Abstract
Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, was not only a leading patron of the arts, he was the man who received more works dedicated to him than any other leading figure of the 1590s, including the Queen herself.3 By the turn of the next century, however, the nobleman who had managed to stir so much enthusiasm and gather around him so many followers — soldiers, writers or aristocrats — had lost the Queen’s favour and was no longer in odour of sanctity with the prominent members of Elizabeth’s Privy Council. This, however, had seemingly not tarnished the earl’s popularity — he had in fact become something of a ‘dangerous image’. Early in 1600, Rowland Whyte reports indeed that an engraving was creating a sensation both at court and in the city, as ‘some foolish idle ballad maker of late cawsed many of his [Essex’s] pictures to be printed on horsback, with all his titles of honor, all his services, and two verses underneath that gave hym exceeding praise for wisdom, honor, worth; that heaven and earth approve yt, Gods elected’.4 God’s elected — or ‘God’s anointed’ as Shakespeare’s Richard II would have it — was a title usually applied to lawful sovereigns. On 30 August of that same year the Privy Council reacted and put a stop to expressions of this cult of honourable personages. The Archbishop of Canterbury received the following instructions from the Privy Council:
There is of late a use brought up to engrave in brasse the pictures of noblemenn and other persons and then to sell them printed in paper sett forth oftentimes with verses and other circumstances not fytte to be used.
The prating tavern haunter speaks of me what he lists; the frantic libeller writes of me what he lists; they print me and make me speak to the world, and shortly they will play me upon the stage.
(Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex to the Queen, 12 May 1600)1
Littel Cecil tripps up & downe, He rules bot[h] court & crowne, With his brother Builie clowne, In his great fox-furrd gowne; With the long proclamation Hee swore hee sav’d the towne, Is it not likelie?
(Anonymous ballad, 1601)2
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Notes
The earl ‘received sixty-six dedications between 1590 and 1600. Throughout the decade he received between five and seven dedications per year, ranging from chivalric treatises, through humanistic translations and musical compilations, to works of religious devotion and controversy’ (A. Fox, ‘The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality: the Decline of Literary Patronage in the 1590s’, in The Reign of Elizabeth I, Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. J. Guy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 231
Quoted in R. C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood, The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California University, 1989), p. 96.
J. R. Dasent, ed., Acts of the Privy Council of England (London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1905), vol. 30 (1599–1600), p. 619
M. James, ‘At a Crossroads of the Political Culture: the Essex Revolt, 1601’, in Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 435.
L’lsle and Dudley MSS, 2:322, cited in L. Barroll, ‘shakespeare, Noble Patrons, and the Pleasures of “Common” Playing’, in Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England, ed. P. Whitfield White and S. R. Westfall (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 112.
Attorney-General Edward Coke’s private papers reveal also that he had certain doubts about Hayward’s guilt (J. Hayward, The First and Second Parts of the Life and Raigne of King Hernie IIII, ed. J. J. Manning, Camden Society 4th series, vol. 42 (London: Royal Historical Society, 1991), p. 34).
Italics mine. PRO SP12/275/33 (undated in the original; dated c. 24 July 1600 in CSP Dom.), printed in E. K. Chambers, William Shakespeare, A Study of Facts and Problems, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1930), vol. 2, p. 323.
Samuel Schoenbaum with characteristic circumspection uses this phrase (‘“Richard II” and the Realities of Power’, Shakespeare Survey, 28 (1975) 7). The two most recent editors of Shakespeare’s Richard II seem to concur also in the view that it was indeed Shakespeare’s play that was performed in the afternoon of 7 February: Andrew Gurr remarks that ‘there is no certain evidence that the performance was of Shakespeare’s play, but since it was a play ‘of King Henry the Fourth, and of the killing of Richard the second’, it seems the most likely of the possible candidates and was certainly in the company’s repertoire’ (W. Shakespeare, King Richard II, New Cambridge Shakespeare, updated edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003 [1984]), p. 7)
W. Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. C. R. Forker, Arden 3 (London: Thomson Learning, 2002), p. 10).
DNB, vol. 5, p. 245. Lee is wrong though in assuming that Christopher Blount was Charles Blount’s (the Lord Mountjoy) younger brother. Christopher Blount was only a very distant cousin of Mountjoy’s. He was in fact the son of Thomas Blount of Kidderminster Manor. He had received a Catholic education in Douai at the English College from 1562 to 1577 and later joined the entourage of the Protestant Earl of Leicester. It was only in 1598 that he was to return to the Catholic faith: ‘He was reconciled with the Church in Ireland by the Jesuit Fr. Fitzsimon in 1598; and thereafter he actively practiced his religion, to the extent of actively trying to convert others’ (C. Devlin, Hamlets Divinity and Other Essays (London: Rupert Hart-Davies, 1963), p. 127).
J. Bruce, ed., Correspondence of King James VI of Scotland with Sir Robert Cecil and Others in England (London: Camden Society, 1861), p. 74.
I am quoting here Jonathan Dollimore’s essay, ‘shakespeare, Cultural Materialism and the New Historicism’, in Political Shakespeare, ed. J. Dollimore and A. Sinfield (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985) p. 88.
P. Yachnin, ‘The Powerless Theater’, English Literary Renaissance, 21.1 (1991) 49–74.
This is Richard Simpson’s conjecture, cited by Clement Mansfield Ingleby, who also prints a transcript of the letter (C. M. Ingleby, ed., Shakespeare’s Centurie of Prayse (London: New Shakespeare Society, 1879 [1874]), p. 39).
E. M. Albright ‘shakespeare’s Richard II, Hayward’s History of Henry IV, and the Essex Conspiracy’, PMLA, 46 (1931) 708–9).
W. Shakespeare, Henry IV, Part 2, ed. R. Weis, Oxford Shakespeare (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998).
The earlier date is argued by René Weis in his edition of the play, the later is proposed by Michael Dobson (The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare, ed. M. Dobson and S. Wells (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), p. 193).
In 1601, the principal players in the company were probably Richard Burbage, William Shakespeare, Augustine Phillips, William Sly, Thomas Pope, John Heminges and Robert Armin (cf. A. Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage 1574–1642, 3rd edn. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 44).
MS. in the Hatfield collection, part 93, f. 74v, summarized in: Salisbury MSS., part 12, vol. 99, p. 165. See also E. B. De Fonblanque, Annals of the House of Percy, From the Conquest to the Opening of the Nineteenth Century, 2 vols. (London, 1887), vol. 2, pp. 252–3.
P. Thomson, Shakespeare’s Professional Career (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 139.
T. W. Baldwin, The Organization and Personnel of the Shakespearean Company (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1927), p. 136
E. A. J. Honigmann, Playhouse Wills, 1558–1642 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1993), pp. 72–5
The title was changed interestingly when the play was printed (see T. Cain, ‘“Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time”: Poetaster and the Essex Rebellion’, in Refashioning Ben Jonson, Gender, Politics, and the Jonsonian Canon, ed. J. Sanders et al. (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), p. 54).
B. Jonson, Poetaster, or The Arraignement, in Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and P. Simpson, 11 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1966)
See E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vol. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), vol. 1, p. 385.
R. Dutton, Mastering the Revels, The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1991), pp. 138–9.
See B. N. de Luna, Jonson’s Romish Plot, A Study of Catiline and its Historical Context (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967).
Respectively, 4.4.6-7; 4.4.11-12; 4.4.15; 4.4.17-20. Tom Cain also emphasizes this intriguing parallel, adding that Lord Monteagle, who accompanied Charles Percy when he hired the players, was a patron of Jonson and, like him, he was a Catholic (see Cain, ‘“Satyres, That Girde and Fart at the Time”’, pp. 63–4). The only possible allusion to the Essex Rebellion in Shakespeare may be found in Hamlet, in a passage where Rosencrantz explains to Hamlet why ‘the tragedians of the city’ are forced to travel: ‘I think their inhibition comes by the means of the late innovation’ (2.2.330-1), even if, as Harold Jenkins explains cautiously, the play is notoriously difficult to date precisely (see W. Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. H. Jenkins, Arden Shakespeare (London and New York: Routledge, 1982), p. 472).
F. J. Levy, ‘Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginning of Politic History in England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 50 (1987) 6.
Cited in R. Dutton, ‘Buggeswords: Samuel Harsnett and the Licensing, Suppression and Afterlife of Dr. John Hayward’s The first part of the life and reign of King Henry IV’, Criticism, 35.3 (1993) 308.
Camden, The historie of the most renowned and victorious princesse Elizabeth, book 4, p. 181. When the Queen called her tenth and last parliament, it was hardly surprising that she seemed intent on defending her prerogative which she felt had been threatened by recent events. This is what she commanded the Speaker to read in parliament:’ she said that her kinglye prerogatyve (ffor soe she termed it) was tender, and therefore desireth us not to speake or dowbte of her carefull reformacion, ffor she said that her commaundemente given a little before the late trobles (meaninge the earle of Essex’ matters) by the unfortunate event of them was not soe hindered, but that she had since that tyme... thought uppon them...’ (T. E. Hartley, ed., Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 3 vols. (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1981–95), vol. 3, p. 395).
Cited in J. Nichols, Bibliotheca Topographica Britannica, 10 vols. (New York: AMS Press, 1968 [facsimile reprint of 1780–90 edn.]), vol. 1, appendix 7, p. 525.
‘Rebellion is the sinne of witch-craft nam’d’, as Richard Vennard proclaimed in a propaganda pamphlet entitled Englands Joy ((London, 1601?), sig. A3V. S.T.C: 24636.3). Regarding witchcraft trials, Marion Gibson remarked that’ since it was the representation of events by victim and witch to the justice and then to the judge and jury which mattered in preliminary hearings and in court... this circular need for coherence and plausibility is important.... The literary, storytelling stereotype is more important in shaping the account and the consequences of its telling than are the inaccessibilities of whatever really happened’ (M. Gibson, Reading Witchcraft, Stories of Early English Witches (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), pp. 8–9).
G. Chapman, The Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron, ed. J. Margeson (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1988), p. 210
Lucy Aitkin reports indeed that ‘The life of the earl of Southampton was spared, at the intercession chiefly of Cecil...’ (Memoirs of the Court of Elizabeth, 2 vols. (London, 1818), vol. 2, p. 479).
Leo Hicks tries to demonstrate that Cecil did support at one point the claims of the Infanta. The evidence he brings in is interesting but certainly not conclusive (L. Hicks, S. J., ‘sir Robert Cecil, Father Persons and the Succession’, Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 24 (1955) 95–139).
J. Hurstfield, ‘The Succession Struggle in Late Elizabethan England’, in Elizabethan Government and Society, Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. S. T. Bindoff et al. (London: Athlone Press, 1961), p. 389).
There were limits as to how far Cecil could ‘tune the pulpits’. Barlowe’s sermon tried not to overstate its case so as not to alienate the mainstream and dissident Protestants who had supported Essex. The government was never in full control of the pulpits, it was a matter ‘not of imposing uniformity, or ensuring that all preachers spoke with one voice, but simply of using sermons as a channel of communication, a ‘point of contact’ between the state and its subjects’ (A. Hunt, ‘Tuning the Pulpits: the Religious Context of the Essex Revolt’, in The English Sermon Revised, Religion, Literature and History 1600–1750, ed. L. A. Ferrell and P. McCullough (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 109).
Folger Library MS. V.b.214, printed in A. J. Loomie, ‘A Catholic Petition to the Earl of Essex’, Recusant History, 7.1 (1963) 38–41.
J. MacManaway, ‘Elizabeth, Essex, and James’, in Elizabethan and Jacobean Studies Presented to Frank Percy Wilson, ed. H. Davis and H. Gardner (Oxford: Clarendon University 1959), pp. 219–30.
A. Shell, Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 127–8.
See M. Heinemann, ‘Rebel Lords, Popular Playwrights, and Political Culture: Notes on the Jacobean Patronage of the Earl of Southampton’, Yearbook of English Studies, 21 (1991) 83.
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© 2006 Jean-Christophe Mayer
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Mayer, JC. (2006). The Discovery of a ‘Popish Plot’? The Chamberlain’s Men and the 1601 Essex Rising. In: Shakespeare’s Hybrid Faith. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230595897_6
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