Shakespeare William - Shakespeares England: life in Elizabethan & Jacobean times

Shakespeares

E NGLAND

Shakespeares

E NGLAND

Life in Elizabethan
& Jacobean Times

EDITED & INTRODUCED BY

R. E. P RITCHARD

First published in 1999, 2013

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

This ebook edition first published in 2013

All rights reserved

R.E. Pritchard, 1999, 2003, 2013

The right of R.E. Pritchard to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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EPUB ISBN 978 0 7509 5282 8

Original typesetting by The History Press

C ONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

British Library: 1 (MS Eg. 1222.f.73); Bodleian Library: 2, 7, 9, 10, 11, 16, 21 (A.3.15.614), 3 (Mal.632), 6 (R.205), 8 (Douce M.399), 12 (4 17.11.Art), 14 (A.5.287), 20 (Mal.6012), 22 (Mal.632), 25 (G.A. Ireland 4 82); Pepysian Library, Magdalene College, Cambridge: 4, 5, 24; Staatriche Museen, Kassel: 13; Guildhall Library: 15, 18; Museum of London: 17; Courtauld Institute: 19; British Museum: 23 (117a).

If the publisher and the author have unwittingly infringed copyright in any picture or photograph or text reproduced in this publication, we tender our sincere apologies and will be glad of the opportunity, upon being satisfied as to the owners title, to pay an appropriate fee as if we had been able to obtain prior permission.

I NTRODUCTION

To hold... the mirror up to nature; to show... the very age and body of the time his true form and pressure.

Shakespeare, Hamlet (16003)

This collection of writings by and about Shakespeares contemporaries, drawn from books, plays, pamphlets and a handful of poems, has been selected both because the passages are interesting and entertaining in themselves, and because of the insight they give us into how some Elizabethans and Jacobeans, the well-known and the obscure, perceived the England of their times. A wide range of topics touched on by Shakespeare is included: love and marriage, work and leisure, Court and country, religion and crime, home life and overseas; throughout, a shared world-view becomes apparent.

While some of the famous appear, the emphasis here is on lesserknown writers and passages. In some ways, the greater writers are greater because they penetrate more incisively and eloquently into the essential spirit of their age; but the lesser writers may provide more of the cultural and linguistic context, often give a more generally informative picture of what was going on, and provide their own distinctive pleasures and judgements. Some writers of the time Holinshed in his Chronicles, Spenser in The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare in his Histories and King Lear strove, through poetic mythology and history, to engage with and shape England, as not just a place or uncertain political structure but an evolving and not readily definable cultural identity. The writings here suggest the day-to-day feel of it, then.

It is notable that the writers are almost all men from the minority upper and middle social orders: women and the lower social orders were generally less literate, with fewer opportunities to write, let alone publish. Their views and experiences achieved little public expression then (though matters improved later in the seventeenth century). Consequently, even if this were a much larger volume, a complete picture of English society at the time would hardly be possible. Likewise, when encountering these writers reflections on life, we should remember that (as Hamlet would know) all mirrors distort, and that generally they were less concerned with objective reporting than with making money or a reputation, entertaining, persuading, or reflecting the prejudices of various readerships. Some might consciously engage in long-term political, religious or cultural struggles, and most reveal unexamined assumptions. Inevitably, their culture speaks through them. As such, these writings are part of the history of their times, reflecting and helping to shape their society and its values; they are not objective socio-cultural analyses.

With this in mind, each chapter has a concise, contextual introduction, indebted in varying degrees to the work of recent historians, as represented in the select list of further reading. For greater convenience, spelling, punctuation and typographical conventions have been modernized, and glossing of obscure words and phrases is inserted in the text, in square brackets, rather than tucked away at the back. Such modernization, however, tends to conceal what the original appearance might suggest, that different linguistic practices derive from different cultures and assumptions; even where the words are the same, the meanings may vary. These voices echo out of the past: while much is very recognizable, we may not catch everything they say. (In Pierre Menard, Jorge Luis Borges warns us of the elementary idea that all epochs are the same, or that they are different.)

Writing at this time intended for publication had to be approved and entered in the Stationers Register; after that, it was widely available, from the bookstalls near St Pauls churchyard, from provincial booksellers and, especially in the case of pamphlets, from country pedlars (like Autolycus in The Winters Tale). The expansion of education produced an increasingly wide readership (more could read than could easily write), at all levels of society. The day of the professional writer seeking profitable subjects (a printer might offer forty shillings and an odd pottle of wine), catering for different markets had arrived. Most readers were looking for serious material: religious writing (theology, debate, sermons) was predominant, and history, travel, medical and instructional works sold well. Docere et delectare, profit and delight, were the watchwords. There was also a growing market for entertainment satirical pamphlets, accounts of crime and scandal, poems and ballads, almanacs, playscripts, jestbooks, and fiction (though the realist novel did not appear until much later). By the turn of the century, perhaps two hundred books were published each year.

Most writers work was shaped by their education, where the grammar schools and universities concentrated on style as demonstrated in the Latin classics and rhetoric. Writers were trained in the formal disposition of material and the conscious selection of style appropriate to subject and purpose, and encouraged to develop copiousness accumulation and variation while variety of metaphor, simile and phrase, and verbal patterning, were particularly appreciated. Classical literary models lay behind much of their writing; increasingly important, however, was the influence of spoken English, of voice (Language most shows a man: speak, that I may see thee, wrote Ben Jonson): in the writing of the time, much of the vocabulary, structure and rhythms reflect the pressure and requirements of vigorous speech rather than of grammatical correctness.

At all levels, there is an appreciation of rhetoric, of style, of vigour, of the capacity to combine the colloquial and direct with the extravagant or formal. Whatever the views the writers seek to propagate, whatever the accuracy of their reportage, it is the strength of, and their pleasure in, their writing that is apparent, that in turn serve to increase our pleasure in reading, and to extend our imaginative sympathy and understanding of life both then and now.