The often despised Churchyard had started something, a kind of minor biographical trend, for after the success of Mistress Shore’s monologue in A Mirror for Magistrates writers and readers began to realise even more clearly that they had found a useful female icon. This was someone who not only belonged to vaguely medieval ‘legend’, as they saw it, and had not been a member of the aristocracy, but who had been real, middle class too. She had broken the rules of marriage and had become aware of her ‘sin’, after deserting her middle-class husband for a married lover – who happened to be a king with a long reputation for acquisitive sexual curiosity. After his sudden early death she had suffered at the hands of her former lover’s brother, made a mysterious marriage which nobody had learnt much about, and spent the last decades of a long life in neglect and poverty.
There were themes here to catch the attention of everyone, for the interests of Elizabethan readers were changing. All educated people were still deeply interested in legend and poetry but they were beginning to think more about social problems, especially, as mentioned earlier, the arranged marriage system with its attendant difficulties. Forward-looking people were beginning to see it as old-fashioned, partly because there were other reasons now for an increased interest in women. During the sixteenth century, after the early death of Edward VI in 1553, England was ruled by a queen, Mary I, who insisted on marrying a Catholic like herself, and a foreigner at that; when she died childless in 1558 she was followed by the pathetic nine-day reign of Lady Jane Grey, forcibly married for political reasons to a man she did not care for. Elizabeth I came to the throne in 1558, was never married and with much regret had to sign the death warrant of Mary Queen of Scots, who was related to her through a daughter of Edward IV and had herself been married three times. If Mary’s first husband, François II of France, had lived, she might, with him, have even claimed the throne of England – and in any case now was regarded as a danger. Women with power, or potential power, could obviously not be ignored any longer. Women were important now, they were no longer mere wives and mothers, while some of Elizabeth’s subjects had searched for and failed to find any heroine they could admire beyond those of classical times and foreign countries. It was not too easy to find a woman they could admire or even criticise, a woman who mattered. They could not openly admire Joan of Arc – obviously unsuitable for the English – and actresses had not yet invaded the fashionable and increasingly popular theatre, although women took part in court entertainments, assuming at least semi-dramatic roles.
However, even middle-class women were now well educated and read widely, while a few outstanding among them even translated or wrote themselves. They included, for instance, the Countess of Pembroke who wrote well and was said to give advice to her brother, Sir Philip Sidney. Among these women too were those scarcely known feminists avant la lettre who believed that women had been treated for too long as an inferior race. If, in the recent past, you had been a queen, a princess or an aristocrat you could of course have lived a comfortable life. However, you might have been born Queen Margaret of Anjou, who had been on the losing side; then if you had been Lady Margaret Beaufort, Duchess of Richmond, you would have been able to work hard for political change, leading to your son’s transformation into Henry VII, but you would have worked in the secret shadows. Cecily of York, Edward IV’s mother, had acted in the same way earlier. Her contemporaries near the court circle listened to her but did not take her too seriously. Shakespeare was probably the only writer who presented her as a real person, and that was long after her death. Many women of the merchant class surely achieved a happy and well-fulfilled life, and even if they didn’t they tended not to complain; but if you had been born in the mid-fifteenth century the daughter of a successful mercer, married off young as part of a business arrangement to another successful mercer, you had to show initiative and courage before you could escape from the system. For where could you go, except into the arms of some rich and preferably unmarried lover? – and they were not easy to find. Otherwise there was only the convent.
So it was not long before the real-life legend of Mistress Shore, trailed, as would be said today, by Thomas Churchyard, attracted the attention of two much more valuable writers and she finally received her adopted Christian name, which made her seem much more ‘real’. The earlier of these two writers was Michael Drayton, born in Warwickshire, reaching London in 1593 and publishing his early work three years later. Impressed by Spenser’s Shepherd’s Garland of 1579 he brought out his own Shepherd’s Calendar in 1593. He is thought to have been influenced by the inevitable monologues published by Churchyard and others, whose work for A Mirror for Magistrates at least led younger writers to consider historical figures rather than idealised or legendary men and women as subjects for poems likely to please the public. Drayton chose historical figures and made some unlikely but noteworthy choices, including Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, the close, possibly homosexual, friend of the late twelfth- and early thirteenth-century King Edward I and he also wrote (at great length) the Tragical Legend of Robert, Duke of Normandy, who had been the father of William the Conqueror and was killed during the Crusades.
Drayton was a prolific writer of sonnets, at least one of which has never been forgotten by editors of anthologies; perhaps over the years the lovesick have quoted it to a partner: ‘Since there’s no help, come let us kiss and part’. However, history – his poem on Agincourt is a classic – and historical figures obviously fascinated him, and he took inspiration from the youthful Ovid, borrowing an idea from the Heroides which were popular with the Elizabethans. Ovid had chosen pairs of legendary lovers and imagined the letters written by the women to their absent partners: Helen and Paris, Hero and Leander, Dido and Aeneas among others. Some of the men even replied to their correspondents. Drayton himself chose not classical but mainly English historical figures for his paired correspondents, although some of the ‘partners’ belonged to legend, and their exchanges of letters became England’s Heroical Epistles of 1597, easily the best-remembered series of poems he wrote. Among the couples he chose as correspondents were Fair Rosamond and King Henry II, inevitable favourites with the public, King John and the chaste Matilda, next Eleanor, Duchess of Gloucester, and her husband Humphrey; they were followed, surprisingly perhaps, by Lady Jane Grey and her nineteen-year-old unwilling husband Lord Guildford Dudley, and, unsurprisingly, Mistress Shore, as she was still named, with her royal lover King Edward IV.
For each pair of correspondents, readers are told the whole story as imagined by Drayton in passages of rhyming couplets, and the stories are sometimes more imaginary than true. In Mistress Shore’s case the poet did not question the legend that had been believed for a long time. The king describes how he had seen the woman he wanted in the goldsmith’s shop and how her husband Matthew had ‘one jewel more . . . That I might not for love or money buy . . .’.1 The king writes to Mistress Shore, tempting her with life in a palace, for a shop was no place for such a beautiful creature, she ought to be living ‘in a prince’s sumptuous gallery’:
. . . hung all with tissue, floored with tapestry;
Where thou shalt sit and from thy state shall see
The tilts and triumphs that are done for thee.
The king also hoped in an autocratic way that she would appreciate the grandeur of his kind of love:
Then know the difference (if thou list to prove)
Betwixt a vulgar and a kingly love.
Mistress Shore in her reply seems to regret that she was tempted with such attractive possibilities:
Would I had led a humble shepherd’s life.
Nor known the name of Shore’s admired wife,
And lived with them, in country fields that range,
Nor seen the golden Cheap, nor glittering Change.
It is difficult to imagine this correspondent living anywhere outside the city of London, the countryside was not her scene, to use a more modern expression. In the poem she reminds the king that she had been married very young and describes her changed attitude towards her unfortunate husband; and in any case it was all the king’s fault:
Thou art the cause Shore pleaseth not my sight,
That his embraces give me no delight.
Perhaps Drayton never knew, or had decided to forget that these ‘embraces’ were limited, for the Shores had been divorced through the Court of Arches in 1476 which had accepted the allegation of the husband’s impotence. On the other hand anyone who cared about the situation could have assumed that these alleged grounds for divorce had been a mere invention and decided to ignore the whole of the divorce proceedings, believing that Mistress Shore had not been free to leave husband and home. She had behaved like an irresponsible wanton woman.
It would have come as a shock to the real-life King Edward IV to learn that he, along with all the men of his time, was to blame for his high-handed treatment of his latest conquest. Jane spoke out:
Blame you our husbands then, if they deny
Our public walking, our loose liberty,
If with exception still they us debar,
The circuit of the public theatre;
To hear the smooth-tongued poets’ siren vain,
Sporting in his lascivious comic scene . . .
At this point Mistress Shore began to be angry, she referred to the
. . . passionate tragedian in his rage,
Acting a lovesick passion on the stage;
When though abroad restraining us to roam,
They very firmly keep us safe at home . . .
(Drayton had forgotten that there was no ‘public theatre’ in Jane’s time, but it suited him to mention this detail.)
At the same time there was nothing for women to do in this prison-like home, for there were plenty of servants, and the overprotected wife remained idle, without any worthwhile entertainments:
What sports have we, whereon our minds to set?
Our dog, our parrot or our marmoset;
Or once a week to walk into the field;
Small is the pleasure that these toys do yield . . .
Mistress Shore seemed to be trying hard to make the king feel guilty, as any other man might feel, reminding him that he is offering tempting promises simply because he is the king; but at the same time she knows that she is being tempted and she knows too that she cannot resist him:
Thou art the cause I to myself am strange . . .
Long winter nights be minutes, if thou here,
Short minutes, if thou absent, be a year . . .
It was all his fault, she wrote at the end of her ‘heroical epistle’, but she admitted that she had lost her battle with duty and could do nothing about it:
And thus by strength thou art become my fate
And makes me love, even in the midst of hate.
Who inspired this hate and who was hating whom? Was she trying to say that she hated giving in to the king? That was a strong word but perhaps she meant it – and of course it supplied a useful rhyme. She surely hated the system rather than the unfortunate Shore, for after all he had been caught up in the arranged marriage system too and might otherwise have remained a bachelor. Drayton was thought to be possibly homoerotic, attracted to men but not necessarily a practising homosexual, but as with many of the men in both groups his attack on the way men had usually treated women showed insights into women’s problems, especially those of his own century. At the same time the poet’s dramatisation of the well-known story is less interesting to later generations than the prose ‘Annotations’ that he thought necessary to add after each exchange of letters. In this instance he added a great deal, starting with a long quotation from Sir Thomas More’s earlier references to Mistress Shore in his History of King Richard III, for over the previous century and beyond few writers felt they could or should forget or question this text. Drayton then repeated another detail mentioned by More, to the effect that the lady was not very tall, but added some additional details: her hair was ‘of a dark yellow, her face round and full, her eye grey, delicate harmony being betwixt each part’s proportion, and each proportion’s colour, her body fat, white and smooth, her countenance cheerful and like to her condition’. No wonder King Edward fancied her.
Then came an interesting, tantalising description: ‘The picture which I have seen of her was such as she rose out of her bed in the morning, having nothing on but a rich mantle cast under one arm over her shoulder, and sitting on a chair, on which her naked arm did lie.’ Had the poet actually seen such a picture, now presumably lost, and not referred to by any previous or contemporary writer, or had he merely imagined it? He then went on to give a brief, undetailed biographical sketch of his subject: ‘What her father’s name was, or where she was born, is not certainly known: but Shore, a young man of right goodly person, wealth and behaviour, abandoned her bed after the king made her his concubine.’ Drayton then referred to Richard III’s treatment of her, ‘not so much for his hatred of sin, but that by making his brother’s life odious, he might cover his horrible treasons the more cunningly’.
In the second volume of Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, edited by Henry B. Wheatley and first published in 1765, the reader was brought up to date on Mistress Shore’s life by the inclusion of Richard III’s much quoted letter to the Bishop of Lincoln, his chancellor, about his ‘Servant and Solicitor’ Thomas Lynam and ‘the late Wife of William Shore’.2 Wheatley quoted these facts because he was about to include in his edition of Percy’s collection one of the famous ballads about ‘Jane Shore’, to be described later, and mentioned these details presumably because he thought the author should have known them. The same is perhaps true of Drayton, but the Elizabethan poet was not so much concerned with biographical accuracy, as with writing a ‘Heroical Epistle’ and he clung to his vision, trying to evoke the characters of his two correspondents, the relationship between them and especially their self-defence; although the king did not defend himself credibly, he was in love and he was king, and he thought that was enough. A king must not be disobeyed: Jane must go to him when he commanded her. At the same time Drayton was obviously concentrating on the woman the king wanted and the reasons for her decision to obey him. Jane made the point that had not been mentioned by many writers about her life: a husband not only forces you to stay at home but forgets that you don’t know how to get through the day, for there is nothing for a wife to do. So the moral and social lessons were there for the readers to absorb, wrapped up in several pages of readable poetry.
To return to Wheatley and his quotes from Drayton, Percy’s editor himself added one more picturesque detail about ‘Jane’, admittedly based on a source probably far from reliable: ‘. . . the Duchess of Montagu had a lock of her hair which looked as if it had been powdered with gold dust’. The description may not be accurate, but who knows or in fact cares? Those few words bring a hint of glamour left over from the life that ‘Jane’ may have lived in the vanished world of medieval London.
These Heroical Epistles have remained the best remembered of Drayton’s work not because they were the equivalent of later centuries’ romantic fiction, but because they showed a memorable degree of psychological insight set within a series of mini-dramas already known to the readers. A great number of these readers would be women, pleased to read about women and the ways in which they had been treated in a high-handed manner by men, or had won minor battles with some of them, or unfortunately had made mistakes, as Mistress Shore had obviously done.
Among Drayton’s vast output the heroines – there were some heroes too – and the poems themselves find no serious competition today from his other work; possibly he wrote too much, including at least twenty plays, some on classical or historical themes. The latter were apparently performed, some printed and many lost, but Drayton was not a born dramatist and at this period he would have found too many rivals. His other major work, Poly-Olbion, designed as a public relations exercise glorifying England, its history, geography and royalty, is not forgotten but it can never be a rival to the Heroical Epistles. The latter may be a minor work, but it embodies the preoccupations of the period, inheriting and extending in some ways the success of A Mirror for Magistrates, while any feelings of guilt the characters express can involve the readers without overwhelming them.
The first edition of the Epistles dates from 1597 and for later editions the author revised his work only slightly. If Drayton was a genuine poet but a half-failed dramatist, this set of poems was followed two years later by two linked plays written by someone who was definitely a dramatist, although not a genius. He was even more prolific than Drayton, wrote in virtually every existing genre and did many other things too. In fact, he wrote far too much. The plays relevant to Jane, and assumed to be his – for his prodigious output meant that his work was never carefully classified – were The First and Second Parts of King Edward the Fourth of 1599 or 1600, as set out on the title page, which then continued ‘with His merry pastime with the Tanner of Tamworth, as also his love to fair Mistress Shore, her great promotion, fall and misery and lastly the lamentable death of both her and her husband’.
This sounds a little closer to the familiar story, but who was this enterprising playwright? He was Thomas Heywood,3 a many-sided writer, who wrote or contributed to some two hundred plays, most of which are now lost. His best-remembered drama remains A Woman Killed with Kindness of 1603, and perhaps his best-known other work is that unexpected essay which now appeals to the feminists: Gunaikeion, or Nine Books of Various History Concerning Women. This production occupies more than 400 pages and after tracing the history of women from the Greek goddesses to Queen Elizabeth and her successor as queen, James I’s Danish-born wife Anne, Heywood concluded that women had never been fully appreciated; but he stopped short of saying that they deserved full equality with men: it was too early for the public to accept that. However, the social climate was indeed changing. Heywood noted too that he had written this work in seventeen weeks because he was short of money. That aspect of the writing life has never experienced fundamental change, it merely varied from time to time.
Heywood had been born in Lincolnshire in 1573 and when later a student at Cambridge he saw every possible kind of play acted in public. From 1594 he never stopped writing and often appeared on the stage himself as an actor. This led him in 1612 to write a readable and useful book, his Apology for Actors, in which he emphasised that the performances of actors could supply more than mere entertainment, they could supply lessons in morality, and that was considered worthwhile. His two plays about Edward IV were probably first produced in 1599 and the story they tell is different from that told by every other writer so far about one of the king’s mistresses, Mistress Shore. Surprisingly perhaps in these plays, Mistress Shore is happily married to the goldsmith Matthew Shore and they have a small child. At last Mistress Shore has a Christian name: both her husband and later King Edward IV address her as ‘Jane’. Some parts of the two linked dramas seem almost farcical today but Heywood was intent on making any points he could about the behaviour of royal persons in contrast to that of their underlings and he had some ideas of his own about the relationships between the principal characters. In Part II the second scene in Act II is particularly hard to accept: surely even brilliant acting could hardly make it credible.
Queen Elizabeth Woodville enters with her son the Marquess of Dorset, ‘leading Jane Shore who falls on her knees before the Queen, fearful and weeping’. The Queen’s response is sarcastic:
Queen Shore! Nay, rather Empress Shore!
God save your grace, your majesty, your highness!
. . . what! You kneel there? King Edward’s
bedfellow,
And I, your subject, sit! . . .
I may take your place; you have taken mine.
I am sure you are our sister Queen at least:
Nay, that you are. Then let us sit together.
Jane pleads for forgiveness, but the angry Dorset tries to intervene, telling his mother to scratch her eyes out, even threatening to do it himself. His mother tells him to keep out of the way. She then lectures Jane, asking how she would have felt if she, the queen, had taken her husband away. Heywood was nothing if not a realist, allowing the queen, temporarily at least, to speak like any suffering wife in any domestic scene:
. . . Yes, I warrant thee
There’s not the meanest woman that lives,
But if she like and love her husband well,
She had rather feel his warm limbs in her bed
Than see him in the arms of any Queen.
The queen probably did not know much about the Shore ménage. She then quotes the unhappy fate of Fair Rosamond, the woman so often linked with Jane, and warns her current rival that her life too could be in danger: might not she, the queen, like Eleanor of Aquitaine, now take her revenge? Jane, humble and prostrate, replies that she is ready for ‘torture, poison, any punishment’. Dorset again tries to intervene and his mother sends him away. (It is known now that Dorset was later to become Jane’s lover – if he had not already been so earlier.) The queen then threatens violence against her rival: she ‘draws a knife, and making as though she meant to destroy Jane’s beauty, runs to her’, but she has a change of heart, ‘and falling on her knees, embraces and kisses her, throwing away the knife’. But the drama is not over yet:
Enter King Edward, angrily:
Why, how now, Bess? What, will ye wrong my Jane?
Come hither, love! What has she done to thee?
Pure melodrama, unbelievably touching: at least that was what the dramatist had intended. Jane tells the king to love his ‘beauteous queen’,
The only perfect mirror of her kind.
The two women kneel on either side of the king, they all forgive each other and Edward admits to ‘Bess’ later that he had been alarmed at what she might do to her rival.
Two women and one man: a triangle that has often been regarded as a situation more suitable for comedy than tragedy. No wonder Heywood needed two plays, for he was to include much more material, such as the appearance of the rebel Falconbridge (correctly Fauconberg), who incidentally hoped that he too might seduce Jane. Later in this two-part drama, Jane herself achieves great power through her closeness to the king, and rescues her husband and his associates from serious trouble; but the modern reader surely cannot accept the denouement: it includes too much suffering, with Jane and Matthew Shore finally dying in each other’s arms. It is difficult today to take it all seriously, but this love-in-death ending was to appeal to many later dramatists and their audiences.
However, the drama was a great success for over a century. There were other memorable plays at this period; in the anonymous Arden of Faversham and The Yorkshire Tragedy, the heroines were more important than the other characters, and the latter play was apparently based on a true crime of the period; these two dramas, plus King Edward IV, marked a new genre, the domestic tragedy. Shakespeare’s tragic lovers were all royal and seriously heroic, while the other lovers he created were usually aristocrats, or professional upper-middle-class people, rarely artisans or peasants and they were nearly always both of the same class. Many of the characters were still involved in the ever-present problem of arranged marriage. In The Merry Wives of Windsor Fenton, described as a ‘gentleman’, has to work hard to win Mistress Page as his wife, and when he is successful he reminds her father in the last scene of the play that he would not have treated his daughter well, he ‘would have married her most shamefully’, whereas he, Fenton, was marrying her for love, and sparing her ‘a thousand cursed hours’: she would not have been subjected to the virtual imprisonment in a boring home that Jane Shore, according to Drayton, had had to endure.
Social change was obviously imminent and in the early twenty-first century Richard Helgerson, in his absorbing study Adulterous Alliances, saw the importance of women’s roles in what was developing into ‘female complaint’, followed in the eighteenth century by the ‘she-tragedy’. Helgerson pointed out that Heywood’s play was important to a changing public who were shocked to hear about ‘a royal man in illicit relation to a bourgeois woman’: that was new. The Jane Shore situation had not been forgotten, because it caused violent reaction: ‘Invading the exclusively ruling class and masculine domains of social history,’ Helgerson continued, ‘de casibus lament, national history play, and classical tragedy, that story has provoked repeated hostility. But,’ he went on, ‘it has also remade those generic domains in its own image and, in so doing, has helped remake the culture from which they arose. Tears that were shed over Jane Shore prepared the way for a world in which urban merchants, like the Londoners Jane came from, would take the place of kings, a world in which the middle class would have other luxuries than the luxury of grief.’4
So Jane, who had taken some risky independent action on her own, was seen as responsible, over-responsible perhaps, for the social change that was now clearly on its way. Did the changing situation and the treatment of women in imaginative works provide an unexpected hint of democracy to come? Perhaps it was the first stage, a step towards the modern world. Heywood’s play had certainly transformed Edward IV and his queen into ordinary domestic mortals, but Edward had not yet lost all the autocratic attitudes of monarchy: ‘Jane, in the evening I will send for thee,’ he announced as he left her, giving her a ‘true-love kiss’: he did not intend to come to the Shore house to claim her, and he was not yet relinquishing his kingly rights.