Shakespeare and the Hollow Crown

Speech by John Bell
ARM Quarterly Lunch, Sydney
15 June 2005

From the late eighteenth century to the early part of the twentieth century, Shakespeare was hijacked by the establishment and selectively quoted by parsons, headmasters and conservative politicians to legitimise comfortable conservative attitudes towards the monarchy. patriotism, the English class system and the Church of England.

But form the First World War onwards, scholars, actors and theatre directors have been unearthing and re-constructing a very different Shakespeare; a far more subversive and rebellious writer who, nevertheless, had to be careful about revealing his true convictions.

He had good reason; the Elizabethan Age, for all its superficial splendour, was a dark and brutal time of suppression, persecution, police spies and severe censorship.

Shakespeare had a taste of this from his childhood when the family fell from grace because of their catholic recusancy.

As he walked to the Globe Theatre by Southwark Bridge he'd have noticed the thirty heads stuck on spikes - the heads of noblemen who'd been accused of treason. He'd have passed the numerous gibbets bearing the rotting corpses of lesser criminals and probably turned his face from the public floggings, brandings and humiliation in the stocks for petty offenders.

He probably knew John Blunt, the publisher who had his hand chopped off at Charing Cross for daring to write a pamphlet urging the Queen to marry and bless the Kingdom with an heir. Of his fellow playwrights Thomas Kyd had been tortured to death, Christopher Marlowe had been murdered in a murky espionage plot and Ben Jonson had been thrown in prison for cracking a joke about King James I. Plays were closely scrutinised by the censor before being granted a licence and theatre audiences were infiltrated by police spies and informers, noting who was attending the plays and what subversive sentiments were being aired in the guise of entertainment.

The puritans had succeeded in having the playhouses banished from the city of London across the river to areas called the Liberties where they took their place alongside the pubs, brothels and bear-baiting pits. The Government availed himself of every change to close down the theatres because it feared large gatherings of people in one place - and the Globe, for instance, held over 2000.

You couldn't publish anything controversial, you couldn't say it in public, even in the pulpit; but if you were clever, you could get away with it in the theatre.

All of Shakespeare's plays are set in contemporary London, but in disguise. As long as the story took place in Rome, Athens, Elsinore or Verona you could take swipes at the Monarchy, the Government, the Church and even espouse republican sentiments. You could say "something is rotten in the State" as long as you added "of Denmark".

Julius Caesar was regarded throughout the Middle Ages as a hero. One of the nine worthies. Shakespeare depicts him as feeble, arrogant and superstitious. Our sympathy in the play is directed not towards Julius Caesar but towards Brutus and Cassius, the republican regicides. This is a reversal of audience expectation and common practice which held regicide to be the greatest of crimes. Cassius, the most passionate of the republicans, reminds Brutus that his ancestors "would have brook'd the eternal devil keep his state in Rome as easily as a King." Dangerous sentiments in the age of Absolute Monarchy.

Shakespeare's English history plays paint a very unflattering picture of Monarchy: the cycle of Henry VI plays depicting the Wars of the Roses shows the various claimants to the Crown as nothing more than a bunch of thugs - treacherous, murderous and venal - as quick to change sides as they are to knife each other in the back. Their struggle culminates in the rise of Richard III, the tyrannical monster who begins a reign of terror. The English Crown is a tainted and bloody trophy.

Even Henry V, often regarded as a patriotic hymn to the Monarchy, only plays that way if you cut great chunks of the text, as was done throughout the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries, including film versions by Laurence Olivier and Kenneth Branagh.

When you play the full text, the effect is far more ambivalent and unsettling. The King's justification for invading another sovereign state is decidedly dodgy, a fact realised by his troops:

"The King is but a man, as I am.
The violet smells to him as it doth to me…
In his nakedness he appears but a man…
But if the cause be not good, the King himself hath a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and arms and heads chopped off in a battle shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, 'we died at such place' - some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in battle, for how can they charitably dispose of anything, when blood is their argument? Now, if these men do not die well, it will be a black matter for the King that led them to it."

These sentiments are tantamount to treason. Queen Elizabeth and King James I clung tenaciously to the myth of the Divine Right of Kings, a tenet articulated by Shakespeare's Richard II:

"Not all the water in the rough, rude sea
Can wash the balm from an anointed King;
The breath of worldly men cannot depose
The deputy elected by the Lord."

But Richard is wrong. He is deposed by his cousin Henry Bolingbroke, imprisoned and murdered. Divine Right is proved to be an idle dream…

Queen Elizabeth was furious. For a time the play was banned, and later only allowed if the abdication scene was cut.

"Know ye not," said Elizabeth, "that I am Richard the Second?"

Shakespeare was a man of his time. He couldn't have foreseen that only 33 years after his death Charles I would be executed and a Commonwealth proclaimed. The Monarchy would never recover its power or prestige.

But even Richard II comes to understand the reality of his condition, and gives tongue to prescient speech that Charles I might well have pondered on his way to execution:

"Within the hollow Crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a King
Keeps death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and grinning at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be fear'd, and kill with looks
Infusing him with self and vain conceit
As it this flesh which walls about our life were brass impregnable; and humour'd this,
Comes at last, and with a little pin
Bores through his castle wall, and farewell King!"