Rebellion: The History of England from James I to the Glorious Revolution (15 page)

O shows! Shows! Mighty shows!

The eloquence of masques! What need of prose

Or verse, or sense t’express immortal you?

You are the spectacles of State!

Inigo Jones himself admitted that the masques were ‘nothing else but pictures with light and motion’.

The stage itself was designed to create the illusion of an infinite perspective, moving from the reality of the king and assembled court into an idealized world where everything had its place and proportion. These perspective stages were a wholly new thing in England, introducing novel principles of symmetry and order. The power of art represented the art of power. The masque was conducted in a formal space in which the laws of nature could be chastened and subdued by the king himself, who sat on the line of perspective from which everything could be perfectly seen. Only in his presence could the seasons miraculously change, or trees walk, or flowers be transformed into human beings.

It was the perfect complement to the doctrine of the divine right of kings that James had professed early in his reign. He sat in the centre of the especially constructed auditorium so that the eyes of the audience were as much upon his regality as upon the performance itself. James had already written in his instruction manual to his elder son,
Basilikon Doron
, that a king ‘is as one set on a stage, whose smallest actions and gestures all the people do gazingly behold’. Inigo Jones himself wrote that ‘in heroic virtue is figured the king’s majesty, who therein transcends as far common men as they are above beasts’.

The stage had three habitations. At the highest level was a metaphysical world populated by divine or allegorical figures; below this was the world of the court, in which the monarch was the emblem of order and authority; beneath these two worlds lay ordinary reality which, with its emblems of Vice and Disorder as well as various ‘low’ figures, provided the material for the ‘anti-masque’. The anti-masques represented mutability and inconstancy; they embodied the threat of chaos that was wonderfully removed from the world of the idealized court. The king defeated all those who threatened or abused him. As Sir William Davenant wrote in his masque
Salmacida Spolia
:

All that are harsh, all that are rude,

Are by your harmony subdu’d;

Yet so into obedience wrought,

As if not forc’d to it, but taught.

The scene might suddenly change. A palace might become a bower, where fairy spirits tread upon trolls and other wicked things; Oberon may appear in a chariot, drawn by two white bears, before ascending into the air; a statue might breathe and walk; a feather of silk may become a cloud of smoke, surrounded by several circles of light in continual motion. A scene might be set in a courtyard or in a dungeon, in a bedchamber or in a desert. All was framed by a proscenium arch, the direct forebear of the modern theatrical space. That is why the English drama favoured interiors.

A courtier and diplomat, Dudley Carleton, noted of an early production in 1605 that ‘there was a great engine at the lower end of the room, which had motion, and in it were the images of sea-horses with other terrible fishes, which were ridden by Moors … at the further end was a great shell in the form of a scallop, wherein were four seats; on the lowest sat the queen with my lady Bedford; on the rest were placed the ladies … their apparel was rich, but too light and courtesan-like for such great ones’. James never took part in the masques, but his wife and children delighted in them; they rehearsed their parts for as long as two months, emphasizing the importance that they placed upon them.

The speaking roles were performed by professional players while the music and song were provided by court musicians; the dancers and masquers, among them members of the royal family itself, remained mute. At the end of the proceedings they advanced into the dancing space, before the king, and invited members of the especially invited audience to dance with them. The concord of music therefore concluded a display in which the virtues of reason, order and good governance are all conjoined.

The dancers of the masque thus celebrate the restoration of an ideal order, a magical ritual designed to emphasize the Stuart vision of kingship and continuity. The masques therefore became known as ‘court hieroglyphics’. It is not unimportant that foreign ambassadors were an integral part of the audience, since the masque was also a form of mystical diplomacy. It was meant to convey, by the expense of the production, the wealth and liberality of the sovereign; the more money spent, the more the glory and the more the praise. In 1618 James spent the unparalleled sum of £4,000 on one production. The fourteen ladies of another masque needed, for their costumes, 780 yards of silk. Yet the masques appealed to appetites other than sight. A lavish banquet, complete with orchestra, often preceded or accompanied the performance.

It was an age of music. In the years between 1587 and 1630 over ninety collections of madrigals, airs and songs were published. Madrigals were compositions for several voices without music, and airs were solo songs accompanied by instruments; the madrigal was the most artificial, and therefore considered the most delightful. Catches were sung by gentlemen in their taverns, by weavers at their looms and by tinkers in their workshops. A man who could not take part in a madrigal, or play the lute, was considered to be unfinished. Lutes and citherns were available in barbers’ shops for the diversion of waiting customers. Music books were customarily brought to the table after supper was ended.

No epoch in the history of English music can excel the diversity of genius that flourished in this period. It was the age of Dowland and of Morley, of Campion and of Byrd, of Bull and of Gibbons. It was also the age of songs such as ‘Lady, Lie Near Me’, ‘If All The World Were Paper’, ‘New, New Nothing’ and ‘Punk’s Delight’. In the time of James, the island was filled with sounds and sweet airs.

In the closing months of 1611, the private theatre at Blackfriars echoed to such harmonies. Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
was a work of musical theatre with professional singers and a consort of instruments. The stage directions tell their own story, requesting ‘solemn and strange music’, ‘soft music’, ‘a strange hollow and confused noise’. ‘Enter Ferdinand, and Ariel, invisible, playing and singing.’ Ferdinand asks, ‘Where should this music be? I’ th’ air, or th’ earth?’ It was everywhere, being ‘dispersed’ music that came from various parts of the stage. In this play Stephano sings sea shanties, while Caliban croons drunken catches. Music was played in the intervals between the acts, and at the close a ritual dance was performed by all of the actors. Music was also played as an accompaniment to scenes of wonder and of pathos, on Prospero’s grounds that ‘a solemn air’ is ‘the best comforter to an unsettled fancy’.

The music of the instruments was diverse. The soft and mournful notes of the recorder were accompanied by a consort of strings including viols, lutes and citherns. An organ was suitable for the solemn music of supernatural change and awakening. Ariel often enters with pipe and tabor. Thus Caliban reveals that

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices …

The last song of the play is sung by Ariel. The words are those of Shakespeare and at a slightly later date they were given a setting by Robert Johnson, a musician attached to the court of the king. It is clear, however, that the melodic inspiration came to Shakespeare from folk tunes or ballads that were in the air at the time.

Where the bee sucks, there suck I,

In a cowslip’s bell I lie;

There I couch when owls do cry.

This is a song of freedom, chanted just before Prospero releases Ariel from his service; perhaps the spirit danced at the close. The part was performed by a boy, or a light-voiced singer, and the role may have been taken by the seventeen-year-old ‘Jackie Wilson’ who later handed down the settings for the song. Blackfriars was known as a ‘private’ theatre because it was enclosed by roof and walls; in such a setting, the music would have a more powerful and intimate effect.

The Tempest
was also performed before the king at Whitehall on 1 November 1611, and owes some of its ritual and sweet melody to the masques of the court; actors from Shakespeare’s company also took part in those masques. There was a marked cultural or courtly style in the early years of the seventeenth century.

The great plays of Shakespeare’s maturity were written during the reign of James,
Othello
and
King Lear
,
Measure for Measure
,
Antony and Cleopatra
and
The Winter’s Tale
among them. The witches of
Macbeth
were in part inspired by James’s own interest in the phenomenon. The king was a more enthusiastic patron of the drama than Elizabeth had ever been. Six days after his arrival in London, from Scotland, he called together Shakespeare and the other members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and issued to them letters patent that allowed them to perform as the King’s Men. The actors were appointed to be grooms of the chamber a few months later.

The era of James I also encouraged other forms of drama. A cardinal, dressed in crimson silk, with a tippet or shoulder cape of sable, comes upon the stage. He is meditating upon a book.

Cardinal:
I am puzzled in a question about hell:
He says, in hell there’s one material fire,
And yet it shall not burn all men alike.
Lay him by. How tedious is a guilty conscience!
When I look into the fish-ponds in my garden
Methinks I see a thing armed with a rake
That seems to strike at me.

It does not occur to the cardinal that it may be his own reflection.

The Duchess of Malfi
, by John Webster, is a defining drama of the period, and is one of a number of plays that subsequently have been brought together under the collective title of ‘Jacobean tragedy’. Since it is the only literary genre that carries the name of the age, it may be of some importance for any understanding of it. It signifies melancholy, morbidity, restlessness, brooding anger, impatience, disdain and resentment; it represents the horror of life. The exuberance and optimistic inventiveness of the Elizabethan years have disappeared. The joy has gone. The vitality has become extremity and the rhetoric has turned rancid.

The duchess herself asks, ‘Who am I?’ To which comes the reply: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little curded milk, fantastical puff paste: our bodies are weaker than those paper prisons boys use to keep flies in – more contemptible, since ours is to preserve earth worms. Didst thou ever see a lark in a cage?’ This is perhaps the quintessence of Jacobean dramatic style and can be compared to John Donne’s contemporaneous verse on:

This curdled milk, this poor unlitter’d whelp,

My body …

The Duchess of Malfi
was written for Shakespeare’s company and was first performed towards the close of 1614 at the theatre in Blackfriars before a fashionable audience that would catch most of the allusions to the plays and poems of the day. In a theatrical world of death and murder, of graves and shrines, music was once again an essential element for conveying suspense and intensity.

The plot itself is a poor thing. The duchess, a widow, wishes to marry the steward of her household in a union which might be perceived to dishonour her. Her two brothers – Ferdinand, duke of Calabria, and one known only as the cardinal – conspire to be revenged upon her. By means of a spy and secret agent, Bosola, the duchess is captured and subjected to a range of mental tortures designed to induce insanity; she is presented with the severed hand of her husband, and a gaggle of mad people is brought into her presence. A curtain is drawn to show a tableau comprising the dead bodies of her husband and children. It is revealed in an aside to the audience that they are waxworks, but not until the
frisson
of their discovery has subsided. The duchess is in the end strangled, but not before being shown the cord that will dispatch her.

Duchess
: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut
With diamonds, or to be smothered
With cassia, or to be shot to death with pearls?

On sight of her body Ferdinand utters what are the most famous words of the play:

Cover her face; mine eyes dazzle; she died young.

Out of guilt and despair he then descends into murderous madness.

One met the Duke ’bout midnight in a lane

Behind St Mark’s church, with the leg of a man

Upon his shoulder; and he howled fearfully;

Said he was a wolf …

The final scene concludes with a bloody conflict in which both Bosola and the cardinal are killed, bringing the sum total of fatalities in the play to ten. Enough has been quoted, perhaps, to convey the sensibility of the time as well as the taste of the Jacobean audience.

It is a world of secrecy and madness, where characters hide and wait. The duchess sees a trespasser in the mirror and trembles. The broken phrases are forced out. ‘What is it?’ ‘What’s that?’ ‘Oh fearful!’ ‘Why do you do this?’ ‘What’s he?’ A common exclamation is ‘Ha!’ Some of Webster’s favourite words are ‘foul’, ‘mist’ and ‘dunghill’. The dialogue, when not fabulously ornamental, is direct and rapid, almost a whisper. ‘Can you guess?’ ‘No.’ ‘Do not ask then.’

The play might be described as morbid or as grotesque, the English version of
Grand Guignol
, were it not for the fact that it is possessed by a wild and almost frantic energy. That energy is part of the characters’ desperation, their vitality and misery mingling in frightful images of fever and of death. They seem to be possessed by will and desire rather than belief; they are united only in the quest for survival in an unstable world. They run towards darkness. This is in fact a most significant image of the age and one to which, as we shall see, Hobbes’s
Leviathan
is addressed. Indeed, this is a world from which God seems to have departed, leaving it in ‘a mist’. There seems to be no meaning in the abyss of darkness that opens beneath their feet. It was also a time when, in the work of Francis Bacon, the natural world was being stripped of its association with the divine presence.