3
When beggars die, there are no comets seen;
The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes.
(Shakespeare, Julius Caesar)
In the late 16th century, as England contended with war, inflation, unemployment, famine, food riots, and large-scale vagrancy, its Parliament codified the first secular Poor Law (1598, 1601),1 and Shakespeare came into his strength as a dramatist. This chapter breaks new ground in arguing a close relationship between Poor Law, the most important legislation of the Elizabethan period, and Shakespeare: Poor Law was, to a large extent, a reflection of public opinion, to which Shakespeare, as both commercial dramatist and national dramatist, was highly sensitive. King Lear has rare feeling for the poor, perhaps owing in part to the hardships Shakespeare witnessed on the streets of London and in the famine-ridden countryside to and from Stratford, and in the knowledge that his audiences included the groundling poor, who paid a pittance to crowd in. In reaction to extended wars and economic uncertainty, to frequent revolts of the poor, and panics over mass destitution, vagrancy, and unemployment, English Poor Law was passed as it was in other European countries, aiming as much to protect society from the poor as to protect the poor. Poverty became a major concern in the Elizabethan age, both in law and in culture, to control the poor and reduce their potential for harm, but also to help them and to understand them sympathetically. These attitudes were not mutually contradictory, for if the poor were protected, they were less dangerous – this being a fundamental principal of all welfare systems, including that in the Hebrew Bible. A positive view of the poor in the 16th century was fostered by vernacular Bible translation and by the rise of nationalism, by the spread of secular government and by humanistic learning and science, in the Reformation. In England, during its long war with Spain and the threat of invasion (1585–1604), theater could be defended as a vehicle for patriotism and national unity – including the common people. Shakespeare, who does not spare his audiences the popular fears of desperate, violent, and impoverished masses, gives perhaps the most moving portrayal of the poor in literature, in King Lear, with its visionary glimpses of a return to an Eden of biblical love and compassion for the poor.
From the time of Henry VIII until the English Revolution, there were countless village revolts, mostly in retaliation for the enclosure of public land.2 The poor were harmed further when the king broke with Rome and closed hundreds of monasteries (1536–9) and hospitals (1544–9), diverting Church wealth for his own use; in doing so, he deprived large numbers of poor people of food, charity, shelter, and medical care, and forced responsibility for the poor onto the state.3 The closure of the monasteries, which acted as independent welfare organizations, was a disaster for the poor who depended upon them. The desperate needs of the poor, and failure to help them, were catalysts for dissidence and revolt, threatening public order and Tudor rule.
In 16th-century England, the ideal of ‘common weal’ became central in Tudor parliamentary policy: in the establishment of a national poor rate, the creation of institutions for helping the poor, such as the workhouse and the hospital, and protection from want. Despite their lack of power in Parliament, the common people were a vital source of labor, taxes, and manpower in war. Good soldiers, writes Francis Bacon in his Essays, are not weighed down with taxes and humiliated by poverty and servility, but should ‘live in convenient plenty’.4 More than previous monarchs, the Tudors took the poor and popular opinion into account. Henry VIII would banquet in his palaces, often obscenely for hours, consuming huge quantities of food and drink, but he gave the leftovers to the poor massing hungrily at the gates. When the king’s daughters, Mary and Elizabeth, came to the throne, they washed the feet of the poor, following the example of Jesus (John 13: 14) and the pope.5 After breaking with Rome in the 1530s, England was desperate for national unity. Already plagued by poverty and vagrancy, England was torn by dangerous religious schism. The heretical creation of the Church of England headed by the monarch rather than the pope was a running sore of conflict with those loyal to Rome, both internally and on the Continent. Regardless of religious change, the poor had their needs and their voice, and they had to be answered and fed.6 Under Elizabeth I, whom the pope excommunicated, England became a pariah Protestant country, threatened with invasion by Catholic Spain. The Tudors aimed to limit and control these sources of conflict and division through national unity. English nationalism grew in various seemingly unconnected developments: a standing army; a national Church with its own vernacular Bible, the single greatest spur to the development of the English language; the annexation of Wales in Acts of 1536 and 1542; expansion of education, with many schools built under the Tudors; and royal approval, encouragement, and support for a secular national theater in the 1570s. English Poor Law was part of the surge toward national unity – the key to Tudor survival. Elizabeth sought to calm religious conflict with the balm of secularization. At the heart of Elizabeth’s mythmaking, and a boon to poets, was the secularization of Christian ideology and imagery, of asceticism and love, particularly of herself as Virgin Queen devoted to the love of her people. In her final address to Parliament, on November 30, 1601, Elizabeth summed up the popular judgment she desired of her reign: ‘You never had, nor shall have any that will love you better.’7 Her perilous early life and superb humanist education evidently left her with a highly developed feeling for public opinion, for government as a form of theater, and for the nuances of language that could decide life or death. She had, perhaps more than most rulers, knowledge of what it was like to be on the margin, in peril – as many of her countrymen were, including writers, artists, and performers … and the common people, many of whom would emerge from the warmth of the theater and its dream-like fantasies into a dark, cold, brutal life of backbreaking work, hunger, and disease.
Shakespeare presented in his plays a vision of national unity, incorporating all England, its history, social strata and types – including the poor. History gave Elizabethan nationalism legitimacy and depth within an ancient, distinguished, and colorful tradition; and Shakespeare’s main source was an historian of England, Raphael Holinshed (1587). The Spanish threat to England’s existence opened a window of opportunity for Shakespeare and other writers to depict the poor with warmth and profundity, as part of England. In his portrayal of common people, Shakespeare, in effect, restored something of the biblical spirit – as, indeed, the Protestant revolution professed to do.
A change in attitude toward the poor from the reign of Henry VIII to Elizabeth I might be detected by holding up the writings of Thomas Wyatt (c. 1503–42), a leading poet and courtier of the earlier period, alongside Shakespeare. Wyatt’s poetry, unlike Shakespeare’s, gives practically no indication that most people in England in the early 16th century were poor, and that the economic crisis of the 1520s was provoking peasant revolts in England and other countries. Wyatt wrote for a relatively closed, aristocratic and wealthy, courtly circle, while many in Shakespeare’s audiences were poor (in the Globe Theatre, standing room admission cost one penny, and the audiences mostly stood). Under Tudor rule, the character and role of English language and literature changed. In early 16th-century England, neither the need for social change nor for national unity was felt as strongly as later, in the age of Elizabeth. The Tudor concern with public opinion is stamped on late 16th-century English literature; the translation of the Bible made this literature less elitist, as did Elizabethan theater, neither of which could have had royal approval unless they served Tudor policy. When Henry VIII came to the throne in 1509, the idea that a child of his would sanction a secular popular national theater in defiance of the Roman Church was preposterous. Henry VIII began as a loyal Catholic married to a Spanish princess; the Roman Church, not Parliament, had responsibility for the poor. Cardinal Wolsey, chief adviser of the king from 1509 to 1529, began as the king’s almoner, distributing charity to the poor. As Lord Chancellor, Wolsey, though accused of profligacy (notably in building Hampton Court), addressed problems such as the handling of dearth, poverty, and epidemics, and the training of physicians; he introduced the use of quarantine to England in 1518, the year he founded the College of Physicians. Wolsey’s ambitious social reform, influenced by humanists such as Thomas Linacre, turned crises into opportunities ‘to advertise the humanist credentials of the English monarchy and its chief minister’.8 During this period, Thomas More, a student of Linacre and adviser to the king, wrote Utopia (1516), contrasting an ideal state with the reality, ‘among us’ – in the various forms of corrupt government of the day, the ‘conspiracy’ of the parasitical rich (conspiratio divitum) to keep what they have obtained through deceit and their oppression of the poor. These observations in the closing pages of Utopia allude to growing distress of the European poor in the early 16th century. More acknowledges, in contrast with Poor Law which tends to blame the poor for their poverty, that social conditions cause crime and vagrancy – hungry people steal.
As poverty and vagrancy spread in much of Europe, Henry VIII met the French king, Francis IV, in France in 1520 to enjoy the Field of Cloth of Gold, the extravagance presented for the combined English and French courts. John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, attacked this costly show:
Take away the glistering garments, take away the cloth of gold,
take away the precious stones and the other richness of apparel,
and what difference is betwixt an Emperor and another poor man?
Take from the ladies their gay clothes, chains and other jewels,
and what difference of them as concerning this outward glory
and of a poor woman?9
The Church itself came increasingly under attack for neglecting the poor. Henry’s breach with Rome for refusing to let him divorce Catherine of Aragon ended Wolsey’s career, and encouraged outspoken critics of the Church, such as Simon Fish. Fish championed the common people and defended William Tyndale who translated the Bible into vernacular English in the 1520s when Bible translation into the vernacular was a capital offense. His pamphlet, ‘Supplication for the Beggars’ (1529), addressed to Henry VIII, argues for reform, citing the sufferings of the poor and the huge wealth of the Catholic Church.10 Fish exhorts the king to punish the clergy, and force them to marry and work, as God compels in the Bible, ‘by the sweat of their faces’; to tie these ‘idle thieves’ to carts like common criminals and whip them in every market town, ‘that they by their importunate begging take not away the alms that the good Christian people would give unto us sore impotent miserable people’.11 Fish’s pamphlet provoked a reply from Thomas More, by now Wolsey’s successor as Lord Chancellor and Tyndale’s most bitter and dogged enemy. More’s Utopia, with no poverty or injustice,12 was the opposite of what Fish claimed England to be (indeed, as More himself indicates, an ideal in contrast with any government of the time). The unrest in the decades following the publication of Utopia showed that England was no Utopia but, as in much of Europe, a land of suffering, threatened by an increasing population of starving, homeless, angry people.13
At this time, hunted for heresy and in hiding before his capture and execution in 1535, William Tyndale secretly published the first English printing of the Five Books of Moses (1530), perhaps the most influential book in English (as Luther’s translation was in German, at the same time, also creating a standard vernacular). Tyndale’s vivid translation of the story of Israelite slavery could easily be applied to the conditions of the poor in the early 16th century: ‘And the Egyptians held the children of Israel in bondage without mercy, and made their lives bitter unto them with cruel labour in clay and brick, and all manner work in the fields, and in all manner of service, which they caused them to work cruelly.’14 In his marginal gloss to Exodus 22: 21, ‘ye shall trouble no widow nor fatherless child’, Tyndale takes aim particularly at the Roman Church: ‘Let all oppressors of the poor take heed to this text.’15
Wolsey tried to change conditions of the poor through proclamations, commissions, letters, and personal orders; Thomas Cromwell, the king’s chief minister in the 1530s, did so through parliamentary statute. Poor Law legislation at this time aimed to suppress begging, to give work to the poor, and to give relief according to measurements of need. Parliament made local parishes take responsibility for the poor born within their boundaries. They were expected to make the able-bodied poor work for a living and to raise compulsory poor rates for a weekly dole for those unable to work, including the very old and young, orphans and widows, the sick and infirm, and the many soldiers who fought for England unpaid and returned, at times armed and dangerous, to an impoverished civilian life. Poor Law held the poor responsible for the social evils which grew throughout the 16th century: vagrancy, organized crime, prostitution, drunkenness.16 Poor Law distinguished between genuine beggars and fakes who counterfeited disease and mutilation. As on the Continent, literature reflected the judicial measures against beggars.17 The poet, Robert Copland, in The Highway to the Spital-House (c. 1536), sketches some of the props and wiles of which the poor were suspected: stilts, crutches, bloody bandages, plasters, substances that looked like leprosy, soap to make the mouth foam: ‘And when they be in their own company,/ They be as whole as either you or I.’18
Poor relief was given less as a right than as a moral judgment and punitive deterrent. Summary justice was introduced by Henry VII, martial law by Henry VIII, the house of correction (Bridewell) by Edward VI, the census and identifying badges by Elizabeth I. Literature of the Tudor era rarely allows the poor themselves to react to the legislative stigmatization of their poverty as, for example, in the 19th century John Clare responded in his poetry to the Enclosure Act of 1809, or the Ukrainian poet, Taras Shevchenko, born a serf, to Ukrainian impoverishment under Tsarist rule.19 Yet, in the Elizabethan theater, the poor had a public voice, often with eloquence ringing through the centuries. Shakespeare had a long English medieval tradition behind him, in which common people as well as monarchs and aristocrats were represented memorably together on stage, and the poor were a large part of the audience.20 In an age of legislative harshness against the poor, Shakespeare restored biblical compassion for the poor, and for the downtrodden of the earth.
Elizabethan theater was the outstanding creation of Tudor educational reform. More than any other major English literature in the two centuries after Chaucer, except the Bible in translation, the theater was intended for and reached the common people. Although written down, plays were meant mainly to be heard, by rich and poor alike, and Shakespeare’s early audiences evidently included many who were illiterate or semi-literate. The theater was a superb entertainment and education of the poor, who had the good fortune of being able to see Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Macbeth without having to be taught and examined on these plays at school. The publication of the vernacular Bible greatly encouraged literacy among the common people. Monarchic sanction for the Bible in translation and the growth of the English language at the expense of Latin had an anti-papal thrust, and opened the way to an educational and literary meritocracy which could not be confined to the upper class. Henry VIII’s break with Rome led to an expansion of education at all levels – with an unprecedented number of university-educated men, but also reaching many children of the poor – to counter the Catholic threat and make good Protestants of them, obedient to king and country. In fact, this education had unintended revolutionary consequences, stimulating enterprise and upward mobility and creating a more politically aware and critical public. Tudor education opened the way to a relatively democratic theater, created in large part by former grammar school pupils, notably Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, John Webster, and Ben Jonson.21 Some English aristocrats were alarmed at this ‘invasion’ of the lower classes. Sir Philip Sidney’s Apology for Poetry (written c. 1580) suggests that only gentlemen have the background and training to write poetry. Edmund Spenser, in The Faerie Queen, asserts the commonly held view of the inequality of the classes, particularly in his depiction of the mad communistic Giant who seeks to level the mountains, suppress tyrants and lords, ‘And all the wealth of rich men to the poore will draw’ (V ii 38); when he fails to listen to reason, echoing the Psalms and the Book of Job – ‘He pulleth downe, he setteth up on hy’ (ibid., 41) – Justice decrees that, like a traitor in Rome, the Giant be cast to his death from a lofty rock.22 Yet, despite its contempt for democracy, the aristocracy was instrumental in breaking the dam holding popular culture back. Much wealth confiscated from the Church passed to the aristocracy, loyal to the monarch. Some invested this windfall as patrons of the theater. Their influence in court depended partly on their ability to entertain the monarch, and their ‘wealth and influence helped to patronize and protect a spectacular secular culture’.23
The English break with Rome in the 1530s enabled the creation of a secular theater 40 years later: under the pope this would have been impossible as the Catholic Church condemned theater as sinful. Monarchic approval and aristocratic patronage were necessary for the emergence of a national theater. Such a theater could damp down the fiery religious conflicts reignited by Elizabeth’s Catholic predecessor, Mary Tudor. Secular theater, perhaps not accidentally, began shortly after the queen was excommunicated by the pope in 1570. She admitted theater, as it were, through the back door, in the 1572 Act for the Punishment of Vagabonds. This Act, which put actors in the same category as vagabonds and required that they obtain aristocratic patronage,24 preceded the opening of the first purpose-built English theater by about four years. The birth of secular theater coincided with the death of religious theater, in 1576. Until then, actors were mostly from the working class, performing in inns and fairs, in miracle and morality plays. Aristocratic patronage made secular theater, previously associated with immorality and heresy, respectable.25 Henry VIII had used martial law against vagrants;26 now, his daughter, desirous of the love of her people, gave the royal imprimatur to a theater of vagabond players. In unleashing the heresy of a secular national theater, Elizabeth was spitting in the face of the pope.
The excommunicated queen knew intimately the taint of immorality and damnation. Her entire life had been shadowed, at times threatened, by questions of legitimacy, as a Tudor, a woman, a child conceived out of wedlock to a mother executed by her father for adultery, and as head of a renegade Church. Her vulnerability was shown also by the Rising in the North (1569), which like the Pilgrimage of Grace in the 1530s made clear the need to unite the nation, to avoid dissent and religious conflict, and to reduce the distress of the poor, who were needed to support the Tudor status quo and to provide revenues and manpower to deal with the Spanish threat. The queen expressed magnificently her conviction that she owed her office to the people’s will, dependent on her being a just ruler, in her speech at Tilbury on August 8, 1588, as the Spanish Armada approached British shores: ‘I have always so behaved myself that, under God, I have placed my chiefest strength and safeguard in the loyal hearts and good will of my subjects.’27
Elizabethan theater, in its universalism and eclecticism, its exploration of human nature above all, was an implicit rejection of religious difference. Here high and low, rich and poor, Protestant and Catholic, mixed, in the audience and on stage. Patronage, by the earls of Leicester, Sussex, Oxford, Derby, and others, and Elizabeth’s love of a good play, were crucial in overcoming municipal and Church opposition to the theater. Elizabethan (and Jacobean) theater at its height was one of the most powerful educational tools conceived by humankind, open to all strata of society, from illiterate child laborers shivering in the pit to the queen herself.28
Shakespeare’s universalism was not without political significance in its time: in A Midsummer Night’s Dream aristocrats and workers are joined in a state of nature and human folly – ‘What fools these mortals be’, says Puck; in King Lear, the king suffers with the Fool and Poor Tom on the heath, each a ‘bare fork’d animal’, homeless, hungry, cold – and mad.29 Elizabeth’s paradoxical weakness as an individual and strength as part of a nation - in her Tilbury address, she refers to herself as having ‘the body of a weak and feeble woman’, strengthened by her common human bond with her subjects, their ‘loyal hearts and good will’ – is constantly paralleled in the flaws and frailties and the gloriously varied humanity of Shakespeare’s characters.30 In Shakespeare, as in Elizabethan policy, humanism creates a middle ground shared by all those who might otherwise be divided by religion or class. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes?’ is, perhaps, the most remarkable of the Shakespearean affirmations of common humanity, in effect a secular return to the biblical notion of the equality of all in the eyes of God. In Othello, Desdemona falls in love with Othello regardless of his race, because of the adventurous life he has lived, surviving combat and flood, and sold into slavery: ‘She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d’ (I iii 166). In Henry V, the king on the night before the battle of Agincourt moves anonymously among his men, joined to them by common humanity: ‘I think the king is but a man, as I am … in his nakedness he appears but a man’ (IV i 101–2, 105–6). He confesses the human torment of his responsibility, recalling the proverbial rich man in Ecclesiastes (5: 11) who, unlike the laborer who sleeps the sweet sleep of exhaustion, cannot sleep for worry. The king, too troubled to sleep, envies the ‘wretched slave’ who sleeps hungrily a blessed sleep (IV i 270f.). To be a king is but an outward show hiding a deeper shared humanity. At the core of Caliban’s character in The Tempest, hidden deep behind his grotesque, ugly, and embittered appearance, is a sensitive dreamer, lover, and poet. As Shakespeare’s audiences watched, many of them no strangers to hunger and cold, and the fear of oppression, did they not feel drawn into this common humanity, this common England, did they not also have dreams and passions? Were they not also, despite their poverty and fears, capable of creation and great deeds?
Shakespeare emphasizes common humanity in a world in which rich and poor shared many disabilities: particularly unsanitary conditions, a high mortality rate and susceptibility to disease, as well as ignorance of medicine, hygiene, and diet.31 In Shakespeare’s Pericles, the death at sea of the queen in childbirth, mourned ‘lying with simple shells’ by her husband, King Pericles, links royalty with their meanest subjects. Although the poor were more likely to abandon their children than the rich, The Winter’s Tale presents child abandonment as a universal tragedy: the abandoned Perdita is a princess saved by a shepherd.32 As for the ravages of plague, even the gods are affected. In 1592, while the bubonic plague killed about 10% of Londoners and the theaters were forced to close, Shakespeare turned to love poetry. In Venus and Adonis, Venus whispers that Adonis’ kisses have the power
To drive infection from the dangerous year:
That the star-gazers having writ on death,
May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath.
(508–10)
In the 1603 epidemic, Shakespeare again draws on imagery of plague, to which all are vulnerable, when Othello sees how Iago had the fateful handkerchief steal over him ‘As doth the raven o’er the infected house/ Boding to all’ (IV i 21–2).33
Shakespeare adapts biblical equality of all humans – including the poor – to an increasingly secular, humanist world. Guilt-inducing heresy could liberate: Protestants in particular were renegades from the established order, inhabitants of a fallen world from which the old fixities had gone, leaving the individual alone to consider, as Hamlet does, ‘What a piece of work is a man’. A fallen world had its miseries but gave artists and writers, scientists and thinkers, new freedom to experiment with the new, to abandon social distinctions and stereotypes, and in particular to seek truth not in external reality alone but also in the intricacies of the human heart – including its evil. Shakespeare advocates reform, not revolution of the common people, though revolution is not without cause. In Henry VI, Part 2, the mid-15th-century revolutionary Jack Cade is mocked as an absurd tin-pot dictator, abolishing money, promising murder and mayhem.34 ‘The first thing we do’, says a follower of Cade, echoing the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, ‘let’s kill all the Lawyers’ (IV ii 76). Shakespeare treats his audience at the Globe Theatre to a picture of slapstick insurrection with which many in the 1590s might have secretly sympathized: ‘Up Fish Street! down Saint Magnus’ corner. Kill/ and knock down! Throw them into the Thames!’ (IV viii 1–3). Cade’s megalomanic extravagance and threat to the body politic swallows up the genuine grievances of the poor.
In The Tempest, too, Shakespeare ridicules the very idea of insurrection, in the story of the butler, Stephano, and Trinculo the jester, who with the help of Prospero’s slave, Caliban, try to set up a state of their own.35 As a deformed tormented dreamer, Caliban has some of Shakespeare’s most beautiful lines: ‘In dreaming,/ The clouds methought would open and show riches/ Ready to drop upon me; that, when I wak’d/ I cried to dream again’ (III ii 152–5). Yet, as revolutionaries, the low-born could be depicted only as ludicrous bumblers and failures, their grievances, however real, the stuff of comedy; in this respect, Shakespeare follows earlier medieval literature in which common people are often mocked.36 Even so, the farcical ‘revolution’ in The Tempest points to rumblings of discontent in English society. A quarter-century after Shakespeare’s death the king was overthrown – and the theaters torn down.
In King Lear, however, Shakespeare depicts extreme conditions of the poor, the freezing hovel in a storm, suggesting an answer not in revolution but better monarchic governance. He wrote King Lear in the early years of Elizabethan Poor Law, when English poverty and vagabondage were rampant. The play represents a humanistic peak in its story of a king who, like Job, loses everything to rediscover his true moral role and divine authority among his poorest subjects: ‘I have ta’en/ Too little care of this’ (III iv 32–3).37 This is the heart and soul of Shakespeare, speaking mostly to poor largely illiterate workers (the ‘groundlings’) – and the most direct challenge in English literature to the axiom of the divine right of kings – emphasizing instead the divine obligation of kings – while affirming the power of charity and love of the poor.
The more frequently heard clamor of medieval and early modern European parishes – foreshadowing more recent national and local governments, alarmed by deficits and alleged abuse of welfare – was that they were taking too much care of the poor; they were discouraging initiative and enterprise, letting the poor take advantage of Christian love, willfully remaining poor at parish expense. Poor Tom of Bedlam and the handful of other poor creatures on the blasted heath in Lear are hardly going to break the exchequer. What of whole teeming fields of poor folk escaping famine or plague, begging Christian charity in underfunded parishes, and at times violently attacking local people? This was the reality in much of 16th-century Europe, especially in the 1520s and 1530s, a time of dislocation and migrancy, beggar revolts and seething religious conflict; and in England, too, at that time and also in 1590s, ‘a decade of extreme hardship for the poor, with bad harvests and famine years’ as well as rising crime rates and persecutions.38 To Francis Bacon, beggars were an eyesore, a scandal, and a threat to the state.39 Newly created Elizabethan grammar schools taught that the poor were ‘crooked, reprehensible, ignorant, venal, homeless and mean-spirited’ – they would do best to jump off a cliff.40 ‘The Poor People’s Complaint’, a popular ballad of 1585, laments the lack of proper care for the poor:
We go to brave buildings of fair brick and stone,
Where men of great calling live lordly alone.
We ask it for God’s sake, but none will come near us.
We crave it for Christ’s sake, yet no man will hear us.
Lord help us, Lord help us, Lord help us with speed.
Come now, lord, and help thy poor people that need.41
An anonymous ballad dating from 1594 attacks injustice against the poor and the immoral advantages of the rich:
Now favour hindreth equity, and riches rule the roost.
In vain the poor cry charity; go help you, say the most.42
Neglect of the poor can occasionally be glimpsed in Shakespeare’s plays, despite censorship, for example in King Lear and Coriolanus.43 Government legislation in the Poor Law of 1598 and 1601 aimed to control the growing number of poor people in the realm. Theater became a medium in which even the poor could occasionally see the truth about themselves, in their suffering, want, and exploitation. Population growth led to inflation. The 1590s was a time of misery and migration from rural to urban centers, particularly London. Enclosures provoked frequent riots in the countryside, and in the towns poor apprentices rioted, squeezed by high prices and rents and low wages: theaters were often flashpoints of social conflict. In the 16th century, wages in England rose by about three times while the price of grain went up six times (the same trend was found elsewhere in Europe); the population of London rose by about four times, while its beggar population went up by an estimated 12 times.44 The wars against Spain and Ireland were paid for by increasing the tax rate. While the landed classes benefited from a boom in trade and construction, many laborers were broken by inflation, plague, unemployment, and hunger. Harvests failed in 1595–8, and there was famine in the north of England and in parts of the south; food riots were common; on London’s streets, people died daily ‘like dogges’.45 By this time, poverty was ‘top of the agenda’ of the Elizabethan Parliament.46 Shakespeare’s audience would have recognized these conditions in his plays of the late 1590s. In Romeo and Juliet, Romeo remarks to the starving apothecary who risks his life selling poison in his desperation:
Art thou so bare and full of wretchedness,
And fear’st to die? Famine is in thy cheeks,
Need and oppression starveth in thy eyes,
Contempt and beggary hangs upon thy back.
(V i 68–71)47
Famine appears, too, in Titania’s attack on Oberon’s evil magic in A Midsummer Night’s Dream:
The ox hath therefore stretch’t his yoke in vain,
The ploughman lost his sweat, and the green corn
Hath rotted, ere his youth attain’d a beard:
The fold stands empty in the drowned field,
And crows are fatted with the murrion flock,
The nine men’s morris is fill’d up with mud;
And the quaint mazes, in the wanton green,
For lack of tread, are undistinguishable:
The human mortals want their winter here;
No night is now with hymn or carol blest…
(II i 93–102)
In these hard times, the Poor Law of 1598 and 1601 became ‘the centre-piece of Elizabethan social policy’.48 By 1600, London’s population reached about 200,000; but the civil parish of rural England consequently became a microcosm of state authority.49 Legislative recognition of state obligation to the poor is perhaps reflected in King Lear (1606). On the heath, Lear becomes aware of the ‘poor naked wretches’ among his subjects, a large part of his kingdom, for whom he accepts responsibility. Now no better than they – perhaps worse, being unaccustomed to life as a ‘bare, fork’d animal’ – he enters their lives in his fall to their level, a true king, ironically, when he gives up the crown. Life at the court is petty and artificial alongside the naked poor exposed to the elements, abandoned by their sovereign, in a state of nature.50 Even the false beggar, making violent pretence of insanity, mutilating himself, cursing and entreating in hope of frightening people into giving charity, is depicted with moving empathy, by Edgar, betrayed and hunted, exposed to the elements, ‘brought near to beast’, himself forced, as others did, to act the part of mad Poor Tom to save his life:51
The country gives me proof and precedent
Of Bedlam beggars, who, with roaring voices,
Strike in their numb’d and mortified bare arms
Pins, wooden pricks, nails, sprigs of rosemary;
And with this horrible object, from low farms,
Poor pelting villages, sheep-cotes, and mills,
Sometime with lunatic bans, sometime with prayers
Enforce their charity.
(II iii 13–20)52
Now, one among the poor, Lear faces his failure as king. He acknowledges as few rulers do his unfulfilled duties to the poor. From the moment of illumination on the heath, Lear speaks with new wisdom and compassion, admitting that ancient and infirm though he is, he cannot shirk his divinely appointed tasks. There is also the implicit irony that the king, speaking of Christian charity to a wholly Christian audience, is a pagan king in a pre-Christian age. Lear’s suffering (together with that of Gloucester, Edgar, and Kent) is analogous to the crucifixion – without the blood-stained dogma of Christianity and the religious divisions which undermined national unity in the Tudor era. Lear’s newfound compassion for the poor, powerful as the elements, is human rather than specifically Christian. Perhaps the closest literary parallel is the Book of Job:
Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O! I have ta’en
Too little care of this. Take physic, Pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the Heavens more just.
(III iv 28–36)53
Lear’s fall into poverty makes him, in the short time left to him, a king of truth, justice, and compassion.54 The lies of court are overturned by the truth of Nature, as in the Book of Job, in a storm. Lear’s newfound feeling for the poor opens him to the love of his daughter, Cordelia, the embodiment of love.
Even so, much pre-modern literature on the poor tends to have a temporary, conditional, exceptional quality: a true Christian king might express the compassion of Lear, but in fact there is only one, pagan Lear. Monarchs are divinely charged with responsibility for their subjects, but for the most part Shakespeare’s kings and queens have little concern for the masses they rule. Did they care at all? This question is asked in the opening of Coriolanus (c. 1608), in a scene with most immediately reference to the Midland Revolt of 1607, but also remembers the 1590s in its portrayal of a society brought down by famine and war.55 The Romans are desperate with hunger. Menenius, a nobleman, insists that the state cares for its people, which a citizen angrily rebuts. By putting the criticism in the vanished Roman era, Shakespeare slips in a critique of his own age, with its failures to deal effectively with the needs of the poor:
Care for us? True, indeed! They ne’er cared for us yet: suffer us to famish, and their storehouses crammed with grain; make edicts for usury, to support usurers; repeal daily any wholesome act established against the rich, and provide more piercing statutes daily to chain up and restrain the poor. If the wars eat us not up, they will; and there’s all the love they bear us.
(I i 75–81)56
In Coriolanus, Shakespeare gives a rare literary exposé of the degradation of charity, not directly as experienced by countless poor through the ages – this could have been construed as an attack on Poor Law – but through Coriolanus himself who, after defeating Rome’s enemies in battle, is rewarded with a consulship but must first submit to the humiliation of seeking the votes of the common people whom he despises for their cowardice and fickleness. As a nobleman with a powerful public conscience, he is devoted to Rome, his duty to give of himself freely to the aid of the state, seeking nothing in return. Even his enemies recognize his spirit of self-sacrifice:
He covets less
Than misery itself would give; rewards
His deeds with doing them …
(II ii 124–6)
Now, victor of Corioles, he cannot abide the conventions of public life, feeling himself a beggar seeking public charity, abased by having ‘to trouble the poor with begging … I have your alms’ (II iii 66–7), and unable in the end to go through with it. Coriolanus speaks for the poor throughout history who refuse charity, though entitled to it:
Better it is to die, better to starve,
Than crave the hire which first we do deserve.
(III iii 108–9)
A beggar’s tongue
Make motion through my lips, and my armed knees,
Who bowed but in my stirrup, bend like his
That hath received an alms! I will not do’t …
(III ii 117–20)57
In this rejection of the humiliation of the poor, Shakespeare deflects condemnation of contemporary English policies and attitudes on to the long-dead Roman empire. Coriolanus was seen in its time by a large part of the London population, including the king and much of his court. Did it contribute to improvements in English poor relief? Poor Law varied in effectiveness in different periods, places, and circumstances. Yet, England after the time of Shakespeare – unlike most other parts of Europe, including Russia, France, Spain, and Scandinavia – was spared mass starvation.
Notes
1 On the growth of the idea of the ‘common weal’ in 16th-century England, see Slack (1998). In Coriolanus, the classes of society are compared to the parts of the body, each with its own role, all dependent on one another (I i 94f.)
2 On English village revolts, 1509–1640, see Manning (1988). Thomas More, in Utopia (1516), attacks the idle landowners who turn cultivated land into pasture and evict the tenants, some of whom turn to crime in order to survive. This is a remarkable admission for its time of social causes of crime.
3 On the effects of the Reformation on charity, see Jones (1969).
4 ‘Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates’ (Essay no. 29) (Bacon 1966: 92).
5 See Richards (2012: 91–2, 102). Notwithstanding the nominally high status of the poor in Christian doctrine, 16th-century European Poor Law was intended to control the poor and protect the upper classes from them; prisons and other houses of correction were generally intended for the poor (Foucault 1977).
6 ‘Of all the medieval activities held to assist the soul after death the relief of the poor was the only one permitted and indeed actively encouraged by the Protestant authorities after 1547’ (Duffy 1992: 505). Gifts to the poor were, as in the past, regarded as equivalent to gifts to Jesus and to God (ibid.).
7 The texts of the speeches of Elizabeth I quoted in this chapter are taken from MacArthur (1996).
8 See Slack (1988: 117).
9 Quoted by Hurstfield (1979: 7).
10 Fish’s accusation appears to be echoed in Book 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen (1590), whose allegorical attacks on the Church of Rome include Kirkrapine (‘church robbery’) for robbing ‘poore mens boxes of their due relief,/ Which given was to them for good intents’ (I iii 17).
11 Quoted with spelling modernized from the original text (1529), British Library, Rare Books. For comparable attacks on clergy who defraud the people of their possessions, see the Koran (9: 32).
12 More’s Utopia not only has no poor, it also has no ‘wine-bars, or ale-bars, or brothels; no chances for corruption; no hiding places; no spots for secret meetings’; for the poor of other countries, however, the people of Utopia give freely one-seventh of all products they have in abundance (More 2002: 59).
13 On the European economic crisis of the 1520s and 1530s, leading to the passage of Poor Law legislation in a number of countries, including England, see pp. 52–3.
14 Tyndale (1992: 91).
15 Ibid., 119.
16 On the growth of social problems in 16th-century England, see (Slack 1988: ch. 5).
17 On negative images of the poor in European literature, see pp. 42–3
18 Quoted by Carroll (1996: 40).
19 On Clare and Shevchenko, see pp. 123–6.
20 According to Barrell and Bull (1982: 107), England was the only medieval European country with a popular drama in which aristocrats and peasants appeared together on stage. Shakespeare’s humanism shines particularly in scenes – culminating with Lear on the heath – in which kings and princes are equal to the common people: for example, the disguised King Henry V among his cold, anxious soldiers on the night before Agincourt or Hamlet among the gravediggers. As English nationalism grew in the 16th century, the classes, however divided, increasingly saw themselves, however reluctantly, as one nation.
21 A progressive feature of the Elizabethan theater was the presence of women, in the audience, working in the theater, and represented on stage (though played exclusively by males) (McNeill 2007).
22 This section of The Faerie Queen was published in 1596, at a time when Spenser served as secretary to Lord Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland; and among the political significances of the poem is justification for the often-brutal suppression of the Irish in the name of Justice.
23 See Heinemann (2003: 172).
24 See Riggs (2004: 194ff.).
25 Some of these plays, less than 150 of which have survived, have much artistry – the Second Shepherds’ Play in the Wakefield Cycle is the best-known – with occasionally striking depictions of the lives of the poor, superimposing the world of the Bible onto medieval England (Crawley 1979).
26 On vagrants and Tudor law, see Beier (1983).
27 In a play written shortly after the death of Elizabeth I in 1603, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, Thomas Heywood sums up the popular image the queen sought (and largely succeeded in creating): ‘I spend my labour to relieve the poor’ (quoted by Carroll 1996: 35).
28 Shapiro (2005: 10) conjectures that in Shakespeare’s London, with a population of about 200,000, over a third of the adult population saw a play every month. Elizabeth is never reported as visiting a theater; the theater came to her palaces and stately homes.
29 In Slack’s view (1988: 113), the literary depiction of English poverty achieves profundity around 1600. The elevation of the poor in theater has its origin, perhaps, in Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus in which, as in King Lear, a king falls to extreme poverty; and it is taken up again in 20th-century theater, notably in Gorky’s The Lower Depths (1902) and Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot.
30 In Othello, Iago’s wife, Emilia, affirms that women possess humanity, and human frailties, equal to that of men: ‘Let husbands know/ Their wives have sense like them. They see, and smell,/ And have their palates both for sweet and sour,/ As husbands have’ (IV iii 96–9). The argument here, which must have gone down well with the women in Shakespeare’s audience, is not far different from Shylock’s self-defense, and it applies to rich and poor alike.
31 In the 16th century, an estimated two in five of children born to royalty and the aristocracy survived (Hill 1980: 46). Queen Anne of England and Ireland (1665–1714) lost all 17 of her children.
32 In the Hebrew Bible, too, sufferings associated with the poor are experienced by the better-off: the matriarch Rachel dies in childbirth; and Ishmael and Moses are abandoned as infants. See p. 57 note 4.
33 On largely unavoidable sufferings, such as plague and infant mortality and abandonment, in the emergence of the medieval anti-Semitic imagination, see p. 44.
34 On Jack Cade in the context of social discontent in Shakespeare’s day, see Carroll (1996: ch. 4).
35 In Cervantes’ Don Quixote, similarly, Sancho Panza is a ludicrous failure when he becomes a governor.
36 On mockery of the common people in medieval literature, see Freedman (1999).
37 On the unique representation of poverty in King Lear, see Carroll (1996). Carroll observes that most beggars in Renaissance drama are gentry or nobles in disguise, as is Edgar; but Edgar is unusual in his suffering.
38 On the hardships of the Elizabethan poor in the 1590s, see Heinemann (2003: 170).
39 See Carroll (1996: 36).
40 On hostility toward the poor in Elizabethan schools, see Riggs (2004: 51).
41 Quoted by Sullivan and Woodbridge (2000: 270).
42 Quoted by Slack (1988: 106).
43 The content of Elizabethan and Jacobean theater was deeply affected by censorship and fear of censorship, especially in the 1590s: ‘The 1590s was a decade of extreme hardship for the poor, with bad harvests and famine years, and an outcry against corn-hoarders and price-raisers. In the south-east, notably in Essex and Oxfordshire, there were grain riots, and in London itself riots for cheaper bread and against aliens, who were thought to be taking trade away from local people. These were issues too dangerous for popular literature and theater to be allowed to treat freely at this moment’ (Heinemann 2003: 170). Another restrictive principle – ‘He who pays the piper calls the tune’ – applies to literature of this period: rarely does it depict workers at work (Hattaway 2003: 107). The aristocrats who patronized the theater wanted plays about kings and queens, princes and princesses, not cobblers and tailors, glove-makers and carpenters. Those who broke the censorship rules were punished. In Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1596), a poet accused of blaspheming the queen is nailed by his tongue to a post (V ix 25).
44 On beggary and population changes in Tudor London, see Lis and Soly (1979: 72, 78).
45 See Carroll (1996: 30). Though food riots in time of famine were a fact of daily life in the 1590s, they could not be portrayed realistically in the Elizabethan theater. In the 19th century, in works such as Manzoni’s The Betrothed (1840) Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848), and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment (1865), the depiction of hunger and the breakdown of public order in time of famine became more common in fiction.
46 Slack (1988: 126).
47 Conditions of the English poor in the 1590s, bad as they were, were probably no worse than those elsewhere in Europe. Braudel (1994: 454) estimates that in the 1590s, 12–14 million inhabitants of Mediterranean countries were living at or near the starvation level.
48 Hindle (2000: 153). Elizabethan Poor Law had particular significance in London, which grew from 55,000 in 1520 to 200,000 in 1600 (ibid., 41).
49 In 1563, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, Elizabeth I enacted the Poor Law and the Statute of Artificers, the basis of later Poor Laws of 1598 and 1601. The Act of Settlements and removals (1662) elaborated upon the 14th-century laws requiring each parish to bear responsibility for its own poor, and that the poor in need of help had to return to the parish of their birth.
50 In King Lear, Shakespeare appears to reverse the ‘feast of fools’ (festa stultorum) of medieval carnivals in which fools became kings.
51 Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621: 209), gives examples of false beggars, ‘counterfeit men’, expressing sympathy as poverty has driven them to the degradation of feigning disease, dismemberment, blindness, paralysis, testifying to a degree of misery that makes suicide attractive. Literary depictions of false beggars tend to follow popular opinion and legislation in their hostility to those who seek alms illegitimately. See pp. 42–3. On Bedlam, see p. 81.
52 Poor Tom is a type of ‘Abraham-On Poor Tom and Bedlam’; see Carroll (1996: ch. 6).
53 For a picture of the homeless poor in the Book of Job, see p. 32.
54 Lear becomes, in spirit at least, the ideal biblical king: ‘It is the abomination of kings to do wickedness, for the throne is established in righteousness’ (Proverbs 16: 12). In Cymbeline, similarly, the rich, ideally, should set an example to the poor. If the rich lie, the poor will follow, and so ‘falsehood/ Is worse in kings than beggars’ (III vi 13–14).
55 On contemporary discontent at the treatment of the poor, see Thomas Dekker’s The Bel-Man of London (1608): ‘Statutes to Burne us i’th eares for Rogues … to Sindge us i’th hand for pilferers … to whippe us at posts for being Beggars; and to shackle our heeles i’th stockes for being idle vagabondes’ (in Carroll 1996: 26).
56 In Coriolanus, the common people have reason to suspect their rulers of ignoring, despising, or maltreating them: later in the play (IV vi 97–9), Menenius expresses contempt for them (‘apron-men’,‘garlic-eaters’), as do Coriolanus himself and his aristocratic mother (II iii 123ff., III ii 9–11), though Coriolanus also has genuine reasons to distrust and abhor the ‘mobility’, particularly for its fickleness and the ease with which it can be manipulated.
57 After Coriolanus, banished by his own countrymen, goes over to his enemies, the Volscians and their general, Aufidius, he fights victoriously against the Romans and, moved by his mother’s entreaties, he spares Rome. Imagery of beggary returns as Aufidius, enraged by this ‘charity’, resolves to have Coriolanus murdered, as ‘a man by his own alms empoisoned/ And with his charity slain’ (V vii 10–11).