The Tower of London, by Wenceslas Hollar, 1647. English kings traditionally began their coronation ceremonies at the Tower, spending the night there before setting out on the pre-coronation procession through the City to Westminster.
LONDON’S TRIUMPHAL ARCHES
Julius Caesar, as we all learned at school, was one of Rome’s greatest generals, and a ruler murdered by his friends. Few of us consider him one of London’s earliest architects. But for Shakespeare’s audience, that is what he was – and the London they were living in thought of itself, physically and intellectually, as the living heir of ancient Rome.
The Tower of London is to us one of the great monuments of medieval England, perhaps the defining symbol of the Norman Conquest. In Shakespeare’s day, people believed the Tower was built not by William, but by a different, even more celebrated conqueror:
PRINCE EDWARD: I do not like the Tower, of any place.
Did Julius Caesar build that place, my lord?
BUCKINGHAM: He did, my gracious lord, begin that place,
Which, since, succeeding ages have re-edified.
PRINCE EDWARD: Is it upon record, or else reported
Successively from age to age, he built it?
BUCKINGHAM: Upon record, my gracious lord.
PRINCE EDWARD: But say, my lord, it were not registered,
Methinks the truth should live from age to age,
As ‘twere retailed to all posterity,
Even to the general all-ending day.
RICHARD [Aside]: So wise so young, they say, do never live long.
The Tower of London, by Wenceslas Hollar, 1647. English kings traditionally began their coronation ceremonies at the Tower, spending the night there before setting out on the pre-coronation procession through the City to Westminster.
It is not just the young princes in the Tower who knew that this was a Roman building. The Queen in Shakespeare’s Richard II also shudders at the ‘flint bosom’ of what she calls ‘Julius Caesar’s ill-erected tower’.
Prison or palace, Roman or not Roman, the Tower has always been a dominant presence in the city. This was where kings, the day before their coronation, set out on a triumphal procession through London to show themselves to the citizens, who would flock to welcome them. This ritual of the royal entry was modelled on an ancient Roman tradition – so where better for a king to begin his triumph than from what everybody knew was Julius Caesar’s tower?
On 15 March 1604 it was James I’s turn to make his ceremonial entry into his new capital. He had been crowned almost a year earlier, but, as we saw in the previous chapter, the pre-coronation procession had been cancelled because of the great plague of 1603. Now that the disease had abated and the city was safe for crowds to gather, some 250 joiners and carpenters, painters and carvers, dressmakers, actors and musicians set to work.
They made seven triumphal arches, cobbled together out of wood and plaster, coloured and gilded, decorated with statues and paintings, the largest of them ninety feet high and seventy feet across, which spanned the City streets at various points along James’s processional route from the Tower to the Strand. At each stage, the king would stop to admire the arch itself, and there would be a performance, combining music, dancing, pageants and songs – the words mostly written by the playwrights Thomas Dekker and Ben Jonson. It was just the sort of citywide street party imagined in Henry V:
CHORUS: But now behold,
In the quick forge and working-house of thought,
How London doth pour out her citizens:
The Mayor and all his brethren in best sort,
Like to the senators of th’antique Rome,
With the plebeians swarming at their heels,
Go forth and fetch their conquering Caesar in.
For the whole of that day, 15 March 1604, real-life London fantasized that it was ancient Rome, and James its ‘conquering Caesar’ guaranteeing peace and prosperity.
The seven arches were demolished and recycled immediately after the procession, but we know what they looked like because the designs were published as a set of splendid engravings in a souvenir guide (available for purchase at the print-sellers ‘at the White Horse’ in Pope’s Head Alley). Thomas Dekker, dismissed as a cheap hack by his co-writer and rival Ben Jonson, but always quick to spot a publishing opportunity, rushed out a written account, which was sold in pamphlet form and which has left us with a detailed description of the day.
The most prominent performer in James’s royal entry pageants was Edward Alleyn, of the Prince’s Men. He was the leading actor of the age, famous as Tamburlaine and Dr Faustus. (Unknown artist, 1612)
The first arch, which stood at Fenchurch Street, set the tone. The print shows a roughly classical, more or less Roman arch, with on top of it a huge model of the City of London. Old St Paul’s is surrounded by gothic spires, but the whole confection is proudly, classically labelled LONDINIVM. Modern London is once again a Roman city, and the city on the Thames is the equal of her sister on the Tiber. Pretentious? Of course. Ambitious? Certainly. But it was central to how London wanted to see itself.
Like all the arches, this first one is full of classical symbols and Latin mottoes. As James approached, various actors appeared – some on the arch itself – to address the King, including a deified embodiment of the Thames, who to modern eyes seems a bizarre confluence of classical paganism with Protestant London’s totemic river. Renaissance scholar Professor Elizabeth McGrath describes the scene:
There are various figures on it, allegorical figures, personifications of virtues; in fact they were people dressed up to be these figures. The River God Thames raises himself up – ancient river gods generally lie down; they are also naked, but in fact we know that the boy who represented the river was dressed in a skin-tight leather suit to simulate nudity, painted blue because he should be blue for water (although of course the Thames then, even more than now, was never blue).
Next up was ‘the Genius of the City’, played by Edward Alleyn, the greatest actor of the age and leader of the Prince’s Men. His address, Dekker tells us, was ‘delivered with excellent Action and a well tun’de audible voice’. With stars like Alleyn taking part, the whole spectacle must have been like a Jacobean street-theatre version of a Royal Variety Performance – and, as always, the most important person present did not stay long enough. Dekker tells us that the crowd was disappointed that King James moved on so quickly, as they had been ‘glewed there together so many houres to behold him’. But a few hundred yards further, at Gracechurch Street – or as it was then called, ‘Gracious Street’ – a second arch was waiting for him: the arch of the Italians.
The Italians Pegme, from Stephen Harrison, The Arches of Triumph, London, 1604. The Italian arch depicted a Caesar-like James I being greeted by Henry VII.
Needless to say, the classical theme continues at ‘this great Italian Theater’. At its base, the Roman sea gods Neptune and Amphitrite frolic in the waves just off the coast of Kent. There are Latin inscriptions, allegorical figures and, in the centre, a painting of James arriving on horseback like a Roman emperor. The Italian merchants who had paid for the arch were seated in galleries and greeted the king with more speeches, this time in Latin. Such orations were not as daunting as they would be to us, and the spectators might well have understood quite a lot. Jonathan Bate explains:
The study of the classics, and in particular of ancient Rome, was the absolute centre of education at this time. They did not study English history, they studied classical history. They read works like Livy’s History of Ancient Rome, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans. Also crucial was the study of the great political texts, particularly Cicero – they did not study Chaucer, or texts in the English language, they studied Latin literature: Virgil, Ovid, Horace. We can see from Shakespeare’s works that he knew those poets very well.
And Shakespeare’s characters let us know that they too have studied Horace, Virgil and Ovid. In Titus Andronicus young Lucius appears with a book tucked under his arm and diligently announces:
YOUNG LUCIUS: Grandsire, ‘tis Ovid’s Metamorphoses;
My mother gave it me.
It was not just boys who studied the writers of ancient Rome: many girls were taught classical languages too. In The Taming of the Shrew, Bianca is booked in for her weekly Latin lesson. Who could be duller and less threatening than a Latin tutor? So her father can leave her safely alone with him. But translating the classical texts – when your Latin teacher turns out to be your suitor in disguise – can be a lot of fun:
LUCENTIO: Here, madam.
[He reads]
‘Hic ibat Simois, hic est Sigeia tellus, Hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis.’
BIANCA: Construe them.
LUCENTIO: ‘Hic ibat’, as I told you before – ‘Simois’, I am Lucentio – ‘hic est’, son unto Vincentio of Pisa – ‘Sigeia tellus’, disguised thus to get your love – ‘Hic steterat’, and that Lucentio that comes a-wooing – ‘Priami’, is my man Tranio – ‘regia’, bearing my port – ‘celsa senis’, that we might beguile the old pantaloon.
An audience that could laugh at teenagers flirting in Latin would have been quite capable of reading a few short phrases on a triumphal arch and understanding at least the gist of a Latin speech.
The rest of James’s progress was a kind of world tour. The Italian arch was followed by the arch of the Dutch and Belgian merchants. Then a lively Danish march played in honour of James’s wife, Anne of Denmark, accompanied the royal couple to Cheapside, where a fourth arch stood, near a fountain running with wine. This arch was entitled the New Arabia. Somewhat surprisingly, Britannia was the theme here – but a Britain of a very exotic kind. Topped by a minaret and flanked by oriental towers, the arch presents to the viewer Arabia Britannica, a happy land made fertile by the presence of its new king, and inhabited by figures representing Fame, Brightness, Youthfulness and Cheerfulness, all intent on telling the king how thrilled his subjects are to be his subjects.
Arabia Britannica, from Stephen Harrison, The Arches of Triumph, London, 1604. The fourth arch, at the east end of Cheapside, equated Britain with Arabia Felix, fortunate Arabia, a byword for wealth and ease in classical literature.
It was pure theatre: classical arches as a seamless backdrop to classical pageantry. It is no surprise that at this point a figure stepped forward to announce James’s own descent not just from a mere Tudor king of England, Henry VII, but from a prince of ancient Troy, Brutus, who after sailing round the Mediterranean had, it seems, eventually landed at Totnes a couple of thousand years before:
Great monarch of the West, whose glorious stem
Doth now support a triple Diadem
Weighing more than that of thy grand Grandsire Brute.
James would have loved this. Even today, if you visit Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh, a line of portraits depicts the ancestors of our present queen. The first of them is Brutus of Troy.
Plutarch’s Lives, as translated by Thomas North in either the 1579 or 1595 editions, was probably Shakespeare’s most important source for his Roman plays, especially Julius Caesar (1599).
After this confirmation of James’s prodigious ancestry, the royal party processed on to the Garden of Plenty, arch number five, in Cheapside. The sixth arch, in Fleet Street, was the enormous New World, ninety feet high and fifty feet wide, whose centrepiece was a moving globe with personifications of the Four Cardinal Virtues and James’s four kingdoms (England, Scotland, France and Ireland), with Envy standing by, powerless and miserable.
The procession finished in a total fusion of London and ancient Rome. Temple Bar had been transformed into the Temple of Janus, Roman god of beginnings and endings, and inhabited by yet another impressive troupe of nymphs – Peace and Liberty, Safety and Felicity – together with that most important of all Jacobean virtues, Wealth. Here, the Genius of the City stepped forward again to acknowledge the perhaps rather embarrassing scheduling of the procession for one of the most inauspicious days in the Roman calendar, the Ides of March, on which, famously, Julius Caesar had been assassinated. As James was about to pass from the City into the Strand, the Genius spokes lines by the classically educated Ben Jonson:
Begin our Spring, and with our Spring the Prime,
And first accompt of Years, of Months, of Time.
And may these Ides as fortunate appear
To thee, as they to Cæsar fatal were.
Be all thy Thoughts born perfect, and thy Hopes
In their events still crown’d beyond their Scopes.
Let not wide Heav’n that secret Blessing know
To give, which she on thee will not bestow.
The whole day was a riot of pyramids and columns, divinities and personifications, music, songs, tableaux and endless Latin orations. Some of these, as Dekker notes, were left unspoken or cut short – ‘a regard being had that his Majestie should not be wearied with teadious speeches’. It was all created with a royal audience of one in mind, and only the King, with his accompanying family and Court, would have been able to make much sense of it all (provided he could keep his concentration up). The watching crowds, however much they might have tried to follow the procession round, would have had only a pretty hazy idea of what was going on. In truth, many of them must have been there principally to see the King and his entourage, eat the free food and drink the free wine, rather than to follow the pageants and listen to the speeches. The gold and glitter of the royal costumes were surely at least as much the attraction as the choirboys from St Paul’s kitted out as Ceres and Pomona.
Silver coronation medal of King James I, 1603, created to be scattered around Westminster Abbey during James’s coronation service. James is shown in the costume and with the titles of a Roman emperor.
We do not know what role Shakespeare and the King’s Men played in the day. They must have done something, but Dekker mentions only the Prince’s Men, for whom he often worked – Edward Alleyn, their leader, was a good friend who had helped extract him from the debtors’ prison. When the day was over, the whole show was dismantled as quickly as it went up. Like Prospero’s towers and palaces, the structures simply disappeared. But in their ornate, ephemeral glory, the arches were making an explicit point: London was not just the inheritor of Rome, James I was the bestower of a new classical order and authority. An illusion of timeless legitimacy was conjured through the fleeting medium of street theatre.
*
This transformation of modern life into ancient Rome worked both ways. If Fleet Street could become the Forum for a day, then the Forum could now and then be Whitehall. In all the Roman plays – Julius Caesar, Coriolanus, Antony and Cleopatra – ancient Roman history stands in for English domestic politics – as everyone in the audience could have seen. Jonathan Bate again:
Towards the end of Queen Elizabeth’s life, people began to look at the example of ancient Rome and to get very worried that if there is uncertainty over your succession or system of government, there might be civil war. Julius Caesar, which Shakespeare wrote in 1599, is a play that addresses exactly this sort of question. What sort of state are you going to have? Are you going to have a monarch or an emperor or a more republican system? When King James came to the throne in 1603 he began to project an image of himself as being like the ancient Roman Emperor Augustus, who after a long period of civil war brought Rome to unity. James sees himself bringing peace, bringing greatness to the nation, and that is why, in establishing this new image of the king in London, he makes sure that, when he arrives in London and when his coronation is celebrated, the Roman imperial idea is invoked through the triumphal arches.
Julius Caesar’s triumph, as depicted on this maiolica plate (France, 1600–1630), gives a sense of the sheer colour and spectacle of a royal entry procession, as well as of the all-pervading visual language of the classical tradition.
The route of James I’s royal entry, 1604.
Like James’s procession, Shakespeare’s Roman plays are an intoxicating mixture of ancient and modern, Roman and British. And so in its way was the Globe Theatre itself. The very idea of a theatre is a classical one, and the shape of the new London theatres was derived from surviving Roman models in France and Italy. Shakespeare’s Roman plays were performed in front of what was in effect a permanent temporary triumphal arch, on which people appeared and made speeches – the Globe’s own stage. In the reconstructed modern Globe you can still admire the painted columns and classical details very much as they would have been on James’s triumphal arches. And just as the arches embraced the whole world – Britain, Arabia, the Americas – so the theatre too aimed to hold the entire globe in one – ultimately classical – embrace.
