Abstract
In 1596, Paul Hentzner (1558–1623), a German lawyer, travelled through England as part of his three-year tour of France, Italy and Switzerland. Hentzner’s description of his visit includes important first-hand testimony of the royal palaces, their architecture and treasures, and he is less reticent than English courtiers in giving a frank assessment of the 66-year-old Queen Elizabeth (‘her face oblong, fair, but wrinkled … her nose a little hooked; her lips narrow, and her teeth black’).1 Fortunately for us, Hentzner also recorded some of the customs of the peasantry. In the early evening of 14 September 1598, he approached the outskirts of Windsor:
As we were returning to our inn, we happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home; their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed, by which, perhaps, they would signify Ceres; this they keep moving about, while men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn. The farmers here do not bind up their corn in sheaves, as they do with us, but directly they have reaped or mowed it, put it into carts, and convey it into their barns.2
Menenius For the dearth,
The gods, not the patricians, make it, and
Your knees to them, not arms, must help.
Shakespeare, Coriolanus (1607–8), 1.1.70–2
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Notes and References
Jim Crace (2013), Harvest (London: Picador), p. 68.
The term ‘Little Ice Age’ was first used by François E. Matthes (1939), ‘Report on the Committee on Glaciers,’ Transactions of the American Geophysical Union 20: 518–23.
The historical and cultural impact of this experience of climate change during this period is examined by Wolfgang Behringer (2011), A Cultural History of Climate (London: Polity);
Brian Fagan (2000), The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History, 1300–1850 (New York: Basic Books);
and Geoffrey Parker (2013), Global Crisis: War, Climate Change and Catastrophe in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
On the agrarian crisis of the 1590s and its impact on health, social order and literature including drama, see William C. Carroll (1996), Fat King, Lean Beggar: Representations of Poverty in the Age of Shakespeare (Ithaca, NY and London: Cornell University Press);
Andrew McRae (2002), God Speed the Plough: The Representation of Agrarian England, 1550–1660 (Cambridge University Press), pp. 51–90;
and John Walter (1991), ‘The Social Economy of Dearth in Early Modern England,’ in Famine, Disease and the Social Order in Early Modern Society, ed. John Walter and Richard Schofield (Cambridge University Press), pp. 75–128.
Shakespeare’s grain hoarding and related business activities are mentioned by Katherine Duncan-Jones (2001), Ungentle Shakespeare: Scenes from his Life (London: Arden Shakespeare), pp. 121–2,
Stephen Greenblatt (2005), Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare (London: Pimlico; orig. pub. 2004), pp. 362–4,
Germaine Greer (2008), Shakespeare’s Wife (London: Bloomsbury), pp. 228–9,
E. A. J. Honigmann (1988), ‘“There Is a World Elsewhere”: William Shakespeare, Businessman,’ in Images of Shakespeare, ed. Werner Habicht, D. J. Palmer and Roger Pringle (Newark: University of Delaware Press), pp. 40–7,
and Samuel Schoenbaum (1975), William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life (Oxford University Press).
Shakespeare’s decision to forsake patronage poetry and the formation of the Lord Chamberlain’s (later King’s) Men as a joint-stock playing company is discussed by James Shapiro (2005), 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare (London: Faber and Faber), pp. 8, 40.
Bart Van Es (Shakespeare in Company [Oxford University Press, 2013]) argues that the latter development was crucial in the development of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy.
Jonathan Leake (2013), ‘Swan of Avon was Tax Dodger’ and ‘Bad Bard: A Tax Dodger and Famine Profiteer,’ The Sunday Times 9838 (31 March): 1, 22.
On Shakespeare’s funerary monument, see Diana Price (1997), ‘Reconsidering Shakespeare’s Monument,’ Review of English Studies 48.190: 168–92,
and Jane Martineau, ed. (2003), Shakespeare in Art (London: Merrell Publishers), pp. 201–15. See also the letters by Jonathan Bate, Peter Beal, Brian Vickers and Stanley Wells written in response to Katherine Duncan-Jones’s review of the ‘Searching for Shakespeare’ exhibition (National Portrait Gallery, London, 17 March 2006), published in the Times Literary Supplement (Jonathan Bate, Peter Beal, Brian Vickers and Stanley Wells [2006], Letters published in the Times Literary Supplement, 16 June, 23 June, 30 June, 7 July, 14 July www.the-tls.co.uk/tls/public/article706972.ece [date accessed: 20 May 2014]).
Gainsborough made this comment in a letter to David Garrick, 22 August 1768 (David Garrick (1831), The Private Correspondence of David Garrick, 2 vols [London: Henry Colburn and Richard Bentley], vol. 1, p. 312). John Dover Wilson (1932), The Essential Shakespeare: A Biographical Adventure (Cambridge University Press), p. 6.
Marjorie B. Garber (2008), Profiling Shakespeare (London: Routledge), p. 221.
Frankie Rubinstein (2002), ‘Speculating on Mysteries: Religion and Politics in King Lear,’ Renaissance Studies 16: 235–62 (p. 259);
Joy Kennedy (2002), ‘Shakespeare’s King Lear,’ The Explicator, 60: 60–2;
Philippa Berry (1989), Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen (London: Routledge), pp. 90–2;
Steven Marx (2000), ‘“Within a Foot of the Extreme Verge”: The Book of Job and King Lear,’ in Steven Marx, Shakespeare and the Bible (Oxford University Press), pp. 59–78.
Jan Kott (1964), Shakespeare Our Contemporary, trans. Boleslaw Taberski (London: Methuen), pp. 127–62. Brook provided the preface to this English edition.
Macbeth Act 1 Scene 3 takes place on ‘this blasted heath’ (1.3.77). See James Ogden (1997), ‘Lear’s Blasted Heath,’ in Lear from Study to Stage: Essays in Criticism, ed. James Ogden and Arthur H. Scouten (London: Associated University Presses), pp. 135–45,
and Henry S. Turner (1997), ‘King Lear Without: The Heath,’ Renaissance Drama 28: 161–83; The History of King Lear Acted at the Duke’s Theatre Reviv’d with Alterations by N. Tate (London: Printed for E. Flesher, 1681), 3.1, p. 24. Tate transforms Cordelia’s list of ‘idle weeds’ into ‘idle flowers’: ‘rank Femiter and furrow Weeds,/ With Berries, Burdocks, Violets, Dazies, Poppies,/ And all the idle Flow’rs that grow/In our sustaining Corn’ (p. 43). 3.1 of Rowe’s edition is situated on ‘A Heath’ (p. 2509); 3.3 on ‘Part of the Heath’ (p. 2513); and 4.1 on ‘An open Country’ (p. 2523).
On Shakespeare’s Warwickshire upbringing as an influence on his presentation of plants and the environment, including discussion of Cordelia’s description of her father, see Jonathan Bate (2008), Soul of the Age: The Life, Mind and World of William Shakespeare (London: Viking), pp. 36–59. Even if Shakespeare had no direct experience of arable farming, he was surrounded by people who did: his paternal grandfather, Richard Shakespeare, was a farmer; his mother, Mary Arden, was the daughter of a yeoman farmer; and Anne Hathaway’s father, Richard, was also a yeoman farmer.
Peter Hedden (2003), ‘The Genes of the Green Revolution,’ Trends in Genetics 19: 5–9.
In the ‘Field Scene’ of Act 4 of Tate’s edition (1681), Lear enters ‘a Coronet of Flowers on his Head. Wreaths and Garlands about him’ (p. 47). See also The History of King Lear … Collated with the Oldest Copies, and Corrected; With Notes Explanatory and Critical, by Mr. Theobald (Dublin: Printed by R. Reilly for John Smith and Abraham Bradley, 1739), in which Lear is described ‘drest madly with Flowers’ (p. 88). On the significance of Ophelia’s ‘garlands’ and Lear’s crown of ‘idle weeds’, see Frank McCombie (1981), ‘Garlands in Hamlet and King Lear,’ Notes and Queries 28: 132–4.
Pascale Drouet (2008), ‘“I speak this in hunger for bread”: Representing and Staging Hunger in Shakespeare’s King Lear and Coriolanus,’ in Hunger on the Stage, ed. Elisabeth Angel-Perez and Alexandra Poulain (Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 2–16.
Virgil, Georgics: ‘unfeeding darnel’ is mentioned in bk 1, 1. 153 (Virgil [2009], The Eclogues and Georgics, trans. C. Day Lewis, intr. R. O. A. M. Lyne [Oxford University Press], p. 56). On the use of this topos in King Lear and Henry V, see T. J. King (1968), ‘“Darnel” in King Lear,’ Notes and Queries, n. ser., 15: 141,
and John H. Betts (1968), ‘Classical Allusions in Shakespeare’s Henry V with Special Reference to Virgil,’ Greece & Rome, 2nd ser., 15: 147–63.
King, ‘“Darnel” in King Lear,’ p. 141. On this point, see also F. G. Butler (1989), ‘Lear’s Crown of Weeds,’ English Studies 70: 395–406.
Richard Dutton (2012), ‘Shakespeare, Holinshed and “The Matter of Britain”,’ in The Oxford Handbook to Holinshed’s Chronicles, ed. Paulina Kewes, Ian W. Archer and Felicity Heal (Oxford University Press), pp. 47–61 (p. 54).
R. B. Outhwaite (1991), Dearth, Public Policy and Social Disturbance in England, 1550–1800 (Cambridge University Press), p. 3.
On riots and disorder in London in protest against the price and provision of foodstuffs including grain, see Chapter 1 and Aaron Landau (2004), ‘“Rouse up a brave mind”: The Merchant of Venice and Social Uprising in the 1590s,’ in Renaissance Papers 2003, ed. Christopher Cobb and M. Thomas Hester (New York: Camden House), pp. 119–47.
On Richard II in the context of the debate over enclosures, see William O. Scott (2002), ‘Landholding, Leasing, and Inheritance in Richard II,’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 4: 275–92.
See Edmund Bonner (1555), A Profitable and Necessarye Doctrine with Certayne Adionyed Therunto (London: John Cawoode), p. 10; George Gascoigne (1587), The Whole Woorkes (London: Abell Jeffes), sig. ¶iijr; and Edmund Spenser (1999), The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe (London: Penguin), p. 152.
As Hibbard notes, the source of this passage appears to be Plutarch (1979), The Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, trans. Thomas North (London: Thomas Vautroullier and John Wight), pp. 245–6.
See William Shakespeare (1967), Coriolanus, ed. G. R. Hibbard (New York: Penguin Books).
OED, ‘blast’, ‘6. A sudden infection destructive to vegetable or animal life (formerly attributed to the blowing or breath of some malignant power, foul air, etc.).’ Blast spread in part as a consequence of the susceptibility of cereal weeds such as darnel and its close relative rye. On this point, see N. J. Talbot (2003), ‘On the Trail of a Cereal Killer: Exploring the Biology of Magnaporthe grisea,’ Annual Review of Microbiology 57: 177–202;
and L. E. Trevathan, M. A. Moss and D. Blaslngame (1994), ‘Ryegrass Blast,’ Plant Disease 78: 113–17.
Mario L. D’Avanzo argues that the reference to ‘mildew’ alludes not simply to the ruin of crops, but also to the poisonous effects of ergot, which caused ‘insanity, gangrene, convulsions, and death’ (Mario L. D’Avanzo [1977], ‘“He Mildews the White Wheat”: King Lear, III.iv.120–24,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 28: 88–9 [p. 88]). The earliest example of usage for ‘ergot’ listed in OED is dated 1683.
On the similarities between the deaths of Lord Darnley and Hamlet’s father, see Andrew Hatfield (2004), Shakespeare and Renaissance Politics (London: Thomson Learning), pp. 87–8.
Dan Brayton (2003), ‘Angling in the Lake of Darkness: Possession, Dispossession, and the Politics of Discovery in King Lear,’ English Literary History 70: 399–426.
John Stow (1580), The Chronicles of England (London: Printed by Ralphe Newberie for Henrie Bynneman), p. 1131; Raphael Holinshed et al. (1586), The Second Volume of Chronicles (n. pl.: n. pub.), p. 381. See also Harry Clyde Smith and Avlyn Dodd Conley (1954), The Darnall, Darnell Family (n. pl.: American Offset Printers).
On Gorboduc as an influence on King Lear, see, for example, O. B. Hardison (1975), ‘Myth and History in King Lear,’ Shakespeare Quarterly 26: 227–42 (p. 227),
and Barbara Heliodora Carneiro De Mendonça (1966), ‘The Influence of Gorboduc on King Lear,’ Shakespeare Survey 13 (1966): 41–8.
On this point, see Dorothy F. Atkinson (1936), ‘King Lear — Another Contemporary Account,’ English Literary History 3: 63–6.
Geoffrey of Monmouth (1973), The History of the Kings of England, trans. Lewis Thorpe (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
Frances A. Yates (1975), Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (London: Taylor & Francis), pp. 30–1.
On Cordelia as a ‘figure of archetypal virgo’, see Catherine S. Cox (1998), ‘“An Excellent Thing in Woman”: Virgo and Viragos in King Lear,’ Modern Philology 96: 143–57 (p. 143).
On Cordelia as Ceres/Demeter, see Janet Adelman (1992), Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest (London and New York: Routledge), pp. 306–7, n. 45. Adelman posits as a source for Shakespeare’s use of ‘Darnel’ in Scene 18 Ovid’s story of Ceres’s revenge on Sicily (Metamorphoses, bk 5, 485).
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© 2014 Jayne Elisabeth Archer, Richard Marggraf Turley and Howard Thomas
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Archer, J.E., Turley, R.M., Thomas, H. (2014). Remembering the Land in Shakespeare’s Plays. In: Food and the Literary Imagination. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137406378_5
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