SOURCE: Mayer, Jean-Christophe. “Shakespeare's Religious Background Revisited: Richard II in a New Context.” In Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England, edited by Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard, pp. 103-20. New York: Fordham University Press, 2003.

[In the following essay, Mayer demonstrates how Shakespeare's Richard II exacerbated the volatile and ideologically unstable climate of the late Elizabethan period. The critic details how different political and religious factions manipulated the play's themes of loyalty and betrayal to serve as propaganda for their own causes, culminating in an alleged staging of the play the night before the ill-fated Essex Rebellion.]

When Shakespeare completed Richard II in 1595, he was writing in a period that historians have ceased to regard as congenial.¹ Those “nasty nineties,” as Patrick Collinson observed, were certainly not a period of stabilization, routinization, or secularization: this was not “a decade of sweetness and light, of incipient puritan piety and mellowing Anglicanism, but a rather ugly decade, when the going got tough and unpleasant for all parties” (Collinson 1995, 153). It was in this context that Shakespeare launched a sequence of four plays on the Lancastrian period of English history with the story of the deposition of the Plantagenet King Richard II.²

By the mid-1590s, the story and the allusions to the reign of Richard II had already been used by historians and law specialists to discuss the terms by which a king might be deposed. The theme was appropriated also by malcontents to point to the moral of the story, in ways that repeatedly challenged what some critics would still like to call “the Elizabethan status quo.”³ In other words, allusions to Richard II had become commonplace when commenting on the realm of politics.

The aim of this essay is not, therefore, to affirm that Shakespeare was the first to seize upon the theme (even if the dramatist's contribution to it is of course unique), but it does make a claim to put Shakespeare's play in a context that has so far been overlooked—a context showing that theater, politics, and polemic sometimes wrestled with the same specific issues. To throw a detailed light on this context, it is useful to focus on events surrounding two major dates: 1595 and 1601. Both dates, as we shall see, involve the same play—Shakespeare's Richard II—and the same protagonists: the players of Shakespeare's acting company, Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, and the English Jesuit and political activist Robert Parsons.

Much attention has been given to the links between the publication of John Hayward's The First Part of the Life and Raigne of King Henrie the IIII (1599) and Shakespeare's play.⁴ Despite its title, Hayward's book was mostly concerned with the last years of Richard II's reign. The unsettling elements in Hayward's work were its many invented speeches. The Archbishop of Canterbury, for instance, was made to address a totally fabricated speech of encouragement to Henry Bolingbroke as he was contemplating the deposition of Richard II.⁵ The dramatization of history was something the authorities regarded with suspicion, especially in the work of an historian. It must be noted, however, that Hayward's politically controversial historical account was written in 1599. Shakespeare could not have consulted Hayward's manuscript to write Richard II, as the dates of Shakespeare's play cannot be made to match the historian's.⁶ We will thus turn to another work, which—as we shall try to argue—has greater topical relevance.

This work, published the same year as Shakespeare's Richard II, has attracted considerably less attention, even though Robert Parsons's Conference About the Next Succession to the Crown of England (1594) was dedicated to someone who, in many ways (and especially because of his popularity) resembled Henry Bolingbroke—Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex. As its title indicates, the treatise was concerned with the very pressing and very dangerous issue of Elizabeth's succession, and it also contained several passages on what the Jesuit father clearly regarded as the lawful deposition of Richard II.

The context in which this work appeared and the considerable interest it stirred is the story this essay aims to recount with a view that Shakespeare's Richard II may appear in a different light—one that reveals the very complexity of the relationship between religion and politics in Elizabethan England. But prior to these considerations, it is necessary to picture a world in which the ideological polarization of discourse produced an outwardly oppositional view of society—one that probably still misleads us today into thinking that these oppositions actually existed. “In early modern England the relation between Englishness and Christianness was important, contested, and uncertain” (Taylor 1994, 288). Because so much was at stake politically in these ideological and religious debates, those who entered the polemic often created an imaginary opposition so as to give more weight to their arguments. Catholics, Protestants, Puritans had thus very little in common according to their most radical defenders. For the sake of argumentation, polemicists tended to ignore the very different and multiple shades of belief. Those who sought to cross boundaries, or simply chose to disregard the artificial polarities generated by Elizabethan society, risked their career and sometimes their life, as they could easily be called “traitors” to several causes.

What the ideological circumstances surrounding and following the writing of Richard II may reveal is precisely the imaginary constructions of opposition and the interchangeability of some of the poles of opposition. In this way, I would like to suggest that Patrick Collinson's analysis of the historical validity of the term “Puritan” could be extended to other polarized terms of opposition in Elizabethan society, such as “Catholic,” “recusant,” or “heretic.” Collinson writes indeed that:

… the term “puritan” is indicative not so much of an entity and a state, puritanism, as of a situation with at least two sides to it, and of a dynamic, unstable and stressful process: a particular example of the cultural phenomenon of definition and reification through stigmatization, indicative of polarity and contributory to polarity.

(Collinson 195, 155)

There are many concrete proofs of the instability of such terms. Among these, I have recently come upon a somewhat calculated use of the term “Puritan papist” by Henry Earl of Northumberland in a letter to Elizabeth's future successor, James VI of Scotland. Regarding the possible support that might be given to a Catholic opponent of James, Henry of Northumberland writes: “… this man is committed to prison, and I assure your Maiesty condemned by all of them, ore the most pairt, that are Catholiklye affected, vnles it be by some of them that are puritane papistes that thirst after a spanish tytle” (Bruce 1861, 74). Clearly, the purpose in creating the term “Puritan papist” was to make a practical distinction—a distinction that blurred the all-too-frequently polarized picture of English Catholicism and created another pole of opposition within the opposition itself. Northumberland sought simply to distinguish between the “hardliners,” as he saw them, those who looked toward Spain, and those whose loyalty deserved respect and perhaps toleration from the future sovereign. There is reason to believe, as I shall now try to show, that Shakespeare, in his handling of the themes of loyalty and betrayal in Richard II, was also aware of the many shades that these highly charged terms could comprise.

I. ESSEX, PARSONS, AND SHAKESPEARE—TOPICAL ALLUSIONS AND HIGH POLITICS

                    But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens.
The Mayor and all his brethren, in best sort,
Like to the senators of th'antique Rome
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conqu'ring Caesar in—
As, by a lower but high-loving likehood,
Were now the General of our gracious Empress
—As in good time he may—from Ireland coming,
Bringing rebellion broachèd on his sword,
How many would the peaceful city quit
To welcome him!

(Henry V, 5.2.22-34)⁷

Shakespeare knew of Robert Devereux and was no doubt aware of the political importance of the Earl of Essex, as this prologue from Henry V amply testifies. The martial hero, seemingly so close in the eyes of Shakespeare to a king (Henry V) or to an emperor (Caesar), is through the paradox of “lower but high-loving” put back into a place that was more hierarchical and thus a trifle less threatening for Elizabeth—that of “General of our gracious Empress.” Shakespeare's Henry V, which dates back to 1599, has apparently captured the topical mood of a moment in history and frozen a picture of the earl that was to be quickly challenged in the ensuing two years leading to his demise, trial, and execution for treason.⁸

But it may well be that Shakespeare had captured an earlier topical mood in his Richard II—one that also contained elements that could be deemed dangerous for the Elizabethan régime. Richard II begins, strangely enough, with accusations of treachery and a trial. In the subtle world of the play's high politics, it is not quite clear who the traitor is. There is, however, much talk of “high blood” on the part of Bolingbroke in an atmosphere that is very ritualized and outwardly imbued with chivalric ideals: “By that and all the rites of knighthood else / Will I make good against thee, arm to arm,” says Bolingbroke to his rival Thomas Mowbray (1.1.75-76).⁹

In his dedication to the Earl of Essex in the Conference About the Next Succession, the Jesuit Robert Parsons is keen to insist upon the earl's lineage, “your noble ancestors,” as he calls them, pointing out that all this is “recorded by our Inglish histories” (Parsons 1594, 2-3). By insisting on the earl's lineage, Parsons thus manages through his argumentation to place Robert Devereux at the heart of the succession struggle, creating (artificially) a nearness to the queen that reminds us of Bolingbroke's dangerous closeness to power in Shakespeare's play:

… no man is in more high & eminent place or dignitie at this day in our realme, then your selfe, whether we respect your nobilitie, or calling, or fauour with your prince, or high liking of the people, & consequently no man like to haue a greater part or sway in deciding of this great affaire … then your honour, and those that will assist you & are likest to follow your fame and fortune.

(Parsons 1594, 2)

The “high liking of the people” associated to Essex's person is redolent in some ways of Bolingbroke's own popularity that comes back to haunt Richard time and time again: “As were our England in reversion his, / And he our subjects' next degree in hope” (1.4.36)—in other words, as if Bolingbroke was the next person in line for the throne. It is a strange coincidence also that Hereford was a name borne by Bolingbroke and by the Essex family, as Walter Devereux—Robert's father—was elevated by Elizabeth from Viscount Hereford to Earl of Essex in 1572.¹⁰ But it is the antiquary and historian William Camden who unwittingly reveals the associations between Bolingbroke—the defender of his murdered uncle, Woodstock—and Robert Earl of Essex. In the eyes of some of the Catholics, recalls Camden in his history of the reign of Elizabeth I, Essex had antecedents for the crown and these Catholics “cast their eyes upon the Earle of Essex, … feigning a Title from Thomas of Woodstock, King Edward the third's sonne, from whom hee derived his Pedigree” (Camden 1630, 4:57).¹¹

It is clear that Shakespeare's Richard II weaves a web of associations that may not be entirely fortuitous for a playwright caught up in a system of patronage that implied a measure of dialogue with the ruling classes, and sometimes necessitated some fine tuning and subtle positioning. To take the measure of this positioning, one must turn to the fast-moving environment in which the dramatist had to operate.

II. ESSEX AND THE “RITES OF KNIGHTHOOD” (1595)

But why did Robert Parsons, under the name of Doleman, dedicate his Conference to Robert Earl of Essex? The meaning of this dedication is perhaps found in the events surrounding the writing of Shakespeare's Richard II and Parsons's treatise.

On Sunday, February 25, 1593, Robert Earl of Essex took the Oath of Supremacy and the oath of a privy councillor. In the early 1590s, the queen's Privy Council had become an aging body and was in great need of new blood. At twenty-seven, Essex was then seen as definitely on the rise; he was recognized as one of the queen's chief advisers in matters of state and particularly in the domain of foreign affairs. Essex's martial prowess turned him into an ideal courtier in the slightly surreal and artificial atmosphere of chivalry that the queen sought to create around her. But he was someone also who had an impressive intelligence network in England and abroad—which was a great asset for the queen and her other councillors. In the ensuing years he was to develop this network even further.

This policy opened diplomatic doors for Essex in Europe and set him off at home against other men of state such as William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who had become synonymous with bloody repression in the eyes of the Catholic community. In many ways, Essex was also anticipating without realizing it the policy of Robert Cecil, who would later have the same underhand involvement with Catholic circles. For the more militant Catholics, however, Essex's policy of toleration could be seen as a threat and as something that could stall plans for the restoration of the old Catholic order in England by the force of arms. There was indeed an element of political calculation in Essex that helped him to enter many circles of power, including oppositional circles. Publicly he displayed the reassuring image of a staunch Protestant, but behind the scenes he engineered quite a different policy (Hammer 1999, 174). In the early 1590s, he had already started to send positive signs to those members of the English Catholic community who were loyal to the government and who considered themselves anti-Spanish. In 1593, he was instrumental in securing the brief release from prison of the well-known recusant Sir Thomas Tresham; and during the Cadiz expedition of 1596, he also sought to appear more like an anti-Spanish agent than an anti-Catholic one (Hammer, 175).

This was certainly what worried the author of the Conference About the Next Succession. Whereas Essex saw his dealings as subtle and discreet, the Dedication sought to expose him in order to destabilize him. First, by openly associating him with the Catholic community, Parsons turned him into a potential collaborator and double agent: “First then I saye,” writes Parsons, “that my particular obligation towards your honours person, riseth partly of good turnes and benefites receaued by some frendes of myne at your Lordships handes …” (Parsons 1594, 2). Then, by linking him to the burning issue of the succession, the Jesuit father was probably trying to alienate him from the queen—Essex was suddenly exposed as a conniving agent provocateur—a Bolingbroke whose dealings were dubious and who was invited through the repeated allusions to Richard II in the treatise to take appropriate action. Parsons's book thus complicated matters in a political climate that was already extremely tense.

Some of the correspondence exchanged by the courtiers at the time shows how serious a threat Parsons's treatise represented, and also how many people had heard of it, had read it, or were wanting to read it. On September 25, 1595, Robert Beale writes the following to Sir Robert Sidney:

Our irresoluteness at home, and the little estimation of us abroad make me fear we shall receive some blow. …

I hear of late a vile book has been printed in English in Antwerp touching the succession of the Crown, and deriving a strange pretence from John of Gaunt upon the King of Spain. If you could procure me one of the books, I should be beholden. I hear it is dedicated to the Earl of Essex, of intent surely to bring him in jealousy and disgrace.

(Kingsford 1934, 2:165)

On November 3, 1595, Parsons's Conference comes into the hands of the queen, who then shows it to Essex (Spedding 1861-74, 1.374). Two days later, on November 5, Rowland Whyte, this time, shares the latest gossip from the court with Sire Robert Sidney in a letter:

Vpon Monday last, 1500 [Queen Eliz.] shewed 1000 [Earl of Essex] a printed Book of t—t, Title to a—a: In yt their is, as I here, daungerous Praises of 1000 of his Valour and Worthines, which doth hym harme here. At his comming from Court he was obserued to looke wan and pale, being exceedinglie troubled at his great Piece of Villanie donne vnto hym; he is Sick, and continewes very ill. 1500 visited hym Yesterday in Thafternoone. He is mightelie crossed in all Things. …

Whyte's postscript to the same letter shows the true impact of Parsons's controversial book: “The Book I spake of is dedicated to my Lord Essex, and printed beyond Sea [sic], and tis thought to be Treason to haue it. To wryte of these Things are dangerous in so perillous a Tyme …” (Collins 1746, 1:357-58).

On November 12, 1595, another letter by Rowland Whyte addressed to Sir Robert Sidney announces that Essex is back in favor and that the storm is momentarily over. Essex is again at the helm of the queen's foreign affairs: “My Lord of Essex hath put off the Melancholy he fell vnto, by a printed Booke deliuered to the Queen; wherein the Harme was meant hym, by her Majesties gracious Fauor and Wisdom, is turned to his good, and strengthens her Loue vnto hym; for I heare, that within these 4 Days, many Letters sent to her self, from forren Countries, were deliuered only to my Lord of Essex, and he answered them …” (Collins 1746, 1:360).

Later that same month, Essex's adviser Francis Bacon was to try and heal the wounds between the earl and the queen during the Accession Day tilt—an occasion for a celebration of the Elizabethan régime through the somewhat allegorical rites of a neomedieval chivalric ethos. Bacon thus composed for his patron a masque of “Love and Self-love” that was to accompany the highly ritualized Accession Day tournaments. The occasion was supposed to reinforce the bond between Essex and the queen through a form of neomedieval pageantry that could serve as a powerful means of mediation in times of doubt or crisis. But in this case, what the spectators of the masque witnessed was a breakdown of “the rites of knighthood,” to quote Shakespeare's Bolingbroke (1.1.75). In the same way that Shakespeare's Richard II puts a premature end to a form of ritual that could serve traditionally to resolve conflicts (1.3.124 onward), the queen, who could see (like Richard) only too clearly through the so-called ritual and allegory of Bacon's Masque, simply stormed off, thus ending abruptly the allegorical dialogue of reconciliation initiated by Bacon. Rowland Whyte reports again in his correspondence that the queen got up all of a sudden and said, “that if she had thought their had bene so much said of her, she wold not haue been their that Night, and soe went to Bed” (qtd. in McCoy 1989, 86).

Shakespeare's Richard II depicts a world in which it is clear from the start that the rites of chivalry are no longer capable of reconciling opposites. It becomes gradually obvious that other means of mediation have to be used, rediscovered, or reinvented. Despite the failure of Bacon's masque, 1595 was the year when Essex's influence over the queen had reached its height. In July 1596, however, the newly appointed Secretary of State Robert Cecil—Lord Burghley's son—was to become suddenly a fierce competitor. Opposition within the queen's Privy Council was even more deeply entrenched. Mediation had to be sought, and it was to be sought in already existing bodies or offices that suddenly acquired a new value. One of these bodies was Parliament, while the office that was to turn Essex into an overambitious courtier in the eyes of some of his contemporaries was the ancient office of Earl Marshal and Constable, to which he was appointed in 1597.

With his insistence on the powers of Parliament, Robert Parsons had turned an existing political body into something more dangerous—an institution that had the power to step in if and when the monarchy was in crisis. As Cyndia Susan Clegg points out, “Not until Parsons argued that the Spanish Infanta's succession to the crown of England was legitimate because Parliament deposed Richard II did Parliament's powers become incorporated into oppositional discourse. Parsons's book thus created in the mid-1590s an issue where one had not existed before” (Clegg 1997, 445). It therefore becomes more understandable that the Parliament or deposition scene in Richard II (4.1.154-317) did not appear in print until 1608 (when the succession issue was over), as (from the point of view of the censors dealing with printed books) its implications were unacceptable as long as the issue was not settled. For the censors of play texts, however, this was a less burning issue, and it is likely that the play continued to be performed with the deposition scene as it most certainly was in 1601 when the supporters of the Essex rising paid the Chamberlain's Men (the Bard's own acting company) to perform a play that in all likelihood was Shakespeare's Richard II.¹²

In Shakespeare's play, the role of Parliament became immediately visible to the audience, and it is the very staging of the deposition that, in the eyes of Bolingbroke, guarantees the legitimacy of the whole process:

Fetch hither Richard, that in common view
He may surrender. So we shall proceed
Without suspicion.

(4.1.155-57)

Parsons himself had presented both the Privy Council and Parliament as safeguards against tyranny. In his Conference, Parliament is seen as the almost ultimate guarantee that succession crises are resolved in a satisfactory manner (God's will in these matters is consciously played down by Parsons). For the Jesuit activist, the deposition of Richard II:

… could not be executed in better nor more conuenient order. First for that it vvas done by the choice and inuitation of al the realme or greater and better parte thereof as hath bin said. Secondly for that the king vvas deposed by act of parlament, and himself conuinced of his vnworthy gouerment, and brought to confesse that he vvas vvorthely depriued. …

(Parsons 1594, 67)

That the Conference was dedicated to the Earl of Essex may not be fortuitous either, because Parsons may have been aware that the earl had a will to find constitutional solutions that would help curtail the whims of royal authority. When Essex was appointed Earl Marshal in 1597, he became immediately interested in reviving the ancient powers of this highest surviving feudal office and commissioned researchers to look into the status and privileges of the office. The findings themselves were potentially seditious in that they reinstated an authority that partly endangered the concept of royal sovereignty. In this sense, as Richard C. McCoy points out in a seminal study, “The research initiated by Essex is … another ‘missing link’ between earlier medieval and Tudor theories of mixed government and the parliamentary opposition of the seventeenth century” (McCoy 1989, 94).

III. REBELLION AND THE POLARIZATION OF DISCOURSE

Essex's ambitions were to be thwarted, nonetheless, both by the man who had become his rival and by his military ventures, which caused his estrangement from the circles of power, and, as a consequence, encouraged him to take desperate measures to regain his lost influence.

The end of the 1590s saw many of the familiar hauntings of the decade reemerge. Parsons's defense of the rights of the Infanta of Spain to the throne of England had not been forgotten, and the topic itself kept rearing its head in the correspondence addressed to the Secretary of State, Robert Cecil. In a letter dated June 27, 1599, Sir Henry Neville even proposed to use the Infanta as a means of testing the loyalty of potential suspects:

… whether yt be not convenient, that suche Preists or notorious Recusants as shall be hereafter apprehended, be severely examined, whether they have not sollicited others, or bin sollicited themselves, to subscribe to that Title of the Infanta. And lastly, whether yt will not be fit, when you shall come to treat with the Archduke, to insist upon an Article, of the Infanta's Resignation of any pretended Title.

(Sawyer 1725, 1:52)

The whole issue of the succession as well as its religious and political implications had become a means of tracking down opponents, of creating an opposition. Be that as it may, the secretary himself played a game very similar to that of Essex, who sometimes got dangerously involved with some of the members of the Catholic community in England or abroad. It even appears that Cecil could have been secretly interested in potential negotiations with the Infanta. A series of letters addressed to him by one Filippo Corsini seems to point in that direction. Starting, as far as the evidence shows, at the beginning of August 1599, these letters give news of the whereabouts of the Infanta and of the Archduke her husband, and they also reveal that Cecil requested that a portrait of the couple be sent to him in all secrecy. Corsini writes to him on September 3, 1599: “I have received your letter and seen your wish to have the picture, and on Saturday when the courier starts I will write as from myself and to a friend of mine, who will see that you have it as soon as possible, in the manner you ordered, and with all secrecy and speed” (Calendar of the Manuscripts 1883-1976, 9:345). On November 14, the paintings arrived, and Corsini promised to continue to treat the whole matter with the uttermost secrecy: “I have received from Antwerp the portraits of the Infanta and the Archduke Albert her husband. I send them to you by my friend the bearer. They are present to me and I humbly beg you to accept of them from me. You may be assured that this affair has been carried out in all secrecy” (9:391).

On Sunday, February 8, 1601, the supporters of the Earl of Essex staged their ill-fated coup. The day before, a play that probably was Shakespeare's Richard II had been performed by the playwright's own company. Sir Gilly Meyrick—Essex's faithful attendant—had even given the players an extra forty shillings: “So earnest hee was to satisfie his eyes with the sight of that Tragedie, which hee thought soone after his Lord should bring from the Stage to the State. …” (Bacon 1601, sig. K3). The earl's supporters were soon arrested and the trial began. On February 18, some of the evidence was brought before the Privy Council:

Your letters of the 17th of this present touching the seditious and provoking speeches uttered by the Earl [of Essex] to stir the people to adhere unto him in his rebellious actions, we receive in the evening about eight o'clock; and according to the straitness of the time, we have examined divers that did hear the Earl publish and intimate to the people those seditious and provoking speeches that the crown of England was sold or betrayed to the Infanta of Spain, and to that effect: whose examinations we have taken in writing, upon their oaths, and do send them to you inclosed herein.¹³

Essex's indignant outcry in the streets of London foreshadows the accusations directed against him during his trial and points to the same process of outward and artificial polarization that we outlined at the beginning of this essay. Essex is executed on February 25, 1601. A few days later (on March 4), Monsieur de Boisisse, the French ambassador in England, recalls the accusations against Essex:

… qu'il estoit papiste; qu'il retinoit les Jesuits en sa Maison; qu'il vouloit usurper la Couronne; qu'il avoit de grandes Intelligences en Escosse, & en Irelande avec le Conte de Tyrone. Bref, qu'il avoit vendu la Ville de Londres al Infante, & qu'il en avoit reçeu quelque Argent. Voila ce que generallement ilz luy objecterent.

(Sawyer 1725, 1.298)¹⁴

The ambassador then tells of Essex's desperate ploy. Indeed, during the trial the earl had also attempted to incriminate Robert Cecil, accusing him of conniving with the opposition:

… ilz font venir le Secretaire, comme personne interposeé [sic] en leur tragedie. Lequel ayant plus de deux ans passé, bien songé à ce qu'il avoit à dire, tonnà une quantité de paroles contre le Conte d'Essex. Lequel n'eut faute de responce de moyens pour maintenir au Secretaire, qu'il avoit eu Intelligence avec le feu Roy d'espagne l'année de la Grande Flotte. Ce que picqua si fort le Secretaire, (pour en estre paraventure quelque chose) qu'il se prit à crier tout/hault, qu'il ne feroit jamais service à sa Majesté, si on ne luy ostoit la teste comme à un Traistre.

(Sawyer 1725, 1:298)¹⁵

All through the trial other commonplace accusations resurfaced, among them, allusions to Richard II—the play that Essex's supporters had actually used on the day of the rebellion to further their cause. Extracts of the hearing show how much the whole issue of the deposition of Richard II was present in the minds of the accused, but also in those of the accusers, especially in this dialogue between Southampton and the Attorney-General:

SOUTHAMPTON:
Good Mr Attorney, let me ask you what, in your conscience, you think we would have done to her Majesty if we gained the Court?
ATTORNEY-GENERAL:
I protest upon my soul, and in my conscience, I do believe she should not have lived long after she had been in your power. Note but the precedent of former ages: how long lived King Richard the Second after he was surprised in the same manner. The pretence there was also to remove certain councillors; but it shortly after cost the King his life. Such is the unquenchable thirst of ambition, never satisfied so long as any greatness is unachieved. But I know this for certain, that to surprise the Court or take the Tower by way of defence from private enemies, is plain treason.

(Jardine 1832, 1:337)

Another accusation dealt with what had disappeared in the published quartos of Shakespeare's play (until 1608), that is to say, the whole issue of the powers of Parliament. On February 26, 1601, the day that followed Essex's execution, Robert Cecil, writing to Lord Deputy Mountjoy, painted a picture of what—according to him—Essex had envisaged politically: “… and then, having her [the queen] in their possessions, to have used the shadow of her authority for removing of all they misliked, and for change of the Government; and so to have called a Parliament, and have condemned all those that should have been scandalized to have misgoverned the State” (Calendar of State Papers 1860-1912, 1:199).

Beyond the artificial polarization of discourse, all the accusations of betrayal, of supporting the cause of Spain, of conniving with Catholics, this was probably the crucial issue that cost the earl his head—the parliamentary issue, one that had also forced the publishers of Shakespeare's early quartos to cut the so-called “woeful pageant” (4.1.320) of Richard II's parliamentary demise. The reappearance in 1601 of Richard II—Shakespeare's “old play,” as the actors themselves referred to it—is a proof of the play's enduring topical nature. It may also suggest that its strong contextual associations both at the time of its writing and after open a new field of interpretation—one that points to the very incompleteness of thematic readings and that also “challenge[s] the assumption that a progression narrative is a suitable model for the construction of Shakespeare's career” (Hamilton 1992, xii).

In the extremely tense political context of February 1601 (the Earl of Essex felt much maligned), the agreement to stage a play on the deposition of Richard II could surely not be motivated by commercial reasons alone—such a decision was no doubt a statement of support to the disgraced earl.¹⁶ Shakespeare had toyed with ideas of rebellion in Richard II—ideas that Robert Parsons had also used to destabilize the Elizabethan state—but whereas Parsons prayed that his arguments would one day force change to happen, it is unlikely that Shakespeare and his fellow actors were aware that their play was just a rehearsal of an open rebellion taking place the next day. Nevertheless, they had, without realizing it, agreed to cross the line that separated political support from potential treason.

Notes

1. I follow Gurr's conclusions regarding the date of the play (Shakespeare 1990, 1).

2. See Shakespeare, King Richard II (1990, 1).

3. For non-Shakespearean uses of the theme, see Campbell (1964, 191).

4. This question is well documented, thanks to a string of articles by Albright (1927) and Heffner (1930, 1932) in PMLA. A recent article by Dutton (1993) is also extremely useful.

5. “… our auncestors liued in the highest pitch and perfection of libertie, but we of servilitie, being in the nature, not of subiectes, but of abiectes, and flat slaues; not to one intractable Prince onely, but to many proude & disdainefull fauorites; … And therefore we are now compelled to shake off our shoulders this importable yoke, and submit our selues to the soueraigntie of some more moderate and worthy person.” (Hayward 1599, sig. 14). The work also bore a lavish dedication in Latin to the Earl of Essex.

6. See Heffner (1930, 767).

7. See Shakespeare, Henry V (1986, 592-93).

8. On the evidence that the prologue (or chorus) scenes are absent from the 1600 quarto edition of Henry V (Q1), it has been argued that these scenes are a later addition, and that the allusion to “the General of our gracious Empress” actually refers to Charles Blount, Lord Mountjoy, who was Queen Elizabeth's (more successful) general and lord deputy in Ireland from 1600 to 1603 (see Smith 1954). Taylor, in his edition of the play, demonstrates convincingly that this is unlikely (Shakespeare 1994, 4-7). Taylor also emphasizes the topicality of the play: “The date of Henry V can thus not only be established with—for Shakespeare—extraordinary precision; it is also of extraordinary importance. Reflections of contemporary history have been suspected in many of Shakespeare's plays, but the allusion to the Irish expedition in 5.0.29-34 is the only explicit, extra-dramatic, incontestable reference to a contemporary event anywhere in the canon” (7).

9. All references to the play are taken from Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Gurr (1990).

10. See Hammer (1999, 18-19).

11. Also quoted in Campbell 180. More accurately, according to Shakespeare, Thomas was Edward's sixth son, and the third son was Lionel, Duke of Clarence (see 2 Henry VI 2.2.10 ff.).

12. For this distinction between the two types of censorship, see Shakespeare, King Richard II (1990, 9). That it was Shakespeare's play is a logical supposition. As Schoenbaum pointed out, no real contradictory elements have been discovered to demonstrate that the play was not Shakespeare's (1975, 7).

13. February 18, 1601, Sir Edward Wotton, Sir Henry Brouncker, and Mr Recorder Croke to the Council (Calendar of the Manuscripts 1883-1976, 11:66-67.)

14. “… that he was a papist, that he had Jesuits to stay at his house, that he wanted to usurp the Crown; that he had secret intelligence with men in Scotland and with the Earl of Tyrone in Ireland. In short, that he had sold the city of London to the Infanta and that he had received money in exchange. These were the main accusations.”

15. March 4, 1601, London, “Copy of a Letter from Monsieur de Boisisse (the French Ambassador then residing in England) to Monsieur de Rohan”: “… they bring in the Secretary [of State] to play the middle man in their tragedy. He had had time during the last two years to think about what he wanted to say and he thus vented all his anger against the Earl of Essex. The Earl was quick to retort that the Secretary had had secret intelligence with the late King of Spain in the year of the Armada. The Secretary was so stung by this (which suggests that this may have been truthful), that he cried out that he would leave the service of her Majesty if the traitor was not beheaded.”

16. As Thomson writes, “The agreement to stage the play on Saturday 7 February was an open statement by a company of players that they supported the maligned Earl of Essex. When, on Sunday 8 February, Essex's discontent broke out into rebellion, such support was no longer easily distinguishable from treason” (1992, 139).

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