Late Tudor England

If there was ever a Merrie England, it was not in William Shakespeare's time. During the sixteenth century population levels in Europe were rising; between 1500 and 1650 England's may have risen from about two to five million. This put heavy strains on inelastic societies and economies. One effect, emphasized recently by J.A. Goldstone, was to increase the number of younger people, always likely to be the most restless; and the fact that most property – in land especially – went to eldest sons, added to the number of discontented juniors. Massive unemployment, homelessness, vagrancy, were evidence of how gravely England's social framework was being dislocated. There was much migration, chiefly from the countryside into the towns; above all into London, whose population, further swollen by foreigners, by 1600 was approaching 200,000, immensely greater than that of any other English town. Within the limits of the medieval 'City' the capital was self-governing, with an elaborate oligarchical constitution; its wealth made it a political factor that no government could ignore. Outside the walls were suburbs and dismal slums.

Too many commentaries on Shakespeare's background have been concerned with Elizabethan society as a whole, Krieger observes in his Marxist study, whereas it is often necessary to think of discordant social classes (66). England had a nobility of great landowners, few in numbers but powerful in their own provinces and influential nationally. Under it was a large and growing gentry-class, whose support – or at least assent – was indispensable to the government. There was more social mobility in the later sixteenth century than before or after, particularly in terms of landownership. Many were rising into the gentry, others were sinking out of it. These were fewer, but there were loud laments over the ruination of old families, weighed down by debts or dissipation, which could be viewed as an index of national decay. On the land, where most people lived, semi-capitalist relations were spreading most quickly. Landlords rented out their estates to substantial farmers, who worked the soil with the help of hired labour – a hybrid system never so widespread anywhere else as it came to be in England. Population growth was accompanied by rising food prices, which benefited landowners and yeomen-farmers but depressed real wages, while more and more smallholders were sinking to the degraded status of farm labourers. Those who were doing well were prospering more at the expense of the poor than by virtue of any productive improvements. Hardships of poverty were augmented by a prolonged climatic downturn, at its worst during Shakespeare's lifetime; bad harvest years were recurrent, a series of them occurring in the later 1590s.

Penury and misery threw a heavy shadow over the scene Shakespeare was born into. 'Sturdy beggars', or tramps, inspired alarm, and were brutally treated by way of reprisal. But there were always some writers ready to protest, even if ineffectively, against rampant social injustice. In a play by Robert Wilson the clown reproached the greedy rich and prophesied that oppressors would end in hell (Bradbrook, Player 189). In 1608 a pamphlet by Thomas Dekker expressed a Londoner's disillusion with ideas of rural felicity, on finding 'the poore husbandman made a slave to the riche farmour; the farmour racked by his landlord ...' (Belman 109). Excessive profiteering might be condemned by the government itself, because liable to provoke disorders. A Privy Council circular to Justices of the Peace on 22 September 1597 denounced 'engrossers' who were trying to corner food supplies, as miscreants 'more lyke to wolves or cormorants than to naturall men'. Such sermonizing was unlikely to soften hard hearts. Next year the major of Dartmouth was accused of embezzling part of a grain supply intended for the hungry poor (J.T. Kelly 126).

For its favourites life held new comforts. Multitudes of families of all ranks from yeoman upward were building themselves new houses, with chimneys and glass windows. Women of the better-off classes seemed to foreign visitors surprisingly free, though they were always being reproved from the pulpit for wanting more freedom than could be good for them. The 'middle classes' were multifarious, ranging from very rich to very modestly furnished. There were families and groups that can be labelled 'bourgeois', but there was scarcely as yet a 'bourgeoisie', with a collective line of development and ambition. Capitalism was forging ahead amid a complex of other impulses, material or moral, at work in early modern Europe, which may be summed up as 'individualistic'.

Many self-made men were eager to become bourgeois gentilhommes, while those above them who were shrewd enough to keep up with the times were now gentilhommes bourgeois, esteeming profits as highly as pedigrees. Competition was in many ways the keynote of the age. Each man must push himself to the front, without too much scruple about means, or be elbowed aside. A highly litigious spirit was stirring; lawyers were in great demand. It was a society that could breed all kinds of morbidities (Stafford-Clark 29), an age of anxiety. Madmen thronged the drama. But it was equally an age of opportunity and progress. Hardships and tensions do not by themselves engender literature; they can help to do so when they are interacting with opposite factors, fresh inspiration, new ideals. Individualism separates, but can also recombine, by amplifying men's ability to respond to other personalities. No era before that of Bacon and Shakespeare had felt so deeply the truth that 'No man is an island'.

Social individualism in the western Europe of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries had its opposite pole in authoritarian government. It was the age of the 'New' or 'Absolute' monarchies. In England the Tudor dynasty seized power and ended the Wars of the Roses in 1485; it lasted until the death of Elizabeth in 1603. It was often arbitrary enough in its methods; but it differed from the Continental model in being less despotic, less well equipped with authority to levy taxes, and therefore less able to build up a standing army to enforce its will. It depended for supplementary revenues on Parliament; this institution therefore stayed alive, when most of the many similar ones on the Continent were dying out. It met only at irregular intervals, when the government wanted it; but little by little its importance was growing. There was an increasing appetite for seats in the House of Commons, where the gentry were heavily overrepresented. A bulky bureaucracy like the French was as much out of the Tudors' reach as a regular army, and local administration had to be left, under loose government supervision, to town councils, reliably undemocratic, and landowners, still half-feudal, acting as Justices of the Peace.

Nationalism was a buttress to authority; it was growing, along with individualism and conscious class division, in a union of contraries. As everywhere it was a product of changing forces, economic and cultural, and had close links with religion in a Europe now bitterly divided over the control of routes to Heaven, as well as to the Indies. In England it could be identified with a Tudor mystique and a 'cult of personality' on which Elizabeth depended heavily. She was easy to idealize, as England's preserver through long years; but ordinary Englishmen seem to have had very mixed feelings about the regime they lived under. Her court was a synonym for depravity and arrogance; there must have been a strong admixture here of middle-class feeling against a luxurious aristocracy and its pretensions. Among the noble families, old and new, civil wars had been exchanged for a more modern form of power struggle, with the court as an arena for intrigues and feuds. Politics was still a dangerous game, and through the Tudor epoch a long line of ambitious men followed one another to the block, ending with the Earl of Essex, Elizabeth's erratic favourite, in 1601.

From Mary Tudor's death in 1558, a Church of England was being pushed or pulled together. In the earlier years it was very much a makeshift: conservatively episcopalian in structure, partly Calvinist in theology. Church attendance was compulsory (though this was impossible to enforce in full); the main Sunday business was the reading out of Homilies which expounded the duty of unquestioning obedience to government and law, under penalty of hell fire. But repeated official changes of religion in mid century had made for indifference. There was a large, only slowly dwindling number of Catholics, or half-Catholics; but war with Spain, at first undeclared, intensified patriotic feelings and helped to merge them with radical Protestantism, or Puritanism, and its Calvinistic creed. 1588, the Armada year of triumph, was the high-water mark of Puritan influence before the 1630s, and brought on a premature attempt to rid the Church of bishops which suffered a sharp check from authority.

During and after the 1590s, as a result – fortunately for the drama then reaching its heights – Puritanism was on the defensive, obliged to content itself with quieter activities. Its strength was among the middling classes, including sections of the gentry. It was growing from below – among urban artisans, small traders and the like, compelled to practise thrift, sobriety and prudence in order to survive; and from above – sponsored by bigger businessmen and serious-minded magistrates, in whose eyes its virtues were needed to form good citizens and zealous employees. Economic progress, increasingly on capitalist lines, could not go on without reliable, conscientious workmen (Collinson, ch. 5). Drunkenness, vice, time-wasting frivolities like the theatre, were to be condemned because they made workers – London 'prentices, for instance – less industrious, and might make them unruly. Most of the poor, all the same, continued to prefer ale, when they could get it, to prayer.

A rough balance of forces prevailed, at any rate in London, between aristocracy, headed by the Court, and middle classes, led by the City; each camp with many dividing-lines of its own. This, and a government not much interested in theology so long as it did not disturb the political order, gave England an invaluable interval during which the pressure of religion on minds open to ideas was greatly relaxed. There was air for breathing by men, Shakespeare among them, ready to profit by this degree of freedom – very exceptional in Europe then and long after – and think for themselves. They might take religious ethics seriously, while troubling themselves very little about dogmas. As users of the English language they benefited from the various translations available of the Bible, much of whose phraseology was passing into common speech. They could not be unaffected by the misgivings about the state of the human soul that were spreading and deepening along with social tensions, and were at last to break out in the 'Puritan revolution'. In a wider view these uneasy, even morbid sensations were part of a general expansion of human consciousness. Self-examination stimulated curiosity about both depths and heights of the human personality, and accompanied questioning of the world and all its laws.

It was a maxim of statesmanship, warranted by Machiavelli, that the best – if not the only – way to avert strife at home was to engage in wars abroad (Hale; Kiernan, 'War'). The New Monarchies were habitually at war. Victories and conquests were their most potent means of impressing their subjects. England was involving itself in the affairs of western Europe, as well as pushing on the conquest of Ireland. English forces assisted the Revolt of the Netherlands against Spanish rule; in France they gave aid to the Protestant leader Henry of Navarre, who inherited the throne (as Henri IV) and made sure of it by turning Catholic in 1598 but granting religious toleration. To fill the English ranks, conscription often had to be relied on; the system, cheap but inefficient, pressed heavily on the poor, and war was popular chiefly among those who did not have to fight. By some moralists it was condemned, and middleclass attitudes – except to defensive action, as against the Armada – were often ambivalent. Puritan influence could favour continuance of the Spanish war; Spain was the champion of popery, and also represented Empire and its gold, which some of the merchantry were eager for a share in.

Shakespeare belonged to a period of half-dawn, when an old order and its panorama of life were fading or crumbling and a new one was only fitfully taking shape. History and mythology jostled together, magic and science, theology and reason. Such a situation might well be ideal for stirring poetic impulses. Although in early modern times the higher classes in western Europe were drawing apart, in social habits and cultural tastes, from the mass of the people, there was still much common ground. Well into the seventeenth century there was a reading public avid for stories borrowed from or imitating old romances of chivalry, or tales of fairyland (Wright, esp. ch. 11). They could blend well enough with classical literature. Ovid's storehouse of mythology was being translated after 1560 and won many hearts, Shakespeare's among them.

In his far-off corner of Europe, and with a brief working life of barely more than two decades, Shakespeare might seem as if bounded into a nutshell. That he could nevertheless become king of infinite space owed much to the fact that English culture was not suffering from insularity, but in many ways was part of a cosmopolitan whole. He read Montaigne, took plots from Italian novels; he was very English, but was also a European phenomenon: his later universal appeal is a confirmation of this. Well-off families were sending their sons abroad to learn. Publishing was enjoying vigorous growth. Literacy was keeping pace with it, in London spreading down to all but the lowest levels (Stone 68, 79), and with it a remarkable degree of interest in words, idioms, the capacities of the English language. For an increasing variety of employments, education was a necessary passport (Trevor-Roper 27). For the intellectual cream, whose members might be also men of affairs, the times could hold incitements to immense undertakings. Bush cites Bacon's Instauratio Magna, Spenser's Faerie Queene, Raleigh's History of the World, as each 'the partial accomplishment of an impossibly vast design' (262). Rowse writes of Dr Dee and his circle as examples of an 'insatiable passion to know about the unknown and unknowable' (Renaissance 285). Marlowe's Tamburlaine could talk of 'climbing after knowledge infinite' (Part I.ii.7); words highly inappropriate in so barbaric a mouth, but perfectly characteristic of his creator's era.

Society and Art

In a lecture in 1949 R.H. Tawney maintained that nothing is known – and implied that nothing can be known – about links between the art of an age and its economy; our business is to admire genius, not to try to explain it (33–4). Turgenev showed more insight when he praised his admired philosopher Belinsky for recognizing that 'in the development of every people a new literary epoch comes before every other, that without experiencing and going beyond it, it is impossible to move forward' (115). Lukács credited art with a still more direct contribution when he wrote that the more intricate the problems of a changing society, 'the greater the part literature can play in social evolution, in the ideological preparations for some great crisis in social relations' (Realism 107).

Since the late eighteenth century this has been the task especially of the novel, with its power of exploring situations whose facts are becoming comprehensible; for an era like Shakespeare's, with charts still mostly guesswork, the poetic drama offered a uniquely fitting means of expression, on a plane less realistic but more highly imaginative. Hazlitt contrasted Chaucer's thoughts, each 'separate, labelled, ticketed', with the 'sociability' of Shakespeare's, all tumbling into one another (Characters 71). It was partly a difference between narrative and drama, but akin also to that between dry land and sea; Shakespare's endlessly combining images have an effect of light reflected from rippling waves, as in Impressionist painting. They mirrored an England in a state of fluid change, as Shakespeare's own art always was. Poetic drama has a universalizing nature; the changeful times it has accompanied have lifted men, by accentuating their consciousness, to heightened awareness of elemental things shared by all.

It may be conceivable, but is extremely unlikely, that Shakespeare could have written as he did about war, death, property, all the while contemplating their grimness from an Olympian peak of detachment. Joseph Conrad disclaimed any moralizing intention in one of his novels, but added that 'even the most artful of writers will give himself (and his morality) away in about every third sentence'. Shakespeare grew up in the tradition of the old 'morality' plays, Fripp writes: 'The ancient didactic clings to him, and he has no wish to cast it away' (66–70). It was part of a general consensus that literature can be justified only by a serious purpose. It was conventional wisdom with Elizabethan men of letters, as with Hamlet, that Art should hold a mirror up to Nature, or social reality; and the mirror of Art is a magic one which does not merely photograph but selects, magnifies, colours, shows things unseen. A poet's mind is 'a mirror by which the soul receives visions', in a modern critic's words (Beckerman 28). It seems misconceived of another critic to assert of Shakespeare that 'there is never anything outside his plays that he wanted to "say" ' (Frye, Shakespeare 2). On the contrary, they are full of notions, interpolations, of his own that may have little or nothing to do with their plots.