The dynamic changes continually unfolding throughout England during Elizabeth’s reign were to impact significantly on the cultural life of the nation. The Queen maintained a lively interest in the arts throughout her lifetime with a particular interest in music and the theatre. She was an excellent musician, exceedingly proficient on the virginals, a small keyboard instrument which had become popular during the sixteenth century and one on which she practised diligently almost every day. Tradition has it that the Queen was playing the virginals when news of the Earl of Essex’s execution was brought to her. Elizabeth is said to have paused momentarily, and then, without making any comment, continued to play.
The composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd flourished under her patronage; both were employed at the Royal Court, despite being Catholic. Byrd was devout in his religion, a fervour which comes through strongly in the church music which he composed, particularly the Masses, although he also created a wealth of both vocal and instrumental secular music, which has led to Byrd being called the father of the English keyboard. The richness of Byrd’s work contrasts with the more austere compositions of Thomas Tallis, and the strong tradition of English choral music dates from this time. The Queen generously granted Tallis and Byrd the sole rights to print, publish and sell music throughout her nation. Both lived into their eighties, Byrd outlasting Elizabeth by some twenty years. Along with Dowland, Byrd and Tallis are the best remembered of the Elizabethan composers, although the best-known musical work of the period is God Save the Queen, composed by Dr John Bull many years before it was adopted as the National Anthem.
The Queen’s enthusiasm for theatrical performances, one shared by a number of her Privy Councillors, was essential in protecting the embryonic theatre from the growing hostility of the Puritans, who would have liked to see all theatres closed on a permanent basis and every theatrical company banned. Both needed a licence from the Lord Chamberlain in order to remain in existence, so Elizabeth’s keen interest, which was shared by a number of her most prominent courtiers such as the Earl of Leicester, Lord Strange and Lord Hunsdon, was extremely important. Without royal interest and prominent courtiers’ direct involvement, there may not have been any actors or theatres to perform the works of such dramatists as Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe and William Shakespeare.
The visual arts also flourished during Elizabeth’s reign, particularly painting. It has been said that while the Queen had no great interest in painting, she enjoyed being painted. Certainly she was exceedingly vain and loved being depicted in the best possible light, considering the official portrait to be an ideal medium for adding a distinctive gloss to the royal image. During the long period of time when the most eligible bachelors in Europe were courting her, a flattering portrait was a favourite device utilized in this elaborate ritual in order to show an ardent yet distant suitor the object of his desires. As Elizabeth’s reign developed and the fame of her exploits spread throughout Europe, the growing demand to capture her on canvas created a constant requirement for the services of the best artists of the day. Eminent European painters, such as the Italian Federigo Zuccaro and the Flemish artist Steven van der Muelen, came to England. At the same time, it became more and more fashionable for Elizabeth’s wealthy courtiers to have their portraits painted, the exceedingly vain Earl of Leicester virtually supporting the art industry single-handedly by having himself constantly portrayed in a variety of progressively more arrogant poses. Leading royal courtiers such as Sir Francis Walsingham, Sir Robert Cecil and Sir Henry Lee became enthusiastic patrons of the leading painters of the time. One of the best-known paintings of the Queen, the so-called Ditchley Portrait, by Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, resulted from Lee’s patronage of Gheeraerts and is now considered to be the best portrait of the Queen created during her lifetime. Gheeraerts became extremely fashionable after the Queen had sat for him in 1592, working in England for more than thirty years and marrying fellow artist John de Critz’s sister, Magdelena, while Gheeraert’s sister Sara, became the wife of the miniaturist Isaac Oliver. Gheeraert’s style of painting was greatly influenced by the emerging Antwerp School in the Netherlands whose best-known members were the Breughels.
During this time, loyal courtiers began to wear a miniature of the Queen pinned to their chest like a badge of honour, a craze that greatly assisted the fortunes of the leading miniaturists of the day, such as Levina Teerlinc, Isaac Oliver and Nicholas Hilliard. The latter’s first miniature of the Queen is thought to have been painted in the early 1570s. A dozen or so years later even gung-ho seafarers such as Sir Francis Drake were proudly besporting one of Hilliard’s miniatures of their sovereign. Today, Hilliard is considered the most significant portrait painter of the Elizabethan era.
Elizabeth’s firm establishment of Protestantism as England’s official religion meant that the nation provided a safe haven from Catholic oppression. A number of prominent Protestant Flemish painters settled in England in order to escape persecution from the Duke of Alva in the Netherlands, thereby making Elizabeth’s kingdom an artistic asylum and strengthening the advancement of painting in the nation. Among their number was Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder who brought his young son with him, while John de Critz was befriended by Walsingham; Isaac Oliver was a French Huguenot refugee who first became Hilliard’s pupil and then his greatest rival as a miniaturist – he was to paint Elizabeth on a number of occasions. Gheeraerts the Younger’s classic painting of the Queen, the Rainbow Portrait, was painted at the end of the sixteenth century; it is to be found at Hatfield House and is thought to have been commissioned by Sir Robert Cecil who was building Hatfield at the time.
The presence of so many leading European artists in Elizabethan England, either on a permanent or temporary basis, was in turn helpful in assisting the cause of English-born painters such as George Gower, William Segar, Robert Peake and, most illustrious of them all, Nicholas Hilliard. Hilliard was born in Exeter in 1547, thereby demonstrating that Devon was capable of providing famous men other than great seafarers during Elizabeth’s reign. He had originally trained as a goldsmith and for two years was employed in France as a miniaturist by the Duke of Anjou. To some extent, he was influenced by French court portraiture, but rather more by the most outstanding portrait painter of the sixteenth century, Hans Holbein. Hilliard’s technique, based on simplicity of line and use of bright colour, greatly appealed to the Queen and he was to paint her on a number of occasions. It might be difficult to imagine that the restless Queen would agree to remain in one place long enough to be painted, but her sittings for Hilliard are well recorded by the artist himself, as are their conversations when he instructed her in the mysteries of limning and chiaroscuro. Limning, the art of painting on a small scale, greatly appealed to the Queen, who kept a collection of miniatures in a small cabinet in her bedchamber, carefully wrapped with names inscribed in her own hand on the paper. One had written on it ‘My Lord’s picture’; inside was a likeness of the Earl of Leicester. The term chiaroscuro, derived from the Italian for light, chiaro, and dark, oscuro, refers to the then relatively new technique of building up thin layers of paint on canvas or oak board, then applying rich impasto pigment, in order to achieve dramatic highlights. This found far less favour with a Queen as conservative in her appreciation of art as most other matters; ‘the Queen cares not for novelties’, noted de Maisse.1 To Elizabeth, chiaroscuro represented modern art and her taste in painting was positively medieval.
It may also seem remarkable that the haughty Queen would have had a lengthy conversation with a mere humble artist like Hilliard, for in the mid-sixteenth century, the artist did not enjoy the same status as was to be afforded by society in later years. Artists were seen more as craftsmen, indeed Hilliard complains of being regarded as merely ‘a needy articer’ and although George Gower had the grand title of Sergeant Painter while the official court painter, he was to spend much of his time in mundane activities such as supervising the redecoration of the interior of various royal palaces. Gower had been the most sought-after portrait painter at the Royal Court prior to the appearance of Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger, having risen to prominence by painting a series of aristocratic ladies of the Court decked out in all their finery. He portrayed women such as Lettice Knollys, wife of the Earl of Leicester, and Elizabeth Sydenham, Sir Francis Drake’s second wife. His career culminated in the archetypal portrayal of the Queen – the Armada Portrait – considered to be Gower’s most outstanding work, an icon-like neo-medieval painting, and one of the world’s most important historical works of art.
Robert Peake was another prolific Elizabethan artist who maintained a considerable studio where he employed a large number of assistants; he was later to flourish under James I. It was Peake who was to produce the celebrated Procession to Blackfriars, which depicts Elizabeth being carried in splendour by a number of adoring courtiers, accompanied by Garter Knights including Lord Howard of Effingham, the Earl of Cumberland, Edmund Sheffield, later Earl of Mulgrave, and Gilbert Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury carrying the Sword of State. William Segar was another Elizabethan artist who was later to benefit from the favours of King James, being made Garter King of Arms in 1603 and subsequently knighted by Elizabeth’s Scottish successor. Segar’s great masterpiece is the Ermine Portrait, a painting of the Queen created shortly after the epic defeat of the Spanish Armada, which can also now be found at Hatfield House.
An appreciation of Elizabethan art has always been inhibited by being sandwiched between the eras of Holbein and Van Dyck; it is only in recent years that it has gained the recognition it fully deserves as an outstanding period of English art, largely through the efforts of Sir Roy Strong.
The Queen’s connection with architecture is more tangential as she declined to build any royal palaces during her reign or commission any great public buildings on account of the expense to the royal purse. Elizabeth was not to provide the nation with any English equivalent of Versailles or Fontainebleau. At the same time, the Church had also ceased to provide patronage for the visual arts as it had in medieval times, the reasons being a combination of economic and theological considerations. Elizabeth’s father’s actions in the dissolution of the monasteries had left Church revenues severely depleted, a state of affairs that Elizabeth was to maintain as she diverted funds away from the Church in order to reward favoured courtiers. At the same time, rigid Protestant intellectual thinking progressively came to associate the visual arts with idolatry, resulting in both Church and Court taking a far greater interest in music and literature than painting, sculpture or architecture.
Architecture did not have the same standing in Elizabethan society as it enjoys today, nor did it attract the same level of interest as in continental Europe. Instead, architecture was regarded more as a craft, though Elizabethan craftsmen enjoyed a far greater status than the present day. The term ‘architect’ was little used in the sixteenth century: it was the master mason who drew up the plans and supervised the construction of buildings under the eagle eye of an owner who invariably would constantly change his mind while construction was under way. In Tudor times, there was no formal training for becoming an architect – even a century later, Christopher Wren, who had been the Professor of Astronomy at Oxford University when Charles II appointed him to be Surveyor of the Royal Works, was effectively his chief architect but still using a title which dated from the Tudor era.
The Renaissance in the visual arts had been slow to arrive in England, again primarily because of the actions of King Henry VIII. After the break with Rome, it was no longer advisable either to journey to Italy or to be seen to be influenced by ideas from a Catholic country. Conversely, no major continental architect was likely to risk papal wrath by accepting commissions in England, thereby jeopardizing potential employment in his own country. So while King François I was able to entice the likes of Leonardo da Vinci and Serlio to France, no foreign architect of comparable note dared to venture across the English Channel. These factors continued during the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth: it was left to a young set designer named Inigo Jones, working in the theatre at the end of her reign, finally to introduce Renaissance architecture permanently to England in the seventeenth century.
Though the prospects for architectural advancement in England did not therefore appear auspicious, significant building activity did occur in Elizabeth’s kingdom for a completely different reason. A favourable combination of peaceful conditions and more broad-based wealth existed within England during the first half of the Queen’s reign. This meant that wealthy inhabitants no longer needed to defend themselves in a castle or fortress and a considerable number of recently self-made men wished to demonstrate their newly acquired wealth and social standing to society in an appropriate and instantly recognizable manner. Consequently, magnificent new country houses came into existence, not so much as an expression of architectural reverence but as status symbols par excellence for all to see and admire, resulting in the creation of Burghley in Lincolnshire, Longleat and Corsham Court in Wiltshire, Derbyshire’s Hardwick Hall and Wollaton Hall in Nottinghamshire. These splendid houses were financed by ‘new money’, acquired through prosperous Tudor times after a considerable amount of land and building material had become available subsequent to the dissolution of the monasteries. Elizabeth’s prosperous courtiers continued to build these great houses out of the wealth which she had helped them acquire. They hoped that they might gain that ultimate social cachet, a visit from the Queen, so that they could entertain her in suitably sumptuous style. She liked to live well, particularly at somebody else’s expense, and encouraged this egotistical line of thinking to her own advantage. Thus Sir Christopher Hatton built Holdenby in Northamptonshire, Lord Burghley constructed Theobolds in Hertfordshire and the Earl of Leicester updated Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire, virtually as additional royal palaces where their beloved Queen could be royally entertained. The Earl once entertained Elizabeth at Kenilworth for nearly three weeks of continual feasting and pageantry; on another occasion the Queen spent almost two weeks at Theobolds as Lord Burghley unsuccessfully attempted to persuade the sovereign to appoint his son Robert to be her Secretary of State. The Queen visited Theobolds on more than a dozen occasions during her time on the throne.
Elizabeth became well accustomed to visiting her wealthy courtiers:
Her Highness hath done honour to my poor house by visiting me, and seemed much pleased at what we did to please her. My son made her a fair speech, to which she did give most gracious reply. The women did dance before her, while the cornets did salute from the gallery, and she did vouchsafe to eat two morsels of rich comfit-cake and drank a small cordial from a golden cup.’2
Thus wrote Sir Robert Sidney after one of Elizabeth’s visits to Penshurst Place in Kent, his description fully conveying the pleasure and excitement of entertaining the monarch at home.
Elizabeth’s successor, James I, was later to fall in love with Theobolds, which by then had been inherited by Sir Robert Cecil following the death of his father, the King acquiring it in exchange for Hatfield. Cecil replaced the old Tudor palace with the magnificent edifice seen today using the designs of Robert Lyminge and possibly Inigo Jones. Cecil never lived there himself as it was not completed during his lifetime.
Thus Renaissance architecture crept into England virtually by the back door, in a rather oblique yet nevertheless effective manner, the Queen having stimulated a widespread desire among her most prominent and wealthy courtiers to build in order to impress. Compared to earlier private residences, these new homes for the nouveaux riches were enormous, huge prestigious glittering palaces built out of faced stone or brick rather than the half-timbered domestic buildings of earlier times. Like their owners they were flamboyant, brimming with confidence, and marvellous expressions of the mood of the nation in the halcyon years of Elizabeth’s time on the English throne. Three key examples – Longleat, Hardwick Hall and Wollaton Hall – are the work of one man, Robert Smythson, who has only recently achieved the recognition he so richly deserves. Longleat, now the home of the 7th Marquess of Bath, is widely regarded as an outstanding example of English Renaissance architecture, its exterior remaining virtually identical to the time the Queen visited its original owner Sir John Thynne in 1574. The magnificent tapestries in the Great High Chamber and Long Gallery at Hardwick were originally purchased the year before the defeat of the Armada. Elizabeth never visited Hardwick though a fine portrait of her, attributed to Nicholas Hilliard, hangs in the Long Gallery.
Smythson built across the English landscape between the early 1560s and 1614, the year of his death at nearly eighty. His work was then continued by his son John, and grandson Huntingdon, for a further three-dozen years. Smythson first achieved prominence when he came to Longleat after it had been devastated by fire in the spring of 1568. He had been recommended to Sir John Thynne by the Queen’s master mason Humphrey Lovell: ‘According to my promes I have sent unto yowe this bearer Robert Smythson, freemason, who of laytt was with Master Vice Chamberlaine, not doubting hem but to be a man fett for your worshipe.’3 Smythson virtually single-handedly personified the development of Elizabethan architecture as he constructed Longleat, Hardwick and Wollaton, together with other masterpieces such as Worksop Manor for the Earl of Shrewsbury, whom the Queen had appointed the gaoler of Mary, Queen of Scots. He was also the fourth and last husband of the formidable Bess of Hardwick, the creator of Hardwick Hall.
During Smythson’s lifetime, architecture in Elizabethan England evolved from a mere imitation of the continental Renaissance, ‘after the Italian modell’,4 to a more robust style which established an essentially English identity, blending the classical concepts of the Renaissance with more traditional Late Perpendicular features dating from the end of the Middle Ages. Houses such as Burton Agnes in Yorkshire and Montacute in deepest Somerset reflected this more national expression of architectural endeavour and displayed the confidence and sense of patronism that Elizabeth had created in her kingdom towards the end of the sixteenth century. This revival in Gothic interest intensified in the last quarter of Elizabeth’s reign, as instanced in the popularity of jousting tournaments, the publication of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia together with Gower’s neo-medieval Armada Portrait of the Queen. This almost Hollywood-style fantasy, which embraced so enthusiastically the concepts of medieval chivalry, even led to the building of mock castles such as Lulworth Castle in Dorset and Bolsover in Derbyshire, finally climaxing in the extravagant style of the Jacobean period subsequent to Elizabeth’s death in 1603.
England had sniffed the cool breeze of Renaissance architecture and then firmly shut the door again in order to retreat happily once more into a nostalgic past, something which in architectural matters the nation has tended to do ever since. It was left to Inigo Jones to revive Renaissance interest much later in the seventeenth century. Nevertheless, Robert Smythson made a decisive mark across the landscape by creating some of the greatest houses in England today – it could be said that English architecture came into its own in Elizabeth’s time as it began to establish a truly distinctive national identity, instead of slavishly imitating continental trends.
The rapid rise in educational standards across England during Elizabeth’s reign had a particularly significant impact on literature and drama. The Queen and her Council had made considerable efforts to improve standards of literacy across England in order to facilitate the reading of the Bible on a far wider scale. Both the Old and New Testaments had been published in English and their contents made readily available in every parish church throughout the nation. The translation of the Bible was itself a literary masterpiece, and its creation was the publishing sensation of Tudor England. At the same time, the Queen’s determination to ensure that its contents reached the widest possible audience, coupled with her continuing actions to improve her citizens’ learning abilities, made them anxious to read as much as possible. Technological advancement in printing facility created a print culture that had much the same impact on Elizabethan society as the Internet in the latter half of the twentieth century. Suddenly, a huge amount of European literature became available in England as both scholars and authors were able to read Italian drama and French poetry. This happy state of affairs considerably enriched English cultural life and had a profound influence on the creative minds of Elizabethan England, particularly poets and playwrights as they devoured the latest work of their continental counterparts. Shakespeare for one was to benefit considerably from this situation, being always on the lookout for raw material that he could rapidly recycle into yet another masterpiece. Virtually all Shakespeare’s comedies and some of his tragedies were largely based on Italian material which had been translated into French and then become freely available in England. So Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice and Othello were all drawn from Italian novellas, while Petrarch inspired the Roman plays such as Julius Caesar and Holinshed provided material for the great historical dramas such as Henry V and Richard III: ‘Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this sun of York. . . .’5
Elizabethan dramatists were not impeded by the laws of copyright and completely uninhibited by any thoughts of plagiarism. Rival versions of Richard III and Henry V ran happily at adjoining theatres and there was at least one version of both Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet in existence before those now associated with Shakespeare, who displayed no qualms in taking memorable phrases from other sources. Thus Antony and Cleopatra’s ‘. . . barge she sat in, like a burnished throne . . .’ is essentially Sir Thomas More’s translation of Petrarch transposed into verse. Elizabethan audiences placed far less importance on originality than today – style and sheer entertainment value were the qualities they most appreciated.
The Queen had also been anxious to improve the intellectual quality of her clergy and considerable efforts had been made at university level to ensure that Protestant clerics should be far better educated than their Catholic predecessors. If anything, this well-intentioned stratagem proved over-successful, resulting in a surplus of potential clergy in the latter half of the sixteenth century with no church livings readily available. Happily, however, this state of affairs coincided with the growth of the theatre, so many university graduates decided to see whether they could make a living writing for the stage rather than taking Holy Orders, thereby creating an instant army of potential playwrights for whom there was fortunately a rapidly expanding market. Nashe, Greene and Peele were three such young graduates, who became playwrights and were known as ‘University Wits’.
The growth of the Elizabethan theatre is a classic instance of the laws of supply and demand: a constant requirement for new plays was met by an inexhaustible procession of new young playwrights, intelligent, highly creative and hungry for success. The rapid growth of the theatre towards the end of the sixteenth century is as much due to a variety of socio-economic factors as purely cultural influences. The population of London rose rapidly during Elizabeth’s reign, becoming large enough to support the major capital cost of the purpose-built theatres which had begun to replace the tiered courtyards of traditional coaching inns as suitable venues for theatrical performances. There was an increasing demand for a wider range of entertainment and leisure activities, coupled with a growing, more sophisticated middle class with more leisure time to enjoy who were looking for new activities which were rather more intellectually stimulating than traditional pursuits such as bear-baiting and cockfighting. Conveniently for the new playwrights, the old style of drama provided by the traditional morality plays was no longer available, having been banned by the authorities as being theologically incorrect – the Protestants disliked God being portrayed as simply an old man with white hair and a long beard. Yet the working classes also wished to be entertained and flocked to the new theatres to stand in front of the stage in an area which became known as ‘the groundlings’.
Suddenly theatre builders, impresarios, playwrights and actors had an audience. Action, lights, music! Theatre became the new art form of the Elizabethan age. A handsome living could be made out of live theatre: there was no such thing as a long-running production, the theatre company would stage a different play each and every day, creating a continual requirement for fresh material from new writers. So great was the demand that plays were created by teams of dramatists, in much the same manner as modern-day television scriptwriters create a long-running serial or soap opera. Rival theatre owners and impresarios scrambled to outdo each other in a frantic desire to attract the largest audiences to their own particular production. Speed was of the essence, in order to effectively respond to a neighbouring theatre’s successful production or to cash in on the latest popular theatrical trend. As a leading modern-day Oxford literary don amusingly explains:
If you read the diary of Philip Henslowe, the owner of The Rose, the rival theatre to The Globe, you will find him saying, ‘what are we going to put on next Wednesday? Here’s a shilling, go down to the pub and share it out amongst half a dozen popular poets and tell them to come and see me. The place up the road has a play about Anthony and Cleopatra, we must have our own Anthony and Cleopatra. Here’s the story, carve it up, an act each, come back on Monday with it finished. We’ll rehearse for two days and perform it on Wednesday.’6
It was in this frenetic atmosphere, this seething cultural climate, in which playwrights such as William Shakespeare, Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, Edmund Spenser, Ben Jonson and Thomas Dekker found themselves in London during the last decade of the sixteenth century, where actors such as Ned Alleyn, Richard Burbage and William Kempe trod the boards in front of enthusiastic and totally classless audiences.
None of their activities would have been possible without the direct interest and support of the Queen and a number of her most prominent courtiers, men such as the Earl of Leicester, Lord Hunsdon, the Lord Chamberlain and Lord Strange. Without the authority of the Lord Chamberlain, it was illegal to form a company of actors or perform a play; furthermore the Puritan-dominated City of London frowned on theatrical performances and made great efforts to have them banned. This threat caused the major new playhouses such as The Globe, The Swan and The Rose to be clustered together on the South Bank of the Thames so as to be outside the jurisdiction of the City of London. Amid this sprawling area could be found every conceivable pleasure and vice – gambling dens, brothels, cockfighting and bear-baiting pits – all ironically located on land owned by the Bishop of Southwark!
While the Queen could be said to have been lukewarm about art and architecture, she certainly made up for this supposed lack of interest in her enthusiasm for the theatre, attending performances at the Middle and Inner Temples and other locations such as the residences of wealthy courtiers. She also summoned theatrical companies to perform at the Royal Court and even had her own company of actors, ‘The Queen’s Men’. Elizabeth’s enthusiasm and patronage successfully kept the Puritans at bay throughout her lifetime and encouraged her leading courtiers to become involved in the theatre. Theatrical companies, including the Earl of Leicester’s Men, Lord Strange’s Men and the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, came into existence, while her Master of Revels, responsible for organizing court entertainment, shrewdly realized that it was more economical to hire groups of players for important functions at Court rather than finance full-time in-house performers. Thus, theatre flourished under the protection of the sovereign and the patronage of rich courtiers with cultural inclinations or pretensions. The Queen cleverly realized that theatre was an excellent place for her citizens to be entertained and kept out of mischief that could otherwise interfere with the orderly conduct of her kingdom. Thus she permitted the leading impresario James Burbage, who employed both Shakespeare and Marlowe, to produce plays virtually wherever he desired: ‘As well for the recreation of our loving subjects as for our solace and pleasure.’
Elizabeth’s specific interest in the stage is impossible to evaluate as examples of her personal involvement tend to rely on amusing yet apocryphal stories. Her favourite Shakespearean play was supposedly The Merry Wives of Windsor, written so it is said after the Queen had seen Shakespeare’s Henry IV and requested him to write another play wherein Falstaff falls in love.7 If there is any truth in this entertaining anecdote it would be a splendid early example of a Royal Command Performance! The Queen is thought to have attended the initial performance of Twelfth Night, escorted by her favourite, the Earl of Essex. A hilarious tale of particularly doubtful authenticity involves Elizabeth appearing on the stage in one of Shakespeare’s productions. In those days it was apparently customary for VIPs to sit or stand around the stage during a performance – on one such occasion, the Queen supposedly became bored and walked across the stage through a crowd of actors that included Shakespeare, who was performing in one of his own plays as he was often accustomed to do. When the Queen’s walkabout was studiously ignored, she retraced her steps and pointedly dropped a glove at Shakespeare’s feet. Without pausing, Shakespeare picked up the glove and returned it to Elizabeth with a flourish, extemporizing:
And though now bent on this high embassy
yet stoop we to take up our Cousin’s glove.8
There was tremendous applause from the audience. In the context of an age where the law did not permit female performers, the concept of the Queen in a walk-on part is ingenious yet implausible. It is highly unlikely that Elizabeth, always conscious of her social standing, would have attended a public performance at a theatre such as The Globe or The Rose although she certainly watched many at private venues. The Merry Wives of Windsor was said to have been premiered at Windsor Castle while the Court was present.
The attendance of Elizabeth and the Earl of Essex at Twelfth Night at the Middle Temple had a greater degree of credibility, as the young Earl of Southampton, a close colleague of Essex, was one of Shakespeare’s major patrons, along with both the 3rd and 4th Earls of Pembroke. Shakespeare may have been concerned when, as a result of Essex’s abortive uprising against the Queen, Southampton was thrown into the Tower and not released until after the Queen’s death in 1603. Essex’s ill-conceived coup had been signalled by his supporters arranging for Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, to put on a special performance of Richard II, Shakespeare’s powerful play about an unpopular monarch being deposed. Shakespeare may well have been fearful of being suspected of an involvement in the plot against the Queen and being suddenly drawn into a real-life scenario every bit as dramatic as one of his own plays.
In many respects, Elizabeth’s entire reign resembled a long-running stage performance of epic proportions, full of love and lust, death or glory, triumph and tragedy, heroes and villains, all the classic ingredients for a successful drama series. Shakespeare did not have to look far for his inspiration, it was all around him. He had arrived in London around the time of the defeat of the Armada and lived there in the euphoric aftermath of this famous victory. He subsequently witnessed the steady slide into the sea of disillusion which arose in the final years of the Queen’s life, when rhetoric finally began to outrun reality. His work fully captures the flavour of Elizabethan England. Plays such as Henry V portray the more upbeat moments, Henry’s stirring speeches to his soldiers at Agincourt having much in common with Elizabeth’s to her troops at Tilbury at the time of the Armada. Productions such as Hamlet and Measure for Measure brilliantly convey the brooding intensity of the Royal Court, everyone anxiously watching each other while meddling in each other’s affairs.
It was a time of both high tension and frantic cultural endeavour as London thronged with all manner of aspiring playwrights and poets, drawn from all walks of life and all levels of social strata. Marlowe, Middleton, Jonson, Spenser, Fletcher and Shakespeare were the dominant playwrights of the day. Christopher Marlowe was the son of a cobbler in Canterbury while Ben Jonson’s stepfather was a bricklayer, Marlowe, Spenser and Fletcher were all university educated, whereas Shakespeare had been to grammar school in Stratford. Marlowe’s work displayed his marvellous gift with words: ‘Was this the face that launch’d a thousand ships, And burnt the topless towers of Ilium?’ from Doctor Faustus; or from Tamburlaine: ‘Accurst be he that first invented war’; and in The Massacre of Paris: ‘pale death may walk in furrows on my face’. Yet Marlowe lacked Shakespeare’s ability to create believable characters, while his plots displayed no real coherence or continuity. Truly powerful passages in Doctor Faustus were bewilderingly interspersed with frivolous practical jokes in scenes more suitable for a knockabout farce, as Marlowe lost the plot in order to engage in the trivial pursuit of a cheap laugh from the groundlings. He did not possess the ferocious, intellectual calibre of Ben Jonson or the ability to conjure up the chilling sense of menace which John Webster was later able to conceive, most particularly in his two brilliant tragedies The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi, both works full of death, despair and decay. Marlowe lacked discipline, and his life contained too many diversions in the twilight world he inhabited when engaged in espionage for Walsingham on the Queen’s behalf. Eventually he was to be murdered in an East End tavern. Marlowe was not yet thirty.
John Fletcher is said to have collaborated with Shakespeare on Two Noble Kinsmen and Shakespeare’s last work, Henry VIII, which is more a pageant than a play. When produced at The Globe, a spark from a cannon which was part of the special effects, set fire to the thatched roof of the tiered gallery and burnt the theatre to the ground. A deeply shocked Shakespeare retired to Stratford and wrote nothing further. Henry VIII is rarely performed today, while Fletcher’s own work is now considered to be rather too flavourless for modern-day tastes.
Edmund Spenser created The Faerie Queene in order to ingratiate himself with Elizabeth and acquire royal patronage, yet he too could write a memorable line: ‘Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.’9 Predictably, the mean-minded Lord Burghley disapproved, ‘What! All this for a song?’10 he grumbled when the Queen instructed him to pay one hundred pounds for a collection of Spenser’s poems. Thomas Kyd was also a popular dramatist when Shakespeare first arrived in London, his best-known play being The Spanish Tragedy which was enormously popular in its time. Thomas Middleton was as much in demand as Shakespeare as a dramatist towards the end of the sixteenth century and was playwright in residence at the Globe when Shakespeare was involved with that theatre. Middleton’s play, A Game Of Chess, once ran for nine successive days, an unusual occurrence at that time. Other playwrights such as John Lyly and Thomas Dekker were very popular in Shakespeare’s day, but are now almost forgotten.
Poetry was equally important during Elizabeth’s reign. An aspiring young man made his mark by writing verse full of wit, elegance and intellectual brilliance. A law student at the Middle Temple or Lincoln’s Inn needed to demonstrate more than a sound knowledge of legal issues so he engaged with his fellow students in rowdy ‘wit contests’, shouting out elegies, satires and epigrams amid a literary Tower of Babel in order to appear the wittiest, most cynical and cleverest young man about town. John Donne acquired his position as secretary to Sir Thomas Egerton, the Queen’s last Lord Keeper, and later Lord Chancellor under James I, in this manner. Donne, like many ambitious young men of the time, was desperate to become a gentleman but never fully succeeded. After he had been dismissed from Egerton’s service for marrying without informing his employer, he had to endure many years of poverty, a situation not helped by Donne’s unerring ability to make his wife perpetually pregnant. The ingenious Donne had tried a variety of ways of achieving success and had sailed with Essex and Ralegh on the Islands Voyage in 1597 as a volunteer. Originally a Roman Catholic, he converted to Protestantism, later taking Holy Orders, and was Dean of St Paul’s for the last years of his life, noted for his fine sermons. Donne’s verses were not published until after his death in 1631 and it was some considerable time before his delicate touch and subtle use of language gained him the recognition which his work now commands:
Go, and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me, where all past years are,
Or who cleft the Devil’s foot.11
Michael Drayton was another poet of some standing in the last years of the sixteenth century; his patron was Mary, Countess of Pembroke and Sir Philip Sidney’s sister. Drayton’s verse, ‘Nor night doth hinder day, nor day the night doth wrong. The summer not too short, the winter not too long’,12 displays all the bright imagery and deft rhythm to be found centuries later in the works of Laurie Lee, another poet possessing a great love of landscape.
Writing poetry, like writing plays, was a classless activity. While Donne’s father had been an ironmonger, Francis Bacon came from an altogether different social strata, yet he too had studied law and, with Donne and Sir Henry Wooton, engaged in poetry contests based on the relative values of Court, city and country, a familiar theme of the day. Sir Philip Sidney, a prominent member of the Queen’s Court, also acquired a formidable reputation as a ‘serious sonneteer’, producing such creations as ‘Thou my mind aspire to higher things’, together with longer works, such as the prose romance Arcadia. Sidney’s virtues had been evident from an early age: ‘Nights and days in ceaseless and related studies, he worked upon the anvil of wit, reason and memory . . .’13 noted an approving observer of a young Sidney. He was the apple of his father’s eye, Sir Henry Sidney, the Queen’s one-time Deputy in Ireland, who urged Philip’s younger brother Robert to ‘imitate his virtues, exercises and actions, he is a rare ornament of his age, the very formula of all well disposed young gentlemen of our court . . . in truth I speak it without flattery to him or myself he hath the most virtues that I ever found in any man’.14 Sidney followed his father to Court and into the service of the Queen but was bitterly disappointed by Elizabeth’s manner towards him, feeling that he had not been granted the recognition he deserved. Just as the early twentieth-century war poet, Wilfred Owen, he was destined to die disillusioned amid the mud of Flanders and, like Rupert Brooke and Keats, was cut down in his poetic prime.
The work of most of the Elizabethan poets pales into insignificance when compared to Shakespeare’s sonnets, such as the celebrated Sonnet Number 18:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.
Scholars have agonized endlessly as to the identity of the ‘Dark Lady’ in these sonnets. Was it Mary Fitton, mistress of William Herbert, the 3rd Earl of Pembroke and godson of the Queen? It has been claimed that the initials ‘W.H.’ in the dedication contained in the first folio of Shakespeare’s plays published in 1623 refers to William Herbert. Like so many issues concerning Shakespeare, these claims remain tantalizingly unsubstantiated and it is incredible that so much is known about Shakespeare’s work yet the man still remains shrouded in mystery. Today an impressive statue of Shakespeare by Sheemakers stands in the front hall at Wilton House near Salisbury, the home of the present Earl of Pembroke. The statue is a copy of William Kent’s sculpture of Shakespeare which is to be found in Westminster Abbey.
Shakespeare alone had the ability to transform a stage open to the sky without the advantage of props, lighting or the special effects of twentieth-century theatre, using purely the power of words to effortlessly transport his audiences to Agincourt, Elsinore or the River Nile. He had an uncanny ability to convince the spectators that the callow young man on the stage really was Juliet, Cleopatra or Viola. Shakespeare held an audience spellbound in the reign of Elizabeth I and can do the same 400 years later, not merely in London but anywhere in the world from New York to Tokyo, translating easily into any language. None of his fellow Elizabethan playwrights possessed his enduring genius, that universal, timeless appeal.
The great prose writers who lived through Elizabeth’s reign should not be ignored; for example, William Camden’s magnificent Britannia and Annals are sweeping surveys of the period giving a detailed personal insight into both Elizabeth’s reign and her kingdom. John Stow’s chronicles, particularly his authoritative portrayal of London, a city in which he lived for more than eighty years, minutely examine virtually every nook and cranny of Elizabeth’s capital as it appeared towards the end of the sixteenth century. At this time Richard Hakluyt was writing one of England’s first outstanding travel books; his marvellous Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffiques and Discoveries of the English Nation used the first-hand accounts of those who travelled to the furthest corners of the globe and returned to recount their experiences. Francis Bacon is one of many men alleged to have written everything attributed to William Shakespeare, some scholars finding it difficult to accept that a mere grammar school boy, who had not been to university, could possibly have produced works of such expertise. Much of Bacon’s elegant prose was created in the time of James I, but he did pen his stylish ‘Essays’ in the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign, composing with polished wit and a persuasive term of phrase. Bacon died in bizarre circumstances in 1626 when, conducting a scientific experiment involving the freezing of a chicken, he contracted a fatal chill and became terminally ill.
Great art and literature is said to mirror the mood of a nation and, while Nicholas Hilliard, Shakespeare, Marlowe and their compatriots were active in England, the interpretation of life in Spain was altogether different. Instead of the vitality of Shakespeare and Marlowe, there was the wry, often bitter satire of Cervantes, conveyed through his account of ‘the Knight of the Doleful Countenance’, Don Quixote and his faithful donkey-riding retainer, Sancho Panza. (Cervantes died on the same day as Shakespeare, 23 April 1616.) In place of the vibrant optimism displayed in the works of most Elizabethan artists, Spain had the distorted religious images of El Greco together with the sombre drama of Titian, one of the acknowledged masters of the High Renaissance.
To some extent, the creators of this period of history reflect the natures of their respective monarchs. Where Elizabeth was dazzlingly colourful in both appearance and manner, Philip of Spain was austere and remote, invariably attired entirely in black, a solitary figure living a life of privileged isolation in the private apartments of his palace, largely ignoring El Greco, who lived in Toledo; Philip favoured Titian as a painter, taking over his patronage from his father Emperor Charles V. He commissioned this Italian artist to paint a series of dramatic mythological works.
Philip had inherited an empire at its peak and he presided over its gradual decline, a process which began after the Armada’s defeat in 1588. Nations normally demonstrate their greatest vitality in their period of growth, but Philip had found Spain already in full bloom, whereas Elizabeth had come to the English throne when the flowering had yet to begin. The cultural life of the respective nations tended to mirror that state of affairs in many respects.
Neither Titian nor El Greco were Spanish – Spain did produce internationally known artists such as Goya and Velazquez, but both were of a later generation. Elizabeth on the other hand fostered a sense of pride and patriotism within her nation that encouraged indigenous artists to flourish. In turn, their work fostered the country’s sense of self-belief, further developing patriotic feeling. This sense of identity helped to develop artistic expression unique to Elizabeth’s kingdom, thereby reducing the necessity of summoning continental genius at every conceivable opportunity.
Though it would be foolish to claim that the Queen was entirely responsible for the flowering of so much creative endeavour during her time on the English throne, nevertheless she was the ruler of the nation when it occurred. Elizabeth was herself a cultured person, and created a climate that encouraged this creative process to flourish in a manner that did not exist before or after her reign. Her father, Henry, had also been a cultured man but was quick to summon Holbein, Eworth or William Scrots from overseas to paint the major portraits of his reign rather than seeking local talent; no English writers or musicians of real note came to prominence during Henry’s time on the English throne, nor was there any comparable great creative advance in the period subsequent to Elizabeth’s death, though Milton was a poet of substance. True, Dryden might have been more sophisticated than Shakespeare, but he totally failed to match the latter’s shimmering imagery or awesome creative power. Charles I quickly reintroduced foreign talent in the shape of the Flemish painter Van Dyck, while the architectural achievements of Inigo Jones were sadly cut short by the Civil War.
During Elizabeth’s forty-five years on the throne, peaceful conditions within her kingdom combined with favourable social and economic circumstances to greatly encourage cultural advancement within the nation, particularly in the literary field. It was during the Elizabethan period that English literature can be said to have come of age and England began to establish a literary reputation to be taken seriously by continental Europe, which had hitherto regarded the Tudor kingdom as a cultural desert island. The English language had expanded enormously, from some 4,000 words during the time of Chaucer to the more than 24,000 words available to Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights and poets. They certainly made the most of the material available, putting England at last on the creative map of Europe, establishing its tradition as a literary nation. The Queen was the catalyst which enabled this to happen, besides being a consummate performer in her own right. Her address given to a potentially hostile parliamentary delegation, incensed over further Crown monopolies, at the time of her last Parliament in 1601, represented a tour de force which any modern actress would have been proud to deliver: ‘Though God hath raised me high, yet this I count the glory of my crown: that I have reigned with your loves.’15 This poses the intriguing question – did Elizabeth also write her own material?