Politics in the play
Aside from identity politics and those positions that apply to authorship itself the only materially political treatment of Shakespeare set in his time frame is represented by Edward Bond's Bingo. This is also the only play that draws attention to to the politics of Stratford, when enclosures were taking place and Shakespeare was obliquely implicated.
Stratford was afflicted by fire and starvation as well as the devastating effects wrought on tenant farmers by the beginning of the enclosure acts.
Anne Dixey engaged in specific research in local records of Stratford and we gained information about grain shortages and enclosures that fed into the play. Shakespeare’s only written record when asked to engage financially was 'I cannot bear the enclosures'. This cryptic phrase has been interpreted as 'I cannot stand them' , or 'I cannot pay for them'. It seems that it was designed to be intentionally opaque.
In 2012 and 2013, Professor Richard Marggraf Turley and Dr Jane Archer investigated Shakespeare’s grain hoarding and tax evasion. Shakespeare was prosecuted in February 1598 for holding grain during a food crisis. This research research led me to an interest in collating and researching many of the contradictory and politically complex elements of Shakespeare’s life.
(Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Howard Thomas & Richard Marggraf Turley (2015) Reading Shakespeare with the grain: sustainability and the hunger business, Green Letters, 19:1, 8-20,)
Charles Nicholl's Shakespeare on Silver Street
extrapolates from evidence given in 1612 by Shakespeare in court that he gave evidence at the Court of Requests in Westminster. From this emerged a story of his lodgings with religious refugees which enabled me to investigate his relation in a earlier draft to to the Thomas More refugee speech
attributed to Shakespeare.
(Charles Nicholl Allen Lane, 2007)
The Essex rebellion, which sees the Queen watching the banned Richard II, in a foreshadowing of the play within the play of Hamlet, the Gunpowder plot and the execution of friends of Shakespeare’s family provides a backdrop to Macbeth.
Julius Caeser, Henry IV, King John, and many other plays are sometimes subtly contextualised within a matrix of personal and political events. If ever a play is mentioned its connection to the action has been researched historically.
Other issues such as as his attempts, for example, to secure financial security and gain a coat of arms coalesce with the controversy over his will, his relations to his wife and daughters. Initially these elements combine with other themes, perhaps of a more contemporary nature, of ageing and creativity and the transient nature of celebrity.
A narrative emerged of a successful but ailing man now out of fashion, unpicking his role and reaction to the culture.
Through the thought processes and research procedures described, a kind of semi-confessional mode emerged which recalled the notion that within the Protestantism of the times the recent tropes of Catholicism lay, not only within the culture but within Shakespeare’s family, work and psyche. Living through the trauma of executions, starvation, plague and history a series of embodied habits underneath the Protestant veneer led to a confessional which provided a spectacle for women to reflect with men in the audience on masculinity itself.
Along aside this an awareness of queer theory offers another space for exploration of homo-erotic bonding, unspoken love, power and sexuality, and male friendship. Notions of censorship, ageing creativity, celebrity, inherited power and stardom, are also relevant to the final piece, as are the material political questions that surround action, politics, how we make a living and the constraints on art by power and hegemonic structures.
I explored narratives that took into account evidence-based historical research, theoretical and informed textual analysis to explore a number of themes which gradually intertwined in a web of relationships which created the final piece. The resulting findings created a web of relations and aesthetic decisions which in different ways drew me closer to an idea of Shakespeare, his milieu and creative process.
The above section refers both to the enclosures and to the execution of Edward Arden, Shakespeare's uncle.
WILLIAM:
Jon… Jon…
The vagrant woman has returned to harangue me at my window
(To the beggar) yes I know of the enclosures…
I am sorry that they took your land…
But is the famine my affair?
I have no food.
What is that look?
Yes, ’tis a fine house…but I am poor in minutes!
You’d steal my last few? …and hang?
What profit then to your child?
My guard, no Jon do but warn her.
Begging is an offence, under the old queen you’d been flogged through the streets!
(To Jon)
No, let her rave.
Were we burdened thus, as much or more we should ourselves complain.”
I quote myself, Crow! Your invention is grown so threadbare
You snatch at discarded feathers,
That hollow look, has me disquieted
True, mother, my grain stores are full.
But father has it “a thrown scrap invites gulls to swarm,”
I master words but, what rejoinder
That deep silence wherein the hungry, fear not even of death?
Anne wears that look, does she starve?
…..
The poor are wronged Mother:
“To watch and do nothing: makes evil acts common”
….
But I learned silence, through bloody example; as a boy…
Uncle Edward’s house, Edward, drunk and railing:
EDWARD ARDEN:
I will not suffer hell to lose the old religion …
Let my words spill to the street!
My only crime is to be catholic in a godless age!
WILLIAM:
His Gardener: old Hugh, calls me from the door
HUGH:
Come see the Garden Will,
What’s the matter lad?
WILLIAM:
What bids the flowers die,
And not the gorse, Hugh?
HUGH:
They but sleep through winter,
Save their blooms for sunnier days
Oh, here’s a penny of sugar for ye lad.
WILLIAM:
Uncle’s words had him butchered.
His family implicated in a plot, against the Queen.
He was executed,
Old Hugh, dragged from his unkempt plot
To be tortured, till broken and toothless
He confessed to being a catholic priest in hiding.
I saw uncle’s head displayed
His lips: bloodless and blackened,
Taught me silence and equivocation
-1616