tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/king-james-i-31277/articles
King James I – The Conversation
2024-03-06T13:23:19Z
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/223522
2024-03-06T13:23:19Z
2024-03-06T13:23:19Z
Mary & George: homosexual relationships in the time of King James I were forbidden – but not uncommon
<p>The Sky TV series Mary & George tells the story of the Countess of Buckingham, Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore), who moulded her son George (Nicholas Galitzine) to seduce King James I. She believed that, as the king’s lover, her son could become wealthy and wield power and influence.</p>
<p>No one identified as a “homosexual” in King James’s time (1566-1625). The word was only <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/homosexuality-in-renaissance-england/9780231102896">coined in the Victorian period</a> and sexuality was not used to construct identities as it is today. </p>
<p>There was also a more <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674543553">fluid concept of gender</a>. Male and female bodies were seen as <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Gender-and-the-English-Revolution/Hughes/p/book/9780415214919">fundamentally the same</a>, with sexual differences determined by the way bodily humours (fluids) flowed through them. </p>
<p>A man who desired sex with other men was seen as having an imbalance in his humours – and was <a href="https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674543553">blamed</a> for failing to control it. </p>
<p>Sexual acts between men were forbidden by the church, citing passages from the the Bible. <a href="https://biblia.com/bible/esv/1-corinthians/6/9">Corinthians 6:9</a> classed the “effeminate” and “abusers of themselves with mankind” among the “unrighteous” who would not inherit the kingdom of God. </p>
<p>The puritan theologian William Perkins, <a href="https://ota.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/repository/xmlui/bitstream/handle/20.500.12024/A09339/A09339.html?sequence=5&isAllowed=y">writing in 1591</a>, itemised “strange pleasures about generation, prohibited in the word of God”. This included sexual acts with beasts, devils and members of the same sex. </p>
<p>It was sometimes thought that men who had sex with men would give birth to monsters. Sodomites (people who engaged in anal sex) were said to be the offspring of witches having sex with devils.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Trailer for Mary & George.</span></figcaption>
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<h2>Sodomy on trial</h2>
<p>Originally under the jurisdiction of the church courts, in 1533 <a href="https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/131232/1/Revised_submission_to_Parliamentary_History_WRR_version.pdf">sodomy or “buggery”</a> became a secular crime subject to the death penalty. The offender “not having God before his eyes” was said to have “devilishly” and against “almighty god” and the “order of nature” committed the “destestible” sin of sodomy “not to be named amongst Christians”. </p>
<p>This sort of phrasing was usually reserved for the most heinous offences such as witchcraft, blasphemy and treason.</p>
<p>In early modern southern Europe, hundreds of men were tried and executed for sodomy. But in northern Europe, <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/forbidden-desire-in-early-modern-europe-9780198886334?lang=3n&cc=pa">very few cases were prosecuted</a>. </p>
<p>Low rates of prosecution can indicate one of two things. Either an unwillingness to prosecute a crime, or that the crime occurred infrequently. </p>
<p>Historian <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/homosexuality-in-renaissance-england/9780231102896">Alan Bray argues</a> that, in this instance, it indicates a lack of interest in prosecuting homosexual acts and thereby a degree of tolerance – particularly for acts that did not involve penetration. </p>
<p>Early modern historian Noel Malcolm offers <a href="https://global.oup.com/academic/product/forbidden-desire-in-early-modern-europe-9780198886334?lang=3n&cc=pa">a different explanation</a>. He suggests that the higher rates of prosecution in southern Europe reflect a greater prevalence of homosexual acts involving men who were otherwise heterosexual by preference there. </p>
<p>It is a bold thesis, but is it correct? The low rates of prosecution for sodomy in England follow a comparable pattern to those for rape – so infrequently prosecuted that it’s hard to believe that either represents their actual incidence. Both often involved accusations by a person of lower status against someone in authority.</p>
<p>Jurors were <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296174755_The_patriarch_at_home_The_trial_of_the_2nd_Earl_of_Castlehaven_for_rape_and_sodomy">reluctant to convict</a> sexual crimes which carried the death penalty. There was also an inclination to doubt the credibility of victims. This discouraged accusations. In a <a href="https://www.routledge.com/Wanton-Wenches-and-Wayward-Wives-Peasants-and-Illicit-Sex-in-Early-Seventeenth-Century-England/Quaife/p/book/9780367174743">1622 case from Somerset</a>, sex crimes involving multiple unwilling partners had been going on for 14 years before victims came forward. </p>
<p>The rarity of sodomy cases, and the sparse detail given in most English legal records, makes it difficult to conclude much about queer sexual practices. </p>
<p>A Sussex clergyman and an Essex schoolmaster <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/homosexuality-in-renaissance-england/9780231102896">were accused</a> in the late Elizabethan period. A coxswain on an East India ship who <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/homosexuality-in-renaissance-england/9780231102896">“committed buggery”</a> with a ship’s boy in 1609 was tried at sea and hanged. </p>
<p>A steward who had sexual contact of a different sort with the same boy was merely whipped. In another naval case from 1638 the offender was imprisoned but <a href="https://cup.columbia.edu/book/homosexuality-in-renaissance-england/9780231102896">eventually pardoned</a>. </p>
<p>Accusations of sodomy were also used to attack religious opponents. Protestant polemicist John Bale made a <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/176987/the-anatomy-of-melancholy-by-burton-robert/9780141192284">“catalogue of sodomites”</a> supposedly discovered in Henry VIII’s monasteries. </p>
<p>An <a href="https://archive.org/details/puritanismemothe0098bcca">anti-puritan publication</a> of 1633 claimed that theologian John Calvin fled to Geneva not on account of religious persecution, but because he had been charged with sodomy in France. In the 1630s, puritans in Sussex framed the traditionalist vicar of Arlington, <a href="https://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/library/browse/details.xhtml?recordId=3203052&recordType=Journal">John Wilson</a>, for supposedly attempting to “commit buggery” with three men and a mare.</p>
<h2>King James’s relationships</h2>
<p>But it wasn’t all negative. Growing up in the all-male environments of school, university and inns of court, it was seen as normal for the most intense emotional relationships of elite males to be with other men. </p>
<p>In the late 1500s, the French essayist <a href="https://hyperessays.net/essays/on-friendship/">Michel de Montaigne wrote</a> of his friend Étienne de la Boétie: “If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.”</p>
<p>Philosopher and statesman Francis Bacon considered heterosexual love a “weak passion” compared to the <a href="https://rictornorton.co.uk/baconfra.htm">love between male friends</a>. Bacon apparently preferred the “Ganymedes” (<a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Ganymede-Greek-mythology#:%7E:text=Ganymede%2C%20in%20Greek%20legend%2C%20the,Minos%2C%20to%20serve%20as%20cupbearer.">Ganymede</a> was a mythological beautiful boy abducted by Zeus) among his servants to his sexually frustrated wife. But he was never prosecuted. </p>
<p>When it came to powerful man like Bacon, and perhaps with lesser mortals as well, it seems that while people didn’t approve of his sexual inclinations, they were willing to ignore them. </p>
<p>As to what King James I got up to sexually with his male favourites in his bedroom, historians can never be sure. The stories of his Ganymedes which abounded after his death could simply reflect prejudice against him as a Scottish foreigner, or distaste at his extravagance towards his favourites. They may be a misreading of his <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/23265594">physical demonstrativeness</a> with friends, which shocked his wife Anne when she first met him.</p>
<p>Though we don’t know the truth about his sexual preferences, we do know that James had three intense and exclusive <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt20q1z4b">romantic affairs with men</a>. It’s possible that they had a sexual side, just as it’s possible that had he lived today, he wouldn’t have <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/254157154_James_VI_and_I_Time_for_a_Reconsideration">defined himself as heterosexual</a>.</p>
<p>Instead, shaped by his time, in his book <a href="https://archive.org/stream/cu31924097402626/cu31924097402626_djvu.txt">Basilikon Doron</a> (1599), James classed sodomy with witchcraft and murder as unforgivable crimes. It must have required some degree of hypocrisy – or cognitive dissociation – for him to square this statement with his own desires. But he probably thought the rules did not apply to him: it was a maxim in law that the king could do no wrong. </p>
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<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Fiona McCall does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
It was sometimes thought that men who had sex with men would give birth to monsters.
Fiona McCall, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, University of Portsmouth
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/105944
2019-11-04T10:36:04Z
2019-11-04T10:36:04Z
The Gunpowder Plot: torture and persecution in fact and fiction
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299460/original/file-20191030-17914-1lgl5m3.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=59%2C14%2C4896%2C4086&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">After the main plotters of the Gundpowder plot were tortured and executed, accusations of treason, heresy, and witchcraft were used to persecute other enemies of the Crown. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gruppenbild_Die_Verschw%C3%B6rer_des_Gunpowder-Plots.jpg#filelinks">Crispijn van de Passe the Elder/ Wikimedia</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>In 1605, England’s parliament was sitting on a powder keg, literally. Like now, the country was bitterly divided between two factions, with religion at the heart of the schism after the Reformation pitted Protestants and Catholics against each other in a life or death struggle. History tells us that instead of seeking a political solution such as an election, a group of 13 Catholic conspirators plotted to blow up parliament. </p>
<p>The conspiracy aimed to assassinate King James I and the Protestant establishment with a massive explosion under the House of Lords. Every “fifth of November” since then, what is now known as the <a href="https://www.bbc.com/timelines/z3hq7ty">Gunpowder Plot</a> is remembered in Britain through bonfires, fireworks and the burning of effigies of one of the conspirators, Guido (Guy) Fawkes. Following the torture and execution of Fawkes and his co-conspirators, accusations of treason, heresy, and witchcraft were used to persecute many of the perceived enemies of the crown. </p>
<p>The process of arrest, torture, trial and execution was widespread, as the king sought to rid the country of his twin hatreds: <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/civil_war_revolution/gunpowder_robinson_01.shtml">Catholicism</a> and <a href="https://www.historyextra.com/period/stuart/shakespeares-macbeth-and-king-jamess-witch-hunts/">witchcraft</a>. This purge caused many Catholics, especially priests, to flee northwards to escape the king’s revenge. Lancashire came to be perceived by the royal court as a lawless area where Catholicism and witchcraft thrived – and it was there that the infamous <a href="http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/">Pendle witch trials of 1612</a> took place.</p>
<p>Though evidence remains from the actual trials, one of the most intriguing accounts didn’t come until 400 years after the events, when author Jeanette Winterson published her work of fiction, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/16/daylight-gate-jeanette-winterson-review">The Daylight Gate</a>. In this story, the fates of a group of vagrant women and a Catholic nobleman, Christopher Southworth, converge when the attention of the law turns towards them. Winterson uses the genuine names of the women who were tried for witchcraft – though freely fictionalising their lives. Southworth was also a real person, a Jesuit priest from one of the oldest families in Lancashire. </p>
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<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=938&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/299471/original/file-20191030-17888-othitv.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1178&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">An illustration of Ann Redferne and Chattox, two of the ‘Pendle witches’.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nance_Redferne_%26_Chattox.jpg">William Harrison Ainsworth/Wikimedia Commons</a></span>
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<p>As in real life, the women in the novel are charged with murder by witchcraft. Whether they committed acts of witchcraft or not, that is not their true crime here. These women have too much power and liberty for the patriarchal Protestant society in which they live. Southworth, meanwhile, is hunted in the novel for his involvement in the Gunpowder Plot. Captured previously, he had escaped from prison and fled to France, before returning to England to save his sister from her own witch trial. </p>
<p>There is no evidence to show the real Southworth was a part of the Gunpowder Plot. But historical record shows us Southworth was accused of coaching a young girl to make false accusations of witchcraft against her family – possible because the family had renounced Catholicism and converted to Protestantism. Given this, it’s likely he would have supported at least the aims of the Gunpowder Plot.</p>
<h2>Monstrous marks</h2>
<p>The fictional women’s bodies are sites onto which the men of the law project both their fears and desires. “Look her over for the witch marks – go on, Robert, run your hands across her. Do you like her breasts?”, remarks a constable’s assistant. But these are bodies made monstrous by the effects of poverty. The feet of the appropriately named Mouldheels are described as stinking “of dead meat … wrapped in rags and already beginning to ooze”. Yet despite this monstrosity, these women are still raped by their captors as desire, disgust and domination merge.</p>
<p>Southworth’s status in the novel is initially different from the women. He was born and raised with the twin privileges of being male and wealthy. With no marks on his body to denote his Catholic faith, he could not be identified as an “other” without specific knowledge of his religious divergence from the ruling class. But, following the failed Gunpowder Plot, his torture at the hands of the king’s jailers results in his body being made monstrous. Attempts to blind Southworth leave scars on his eyelids and cheeks, and pictures are carved into his chest with knives. </p>
<p>Like the women, he is raped by his jailers. He is then literally emasculated when his penis and testicles are cut off. Perhaps luckily for the real-life Southworth, there is no evidence of an arrest, although his historical records are very scant. By comparison, <a href="https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=19&sequence=1">the archives indicate the torture of Fawkes</a> at the hands of the king’s inquisitors.</p>
<p>In this febrile, paranoid society of post-Gunpowder Plot England, the connection between Catholics and witches is stated explicitly. As Potts, the prosecutor sent by the royal court to seek out heretics, says: “Witchery popery, popery witchery. What is the difference?”. The outcomes are certainly very similar. And the burning of the womens’ bodies after their execution mirrors the ritual bonfires and immolation of Guy Fawkes effigies that have celebrated the failure of the Catholic plotters ever since.</p>
<p>Winterson’s novel forces the reader to consider what a monster is and what they might look like. Elizabeth Device, one of the supposed witches, is described as follows: “The strangeness of her eye deformity made people fear her. One eye looked up and the other looked down, and both eyes were set crooked in her face.” But her disfigured appearance had not saved her from being raped nine years before the novel’s setting. Throughout the book, fear and disgust mix dangerously with desire and power to produce awful crimes. </p>
<p>The real monsters are the men who savagely abuse and oppress the unfortunate – whether women or Catholics. Yet, they are not represented as physically repulsive. One of the torturers even has a “pleasant voice” as he questions his victims. In the end, The Daylight Gate reveals that monstrous desires produce and prey on monstrous bodies, and all those subjected to the burning heat of the king’s revenge eventually turn to ash. While the political situation in Britain today has moved away from the Catholic/Protestant schism of 1605, it is worth remembering the human tragedies behind the celebration of Bonfire Night.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105944/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Shareena Z Hamzah-Osbourne does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Bonfire Night keeps the flames of division burning.
Shareena Z Hamzah-Osbourne, Honorary Research Associate, Swansea University
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/109993
2019-01-18T16:41:40Z
2019-01-18T16:41:40Z
Mary Queen of Scots: don’t worry about movie accuracy, historians can’t agree on who she really was either
<p>The story of Mary Queen of Scots, packed as it is with drama and tragedy, has always been a favourite of film makers. As far back as 1895, Thomas Edison made <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIOLsH93U1Q">The Execution of Mary Stuart</a>, a short film which was the first ever to use special effects to show Mary having her head chopped off. Since then, the doomed Scottish queen has been the subject of numerous biopics, ranging from Katharine Hepburn’s <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0027948/">Mary of Scotland (1936)</a> to the new Josie Rourke film <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2328900/">Mary Queen of Scots</a>, starring Saoirse Ronan as Mary. </p>
<p>When news media cover period dramas, historians are always asked if they are accurate. As far as the new Rourke film is concerned, the answer is no, of course not. Yet again audiences will come away thinking that she met Elizabeth I in person; there was a romantic involvement between Mary’s husband Henry Stewart Lord Darnley and her Italian secretary David Rizzio; and that 16th century Scots were wild and uncultivated. </p>
<p>Compared to its predecessors, however, Rourke’s film does quite well at blending the established narrative about Mary with creative licence. The <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067402/">1971 film</a> of Mary’s life, starring Vanessa Redgrave and Glenda Jackson, had the two queens meeting not once but twice. The 1936 movie was generally criticised for its melodramatic portrayal of Mary. And let’s not even address the wildly inaccurate treatment of Mary and the Anglo-Scottish relationship in the <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0127536/">1998</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0414055/">2007</a> biopics of Elizabeth I, starring Cate Blanchett. </p>
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<p>Yet while tallying points on the historical scorecard in films is always fun, it’s harder to criticise film makers here than over many other historical events. The reality is that it’s highly problematic to think in terms of the “truth” about Mary because right from the beginning, all the historical sources have polarised into two wildly different accounts of to what extent she influenced the events of her demise. </p>
<h2>Mary vs Mary</h2>
<p>Everyone agrees that Mary returned to Scotland from France in 1561 to become the active monarch, and that her reign started well and began to crumble after she married her cousin Lord Darnley in 1565. The marriage soon fell apart and Darnley was murdered by an explosion two years later. </p>
<p>Mary quickly married the Earl of Bothwell, and was forced to abdicate by rival nobles who objected to him becoming so closely interlinked with the throne. She ended up imprisoned before fleeing to England in 1568, where she was <a href="https://www.historyscotland.com/articles/mary-queen-of-scots/where-was-mary-queen-of-scots-imprisoned">jailed</a> again, in large part because of the threat she posed to Elizabeth as a rival to the throne. She remained in captivity until she was executed in 1587. </p>
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<p>The disagreement turns on whether Mary was essentially a blameless victim or scheming perpetrator. Did she have a hand in Darnley’s death, in collusion with his possible murderer Bothwell? Did she marry Bothwell willingly or was she effectively forced because he had raped her? Was she actually involved in the Babington Plot against Elizabeth which resulted in her execution? </p>
<p>The two competing narratives sprang up from the moment Mary was forced off the throne in favour of her 13-month-old son, James VI. The intellectual and poet George Buchanan wrote one version, initially in his scurrilous 1571 tract <a href="http://ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/headers/A69/A69648.html"><em>De Maria Regina Scotorum</em></a>. He smeared her as a lascivious whore who colluded with Bothwell in Darnley’s murder and helped her lover to seize the Scottish throne. </p>
<p>The victim narrative was created by Catholic writers like John Leslie, Bishop of Ross, who was one of Mary’s leading agents during her English captivity. Leslie’s <a href="https://glasgowuniscotrenaissance.wordpress.com/2018/04/23/john-leslie-a-defence-of-princesse-marie-quene-of-scotlande-and-dowager-of-france-with-a-declaration-as-well-of-her-right-to-the-sucession-of-the-crowne-of-englande-as-that-the/">1569</a> text celebrated her Catholic piety and condemned <a href="https://www.tudorsociety.com/24-july-1567-the-abdication-of-mary-queen-of-scots/">her removal</a> from the Scottish throne as an act of highest treason against the rightful Stewart monarch. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=629&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254527/original/file-20190118-100267-1wu3qog.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=790&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Quite contrary.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp02996/mary-queen-of-scots">NPG</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The same binary approach to Mary continues to the present day. During the civil wars of the mid-17th century, everyone compared her to her grandson Charles I. Royalists <a href="https://specialcollections-blog.lib.cam.ac.uk/?p=6793">claimed</a> they were both examples of how ambitious opponents have cast down the lawful monarch. Pro-republicans like John Milton <a href="https://www.dartmouth.edu/%7Emilton/reading_room/eikonoklastes/text.shtml">countered that</a> she was the source of Charles’s deceitful and evasive nature, and a moral warning of Stewart tyranny to come. </p>
<p>In the Victorian era, Mary’s <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Mary_Queen_of_Scots.html?id=msZMAQAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y">critics</a> built on Buchanan’s negative image of her, influenced to some extent by Presbyterian bias. <a href="https://www.baumanrarebooks.com/rare-books/skelton-john/mary-stuart/60252.aspx">Defenders</a> excused Mary’s failings on account of her youth, gender, and a French upbringing which ill-prepared her to rule Scotland. Modern historians have been far better at viewing Mary in the context of her gender in a highly patriarchal society, but still divide vehemently. The late <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/29/jenny-wormald">Jenny Wormald</a> received death threats for her unrelentingly harsh <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Mary_Queen_of_Scots.html?id=9bGbnAEACAAJ&redir_esc=y">critique</a> in 1988; while John Guy took the process full circle with a staunch <a href="https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/my-heart-is-my-own-mary-queen-scots/author/john-guy/">defence of Mary</a> in 2004. </p>
<h2>Mary in public</h2>
<p>We know less about public perceptions of Mary down the centuries. Indeed, I’m involved in a new two-year <a href="https://www.gla.ac.uk/news/headline_629499_en.html">research project</a> at the University of Glasgow, with more than 40 academics and curators, partly to understand this better. We know, for instance, that in the 18th century, Mary was curiously absent from the propaganda of the Jacobites battling to return the Stewarts to the British throne through Bonnie Prince Charlie. This might have been because the attempts to restore her to power had always failed. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=792&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/254169/original/file-20190116-163286-1ja8ohi.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">En deuil blanc by Franςois Clouet (1559).</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>We also know that the imagery of Mary has consistently presented her as a martyr. What are believed to have been authentic likenesses of Mary were produced during her time as a youth in France – most notably the 1559 <em>deuil blanc</em> (white veil) portraits mourning the death of her first husband, François II. </p>
<p>But while Mary was highly fashion conscious and wore a huge range of colours and outfits – a fact captured well in the new film – she’s almost always seen dressed like in the image earlier in the article: a black gown with a widow’s cap, high white collar, tightly bound hair and rosary and crucifix. This is derived from <a href="https://www.mountstuart.com/execution-mary-queen-scots/">contemporary accounts</a> of what she wore in captivity and at her execution. But in a similar way to images of Robert Burns, these details would stay the same over the years while her face, body size and shape have varied hugely. </p>
<p>The films of Mary have also been consistent, depicting her mainly as a sympathetic, strong heroine. It may or may not be the real Mary; we will never know for sure. So there isn’t a lot of point in worrying about historical accuracy when it comes to this Scottish icon. Take her as you find her, and rest assured that it won’t be long before Hollywood decides to serve up another new version for mass consumption.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/109993/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Steven Reid receives funding from the Royal Society of Edinburgh for the research project described in the article. </span></em></p>
The doomed Scottish monarch has divided opinion ever since the days when she was forced off the throne.
Steven Reid, Senior Lecturer, Scottish History, University of Glasgow
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/95791
2018-04-30T15:03:44Z
2018-04-30T15:03:44Z
How I tracked down the Frenchman who helped translate the King James Bible (and who didn’t speak English)
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216822/original/file-20180430-135851-261jxh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Title page and dedication from a 1613 King James Bible, printed by Robert Barker.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:KingJamesBible1612-1613.jpg">Private Collection of S. Whitehead</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>The King James Bible, often referred to as the “authorised version”, is one of the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12205084">most widely read and influential books in history</a>. Published for the first time in 1611 at the behest of King James I of England, the translation was the work of more than 40 scholars, who started from the original Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible.</p>
<p>Because of the Bible’s fame, people might be surprised to hear that it is still possible to find previously unknown and unidentified sources that shed light on how it came together. In fact, the process of translation remains mysterious – and there is plenty of work left to be done on how this was done. This reflects the wider possibilities of research into pre-modern literature and history – and there is still a huge amount to find out through archival research.</p>
<p>Over the past few years, I have been researching new evidence about how the bible was translated and have identified three new pieces of evidence that had been written by the King James translators in the course of their work. Before that, scholars had <a href="http://www.cambridge.org/gb/academic/subjects/religion/biblical-studies-new-testament/king-james-bible-short-history-tyndale-today?format=PB#f5VtJW0vzsIg0BV9.97">only found four</a>: a copy of an earlier English translation, parts of which were apparently revised by some of the translators; an anonymous draft of part of the New Testament; a set of <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=8E06AAAAcAAJ&pg=PA120&lpg=PA120&dq=todd+ward+esdras+walton&source=bl&ots=8FeJqufwoJ&sig=AjRQTK1Y28DI6VkTx96LzT4eoGs&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwin8ua_i-LaAhWqCsAKHQA7AusQ6AEINjAD#v=onepage&q&f=false">notes</a> on part of the Apocrypha by the translator Samuel Ward; and notes on the New Testament by another translator, John Bois. Nothing had been added to these sources since the 1970s.</p>
<h2>Fresh information</h2>
<p>My work brings the total number of sources from four up to seven. But what are the three new items? The first thing that links the three items is that they were not accurately catalogued. The first was a printed copy of the Old Testament in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, <a href="http://kingjamesbibletranslators.org/bios/John_Bois/">annotated heavily by Bois</a>, a linguist of whom it is said he could “write Hebrew with an elegant hand” by the age of six.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=486&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216854/original/file-20180430-135848-1mg35g4.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=611&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">John Bois’s annotated copy of the Greek Old Testament.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Nicholas Hardy, courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; Bodleian Library, D 1.14 Th.Seld., p. 343</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>But although the sub-collection this book belongs to has been in Oxford for centuries, it still has not been catalogued to modern standards. </p>
<p>The information available for each book is basic – in this case, the catalogue entry did not reveal that the book contained annotations, much less that they were by a well-known biblical translator. It is one of hundreds of thousands of early printed books all over the world that scholars still have to inspect in person in order to find out what they contain.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=824&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216848/original/file-20180430-135803-1rf16kl.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1036&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Correspondence between John Bois and Isaac Casaubon about the King James Apocrypha.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">© British Library Board; MS Burney 363, fol. 103r</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The same is true of the second and third items I found. The second was a set of handwritten letters exchanged between Bois and the celebrated French scholar, <a href="https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/casaubon/on_casaubon/">Isaac Casaubon</a> – who had arrived in England in 1610 at the behest of James I and who also participated in the translation. These letters have been in the British Library for about two centuries, but the catalogue says nothing about them other than the names of the correspondents. </p>
<p>The third item was a series of notes in the Bodleian Libraries which Casaubon made after discussing various problems of translation with another translator, <a href="http://kingjamesbibletranslators.org/bios/Andrew_Downes/">Andrew Downes</a>, a professor of Greek at Cambridge University. </p>
<p>Similarly, the notebook containing this record of the translation has a catalogue entry, but it is patchy, imprecise and does not capture the required level of detail. Again, there are thousands of partially catalogued manuscripts all over the world that stand ready to yield secrets like these to researchers who are willing to take a punt and consult them directly.</p>
<h2>Common language</h2>
<p>The next factor that links all three discoveries might surprise readers who think of the King James Bible as a distinctively “English” cultural product: they were all written in Latin, and they all involved some sort of foreign as well as English input. The printed edition of the Old Testament which Bois annotated had been published in Rome and Bois and Casaubon corresponded with each other in Latin. Casaubon’s conversations with Downes, similarly, were held and recorded in Latin, because Casaubon could not speak or write English.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/216859/original/file-20180430-135851-1d1lc2l.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Isaac Casaubon’s notes on his conversations with Andrew Downes about the King James Apocrypha and New Testament.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Photo Nicholas Hardy, courtesy of the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; MS Casaubon 28, fol. 4v</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Latin was the closest thing Europe had to a <a href="https://www.lrb.co.uk/v23/n21/anthony-grafton/thank-you-for-your-letter">common language</a> at the time, especially for its intellectual elites. Because comparatively few scholars of this period can read Latin, even a little knowledge of the language can open many different doors to unknown dimensions of early modern culture.</p>
<h2>Golden age of English writing?</h2>
<p>One thing is even more important than access to under-catalogued collections or material in unfamiliar languages, however. I needed a reason to do this research in the first place. In my case, there were two overarching motivations for my work on the King James Bible. </p>
<p>First, I was interested in these sorts of sources because I was interested in what the history of scholarly practices could tell us about the history of religion. Religion is often studied as though it were a matter of unquestioning faith, spiritual piety or clashes between fixed, mutually exclusive doctrines. </p>
<p>I wanted to show that Christian readers of the Bible in the early modern period were at the cutting edge of intellectual culture and were capable of seeing their sacred texts as historically and culturally specific documents. The sources I found illustrate how and why they could do this, as another commentator <a href="https://www.thedailybeast.com/bible-loved-by-christian-fundamentalists-written-using-method-they-hate?ref=author">has already observed</a>. </p>
<p>Second, I wanted to unpick the commonplace notion that the King James Bible, like other translations of the Bible into English from this period, was a product of a newly independent, assertive national literary culture: the culture of writers like Shakespeare, to take the most famous contemporary example. It may have come to look this way in subsequent centuries, but at the time it bore witness to constant cooperation and exchange between English and continental scholars. </p>
<p>The vast majority of researchers in my field are like me: they don’t enjoy the task of wading through library catalogues or reading Latin manuscripts for its own sake. The reason they do those things in the first place is to test and critique the grander narratives which we tell each other about the past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/95791/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Nicholas Hardy does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
Research on under-catalogued documents in Oxford sheds new light on one of history’s most influential books.
Nicholas Hardy, Fellow in English Literature, University of Birmingham
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/68713
2016-11-14T19:10:06Z
2016-11-14T19:10:06Z
Why was Shakespeare’s death such a non-event at the time?
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145743/original/image-20161114-21939-lxhsh9.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">People hold up face masks with Shakespeare's portrait during celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of his death this year. It was a completely different story when he died.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dylan Martinez/Reuters</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>William Shakespeare died on 23 April 1616, 400 years ago, in the small Warwickshire town of his birth. He was 52 years of age: still young (or youngish, at least) by modern reckonings, though his death mightn’t have seemed to his contemporaries like an early departure from the world.</p>
<p>Most of the population who survived childhood in England at this time were apt to die before the age of 60, and old age was a state one entered at what today might be thought a surprisingly youthful age.</p>
<p>Many of Shakespeare’s fellow-writers had died, or were soon to do so, at a younger age than he: <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Christopher-Marlowe">Christopher Marlowe</a>, in a violent brawl, at 29; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Francis-Beaumont">Francis Beaumont</a>, following a stroke, at 31 (also in 1616: just 48 days, as it happened, before Shakespeare’s own death); <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Robert-Greene">Robert Greene</a>, penitent and impoverished, of a fever, in the garret of a shoemaker’s house, at 34; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Kyd">Thomas Kyd</a>, after “bitter times and privy broken passions”, at 35; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/George-Herbert">George Herbert</a>, of consumption, at 39; <a href="http://www.biography.com/people/john-fletcher-9297122">John Fletcher</a>, from the plague, at 46; <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edmund-Spenser">Edmund Spenser</a>, “for lack of bread” (so it was rumoured), at 47; and <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Thomas-Middleton">Thomas Middleton</a>, also at 47, from causes unknown.</p>
<p>The cause or causes of Shakespeare’s death are similarly unknown, though in recent years they have become a topic of persistent speculation. Syphilis contracted by visits to the brothels of Turnbull Street, mercury or arsenic poisoning following treatment for this infection, alcoholism, obesity, cardiac failure, a sudden stroke brought on by the alarming news of a family disgrace – that Shakespeare’s son-in-law, Thomas Quiney, husband of his younger daughter, Judith, had been responsible for the pregnancy and death of a young local woman named Margaret Wheeler – have all been advanced as possible factors leading to Shakespeare’s death.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=724&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145708/original/image-20161114-9050-9zuk2j.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=910&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of Shakespeare from the First Folio of his plays.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Francis Thackeray, Director of the Institute for Human Evolution at the University of Witwatersrand, believes that <a href="http://www.livescience.com/14797-shakespeare-bones-smoked-pot.html">cannabis was the ultimate cause of Shakespeare’s death</a>, and has been hoping – in defiance of the famous ban on Shakespeare’s tomb (“Curst be he that moves my bones”, etc.) to inspect the poet’s teeth in order to confirm this theory. (“Teeth are not bones”, Dr Thackeray somewhat controversially insists.) No convincing evidence, alas, has yet been produced to support any of these theories.</p>
<p>More intriguing than the actual pathology of Shakespeare’s death, however, may be another set of problems that have largely evaded the eye of biographers, though they seem at times – in a wider, more general sense – to have held the poet’s own sometimes playful attention. They turn on the question of fame: how it is constituted; how slowly and indirectly it’s often achieved, how easily it may be delayed, diverted, or lost altogether from view.</p>
<h2>No memorial gathering</h2>
<p>On 25 April 1616, two days after his death, Shakespeare was buried in the chancel of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford, having earned this modest place of honour as much (it would seem) through his local reputation as a respected citizen as from any deep sense of his wider professional achievements.</p>
<p>No memorial gatherings were held in the nation’s capital, where he had made his career, or, it would seem, elsewhere in the country. The company of players that he had led for so long did not pause (so far as we know) to acknowledge his passing, nor did his patron and protector, King James, whom he had loyally served.</p>
<p>Only one writer, a minor Oxfordshire poet named <a href="http://oxfraud.com/SL-Basse">William Basse</a>, felt moved to offer, at some unknown date following his death, a few lines to the memory of Shakespeare, with whom he may not have been personally acquainted. Hoping that Shakespeare might be interred at Westminster but foreseeing problems of crowding at the Abbey, Basse began by urging other distinguished English poets to roll over in their tombs, in order to make room for the new arrival.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Renownèd Spenser, lie a thought more nigh.<br>
To learned Chaucer; and rare Beaumont, lie<br>
A little nearer Spenser, to make room<br>
For Shakespeare in your threefold, fourfold tomb.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>None of these poets responded to Basse’s injunctions, however, and Shakespeare was not to win his place in the Abbey for more than a hundred years, when Richard Boyle, third Earl of Burlington, commissioned William Kent to design and Peter Scheemakers to sculpt this life-size white marble statue of the poet – standing cross-legged, leaning thoughtfully on a pile of books – to adorn Poets’ Corner.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=995&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1251&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1251&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145716/original/image-20161114-9093-yl6z9w.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1251&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A Derby porcelain figure of Shakespeare modelled after the statue of 1741 by Peter Scheemakers in Poets’ Corner.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimeida images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On the wall behind this statue, erected in the Abbey in January 1741, is a tablet with a Latin inscription (perhaps contributed by the poet Alexander Pope) conceding the belated arrival of the memorial: “William Shakespeare,/124 years after his death/ erected by public love”.</p>
<p>Basse’s verses were in early circulation, but not published until 1633. No other poem to Shakespeare’s memory is known to have been written before the appearance of the First Folio in 1623. No effort appears to have been made in the months and years following the poet’s death to assemble a tributary volume, honouring the man and his works. None of Shakespeare’s other contemporaries noted the immediate fact of his passing in any surviving letter, journal, or record. No dispatches, private or diplomatic, carried the news of his death beyond Britain to the wider world.</p>
<p>Why did the death of Shakespeare cause so little public grief, so little public excitement, in and beyond the country of his birth? Why wasn’t his passing an occasion for widespread mourning, and widespread celebration of his prodigious achievements? What does this curious silence tell us about Shakespeare’s reputation in 1616; about the status of his profession and the state of letters more generally in Britain at this time?</p>
<h2>A very quiet death</h2>
<p>Shakespeare’s death occurred upon St George’s Day. That day was famous for the annual rites of prayer, procession, and feasting at Windsor by members of the Order of the Garter, England’s leading chivalric institution, founded in 1348 by Edward III. Marking as it did the anniversary of the supposed martyrdom in AD 303 of St George of Cappadocia, St George’s Day was celebrated in numerous countries in and beyond Europe, as it is today, but had emerged somewhat bizarrely in late mediaeval times as a day of national significance in England.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=398&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145727/original/image-20161114-21915-111gnvc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=500&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Tourists watch actors perform at the house where William Shakespeare was born during celebrations to mark the 400th anniversary of his death.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dylan Martinez/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>On St George’s Day 1616, as Shakespeare lay dying in far-off Warwickshire, King James – seemingly untroubled by prior knowledge of this event – was entertained in London by a poet of a rather different order named William Fennor.</p>
<p>Fennor was something of a royal favourite, famed for his facetious contests in verse, often in the King’s presence, with the Thames bargeman, John Taylor, the so-called Water Poet: a man whom James – as Ben Jonson despairingly reported to William Drummond – reckoned to be the finest poet in the kingdom.</p>
<p>In the days and weeks that followed, as the news of the poet’s death (one must assume) filtered gradually through to the capital, there is no recorded mention in private correspondence or official documents of Shakespeare’s name. Other more pressing matters were now absorbing the nation. Shakespeare had made a remarkably modest exit from the theatre of the world: largely un-applauded, largely unobserved. It was a very quiet death.</p>
<h2>An age of public mourning</h2>
<p>The silence that followed the death of Shakespeare is the more remarkable coming as it did in an age that had developed such elaborate rituals of public mourning, panegyric, and commemoration, most lavishly displayed at the death of a monarch or peer of the realm, but also occasionally set in train by the death of an exceptional commoner.</p>
<p>Consider the tributes paid to another great writer of the period, William Camden, antiquarian scholar and Clarenceux herald of arms, who died in London in late November 1623; a couple of weeks, as chance would have it, after the publication of Shakespeare’s First Folio.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=800&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145725/original/image-20161114-21939-s36hv4.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1005&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Portrait of William Camden by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger (1609).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia commons</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Camden was a man of quite humble social origins – like Shakespeare himself, whose father was a maker of gloves and leather goods in Stratford. Camden’s father was a painter-stainer, whose job it was to decorate coats of arms and other heraldic devices. By the time of his death Camden was widely recognized, in Britain and abroad, as one of the country’s outstanding scholars.</p>
<p>Eulogies were delivered at Oxford and published along with other tributes in a memorial volume soon after his death. At Westminster his body was escorted to the Abbey on 19 November by a large retinue of mourners, led by 26 poor men wearing gowns, followed by soberly attired gentlemen, esquires, knights, and members of the College of Arms, the hearse being flanked by earls, barons, and other peers of the realm, together with the Lord Keeper, Bishop John Williams, and other divines. Camden’s imposing funeral mirrored on a smaller scale the huge procession of 1,600 mourners which in 1603 had accompanied the body of Elizabeth I to its final resting place in the Abbey.</p>
<p>There were particular reasons, then, why Camden should have been accorded a rather grand funeral of his own. But mightn’t there have been good reasons for Shakespeare, likewise – whom we see today as the outstanding writer of his age – to have been honoured at his death in a suitably ceremonious fashion? It’s curious to realize, however, that Shakespeare at the time of his death wasn’t yet universally seen as the outstanding writer of his age.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=798&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145705/original/image-20161114-9077-bs3d2z.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1003&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Ben Jonson by George Vertue (1684-1786) after Gerard van Honthorst (1590-1656).</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>At this quite extraordinary moment in the history of English letters and intellectual exchange there was more than one contender for that title. William Camden himself – an admired poet in addition to his other talents, and friend and mentor of other poets of the day – had included Shakespeare’s name in a list, published in 1614, of “the most pregnant wits of these our times, whom succeeding ages may justly admire”, placing him, without differentiation, alongside Edmund Spenser, John Owen, Thomas Campion, Michael Drayton, George Chapman, John Marston, Hugh Holland and Ben Jonson, the last two of whom he had taught at Westminster School.</p>
<p>But it was another poet, Sir Philip Sidney, whom Camden had befriended during his student days at Oxford, that he most passionately admired, and continued to regard – following Sidney’s early death at the age of 32 in 1586 – as the country’s supreme writer. “Our Britain is the glory of earth and its precious jewel,/ But Sidney was the precious jewel of Britain”, Camden had written in a memorial poem in Latin mourning his friend’s death.</p>
<p>No commoner poet in England had ever been escorted to his grave with such pomp as was furnished for Sidney’s funeral at St Paul’s Cathedral, London, on 16 February 1587.</p>
<p>The 700-man procession was headed by 32 poor men, representing the number of years that Sidney had lived, with fifes and drums “playing softly” beside them. They were followed by trumpeters and gentlemen and yeomen servants, physicians, surgeons, chaplains, knights and esquires, heralds bearing aloft Sidney’s spurs and gauntlet, his helm and crest, his sword and targe, his coat of arms. Then came the hearse containing Sidney’s body. Behind them walked the chief mourner, Philip’s young brother, Robert, accompanied by the Earls of Leicester, Pembroke, Huntingdon, and Essex, followed by representatives from the states of Holland and Zealand. Next came the Lord Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, with 120 members of the Company of Grocers, and, at the rear of the procession, “citizens of London practised in arms, about 300, who marched three by three”.</p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=384&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145672/original/image-20161114-9083-1ijy429.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=483&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1587 engraving by Theodor de Bry showing the casket of Sir Philip Sidney carried by pallbearers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Sidney’s funeral was a moving salute to a man who was widely admired not just for his military, civic and diplomatic virtues, but as the outstanding writer of his day. He fulfilled in exemplary fashion, as Shakespeare curiously did not, the Renaissance ideal of what a poet should strive to be.</p>
<p>In an extraordinary act of homage not before seen in England, but soon to be commonly followed at the death of distinguished writers, the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge produced three volumes of Latin verse lauding Sidney’s achievements, while a fourth volume of similar tributes was published by the University of Leiden. The collection from Cambridge, presented contributions from 63 Cambridge men, together with a sonnet in English by King James VI of Scotland, the future King James I of Britain.</p>
<p>Earlier English poets had been mourned at their passing, if not in these terms and not on this scale, then with more enthusiasm than was evident at the death of Shakespeare. Edmund Spenser <a href="https://archive.org/details/faeriequeenenewe11spenuoft">at his death in 1599</a> was buried in Westminster Abbey next to Chaucer, “this hearse being attended by poets, and mournful elegies and poems with the pens that wrote them thrown into his tomb”. The deaths of Thomas Wyatt and Michael Drayton were similarly lamented.</p>
<p>When, 21 years after Shakespeare’s death, his former friend and colleague Ben Jonson came at last to die, the crowd that gathered at his house in Westminster to accompany his body to his grave in the Abbey included “all or the greatest part of the nobility and gentry then in the town”. Within months of his death a volume of 33 poems was in preparation and a dozen additional elegies had appeared in print. Jonson was hailed at his death as “king of English poetry”, as England’s “rare arch-poet”. With his death, as more than one memorialist declared, English poetry itself now seemed also to have died. No one had spoken in these terms at the death of Shakespeare.</p>
<p>To take one last example: at the death in 1643 of the dramatist William Cartwright whose works and whose very name are barely known to most people today – Charles I elected to wear black, remarking that </p>
<blockquote>
<p>since the muses had so much mourned for the loss of such a son, it would be a shame for him not to appear in mourning for the loss of such a subject.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>At the death of Shakespeare in 1616 James had shown no such minimal courtesy.</p>
<h2>Backroom boys</h2>
<p>Why should Shakespeare at his death have been so neglected? One simple answer is that King James, unlike his son, Charles, had no great passion for the theatre, and no very evident regard for Shakespeare’s genius. Early in his reign, so Dudley Carleton reported, </p>
<blockquote>
<p>The first holy days we had every night a public play in the great hall, at which the King was ever present, and liked or disliked as he saw cause: but it seems he takes no extraordinary pleasure in them. </p>
</blockquote>
<p>But Shakespeare and his company were not merely royal servants, bound to provide a steady supply of dramatic entertainment at court; they also catered for the London public who flocked to see their plays at Blackfriars and the Globe, and who had their own ways of expressing their pleasure, their frustrations, and – at the death of a player – their grief.</p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=709&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145718/original/image-20161114-9050-1xjce3r.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=891&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of the actor Richard Burbage.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikimedia images</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>When Richard Burbage, the principal actor for the King’s Men, died on 9 March 1619, just seven days after the death of Queen Anne, the London public were altogether more upset by that event than they had been over the death of the Queen, as one contemporary writer – quoting, ironically, the opening lines of Shakespeare’s <a href="http://shakespeare.mit.edu/1henryvi/full.html">1 Henry VI</a> – tartly observed.</p>
<p>So it’s necessary, I think, to pose a further question. Why should the death of Burbage have affected the London public more profoundly than the death not merely of the Queen but of the dramatist whose work he so skilfully interpreted?</p>
<p>I believe the answer lies, partly at least, in the status of the profession to which Shakespeare belonged, a profession which didn’t yet have a regular name: the very words playwright and dramatist not entering the language until half a century after Shakespeare’s death.</p>
<p>Prominent actors at this time were far better known to the public than the writers who provided their livelihood. The writers were on the whole invisible people, who worked as backroom boys, often anonymously and in small teams; playgoers had no easy way of discovering their identity. Theatre programmes didn’t yet exist. Playbills often announced the names of leading actors, but not until the very last decade of the 17th century did they include the names of authors.</p>
<p>Only a fraction of the large number of plays performed in this period moreover found their way into print, and those that were published didn’t always disclose the names of their authors. </p>
<p>At the time of Shakespeare’s death half of his plays weren’t yet available in print, and there were no known plans to produce a collected edition of his works. The total size and shape of the canon were therefore still imperfectly known. Shakespeare was not yet fully visible. </p>
<p>In 1616 the world didn’t yet realise what they had got, or who it was that they’d lost. Hence, I believe, the otherwise inexplicable silence at his passing.</p>
<h2>To the Memory of My Beloved</h2>
<p>At the time of Shakespeare’s death another English writer was arguably better known to the general public than Shakespeare himself, and more highly esteemed by the brokers of power at King James’s court. That writer was Shakespeare’s friend and colleague Ben Jonson, who early in 1616 had been awarded a pension of one hundred marks to serve as King James’s laureate poet. </p>
<figure class="align-center zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/145719/original/image-20161114-9089-1iuia77.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=502&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A 1623 copy of the calf-bound First Folio edition of William Shakespeare’s plays.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Dylan Martinez/Reuters</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>A first folio edition of Shakespeare’s collected plays was finally published in London with Jonson’s assistance and oversight in 1623. This monumental volume at last gave readers in England some sense of the wider reach of Shakespeare’s theatrical achievement, and laid the essential foundations of his modern reputation.</p>
<p>At the head of this volume stand two poems by Ben Jonson: the second, <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44466">To the Memory of My Beloved, the Author, Mr William Shakespeare, and What He Hath Left Us</a> assesses the achievement of this extraordinary writer. Shakespeare had been praised during his lifetime as a “sweet”, “mellifluous”, “honey-tongued”, “honey-flowing”, “pleasing” writer. No one until this moment had presented him in the astounding terms that Jonson here proposes: as the pre-eminent figure, the “soul” and the “star” of his age; and as something even more than that: as one who could be confidently ranked with the greatest writers of antiquity and of the modern era.</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Triumph, my Britain, thou has one to show<br>
To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe,<br>
He was not of an age, but for all time!</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Today, 400 years on, that last line sounds like a truism, for Shakespeare’s fame has indeed endured. He is without doubt the most famous writer the world has ever seen. But in 1623 this was a bold and startling prediction. No one before that date had described Shakespeare’s achievement in such terms as these.</p>
<p><em>This is an edited version of a public lecture given at the University of Melbourne.</em></p>
<p><em>On the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne is establishing the Shakespeare 400 Trust to raise funds to support the teaching of Shakespeare at the University into the future. For more information, or if you would like to support the Shakespeare 400 Trust, please contact Julie du Plessis at julie.dp@unimelb.edu.au</em></p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/68713/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Ian Donaldson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
This year, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death has been marked by a flood of events around the world. But why did his exit cause so little public grief at the time, in and beyond the country of his birth?
Ian Donaldson, Honorary Professorial Fellow, School of Culture and Communication, The University of Melbourne
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.
tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/65486
2016-09-16T11:16:25Z
2016-09-16T11:16:25Z
Scotland shouldn’t rush second indyref – that’s Ireland’s bitter lesson
<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137954/original/image-20160915-30614-2sa6hg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Nation divided. </span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="http://www.shutterstock.com/pic-380882974.html">Dmitry Kaminsky</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>Two years after it was derailed in the <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/events/scotland-decides/results">referendum</a> of September 18, 2014, Scottish independence is back on track. The UK’s vote to <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/politics/eu_referendum">leave the EU</a> in June, contrary to Scottish wishes, <a href="http://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/14721998.Iain_Macwhirter__The_timing_of_the_referendum_is_the_biggest_decision_Nicola_Sturgeon_will_ever_make/">has given</a> those in favour of independence grounds for a second referendum. All the more so, on the back of the SNP’s <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/election/2015/results/scotland">sweeping victory</a> at the 2015 UK election. </p>
<p>But there’s a problem. While some polls <a href="https://yougov.co.uk/news/2016/07/30/brexit-fails-boost-support-scottish-independence/">show</a> a slight increase in support for independence, it’s not enough to have the Scottish nationalists reaching for another referendum. The uncertainty caused by Brexit <a href="http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-09-02/brexit-brings-back-old-dilemmas-for-scots-seeking-independence">may be</a> sowing fresh doubts among those put off by the No side’s <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/eureferendum/11928102/Project-Fear-stopped-Scottish-Independence-but-can-it-keep-Britain-inside-the-EU.html">Project Fear</a> last time around. </p>
<p>Scottish first minister Nicola Sturgeon knows that getting the timing of a referendum wrong could take independence off the table for a very long time. While she keeps her cards close to her chest, some opponents <a href="http://www.scotsman.com/news/politics/david-davis-accuses-snp-of-u-turn-on-second-indy-referendum-1-4221997">have been</a> taunting her about U-turning on <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-36620375">her plans</a> to hold one imminently. </p>
<p>So what is the right way forward for the Scottish independence movement? It is worth looking at Ireland, which this year marked the centenary of the <a href="https://theconversation.com/six-days-that-shook-the-world-how-the-easter-rising-changed-everything-57140">1916 Easter Rising</a>. </p>
<figure class="align-right zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=730&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/137949/original/image-20160915-30617-1ontf3c.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=917&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Charles Stewart Parnell.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=charles+stewart+parnell&client=safari&channel=mac_bm&biw=1440&bih=762&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwj-r4r-uJHPAhXmBsAKHV1cBLoQ_AUIBigB#q=charles+stewart+parnell&channel=mac_bm&tbm=isch&tbs=sur:fc&imgrc=v3QzbpoHbXt6ZM%3A">Wikimedia</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>In the years leading up to that moment, Ireland and Scotland both appeared to be heading for Home Rule – the prototype of what latterday Scots call “<a href="http://wingsoverscotland.com/the-meaning-of-devo-max/">devo max</a>”. The death of the great Irish parliamentary leader Charles Stewart Parnell in 1891 <a href="http://www.historyireland.com/20th-century-contemporary-history/parallel-parnell-parnell-delivers-home-rule-in-1904/">hadn’t quite</a> scuppered hopes for these constitutional settlements, as some had feared. What <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-29048884">eventually</a> did <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/victorians/home_rule_movement_01.shtml">was</a> World War I. </p>
<p>The socialists in Ireland, led by Edinburgh-born <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/easterrising/profiles/po04.shtml">James Connolly</a>, refused to fight in the war or to believe Home Rule would be forthcoming afterwards. Instead they rose up in Dublin in Easter 1916 in what became the first step in a bloody path to independence. </p>
<p>The price they paid was partition and civil war and a capitalist arrangement very far from their socialist vision. It demonstrates that the British state does not readily give up what it sees as its core constituent parts. Winston Churchill <a href="http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/the-world-crisis-volume-iv-9781472586957/">called</a> the relinquishing of 26 Irish counties “one of the most questionable and hazardous experiments on which a great Empire in the plenitude of its power had ever embarked”.</p>
<p>Scotland, by contrast, did not rise up prematurely for the sake of piecemeal independence. It never settled for half, never relinquished a key region, as Ireland did with Ulster. Instead it moved at a stately pace. Too stately, at times, <a href="http://www.thenational.scot/news/exclusive-poets-lost-plea-for-nation-to-be-confident-and-self-aware-unearthed-after-70-years.17796">for some</a> who desperately wished to see independence in their lifetimes. </p>
<h2>Shared histories</h2>
<p>Part of the key to understanding why Scotland has developed differently is in its historic relations with other parts of the UK – not least Ireland. It is well known that Scots ran the empire hand in glove with the English, but what is less well known is the background to its involvement in Ireland. </p>
<p>The six counties in Ulster that were excluded from Irish independence were <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/plantation/planters/es06.shtml">predominantly settled</a> by Scots as part of the British plantations scheme of Ulster in 1609. This successful joint venture just after <a href="http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/unioncrownsparliaments/unionofthecrowns/index.asp">the union</a> of the Anglo-Scottish crowns of 1603-1608 was a crucible for Britishness that bound the two nations together. </p>
<p>Commentators often cite the bankruptcy of the Scottish merchant classes following the failed <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2007/sep/11/britishidentity.past">Darien Scheme</a> as the main reason for the <a href="http://www.educationscotland.gov.uk/scotlandshistory/unioncrownsparliaments/unionofparliaments/">union</a> of the Scottish and English parliaments in 1707, but this arguably obscures the more important staging post in Ulster several generations earlier. The point is that Scotland’s sense of involvement with Britain runs very deep and is therefore understandably difficult to disentangle. </p>
<p>That said, devolution and disintegration is <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/acts_of_union_01.shtml">arguably</a> part and parcel of the history of the interaction of Wales, Ireland, Scotland and England. And Brexit could help bring Scotland and Ireland closer together insofar as both Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. </p>
<p>Then there is Wales: despite voting to leave the EU, Cardiff <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jul/22/brexit-scotland-wales-northern-ireland-eu-referendum">has been</a> threatening to team up with Belfast and Edinburgh to demand the right to vote on the terms of Brexit. This is a sign that all three Celtic countries are committed to ensuring that England, having long used the British union as a bulwark against Europe, doesn’t dictate future arrangements. Allegiance to the centre in London is certainly not what it used to be. </p>
<p>In short, both Ireland and Scotland’s histories are reminders to Scots in favour of independence that this game is best played long. The Brexit vote may look like a mixed blessing from their point of view, but it’s worth remembering that 2014 was preceded by a vote against devolution in the referendum of 1979 that was nevertheless followed by a Scottish parliament 20 years later. Scottish independence <a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/comment/scottish-referendums-swings-and-turnabouts-two-years-on-the-long-road-to-poll-position-9745063.html">is less likely</a> a road to nowhere than a long journey with twists and turns along the way. </p>
<p>Ireland’s independence story suggests that doing things quickly, whatever the passions of the present, is never wise. To borrow from <a href="https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/">Karl Marx</a>, if 2014 was a tragedy for Scottish supporters of independence, a premature sequel could end in farce. Nearly 310 years <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/341284.stm">after</a> the Act of Union of 1707, “the settled will of the Scottish people” remains unsettled. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-37250448">Keep talking</a> and the independence movement is liable to eventually end up on the right side of history.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/65486/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Willy Maley does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>
To achieve independence, history says you should play a long game.
Willy Maley, Professor of Renaissance Studies, University of Glasgow
Licensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.