The Elizabethans (28 page)

Bale stresses Oldcastle’s literacy (he ‘toke paper & penne in hand, & so wrote a Christen confession or rekening of his faith’.) His Oldcastle not only addresses the people, warning them of the duplicity of Catholic priests (‘Good Christen people for Gods love be wel ware of these men. For they will else begyle you and lead you blindelynge into hell with themselves’), but also ‘admonished the Kinges, as Richard the second, Henry the fourth, and Henfy the fyft, of the clergies manifold abuses, and put into the parliament house certain bokes concerning their just reformacion . . .’
¹⁵

So the Reformation transformed Oldcastle a century and more after his death, from an heretical troublemaker to a Protestant hero. Yet by 1596, when William Shakespeare wrote
Henry IV Part I
, Sir John Oldcastle the Lollard martyr had become the hero of the ‘Puritan left’. The editor of the Arden Shakespeare
King Henry IV Part I
, David Scott Kastan, sees Falstaff as a parodic representation of a ‘puritan’. Certainly there are traces of the Protestant ranter in Falstaff’s language – he speaks in scriptural allusions. ‘If to be fat is to be hated, then Pharaoh’s lean kine are to be loved’ (
Henry IV,
II.iv.345) . . . ‘Thou knowest in the state of innocency, Adam fell, and what should poor Jack Falstaff do in the days of villainy?’ (
Henry
IV
, III. iii.120). He exclaims, ‘I would I were a weaver; I could sing psalms or anything.’ (
Henry IV
, II.iv.127). Shakespeare originally called Falstaff Sir John Oldcastle, an amazingly tactless thing to have done, given the fact that William Brooke, 10th Lord Cobham, was Lord Chamberlain from 8 August 1596 to 5 March 1597, and responsible for censoring plays. Since the original Oldcastle had also been called Lord Cobham, it was a risky bit of cheek. Traces of the joke remain even after Shakespeare changed the name to Falstaff; as when Prince Hal refers to the fat knight as ‘my old lad of the castle’ (
Henry IV,
I. ii.29).

Whatever the origin of the joke – making a Puritan hero into the most dissolute comic character in the Shakespearean canon – it is clear that ‘Falstaff’ took on a reality of his own, which turned Oldcastle into a mere shadow. The relationship of the fat, boozy older man trying to corrupt a young man of much higher birth is a theme repeated in the Sonnets, and Fall-Staff/Shake-Spear must have had a strong element of autobiography in his composition. He erupted into the English chronicle-plays that had helped to make Shakespeare’s name and had a greater reality than any of the ‘historical’ figures with whom he was surrounded on the stage. This was one way of extending the national mythology which was first enacted in the theatre in Shoreditch some time in 1597.
¹⁶

The work of antiquarianism, and the reworking of mythological history, could be enlisted to justify contemporary political standpoints. In Spenser’s by-now-notorious dialogue, for example,
A View of the Present State of Ireland
, one of the speakers wonders at the legitimacy of using the ‘moste fabulous and forged’ dross of Irish chronicles to justify the English policy in Ireland during the 1580s and 1590s. But Irenius, the more right-wing and in many ways more like Spenser of the conversationalists, defends the custom:

Trevely I muste Confesse I do soe, but yeat not so absolutelye as ye doe suppose do I hearin relye upon those Bardes or Irishe Cronicles, thoughe the Irish themselves throughe theire Ignorance in matters of Learninge and deper judgement doe moste Constantlye believe and Avouch rheym. But unto them besides I add myne owne readinge and out of them bothe together with comparison of times likenes of manners and Customes Affinytie of words and names properties of natures and uses resemblances of rightes and Ceremonies moniments of Churches and Tombes and manie other like circumstances I doe gather a likelyhode of truethe, not certainlye affirming anye thinge but by Conferringe of times nacions languages monimentes and such like. I doe hunte out a probabilitye of things which I due leave unto your Judgement to beleeve or refuse.
¹⁷

Like those British in India who fell in love with the architecture, antiquities, languages and culture which they threatened by their very presence on Indian soil, Spenser was to become a passionate devotee of the folklore and literature of Ireland, as well as a celebrant of its landscape. He was also a populariser of the Elizabethan falsehood, culled from medieval chroniclers and fantasists, that Ireland always had belonged to England.

Giraldus Cambrensis, the wonderfully entertaining and gossipy Archdeacon of Brecon, had invented, in his history (in order to bolster the claims of King Henry II to occupy Ireland) the myth of the ‘Bayonne title’. This was the story that the sons of Mil, or Milesians, were granted permission to settle in Ireland by one Gurguntins, ‘King of the Britons’. ‘From this it is clear,’ Giraldus wrote, ‘that Ireland can with some right be claimed by the kings of Britain even though the claim be from olden times.’ Giraldus’s story, freely garbled, was reproduced in Holinshed’s account of Ireland’s ‘First Inhabitants’. Spenser, both in the
Faerie Queene
and in his
View of the Present State of Ireland
asserts that ‘it appearthe by good recorde yeat extante that Kinge Arthur and before him Gurgunt had all that Ilande in his Allegiance and Subieccion’. This ‘goode recorde’ was Giraldus’s wild claim that Ireland owed tribute to King Arthur in the days of ‘Giolla Már’, a figure who had the convenient attribute of not having existed in the prosaic realm of fact.
¹⁸

Spenser’s historiography of Ireland was entirely consistent with other Elizabethan antiquaries, such as William Hakewill, who wrote of the Romans needing to subjugate a Celtic people ‘by nature disobedient’. Comparing the benefits brought to the British mainland by the Saxon invasions with the conquest of Ireland by the Elizabethan English, Hakewill concluded that ‘nothing is more of conquerors desired, and more usually put in practise; so indeed is there nothing of more honor and security in ages to come, if once it may be thoroughly performed.’

Hakewill (baptised 1574, died 1655) was of a later generation – serving as a Cornish MP in the reign of James I. But he was a serious historian, still valued today as an historian of Parliament, and a good indicator of how the English mindset vis-à-vis Ireland took for granted the rightness of the Elizabethan colonisers. ‘Modern writers have praised Hakewill for his painstaking research and historical integrity.’
¹⁹

Yet while modern academic historians might praise Hakewill, or more notably Stow, for their primary research, the Elizabethans themselves (perhaps they had this more in common with the journalists and general readers of the twenty-first century) looked to the past for lessons and patterns. Philip Sidney’s
A Defence of Poetry
(perhaps written 1579–80) mocks the old bore antiquary:

laden with old mouse-eaten records, authorising himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundation of hearsay; having much ado to accord differing writers and to pick truth out of their partiality, better acquainted with a thousand years ago than with the present age, and yet better knowing how this world goes than how his own wit runneth; curious for antiquities and inquisitive of novelties, a wonder to young folks, and a tyrant in table talk . . .’
²⁰

This sounds like a portrait of an actual pompous historian/antiquary who had bored young Sidney. The ‘poetry’ which the young writer defends is the truth that can be conveyed in fiction. Sidney amasses some impressive poets in his
Defence
of a fictive way to truth – Dante, Virgil, King David and Jesus are among those who tell fictitious stories to frame moral truths.

‘Who readeth Aeneas carrying old Anchises on his back, that wisheth not it were his fortune to perform so excellent an act?’
²¹
Naturally Sidney, who was well versed in European literature, ancient and modern, defends the ingenuity and beauty of poetic
form
, as well as fictional content. The
Defence
was not published in Sidney’s lifetime. Like most of what he wrote, it was meant for a tiny coterie. But he must have been aware that, in the 1570s, he himself and Edmund Spenser were bright new stars in the sky, the brightest in England since Chaucer. ‘Homer, a Greek, flourished before Greece flourished.’
²²

Edmund Spenser, whom we last met as a poor schoolboy at Mulcaster’s Merchant Taylors’ School, is a triumphant example of the socially egalitarian effect of grammar-school education, which existed in England from the accession of the first Queen Elizabeth until the first or second decade of Elizabeth II. Whereas Sidney was born to near princely privilege, Spenser had no such advantages. The poor scholar of Merchant Taylors’ School became the sizar of Pembroke College, Cambridge, obliged to work as a servant to the other students while pursuing his life of learning. Yet even before he went to the university, Spenser had been engaged by a London publisher to translate some sonnets of Petrarch and Joachim du Bellay’s ‘Visions’. Through the kindly influence of Mulcaster, his old headmaster, and with help from Gabriel Harvey, a Fellow of Pembroke, Spenser obtained work for powerful patrons: Sir Henry Norris, Ambassador to France and Norris’s sons, John and Thomas, for whom Spenser worked in Ireland. Through the 1570s Spenser was at work on
The Shepheardes Calendar
, among other works. It was probably in the late 1570s that he came to know Philip Sidney.

Sidney and, rather later, Walter Raleigh were among the early supporters of Spenser in his great enterprise,
The Faerie Queene
, which was destined never to be finished. It is probably the most difficult of all long English poems fully to appreciate in this age of hurry. This is not because it is incomprehensible. Very far from it. You can best appreciate it as if you had gone back to childhood and were indeed reading a series of fairy stories, or adventure stories, all interwoven with one another.

When the schools of Eng. Lit. were set up in the universities, it was perhaps inevitable that
The Faerie Queene
should have been on the syllabus, and that an explanation of this vastly imaginative and extraordinary work should have provided useful and enjoyable employment for the academics. For here was an
Englishman
, writing a poem that was in some senses based upon the Italian epic of Ariosto. Plenty of material here for the Comparative Literature brigade. Then, too, the work is an ‘allegory’. The Redcrosse Knight who rides across page one is an ‘allegory’ of holiness, or of the human quest for holiness. And then again, he is clearly a Protestant knight, so there is plenty of material here for academic minds, looking for the exact position that Spenser adopted towards the controversies of the Reformation.

As an eager reader of Spenser, I record my debt to all the Spenser scholars whose work has helped me. Yet I do not think there is any experience where I have felt more strongly the discrepancy between the achievements of the scholars and the work itself. It is useful to know everything that they have to tell us. (And Frances Yates’s exposition of Spenser’s interest in numerology, in magic, in the occult philosophy of Giordano Bruno is of especial interest.) And yet, when I think of the books that I have read about the Faerie Queene, or the helpful notes in learned editions, the mind supplies a parallel text. On one side of the page is all the learned stuff, necessary perhaps for the exposition of a learned poet. On the other side of the page is the poem itself, and the effect it produces on the mind if read for long stretches. I should strongly recommend any reader of this book to get hold of a copy of
The Faerie Queene
that does
not
have explanatory notes. Just give yourself up to the story and to the rather hypnotic and trance-like narrative. At some points you will get lost, as do all the characters in his many-stranded polyphonic theme:

Like as a ship, that through the Ocean wyde

Directs her course vnto one certain cost,

Is met of many a counter winde and tyde,

With which her winged speed is let and crost,

And she herself in stormie surges tost;

Yet making many a borde and many a bay,

Still winneth way, ne hath her compasse lost:

Right so it fares with me in this long way,

Whose course is often stayd, yet neuer is astray.
²³

You will find the monsters and witches frightening, the virtuous characters half-comic, half-uplifting, the variety of tone and mood unlike any other writer.

Possibly the best place to start is in the Third Book, the Book of Love. Stop worrying about whether you have ‘caught’ the meaning of any particular allegory. Spenser is a great artist, and he will do your work for you. When you come into the House of Busyrane, for example, you do not need to be told by a commentary that the ‘Kings, Queenes, Lords, Ladies, Knyghts and Damsels gent’ who are here ‘heap’d together with the vulgar sort’ are in the grips of insane, uncontrollable erotic love: they are in Venusberg, they are Anna Karenina and Vronsky, they are Tristan und Isolde. (If you have to find a parallel to reading the poetry of Spenser, it is closer to attending a Wagner opera than it is to reading a textbook.) The dreadful storms, the thunder and the lightning, as the chaste Britomart rescues Amoret from the griefs and deceptions of such love, come as a beautiful relief, on one level. But Britomart herself is as much confused as the girl she rescues by the end. The narrative does not end. It goes on into further complexities, just as the emotional-moral life does. And it is the inner adventures of the emotional-moral life that form one of Spenser’s themes. No one who has been there ever forgets his Garden of Adonis or his Temple of Venus. But nor is there any work of literature known to me that makes it seem so positively romantic to be what we should call a Low Churchman.