December 2, 1998

J. Masten

Questions for Michael Bryson’s exam

Choose one of the following.

1.Much of the drama on the exam list is set outside England, often in specifically non-Protestant contexts. Bracketing the complex question of why this might be so, write instead an essay in which you discuss the effects or implications of this fact, commenting in particular on the way in which this drama negotiates, confronts, engages, or ignores the Reformation. Are there specifically English issues and controversies of the Reformation that these plays set in Spain, Italy, Germany, etc., take up? What relevance might setting have to (what effect might setting have on) the treatment of specifically religious, theological, or ecclesiastical questions in these plays? Are there specific strategies of representation (ways of representing or performing, e.g., the sacred, the body, the text, the heretical, the icon, ritual, etc.) that illustrate something about the theatre's approach(es) to the English Reformation, its questions, and its controversies? Your essay should discuss at least five plays (possibly including but certainly not limited to Shakespeare). (Feel free as well to use plays set in England as reference points.)

2. In the past two decades, under the banner of various kinds of historicism, much work has been done to resituate early modern English drama in the historical, social, and cultural contexts/discourses of its time. One could argue, however, that comparatively little has been done to bring in religion as one of those contexts/discourses. The question is: how would a critic go about this? What are the particular methods or ways of reading that seem to be called for, and why? What kinds of research might be particularly fertile for this kind of project? Is "contextualization" a useful model in this regard, or is there an alternative method or model you would advocate for examining the relation of religion and drama? Are there particular issues around religion that would require particularly close attention in relation drama, its conventions, its genres, its modes of production and representation? Write an essay that examines the challenges and opportunities of this conjunction in relation to at least four plays on the list.

Michael Bryson Exam Day #3

Among the issues which are critical for even a rudimentary understanding of the social, political, and religious dynamics of "Reformation-era" (roughly 1530-1660) England, three seem especially relevant to a discussion of English drama (particularly late Elizabethan drama--the period of drama I find by far the most interesting): the nature of kingship (kingship by divine right or kingship by force); the relation of kingly authority to ecclesiastical authority; and the pronounced late-Elizabethan anxieties over succession, and the accompanying threat of political chaos that loomed over the unknown horizon of a post-Elizabethan era, an issue that, in somewhat altered form, continued to be urgently relevant all the way through the periods of the Commonwealth and the Restoration.

The threat of political chaos (all too often, in the experience of sixteenth-century England, intimately associated with theological and ecclesiastical struggles) is personified in the figure of the stage-Machiavel. An early example of this character is Lorenzo, the "Machiavel" of Thomas Kyd’s 1592 play, The Spanish Tragedy. This kind of figure is portrayed as being capable of any and all nefarious schemes and duplicitous actions. This Spanish Machiavel fits neatly into late Elizabethan notions of the duplicity and danger of Spain (so recently and dramatically defeated in 1588) and of the Catholic church. The fact that Lorenzo and the King of Spain, for reasons of political advantage, favor a match between the captured Portuguese prince Balthazar and Bel-imperia over a match between the same lady and Horatio (and the willingness of Lorenzo to murder Horatio in an attempt to ensure the desired match) dramatizes the Elizabethan notion of the Machiavel as a soulless creature dedicated to endless manipulation, betrayal, and violence as means to power and advantage (not, of course, that such tactics were wholly unfamiliar in England). The fact that the historical Machiavelli was Italian and (at least nominally) Catholic, a set of circumstances that made him at once foreign and a representative of the Roman "anti-Christ," contributed mightily to the formation of a stock dramatic type (one perhaps most brilliantly realized in Shakespeare’s Iago), that was a thorough distortion of the ideals and ideas of the actual Machiavelli. The Prince is a manual giving advice to absolute rulers on how to remain absolute rulers. It is not a blueprint for Machiavelli’s ideal society or Machiavelli’s ideal citizen. In the Discourses, Machiavelli recommends a mixed constitution, in which neither the wealthy few, nor the poorer many could dominate. Each would keep its eye on the other in a checks-and-balances system. Ultimately, Machiavelli believed that government by the populace (that 5-10% of the actual population who were citizens) is better than government by princes. But such ideas do not make dramatic stage characters.

Shakespeare’s King John, though an "English" play, is one of numerous Shakespeare history plays set at least partially in France. It is not the attendant military struggles with which this play deals in part, but the struggle between secular and ecclesiastical authority that is of primary interest here. John is excommunicated by Cardinal Pandulph, the Papal legate, over the issue of John’s refusal to appoint Stephen Langston (the Pope’s favored candidate) to the position of Archbishop of Canterbury. In so doing, Pandulph essentially releases John’s subjects from "allegiance to an heretic" and declares that the hand that "takes away thy hateful life" shall be "worshipped as a saint." This deals with two issues current in the reign of Elizabeth. The first is the power of ecclesiastical authority to use excommunication as a weapon against a monarch, and to declare that the uncooperative monarch’s subjects were no longer obliged to continue in their obedience; this, in fact, had been done to Elizabeth fairly early in her reign, when the Pope "released" Elizabeth’s subjects from their allegiance to her. The second issue is the belief of Elizabethans that Catholic monks and Jesuits preached, as a matter of policy, the assassination of Protestants, both high and low. In 1584, one William the Silent, leader of the Dutch Protestant revolt against the Spanish king Phillip II, had been murdered by a Catholic assassin in Phillip’s employ, while the 1572 massacre of thousands of French Protestants had been greeted with open delight by Phillip II and Pope Gregory XIII. The historical King John, in order to lift the excommunication and ensure the loyalty of his troops while trying to recover lost French provinces, was known to have handed over his kingdom to the Pope, receiving it back again as a Papal vassal. In an Elizabethan context, John is both a proto-Protestant hero for his resistance to the Pope, and a popularly vilified traitor for his handing of the English crown to the Roman "anti-Christ."

The issue of succession (who is to take power and on what principle) and the nature of kingship itself is critical in Hamlet. In the political world of Elsinore, there is not a recognizably primogeniture-based principle of succession to the Danish throne. Succession is a matter of some uncertainty. Hamlet seems to suggest that succession is determined by election among the nobility, as he says to Horatio that Claudius has ‘‘popped between the election and my hopes.’’ The nature of kingship in this play is briefly, but tantalizingly, aligned with the developing notion in late Elizabethan England of the "divine right of kings." Claudius, upon being confronted by Laertes in Act IV over the death of Polonius, says to Queen Gertrude "there’s such divinity doth hedge a king that treason can but peep to what it would." Of course, this notion of the divinity of kingship is undercut by the very person who expresses it: Claudius the regicide. The anxiety over succession in this, and other plays, can be seen as part of a general anxiety over the failure of a now-aged Elizabeth to produce any heir. What will happen to England when she dies? Will the bad old days of Mary return? Is the Catholic church, ever the bogey man at the English door, poised to strike and reassume control over an England that will be plunged into chaos? Given the violent shocks and aftershocks of the early- to mid-sixteenth century in England, these are by no means baseless fears. Another interesting note is that, by the end of the play, it is Fortinbras (whose name means, roughly, "strong-in-arm") of Norway who sits on the Danish throne. This is quite literally a hint as to the kind of "strong-man" politics that almost inevitably steps (or attempts to step) into disorder or collapsed/failed order. This kind of "strength" is precisely what is at issue in two other Shakespeare plays: Richard II and Troilus and Cressida.

The strong-man theory of political power is played directly against a clearly stated doctrine of the divine right of kings in Richard II. Richard, who according to a strictly primogeniture-based succession principle is clearly the legitimate English monarch, also refers to himself as God’s anointed King. "Not all the water in the rough rude sea can wash the balm from an anointed king." He goes on to say that "the breath of worldly men cannot depose the deputy elected by God." John of Gaunt refers to Richard as "God’s substitute, His deputy anointed in His sight." Henry Hereford (or Bolingbroke) is clearly not, according to a strictly primogeniture-based succession principle, a legitimate monarch in the same sense that Richard is. Henry becomes king because he can; he has power sufficient (due to the massing of his own forces and those of his allies) to forcibly isolate and depose Richard. "Do we must what force will have us do," says Richard to Henry. Henry IV, like the famous rebel of Paradise Lost, immediately wants to re-impose on his followers the very system of authority he has (in this case, successfully) rebelled against. Henry announces his intention to make things right with the source of divine kingship by planning a Crusade to the Holy Land (a mission he never carries out). He also displays anxiety over the primogeniture-based succession principle in his inquiries after his "unthrifty son," the future Henry V. The point that Henry comes from banishment, from outside of England, should not be missed here; though this play is set in England, it is the illegitimate return to England of a nobleman banished to foreign territories that precipitates the downfall of the legitimate English monarch. Though Henry is English, his threat is, in this sense, "foreign."

Divine order, and the chaos of force and violence that threaten to overwhelm the world if that order is destroyed, are clearly expressed themes in the famous "degree" speech of Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida. Set amidst the chaos and divine acrimony (the bitter disputes between the various Olympian deities) of the Trojan War, Ulysses’ speech begins with one of the most ancient mythological/theological ideas, perhaps most famous in a Christian context in the phrase "on Earth as it is in Heaven." Starting with the idea that the heavens themselves "observe degree, priority, and place," Ulysses sketches an apocalyptic picture of what happens in a world in which that heavenly principle is abandoned. Eventually, "strength should be lord," "force should be right," then "every thing includes itself in power, power into will, and will into appetite." Finally, appetite, described as "an universal wolf" will at last "eat up himself." This is an almost textbook example of what could be referred to as Shakespeare’s anti-commons attitude. In this time of extreme anxiety over political succession and religious (Protestant, specifically Anglican Protestant) stability, the idea of "degree, priority, and place" is being attacked from within England itself. The struggles over church government in the 1 580s and 1 590s, the Marprelate tracts, the Admonition controversy between Archbishop Whitgift and the Presbyterian agitator Thomas Cartwright, all of these things can be seen, from a conservative point of view, as attempts to overturn "degree, priority, and place." In Troilus and Cressida, Ulysses’ complaint about the failure to observe "degree, priority, and place" is in the context of the failure of the Achaian forces to remain unified in the face of the Trojan (read Roman) enemy. Read back onto the political and religious anxieties of the late Elizabethan era, this failure to observe "degree, priority, and place" threatens England’s ability to remain politically and theologically unified in the face of a hostile, and still largely Catholic Europe. The "strength [that] should become lord," and the "appetite" of the "universal [the meaning of the word catholic] wolf’ take on an entirely different meaning in this light.

Each of these concerns (the nature of kingship, the succession principles behind kingship, the relation of secular to ecclesiastical power, the anxieties about the nature of political power and especially foreign political power embodied in the xenophopbically drawn stage-Machiavel, and the anxieties about "degree" and chaos) as dealt with in the plays above, arguably has its roots in the religious and political upheavals of the sixteenth century. These upheavals begin with Henry VIII’s determination to have his marriage to Katharine of Aaragon annulled, continue through the brief but vigorously Protestant reign of Edward VI, as well as the failed attempt to place the Protestant Lady Jane Grey on the throne after Edward’s early death, the reign of Mary and the persecution and/or exile of English Protestants, finally coming to a head in the last years of a barren and heirless Elizabeth. Each of these concerns will continue in slightly altered form through the Stuart regimes of James and Charles I. The anxieties over foreign political power (especially Catholic political power) become the resentments directed against Henrietta, Charles’ Catholic queen. This, in turn, is transformed by Puritan agitators such as William Prynne, into a condemnation of the very stage itself. In his 1633 Histriomastix, Prynne blasts English drama as immoral, leading especially to the corruption of women, and he lays this at the feet of Queen Henrietta, who was known for her patronage of drama. The issue of the relation of secular to ecclesiastical power becomes, for the Stuarts, a question of the identity of the two powers in one and the same figure, the divine king who rules the English church through the bishops. The question of the nature of kingly power settles, at least in the minds of the Stuart kings, into an increasingly doctrinaire absolutism. But these issues (at least, and this is a major qualification, in that late Jacobean and Carolinian drama with which I am currently familiar) no longer seem to dominate the English stage in the manner of the late 1590s and early 1600s. The vogue turns increasingly towards a kind of lurid sensationalism, perhaps best illustrated by the Romeo-and-Juliet-plus-incest-meets-Titus-Andronicus quality of Ford’s Tis Pity She’s a Whore.

The issues dealt with in the above plays are dealt with again, only in non-dramatic form, after the closure of the English theatres. The issues of succession, the nature of kingly (and other forms of secular) power, the relation of secular authority to ecclesiastical authority, and the threat of political chaos that looms if a king (Charles I) is deposed are all central to the non-dramatic literature of the 1640s. The voluminous pamphlet wars of the 1 640s, to which one John Milton contributed regularly and vigorously, are the thematic heirs to the politically- and theologically-engaged dramas I discuss above.