SOURCE: “The Duke and the Beggar in Shakespeare's 2 Henry VI,” in Criticism, Vol. 41, No. 3, Summer, 1999, pp. 309-21.

[In the essay below, Pearlman interprets the dramatic and theological significance of the encounter between Duke Humphrey of Gloucester and the beggar Saunder Simpcox in 2 Henry VI.]

In the midst of the factious wrangling that comprises so much of the matter of Shakespeare's The Second Part of Henry the Sixth, there occurs an innovative scene in which the young playwright takes some creative liberties with the new genre of the history play.

The situation is this: the fierce rivalry between Winchester, the proud cardinal, and his half-nephew the “good Duke” Humphrey of Gloucester—a younger brother of Henry V—has led Winchester to throw down his gage most unclerically: “if thou dar’st, this Euening / On the East side of the Groue” (2.1.41-42; TLN 762-63).¹ Humphrey is enraged: “Now by Gods Mother, Priest / Ill haue² your Crowne for this” (51; TLN 774-75). Standing by, wringing his hands, is the pious king: “How irkesome is this Music to my heart? / When such Strings iarre, what hope of Harmony? / I pray my Lords let me compound this strife” (55-56; TLN 781-83). Up to this point the representation is very much in keeping with the play's regular diet of beard-to-beard challenges and hapless gestures at peacemaking. But just at this juncture comes a surprise—the novelty of which modern audiences and readers may easily overlook There is a curious stage direction—“Enter one crying a Miracle”—and a report that at Saint Alban's shrine a beggar who has been blind since birth has suddenly acquired sight. Then follows a hubbub and a mildly carnivalesque procession: Enter the Maior of Saint Albones, and his Brethren, bearing the man betweene two in a Chayre (66 s.d.; 795-96). The erst-while blind man, who gives his name as “Saunder Simpcoxe,” is cross-examined by Duke Humphrey; it is not very long before Simpcox's “miracle” is declared a fake. The duke tricks the beggar into describing a cloak as “Red Master, Red as Blood” and a gown as “Black forsooth, Coale-Black, as Iet” (111; TLN 855). Alas for poor Simpcox, Humphrey turns out to be something of a philosopher of language:

Then Saunder, sit there,
The lying’st Knaue in Christendome. …
Sight may distinguish of Colours:
But suddenly to nominate them all,
It is impossible.

(124-25, 127-29; TLN 871-72, 875-77)

Having detected the one hoax, Humphrey then goes on to prove that Simpcox, who has also pretended to be lame, enjoys full use of his legs. The Duke sends for the beadle and for a stool, and he instructs the beadle to whip Simpcox until he “leaps ouer that same Stoole” (140; TLN 896-97). There is a second descriptive stage direction: After the Beadle hath hit him once, he leapes ouer the Stoole, and runnes away: and they follow, and cry, A Miracle (147 s.d.; TLN 902-4). Humphrey then orders the beggar and his wife to be “whipt through euery Market Towne / Till they come to Barwick, from whence they came” (153-55; TLN 909-10). Even though the threatened duel between the aristocratic cousins never comes to pass, the business of the play picks up exactly where it had left off. A partisan of the Winchester faction accuses “the Lady Elianor, the Protectors [i.e. Gloucester's] Wife” of “[d]ealing with Witches and with Coniurers” (166; TLN 924)—a charge that soon leads to her disgrace and banishment, contributes as well to Duke Humphrey's fall from power, and eventually becomes a justification for the duke's murder. And so the intrafamilial squabbling continues on its steady course.

Disconnected as it is from the jousting for political power, the interlude of duke and beggar has not made much of an impression on criticism. It is probably best known for contributing (or repeating) a tag line famous on the Elizabethan stage, for it is in this scene that Gloucester utters the phrase “things called whips” (134; TLN 884). If it be permissible to draw a large inference from a particle of evidence, then, strange as it may seem, this corner of the play, however slight and enigmatic to us, may very well have loomed large to early audiences.³

The interlude constitutes a brief (if welcome) respite from the pressure of plot. But although Simpcox and the knot of actors who accompany him fill the stage with color and bustle and humor (cruel humor, to be sure), their actions at first glance seem to be devoid of consequences. Simpcox, and Simpcox's wife—who speaks very few lines, but who nevertheless plays a part of genuine poignancy—along with the mayor and the beadle and the fickle supernumeraries who had cried the miracle (first enthusiastically but later derisively), all exit never even to be mentioned again. They perform the task the apprentice playwright allotted to them and then they vanish, leaving behind not only a less colorful stage but also a loose end that calls for some sort of explanation.

Is it mere accident that the Simpcox affair, sealed off as it is from the major tendencies of the plot, is also atypical in genesis? The story on which Shakespeare based the interlude is anomalous in that it does not appear either in Edward Hall's Union or in Raphael Holinshed's Chronicle—standard historical volumes that, with the exception of this single episode, constitute the repository for everything in 2 Henry VI for which there is a known precedent. The anecdote of the beggar and the duke does not derive from the chronicles, but instead from that most capacious book of Protestant martyrology and propaganda, John Foxe's Actes and Monuments—a circumstance that seems to hint at an association between the sham miracle and the century's bitter religious quarrels.

And there is an additional anomaly: in writing the Simpcox interlude, Shakespeare did not make use of Actes and Monuments in precisely the same way he employed the chronicles. Instead of following what seems to have been his customary practice of composition, which was to read and ponder and then to close the book, Shakespeare appears to have written this section of the play with Actes and Monuments open upon his table—the correspondences between Foxe's language and Shakespeare's are too exact to admit otherwise. Here, for example, is a part of Foxe's version of the event:

then [Humphrey of Gloucester] looked aduisedly upon his [i.e. the beggar's] eyen againe, and sayd: I beleue you very well, for me thinketh ye cannot see well yet. Yes syr, quod he, I thanke God and hys holy martyr, I can see now as well as any man. Yea can, (quod the Duke) what colour is my gowne? Then anon the beggar tolde him. What colour (quoth he) is this mans gowne? He told him also, and so forth without any sticking, he told him the names of all the colours that could be shewed him.⁴

Shakespeare faithfully reproduces both format and vocabulary:

Glost. A subtill Knaue, but
yet it shall not serue: Let me see thine
Eyes; winck now, now open them: In my opinion, yet thou seest not well.
Simpc. Yes Master, cleare as day,
I thanke God and Saint Albones.
Glost. Say’st thou me so: what
Colour is this Cloake of?
Simpc. Red Master, Red as Blood.
Glost. Why that’s well said:
What Colour is my Gowne of?
Simpc. Black forsooth, Coale-Black,
as Iet.

(TLN 844-55; 2.1.104-11)

Why did Shakespeare abandon his habitual procedure in order to imitate so closely a story that is oblique to the main action of his play? To this question the easy and plausible response is that he just happened to be leafing through a copy of Foxe and, stumbling upon the juicy tale of the fraudulent miracle, could not resist interpolating it into his play—but in this case the easiest answer may not be the best answer.

There are therefore a number of little puzzles generated by this scene. How should they be approached? One possibility is to think in terms of the interlude's dramaturgy. While the sham miracle stands apart from the action, it comments on the place of the supernatural in daily life and raises issues not only of perception but also of social class. Viewed from such a perspective, the Saunder-Gloucester encounter may be understood as a vaunt-courier of a more ambitious drama still several years in Shakespeare's future. It is, for example, transparent that the playwright's first history plays draw almost all of their major characters from the knightly classes. Yet it would not be more than a few years later, when Shakespeare came to write the second sequence of histories, that he had discovered how to present a more comprehensive picture of society. The pair of tramping beggars who try vainly to enforce their charity nod toward those who will populate the taverns, townships, and trenches of the later plays. Similarly, Saunder himself may be viewed as a flat precursor of the more rounded characters who will later themselves be exposed and expelled: Bardolph, for example, hanged for stealing a pyx (or pax) before Agincourt, or Pistol, unmasked as a coward and forced to turn bawd in order to eat.

While Shakespeare dispensed with the begging couple after he sent them back to Berwick (in contrast to the interest he sustained in Bardolph and Pistol), he did not entirely give over the effort to portray English society in fuller dimension. In 2 Henry VI, the playwright experimented with a series of conflicts between rich and poor in order to create a not-entirely-realized but nevertheless ambitious movement contrapuntal to the main action of the plot. He therefore contrived to bring onto the stage, at various times, a group of petitioners who try to register a complaint about the enclosure of commonland (1.3.1-24; TLN 383-421), an apprentice who impeaches and subsequently defeats in single combat his treasonous master (1.3.180-217; 2.3.47-100; TLN 571-617; 1115-68), and a ship captain who, mocked by the insufferably arrogant Duke of Suffolk as an “obscure and lowsie Swaine” (3.3.50; TLN 2218) becomes the very person who orders Suffolk's head to be struck off. This chain of related events comes to a climax in the serio-comic depiction of the Jack Cade rebellion. While, in isolation, the Simpcox story illustrates, among other things, the need to maintain vigilance against fraud, in the larger context it joins others to create a backdrop of social discontent that elucidates if it does not justify the popular uprising that will rattle the kingdom. Although the back-of-the-hand dismissal of Simpcox and his wife surely encouraged the larger part of the theatrical audience to hoot at landless impudence, it also asked more alert souls to acknowledge that there might be risks to the summary treatment of the disenfranchised.

A second major effort of the episode was to clarify the character of Humphrey of Gloucester. Shakespeare must certainly have noticed the moral that Foxe himself drew from the story: “By this may it be seene howe Duke Humfrey had not onely an head to disserne and disseuer trueth from forged and fayned hipocrisie, but study also and dillegence lykewise was in him, to reforme that which was amisse” (704d). Shakespeare attached great weight to the words “disserne and disseuer.” In his version of events, Gloucester logically and systematically disentangles Simpcox's chain of pretences. It is first established that the beggar claims to be crippled as a result of a fall from a tree. Then the duke's examination proceeds (now in dialogue that is entirely Shakespeare's invention):

Glost. How long hast thou
been blinde?
Simpc. O borne so, Master.
Glost. What, and would’st climbe
a Tree?
Simpc. But that in all my life when
I was a youth.
Wife. Too true, and bought his climbing
very deare.
Glost. ‘Masse, thou lou’dst
Plummes well, that would’st venture so.
Simpc. Alas, good Master, my Wife
desired some Damsons, and made me climbe, with danger of my Life.

(2.1.98-103; TLN 835-44)

It is easy to imagine Gloucester stroking his beard and saying “Hum” as he step-by-step dissevers truth from feigning. An insightful and a clever man, audiences would surely conclude—and a just man as well, for while the whipping that Gloucester administers might seem harsh to us, it would reassure earlier audiences that the duke was not given to that harmful lenity in magistrates that so alarmed Elizabethan orthodoxy.

The Gloucester-Simpcox interlude adds variety to the action, reinforces some notable themes, and deepens the character of the duke. Can there be more? Foxe praises Gloucester not only for his perspicuity but also for trying “to reforme that which was amisse.” “Reforme” is no neutral word in Actes and Monuments; it is a clue that at the heart of the episode is an implicit conflict between the old and the reformed religion. The earliest Protestants, it must be recalled, were far more fierce about what they detested (pilgrimages, saints, relics, shrines, and suchlike) than they were exalted by the new theology they professed; and the miracle, after all, was a distinctive inheritance of medieval Catholicism. The Calvinist reformer William Perkins drew a bottom-line distinction between the Roman and Genevan creeds when he asserted that “miracles are not done, or to be done for them that beleeue, but for infidels that beleeue not.” Although centuries ago, Perkins argues, the deity might have personally interceded in order to dazzle recalcitrant pagans, in these modern times such an intervention would be supererogatory and consequently fraudulent. His authoritative opinion: “miracles & reuelations had an end … about three hundred yeares after Christ.”⁵ Or as Shakespeare puts it elsewhere, with perhaps a touch of longing for older ways, “[t]hey say miracles are past, and we haue our Philosophical persons, to make moderne and familiar[,] things supernaturall and causelesse.”⁶ Simpcox's claim to the spontaneous acquisition of sight would have been understood by reformed audiences to hark back to a superseded system of belief.

Although all miracles smack of pre-Reformation ignorance, this particular miracle would have been all the more suspect not only because of the pretended intercession of the saint (Simpcox claims that “a hundred times … In my sleepe … good Saint Albon / … said; Symon, come” (2.1.89-90; TLN 824-25), but also because the marvel occurred at Saint Alban's shrine—a renowned piece of popery that had been extirpated in 1538 by the energetic deputies of Thomas Cromwell. Only the very oldest members of Shakespeare's audience would have gazed with their own eyes upon the spectacular monument (after Canterbury and Walsingham perhaps the most frequented in all England), but many others would have heard of it by word of mouth: over eight feet, constructed of Purbeck marble and painted clunch, decorated with quatrefoils, censing angels, statuettes of kings and prelates and with scenes of Saint Alban's stoning, blazoned with golden lions, fleur-de-lys, and stars, and set in a canopied niche illuminated with tapers, a bejeweled reliquary containing bones purported to be those of the semi-mythical saint's.⁷ Foxe the martyrologist (born in 1516) and others of his generation would have known the shrine in all its superstitious glory. The observation that Gloucester had a head “to reforme that which was amisse” intimates that Foxe conceived of the miracle as an imposition of the old belief and of the good duke as a reformer before the fact.

In the light of this information, it becomes clear that the implicit opposition of traditional and reformed must inevitably color Shakespeare's enactment of the miracle. The overweening Cardinal Winchester is a prominent member of the priestly hierarchy, while Gloucester, his secular opponent who so easily smells out the fraud, is a friend of the populace and an enemy of the clergy. (It is a nice irony that the Humphrey of history was in fact not only a great hunter of Lollards but in fact a patron of Saint Alban's, where a “fair vault” was made ready for him even during his lifetime.)⁸ Even without Foxe's guidance, the interlude might easily (although far too simply) be read as Protestant debunking of Catholic magic.

It is in regard to the miracle and its interpretation that an atmosphere of controversy surrounding the encounter between duke and beggar becomes pertinent. Shakespeare, it would seem, found the anecdote in Foxe's Actes and Monuments, but although the playwright is more often thought of as a browser than as a systematic researcher, there is no compulsion to think that he simply stumbled onto its discovery. Holinshed, whom Shakespeare had obviously read very carefully, brought his evaluation of Humphrey of Gloucester to a close with generous praise for the duke's “feats of chiualrie … valiant and fortunate, his grauitie in counsell, and soundnesse of policie profound and singular.” But the chronicler did not stop there; for those who would like to learn more about Humphrey, Holinshed “refer[red] the readers unto maister Foxe's book of Acts and Monuments.”⁹ Knowing that Humphrey would play a prominent part in his play, Shakespeare would very probably have followed such excellent advice. Nor could Actes and Monuments have been a difficult book to locate. It is true that Gloucester's exposure of the fraudulent miracle was not to be found in the less enormous 1563 edition of the work, but it was present in its 1570, 1576, and 1583 manifestations—any one of which Shakespeare might easily have consulted.

Having hefted Foxe from shelf to desk, Shakespeare would have immediately grasped the obvious theatrical opportunities the tale offered. But that is not the whole of the matter. Where did John Foxe, himself a gatherer rather than a maker, come upon the story? Inasmuch as Foxe did not report it until his 1570 compilation, the best guess is that he did not become aware of the matter until it appeared in Richard Grafton's Chronicle at Large—a book which first saw the light in March of 1562.¹⁰ It is curious that although Foxe was quite faithful to the anecdote itself, he slightly changed Grafton's account of its provenance. Grafton had been forthright about his own sources: the story, he says, was “written and set forth by Sir Thomas Moore knight, in a booke of hys, entituled, a Dialogue concerning heresies and matters of religion, and in the xiiii chapter of the same booke.”¹¹ Foxe was more circumspect than Grafton. Although he mentioned More, Foxe did not choose to reveal the exact title of More's dialogue—no doubt because it sounded too partisan. It must have been difficult enough for Foxe to admit that he had reproduced a story drawn from the work of the great Catholic controversialist; it was far too awkward to confess that he drew specifically from an attack on the same Reformation heresies that had by now become the staple of his own belief. Even further to dilute the anecdote's Roman auspices, Foxe added a crucial piece of information that Grafton either did not know or did not choose to report. Here is the important sentence, in full, in which Foxe introduces the story that would eventually become the Saunder Simpcox interlude. Shakespeare certainly read it. How could it not have thoroughly transfixed him?

Furthermore, as the learning of this Prince [i.e. Humphrey of Gloucester] was rare and memorable, so was the discreete wisedom and singular prudence in him no less to be considered; as, for the more manifest proofe thereof, I thought it here good, amongst many other of his goodly doings, to recite one example, reported as well by the penne of sir Thomas More, as also by M. William Tindal, the true Apostle of these our later dayes, to the intent to see and note, not only the craftye working of false miracles in the clergye, but also that the prudent discretion of this high and mighty prince, the fore said duke Humfrey, may give us the better to understand what man he was.¹²

In these words Shakespeare would have found the prejudicial but nevertheless important inference that in Foxe's opinion the story of duke and beggar demonstrated “the craftye working of false miracles in the clergye”—surely an interpretation opposite to what common sense might dictate. Knowing now that the anecdote could be interpreted to carry an anti-Catholic message, Shakespeare had to decide how to deal with its bias. Were that not enough of a challenge, Shakespeare would also have taken note of Foxe's mention of “William Tindal, the true Apostle of these our later dayes.” There they are—More and Tyndale—the great warfaring polemicists of the first decade of the English Reformation, linked in a discussion of an apparently innocuous story of duke and beggar. Surely the playwright would have immediately understood that to deal with an event disputed by such mighty opposites as More and Tyndale would require a deal of tact. There was indeed the opportunity to shadow the iconoclastic fury, the martyrdoms, and the explosive upheavals of the earlier part of the century in its representation; there was also the opportunity to engage exceedingly ticklish issues and possibly to get himself into a good deal of trouble with the authorities. Shakespeare must have known that whatever he put on stage would be understood by some part of his audience as more than merely clownish by play. And yet—even though the event allows a greater variety of interpretations than modern audiences might think—it seems that Shakespeare characteristically chose not to exploit the potential for controversy—possibly out of concern for censorship but just as possibly because he was inherently wary of religious fervor. Nevertheless, it may be asserted with confidence that for Elizabethans there would have been far more at stake in this anecdote than first meets the modern eye.

It is impossible to say whether Shakespeare might have been inquisitive enough—and if inquisitive, able (More's Dialogue of Heresies had not been published separately since 1530 or in a collected edition since 1557)—to follow Foxe to More as he had followed Holinshed to Foxe. Would he not have been curious to uncover the nature of the dispute between More and Tyndale? And what would he have found if he had taken that next step?

In his Dialogue, More vigorously defends the traditional practices of the old religion against the new doctrine that the Roman party would dismiss as sola scriptura. In order to mount a defense, More had perforce to confront the question of miracles, and it is in this surprising context that the story of the blind beggar first found its way into print. More begins in this way: “As I remember me that I haue herde my father tell of a beggar that in kynge Henry his dayes the syxte came wyth his wyfe to saynt Albonys.” (How factual is More's story? Inasmuch as Humphrey of Gloucester died in 1447 and Sir John More was born about 1453,¹³ the tale must have been carried in the oral tradition for quite some while before reaching print. But historical truth is not at issue here.) At first blush, it is surprising that More, the great defender of long-established practices, would put on record the exposure of a fraudulent miracle. But Sir Thomas is a wily advocate. While he concedes that there are instances in which people try to fake miracles, he is confident that such impositions may easily be exposed, for “the goodnes of god bryngeth shortely the trouthe of such falshed [i.e. falsehood] to lyght” (85). Look how simple it was, argues More, for “noble Duke Humfrey” to expose the “falshed” of the “blyson [i.e. bisson =s blind] beggar” (88). More's conclusion: “no such faynyd wonders sholde enfame goddys very [i.e. true] myracles” (88). It is a witty and paradoxical argument: the easy repudiation of sham miracles is evidence that miracles not so easy to expose must be genuine. For students of Shakespeare, the question is not so much whether More's argument is persuasive, but whether the scene, far from indicating merely that the poor will resort to subterfuge in order to win a penny, exposes false miracles but at the same time offers the subliminal subtext that true miracles must exist. While moderns would probably not draw such an inference, it is difficult to deny that some members of the Elizabethan audience—especially those who were older and more traditional in their habits of belief—might have seen things exactly in More's terms and therefore just as likely be confirmed as challenged in their Catholic sympathies. Theology may very well be in the eye of the beholder.

More draws a second conclusion from his tale. He contends that if, in fact, there is blame to be assigned, it is not so much to the beggar as to the susceptible populace: “people myght resonably gather so moche suspycyn / that yf they had made therupon suffycyent inquysycyon and serche / they could neuer haue bene so far abusyd” (88). Certainly it is possible (once again following More's train of thought), that although members of the audience might have frowned upon Simpcox and his wife, they may also have decided that the true villains of the piece were the thoughtless noisy ones who temporarily fell under the beggars' sway. To judge from the headstrong entrance and rowdy departure, such an interpretation is certainly possible. And so the interpretive range of the interlude continues to expand.

Had Shakespeare continued his investigation and traced the controversy to More's great antagonist, he would have had confirmed what he must have already suspected—that the interlude of duke and beggar was also capable of a radical exegesis. Where More is subtle, Tyndale is blunt (and yet his point of view equally difficult to anticipate). Tyndale knows only that the beggar's claim to a miracle is no more than still another imposition on the part of the “spirituality” (a term which Tyndale uses to mock the entire church establishment from pope down to the lowliest parish priest). In Tyndale's scheme of English history, there are two parties inexorably in conflict: on the one side, “the people,” and on the other, their enemy, the “spirituality.” Gloucester is one of “the people” and consequently the perpetual target of the religious establishment. The point of the episode is therefore far more conspiratorial and devious than moderns might otherwise have imagined. According to Tyndale, the “Proctoure of Purgatorye” (by whom he means More himself) “sayeth in his Dialoge quod I and quod he and quod youre frende / how that [Gloucester] was a nobleman and a greate clercke and so wise that he coude spye false miracles and disclose them.” Gloucester's ability to see through such shams, Tyndale insists, constituted a threat to both More and the clergy. It was a talent that must necessarily be “a hatefull science unto our spiritualtye and moare abhorred then necromancye or witchcrafte.” For “if a man be so clear eyed that he can spye false myracles / howe can iugulers (i.e. jugglers—the clergy) gette their lyuynge.” If someone should have a head to discern and dissever, it is “a thinge wherefore a man by their lawe I dare well saye / is worthye to dye / and that secretlye if it be possible.”¹⁴ Tyndale therefore offers still another possible meaning for the scene—that when Gloucester unravelled Simpcox's pretense, he so alarmed Winchester and his allies that the spiteful “spiritualtye,” fearful for their prerogatives, decided to have Gloucester murdered. This is an interpretation that is not supported by Shakespeare's text, where Gloucester's exposure of the miracle and his subsequent assassination do not seem to be causally connected. Although Winchester conspires against Gloucester, he does so in order to secure power for himself and to eliminate a rival. But is it not possible that religious radicals (if by some mischance they had ventured into the synagogue of Satan and stayed to watch a performance of 2 Henry VI) would have understood the play in Tyndale's more or less paranoid terms? Of course much would have to do with the way the scene was played. There are opportunities to make Simpcox's miracle very Roman in presentation. Both More and Foxe, for example, report that when the beggar suddenly gained his sight, “a miracle [was] solemnly ronge, and TE DEUM songe.” At the moment when Simpcox is triumphantly carried onto the stage, The First Part of the Contention (the quarto version of 2 Henry VI)—thought by many to reflect theatrical practice—records that the procession was accompanied “with Musicke” (sig. C2r). What sort of music? A noise of pipes and tabors is one possibility, but monkish chanting another. If the pseudo-miracle was cloaked in the trappings of the old religion, and if, when Gloucester penetrated the mystery, Winchester and his allies, decked in scarlet or crimson, glared and whispered, then Tyndale's understanding might have found support in performance. Such an interpretation might seem farfetched today, but would it have been so in an era before superstition and enthusiasm had yielded to our serene rationality?

Shakespeare may or may not have traced the tale all the way back to Tyndale and More. It would be nice to know, but it is not absolutely material. Willy-nilly, he would have been reminded that even an apparently trivial event such as the encounter of duke and beggar might yield disparate and opposed interpretations. Perhaps it was the knowledge that the episode could be read so variously that inspired Shakespeare to subtend to the exchange between duke and beggar a brief series of choral comments:

King. O God, seest thou this,
and bearest so long?
Queene. It made me laugh, to see
the Villaine runne. …
Wife. Alas Sir, we did it for pure
need.

(2.1.149-50, 152; TLN 905-6, 908)

The coda transforms anecdote into exemplum. The quietist King, elsewhere scorned as content “to number Aue-Maries on his Beades” (1.3.54; TLN 442) is, as usual, pious and passive. Heartless Queen Margaret allies herself to those members of the audience who had guffawed at the begging couple. The cry of Simpcox's wife (“Alas, Sir we did it for pure need”) is truly disturbing. The sentence is unemphatic but not without eloquence. “Alas” signals genuine despair; “Sir” is deferential enough to reassure the audience that the beggars are not seditious; “we” indicates that the wife will not abandon her husband; “pure need” reveals that the fraud was motivated by necessity. “Alas, sir …” therefore glances at a spectrum of contemporary inequities ranging from the lopsided distribution of wealth and the frequent dearths to the brutalities of the Poor Laws. Yet each of these moralistic comments leads the audience away from religion and toward matters of society and politics. Clearly, Shakespeare was not prepared to rush into the dangerous arena of religious recrimination.

If Shakespeare was so chary of the theological fray, why choose to dramatize the anecdote in the first place? It is a good guess that he was attracted to More's tale for other reasons than its doctrinal content. What else could it possibly have offered him? In addition to matters already discussed, the story of duke and beggar credibly represents an encounter between the classes. In Shakespeare's earliest plays such interchanges are often horribly stylized, after the model of master and servant in The Comedy of Errors or Valentine and Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shakespeare needed better models to point him toward Hamlet and the gravedigger, Lear and the fool, Coriolanus and Aufidius's doorkeeper. In addition, it is a fact that Shakespeare was attracted by More's mastery of colloquial dialogue. Had the playwright already read ahead in the chronicles to the story of Richard III and discovered that More wrote dialogue that was good enough to be captured whole and translated into the plays (a practice Shakespeare regularly followed with no other writer except Plutarch)? And knowing that More had something to offer him, did he then track down the anecdote while on the hunt for such models? Shakespeare would copy More frequently. Some instances: in a passage that Shakespeare used in The Third Part of King Henry the Sixth, Lady Elizabeth Grey rebuked the lascivious advances of King Edward by declaring that “as she wist her self to[o] simple to be his wife, so thought she her self to[o] good to be his concubine.”¹⁵ Shakespeare polished the sentiment into a passable couplet: “I know, I am too meane to be your Queene, / And yet too good to be your Concubine” (3.2.97-98; TLN 1611-12). In Richard III, when Buckingham argued that the young princes (the sons of the former King Edward) might not legally seek sanctuary, he says that “I haue often heard of saintuarye menne. But I neuer heard erste of saintuarye chyldren” (33). Shakespeare reproduced this almost exactly: “oft haue I heard of Sanctuarie men, / But Sanctuarie children, ne’er till now” (3.1.55-56; TLN 1634-35). Another in More's recounting of the dubious anecdote. Richard had said to the Bishop of Ely, “my lord, you haue very good strawberies at your gardayne in Holberne, I require you let vs haue a messe of them” (47). Shakespeare tinkered a bit with the emphasis but followed More closely: “My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holborne / I saw good Strawberries in your Garden there; / I doe beseech you, send for some of them” (3.4.31-33; TLN 1999-2001). Nor could Shakespeare resist a substantial exchange that would have appeared thus had it been printed in dramatic format:

Richard. What were they worthy
to haue, that compasse & ymagine the distruccion of me, being so nere
of blood vnto the king and protectour of his riall person & his realme.
Hastings. Certainly my lorde if they
haue so heinously done, thei be worthy heinouse punishment.
Richard. What. Thou seruest me I
wene with iffes & with andes. I tel the thei haue so done, & that
I will make good on thy body traitour. For by saynt Poule I wil not to dinner
til I se thy hed of.

(48-49)

Shakespeare allowed Richard to mock-demonize his opponents (their plot becomes “devilish”) but otherwise was content to do little more than edit:

Richard. I pray you all, tell
me what they deserue That doe conspire my death with deuillish Plots Of damned
Witchcraft …
Hastings. If they haue done this
deed, my Noble Lord.
Richard. If? thou Protector of this
damned Strumpet, Talk’st thou to me of Ifs: thou art a Traytor, Off
with his Head; now by Saint Paul I sweare,
I will not dine, vntill I see the same.

(3.4.59-62, 72-77; TLN 2031-33; 2044-48).

More might just be the writer of the wittiest dialogue in English before Shakespeare. There is therefore the strong possibility that the playwright appropriated the story of duke and beggar for sheer delight in its craft. And if so colorful a conversation happened to carry doctrinal implications that raised hackles on both sides of the aisle, why then, so much the better.

Notes

1. Quotations from Shakespeare's plays, except where noted, are drawn from the fascimile of The First Folio of Shakespeare, ed. Charlton Hinman (New York: Norton, 1968) and are identified by Hinman's through line numbering (TLN) as well as by the lineation in William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Alfred Harbage (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969). The F and Q versions of this episode are substantially different. Citations to Q are drawn from Shakespeare's Plays in Quarto, ed. Kenneth Muir and Michael J. B. Allen (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

2. Usually emended to “shave.”

3. Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedy, ed. P. Edwards (London: Methuen, 1959): “Well, heaven is heaven still, / And there is Nemesis and Furies, / And things call’d whips” (Third Addition, 11. 40-43; see Edwards's note for other uses of the phrase.

4. John Foxe, Actes and Monuments … (London: J. Daye, 1583 [STC 11225]), 704a.

5. [William Perkins], A Reformed Catholike: or, A Declaration … (Cambridge, 1600 [STC 19646]), 986.

6. This is Lafew in All's Well That Ends Well (2.3.1-3; TLN 893-95).

7. J. Charles Wall, Shrines of British Saints (London: Methuen, 1905), 35ff.

8. DNB, “Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester,” X, 238-45.

9. Raphael Holinshed, Chronicles of England, Scotland and Wales (London, 1577), 627b.

10. G. Marc’hardour reviews Foxe's borrowing in “Une dette de Shakespeare envers le père de Thomas More,” Moreana 4 (1967): 76-87. It is possible that Foxe gathered the story from Grafton but verified the text against a copy of More's Dialogue.

11. Richard Grafton, Chronicle at Large (London, 1562 [STC 12147]), 597.

12. Foxe, Actes and Monuments, 705a.

13. DNB, “Sir John More.”

14. William Tyndale, The Practyse of Prelates (Marbroch, 1530 [STC 24465]) sig. f4v-fSr.

15. More's History of King Richard the Third in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 2, ed. Richard S. Sylvester (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 61.