Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States

Mark Bayer, Joseph Navitsky

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000416893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Shakespeare and Civil Unrest in Britain and the United States extends the growing body of scholarship on Shakespeare's appropriation by examining how the plays have been invoked during periods of extreme social, political, and racial turmoil. How do the ways that Shakespeare is adapted, studied, and discussed during periods of civil conflict differ from wars between nations? And how have these conflicts, in turn, affected how Shakespeare has been understood in these two countries that, more than any others, continue to be deeply shaped by Shakespeare's complex, enduring, and multivalent legacy? The essays in this volume collectively disclose a fascinating genealogy of how Shakespeare became a dynamic presence in factional discourse and explore the "war of words" that has accompanied civil wars and other instances of domestic disturbance. Whether as part of violent confrontations, mutinies, rebellions, or within the universal struggle for civil rights, Shakespeare's repeated appearance during such turbulent moments is more than mere historical coincidence. Rather, its inflections on the contested meanings of citizenship, community, and political legitimacy demonstrate the generative influence of the plays on our understanding of internecine strife in both countries.

1 Celebrity Skulls

Heidi Craig

DOI: 10.4324/9781003156543-2

“Here’s fine revolution, an we had the trick to see’t” (Hamlet, 5.1.84–85).¹ As Hamlet confronts various skulls exhumed by the gravedigger to make room for Ophelia’s body, he contemplates the “revolution” that brings everyone, high- and low-born alike, to the same place: the cemetery. Death is the great leveler, obliterating all distinction. The specific identities that Hamlet mockingly assigns to unidentified skulls unearthed by the gravedigger immediately collapse back into anonymity: naming one “Lord Such-a-One” and another “Lady Worm,” the aristocratic titles that the living cling to as signs of distinction are reassigned to names that convey anonymity and decay. Yet just as he morbidly embraces the loss of identity after death, Hamlet communes with the skull that supposedly belongs to Yorick, the King’s jester. Apart from the gravedigger’s claims, Hamlet has no outside confirmation about the skull’s former tenant, yet the mere suggestion that it is his old playmate launches Hamlet into a reverie of remembrance before he disgustedly tosses the stinking remains. Hamlet is preoccupied with the threat that death poses to identity, and the gravediggers’ disinterred skulls embody the paradox of death—simultaneously symbolizing the posthumous annihilation of identity, and its endurance in the memories of the living.² Because the image of Hamlet holding the skull is the play’s iconic moment, the visual counterpart of Hamlet’s most famous tag, “[t]o be or not to be,” it is no coincidence that in popular consciousness these lines from 3.1 and the image of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull from 5.1 are mistakenly conflated into a single moment. The skull is simultaneously being and not being, subject and object, at once evoking memory and oblivion.³

Civil strife in mid-seventeenth-century England between Royalists and Parliamentarians would only serve to reify Hamlet’s abstract musings. The “fine revolution” that levelled all distinctions was doubly relevant in this moment, as England’s political hierarchy was overturned, its monarch eliminated, and the bloodshed of the English Civil Wars (1642–51) brought astonishing numbers of people to the graveyard. In this context, I will argue, Yorick’s skull would evoke the conspicuous, identifiable bodily remains of famous figures such as King Charles I and Oliver Cromwell, yet even celebrity could not protect one from rotting into anonymity. Civil strife depends on heightening differences between peoples with shared identities and histories, but death annihilates all difference. This fact reveals the uncomfortable truth about internecine conflict and the tenuous difference on which it depends. Both the struggles and outcome of civil strife are held in common: conflicts within the commonwealth lead to the shared resting place of the graveyard, on native soil. This union after death mocks the inability to unite in life; the shared cemetery plot is a posthumous commonweal, its peace unattainable for the living.

In the mid-seventeenth century the skull became an emblem of civil unrest: the severed heads of Charles I and Oliver Cromwell were deployed across the political spectrum as symbols of victory and defeat. Skulls’ new symbolic function in the mid-seventeenth century built on various meanings surrounding skulls (real or imagined) from the centuries prior, including the skull’s strong associations with Hamlet: Yorick’s skull quickly became the most famous theatrical prop in Western theater history. Stage skulls in the seventeenth century occupied a curious position between innovation and cliché; Shakespeare is apparently among the first to introduce a skull to the English stage and to set a scene in a graveyard. Yet Hamlet’s skulls participate in a long-standing literary and visual tradition of the memento mori, in which one contemplates a skull as a reminder of one’s own mortality. Popular throughout the sixteenth century, the trope was already stale by the time that Hamlet appeared.⁴ Nevertheless, in Hamlet the image struck a chord: the gravedigger scene was frequently invoked in the seventeenth century, functioned as an intertext for many later works, with several of Shakespeare’s dramatic successors making use of the skull property. By the 1630s, however, English theater generally lost interest in skulls, consigning them, as Andrew Sofer puts it, to the “prop bin of theatre history.”⁵

The skull was exhumed theatrically in the mid-seventeenth century, in an Interregnum performance of “The Grave-Makers,” a droll based on Hamlet 5.1. A “droll” is a short, usually comic extract drawn from a full-length play. It represents a new dramatic form that emerged during Parliamentary prohibition on English theater between 1642 and 1660. Drolls were designed to be performed quickly, inexpensively, and with relatively little theatrical personnel or accoutrement. “The Grave-makers” was likely composed by the comic actor Robert Cox and was included in the early Restoration droll collection printed for Henry Marsh and compiled by Francis Kirkman in The Wits; or, Sport upon Sport, Part 1 (1662), which features drolls drawn from plays by Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, James Shirley, and Shakespeare, among others. My chapter considers the impact of the “The Grave-Makers” in the context of its performance and publication in the Interregnum and early Restoration.⁶ I argue that this droll drew its power from both the familiarity of Hamlet 5.1 and the scene’s resonance with recent civil conflicts of the English Civil Wars and its aftermath, when England’s cemeteries heaved with corpses, and the disembodied heads of the late Charles I and Oliver Cromwell were objects of reverence and revenge. Hamlet’s gravedigger scene and the apprehension surrounding the posthumous treatments of Charles I and Cromwell’s bodily remains share anxieties about mistaken identity, as well as the utter loss of identity after death.

I want to begin by establishing Shakespeare’s political associations in the mid-seventeenth century. While Royalists co-opted Shakespeare as one of their own, his works did not easily yield to straightforward Royalist interpretation. Next, I discuss Shakespearean drolls, which exemplify this political tension: while their performance violated Parliamentarian law, their contents often spoke to republican values, or at least produced politically ambiguous readings. I then move onto an analysis of “The Grave-Makers.” Just as Hamlet 5.1 engages with questions of class,⁷ “The Grave-Makers,” like other Interregnum Shakespearean drolls, focuses its attention on working-class characters, sharply cutting Hamlet’s lines and rendering Horatio only as “friend.” Despite the droll format’s streamlined nature, “The Grave-Makers” maintains an abundance of stage props, including four or five exhumed skulls, speaking to the power of this image in the mid-seventeenth century.

The heavy death toll of the English Civil War gave renewed significance to the long-standing trope of the memento mori, but with a twist that recalls Hamlet. Unlike most memento mori skulls, Yorick’s is “given a name and history.”⁸ Likewise, in the mid-seventeenth century the memento mori trope was reorganized around a specific individual: King Charles I, the most famous victim of the Civil Wars. After he was publicly beheaded in January 1649, souvenirs depicting Charles with or as a skull proliferated, as did relics of his material remains. Like Yorick’s skull, the relic is simultaneously alive and dead, inert and vital, and prompts the same question, namely whether identity can survive the death of the mortal body. With the Restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the corpse of Oliver Cromwell (d. 1658) was exhumed and posthumously beheaded, in a symbolic reversal of the regicide. However, because Cromwell had been buried among English kings in Westminster Abbey, a rumor circulated that Royalists had accidentally desecrated one of their own kings. In the Interregnum and early Restoration, the depiction of Yorick’s skull in “The Grave-Makers” would evoke the disembodied heads of the late Charles I and Cromwell, celebrity skulls whose distinctiveness likewise degenerates into a disconcerting sameness, one that lays bare the futility of civil strife.

Royalist Shakespeare?

Charles I’s personal enthusiasm for Shakespeare was well known. He read and annotated a copy of the Second Folio (1632) while imprisoned at Carisbrooke Castle in 1647–48, a copy now owned by the British Library. The king’s reading might have informed his dying words on the scaffold in January 1649. Moments before he was executed, Charles uttered his final command: “remember.” Patricia Fumerton interprets this as a deliberate echo of the Ghost of King Hamlet’s imperative to “remember me,” arguing that Charles’s “studied performance of kingly self-possession” was “designed to stamp his unchanged identity into the minds of all spectators at the execution.”⁹ On the scaffold, Charles asserted his unchanged identity; after his death, the question of the king’s power preoccupied England for the next decade. According to Ernest Kantorowicz’s well-known theory of “the king’s two bodies,” upon the death of a king’s physical body, his divinely ordained monarchical authority continues uninterruptedly and is immediately transferred to a new king.¹⁰ After the regicide, however, Parliamentarians halted the continuity of the Stuart body politic, outlawing declarations of Charles II as the new king. They also attempted to stymie reverence of the king’s physical body, depriving him of an elaborate public funeral and burying him surreptitiously to avoid creating a Royalist pilgrimage site.¹¹ Caroline relics nevertheless became an important focus for Royalist attention. Parliament killed the king’s two bodies, draining Charles’s physical remains of power and declaring that the Stuarts had reached a dynastic dead-end. These facts informed reactions to “The Grave-Makers,” which likewise grapples with the stark impotence of human remains.

Royalists claimed Shakespeare as an emblem of their cultural sophistication;¹² defining themselves in opposition to the Puritans who held sway in Parliament, whom Royalists stereotyped as antitheatrical, “ignorant blockheads.”¹³ In fact, Puritans did not necessarily oppose theater, and Parliamentarians powerfully leveraged Shakespeare’s well-established cultural authority.¹⁴ The anonymous Parliamentarian pamphlet The Great Eclipse of the Sun, or Charles his Wain Overclouded (1644) describes “a thing call’d Conscience” which troubles the king and his supporters, “it is worse then [sic] Hamlets Ghost; for it will haunt him every where, and cry unto him, O King expect revenge for the blood of they subjects” (A3r).¹⁵ Charles I is haunted by his conscience, just as Hamlet is haunted by his late father.

Shakespeare’s and Hamlet’s ambiguous political applicat...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Shakespeare, Civil Unrest, and the Negotiation of Cultural Value
• 1. Celebrity Skulls
• 2. “I thought my blood derived a Crown to us / But now I find it derives only Treason”: Remembering and Forgetting the Civil War
• 3. Richard Grant White, The Civil War, and the Future of American Shakespeare Studies
• 4. The American Civil War and the 1864 Tercentenary of Shakespeare’s Birth
• 5. Outlaw Shakespeare: Frank James and Post-Civil War Justice
• 6. Shakespeare, Cultural Production, and Class Consciousness in Antebellum New York City: Re-examining the Astor Place Riot
• 7. “As bountiful as mines of India”: Shakespeare as India and the First War of Indian Independence, 1857–89
• 8. A Most Civil Discourse: Jacob Gordin’s The Jewish King Lear and the Jewish-American Immigrant Community
• 9. “The Artist Must Take Sides”: Paul Robeson and Civil Unrest
• 10. The $64,000 Question: What Can Frances DeBerry tell us about Shakespeare Scholarship in Civil Rights Era America?
• 11. The “cockle of rebellion”: Coriolanus During the Vietnam Era
• 12. Sea Changes: Civil Unrest in Shakespeare Studies and Beyond
• Index