#globe research

 Ahead of our Research in Action workshop exploring Elizabethan poetry, Research Intern John King shares an insight into Edmund Spenser.

The London-born poet Edmund Spenser (c. 1552 – 1599) is best known for his allegorical epic poem The Faerie Queene (1589) and the pastoral verses of The Shepheardes Calendar (1579). Although we study him mostly for his stylistic innovations with verse, Spenser wrote during a period of significant colonial upheaval and, as a civil servant, lived in great proximity to, and participated in, the tempestuous events of the Second Desmond rebellion and the Nine Years War that characterised the final decade of the Elizabethan age in Ireland. As one of many young men to take advantage of the schemes to colonize Ireland under Elizabeth’s reign, Spenser’s personal fortune was inexorably tied up with the success of English conquest.

Spenser first came to Ireland in August 1580 as private secretary to the queen’s representative, the Lord Deputy Arthur Grey (1536-1593). It is unclear whether this life in Ireland was entirely of Spenser’s choosing: his appointment may well have been a result of an unfavourable portrait of the politician William Cecil in the satirical poem Mother Hubberds Tale, the manuscript of which no longer survives. Either way, his expatriate life was not without its advantages: he was able to acquire land and wealth at a rate far beyond what he might have achieved as a civil servant in England. By the time he obtained the lease for New Abbey, County Kildare, in 1582, he is identified as ‘Gent.’: this was a significant rise in social status from modest beginnings as a ‘sizar’ at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, where he undertook a servant’s duties alongside his undergraduate studies and received financial support.

Spenser’s commander Lord Grey was a notoriously hard-line Protestant, and concerns about his extreme anti-Catholic outlook had delayed his appointment as Lord Deputy. This reticence proved well-advised when, in 1580, he ordered the massacre of 600 Spanish and Italian troops at the Fort d’Oro, Smerwick, following a three-day siege and their surrender. The scandal was a likely factor in Grey being recalled to England; Spenser, who may have been present at the slaughter, later defended his commander’s actions in the political tract A View of the Present State of Ireland (1598) against accusations of being ‘a bloodye man’ who regarded the life of the queen’s ‘subjectes noe more then dogges’. The tract is arranged as a dialogue between two speakers who present arguments for the eradication of Irish Brehon law, customs, religion and language, and lament the intermarrying of previous generations of English settlers with native Irish so that they ‘should soe muche degenerate from their first natures as to grow wild.’ This anxiety of Englishness derives from the fact that the descendants of the twelfth century Norman settlers in Ireland (Sean Ghaill) largely shared a language and religion with the native Irish. One of the so-called Sean Ghaill, Lord Roche, was involved in a protracted, and ultimately successful, lawsuit against Spenser over the illegal seizing of land during the plantation of Munster, as well as for allegedly threatening his tenants, stealing his cattle, and beating his servants. In 1597, Roche’s son David came out in open rebellion against the Crown.

In September 1598, Spenser was nominated Sheriff of Cork by the Privy Council as ‘a man endowed with good knowledge in learning, and not unskilful or without experience in the service of the warres.’ This accolade was never bestowed, as on the 15th of October his chief residence, Kilcolman Castle, was sacked and burned by local Irish forces, of which Roche’s son was thought to have been a prominent member. Spenser and his family escaped through an underground tunnel and sought refuge in Cork. Ben Jonson would later assert that Spenser’s infant son, Peregrine, died in the fire, though no other record survives of this. The following December, Spenser left Ireland for the last time, delivering letters to the Privy Council in London from Sir Thomas Norris, president of Munster. He died there on January 13th 1599 and is buried in Westminster Abbey.

With Twelfth Night now playing in the Globe, Globe Research Intern John King delves into the world of shipwrecks... 

By the time audiences first witnessed the separation of twins Sebastian and Viola at sea in Twelfth Night (c. 1601), shipwrecks were a recurring motif in Shakespeare’s plays: from the shipwreck that separates two sets of identical twins in The Comedy of Errors (c. 1594), to the failed venture at sea that ultimately sees Antonio indebted to Shylock in The Merchant of Venice (c. 1596). Shakespeare also writes shipwrecks into the plays that follow Twelfth Night. In Othello (1604), a storm disperses the Turkish fleet and briefly separates the Moor from his companions off the coast of Cyprus. Tempestuous sea voyages are particularly conspicuous in the plots of the Late Romances: the unfortunate hero of Pericles (1608) is forced to endure the phenomenon on two separate occasions; a storm wrecks doomed Antigonus’ ship and strands him on Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale (1611); and of course, it is the magical illusion of a shipwreck that brings Antonio to Prospero’s island in The Tempest (1611).

Shipwrecks, then, are a common occurrence in Shakespeare’s plays, but what structural function do they serve? As a plot device, shipwrecks disrupt itineraries and separate families. Out of the chaos they create, the quest to re-establish order and reclaim stable identities provides the drama for plays like Twelfth Night and The Comedy of Errors. When the twins are reunited and Viola’s true identity is finally revealed to Orsino, the count makes reference to the initial calamity that set the events of the play in motion: ‘If this be so, as yet the glass seems true,/ I shall have share in this most happy wreck.’ Naval disasters also serve as a reminder of forces that lie beyond human control: ‘it is comforting’ writes Roman poet Lucretius in De Rerum Natura, ‘when the winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea, to watch from land the severe trials of another person.’ This model of stoic detachment was taken up by early modern humanists like Montaigne, whom we know Shakespeare read.

Shipwrecks would also have had wider associations within the early modern cultural imagination. Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences did not need to look very far for examples of voyages of discovery that had ended in disaster. In 1588, a little over a decade before Twelfth Night was first staged, the Spanish Armada (a fleet of 130 ships sent by King Philip II of Spain to invade England) was scattered along the coast of Scotland and Ireland. Due to severe storms, crucial misjudgement by Spanish forces, and the defensive efforts of English and Dutch fleets, over a third of the Spanish ships failed to return, signalling one of the greatest political triumphs of Elizabeth’s reign. Years later in July 1609, Sea Venture, the first dedicated emigration vessel and flagship of the London Company, was wrecked in a storm off the coast of Bermuda - an event immortalised in the 1610 eye witness account of poet William Strachey (1572-1621), which some scholars believe to be a source for The Tempest.

In Twelfth Night, both Maria and Fabian make reference to the doomed sea voyage of Dutch explorer Willem Barentsz, an event that was fresh in the minds of the play’s first audiences. The expedition set out for the Northeast Passage in May 1596, and in July reached the island of Nova Zembla, where Barentsz’s ship became trapped on the ice. The crew was forced to spend the winter in uninhabitable conditions, and Barentsz died in June 1597, along with several of his crew. In Twelfth Night, when Malvolio’s relationship with Olivia begins to broach uncharted territory, Fabian warns the steward that ‘you are now sailed into the north of my lady’s opinion, where you will hang like an icicle on a Dutchman’s beard.’ Maria furthers the insult, saying that Malvolio’s face has ‘more lines than is in the new map with the augmentation of the Indies.’ This new map, drawn by Edward Wright in 1600, was the legacy of Barentsz’s ill-fated voyage.

Globe Research Intern Nina Romancikova shares an insight into the world of Romeo and Juliet.

What’s the first thing you think of when someone says Romeo and Juliet? It’s probably ‘love’. But it might surprise you that its original audiences were just as likely to have regarded violence as the leitmotif of the play – in the form of civil brawls, street fights and family discord. Violence was an insistent reality for the Elizabethans, a constant danger but also a sensational experience when performed on stage. The Curtain playhouse in Shoreditch, where Romeo and Juliet was probably first performed, was an unfortunate centre for street violence. The scholar Chris Fitter, in an article about quarrels on the streets of London, notes a large-scale brawl taking place outside the Curtain in 1584. 1590s London was driven by violence, fuelled by class conflicts and the anxiety caused by cripplingly high grain prices. One can imagine what resonance Benvolio’s words ‘For now, these hot days, is the mad blood stirring’ (3.1) had for the audience watching Romeo and Juliet, many of whom had memories of the riots of June 1595, when Londoners took to the streets to protest a food shortage that was fast becoming famine.

Shakespeare’s first audiences were also wearily familiar with upper-class gang feuds, like that between the Montagues and the Capulets. The social historian Lawrence Stone records bloody battles in Fleet Street and the Strand, which often escaped the authorities. The Tudor monarchs all issued proclamations against fighting in public. In the 1590s, Elizabeth attempted to limit elite violence to the less destructive private confrontation of the duel. As a result, the number of recorded duels and challenges jumped from just five in the 1580s to nearly twenty a decade later. However, the street fights didn’t cease. Elizabethan violence seemed untameable, even if aristocratic brawling did decline in the face of climbing duelling rates.

Duels generally caused less damage and were bound by etiquette and rules, unlike street fights. Italian fencing manuals were popular among young men, and Italian fencing instructors thrived in London in the 1580s and 90s (when Shakespeare was writing Romeo and Juliet). The Italian vocabulary seeped through to the language of violence of Romeo and Juliet as well. Mercutio uses Italian fencing terms, such as ‘alla stoccado’, ‘passado’ and ‘punto reverso’ (different kinds of rapier thrusts), which mild-natured Benvolio fails to understand. However, it was not only the Italian fencing language and the new weapons that fuelled duelling in England. An underlying and more significant reason was a crisis in masculine honour among aristocracy. Jennifer Low, in Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, argues that the practice of duelling was so central to the notion of the courtier that its meaning helped to define the aristocracy of the period as a whole. Offending a gentleman’s honour could easily provoke a duel – and these so-called honour duels worked to publicise and enhance the masculinity of the gentlemen involved. Viewed in this light, Romeo and Juliet seems very much a play of its age, offering what Jill Levenson calls ‘a panoramic view of violence in Elizabethan England’.

Romeo and Juliet, directed by Daniel Kramer, is now playing in the Globe until  Sunday 9 July. Book tickets.

The fluidity of gender is no 21st-century idea. In Twelfth Night, writes Dr Will Tosh, gender is what you make of it.

If William Shakespeare ever browsed the textbooks in a medical library, he would have been confronted with a variety of opinions about the apparent differences between the sexes. Turning first to On The Usefulness of the Parts of the Body by the 2nd-century Greek physician Galen, still in active use in the 1600s, Shakespeare would have read that women and men were inverted copies of one another. A woman’s sexual organs were precisely the same as a man’s, wrote Galen, ‘the difference between them lying in only one thing... namely, that in women the parts are within the body, whereas in men they are outside.’ According to Galenic theory, it was male ‘heat’ that pushed out the genitalia during a foetus’s gestation, creating the only significant distinction between male and female forms.

But then Shakespeare might have picked up John Banister’s The History of Man (1578), which suggested something quite different about the nature of men and women: Banister advised doctors to ‘wholly abstain’ from considering female anatomy at all, as the alien mysteries of femininity were likely to confound (and probably dangerously arouse) the wisest surgeon. Another influential medical work, a compilation published in 1597 as The Problems of Aristotle, identified women as alarming deviations from the male norm, ‘monster[s] in nature’ whose toxic bodily emissions posed a threat to masculine virility. Human physiology was – it’s fair to say – a matter of debate in Shakespeare’s England.

But although Renaissance surgeons had a somewhat foggy notion of anatomical sexual difference, early modern culture had very set ideas about gendered behaviour: men were distinguished from women through employment, social status, dress, comportment and speech, and it was a matter of supreme importance that these distinctions were preserved. Doctors might have scratched their heads about what, precisely, made a person biologically male or female, but cultural commentators had no doubt about what made someone a man or a woman. Men were active, vocal and born to control a household. Women were passive, meek and designed to obey. It was through the performance of these social behaviours that an individual manifested their gender. Shakespeare’s contemporaries were taught that rigorous self-policing was required to maintain maleness and femaleness as meaningful categories: mannish women and effeminate men ran the risk of doing permanent damage to their bodies and souls. As the Puritan polemicist William Prynne put it in a diatribe against transvestite boy actors, cross-dressing teenagers strive ‘thus purposely, yea affectedly, to unman, unchristian, uncreate themselves, if I may so speake, and to make themselves, as it were, neither men nor woman, but monsters.’

All of which makes William Shakespeare’s achievement in Twelfth Night truly remarkable. His cross-dressed heroine Viola – who calls herself a ‘monster’ in Act II, scene 2 – is no social pariah, but a glorious demonstration of the range of gender possibilities available to early modern people. Viola disguises herself as a boy and wins the love of a man and a woman (Orsino and Olivia); her epicene twin brother Sebastian is beloved of both Olivia and the lovelorn Antonio. On the 17th-century stage, with female roles taken by boys, the play was even more giddily fluid in its gender dynamics: Viola is in fact a boy playing a girl playing a boy for most of the play, indistinguishable from a boy playing a boy (Sebastian) and surrounded by boys playing women (Olivia and Maria) as well as men playing men. In Twelfth Night gender really is what a person makes of it, no matter the story beneath the petticoat or hose. In Shakespeare’s Illyria, sexual dimorphism isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Dressed as the boy Cesario, Viola is regarded by Orsino as an apt wooer for Olivia precisely because of the youth’s alluring androgyny: ‘Diana’s lip / Is not more smooth and rubious,’ observes Orsino. ‘Thy small pipe / Is as the maiden’s organ, shrill and sound, / And all is semblative a woman’s part.’ If Malvolio sniffs that ‘one would think his mother’s milk were scarce out of him’ when he meets the young Cesario, we realise that this is not just an indication of Viola’s disguised femininity when her twin brother Sebastian – born a male but indistinguishable from his sister – admits to Antonio that ‘my bosom is full of kindness, and I am yet so near the manners of my mother that upon the least occasion more mine eyes will tell tales of me’.

It might surprise us that, in the world of Twelfth Night, Viola can effect such a successful gender switch that she convinces everyone around her of her new identity. Olivia certainly has no doubts. ‘I’ll be sworn thou art’ a gentleman, she says of Viola. ‘Thy tongue, thy face, thy limbs, actions and spirit / Do give thee five-fold blazon’. By adopting the manners, habits and behaviours of a man, Viola has to all intents and purposes become one. Her maleness seems hard to shake off – Viola never changes out of her boy’s attire, and Orsino is still calling her Cesario in the final lines of the play, well after her identity as a woman has been revealed.

Shakespeare’s vision of a gender identity that can slip along the scale from female to male and back seems, in 2017, intriguingly familiar. The past few decades have seen a striking increase in the visibility of the transgender community, and a more confident assertion of the individual’s right to live the gendered existence that accords most closely with their identity. But if the number of transgender people seems greater today than in the past – the American charity GLAAD recently reported that more than one in ten young people identified as gender non-conforming, compared to 3% of the over-50s – it’s worth remembering that gender fluidity is no 21st-century invention: Shakespeare’s comedies, and Twelfth Night in particular, show that when it comes to gender, it’s all a matter of performance. As the philosopher Judith Butler put it in 1990, gender is ‘not something that one is, it is something one does’ – and Shakespeare’s characters do it every which way they like.

Dr Will Tosh is Research Fellow and Lecturer with Globe Education. Find out more about the work of our Research team. 

Globe Research Intern Sam Plumb discusses the prose style of Thomas Nashe.

A budding Elizabethan prose writer seeking stylistic inspiration would probably turn first and foremost to euphuism. Named after John Lyly’s popular prose narrative Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit, euphuism may seem peculiar to modern readers. Here is a typical passage from the beginning of Euphues, introducing the titular central character and his prodigal ways: ‘Alexander valiant in war, yet given to wine; Tully eloquent in his glosses, yet vain-glorious; Solomon wise, yet too too wanton; David holy, but yet an homicide; none more witty than Euphues, yet at the first, none more wicked’. Learned references, complex syntax, insistent repetition and alliterative antitheses combine for an experience that recalls Cassandra Mortmain’s musical critique of Bach in Dodie Smith’s I Capture the Castle: reading euphuism is like ‘being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon’.

Despite its unfamiliarity today, euphuism was hugely popular among Elizabethan readers and writers. One of its many imitators was the prose writer and dramatist Thomas Nashe, as he himself hints in a late work: ‘Euphues I read when I was a little ape in Cambridge’. Significantly, Nashe goes on in the same sentence to distance himself from it: ‘to imitate it I abhor’.

In fact, although scholars have seen the influence of euphuism in Nashe’s early works, his very first publication endorses a departure from the mannered and ornate style. Nashe seized upon the prestigious platform provided by his Preface to Menaphon, a popular romance by Robert Greene, to announce a new style in-the-making. ‘Give me the man,’ he demands, ‘whose extemporal vein in any humour will excel our greatest art-masters’ deliberate thoughts; whose inventions, quicker than his eye, will challenge the proudest rhetorician to the contention of like perfection with like expedition’.

What Nashe is asking for here is an art which seems spontaneous, a prose style reading like free, extemporal speech. This ‘extemporal vein’, also sometimes called ‘Nasherie’ in honour of its most famous advocate, gets its earliest airing in one of Nashe’s most successful prose works, an entertaining, topic-leaping pamphlet called Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil. Talented but poor, the author-persona figure of Pierce (the name puns on ‘purse’) asks for a loan from the devil, but the daft antics of the supernatural narrative are perhaps less memorable than its breathlessly realistic style. One typically anecdotal passage describes ‘a young heir or cockney that is his mother’s darling, if he have played the waste-good at the Inns of the Court or about London, and that neither his student’s pension nor his unthrift’s credit will serve to maintain his college of whores any longer, falls in a quarrelling humour with his fortune…’ Like spoken gossip, this is copious, colloquial and deceptively simple.

Though seemingly artless, Nashe’s ‘extemporal vein’ was artfully forged, a fact perfectly obvious to both his supporters and detractors. Nashe’s most prominent critic, the Cambridge don Gabriel Harvey, denigrates his writing by aligning it with ‘Tarlton’s amplifications’. This reference requires some unpacking. Richard Tarlton was the most famous clown of the Elizabethan stage, and was particularly known for his ability to extemporise, or perform spectacular comedy apparently entirely off-script. It is no coincidence that in his non-dramatic work Kindheart’s Dream, Henry Chettle urges Nashe to revenge himself on Harvey through the mouthpiece of Tarlton’s Ghost.

Nashe himself alludes to Tarlton many times, and frequently invokes the extemporal performance style associated with the clown. In many of the lost plays in which he may have had a hand, extemporisation seems to have been deployed, most notably in the infamous Isle of Dogs, some of which was, he claimed, ‘supplied’ by the players. Nashe’s only surviving play, Summer’s Last Will and Testament, memorably features a Tarlton-like clown who, in a spontaneous-sounding ‘prologue’, rails against the author for not having written him enough lines and insists on sitting at the side of the stage, mocking the rest of the action. (Intriguingly, some recent scholars have suggested that the part of the clown, Will Summers, may have been played by a playwright and player with the same initials, William Shakespeare.)

Although the enmity between Nashe and Harvey was deep and complex, perhaps one of the more obvious provocations to Harvey was that Nashe’s style had been so clearly inherited from a ‘mere’ player, himself a lightning rod to a common audience. For Harvey, there is something frightfully common about the extemporal vein, or, in Karen Kettnich’s phrase, ‘lusciously low class’.

Yet this is also what elevates it. In a section of Strange News, the first full pamphlet in his literary skirmish with Harvey, Nashe defends his dead friend Robert Greene against the Cambridge don in his usual scurrilous style: ‘A good fellow he was, and would have drunk with thee for more angels than the lord thou libelledst on gave thee in Christ’s College; and in one year he pissed as much against the walls as thou and thy two brothers spent in three’. In a section of 1 Henry VI possibly authored by Nashe, Joan la Pucelle astonishes her royal auditors with what she calls her ‘unpremeditated’ speech. She claims that this extemporal gift is heaven sent. Reading Nashe’s disarmingly powerful prose, it’s tempting to agree.

On Saturday 20 May, a Read Not Dead event will explore the lifelike spontaneity of Nashe’s extemporal prose with a live reading of his ‘incredible narration’, The Terrors of the Night. Book tickets.