Shakespeare's Theatre of War

Nicholas de Somogyi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351900706
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

The period between 1585 (when Elizabeth formally committed her military support to the Dutch wars against Spain) and 1604 (when James at last brought it to an end) was one in which English life was preoccupied by the menace and actuality of war. The same period spans English drama's coming of age, from Tamburlaine to Hamlet. In this thought-provoking book, Nick de Somogyi draws on a wide range of contemporary military literature (news-letters and war-treatises, maps and manuals), to demonstrate how deeply wartime experience influenced the production and reception of Elizabethan theatre. In a series of vivid parallels, the roles of soldier and actor, the setting of battlefield and stage, and the context of playhouse and muster are shown to have been rooted in the common experience of war. The local armoury served as a props department; the stage as a military lecture-hall. News from the front line has always been shrouded in the fog of war. Shakespeare's Rumour is here seen as kindred to such equally dubious messengers as his Armado, Falstaff or Pistol; soldiers have always told tall tales, military ghost-stories that are here shown to have seeped into such narratives as The Spanish Tragedy and Henry V. This book concludes with a sustained account of Hamlet, a play which both dramatises the Elizabethan context of war-fever, and embodies in its three variant texts the war and peace that shaped its production. By affording scrutiny to each of its title's components, Shakespeare's Theatre of War provides a compelling argument for reassessing the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries within the enduring context of the military culture and wartime experience of his age.

CHAPTER ONE

Casualties of War

‘Does it matter? — losing your legs?’¹

The tall story is told of a conscientious theatre-critic, whose diffidence towards definitive judgement was at last relieved by an assignment to review the latest touring Shakespeare production. Now he was ‘prepared to assert unequivocally that Sarah Bernhardt was the greatest one-legged female Hamlet of her generation’² The leg-pull is quickly revealed: Bernhardt opened in Hamlet in Paris in May 1899, and in London the following month; her leg was not amputated until after the outbreak of the First World War, and there were no revivals (Richardson, 141, 170). But the comedy of the anecdote, the exaggerated taxonomy of its critic’s hedged bets, in fact disguises as absurd two distinct theatrical traditions.

The first is plain. Historians of the nineteenth-century stage agree that ‘female Hamlets were by no means rare’, that Bernhardt’s assumption of the role belongs in a ‘distinct tradition’ of mature actresses playing youths, and ‘should not be regarded as entirely untoward’ (Trewin, 120; C. Smith, 223). As unremarkable, perhaps, as the first (male) Ophelia, though Punch overlooked that far older tradition too, in its sarcastic suggestion that Bernhardt’s cast be supplemented by Henry Irving in that role.

The second is less apparent. A one-legged Hamlet, female or not, seems to prompt the same laughter as attended Peter Cook’s sketch in which a diplomatic theatrical agent attempts to dissuade a one-legged actor from the part of Tarzan, ‘a role for which two legs would seem to be the minimum requirement’ (H. Thompson, 83). Such laughter meets rebuke in the circumstances of Bernhardt’s disability. One of the first roles she played after losing her leg was that of a front-line nurse in a patriotic film; in 1916 she toured the front in person, performing inspiriting recitals to the poilus. ‘She continued like a soldier of the theatre’ (Richardson, 179): her biographer’s remark gains poignancy when one considers that she shared her handicap with so many casualties of the First World War; and that Bernhardt herself seems to have recognized the bitter parallel between player and soldier. She composed the monologue she performed in London in 1916, in which (as one young member of the audience recalled) ‘she played the part of a young French poilu lying mortally wounded on a bank in the wood near the battlefield … she recited some patriotic verses, after which she fell back dead’, and was carried off by stretcher-bearers (Trewin, 129). Like a soldier to and from the stage: it is entirely fitting that the author of that eye-witness account is Sir John Gielgud, unequivocally the greatest Hamlet of his generation.

The maimed rites Gielgud witnessed sound echoes to the circumstances of the stage for which Hamlet was composed. The recital of ‘patriotic verses’ by a ‘mortally wounded’ veteran finds perhaps its closest precedent in Talbot’s dying speech to his dead son, in 1 Henry VI (4.7.18-32). It is probably the passage Nashe bore in mind in his ‘Defence of Plays’ in Piers Penilesse (1592), recommending the reproof and encouragement such spectacles presented to their wartime audiences, ‘who, in the Tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding’ (1, 212). As I shall argue in my final chapter, later audiences would have carried similarly inspiriting expectations of Old Hamlet’s posthumous apparition through the opening scenes of that play. Furthermore, far from being incongruously comic, had Hamlet first limped on stage around 1601, he would have joined a gallery of one-legged military roles constituting a ‘distinct tradition’ of Elizabethan theatre. The humble mutilé de guerre of Elizabethan theatres of war was often made the spokesman for propagandist encouragement in wartime theatres; and unlike Bernhardt’s, the ‘lower half of whose body was ‘covered with a rug’ (Trewin, 129), such characters drew attention to their singular disability.

When the wars were over, the likes of Othello (1604), Bussy d’Ambois (1604), and Coriolanus (1608) underwent an uneasy transition from casque to cushion, while the neglected plight of their disabled P.B.I. haunted the fringes of their stage as the occasion of a bitter comedy. ‘What wold you have me do?’, asks the pandar Boult in Pericles (1607), ‘go to the wars, wold you? wher a man may serve 7. yeers for the losse of a leg, & have not money enough in the end to buy him a woodden one?’ (4.6.170-2). Webster has Bosola calculate the same meagre returns from military apprenticeship in The Duchess of Malfi (1613). In a period when ‘Mathematicall Muses’ were deployed ‘upon this Militare Argument’,³ the ‘Geometry’ awaiting ‘a Souldier, that hazards his limbes in a battaile’ is caustic: ‘to hang in a faire paire of slings … upon an honorable pare of Crowtches, from hospitall to hospitall’ (1.1.57-62). One such veteran with a ‘Stump of wood’ volunteers his expertise in ‘the rules i’th Schoole of warre’ in Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play, The Devil Is In It (1611), only to be ‘baffuld | For my limbes lost in service’. ‘Ile stand toot, I’, he says. ‘With one leg’, comes the scornful reply (2.1.105-24). While drawing attention to a welfare system that remained rudimentary through the reigns of both Elizabeth and James (Cruickshank, 182-88; Gasper, 116), abrasive jokes like these were limited to the stuff of isolated walk-ons and asides. Such distinguished portrayals of the plight of veterans as postwar Hollywood’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) find no precedent on the Jacobean stage.

While the wars continued, their Elizabethan victims were not excluded from the stage in the way their descendants were to be from the screen. Limping casualties of war populated the Elizabethan theatre – on occasion holding centre-stage – because the range of their signification was made broader by wartime. Criticism of the neglect of disabled veterans was tempered there by an imperative tendency to enlist their status to the patriotic demands made on their audiences. As we shall see, London playhouses were the site of both notional and actual recruitment, and the Old Soldier was made the focus of a series of responses to the pressing circumstances of war. One play, A Larum for London, contrived a crippled hero in order to demonstrate the principles of the Just War his audiences were then being expected to wage. The construction of that play’s hero was balanced by a similarly counterfactual villain, whose dramatic pedigree involved the vexed iconological status of the one-legged soldier.

Scholars from previous centuries have notably fixed upon unidexterity as evidence of the singularity of their subjects. So Capell’s Notes … to Shakespeare (1779) includes an account of the Bard’s ‘accidental lameness’, evidenced by two references from The Sonnets (Schoenbaum, 202-3); and according to Collier, Marlowe ‘brake his leg in one lewd scene | When in his earlie age’ (Dabbs, 65) – a forgery usefully corroborative to his ascription to Marlowe of A Larum for London. Yet both the on-stage injury Collier contrives for Marlowe (break a leg!), and the mystery Capell weaves about Shakespeare’s injury (‘without saying how, or when, of what sort, or in what degree’) overlook the theatres of war in which so many of the playwrights’ countrymen lost their limbs.

‘I am a Souldier’, says Dekker’s veteran; ‘We know that by your legges’, comes the retort (2.1.100-101). This chapter seeks to explore the range of meaning attached by Elizabethan playwrights to a figure already revealed here as a site of conflicting emotion. We may find a one-legged actor comic, with Peter Cook (‘I’ve got nothing against your right leg. The trouble is – neither have you’) or poignant, with John Gielgud (‘The curtain fell, but rose again … to reveal her standing proudly upright on one leg, leaning her hand on the shoulder of her fellow-actors’). Elizabethan dramatists erected about the damaged figure of the returning soldier an ideological scaffolding that enhanced both roles, and which sought comparison and contrast between war and revenge, valour and villainy, hero and braggart.

‘Her privates we’⁴

‘We know that by your legges’: if a soldier was known by the halting gait he managed, it was a badge of office shared by all ranks of Elizabeth’s army, from the limping General Mountjoy (Falls, 1955, 233) to the ‘souldiour with one legge’ celebrated in Churchyard’s General Rehearsall of Warres, ‘whose name was haltyng Dick’ (1579, E4r). But veterans like Churchyard or Riche made no bones about the ‘colde reward’ in store for the rank and file, the ‘lacke of limmes’, the ‘Lame lims and legs, and mangled bones’ ventured in a soldier’s service (Riche, 1578, E2r, E2v; Churchyard, 1596 B4v). Contemporary playwrights variously testify to how unremarkable were such casualties.

Robert Wilson’s The Cobbler’s Prophecy (printed 1594), for example, narrates Ralph’s embassy to the Court of Mars, sent by Mercury, to warn of the dangers of neglecting military expertise. ‘Art thou one of God Mars his traine?’ he asks at the gates, ‘Alas good father thou art lame’; ‘My lamenes comes by warre, | My armours rustines comes by peace’, comes the reply, ‘A maimed souldier made Mars his Porter | Lo thus I am’.⁵ Shakespeare too contrives a casual reminder to Orsino of a recent battle in Twelfth Night (1602), ‘When your yong Nephew Titus lost his legge’ (5.1.59). Dekker builds the evident familiarity of such asides into an entire subplot, when he allows the ‘smoake of Warre’ (49) to drift across his own comic stage in The Shoemakers’ Holiday (1599). ‘Enter Rafe being lame’ read Dekker’s stage-directions there (3.2.54), his choice of name for a cobbler-tumed-soldier, suggestive of Wilson’s influence on his play.

In contrast to his Jacobean descendant (the spurned soldier in Dekker’s If This Be Not a Good Play), the harsh realism of Ralph’s predicament is tempered by the accommodation it receives within the solidarity of the ‘Gentle Craft’ the play celebrates. ‘Limbs?’, exclaims Hodge, ‘hast thou not hands man? thou shalt never see a shoomaker want bread, though he have but three fingers on a hand’ (76-7). The painful ironies of Ralph’s status as a one-legged shoemaker are not shirked, but transcended: ‘since I want lims and lands’, says Ralph, ‘Ile to God, my good friends, and to these my hands’ (101-2). At the same time as cementing wartime ‘Anglo-Dutch solidarity’ (Gasper, 21), the play is careful to reward Ralph’s humble resignation. Not only does his wife recognize the error of her ways in dallying with another, but he receives ‘twentie pound’ (5.2.90) from his shamed rival, double the private’s pension proposed in 1597 (Cruickshank, 185). To ‘the number of Captaines and Souldiers about London’ that Nashe recorded among theatre-audiences (1, 212), Ralph’s progress through The Shoemakers’ Holiday must have offered reassurance, the more effective (however spurious) for its steady contemplation of hands without fingers, men without limbs. The play’s measuredly wishful thinking extends as far as to transform the apparatus of Ralph’s disability into a ‘brave sport’: ‘the prowdest of you that laies hands on her first, Ile lay my crutch crosse his pate’ (5.2.132-4). The same reassurances were elsewhere repeatedly pressed home.

‘For lims, you shall have living, lordships, lands’, announces the king in Peele’s Edward I (1593) to a group of ‘maimed Souldiers’.⁶ In today’s currency, Ralph’s gift of twenty pounds is relatively modest – some £12,500 (Nicholl, 1992, [xiv]); Longshanks presents the equivalent of five million to certain of his ‘Countrimen’ whose ‘lims are lost in service of the Lord’ (111). Yet in an escalating auction, his queen trumps even this bounty by adding a nought (‘shee makes a Cipher’) to the pension he proposes (193). ‘To a souldier sir’, comments Sir David of Brecknock, one ‘cannot be too liberali’ (167). The scene is replayed in allegorical mode at the climactic trial of The Contention Between Liberality and Prodigality (printed 1602):

3 SUITER Now, good my Lord, vouchsafe of your charitie,
To cast here aside your pittifull eye,
Upon a poore souldier, naked and needy,
That in the Queenes Warres was maimed, as you see.

LIBERALITY Where have you served?

3 SUITER In Fraunce, in Flaunders, but in Ireland most.⁷

‘He was my souldier, indeed sir, untili he lost his legge’, confirms Captain Wel-Don (1226). The bulk of this play perhaps dates from the 1560s, but (as Greg noticed) seems to have been revised to include reference to the specific campaigns of ‘the Queenes Warres’ in time for its intended performance before her, dated in the text it...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Procedures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Casualties of War
• 2 The Art of War
• 3 Theatres of War
• 4 Rumours of War
• 5 Ghosts of War
• 6 The Question of these Wars
• Bibliography
• Index