A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England

A Time Traveler's Guide to Elizabethan England
© 2014 Ian Mortimer
415 pages

Previously Ian Mortimer has offered readers with access to a time machine a handbook for medieval England. Perhaps mystery plays based on Scripture are not your interest, however, and you'd prefer dining with a little more variety. Come then to Elizabethan England, where the secular theater is in its ascendancy, and the rising merchant marine is bringing the world's produce to English plates. The Elizabethan era is commonly thought of as a golden age for England, between its triumph over the Spanish Armada and the appearance of luminaries like Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson.   Mortimer warns curious travelers, however, that this is still not an age for the cautious:  death  by disease, crime, war, or the law are never too far away, and Elizabeth's crown is so questioned that "Gloriana" must rule with a firm hand, using a zealous secret service keeping tabs on the population and dealing with those who would foment rebellion.

Although Mortimer breaks from his faux-guidebook style (regarding it as contrived if repeated), he still covers the whole of everyday life in England during its 16th century.  Covered at length are dress and occupations, architecture, law, and the evolution of the theater and literature. Material from the previous book which is still in effect - -the feudal ordering of society, for instance -- is  recapped but not plumbed in full again. Mortimer is forced by Elizabeth to focus an entire chapter on religion,  given that the legal union which gave her birth and rule was a religious and political controversy that led England to break from the Church, and cost many men their heads, from the noble to the base.  (Mortimer still focuses on the political aspects of religion, however, with little on religious practice;   it remains more of a background than a subject considered in full. I thought this was odd in a book on the medieval period, and it's still odd.)

As much interest as there in in the lives of those gone on, and of the structures they created which we still use, I also appreciated Mortimer's general appraisal of the age. He is strikingly empathetic of his medieval subjects, including those in an age which is not quite medieval but definitely not industrial-modern, and conveys this to the reader well. He gives the people who breathed and died in this age their full consideration -- sharing their verse and graffiti, imagining the smells and sights,  putting readers into their heads so that we may read the landscape as they did. To them, hills and rivers were not a Windows XP wallpaper, but places to keep the sheep that kept them alive, and the best transportation away.   Mortimer's final appraisal is that as dangerous and uncertain as their lives could be, we see in the Elizabethan age a growing self-confidence -- one that saw men throw themselves into the unknown expanse of the oceans in search of new lands and possibilities, and one that allowed intellectual knowledge to definitely surpass the aura of classical learning. Despite the perils and problems of the age, it  was also one of hope and ambition, one that spurred England to become the greatest maritime power yet seen.

Oh, earlier in the week Ian Mortimer did an "ask me anything" thread on reddit, inviting questions from the public. He answered questions on his sources, inspirations, etc.

Related:
The Life of Elizabeth I, Alison Weir
The Age of Faith and The Reformation, Will Durant
The works of Frances and Joseph Gies

The World as Stage

Shakespeare: The World as Stage
© 2007 Bill Bryson
245 pages

Shakespeare: The World as Stage surprised me when it arrived. Such a slender little volume for a man whose legacy is strong even today!  Bryson’s aim is not to deliver a volume of literary criticism, or even to fix on some minor detail and create an revisionist vision of Shakespeare, but to stick to the facts.  As it turns out, there aren’t that many.  While we know bounds more about Shakespeare than many of his contemporaries -- and more of his works have survived him than them as well --  the man didn’t leave much documentation.    In creating a narrative that connects the few facts we have  -- birth,  employment as an actor, success as a  playwright, death --  Bryson also supplies background information about Elizabethan and Jamesian England, and concludes that Shakespeare’s greatest accomplishment was not “Hamlet”, but rather managing to survive childhood.   England was plagued by disease after disease, so much so that public records sometimes inserted the phrase (in Latin), “here begins plague”, as if to assure future historians that no, this isn’t an error, that many people really did die in that April with its shoures soote. 

If a reader is looking for a light history of Shakespeare that won’t lead them off the road into some niche theory of the bard,  Bryson here provides a concise, cautious, and enjoyable biography of the man and his times that will fill the bill admirably.

Fools and Mortals

Fools and Mortals
© 2017 Bernard Cornwell
384 pages

Brevity is the soul of wit, so here's an attempt at a quick  review.  Bernard Cornwell usually writes war novels, and he's magnificent at it. But he surely gets tired of it, and every so often he delivers a mystery or something that's not dashing heroics.   Fools and Mortals is such a book,  a celebration of the birth of western theater and of Shakespeare in general. Our main character is Richard Shakespeare, the struggling younger brother of much-hailed William.  In a age where only men acted on stage, Richard's days as an actor are seemingly numbered: he's too old to play most women, as his voice has already broken, but actors abound and male roles are competitive. What's worse, Will seems to be deliberately mocking Richard's desire to be taking seriously: his latest  role is a man...pretending to be a woman, and doing it clumsily.   But now isn't the time for jumping ship: the company is the middle  of rehearsals for a high-profile gig that the Queen might attend, and just showing up at practice gives him a chance to swoon over one of the serving girls.   Besides, he's too poor to take chances on pay:  Richard already has to make ends meet by nicking small articles and selling them on the side. When the company's plays are stolen,   Richard's moody resentment of his brother, not to mention his reputation for having sticky fingers, make him the obvious suspect. To clear his name, save the company's hides, and perhaps nail a proper male role, Richard decides to find out who stole the plays and get them back.

...and he does, within a few pages.  And then he exits , pursued by a bear.  The drama promised on the front cover is only a small, brief episode within the larger story of Shakespeare trying to deliver "A Midsummer's Night's Dream", and finish his script for "Romeo and Juliet". It's not easy, because  secret police keep breaking in to nose around, and why would priest-hunters be bothering an acting company?  Most of the novel's action takes place in and around rehearsals or performances. Cornwell notes in his afterword that the novel is largely a tribute to the men and women of his local acting company, who have given him so many happy evenings.  Fools and Mortals is thus a celebration of the English stage -- a novel that allows readers to experience the England which created and nurtured the likes of Shakespeare. Cornwell's usual strengths are here, in humor and in a few action scenes (I wasn't kidding about the bear),  but the weight of the story is its theatrical setting. I enjoyed it well enough, but I'm a regular patron of my local Shakespeare Festival and am thus an ideal audience for this kind of thing. I particuarly liked the way Cornwell included historical flavor: the inclusion of jigs after performances,  for instance, or the use of period slang.  I'm not sure that those who come to Cornwell for his Sharpes and Uhtreds will necessarily like this one, however, given how different it is from his usual work.

Well, so much for brevity. But Polonius was a rubbish advice-giver, anyway.

Related:
Ruled Britannia, another Shakespeare novel. This one is alt-history instead of historical fiction, and has Shakespeare incite  English rebellion against the conquering Spanish empire.
Gallows Thief, Bernard Cornwell. Another non-military work, this one a detective story set in 1817 England.

Shakespeare announcement

Bernard Cornwell chose this, the anniversary of William Shakespeare's death, to announce his next novel: Fools and Mortals. It will follow young Richard Shakespeare as he tries to make his way in the acting world, dominated by his estranged older brother.  Publication is set for mid-October in the U.K.

On that note, here's a little piece of fascination I found:

A linguist and a Shakespearean actor, father and son, here comment on how much of Shakespeare's wordplay is lost  on modern ears,  in part because pronunciation has shifted so much that puns and such are lost.   They take turns reading various passages from Shakespeare (dramas and plays) to demonstrate the difference between modern English (in the Received Pronunciation)  and 'Original Pronunciation'.   Worth listening to if you enjoy Shakespeare.

If you're interested in Shakespeare and comedy, a favorite disc of mine is the Reduced Shakespeare Company's Complete Works of Shakespeare. A trio attempts to do Shakespeare's entire corpus, including the sonnets, in one night. Below is their run-through of Romeo and Juliet, which will give you some idea as to the tenor of it. 

Today -- St. George's Day, incidentally -- starts the last week of Read of England, and it's gone fairly well, I believe.  Two books are waiting to be reviewed, one of which is from my Classics Club list, and another I've been sawing away at for weeks is nigh toppled.  Fifty pages to go!

The Quest for Shakespeare

The Quest for Shakespeare: the Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome
© 2008 Joseph Pearce
275 pages

Although April 23rd is, historically, the feast of England’s patron saint George,   it is also the anniversary of William Shakespeare’s  death.  2016 marks the 400th year since England’s most famous author went to his grave, and in way of honoring him I read Joseph Pearce’s The Quest for Shakespeare. I’ve heard Pearce speak on Shakespeare before, rebutting arguments that other personalities wrote the plays and that Shakespeare is just given credit for them, like Homer.  I’d assume Quest  would follow the same tack, which it does in its introductory chapter, but the real heart of Quest is Pearce’s case for Shakespeare being Catholic.  Although there’s no direct evidence, Pearce argues that the Bard’s loyalties can be inferred from various connections and relationships.

Shakespeare’s religion isn’t just interesting trivia: he lived in the age of Elizabeth, when Henry VIII’s divorce from Rome was visiting the land with terror and blood.  As covered in Come Rack! Come Rope! and Faith and Treason, those who did not attend Anglican services were fined heavily, and Catholic priests were brutally executed. After the Pope’s bull declaring Elizabeth an unlawful monarch, Catholicism had the same ring as treason.   Shakespeare’s father and daughter were both listed and fined as ‘recusants’, establishing the Shakespeare family as Catholic, if not William himself.  His close associations with other Catholics, like a hanged Jesuit priest named Southwell, and the Arden family who were damned in the Somerset plot,  throw a Roman light on him, as does his purchase and maintenance of a house used for hiding priests and performing illegal Masses. That last was compelling for me, especially when combined with the fact that he went out of his way to  engage a crypto-Catholic priest to perform his wedding ceremony.

Pearce's underlying argument is that Shakespeare is not some empty vessel to be filled with the values of his critics, but a man in his own flesh whose values shaped his work. He writes that if Shakespeare were Catholic, this would give the plays a certain moral tone, and closes the book with two appending sections which offer a guide to the moral interpretation of Shakespeare, and an example of it in "King Lear".  Though Pearce flirts with seeing his own desires in Shakespeare himself,  he errs on the side of caution more often than not.  He does have a marked enthusiasm for the central idea, at one point speculating that the lack of information about Shakespeare's early life in London might indicate that he was living a quiet moral life free of scandal.  Well, perhaps, but presumably Anglicans are just as capable of living quiet, moral lives free of scandal. Even if there were an overt Christian theme in the plays, that wouldn't necessitate an overt Catholic theme.  At best in "King Lear" there are characters complaining about the times they lived in, but if someone isn't complaining you're not in the real world, you're in the first version of the Matrix, the one that failed because no one believed in it.

Although too little is known about Shakespeare's life to declare his beliefs or politics with surety -- and interpreting plays is tricky, as anyone can read anything into them --  the amount of connections suggests that even if Shakespeare wasn't an observant Catholic himself, his sense of drama and justice would be influenced by the spectre of his friends being persecuted and even killed by the court...and that is an aspect wholly missed by every teacher on Shakespeare I've ever had.

Ruled Britannia

Ruled Britannia
© 2002 Harry Turtledove
458 pages

1597. The 16th century is drawing to a close, and with it -- seemingly -- England's fortunes. Nine years ago the vast Spanish armada triumphed in delivering its army to English shores, where grim veterans easily cast aside the hastily-drawn levies that met them on the beaches. Spain's daughter reigns as queen, while England's own languishes in Bell Tower.  The Catholic church has been restored to power over Protestantism, and with such severity that the mention of the English Inquisition can cause a man's blood to chill.  One of the most popular of English playwrights, enjoyed by even the overseeing Spanish, is one William Shakespeare, who has been asked to write a play celebrating the life of Spain's aging monarch, Phillip. But what if instead of memorializing the crown occupant, he celebrates the tragedy of Queen Boudica, a Celtic chieftess of yore  who lead her proud Britons in battle against a Roman invader? So begins what must for me be Harry Turtledove's most fascinating piece to date, a tribute to a master wordsmith via alternate history.

Ruled Britannia stands apart from Turtledove's other work, being largely dominated by  the one figure of William Shakespeare instead of drawing from an ensemble cast. There is another viewpoint character, the likewise famous Lope de Vega, but Shakespeare is the star.  Even when he is not telling the story, he is present: lines from his work absolutely riddle the dialogue. The language, too, is unusual: Turtledove switches between present-day English for narration, and Elizabethan English for his characters' conversations.  This requires adjustment on the part of the reader, but like tugging on a boot, it seems natural enough after a little effort. For once, Turtledove's annoying habit of being repetitive works to the readers' advantage, helping the arcane vocabulary and spellings ("murther most foul!") gain familiarity.  Most of the characters are historic personalities, another unusual move for Turtledove, and one of the few exceptions exists in a netherworld of fiction and fact, being one of the real Shakespeare's characters re-purposed for this set.  Shakespeare doesn't get up to much within the book, instead, while he  writes and prepares two plays at once, consorting with Spanish nobles and rebellious Englishers in such a fashion as to court death from other side, readers experience life in occupied England.  Tension comes in the form of a string of deaths of men connected with Shakespeare and the scheme to release Boudica's rebellion onto the unsuspecting dons. The poet is watched both by suspicious Spainards and calculating revolutionaries, neither of whom are afraid of a little villainy in the name of a worthy cause. Faced with death from either side,  Shakespeare ultimately performs for himself, for his own conscience; for he is an Englishman, called to show the mettle of his pasture. His decision whether or not to be the rebellion's propagandist is never in doubt, and the parts of the play shared with readers are certainly blood-rousing enough. The novel's last fifth is on rebellion itself, with lots of sword-fighting and enthusiastic yelling.

For the fan of Shakespeare and historical fiction, this is gold -- and a most unusual treat for readers of alt-historical fiction. While I could have done without some of the luridness and at least twenty uses of the same phrase ("made a leg"), this is one to remember with fondness.