether he be a lover true, or do intend to shrink. And that’s an image, I think, you would not find in John Donne or Shakespeare. In another, more famous poem, Isabella leaves her rather scanty worldly wealth to the city of London, a place which is less the doomy moral theatre of Anne Askew than a throbbing cockpit of trade and good things: I, whole in body, and in minde, but very weake in Purse: Doo make, and write my Testament for feare it wyll be wurse … … First for their foode, I Butchers leave, that every day shall kyll: By Thames you shal have Brewers store, and Bakers at your wyll. And such as orders doo obserue, And pouring into London thrice a weeke: I leave two Streets, full fraught therwith, they neede not farre to seeke. Watlyng Streete, and Canwyck streete, I full of Wollen leave: And Linnen store in Friday streete, if they mee not deceave. And those which are of callyng such, that costlier they require: I Mercers leave, with silke so rich, as any would desyre. In Cheape of them, they store shal finde and likewise in that streete: I Goldsmithes leave, with Iuels such, as are for Ladies meete. And Plate to furnysh Cubbards with, full braue there shall you finde: With Purle of Siluer and of Golde, to satisfye your minde. With Hoods, Bungraces, Hats or Caps, such store are in that streete: As if on t’one side you should misse the t’other serues you feete. For Nets of every kynd of sort, I leave within the pawne: French Ruffes, high Purles, Gorgets and Sleeves of any kind of Lawne. For Purse or Kniues, for Combe or Glasse, or any needeful knacke I by the Stoks have left a Boy, wil aske you what you lack. I Hose doo leave in Birchin Lane, of any kynd of syse: For Women stitchte, for men both Trunks and those of Gascoyne gise. Bootes, Shoes or Pantables good store, Saint Martins hath for you: … And for the men, few Streetes or Lanes, but Bodymakers bee: And such as make the sweeping Cloakes, with Gardes beneth the Knee. Artyllery at Temple Bar, and Dagges at Tower hyll: Swords and Bucklers of the best, are nye the Fleete vntyll. Now when thy Folke are fed and clad with such as I have namde: For daynty mouthes, and stomacks weake some Iunckets must be framde. Wherfore I Poticaries leave, with Banquets in their Shop: Phisicians also for the sicke, Diseases for to stop. Some Roysters styll, must bide in thee, and such as cut it out: That with the guiltlesse quarel wyl, to let their blood about. For them I cunning Surgions leave, some Playsters to apply. That Ruffians may not styll be hangde, nor quiet persons dye. For Salt, Otemeale, Candles, Sope, or what you els doo want: In many places, Shops are full, I left you nothing scant … Here, in all its plenty, is the sprawling mercantile metropolis of modern times beginning to slide into view; here is a first version of the ‘embarrassment of riches’ described by Simon Schama in relation to the slightly later civilisation of the Dutch Republic. It is clear, however, that Isabella Whitney’s London is also a harsh, challenging place where change is almost too fast-moving. As it still is. Earlier, we saw how during Tudor times the world of the court began to intersect more closely with the ordinary urban imagination; like a dangerous magnet, the court attracted attention from everywhere. That’s partly about the politics, increasingly aggressive, of religious reform. But nowhere is it clearer than in the development of the period’s most brilliant and long-lasting cultural innovation – the English theatre. It can often seem as if William Shakespeare and a select few contemporaries exploded upon the world from nothing. But as the man said, nothing comes from nothing. The truth is that the urban world of the sixteenth century across England was brimming with spectacle and theatre long before Shakespeare. In trying to tell the story of the British through poetry there is a particular problem which begins around now, and which I ought to own up to. Just as in high medieval culture, so in early modern culture, Britain was still a Latin-soaked society. If you wanted to get on, if you wanted to be taken seriously, you had to be able to read and speak Latin. In towns across Britain, grammar schools had been established to birch and bully Latin conjugations into young boys – and very occasionally girls too, though almost all the education for them would have been accomplished in the home. Once you had your Latin, the chance of a university education at Oxford, Cambridge or St Andrews might be open to you. (The Scots were well served: from 1451 Glasgow was an option, and from 1495 Aberdeen as well.) Without Latin, and preferably Greek, there was no chance of a career in the Church, the law, or any literate profession connected to the court. This double literacy had huge advantages for the educated British. It meant that scholars from these islands could talk fluently with their counterparts across the European Continent; and it meant that they had access, directly, to the greatest of the classical writers now becoming more and more freely available in Renaissance Europe. But for poetry, it bred a problem. The educated poets were doused, pickled and marinated in Latin and Greek authors. They had been brought up to parse and translate Plautus, Livy, Ovid and Cicero. Their poetic models came from Imperial Rome and ancient Greece. Their minds were stocked, and over-stuffed, with stories from classical mythology. So when they turned to write in English, they naturally showed their proficiency by imitating the Greek and Roman classics. Sometimes they did this so well you barely notice: the early Shakespeare play The Comedy of Errors comes directly from Plautus. But often anthologies of British poetry from this time seem an endless procession of Roman nymphs and swains, busy copies of Ovid’s Metamorphoses or, as we saw earlier, versions of Horace’s odes. This is fine. It produces some highly enjoyable poetry. There is a lot of very, very clever writing, with bold and daring games, going on. But mostly it doesn’t tell us much about the Britain of the period. For that we have to go to less clever, less fashionable verse by people further down the social scale, or who have turned their backs on the enticements of ancient Rome. Thus, in what follows there will be rather less than in most verse collections of Edmund Spenser’s droll mimicries of medieval poets and Virgil – fewer Phoebes and Chloes, fewer Strephons – and more of the earthier, homespun verse of the ballads and the morality plays. British theatrical traditions followed directly from medieval religious pageantry. Some, at least, of the great cycles of mystery plays, from York, Coventry, Wakefield and Chester, were still being performed in the first half of the 1500s, telling the stories of Noah, Cain and Abel, the New Testament and the saints in churches and marketplaces. Here was direct, simple, often funny drama which had to catch the attention of an illiterate peasant, or lose its audience. So long as the Catholic Church and the medieval guilds held on to their authority, these immensely popular and protracted (the York Cycle was composed of no fewer than forty-eight different tableaux) entertainments were an essential part of the religious education of millions of Britons, particularly in the north and Midlands of England. But, like Christianity itself, religious theatre was changing fast, and by the 1540s there was a new kind of drama, equally didactic, in which vices and virtues appeared as characters in their own right. These morality plays, or ‘interludes’, went further in the representation of contemporary British people on the stage, albeit disguised as symbols. Vice, in particular, under many guises, represented the wickedness, lust, cruelty and arrogance that many in the audience would have recognised in the world around them. The young William Shakespeare in Stratford-upon-Avon would have come across these plays – early in his life his father had the job of authorising performances in the town. The companies of players who took them around, travelling by cart and packhorse, enjoyed the protection of leading nobles, churchmen and sometimes the court itself; and the plays that have survived often have direct connections with the Tudor court, and were first performed there. Henry Medwall, little known these days, was a crucial bridge between the medieval world and the Elizabethan stage. Often cited as the first known vernacular English dramatist, he was born in September 1461 in Southwark, then an anarchic and dangerous place, to a family of wool merchants and tailors. He had a relatively prosperous late-medieval upbringing, doused in Latin at a monastery before he went to Eton, and then to King’s College, Cambridge, for more Latin. Alongside all the studying, he threw himself into musical and dramatic entertainments for banquets and other high days. He helped devise Christmas dramas and learned about the importance of mingling music and stories. Later he would serve as a notary public, a kind of lawyer, under Archbishop Morton, hanging on to the edges of the royal court (of Henry VII), rather as Chaucer had a century earlier. For much of his life Medwall was based at Lambeth Palace, where plays were performed in the Archbishop’s Great Hall. It is suggested that Sir Thomas More himself may have acted in Medwall’s first play, Fulgens and Lucres, in around 1497. Medwall had learned his craft from the medieval morality plays, and he too makes symbols of his characters, but as extracts from his second play, Nature, show, he was learning to root them in the realities of contemporary life. Here, for example, is Pride, describing his exuberant long hairstyle: I love it well to have side here Half a foot beneath mine ear For evermore I stand in fear That mine neck should take cold! I knit up all the night And the daytime, comb it to down right And then it crispeth and shyneth as bright As any peryld gold … And as for his clothing, it’s the latest London look: My doublet is unlaced before, A stomacher of satin and no more. Rain it, snow it, never so sore, Me thinketh I am too hot! Then I have such a short gown With wide sleeves that hang down – They would make some lad in this town A doublet and a coat. Gluttony, meanwhile, lurches in with a lump of cheese and a bottle of wine, announcing: … Of all things earthly I hate to fast. Four times a day I make repast, Or thrice as I suppose, And when I am well fed Then get I me to a soft bed My body to repose. There take I a nap or twain up I go straight and to it again! Though nature be not ready, Yet have I some meat of delight For to provoke the appetite and make the stomach greedy. Envy tries to persuade Gluttony to arm himself for the wars – this was written just at the end of the Wars of the Roses – but Gluttony is having none of the weapons or armour. If he’s going to the wars he’s going to be a victualler, looking after the food and drink: I was never wont to that gear. But I may serve to be a Viteller, and thereof shall he have store, So that I may stand out of danger of gunshot. But I will come no near(er) – I warn you that before. Now, no one is saying that this is great poetry, but it’s perhaps not surprising that scholars have wondered whether Shakespeare’s Falstaff is in some respects the child of Henry Medwall’s Gluttony. We don’t know if the great playwright saw this play when he was a boy, but it’s exactly the kind of thing he would have seen, alongside exaggerated and ludicrous tragedies of the kind he mocked in Hamlet. A slightly later contemporary of Medwall, John Heywood, born in Coventry in 1497, was one of the most celebrated wits and playwrights at the court of Henry VIII – as we have seen, a dangerous place to be. A Catholic who eventually fell foul of Henry’s daughter Elizabeth, Heywood had six plays published. He was on the other side of the argument from poor Anne Askew, part of the circle around Sir Thomas More, and at one point he himself narrowly escaped hanging. He was less learned than Medwall – he had risen as a chorister, a musician and an actor – but again, his drama, though highly moralistic, is full of the smell and the street language of the age. These were plays which may have been created on the edges of the court, but then made their way outwards, being performed in private houses, the inns of court, and anywhere else where there was a hall big enough to accommodate the audience. One of the most thoroughly enjoyable takes what is perhaps the classic British conversation to new levels. The Play of the Weather imagines that Jupiter, who bears an uncanny likeness in his grandiosity to Henry VIII, is considering reform of the chaotic British weather, which has been caused by disagreements between various other gods. His chief servant or courtier, ‘Mery Report’, is a rude, puckish creature, not a million miles away from Shakespeare’s Ariel in The Tempest. Mery will be a good servant in this judgement, he tells Jupiter, because the weather means nothing to him personally: For all weathers I am so indifferent, without affection standing up so right – Sun light, moon light, star light, twilight, torch light, Cold, heat, moist, dry, hail, rain, frost, snow, lightning, thunder, Cloudy, misty, windy, fair, foul, above head or under, Temperate or distemperate – Whatever it be I promise your lordship all is one to me. So at least we know that the weather around 1533, when this play was probably written, wasn’t so different from today’s. The play is also about the antagonism and rivalry between different parts of the British economy, again a contemporary theme: among those asking for meteorological favours are a lordly huntsman, a woodsman, a merchant, the owner of a watermill and the owner of a windmill, a gentlewoman who wants to keep herself from being sunburnt, a laundress who needs good drying weather and a schoolboy who enjoys throwing snowballs. So it’s clear that in moving from moral archetypes towards contemporary Britons, we have already come quite far. Although Heywood was a serious man and a passionate Catholic, he was also typically Tudor in his enjoyment of bawdy and of raucous argument. And the play is surprisingly hard-edged in its economic assessment of England at the time. Remember the buzzing market of Isabella Whitney’s London, its goods pouring in by merchant ships? Here is Heywood’s merchant pleading with Jupiter for favourable winds, and a lack of mists and storms. He sounds at times like an early free-market economist: In the daily danger of our goods and life, First to consider the desert of our request, What wealth we bring the rest to our great care and strife – And then to reward us as ye shall think best. What were the surplusage of each commodity Which grows and increases in every land, Except exchange by such men as we be, By way of intercourse that lyeth on our hand? We brought from home things whereof there is plenty, And homeward we bring such things as they be scant. Who should afore us merchants accounted be? For were not we, the world should wish and want … What does this tell us? Certainly that there was a vigorous discussion going on about whether or not the merchant classes deserved their wealth and position. But the play takes on more sensitive questions as well. After a pompous gentleman demands good weather for his hunting, a forest ranger, in charge of hunting territory, eloquently protests his lot: Rangers and keepers of certain places As forests, parks, purlews and chases Where we be charged with all manner and game Small is our profit and great is our blame. Alas for our wages, what be we the near? What is forty shillings or five mark a year? There is a distinct class edge to this. What would Henry VIII, that manically enthusiastic hunter, or indeed a local lord hosting such a play, make of this demand for higher wages? It would certainly have caused a hubbub of debate once the show was over. Similarly, after the libidinous gentlewoman has complained about her complexion being ruined by sun and rain, a working-class laundress gives her a terrific scolding. She too might have been as fair, except that she knew she had to work, partly because of the danger of idleness: It is not thy beauty that I disdain, But thine idle life that thou hast rehearsed, Which any good woman’s heart would have pierced. For I perceive in dancing and singing, In eating and drinking and thine appareling, Is all the joy wherein thy heart is set. But naught of all this doth thine own Labour get. For how dost thou nothing but of thine own travail, Thou mightest go as naked as my nail. The passages between the owners of the windmill and the watermill fascinatingly compare the two ways of grinding meal, and their usefulness to ordinary farmers and peasants. But there’s a lot of sly comedy to be had: the owner of the windmill, of course, wants maximum wind and little rain. But the watermiller explains that the blazing sun is a wonderful thing: And so for drought, if corn thereby increase The sun doth comfort and ripe all, doubtless And often the wind so leyth the corn, God wot, That never after can it right, but rot. England’s heavy rains are in fact essential: water is no mere commodity, but … thing of necessity, For washing, for scouring, all filth cleansing. Where water lacketh, what beastly being! In brewing, in baking, in dressing of meat, If ye lack water what could ye drink or eat? Without water could live neither man nor beast, For water preserveth both most and least. The argument between the two millers quickly degenerates into a sexual competition about grinding; the pecking of their millstones becomes a fairly grotesque metaphor of the kind that Tudor audiences apparently liked. The puckish messenger, Mery, complains that his watermill is ‘many times choked’, to which the watermiller replies: So will she be though you should burst your bones, Except you be perfect in setting your stones … and advises him on good ‘pecking’. Mery responds: So saith my wife and that maketh all our checking. She would have the mill pecked, pecked, pecked every day, But by God, Millers must peck when they may. So oft have we pecked that our stones wax right thin and all our other gear not worth a pin … And on and on it goes. It’s simple bawdy, not great poetry by any standards. But it tells us more about the life and talk of early modern England than all the lovelorn swains and surprised goddesses put together. There is a material directness about these Tudor ‘interludes’ from which Shakespeare and his contemporaries must certainly have learned. Here, for a final example, is the boy, explaining to Jupiter’s servant why he needs ice and snow. He is clearly a classmate of Shakespeare’s more famous schoolboy: Forsooth Sir, my mind is this, at few words All my pleasure is in catching of birds And making of snowballs, and throwing the same. For which purpose to have set in frame, With my godfather God I would fain have spoken, Desiring him to have sent me by some token Where I might have had great frost for my pitfalls* (#ulink_6991fcb9-01ef-5586-83f6-667a8771182e) And plenty of snow to make my snowballs. This once had, boys lives be such as no man leads O, to see my snowballs light on my fellows heads And to hear the birds, how they flicker their wings in the pitfall, I say it passeth all things. Perhaps, on reflection, he’s more like an early English Dennis the Menace. In the end Jupiter realises that everybody wants a different kind of weather, and that to help one would be to destroy somebody else: All weathers in all places if men all times might hire, Who could live by other? Therefore he’s going to leave the unpredictable and ever-changing British weather where it is; which at least gives people something to talk about for the next few hundred years. Everybody is pleased – the schoolboy offers to make some snowballs for Jupiter the next time he’s back. By the middle of the century, it’s to drama that we look for the spirit of the times. That’s the case with the religious fanaticism already discussed: another leading playwright of the pre-Shakespearean theatre was John Bale, whose morality plays were basically anti-Catholic tirades, slashing in every direction at enemies of the true Protestant faith. In his Three Laws, for instance, Sodomy appears on stage boasting about how successful he is, particularly with the Catholic clergy: In the first age I began, And so persevered with man And still will if I can So long as he endure. If monkish sects renew, And popish priests continue Which are of my retinue To live I shall be sure. Clean marriage they forbid, Yet cannot their ways be hid … … In Rome with to me they fall, Both Bishop and Cardinal Monk, Friar, priest and all, More rank than they are ants. Example in Pope Julye, Which sought to have in his fury Two lads, and to use them beastly, From the Cardinal of Nantes. The accusation that priestly celibacy led straightforwardly to interfering with boys, particularly choirboys, seems to go back a long way; this is the uncensored language of the Protestant Reformation in full flood, many miles away from the aureate stanzas of the poets in the anthologies. Again, the boys who grew up to become the great playwrights of Elizabethan and Jacobean Britain were brought up on this kind of thing. In the same John Bale play, when Sodomy and Idolatry cackle together, surely we can hear the echo of the witches in Macbeth: Let her tell forth her matter With holy oil and watter, I can so cloyne and clatter That I can at the latter More subtleties contrive I can work wiles in battle, if I do once but spattle I can make corn and cattle That they shall never thrive … John Bale in his 1539 play Kynge Johan is also the author of the first history play we know of in English; sadly, he makes that too into little more than a diatribe against the wickedness of the Catholic Church. Much more genial plays are two versions of comedies by Terence, Ralph Roister-Doister from 1566, by the Eton and Westminster teacher Nicholas Udall; and Gammer Gurton’s Needle, first acted a year later at Christ’s College, Cambridge, and probably written by John Still, who later became the Bishop of Bath and Wells. These were two sober fellows – Udall was known for the severity of his thrashings of schoolboys, and Still was an eminent professor of divinity. But in each case they caught the tone of contemporary language in ways that none of the earlier morality plays had quite achieved. Roister-Doister is the story of the attempted wooing, then unsuccessful abduction, of a rich widow. Here is the villain’s boy or servant, protesting at the effect on him of Ralph’s frantic pursuit of his woman. The satirical asides on his work with the lute and gittern (a small stringed instrument of the time) are particularly wonderful. … now that my maister is new set on wooing, I trust there shall none of us finde lacke of doing: Two pair of shoes a day will now be too little To serve me, I must trot to and fro so mickle. – Go bear me this token, carry me this letter, Now this is the best way, now that way is better. Up before day sirs, I charge you, an hour or twain, Trudge, do me this message, and bring word quick again, If one miss but a minute, then his armes and wounds, I would not have slacked for ten thousand pounds. Nay see I beseeche you, if my most trusty page, Go not now about to hinder my marriage, So fervent hot wooing, and so far from wiving, I trow never was any creature living, With every woman is he in some loves pang, Then up to our lute at midnight, twangle-dome twang, Then twang with our sonnets, and twang with our dumps, And hey-hough from our heart, as heavy as lead lumps: Then to our recorder with toodleloodle poope As the howlet out of an ivy bushe should hoope. Anon to our gitterne, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum, Thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum, thrumpledum thrum. This is a play known mainly to scholars these days, but I hope I’m not alone in feeling that some of these lines are worthy of Shakespeare: it’s the kind of thing we might have had from Malvolio at his most ridiculous. In Gammer Gurton’s Needle we have an even thinner plot – old lady loses her precious and valuable sewing needle in the leather trousers of her servant Hodge while mending them. Predictably it eventually turns up in his bottom. But again, the play is full of the authentic-sounding dialect of Cambridgeshire in Tudor times. Here is the opening speech, delivered by a servant who stumbles across the house in the immediate chaos of the needle’s loss: Many a mile have I walked, divers and sundry ways, And many a good man’s house have I been at in my days; Many a gossip’s cup in my time have I tasted, And many a broach and spit have I both turned and basted, Many a piece of bacon have I had out of their balks, In running over the country, with long and weary walks; Yet came my foot never within those door cheeks, To seek flesh or fish, garlick, onions, or leeks, That ever I saw a sort in such a plight As here within this house appeareth to my sight. There is howling and scowling, all cast in a dump, With whewling and puling, as though they had lost a trump. It’s like eavesdropping on a culture that has vanished – genial, tough, robust people leading rawly physical lives. This play, as it happens, also contains the earliest English drinking song to have survived: I cannot eat but little meat; My stomach is not good; But sure I think that I could drink With him that weareth a hood. More Drink is my life; although my wife Some time do chide and scold, Yet spare I not to ply the pot Of jolly good ale and old. Back and side go bare, go bare; Both hand and foot go cold; But, belly, God send thee good ale enough, Whether it be new or old. I love no roast but a brown toast, Or a crab in the fire; A little bread shall do me stead, Much bread I never desire. Nor frost, nor snow, nor wind, I trow, Can hurt me if it would; I am so wrapped within, and lapped With jolly good ale and old … The drinker goes on to curse sellers of thin ale, and like many pub-haunters today insists that he is all the better for a skinful the following morning. But as to his wife, happily it turns out that he isn’t quite as misogynistic as it first appears. Indeed, she’s a bit of a toper too: And Kytte, my wife, that as her life Loveth well good ale to seek, Full oft drinketh she that ye may see The tears run down her cheek. Then doth she troll to me the bowl As a good malt-worm should, And say, ‘Sweetheart, I have taken my part Of jolly good ale and old.’ And so the pictures painted of Tudor society by the courtiers, the women who have been pushed out of their houses, the religious fanatics and the burgeoning playwrights all point towards a country that is recognisably ours. It’s an unfair country, full of hypocrisy and special pleading, whose common people by and large ignore their rulers. Despite its fanaticism and brutality, and its terrible weather, it feels surprisingly warm. * (#ulink_0bdbbf2f-3360-5ccc-8427-7653a5b25fa9) ‘Deucalion’s flood’ refers to the Greek version of the Noah flood story, and therefore simply means ‘since time immemorial’. * (#ulink_4a7daee4-25d5-54ce-ac7f-2f22511545bf) A pitfall is a kind of bird trap. 4 England’s Miracle (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) An act of magic, we are told, requires bizarrely varied ingredients. In Shakespeare’s time, apparently clever men were still trying to combine base minerals and rare chemicals to produce gold. His witches throw ‘eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog, adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and owlet’s wing’ into their sinister cauldron. No gold was ever produced, and today we regard the witch-fever of Jacobean Britain as a horrible excuse for the torture and burning of old women. And yet, at the end of the sixteenth century something magical, almost miraculous, did happen in these islands. It reads and sounds like nothing less than a revolution in human consciousness. It was certainly a revolution in how humans understood one another, acted out on wet and greasy wooden platforms in front of a confused but captivated mob. The miracle is sometimes described by the two words ‘William Shakespeare’, but it went a bit wider than that. Although Shakespeare was the leader and prime genius of this revolution, there were others who deserve the name of genius – Kit Marlowe, Thomas Middleton, John Webster and Ben Jonson among them. The revolution on the stage and in words can reasonably be compared to the collision that created the English language in the first place. As we have seen, it was the collision of Germanic, Latin, French and some British tongues that produced the endlessly flexible stew of English. By the late 1500s another collision was taking place. This time it wasn’t simply about the ‘word hoard’, important though that was. At first sight, English culture wasn’t unusual: across Continental Europe there was a peasantry, trading and farming peoples speaking diverse local languages and, as in England, an elite speaking Latin and looking back to classical authors for their inspiration. In London above all – that same London Isabella Whitney described so vividly in the previous chapter – many who had been classically educated were forced to sell their skills to those who had no such education. When Shakespeare arrived in London he soon found his way to the anarchic, wild group of Cambridge- and Oxford-educated writers now known as the ‘university wits’ – Robert Greene, Thomas Nashe, George Peele and Christopher Marlowe himself, the acknowledged star of the early Elizabethan stage. As a non-university man Shakespeare would have been something of an outsider, though he was quick to collaborate and ‘patch’ plays with them. Later, starving and on his deathbed, Greene launched a famous attack on Shakespeare as a mere ‘upstart crowe’ – nothing but an actor, sans proper education, with ideas above his station. Ben Jonson, classically educated though never able to get to Cambridge because he was apprenticed to his bricklayer father-in-law, accused his friend Shakespeare of having ‘little Latin and less Greek’. What quickly became obvious was that this provincial man, crammed with the folklore, smells, sounds and words of the English Midlands, was well able to absorb translated stories from the classical and humanist writers, as well as having a basic grammar-school understanding of the Latinists. Thus he took his part amongst a highly literate and competitive elite who found that, thanks to a new market for entertainment, if they wanted to eat and dress well, if they dreamed of owning their own homes, they had to tell stories in English that would captivate the man in the street. Some at least found that if they took their Plautus and their Terence, stories from Latin Renaissance writers in Italy, and their understanding of the Latin chroniclers of older Britain, and then reshaped the stories and adapted their training in rhetoric and argument, and salted it all with the biting, vivid language of town and country people, they could make gold. They became alchemists of language. The gold came slowly, penny by penny. The population of London when Shakespeare arrived in the 1580s was around 200,000, many of them recent migrants from the countryside or abroad, crammed into a small space still bounded by Roman walls. The theatres opening up as he began his career could accommodate around two thousand observers, and the big innovation was that, rather than a hat being passed around at the end of a performance, as had been the case when the companies toured England, audiences had to pay to get in. A penny bought you standing room, tuppence a basic seat, and three pennies a comfy chair out of the rain. So long as just a few per cent of the population came regularly, that provided a good income stream. Although there were plenty of rival ways of spending time for the overwhelmingly youthful, plague-threatened and competitive Londoners – brutal animal-baiting, bloodthirsty public punishments, taverns and the whorehouses of Southwark – these public theatres were simply more interesting. They were attacked relentlessly by puritan moralists who thought they gave the mob dangerous ideas, encouraging lawlessness and lechery, and who believed the audiences were engaged in sexual misbehaviour with one another. In fact, compared to the entertainments of cruelty, they were a clear advance in civilisation. At any rate, the denunciations, the warnings and the occasional eruptions of state censorship did little to diminish the popularity of this new, cutting-edge entertainment. This wasn’t the invention of William Shakespeare or any of his immediate contemporaries: as we have already seen, there were Tudor writers, from both the Catholic and the Protestant sides, who led the way from morality plays to the modern drama, and who were highly classically trained as well. Yet when the full colour of the theatrical revolution arrives, it does feel like magic. It happens remarkably fast. The Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd arrives in the mid-1580s; so do the first plays by Christopher Marlowe, Dido, Queen of Carthage and the two parts of Tamburlaine, whose amoral plot provoked Shakespeare and whose thundering blank verse thrilled him. And we are off, though it will take Shakespeare himself some years before he puts on his first play, almost certainly Henry VI Part One. The first successful commercial theatre, called rather prosaically the Theatre, was opened by James Burbage in Shoreditch in 1576. The following year it was rivalled by the Curtain, and then came the Rose, the Swan and eventually, in 1599, the Globe. It may not have felt like a revolution at the time. There had been plenty of plays put on in private theatres and in the relative privacy of the inns of court, as well as in the houses of grandees. And in towns around England plays had been performed out of doors too. The first English play in blank verse, the famously abominable Gorboduc, about a disputed succession to the throne, was performed at the Inner Temple before Queen Elizabeth as early as 1561. Far from being rarities, actors and acting companies were known throughout the country – they even travelled abroad, touring Germany and Denmark. And yet in little more than two decades what feels like a new art form was established, spread and produced a flood of astonishing work, much of which is still performed and enjoyed today. It’s hard to avoid the thought that this is one of the great triumphs of early capitalism. One of Shakespeare’s best recent biographers, Stephen Greenblatt, explains why. A population of London’s size, tempted by big new theatres, produced intense competition: ‘To survive economically it was not enough to mount one or two successful plays a season and keep them up for reasonable runs. The companies had to induce people, large numbers of people, to get in the habit of coming to the theatre again and again, and this meant a constantly changing repertoire, as many as five or six plays per week. The sheer magnitude of the enterprise is astonishing: for each company, approximately twenty new plays per year in addition to some twenty plays carried over from previous seasons.’ If you want to know why Shakespeare wrote so many plays, and had a hand in so many others, there is the reason. Money, advance, security, competition: to that extent, he lived in our world. Before the Elizabethan theatres opened, there were relatively few openings for clever writers who weren’t already rich, or had very rich patrons. Like the law and the Church, most of the roads to material advancement were blocked off by medieval regulations, by the ‘squatter’s rights’ of well-established families, and by the rigidly hierarchical nature of early modern society itself. The old stories have it that Shakespeare fled to London after being caught poaching deer. Certainly his father’s business was struggling, and even leaving aside his probable Catholic sympathies there wasn’t much for him in Stratford. In London, however, coins could come tumbling into the hands of those who were ambitious, talented and hard-working enough to give the people what they wanted. You didn’t need, necessarily, a grand patron – though almost all the companies had them, as a form of insurance and protection. What you needed was a buzz, curiosity and persistence. Very quickly a new market was formed. It was a highly competitive one. Write a bad play, or still worse, a boring play, and you were punished by empty places. Write a hit, and then another hit, and your name alone would draw the crowds. Like modern television drama and cinema, this was entertainment which spanned the entire class structure, delighting Queen Elizabeth as well as illiterate boy apprentices. The theatre in Shakespeare’s day still had plenty of formidable enemies. They certainly included servants of the state, paranoid about threats to the monarchy and the established order, as well as the puritans, who abominated all secular entertainments. And then there was the worst enemy of all, bubonic plague, whose regular visitations shut theatres, like other centres of mingling humanity, almost immediately. But above all there was a market, there was opportunity. And there had, therefore, to be product. Shakespeare’s England was still a land of martyrdom, spies and relentless, dangerous conflict between Protestants and Catholics. As early Protestant martyrs such as Anne Askew had been dealt with by Catholic authorities, so now in Elizabethan England, Catholics were treated. A lot of painstaking and learned research has been expended on the question of whether William Shakespeare himself was a Catholic, as if even today rival teams are desperate to recruit him posthumously onto their side. All that seems certain is that he and his family were deeply riven. His father, as one of the key civic officials in Stratford-upon-Avon, was directly involved in the Reformation programme of smashing Catholic statues, whitewashing churches and sacking Catholic officials. On the other hand, he was almost certainly married to a Catholic woman, and a Catholic ‘Confession of Faith’ was found hidden in the roof of his house long after his death. He helped recruit Catholic teachers to his son’s school, and got into trouble for failing to turn up regularly to Protestant worship, though that may have been more about embarrassment over his debts than religious belief. At any rate, he was a conflicted figure. If, as seems likely, Shakespeare himself went to work as a teacher in northern Catholic houses before he came to London, then we must assume he had dangerously un-Protestant views of his own as a young man. Schoolfellows a little older than him fled to the Continent and returned as Catholic agents, and were duly hunted down, tortured and torn apart on the scaffold. Relatives were accused and publicly executed as well – Shakespeare may have seen their heads still rattling on poles when he first entered London across its famous bridge. The recent rediscovery of one of his First Folio collections of plays in France, where it had been in a Jesuit library, has highlighted his links with underground, Catholic England. There are little hints and glints of Catholic teaching in Shakespeare’s plays – most famously in Hamlet – but there is little real echo of the heart-racingly urgent and dangerous politics of contemporary religion. That should surprise nobody: Shakespeare was working under the watchful eyes of government censors and in front of a largely Protestant audience. His likely first company, the Queen’s Players, had partly been formed to spread Protestant propaganda. All England was alive with special agents, or ‘searchers’, and the government’s fears were not unjustified – in 1580 Pope Gregory XIII had declared that the assassination of Queen Elizabeth would not be a mortal sin, inciting English Catholics to a coup. However, just as in the reign of Henry VIII, the religious war did produce some seriously good poetry, this time mainly from the point of view of the harried and desperate Catholic losers. It’s perfectly possible that Shakespeare met the charismatic Jesuit agent and scholar Edmund Campion, who bravely debated with Protestant divines after he’d been tortured and imprisoned. He was confronted by Elizabeth herself, and later died the usual agonising death. Robert Southwell of Norfolk was one of the Jesuits in another mission, shortly after Campion, and came to a similar end, imprisoned, tortured and then hanged, drawn and quartered in 1595. A textual comparison by some scholars suggests that Southwell, connected to Shakespeare’s famous patron the (Campion-befriending) Earl of Southampton, was an author who Shakespeare read closely. In the following extraordinary poem, penned in that year, while Shakespeare was writing A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Romeo and Juliet, Southwell compares himself to a pounded nutmeg, and defiantly proclaims his martyrdom: The pounded spise both tast and scent doth please; In fadinge smoke the force doth incense showe; The perisht kernell springeth with increase; The lopped tree doth best and soonest growe. Gods spice I was, and poundinge was my due; In fadinge breath my incense favoured best; Death was my meane my kernell to renewe; By loppinge shott I upp to heavenly rest. Some thinges more perfit are in their decaye, Like sparke that going out geeves clerest light: Such was my happe, whose dolefull dying daye Begane my joye and termed fortunes spight. Alive a Queene, now dead I am a Saint; Once Mary cald, my name now Martyr is; From earthly raigne debarred by restrainte, In liew wherof I raigne in heavenly blis. My life, my griefe, my death, hath wrought my joye; My freendes, my foyle, my foes, my weale procurd, My speedie death hath scorned longe annoye, And losse of life an endles life assurd. My scaffolde was the bedd where ease I fownde; The blocke a pillowe of eternall rest. My headman cast mee in a blesfull sownde; His axe cutt of my cares from combred brest. Rue not my death, rejoyce at my repose; It was no death to mee but to my woe, The budd was opened to let owt the rose, The cheynes unloosed to let the captive goe. A Prince by birth, a prisoner by mishappe, From crowne to crosse, from throne to thrall I fell. Whether or not he was reading Southwell, the up-and-coming playwright and successful London actor William Shakespeare was also leaning with some political skill in the other direction. About this time he wrote the history play King John. It’s not one of his greater efforts, and it follows the ferociously anti-Catholic play of the same name by John Bale. Like Bale, Shakespeare uses the opportunity to get in a bit of patriotic anti-papal baiting: Thou canst not, Cardinal, devise a name So slight, unworthy, and ridiculous To charge me to an answer, as the Pope. Tell him this tale, and from the mouth of England And thus much more: that no Italian priest Shall tithe or toll in our dominions; But as we, under God, our supreme head, So, under him, that great supremacy Where we do reign we will alone uphold Without th’assistance of a mortal hand. Queen Elizabeth could hardly have put it better herself. We shouldn’t look to Shakespeare for reportage on the most dangerous politics of his day. However, he does give us something even more useful – the ultimate window into a world in which faith, and in particular the fate of the soul after death, occupied almost everybody. In Measure for Measure, a play which to my ear is unforgiving of the smug certainties of any religious believers, the hero, Claudio, believes that in order to protect his sister Isabella’s virtue he must reconcile himself to execution. A duke, Vincentio, urges him not to be frightened of death – as it were, the official line. Be ‘absolute for death’, he tells Claudio – death or life Shall thereby be the sweeter. Reason thus with life: If I do lose thee, I do lose a thing That none but fools would keep: a breath thou art, Servile to all the skyey influences, That dost this habitation, where thou keep’st, Hourly afflict: merely, thou art death’s fool; So far, so predictable. From pulpits up and down the country, preachers constantly urged their congregations to reconcile themselves to death. On scaffolds, and alongside the pyres prepared for religious martyrs, much the same conversation was going on. We know this from the endless sermons and tracts that have survived from the period; but how did ordinary English men and women feel in response? For that, we have to go to the greatest poet. Claudio, a living, breathing and terrified contemporary, is far from convinced, but to die, he tells himself, and go we know not where, To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison’d in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: ’tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death. Paradise, purgatory or hell – the possibilities are simply too awesome and too terrifying for anyone but living saints or fanatics to face. And in the single most famous speech in the Shakespearean canon, Hamlet agrees with Claudio – the impossibility of knowing what comes after life terrifies all men. For Catholics, and indeed for many Protestants, the terrors of hell are so vivid, even after the paintings of damnation in the churches have been whitewashed over by the reformers, that they literally freeze action, in this case the possibilities of revenge or suicide. Daily life in early modern Britain could be, by our standards, almost intolerably harsh. Hunger, cold, danger, terrible illness and the constant threat of being expelled from the community were all regular ripples in the sea of troubles that was daily life. Just getting out, escaping, finally resting – what a wonderful prospect. Except, in a God-haunted world, it wasn’t. To be, or not to be: that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep; No more; and by a sleep to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That flesh is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wish’d. To die, to sleep; To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause: there’s the respect That makes calamity of so long life; For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely, The pangs of despised love, the law’s delay, The insolence of office and the spurns That patient merit of the unworthy takes, When he himself might his quietus make With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear, To grunt and sweat under a weary life, But that the dread of something after death, The undiscover’d country from whose bourn No traveller returns, puzzles the will And makes us rather bear those ills we have Than fly to others that we know not of? Thus conscience does make cowards of us all; And thus the native hue of resolution Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought. What is central to Shakespeare’s tragic imagination is the understanding that, even without the fear of damnation, there is no way out – merely a universe of grey meaninglessness, which hems in the human life from either side. This is what the sinner and murderer Macbeth finally comes to believe in another of the tragedies: To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow, Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, To the last syllable of recorded time; And all our yesterdays have lighted fools The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle! Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, That struts and frets his hour upon the stage, And then is heard no more. It is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing. The arguments about whether Shakespeare was a secret Roman Catholic, struggling to disguise himself all his life, will go on. Most of the time, at least, he seems like a Christian who believes – unlike Christopher Marlowe – that divine judgement awaits a world of sinners. In that he’s a man of his time; what makes him a poet for all time is his inability to reconcile himself to the rites and consolations of any particular religious form. Here, human experience remains scarier and more thrilling than even the Bible admits. For Shakespeare, the great escape from Thanatos was, inevitably, Eros. Again and again he presents love as the only answer to the great challenge of death and oblivion. The love of the other can quieten, if it cannot quite cancel, the remorseless and deadly passage of time, as his sublime thirtieth sonnet sings: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste: Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow, For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long since cancelled woe, And moan the expense of many a vanished sight: Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee, dear friend, All losses are restor’d and sorrows end. In his thirty-third sonnet, Shakespeare goes further. Love is one with nature. It has the power of creation itself: Full many a glorious morning have I seen Flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye, Kissing with golden face the meadows green, Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy; Anon permit the basest clouds to ride With ugly rack on his celestial face, And from the forlorn world his visage hide, Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace: Even so my sun one early morn did shine, With all triumphant splendour on my brow; But out, alack, he was but one hour mine, The region cloud hath mask’d him from me now. Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth; Suns of the world may stain when heaven’s sun staineth. But what of Shakespeare’s own experience of love? It is often pointed out that while his plays brim with hopeful, ardent suitors and erotic teasing, they are mostly silent when it comes to the experience of lifelong, marital love. This is surely related to Shakespeare’s own early marriage to a woman eight or nine years older than he, who was pregnant by him. Anne Hathaway was a rare catch, a twenty-six-year-old orphan with some property of her own, able, unlike most women of her age, to make her own decisions about love and sex. But Shakespeare was only eighteen when they married, and most of what we know about him – granted, not very much – suggests that it wasn’t an entirely happy union. It produced two adult daughters as well as a son, Hamnet, who died at the age of eleven. But Shakespeare spent most of his working life away from Anne, in London. He returned to her at Stratford-upon-Avon at the end of his career, but if his last will and testament is anything to go by, it was hardly an ardent reunion. His main will leaves her absolutely nothing – it all went to Susanna, the older daughter, and her husband – except, famously for a late codicil, leaving Anne ‘my second-best bed with the furniture’. However you play it, it’s not a compliment. More significant, perhaps, than all of that is the fact that there are so few images of happy married life in Shakespeare’s plays. Here is a man who can describe everything – war, lust, the pleasures of drunken debauchery, the agonies of young love, the furies and dementia of the old, the pleasures of male friendship – but who hardly ever gives us the state that is supposed to be at the centre of Tudor (and modern) social existence: marriage. Again and again, ill-matched lovers are briskly yoked together at the end of the play, and we are not encouraged to look ahead at what follows. The rare displays of marriage in action are hardly reassuring – think of the black, bleak compact of Lady and Lord Macbeth, or of the guilt-stricken lust of Hamlet’s mother and uncle. We know that Shakespeare was perfectly capable of imagining a strong, sustaining, lifelong love, because he does as much in one of his greatest sonnets: Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove: O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark, That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wandering bark, Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken. Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. Yet it seems that in his own experience, Love was Time’s fool, and did indeed alter over months and years, if not weeks. Indeed, there is a disturbing loathing when it comes to describing love and sex between older people. The circumstances are hardly normal, of course, but remember Hamlet turning on his lustful mother: O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell, If thou canst mutine in a matron’s bones, To flaming youth let virtue be as wax, And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame When the compulsive ardour gives the charge, Since frost itself as actively doth burn And reason panders will … Nay, but to live In the rank sweat of an enseamed bed, Stew’d in corruption, honeying and making love Over the nasty sty … In spirit, this is very close to one of the most ferocious poems Shakespeare ever produced, the notorious sonnet about the devastating effects of lust, a kind of madness that can destroy human happiness: The expense of spirit in a waste of shame Is lust in action: and till action, lust Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame, Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust; Enjoyed no sooner but despised straight; Past reason hunted; and no sooner had, Past reason hated, as a swallowed bait, On purpose laid to make the taker mad. Mad in pursuit and in possession so; Had, having, and in quest to have extreme; A bliss in proof, and proved, a very woe; Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream. All this the world well knows; yet none knows well To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell. The sexual self-hatred that seems to underlie this sonnet can easily tip over into disgust for the object of love; and the following seems to me to be a poem that is not playful or clever, but essentially hating. It’s apparently about ‘false compare’, or poetic overstatement, but the images we take from it are the black wires and the reeking breath: My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red, than her lips red: If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun; If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head. I have seen roses damasked, red and white, But no such roses see I in her cheeks; And in some perfumes is there more delight Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks. I love to hear her speak, yet well I know That music hath a far more pleasing sound: I grant I never saw a goddess go, My mistress, when she walks, treads on the ground: And yet by heaven, I think my love as rare, As any she belied with false compare. I think it’s important to include these poems, because it’s too easy just to see Shakespeare as the champion of young, romantic love, the origin of the modern updates of Romeo and Juliet, and the hero of the brilliant but unhistorical hit movie Shakespeare in Love. The real author’s views of love and sex are, in truth, a million miles away from the elevation of sexual love as the ultimate good in itself that characterises modern culture. Catholic or not, there is plenty of guilt, self-hatred and personal disappointment wired into Shakespearean attitudes towards love and sex. It’s ‘the answer’. But only sometimes, and for some lucky people. And even then, it’s a subversive, dangerous, society-shaking force. For the next big lesson Shakespeare teaches us about the differences between his world and that of the twenty-first century is the importance of hierarchy and order, up to – and including – monarchy. Hierarchy governed every aspect of daily life: wives and children were supposed to show respect to fathers and husbands; apprentices were tightly bound to their employers, and faced severe punishments if they broke a host of complex rules; smaller gentry owed loyalty and obedience to the great magnates; and the entire country owed absolute obedience to the monarchy. Alongside this, of course, there was the parallel hierarchy, with its many gradations and pomposities, of the Church. But it’s the monarchy, and the whole business of rulers and ruled, that is central to Shakespeare’s notion of society. In many ways Shakespeare invented the British monarchy as such a central component of the national identity. Right from the beginning of his career, with Henry VI Part One, through to its end and The Tempest, Shakespeare believes in order, and that order, properly understood, derives from a wise monarch. The weak, deluded or self-pitying ruler spreads discord and misery throughout the kingdom. The good ruler is not simply a morally attractive figure, but a political blessing on all under his authority. There were very good reasons for this. Murder rates in early modern Britain were higher than we can begin to comprehend today. There was a good chance of being robbed and killed if you travelled; domestic violence was very high and tolerated; this was an armed and pressurised society in which the most significant social division was between those legally allowed to carry swords or pistols, and those forbidden to. Violence was everywhere. Shakespeare may have had his first chance at becoming an actor because a row between two more senior players resulted in a fatal stabbing; and Marlowe famously met his end in a Deptford brawl or assassination, with a dagger through his eye. So it’s hardly surprising that Shakespeare believes in order; and that a highly literate, impoverished young man trying to make his way in the seething chaos of one of the world’s largest cities shows a certain nervousness about the mob. In the second part of Henry VI he portrays the medieval rebel Jack Cade as a deluded, violent and extremely dangerous mob orator, an enemy of grammar schools and learning, prepared to burn down London Bridge and behead his enemies, and whose dream of class victory amounts to slashing the price of bread and beer and declaring that the ‘pissing conduit run nothing but claret wine this the first year of our reign’. Cade’s followers dream of a massacre of lawyers – and indeed, like Maoist revolutionaries, of everyone who can read and write. These are the caricatures of a writer who fears disorder more than anything else, even the brutal punishments of the Tudor state. Fear of disorder can be found almost everywhere in the Elizabethan theatre, even if the theatre itself was regarded as disorderly and threatening. In the play Sir Thomas More, partly written by Shakespeare, the great statesman confronts a London mob furious about immigration and determined to ‘send them back’ – nothing changes. More says: Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise Hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, The babies at their backs, with their poor luggage Plodding to th’ports and coasts for transportation, And that you use it as Kings in your desires, Authority quite silenced by your brawl, And you in ruff of your opinions clothed: What had you got? I will tell you: you had taught How insolence and strong hand should prevail, How order should be quelled, and by this pattern Not one of you should live an aged man, For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, With selfsame hand, self-reasons, and self-right, Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes Would feed on one another. Underpinning it all is a tough-minded and very unmodern belief in the virtues of hierarchy, class and obedience. Much of the time, these days, we almost pretend in our worship of Shakespeare that it’s not there. But it absolutely is: our greatest playwright was no kind of democrat. In Sir Thomas More, Shakespeare, or one of his collaborators, goes further still, telling the London rebels that to rise against the king is to rise against God. And if they succeed in rebellion, by undoing authority, they undo all order and will succeed only in making the world a still more dangerous place: … Why, even your hurly Cannot proceed but by obedience. Tell me but this: what rebel captain, As mutinies are incident, by his name Can still the rout? Who will obey a traitor? Or how can well that proclamation sound When there is no addition but a rebel To qualify a rebel? You’ll put down strangers, Kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses … All of which is to say no more than, in Shakespearean English, ‘the revolution devours her children’. Shakespeare shows again and again his vivid understanding of the utter misery of being outcast from the state. In King Lear, the very greatest of his plays, unsocial man, torn by the storm and by madness, excluded from a functioning society, is merely a ‘poor, bare forked animal’. In the world of the theatre, clothing was very important as a sign of social standing, belonging, authority. Now King Lear rips off his own clothes entirely, to make the point. In writing about whipped beggars with nowhere to hide, and vividly describing the hunger of people at the bottom of the heap, Shakespeare shows that his sympathies naturally spread to the poor. But nothing, or almost nothing, is as terrifying as anarchy. And it’s simply not true that Shakespeare did not know about democracy. As a widely read man he was well aware of the history of popular revolts in England, as well as the democratic experiments of republican Rome. It’s just that as a man of his time, he doesn’t believe democracy could ever work. In his Roman play Coriolanus he puts into the mouths of the common citizens themselves his explanation of why they can’t successfully rule without an aristocratic leader: one explains that they are called ‘the many-headed multitude’, and another parses the thought: We have been called so of many; not that our heads are some brown, some black, some auburn, some bald, but that our wits are so diversely coloured: and truly I think if all our wits were to issue out of one skull, they would fly east, west, north, south, and their consent of one direct way should be at once to all the points o’ the compass. And we can’t be having that. In Shakespeare’s world, whether it’s Jack Cade’s rebellion in London or the common people of Rome, who sound and dress like Londoners, the crowd is always wrong, ridiculous and often menacing. Coriolanus himself, admittedly a study in overweening and arrogant ambition, simply can’t stick the idea of grovelling to the mob: Most sweet voices! Better it is to die, better to starve, Than crave the hire which first we do deserve. Why in this woolvish toge should I stand here, To beg of Hob and Dick, that do appear, Their needless vouches? Custom calls me to’t: What custom wills, in all things should we do’t, The dust on antique time would lie unswept, And mountainous error be too highly heapt For truth to o’er-peer. Rather than fool it so, Let the high office and the honour go To one that would do thus. In the ancient conflict between the Roman mob and military dictatorship, Shakespeare uses an oily aristocrat, Menenius, to describe the traditional proper relationship between the different classes. In his fable, the other parts of the body rebel against the belly for gorging all the food – just as the rich take more than their fair share of social wealth. The belly replies: Your most grave belly was deliberate, Not rash like his accusers, and thus answer’d: ‘True is it, my incorporate friends,’ quoth he, ‘That I receive the general food at first, Which you do live upon; and fit it is, Because I am the store-house and the shop Of the whole body: but, if you do remember, I send it through the rivers of your blood, Even to the court, the heart, to the seat o’ the brain; And, through the cranks and offices of man, The strongest nerves and small inferior veins From me receive that natural competency Whereby they live: and though that all at once, You, my good friends,’ – this says the belly, mark me, – First Citizen. Ay, sir; well, well. Menenius Agrippa. ‘Though all at once cannot See what I do deliver out to each, Yet I can make my audit up, that all From me do back receive the flour of all, And leave me but the bran.’ Now of course, these are only the words of another Roman aristocrat, and Shakespeare is the master of laying off one viewpoint against another. Nevertheless, the metaphor of the state as body would have been familiar and well understood to his audience. To us it may seem hilariously self-serving, but in the context of the original play it may well have felt like simple common sense. The flipside to Shakespeare’s distaste for anything resembling democracy is, of course, his insistence that rulers must be wise and virtuous – or rather, that any of their flaws and failings spread rapidly through the whole of society, causing distress to all. Good kings, bad kings, tyrants, the self-deluded, the saintly and the merely weak – Shakespeare is utterly obsessed by the problems of holding power. This explains, surely, the most distressing reversal in the entire canon, when lively, up-for-it Prince Hal turns on Falstaff, that great, incontinent, fleshly representation of all our baser appetites – the old slob we laugh at and we love – and coldly denies him: I know thee not, old man: fall to thy prayers; How ill white hairs become a fool and jester! I have long dream’d of such a kind of man, So surfeit-swell’d, so old and so profane; But, being awaked, I do despise my dream. Make less thy body hence, and more thy grace; Leave gormandizing; know the grave doth gape For thee thrice wider than for other men. Reply not to me with a fool-born jest: Presume not that I am the thing I was; For God doth know, so shall the world perceive, That I have turn’d away my former self; So will I those that kept me company. When thou dost hear I am as I have been, Approach me, and thou shalt be as thou wast, The tutor and the feeder of my riots: Till then, I banish thee, on pain of death, As I have done the rest of my misleaders, Not to come near our person by ten mile … It is heartbreaking. Falstaff can’t believe it. By some reports Queen Elizabeth herself could not believe it, and wanted Falstaff back in another play. But for Shakespeare good kingship is the ultimate social good, which justifies even this biblical denial. In his careful obsession with the dynasties of England, Shakespeare does more than anyone else to identify the country itself with those who have ruled it. When we speak of Victorian Britain, or the Edwardian period, we are playing unacknowledged, anti-chronological tribute to Shakespeare. To identify the entire nation through the behaviour of its ruler seems an odd thing, but for Shakespeare the character of the monarch is the character of the country itself. Nowhere is this more explicit than when the elderly John of Gaunt confronts the disastrous-seeming reign of King Richard II, vain, impetuous and hugely in debt. Methinks I am a prophet new inspired And thus expiring do foretell of him: His rash fierce blaze of riot cannot last, For violent fires soon burn out themselves; Small showers last long, but sudden storms are short; He tires betimes that spurs too fast betimes; With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder: Light vanity, insatiate cormorant, Consuming means, soon preys upon itself. This royal throne of kings, this scepter’d isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, This other Eden, demi-paradise, This fortress built by Nature for herself Against infection and the hand of war, This happy breed of men, this little world, This precious stone set in the silver sea, Which serves it in the office of a wall, Or as a moat defensive to a house, Against the envy of less happier lands, This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England, This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings, Fear’d by their breed and famous by their birth, Renowned for their deeds as far from home, For Christian service and true chivalry, As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry, Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s Son, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it, Like to a tenement or pelting farm: England, bound in with the triumphant sea Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame, With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds: That England, that was wont to conquer others, Hath made a shameful conquest of itself. Shakespeare’s England, the defiant survivor over the long, bloody wars against the Catholic monarchies of the Continent, still the unreconciled enemy of Scots and Irish, was, however, about to come to some kind of end. The death of Elizabeth and the succession of King James VI of Scotland, son of the same Queen Mary she had had beheaded, provided a ‘Union of the Crowns’ whose consequences and perplexities still surround us to this day. Shakespeare, ever the temporiser, was quickly at work on dramas calculated to appeal to the new king, an intellectual fascinated by exploration and overseas trade, and haunted by the (to him) vivid threat of witchcraft. What didn’t Shakespeare foresee? The most obvious answer is religious civil war. Little more than thirty years after he died in retirement at Stratford in 1616, English Protestant revolutionaries would cut off the head of Charles I. Shakespeare knew very well the threat of puritan fanaticism. He saw friends, near family and fellow writers meet horrible ends on the scaffold for their determination to stick with the old religion. The world of the theatre in which, unlike so many of his contemporaries, he made his fortune and survived, rising to gentility, was always threatened by the chalky fingers and hysterical harangues of puritanical preachers. Occasionally, he turns directly back at them – the odious Angelo in Measure for Measure is the most obvious example. But even he could not have imagined what riot, disturbance and upending of the very principles of monarchy were brewing as he died. 5 Beyond the Nymphs and Swains: Renaissance Realities (#u91e63e02-fa99-5ced-9281-845fa972d908) William Shakespeare led a famously opaque life, leaving only scattered clues to his own existence. If he was a soldier, we’ve never heard about it. He wasn’t a magistrate, or a public preacher, or an active courtier. He lived privately, and he wrote and acted and amassed some money – and that’s about it. The same wasn’t true of many of the other great Elizabethan and Jacobean poets. Though some poets had always lived around the frills of power – Chaucer is an obvious example, and so are Dunbar and Wyatt – it’s really in this period that we see the most public poets of all, poets of action and engagement in public life. Sir Walter Raleigh, sea dog, explorer, courtier and finally the victim of royal politics, was also heavily engaged in the brutal and bloody English suppression of south-west Ireland. An even greater poet, Edmund Spenser, fought with Raleigh against the invading Spanish and Italian troops in Ireland, and tried to settle there. Both men were involved in a notorious massacre of papal soldiers who had surrendered at Smerwick; both believed that Catholic Ireland had to be suppressed by extreme force in order to secure Protestant England. In both cases the very notion of what it is to be British becomes hopelessly entangled with Tudor politics. Edmund Spenser was regarded in his day as the most gloriously talented of British poets, Shakespeare excepted; and although he was London born, no English poet has been more closely associated with Ireland during one of its bloodiest periods. The so-called ‘Munster Plantation’ involved an attempt to settle Protestant gentry and farmers in what had been the domains of the powerful Desmond family, who led a spirited Catholic revolt against Tudor rule. Spenser was happy to take other people’s land, and apparently disdained the Gaelic culture of the island; he was eventually burned out of his family home at Kilcolman during the long-lasting 1590s rebellion led by Hugh O’Neill of Tyrone and known as the Nine Years War. Spenser’s verse tells us directly little or nothing of the events that shaped his life: The Faerie Queene is a lengthy and complex allegory championing the reign of Elizabeth and the Tudor dynasty, through cod-medieval language and courtly imagery. It does contain, however, passages which are moodily resonant and which seem to capture the tones of Munster in these murderous times: That darkesome cave they enter, where they find That cursed man, low sitting on the ground, Musing full sadly in his sullein mind; His grieisie locks, long growen and unbound, Disordred hong about his shoulders round, And hid his face; through which his hollow eyne Lookt deadly dull, and stared as astound; His raw-bone cheekes through penurie and pine, Were shronke into his jawes, as he did never dine. His garment naught but many ragged clouts, With thornes together pind and patched was, The which his naked sides he wrapt abouts; And him beside there lay upon the gras A drearie corse, whose life away did pas, All wallowd in his owne yet luke-warm blood, That from his wound yet welled fresh alas; In which a rustie knife fast fixed stood, And made an open passage for the gushing flood. This feels, I think it’s safe to say, as if it were written by a man who may have taken part in the Massacre of Smerwick. Much more typical of Spenser’s golden eloquence is his famous marriage hymn, written for himself, which shows why his influence on English poetry has lasted so long. It begins like this: Calme was the day, and through the trembling ayre, Sweete breathing Zephyrus did softly play A gentle spirit, that lightly did delay Hot Titan’s beames, which then did glyster fayre: When whom I sullein care, Through discontent of my long fruitlesse stay In Princes Court, and expectation vayne Of idle hopes, which still doe fly away Like empty shaddowes, did afflict my brayne, Walkt forth to ease my payne Along the shore of silver streaming Themmes, Whose rutty Banke, the which his River hemmes, Was paynted all with variable flowers, And all the meades adorned with daintie gemmes, Fit to decke maydens bowres And crowne their Paramours, Against the Brydale day, which is not long: Sweete Themmes runne softly, till I end my Song. The mastery of rhythm, the self-consciously archaic language and the repopulation of British landscapes with classical figures proved addictive for later generations of English poets. For better or for worse, that’s what ‘Spenserian’ means. The Devonian freebooter, founder of the colony of Virginia and ruthless soldier Sir Walter Raleigh was a less considerable poet than Spenser, though his story of vaulting ambition, pride and vertiginous descent is even more dramatic. For his peers he was clearly charismatic, and if poetry can be charismatic then so too is Raleigh’s. He is famous above all for his poems of regret, having lost the favour of Queen Elizabeth. He would eventually be executed by her successor James I at the age of sixty-four after many years languishing in the Tower of London. His poem ‘The Lie’ is, for my money, the most splendidly sod-you-all verse ever written, from a dangerous man who sees through all that’s worst in his society: Go, soul, the body’s guest, Upon a thankless errand; Fear not to touch the best; The truth shall be thy warrant: Go, since I needs must die, And give the world the lie. Say to the court, it glows And shines like rotten wood; Say to the church, it shows What’s good, and doth no good: If church and court reply, Then give them both the lie. Tell potentates, they live Acting by others’ action; Not loved unless they give, Not strong but by a faction. If potentates reply, Give potentates the lie. Tell men of high condition, That manage the estate, Their purpose is ambition, Their practice only hate: And if they once reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell them that brave it most, They beg for more by spending, Who, in their greatest cost, Seek nothing but commending. And if they make reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell zeal it wants devotion; Tell love it is but lust; Tell time it is but motion; Tell flesh it is but dust: And wish them not reply, For thou must give the lie. Tell age it daily wasteth; Tell honour how it alters; Tell beauty how she blasteth; Tell favour how it falters: And as they shall reply, Give every one the lie. Tell wit how much it wrangles In tickle points of niceness; Tell wisdom she entangles Herself in overwiseness: And when they do reply, Straight give them both the lie. Tell physic of her boldness; Tell skill it is pretension; Tell charity of coldness; Tell law it is contention: And as they do reply, So give them still the lie. Tell fortune of her blindness; Tell nature of decay; Tell friendship of unkindness; Tell justice of delay: And if they will reply, Then give them all the lie. Tell arts they have no soundness, But vary by esteeming; Tell schools they want profoundness, And stand too much on seeming: If arts and schools reply, Give arts and schools the lie. Tell faith it’s fled the city; Tell how the country erreth; Tell manhood shakes off pity And virtue least preferreth: And if they do reply, Spare not to give the lie. So when thou hast, as I Commanded thee, done blabbing – Although to give the lie Deserves no less than stabbing – Stab at thee he that will, No stab the soul can kill. It’s the kind of poem one can imagine being roared in a tavern by a group of Renaissance wits. And indeed, there is a legend that it was Sir Walter Raleigh himself who founded the famous drinking club at the Mermaid Tavern in London’s Cheapside, where most of the key dramatists of the Jacobean period gathered – though perhaps not Shakespeare himself. There is a roughness to the Raleigh poem, a crudeness which these days we associate more with the Restoration, but which was certainly part of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean world of poetry. You can find it in many of the dramatists, but also in the verses of the first working-class London poet we remember. John Taylor was a ‘waterman’ who ferried all classes up and down the River Thames, and across it to see plays at Southwark. He was the nearest thing Renaissance London had to a cabbie. His verses aren’t exactly sophisticated, but if you want to know what London sounded like in the early 1600s, they are essential. He knew all too well the seedier side of life, and was scathing about his fares: Look how yon lecher’s legs are worn away With haunting of the whore house every day: He knows more greasy panders, bawds, and drabs, And eats more lobsters, artichokes, and crabs, Blue roasted eggs, potatoes muscadine, Oysters, and pith that grows i’th’ ox’s chine, With many drugs, compounds, and simples store; Which makes him have a stomach to a whore. But one day he’ll give o’er when ’tis too late, When he stands begging through an iron grate. Similarly, some of the serving wenches we glimpse in the background of Shakespeare’s tavern scenes are well known to the water poet: A lusty wench as nimble as an eel Would give a gallant leave to kiss and feel; His itching humour straightway was in hope To toy, to wanton, tally, buss and grope. ‘Hold sir,’ quoth she, ‘My word I will not fail, For you shall feel my hand and kiss my tail.’ Bad behaviour in Jacobean times led not only to begging but to hanging, and the monthly executions at Tyburn provided Taylor with another subject: I have heard sundry men oft times dispute Of trees, that in one year will twice bear fruit. But if a man note Tyburn, ’twill appear, That that’s a tree that bears twelve times a year. I muse it should so fruitful be, for why I understand the root of it is dry, It bears no leaf, no bloom, or no bud, The rain that makes it fructify is blood. I further note, the fruit which it produces, Doth seldom serve for profitable uses: Except the skillful Surgeons industry Do make Dissection of Anatomy. It blooms, buds, and bears, all three together, And in one hour, doth live, and die, and wither. Like Sodom Apples, they are in conceit, For touched, they turn to dust and ashes straight. Besides I find this tree hath never been Like other fruit trees, walled or hedged in, But in the highway standing many a year, It never yet was robbed, as I could hear. The reason is apparent to our eyes, That what it bears, are dead commodities: And yet sometimes (such grace to it is given) The dying fruit is well prepared for heaven, And many times a man may gather thence Remorse, devotion, and true penitence. And from that tree, I think more fools ascend To that Celestial joy, which shall never end. Among the Mermaid drinkers, and Taylor’s clients, were Ben Jonson and John Donne, both of them very different men from Raleigh, and poets who – unlike the loquacious cabbie – were important public figures. Jonson was no more nobly born than Shakespeare. He was a native Londoner, whose father-in-law had been a brickmaker, and while formidably intelligent and well educated, he seems to have had a thick brick chip on his shoulder all his life. But he was politically astute, and rose to be a key figure in the court of James I. His great comedies, Volpone and Bartholomew Fair, give us the sound and stench of Jacobean London with a specificity that goes beyond even Shakespeare. By common consent he’s a much less great playwright, whose characters can seem merely gorgeously decorated cardboard cut-outs, representative of vices and virtues, the too-obvious children of medieval drama. Still, he was a wonderful poet. Because we all like our history neat, it’s easy to forget that so-called periods or chapters or ages overlap and bleed into one another. Thus, in what we now call the ‘Renaissance’ or early modern period, there is plenty of medievalism still lively and present. A great example of this is the rollicking Ben Jonson poem from one of his less well-known plays, in which the devil is invited to dinner and feeds upon a well-seasoned banquet of Jonson’s contemporaries: His stomach was queasy (he came hither coached) The jogging had caused some crudities rise; To help it he called for a puritan poached, That used to turn up the eggs of his eyes. And so recovered unto his wish, He sat him down, and he fell to eat; Promoter in plum broth was the first dish – His own privy kitchen had no such meat. Yet though with this he much were taken, Upon a sudden he shifted his trencher, As soon as he spied the bawd and the bacon, By which you may note the devil’s a wencher. Six pickled tailors sliced and cut, Sempsters and tirewomen, fit for his palate; With feathermen and perfumers put Some twelve in a charger to make a great sallet. A rich fat usurer stewed in his marrow, And by him a lawyer’s head and green sauce: Both which his belly took up like a harrow, As if till then he had never seen sauce. Then carbonadoed and cooked with pains, Was brought up a cloven sergeant’s face: The sauce was made of his yeoman’s brains, That had been beaten out with his own mace. Two roasted sherriffs came whole to the board; (The feast had been nothing without ’em) Both living and dead they were foxed and furred, Their chains like sausages hung about ’em. The very next dish was the mayor of a town, With a pudding of maintenance thrust in his belly, Like a goose in the feathers, dressed in his gown, And his couple of hinch-boys boiled to a jelly. A London cuckold hot from the spit, And when the carver up had broken him, The devil chopped up his head at a bit, But the horns were very near like to choke him. The chine of a lecher too there was roasted, With a plump harlot’s haunch and garlic, A pandar’s pettitoes, that had boasted Himself for a captain, yet never was warlike. A large fat pasty of a midwife hot; And for a cold baked meat into the story, A reverend painted lady was brought, And coffined in crust till now she was hoary. To these, an over-grown justice of peace, With a clerk like a gizzard trussed under each arm; And warrants for sippits, laid in his own grease, Set over a chafing dish to be kept warm. The jowl of a gaoler served for fish, A constable soused with vinegar by; Two aldermen lobsters asleep in a dish. A deputy tart, a churchwarden pie. All which devoured, he then for a close Did for a full draught of Derby call; He heaved the huge vessel up to his nose, And left not till he had drunk up all. Then from the table he gave a start, Where banquet and wine were nothing scarce, All which he flirted away with a fart, From whence it was called the Devil’s Arse. This is recognisably a satire on the England of the 1620s, and yet its brutal, rollicking spirit is Chaucerian. Jonson was a man of very many voices. He took his classical heritage far more seriously than did Shakespeare; at his best he can be shockingly direct, as in his heartbreaking poem about the loss of a young son. We know that the death of children was a common, almost routine, part of early modern life. Shakespeare’s son Hamnet died at the age of eleven, probably of the plague. Memories of him may dance through some of the great plays, but Shakespeare, characteristically, never addressed his loss directly. Jonson did. Farewell, thou child of my right hand, and joy; My sin was too much hope of thee, lov’d boy. Seven years thou wert lent to me, and I thee pay, Exacted by thy fate, on the just day. O, could I lose all father now! For why Will man lament the state he should envy? To have so soon ’scap’d world’s and flesh’s rage, And, if no other misery, yet age? Rest in soft peace, and, ask’d, say here doth lie Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry. For whose sake, henceforth, all his vows be such, As what he loves may never like too much. Earlier on, we heard Shakespeare’s ferocity about sexuality in one of his extraordinary sonnets. Jonson, also the author of some of the sweetest love poems in English, can be just as direct: ‘doing’ means exactly what you suspect it does. Doing, a filthy pleasure is, and short; And done, we straight repent us of the sport: Let us not then rush blindly on unto it, Like lustful beasts, that only know to do it: For lust will languish, and that heat decay. But thus, thus, keeping endless holiday, Let us together closely lie and kiss, There is no labour, nor no shame in this; This hath pleased, doth please, and long will please; never Can this decay, but is beginning ever. Although Jonson was a poet of the city, his work on dramatic masques and his huge fame brought him many courtly and noble connections; and he is the master of a kind of poetry, and indeed a sensibility, which runs through English life in particular from the Tudor period to our own day. The so-called ‘country house poem’ was a very particular and artificial confection: the poet oils up to the landowner by suggesting that his land willingly and desperately gives itself to him. The oaks wish to be cut down to provide, the deer are all too keen to be sliced up into venison steaks, and so on. It’s a conceit at once charming and completely ridiculous. Jonson’s pioneering poem ‘To Penshurst’ was written to compliment Sir Robert Sidney, the Earl of Leicester, on his estate in Kent. Jonson paints a picture of a harmonious countryside, of plentiful order and moderation, which has the lush vividness of a Rubens landscape, and whose sensibility uncurls all the way down to Downton Abbey. It’s ridiculous, idealised, and yet it bites into something in the English psyche too: The lower land, that to the river bends, Thy sheep, thy bullocks, kine, and calves do feed; The middle grounds thy mares and horses breed. Each bank doth yield thee conies; and the tops, Fertile of wood, Ashore and Sidney’s copse, To crown thy open table, doth provide The purpled pheasant with the speckled side; The painted partridge lies in every field, And for thy mess is willing to be killed. And if the high-swollen Medway fail thy dish, Thou hast thy ponds, that pay thee tribute fish, Fat aged carps that run into thy net, And pikes, now weary their own kind to eat, As loath the second draught or cast to stay, Officiously at first themselves betray; Bright eels that emulate them, and leap on land Before the fisher, or into his hand. Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. The early cherry, with the later plum, Fig, grape, and quince, each in his time doth come; The blushing apricot and woolly peach Hang on thy walls, that every child may reach. And though thy walls be of the country stone, They’re reared with no man’s ruin, no man’s groan; There’s none that dwell about them wish them down; But all come in, the farmer and the clown, And no one empty-handed, to salute Thy lord and lady, though they have no suit. Some bring a capon, some a rural cake, Some nuts, some apples; some that think they make The better cheeses bring them … Jonson’s enormous and capacious talent fathered an entire school of poets – the so-called ‘tribe of Ben’. His rival and friend John Donne influenced only a few others. His was an odder, knottier and more intense genius, though today, perhaps because of that, he is far better known. Donne can perplex modern readers because he is both a great poet of love and eroticism, and a great religious poet. At times the two seem to mingle, apparently without curdling. But an urgent, vivid belief in God and redemption coexisted in an argumentatively religious society with equally urgent, vivid and profane urges. Donne wrote about sex and love in his youth, and then about Christ and the Church as he aged, but he wasn’t two men. All through his life he was able to deploy a kind of intellectual avidity, a nervy restlessness that tore at whatever he was doing and thinking. This famous example may be the greatest poem about lovemaking ever written. He’s urging his mistress to rip her clothes off: Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/andrew-marr/we-british-the-poetry-of-a-people/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.