Tracing the Wild Man in Shakespeare’s England

Abstract

Standing in the Lady Chapel at Ely Cathedral, it is hard not to be over-whelmed by the structure that confronts you (Figure 3.1). The scope and intensity of the iconoclastic destruction is matched, over matched, by the wonder produced by that which has survived. What was it like when all the brilliantly painted statues were still in place; when the walls were completely colored in patterns of red, green, and gold; when the windows displayed a kaleidoscope of figures and color; when all the stone wall carving and statuary in its marvelously innovative detail was still intact; when beautiful paintings still covered the walls; when the magnificently carved and decorated altar dedicated to the Virgin, framed by the huge window, caught the eye? Whatever the affect on the fourteenth-century viewer, the senses must have been saturated by the layers of decorative riches. Such musing is now possible and demanded both by what remains and by the visible effects of the fear and fury, and vigor, of the destruction. Empty unadorned windows, with incongruously complex window tracery, shed plain light upon a kind of massacre. All the free-standing statuary has been abducted: the missing bodies marked by scores of empty niches. Of the figures carved into gabled arcade, most every head has been hacked off. Architectural forensics clearly reveals the line and depth of the gouges that trace the ferocity of the blows by hammer and chisel as they deface or obliterate their target.

Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,

Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang¹