Early Modern England 1485-1714: A Narrative History (47 page)

Cultural Life

Before returning to the chronological narrative of English history, it is important to take note of the cultural life of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England, for it was unprecedented in size, scope, and quality in English history. Never before had the English excelled at so many artistic and intellectual pursuits. Why should this have been so? Certainly, London’s growth, the court’s prominence, and the ruling elite’s relative freedom and wealth all created conditions which made art possible. But we cannot explain exactly why these opportunities were taken; even less can we explain why they resulted in the miracles of Shakespeare’s
King Lear,
Byrd’s masses, Dowland’s lute music, Hilliard’s miniatures, Jones’s Banqueting House, or the King James Bible.

Perhaps the first condition for the creation of art is an audience, preferably one which is willing to both pay the artist and supply his or her subject matter. Prior to the Reformation, the principal patron for English art was the Church. But following the break with Rome much existing religious art was destroyed, new images proscribed, and the wealth which paid for culture confiscated. Fortunately for scholarship and the arts, this wealth was deflected into the hands of a royal house and aristocracy willing to spend it on cultural endeavors. Admittedly, the Crown’s patronage of writers and artists was usually indirect, especially under the frugal Elizabeth I. That is, apart from the mounting of tournaments, pageants, and processions, especially on her Accession Day (November 17), the queen commissioned few works of art; apart from the musicians of her Chapel Royal, she paid few artists. She was far more likely to give a poet or a painter, especially an author who glorified her, a court office or a lucrative monopoly. A direct commission was easier to obtain from a great nobleman, such as the earl of Leicester. Still, the monarch’s personality and activities, and those of her entourage, provided subject matter for art and the court was the most important venue for catching the attention of such a patron. As a result, fashions in art or dress either originated or made their debut from Europe at court. In the following paragraphs we will touch briefly upon various forms of art, always beginning at court and moving outward to the productions of the city and countryside.

Generally, the most dramatic and expensive peacetime activity in which monarchs engage is building. Henry VIII was a great builder and palace renovator but his children were too short-lived or too poor to follow his lead. As a result, most of the great buildings put up from 1547 to 1603 were aristocratic, not royal, palaces – the prodigy houses noted earlier in this chapter. Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was no more comfortable financially, but he was far more willing to go into debt, and he was more able to do so because of peace with Spain in 1604. He commissioned Inigo Jones to build the Banqueting House at Whitehall and the Queen’s House at Greenwich. Jones had studied the neoclassical designs of the Italian architect Andrea Palladio (1518–80), and so his buildings represented a radical departure from the old late-Gothic (Perpendicular) style in vogue until the mid-sixteenth century. Elsewhere, as we have seen, Jones designed the first large-scale housing development, and the prototype of the London square, at Covent Garden. In the countryside, the Reformation put an end to church building and renovation; instead, as indicated above, this was a great age for domestic architecture, both noble and common.

The Elizabethan was not a great age for English painting. Indeed, the queen probably set native portraiture back for half a century by her government’s careful regulation and censorship of her image to ensure that she always be portrayed as she was early in her reign: in 1596 she actually ordered unauthorized images destroyed. In any case, there was, arguably, no portraitist in Elizabethan England of the quality of Hans Holbein to grab her attention. The possible exception to this generalization was the miniaturist Nicholas Hilliard (ca. 1547–1619), who created exquisite portraits of Elizabethan courtiers on a small scale. A few aristocrats, such as Leicester and Essex, engaged in collecting: the former had over 200 pictures including 130 portraits. But it was not until the Jacobean period that the visual arts received really effective royal and aristocratic patronage. This occurred because James I’s two sons, Princes Henry Frederick (1594–1612) and Charles (1600–49), along with a number of their aristocratic friends, began to take an avid interest in the visual arts. In particular, Charles encouraged his father to bring over and patronize Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). This patronage resulted in masterpieces such as the former’s ceiling for Jones’s Banqueting House,
The Apotheosis of James I;
and the latter’s royal family portraits. As king, Charles I assembled the greatest art collection in Europe by asking his diplomats and aristocrats on the “Grand Tour” to purchase desirable items. George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (1592–1628; see
plate 14
, p. 226), Thomas Howard, earl of Arundel (1585–1646), and other courtiers emulated the king by filling their residences with the finest paintings, sculpture, furniture, metalwork, woodwork, porcelain, embroidery, and tapestry hangings the continent had to offer. There were no public art galleries, so the only way to experience such visual splendor was to go to court or visit some nobleman’s house. Fortunately, such buildings were at least open to gentle visitors. Indeed, these collections (as well as elaborate dress) were intended to impress important visitors with the patron’s status, wealth, and lineage. Charles I had exquisite taste and loved beautiful things, but when Van Dyck painted him standing with nonchalant dignity surrounded by the royal regalia (see
plate 15
, p. 231), the two undoubtedly meant to convey a more particular message about monarchy.

That message was, for the most part, aimed at the ruling elite. Most English people were never exposed to such sophisticated art. Still, court styles in art did have an influence beyond Whitehall. For example, the sovereign’s Chapel Royal, which included such masters as Thomas Tallis, William Byrd (ca. 1543–1623), and Orlando Gibbons (1583–1625), was the premier center for new Church music, which was then borrowed by cathedral and Church choirs around the country. The court also produced instrumental dance music for balls and madrigals, art songs, lute or keyboard music for quiet hours from the likes of Byrd, Thomas Campion (1567–1620), and John Dowland (ca. 1563–1626). These were often, in turn, published, and sung or played by educated amateurs in aristocratic, gentle, and mercantile households. Toward the end of the reign of Elizabeth I the court began to combine all of the art forms available in formal choreographed pageants with allegorical or mythological plots, spoken lines, elaborate sets, costumes, and music. This reminds us that dance was thought to be highly expressive; increasingly, the ability to dance, a mark of gentility and good breeding. These masques, as they came to be known, achieved their greatest sophistication, splendor, and expense under James I and Charles I thanks to the pen of Ben Jonson (1572–1637) and the scenic designs of Inigo Jones. Their intent was usually to glorify the monarch; however, they, too, were restricted to a courtly audience, so it is difficult to argue that they had much propaganda value for any but a small circle of nobles and gentry.

Beyond the court, urban corporations also commissioned royal portraits and maintained minstrels or waits to perform on ceremonial occasions. Ordinary people sang carols in church – indeed, the Reformation encouraged lay participation – and folk songs and printed ballads in taverns and out-of-doors. The ability of ordinary people to read and sing from ballad sheets reminds us that literacy was rising in late Tudor and early Stuart England. With the increasing number of endowed parish schools, and the printing press, much popular culture was transmitted through cheap, easy-to-read chapbooks and almanacs. But most such culture was traditional and oral: that is, its authorship was unknown and it was transmitted by word of mouth from generation to generation and place to place by roving minstrels, ballad singers, and players who often appeared at fairs and markets. In 1606 one contemporary complained that many people knew more about Robin Hood, a legendary figure since the fourteenth century, than they did the Bible. The popular calendar was full of holidays like St. Valentine’s Day,

Shrove Tuesday (the day before Ash Wednesday), and May Day which once had religious significance but had now become an excuse to relax and have a good time singing, drinking, playing football, or, on the last of these, dancing around a Maypole. Puritan social reformers scorned such activities, but other members of the elite were not so hostile. Early in the seventeenth century James I even issued the
Book of Sports,
noting which recreations and revels could be performed on the Sabbath.

The art form for which the Elizabethan and Jacobean age is best known is, arguably, the theater. The first plays in the English language were medieval mystery and mummers’ plays and pageants, mounted on religious feast days in communities large and small all over England and Wales. These were suppressed at the Reformation, but successive Protestant regimes sponsored anti-Catholic plays of their own. These and other short, secular interludes were performed in private houses by strolling bands of players. By the time of Elizabeth’s accession, full-fledged five-act plays were being mounted by young men at the universities and Inns of Court, especially during the Christmas holidays. The greatest of these university wits was Christopher Marlowe (1563/4–93), who wrote
Dr. Faustus, Tamburlaine,
and the
History of Edward II.
The queen occasionally attended such productions while on progress or on visits to the Inns for their Christmas revels. She enjoyed these plays so much that she began to encourage their performance at court, establishing the office of master of the revels in 1579 to supervise their production. She also gave royal protection to a company of actors, the Queen’s Men, as did Leicester and other court peers. This allowed such companies to tour the country and mount plays for paying audiences. In fact some scholars think that they were part of Walsingham’s spy system.

Such protection was necessary because the law was hostile to roving bands of masterless men: in particular, the Poor Law of 1572 outlawed “common players in interludes & minstrels, not belonging to any baron of this realm” (14 Eliz. 1, c. 5). Actors ran into the stiffest opposition from the civic authorities of London, who disliked the idea of ordinary people – their employees – idling away their time watching plays. In fact, large crowds of any sort were thought to be dangerous nurseries of sedition, crime, and disease. This explains why the earliest theaters were built outside of the city walls, beyond Guildhall jurisdiction. The first was the Red Lion, established north and east of the city in Whitechapel in 1567. In 1576 James Burbage (ca. 1531–97) founded a public playhouse called, appropriately enough, “the Theatre” in the London suburb of Shoreditch. In 1577 a large open-air public theater entitled “the Rose” was established in Southwark, on the south bank of the Thames. This was followed in 1598 by the Globe. Here, all London could come together in the afternoon to see the latest play. But even here, hierarchy obtained: the wealthy sat in upper boxes, the middling orders sat below them, and relatively common people stood in the large open area on the ground level – hence their designation as “groundlings.”

As readers of this text will know, one player and writer among the Lord Chamberlain’s Men was a young immigrant to London from Stratford-upon-Avon named Shakespeare. No historian, and quite possibly no scholar, can do justice to, let alone explain, the dramatic power, the beauty of language, or the insight into the human condition demonstrated in the plays of William Shakespeare. For over 20 years, among a host of talented authors including Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare produced a series of comedies
(Much Ado About Nothing;
A
Midsummer Night’s Dream; Twelfth Night; The Merry Wives of Windsor),
histories
(Richard II; Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2; Richard III),
and, above all, tragedies
(Hamlet; Macbeth; King Lear; Romeo and Juliet)
that delighted Londoners then and continue to speak to humanity now. It remains for the historian to note that these and similar masterpieces would not have been possible without, first, the royal protection and patronage which gave Shakespeare and his compatriots their start; second, the courage and ruthlessness of impresarios like Richard Burbage (1568–1619), who drove their authors and players hard in order to scrape together a profit; third, the rise of a popular audience with some disposable income and an interest in being entertained; and, finally and most remarkably, the development of the English language to a point of sufficient refinement and versatility by the end of the Tudor century that it could be deployed by playwrights to such great effect, and yet still be understandable to people of all social ranks.

Ultimately, the language of Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline England may be its most powerful and lasting cultural achievement, for it was during this period that English became eloquent, expressive, and comprehensible in a wide variety of forms of writing. Historians have offered a number of reasons for this development. First, the public controversies over the divorce and the Reformation encouraged publication generally, and directness and refinement of the language in particular. Thomas Cromwell and his successors patronized a torrent of closely argued pamphlets and treatises in support of the royal position. Related to this was the temporary relaxation of censorship under Edward VI and, with it, the increasing use of the printing press. Protestantism was also associated with the growth in schooling and rise in literacy noted above, which fueled a hunger for the books so printed. Where 800 books had been published in the decade 1520–9, that number rose to 3,000 in 1590–1600. Many of these books went to the great libraries of the nobility, gentry, or scholarly community: the mathematician and astrologer John Dee (1527–1609) had a personal library of 4,000 books. But an even greater number seem to have trickled down to the lower levels of society: in the city of Canterbury in the 1560s only 8 percent of household inventories (usually compiled when someone died) listed books. By the 1620s that percentage had risen to 45.