Let us look at the background against which Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the reign of Elizabeth I, the second of Henry VIII’s children. For much of Henry’s reign Britain was officially a Catholic country, until the king needed a divorce when it became necessary to repudiate the Church of Rome and incorporate the nation into the stream of Protestant Reformation sweeping through Europe. Refusal to conform to this adjustment cost Henry’s chief minister Sir Thomas More, his head. Henry’s son, Edward VI, has been described as a “Protestant bigot” and his sister Mary who succeeded him could be described as a Catholic equivalent. The middle child, Elizabeth, returned the country to the Protestant fold while adopting a relatively middle-of-the-road to religious difference.
What did this mean to value system of people who lived through this period of spiritual turbulence? In today’s Protestant church it is almost a disadvantage for a priest to believe in traditional Christianity, and even respectable Catholic thinkers are saying contraception is acceptable and that the Church will eventually accept married priests. In the 16th and 17th centuries it was a different case. Men were burned alive for refusing to adapt their practices to the demands of one religion or the other. What power was strong enough to cause them to do this? It was the power of a belief in a heaven and hell in which one would spend eternity, a belief that the individual had a relationship with God interpreted through the teachings of a Church on earth.
This belief system is essentially a mediaeval one, but the Reformation and subsequent economic developments (Italian capitalism) and geographical discoveries (the Americas, the spice routes) demanded a more rational approach to spirituality and we can argue that the crisis caused by these two tectonic plates of human history rubbing together produced the earthquake of the Renaissance. Two sets of religious beliefs were claiming the exclusive right of access to God - both could not be right. Although Columbus’ letters are full of thanks to God, the success of his voyages was due as much to secular mathematics as to divine benevolence and the Church had denied the mathematics on which Galileo’s view of the universe was based.
So where did this leave the citizen of Elizabeth’s England, a 16th-century third world country whose economy depended on providing raw materials such as wool, leather and tin to the powerful and sophisticated states of Europe that were divided into Catholic and Protestant power blocs similar to those of the 20th century’s Cold War? In addition to the normal risks of daily life (theatres regularly had to be closed in summer because of plague), we must remember the constant threat throughout most of Elizabeth’s reign, of the mightiest empire in the world, that of Spain. King Philip of Spain, the most powerful man on earth, had married Elizabeth’s sister Queen Mary and wanted to regain his hold on the Protestant island that was encouraging the Dutch rebels in his Hapsburg Empire. We recall the Spanish Armada, the failed invasion of 1588, but most people do not realise that this one of four attempts to conquer England, Ireland and Wales (Scotland was still independent at this time).
The citizen of Elizabeth’s England lived in a world which was insecure both physically and spiritually because important links with the past had been broken. Mediaeval man had looked to the classical and biblical past for the authority that controlled his present, but Renaissance man looked to the future, based on the twin foundations of Judaeo-Christian and Graeco-Roman cultures. The Middle Ages sent crusader colonists to Jerusalem to reinforce the past. The Renaissance sent colonists to the Americas to develop the future. In this state of change and crisis, what I would call the Great National Nervous Breakdown, where did Renaissance man and woman look for guidance? The first answer is still the church, where they would listen to two-hour sermons from preachers like John Donne, the Dean of St Paul’s (who had expeditiously converted from Catholicism to Protestantism to achieve social – and financial – progress). They would also go to the theatres, where the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries presented them with lessons from Roman and British history as well as comedies and tragedies with storylines taken from the centre of western learning, Italy.
Many of Shakespeare’s plays analyse the chaotic and brutal politics of his times by looking at historical parallels but he also analyses human relationships, giving people a guide to living with each other during a period of history when many religious values had been overturned. This section of his work - both tragedy and comedy - centres on love and of course love is the basis of Christianity (though we might not think so when we read the histories of 2,000 years of religious warfare). The comedy 12th Night, in particular, contains a wonderful set of lessons in love that embrace eight different aspects of that emotion.
It is interesting, but not surprising, that Shakespeare should not make open references to religious questions in his plays: if he came down on one side or the other of the Catholic/Protestant divide he could find himself in trouble if and when the nation's religious wind swung around in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, we do find the dilemmas that appear in religion being discussed in non-religious contexts. For example, Macbeth shows us the conflict between free will and fate. The Three Sisters tell Macbeth at the beginning of the play that he shall be king, which may either be a prophecy or the ramblings of three drunken Scottish bag ladies. It is Macbeth who, obediently like any nagged husband ("Are you going to cut the grass/the King's throat or not?") does not wait for the King to die a natural death, but allows his free will to interfere with his fate by hurrying matters along and killing the King prematurely.
The conclusion that I suggest, therefore, is that the arrival of the Reformation in England and Wales (some would say it has not yet arrived in Ireland) caused every ordinary individual in the land to carry out a religious self-assessment. Did you abandon a Church that said those who abandoned it would burn in hell, or did you remain true to that Church and burn on earth? It seems fairly obvious that those engaged in writing plays for general consumption would be living on a higher plane of awareness of the existential conflicts being acted out on the streets and would therefore portray them on stage in heightened forms of expression. This is the advantage English literature gained from the Great National Nervous Breakdown.
There is, however, one huge siege gun aimed directly at this argument: the most religiously conservative country in Europe, Spain, was producing excellent dramatic literature in greater quantities than England and in Cervantes had not only an artistic rival to Shakespeare, but the man who invented the modern novel, the literary form that has overtaken theatre as a point of access most people have to literature. Does this big gun nullify my previous arguments? I think not (but then, I would say that, wouldn't I?). Spain and Portugal (kingdoms that were united for a while during this period) were in a better position than most societies to understand the intellectual and technological revolutions that were carrying their power to the Americas, India, the East Indies, the Philippines and Japan. Indeed, we may even read Don Quixote in this light: the knight's illusions are noble and magnanimous, representing the mediaeval ideals of Christian chivalry, but Sancho Panza represents the modern world of the 17th-century that has to adapt to changes in the physical world and new approaches to the spiritual one. So English writers faced Shakespeare's brave new world by abandoning an old religion and creating many new ones (as Voltaire said: "This is the country of sects. An Englishman, as a free man, goes to Heaven by whatever road he pleases") while the great Spanish dramatists, especially Calderón, looked for answers to the new questions in the old religion.
Interested in teaching English language using literature? Have a look at http://litandlang.co.uk
No comments:
Post a Comment